I’m shocked, like everyone is.
But I also feel sorry for him, which very few other people seem to.
This afternoon, I went to the White House for a meeting with Dan Pfeiffer and Jay Carney, the president’s press secretary.
We cleared the air over ‘Maya-gate’, and they made encouraging noises about an Obama interview.
‘You’re a card we definitely want to play,’ Dan said. ‘We just don’t know yet exactly when we want to play it.’
WEDNESDAY, 18 MAY 2011
Locked horns tonight with Ted Nugent, the self-styled ‘Motor City Madman’ rock musician and ardent gun lover.
‘Anybody that wants to disarm me can drop dead,’ he snarled. ‘Anybody that wants to make me unarmed and helpless, people that want to literally create the proven places where more innocents are killed, called gun-free zones, we’re going to beat you.
‘We’re going to vote you out of office or you can suck on my machine gun.’
Of course, it’s precisely this kind of violent rhetoric that makes me so worried about people like Ted Nugent having guns.
THURSDAY, 26 MAY 2011
Back on the Tonight Show this evening and Jay Leno came into my dressing room for a coffee.
I asked him what he’d learned from forty years in show business.
‘That there are two types of people in the world,’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Those who, when it’s cold in a room, say politely, “Hey, it’s a bit chilly in here, isn’t it?” And those who scream, “Someone shut the fucking window!”’
I sped to CNN afterwards to interview Paris Hilton with her mother, Kathy, expecting a light-hearted romp through Paris’s comparatively trivial celebrity life. But it turned into something much more dramatic.
The catalyst came when I brought up the subject of the infamous sex tape that catapulted Paris into global stardom.
When I asked Kathy what the tape had done to her family, she broke down and wept.
‘It was awful,’ she sobbed.
As Paris tried to comfort her, Kathy’s crying became so intense that I had to actually ask the floor manager to bring her some tissues.
‘The worst thing,’ she said afterwards, ‘is that the internet means it will always be there, so Paris’s children, my grandchildren, will be able to see it one day. And there’s nothing we can do to stop it.’
TUESDAY, 31 MAY 2011
The weirdest day of my TV career so far. The sixth season of America’s Got Talent started up tonight on NBC, airing at exactly the same time as my CNN show (with the Hiltons).
This will be the case, twice a week, for the next four months. So I will be quite literally competing with myself.
‘So, what is the smart way to live-promote AGT and PMT on Twitter when they clash?’ I asked Jonathan. ‘I’m struggling!’
He replied: ‘Torn between two lovers, feelin’ like a fool. Lovin’ you both is breakin’ all the rules.’
WEDNESDAY, 1 JUNE 2011
Celia went for her three-month scan in Los Angeles today, and everything’s fine.
‘Do you want to know what you’re having?’ asked the doctor.
We nodded.
‘A baby girl.’
Wow.
I called the boys to break the news they were going to have a little sister.
‘Oh thank God,’ said Stanley. ‘We’ve been discussing this and decided it wouldn’t be good to have a rival brother living with you!’
I hadn’t even thought of it like that.
THURSDAY, 2 JUNE 2011
Made my debut on comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night chat show and he played me a clip from my Paris Hilton interview, featuring me saying the following words: ‘I could type in “Paris Hilton sex tape” and up it comes.’
The audience roared with laughter. Jimmy didn’t have to say anything.
FRIDAY, 3 JUNE 2011
My ratings are getting decimated by a trial involving an alleged baby killer called Casey Anthony.
A lot of our younger viewers are migrating to watch Nancy Grace cover this disturbing case on HLN, the news and views network.
The big question is what the hell do we do about it?
Larry got into ratings trouble overdoing coverage of hot tabloid stories like the deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and Michael Jackson, because it alienated his core CNN audience.
Jonathan and I discussed it with CNN president Ken Jautz, and we all agreed that we should pretty much leave the Casey story to HLN.
But it’s going to hurt us until the trial ends, no question.
MONDAY, 6 JUNE 2011
America is reeling from a series of extraordinary political sex scandals.
First, Arnold Schwarzenegger impregnates his housekeeper.
Then, French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn is accused of attacking a hotel chambermaid.
And just when you thought you’d heard it all, along comes a congressman named Anthony Weiner, who’s been caught for sending photos of his wiener to random women on the internet.
I had the offender on my show a few weeks ago, and he was a bombastic, arrogant, quick-witted and undeniably entertaining character – who got into a splendidly vicious debate with Donald Trump.
Then I watched him bring the house down at a Washington political dinner. After which I emailed him my congratulations. ‘Brilliant speech, made me laugh out loud.’
He responded, ‘I have a new-found respect for guys who make funny for a living. It’s hard.’
In fact, as he’s now discovering, it’s not that hard to make people laugh. You just have to be a sex-scandalised politician by the name of Weiner.
Tea Party darling Christine O’Donnell about to exit stage left from our interview, after I had the effrontery to ask her about revelations in her own book …
CHAPTER 5
TUESDAY, 7 JUNE 2011
Mitt Romney is emerging as the clear early favourite in the race to be the Republican presidential nominee.
