Shooting Straight: Guns, Gays, God, and George Clooney

by Morgan, Piers

  There really is nothing worse for anyone doing a live broadcast than food poisoning. Almost any other ailment can be concealed with a variety of tricks and potions.

  But acute vomiting is the ultimate nightmare.

  I felt so sorry for Brooke. She’s a rising young star at CNN, and was so thrilled to land this assignment.

  We sat in the chairs an hour later, and prepared to begin the simultaneous live broadcast to the world on CNN International and CNN America.

  ‘If I suddenly tap you on the leg, it means I have to leave urgently,’ Brooke said.

  ‘OK, got it. Don’t worry – if it happens, it happens. I will cover for you.’

  She looked terrible. But she gritted her teeth, and we started as if nothing was wrong.

  Then, half an hour into the two-hour show, ferocious rain swept over the whole area.

  It transpired, pretty quickly, that we were partially exposed to the skies, thus causing the rain to lash into our backs.

  It also turned suddenly very, very cold.

  Within an hour, we were sitting in pools of cold water, our clothes soaked through. These were the most shocking conditions I’d ever tried to film in, and Brooke began to deteriorate badly.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked during a commercial break.

  She was ashen white and shaking like a leaf. ‘Not really.’

  To lighten the tension, members of the huge crowd were peeling off to shout things up at me. Most of it very nice.

  Then I heard the words: ‘Piers Morgan! You are a war criminal!’ Which, of all the charges to level at me, seemed a little perverse given the Daily Mirror, under my editorship, had opposed the Iraq War so vociferously.

  About ninety minutes in, Brooke tapped me on the knee.

  She was about to keel over.

  I called for help, and some of the CNN crew rushed forward to take her out.

  The only solace was that we didn’t have much actual anchoring left to do, as attention was now focused on the actual parade of boats and musical performances.

  So viewers were none the wiser about what was going on.

  But I was very worried about Brooke.

  As soon as we wrapped, I unhooked my microphone and raced off to see how she was – just in time to see her being carried on a stretcher into an ambulance.

  ‘Is she OK?’ I asked her producer.

  ‘Yes, she’s just got hypothermia, and they want to get her to hospital as a precaution.’

  Fortunately, she made a quick recovery, and within a few hours we were exchanging cheery emails.

  ‘Like you promised, my friend, this is a day I will never forget!’ she quipped.

  WEDNESDAY, 6 JUNE 2012

  For politicians, a reputation can be made or broken on a single decision. Or, as in the case of former American defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a whole welter of charges from waging illegal wars to endorsing torture. He remains one of the most divisive characters in modern American politics.

  ‘Why do you think you’ve attracted the reputation you have?’ I asked him tonight.

  He thought for a few seconds, then smirked.

  ‘Dogs don’t bark at parked cars.’

  TUESDAY, 12 JUNE 2012

  We booked Casey Anthony’s lawyer Cheney Mason today, to get an update on how his client has been doing since her dramatic acquittal over the alleged murder of her baby.

  He came to my office before we went on air, and I asked him what the chances were of landing the first interview with his client.

  ‘Do you want to speak to her now?’ he replied.

  ‘For the show?’

  ‘No, on the telephone. Then we can see down the line about a proper interview.’

  Cheney called her on his mobile, then passed it to me.

  ‘How are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m trying to adjust the best that I possibly can,’ she replied. ‘You know, given everything that continues to be thrown at me every day. So I mean I have good days and bad days and I’m trying to take the best out of everything.’

  Her voice was calm and ordinary.

  ‘What do you think your public perception is?’

  ‘Oh it’s bad, it’s absolutely horrible. And a lot of that has to do with the constant media scrutiny, even today. I mean even reputable media, like the New York Times and the Boston Herald, report the same rumours about me as tabloids like the Enquirer.

  ‘So I know that the perception out there is not the best and could absolutely be improved and that’s obviously something that we’d like to try to improve because the perception of me that’s out there couldn’t be further from the truth. I don’t know where people got these ideas from, it’s so far out of even my own comprehension at this point, I don’t even know where any of this stuff came from.’

  ‘What do you think is the biggest misconception about you?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, there are several misconceptions. Obviously I didn’t kill my daughter. If anything, there’s nothing in this world that I’ve ever been more proud of, there’s no one that I love more than my daughter, and this still remains the same thing. She’s my greatest accomplishment.

  ‘I’ve never been the quote unquote “party girl”. I don’t drink now. I’ve probably had a handful of beers since I’ve been on probation, which is being completely honest. I’ve never done drugs. Smoking a little bit of marijuana in my early twenties, that was as far as that went.

  ‘There are so many things out there that aren’t even remotely true, that there isn’t even the slightest bit of truth to.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t weigh five hundred pounds now. I’m not moving to Costa Rica. I’m not making gazillions of dollars at the hands of other people or trying to sell myself to anyone that is willing to throw a couple of dollars at me. I don’t give a shit about money. I may have in the past for other reasons, before any of this stuff started, because I was a stupid kid.

  ‘But I’m twenty-six now and I’ve gone through hell. And even I know the situation isn’t what it should have been when my life totally changed almost a year ago. This isn’t the situation that I should be in right now but I’m dealing with it.’

  ‘Where do you think you personally went wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘By not being honest. I didn’t trust law enforcement because of my relationship with my father, who was ex-law enforcement. And I didn’t give them the benefit of the doubt, which is part of the reason that they didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘People are critical of me and the thirty-one days of my lying to law enforcement, and my not being forthcoming, but what they don’t understand is the reason why. And I totally get why people look at me and have these opinions, because I look at the things that I said, I look back at some of the interviews, and the way that I’ve come across and it’s horrible, it looks absolutely horrible.

  ‘And I’m ashamed in many ways of the person that I was because even then that wasn’t who I was. I wouldn’t even have been able to begin to tell you the person that I was outside of being a mom and you know being twenty-two and being scared and confused just with life in general. Not having a direction, or feeling like I had much of a purpose outside of caring for another person. I didn’t even know how to care for myself, so that was something …’

  Cheney Mason stepped forward and ended the conversation.

  ‘OK, that’s enough for now.’

  I thanked him. ‘Can I use some of those quotes on the show tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was quite a scoop, the first interview of any kind that Casey Anthony has given any journalist.

  Tonight I had dinner with Jonathan and Conor Hanna.

  For reasons almost certainly connected to mutual exhaustion, stress over softening ratings and copious quantities of alcohol (especially on my part), a convivial conversation escalated into an angry midnight argument between me and Jonathan.

  Eventually, I stormed out, marching all the way h
ome in a fit of blind fury.

  WEDNESDAY, 13 JUNE 2012

  Woke at 6 a.m., feeling horrendous.

  Had an instant flashback of last night’s farce, and groaned.

  Then I checked my phone and saw an email Jonathan had sent at 1 a.m., after I’d crashed into a stupor.

  ‘I don’t know what we were arguing about or why we kept at it, but I meant no disrespect and I certainly don’t want you angry. Apologies.’

  I replied in kind: ‘I think we should just get married and be done with it. Silly end to a fun evening. Apologies my end too. Let’s forget it.’

  The reality is that we see more of each other than we do our wives most weeks, and live, eat and breathe the stresses and strains of a rolling nightly news show together.

  I couldn’t do it with anyone else, and I suspect/hope he feels the same way.

  Letting off steam occasionally like last night is no bad thing. It clears the air of any simmering tension.

  And on a nightly cable news show, just as there was on a daily newspaper, there’s always a lot of simmering tension. But you only get that kind of passion from people who really care about what they’re doing.

  SATURDAY, 16 JUNE 2012

  Sir Roger Bannister was the first person to break the four-minute mile – a milestone that many ‘experts’ had said would never be achieved.

  It was an astonishing feat of willpower, and sheer bloody-minded British grit.

  Sir Roger, now eighty-three, quit athletics a few months after smashing the world record, and became a neurologist.

  I met him at a party in London tonight, and asked him if he ever got bored of having to talk about the four-minute mile to every breathless fan (like me) he meets.

  He smiled. ‘No, no, I remain very proud of it. But I only ran for seven years – I’m much prouder of my work in neurology, to which I devoted the next fifty years of my life.’

  As for what drove him, Sir Roger – a charming, razor-sharp man who still looks fit enough to beat me over a mile – once came out with this great quote about competitiveness: ‘Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.’

  A perfect metaphor for life in the cable news business!

  SUNDAY, 17 JUNE 2012

  The boys sent me a joint Father’s Day card this morning:

  ‘Dear @piersmorgan, #HappyFathersDay love, your three best followers, Spencer, Stanley, Bertie.’

  MONDAY, 18 JUNE 2012

  Flew back into New York today, and attended the premiere of Aaron Sorkin’s eagerly anticipated new HBO drama, The Newsroom, about a cable news show not dissimilar to my own. It stars Jeff Daniels as a bored, irascible old TV anchorman called Will McAvoy who has a reputation for being too lightweight – a reputation he then decimates by suddenly transforming himself into an enraged, passionate, hard-news assassin.

  The trigger for this metamorphosis comes early in the first episode we watched, during a tedious college panel debate, when the moderator goads him into answering a question posed by a student: ‘What makes America the greatest country in the world?’

  McAvoy pauses for a few seconds, then goes on an almighty rant about why America is not the world’s greatest country.

  ‘We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labour force and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories – number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real and defence spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined. So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’

  As the students look on, stunned, he adds, ‘We sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbours, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chest. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the world’s greatest artists and the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, and acted like men. We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed, by great men. The first step in solving any problem is recognising there is one – America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.’