In person, as I’ve discovered first-hand over several interviews now, Romney’s a polite, friendly and solicitous man.
He’s a great father and grandfather, according to his five devoted sons, and a great husband, according to his wife, Ann, the woman who was his teenage sweetheart and whom he’s helped nurse with deep compassion through her ongoing battle with multiple sclerosis.
But there’s barely a big issue on which Romney hasn’t switched his position, earning him the nickname ‘Mr Flip-Flop’.
In fact, it’s hard to even recognise the new Mitt from the one who was a successful and popular governor of Massachusetts.
On abortion, he was then firmly pro-choice, now he’s equally firmly pro-life. On guns, he outlawed lethal assault weapons. Now he says they’re fine, despite a rash of horrific recent mass gun killings. On health care, he was the first governor to bring in a compulsory ‘mandate’ health insurance scheme. But when Obama did the same thing, he lambasted it as a ‘terrible idea’. He was also a huge fan of stem cell research, but now he says he’s ‘been persuaded the stem cell debate was grounded in a false premise’.
Each switch was dictated by the need to make him more electable – not to the wider public, but to his own party members, particularly the far right Tea Party element, so he could win the Republican nomination during the primary race, and it seems to be working.
I asked him tonight why he’d done a U-turn on something as emotive as abortion.
‘Ronald Reagan was also pro-choice and then became pro-life. And George W. Bush was pro-choice and became pro-life.’
He’s right, they were. And this raises an interesting question. Are politicians who change their minds on big issues doing it purely for political expediency, as Romney’s accusers claim, or because they’ve genuinely changed their minds?
On gay rights, he was more evasive, saying he opposed gay marriage but was in favour of ending discrimination against gays.
When I asked if he believed homosexuality was a sin, as his Mo
rmon church says it is, he refused to answer.
‘Nice try, but I’m not going to get into this.’
‘That’s a valid question, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a valid question and my answer is nice try …’
‘There are people watching you saying “nice try” repeatedly, saying well why doesn’t he just answer the question?’
‘I’m not here in a religious context. I’m here as a candidate for president. It’s hard for me to imagine describing something as a sin in a political sense. You can talk about something being wrong, or evil. There are murderers – that’s evil, and that’s wrong. It also happens to be a sin according to most religions.
‘But the terminology is religious terminology, that’s probably not something which would figure into public policy.’
This is the purest illustration of the separation of church and state imaginable, and it will be interesting to see if he can get away with sustaining that distinction if he does end up as the nominee.
One thing Republicans won’t have to worry about with Romney is any skeletons rattling in his closet.
‘Have you ever drunk alcohol?’ I asked.
‘No. Well, I tested it once, but it was not a good experience.’
‘Taken drugs?’
‘No.’
‘And presumably you’ve never had an affair?’
‘Of course not!’
I think Romney would be a serious challenge to Obama. He’s smart, experienced, politically savvy and not too right wing.
And his strength is the economy, which may well turn out to be what settles this election.
WEDNESDAY, 8 JUNE 2011
Spent the morning with Chris Christie, the giant – in every sense – governor of New Jersey.
He’s a budget-slashing, tough-talking, former US attorney whom Republicans love and Democrats fear.
I took him back to his old school, then drove with him to his house. It gave me a fascinating insight into one of the most charismatic politicians in the US.
‘America right now is in the fight of its life as a nation, particularly economically,’ I said. ‘Do you think America needs somebody like you who’s going to be tough?’
‘I think America needs lots of tough people. Not just me. I think America needs to get tougher, all of us. We need to understand that it’s time to step up and pay for what we want. And you know, we haven’t been doing that for a long time, and both parties have been guilty of it.’
I liked that answer.
During the drive to the house, I asked him how many cases he fought as a federal prosecutor for the US federal government.
‘A hundred and thirty.’
‘How many did you win?’
He smiled. ‘Ask me how many I lost …’
‘How many did you lose?’
‘None. Zero.’
Christie’s a Catholic, like me.
So I asked the same question I asked Mitt Romney.
‘Is homosexuality a sin?’
‘Well, my religion says it’s a sin. But I’ve always believed that people are born with the predisposition to be homosexual. And so I think if someone is born that way, it’s very difficult to say then that that’s a sin. I understand that my church says that. But for me personally, I don’t look upon someone who is homosexual as a sinner.’
I liked that answer a lot more than Romney’s equivocating.
‘Part of being a Catholic is you confess sins,’ I continued. ‘In light of Weiner-gate, Schwarzenegger-gate and so on, is there anything you want to get off your chest?’
‘You don’t look like a priest to me, Piers. So, no.’
‘Well, should we be worried about any skeletons tumbling out of the Christie closet?’
‘Listen, any confessions I need to make, I’ll make to my wife and to my priest, not on CNN to you, pal!’
I liked that answer too.
‘The other thing about being a Catholic is feeling guilty. Do you feel guilty about stuff?’
‘My weight,’ he said. ‘Because I’m really struggling, been struggling for a long time with it. And I know that it would be better for my kids if I got it more under control.’
‘Why do you think you’ve had a battle with your weight?’
‘If I could figure it out, I’d fix it.’
‘You don’t know what it is?’ I said.
‘I don’t.’
‘Do you ever get help for it?’
‘Sure, plenty of times.’
‘Where do you fall down in terms of dealing with it?’
‘I eat too much,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s not a complicated thing. And you know, it’s one of the things, everybody has faults.’
‘Is it the one jibe about you that really stings?’
‘No, because I know the people who jibe me about that are just ignorant. Because, in the end, it doesn’t have any effect on the way I can do my job. And so, if they’re commentating about me as governor and decide they want to do that, you know what I conclude? I must be doing a damn good job, because if that’s all they got to jibe me about, amen, man, I’m having a good day.’
At the house, his wife said something on-camera about his extraordinary record as a prosecutor, which shed an interesting light.
‘His overriding focus was to never prosecute the wrong person. People will never know how hard Chris worked at not prosecuting someone when he wasn’t absolutely confident they were guilty.’
I liked that answer too.
If he ever decides to run for president, Christie would be a formidable candidate.
TUESDAY, 14 JUNE 2011
I watched AGT tonight, and saw myself judging a man who blows up water bottles until they explode, and a talking trash can.
Then I flicked over to CNN, to see myself interviewing Chris Christie – a man I suspect will be president of the United States one day.
The absurdity of my double TV life was laid bare.
WEDNESDAY, 15 JUNE 2011
New York’s state assembly today approved same-sex marriage.
This bandwagon is well and truly up and running.
WEDNESDAY, 29 JUNE 2011
Charlize Theron, who I interviewed tonight, suffered a terrible tragedy as a sixteen-year-old teenager, when her alcoholic father came home drunk to their South African home and started shooting at her and her mother. To save their lives, her mother grabbed a gun and shot back, killing her father.
South Africa, like America, has a huge gun culture, and many homeowners have guns in the house.
In this case, the gun that Charlize’s mother grabbed to defend them both probably saved their lives.
She was never prosecuted, on the grounds of self-defence, and they now live close to each other in Los Angeles.
It’s hard to argue against a citizen’s right to possess a gun for that purpose in countries where there are so many guns in circulation.
But, as Charlize said: ‘I obviously had an experience in my life where, in the wrong circumstances, a gun could be used in a very tragic way. But I also understand people’s feelings about wanting to protect themselves. I just don’t think anyone should ever have a semiautomatic or automatic weapon for anything.’
SATURDAY, 2 JULY 2011
I’m back in Britain for a week’s holiday.
Elisabeth Murdoch and her PR tycoon husband, Matthew Freud, threw a lavish Great Gatsby-style party at their stunning new Oxfordshire home, attended by all the great, good and slightly dubious of British society.
At midnight, I found myself by the bar with Rebekah Brooks and James Murdoch, two old friends.
They are currently running News International, the UK newspaper division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation empire. Rebekah is chief executive, and James is chairman.
They’re selling lots of papers, and making lots of money, but the company’s been dogged by an ongoing phone-hacking scandal that keeps popping back into the headlines.
Both seemed to think the worst was over
.
MONDAY, 4 JULY 2011
The phone-hacking scandal exploded today after The Guardian newspaper made the most serious accusation yet.
They asserted that the News of the World hacked into the voicemail of a murdered schoolgirl called Milly Dowler after she went missing in 2002. And worse, it alleged they deleted messages that had been left for her, thus giving her parents false hope that she might still be alive.
Turrets are now being aimed at Rebekah, who was editor of the paper at the time.
She’s the most powerful woman in British media, and has inevitably made a few enemies along the way. They’re all queuing up to attack her, and the coverage is already absolutely vicious.
I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of dog-eat-dog assault in Britain a few times, and it’s horrible.
WEDNESDAY, 6 JULY 2011
Eliot Spitzer’s CNN show has been cancelled.
I sent him a note: ‘I’m really sorry. You gave it everything you’ve got and I enjoyed your show a lot, and working with you. Good luck with your next venture. Get back into politics, I’d vote for you.’
‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘Where are you registered to vote?’
THURSDAY, 7 JULY 2011
Casey Anthony was found not guilty of killing her daughter, though guilty of lesser charges of providing false information to the police. Today, she was sentenced to four years in prison, but with time already served, she will spend just six more days inside.
I went to the CNN bureau tonight to tape a show on this shocking development.
As I sat in the makeup room, I suddenly saw a banner shoot up on the TV saying: ‘BREAKING NEWS: News of the World to close.’
I scrambled my phone out of my pocket and began furiously flicking through Twitter to see what the hell was going on.
Sure enough, there was confirmation from James Murdoch that the paper was shutting down in the wake of the hacking scandal.
I couldn’t believe it.
One of Britain’s oldest and most popular newspapers was gone.
A place I’d devoted eighteen months of my life to.
Once I’d got over the shock and sadness, I tried to work out why on earth the Murdochs would have taken such drastic action.
I can only assume that this scandal is far, far worse than everyone thinks.
Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney Page 12