  And nor, indisputably, is my own country, the previous holder of the title before the United States.

  The UK, according to a 2009 study, ranks twenty-third in literacy, twenty-eighth in maths, sixteenth in science, thirtieth in life expectancy, thirty-sixth in infant mortality, eighth in household income, twentieth in labour force and eleventh in exports.

  We too used to be all the things McAvoy fondly recalls Americans being in their great past.

  What are we Brits still world leaders at? Well, we increase our alcohol consumption over the Christmas holiday more than any other nationality. Cheers!

  The Newsroom showed me what’s missing from my own show – a voice.

  I’ve had some great interviews, covered the breaking news pretty well and expressed my opinion over issues like gay marriage. But if I asked my viewers what the show, and me, really stood for – I’m not sure they’d know the answer.

  Will McAvoy had that same feeling until he suddenly exploded about the state of modern America. That moment gave him the confidence to push his opinion on air for how America could be better.

  I need to find my own voice about something I really care about.

  THURSDAY, 21 JUNE 2012

  The single worst thing about living abroad is missing the boys’ sporting events. I used to attend all of them religiously.

  Now, I’m lucky if I get to a handful a year.

  I’ve discussed this with them all many times, and always said that if they wanted me to give up my job and come home, I would.

  And I mean it.

  But they’ve always been insistent that they like the work I do, and enjoy coming to see me in America.

  And, thanks to new technology, we keep in touch pretty constantly through Skype, BlackBerrys and iPhones.

  Today, though, was a perfect example of when I wish I could have been home.

  Bertie, age eleven, was taking part in his school summer sports day in South London.

  He’s a brilliant natural sportsman, so I was expecting him to win something.

  I rang him tonight to see how he’d got on.

  ‘I did pretty well, Dad,’ he chuckled.

  ‘How well?’

  ‘Well, I won the hundred metres …’

  ‘That’s brilliant!’

  ‘And the hundred-metre hurdles …’

  ‘Amazing!’

  ‘I won the high jump …’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘And the long jump …’

  ‘Good God …’

  ‘And the relay … the four-hundred metres … and throwing the cricket ball.’

  I was stunned into total silence for a few seconds.

  ‘You won everything?’

  ‘Yes!’

  He was giggling.

  I, conversely, was on the verge of tears. Of pride and regret.

  Having a fancy job in America has many pluses; of course it does. But missing your eleven-year-old son winning every single event on sports day is something I’ll never get back, and always wish I had seen for myself.

  I wonder on days like today if the sacrifice is really worth it.

  ‘I’m really sorry I missed it, Bertie,’ I said.

  ‘That’s OK, Dad, it doesn’t matter.’

  But it does. We both know it.

  FRIDAY, 22 JUNE 2012

  There’s been a big, scandalo
us trial in America about an American football coach called Jerry Sandusky, who was accused of abusing a large number of young boys at Pennsylvania State University, in a sports department run by the legendary coach Joe Paterno.

  The jury began their deliberations yesterday, and is free to go on each night for as long as they like without informing the media until they decide to break.

  What this meant in practice today was that although I’d already taped my CNN show by 3 p.m., I then had to sit around for the next six hours twiddling my thumbs in case a verdict was suddenly announced.

  My show began to air at 9 p.m., with no sign of any action.

  Then, at 9.35 p.m., Jonathan called excitedly: ‘Go straight to the studio – verdict coming in!’

  I raced downstairs, got mic’d up, was live on air by 9.40 p.m. and began talking to a variety of legal experts about the forthcoming verdict.

  All the while desperate for the jury to announce its decision in my time slot, as we’d be able to break the news first, and it would attract big ratings, as stuff like this always does at CNN.

  The minutes ticked by, and I kept informing viewers, ‘Any second now, we’ll have the verdict.’

  We got to 9.57 p.m., and still nothing.

  ‘What the hell are they waiting for?’ I mused aloud in the final commercial break.

  ‘You to go off air,’ said one of the cameramen, laughing.

  At 9.59 p.m., I did indeed go off air, reluctantly handing the reins to the next anchor, Anderson Cooper.

  And at 10.04 p.m., the verdict was duly announced – Sandusky was found guilty, on forty-five of forty-eight counts.

  For the next hour, Anderson was able to deliver dramatic live news on all the fallout and, of course, inevitably garner all the huge ratings that would come with it.

  To compound my misery, I then had to continue twiddling my very sore thumbs for another two long hours until midnight, when my show reaired, to update it with all the news we’d missed earlier. By which time, most people would have digested the news anyway and gone to bed.

  I slumped into bed at 1.30 a.m., broken by the strain of just missing the breaking news.

  MONDAY, 25 JUNE 2012

  Oliver Stone is arguably the most brilliant, dangerous, unpredictable movie director in the world.