Between You and Me
Page 22
A few days later, the New York Daily News ran a story on the controversy in which Jeffrey Wigand was outed by name as the whistle-blower whose identity we were not allowed to reveal. (To this day, I have no idea where that leak came from.) In late November, Wigand provided a deposition to lawyers who were involved in a Mississippi civil action against tobacco manufacturers, and that led the way to the payoff on my hunch that at some point, my interview with Wigand would be aired on 60 Minutes. Thanks to a large assist from The Wall Street Journal, we were able to open our broadcast in early February 1996 with the full story on Wigand. After running through
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the necessary background in my on-camera introduction, I told our viewers:
“But now things have changed. Last week The Wall Street Journal got hold of and published a confidential deposition Wigand gave ina Mississippi case, a November depositionthat repeated many of the charges he made to us last August. And while a lawsuit is still a possibility, not putting Jeffrey Wigand’s story on 60 Minutes no longer is.”
And that, by any decent law of logic, should have been that, except this was a controversy that refused to die. In the spring of 1996, Vanity Fair published a lengthy article by Marie Brenner on the Wigand saga that was called “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”
Three years later, Hollywood released a film called The Insider, based on the magazine piece. In both the article and the movie, the most appropriate title for the CBS portion of the story would have been
“The Gospel According to Lowell Bergman.”
In both the print and film versions, Bergman was portrayed as the lone CBS knight in shining armor who was not intimidated by the fire-breathing dragons who ruled the evil corporate empire. As for the rest of us at CBS News who had been involved in the story, we were depicted, for the most part, as venal or craven wretches who had no business calling ourselves journalists. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but I truly believe that the movie, in particular, was seriously skewed in that direction. No one should have been surprised by those distor-tions, because the primary CBS source for both the magazine piece and the film was Bergman.
For all its inaccuracies, The Insider had its compelling moments, in large part because of the performances by the actors in the three principal parts. For what it’s worth, I thought Russell Crowe was su-perb in the role of Jeffrey Wigand. But even though Al Pacino played
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a very good Al Pacino, I didn’t recognize much of Lowell Bergman in his rendition. As for Christopher Plummer’s performance, let me just say that it’s not the worst thing in the world to see yourself portrayed on the silver screen by a handsome and urbane Canadian who has been hailed as the most gifted classical actor in North America. I may not know that much about how they make movies in Hollywood, but I do know enough to recognize typecasting when I see it.
Jeffrey Wigand paid a heavy price for his defiance of his former bosses at Brown & Williamson. Even before he made the decision to blow the whistle on them, he and his family were subjected to all kinds of harassment, including telephone calls threatening physical harm. “Leave tobacco alone or else you’ll find your kids hurt” was the message of one such call. After Wigand was publicly identified as the primary source for the tobacco story we broadcast in November 1995, B&W retained a high-octane PR firm that promptly launched a nasty smear campaign to besmirch both Wigand’s professional reputation and his personal character. One of the casualties of all these pressure tactics was his marriage, which ended in divorce in 1996.
And, following through on its threat, B&W did sue Wigand for violat-ing the confidentiality agreement.
Then the tide began to turn in Wigand’s favor. For one thing, the lawsuit against him was dismissed as part of a sweeping multistate settlement that grew out of the Mississippi civil action against the tobacco industry. Thus liberated from those legal restraints, Wigand became—in the best sense—a poster boy for the anti-smoking movement. The brave stand he took against his former employer encouraged other tobacco insiders to come forward and blow their own whistles. Each new revelation bolstered the already vigorous campaign being waged against the industry in courtrooms and state legislatures throughout the country.
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In recent years, Wigand has focused most of his energies on
“Smoke-Free Kids,” a nonprofit organization he founded to counter the industry’s longtime strategy to “hook them young and hook them for life,” as he put it. As a certified expert on the addictive power of cigarettes, he understands better than most that working to establish a generation of smoke-free teenagers is the best hope for achieving the goal of a smoke-free society.
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S h i r l e y M a c L a i n e
AND NOW WE GO TO the back of the book, to mostly less serious matters, stuff that’s intended to be entertaining, even gos-sipy, the kind of interview I’ve done down the years with some regularity—more, perhaps, with women than with men—people the television audience flocks to, the spice of life. And I cannot think of a better way to introduce these valentines than to shine a spotlight on an actress I truly adore, Shirley MacLaine.
I identify her as an actress, and properly so, but when I first saw Shirley on the Broadway stage back in 1954, it was her dancing more than her acting that I was drawn to. She began that year as a nineteen-B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E
year-old chorus gypsy who bounced around from one musical to another. She was in the chorus line of The Pajama Game when it opened in May 1954 and, in addition, was understudy to Carol Haney, the dancing star of the show, which became one of that season’s biggest hits.
What happened next was like something out of a Damon Runyon fable about the Great White Way. When Haney fractured her ankle, MacLaine stepped into the role and made the leap from obscurity to instant stardom. Soon, she was on her way to Hollywood.
Over the next several years, she became a familiar figure on our movie screens, where she displayed a special knack for playing young women with “loose” morals. In Some Came Running, she was a pathetic floozy who had a hopeless crush on a war hero played by Frank Sinatra. In The Apartment, she was an elevator operator in a Manhattan office building who had an affair with a married insurance executive. And in Irma la Douce, she was a Parisian prostitute who enjoyed her work far too much to suit her jealous boyfriend. For each of these performances, MacLaine received an Academy Award nomination.
Also by this time, the early 1960s, her younger brother, Warren Beatty, had followed her to Hollywood and was building his own brilliant career as an actor and director. (The family surname was Beaty, with one T, when they were growing up in Richmond, Virginia.) Working in Some Came Running brought MacLaine into Frank Sinatra’s raucous orbit, and she had the distinction of becoming the only female member of his notorious Rat Pack. “I was sort of their mascot,” she would later recall. Partly because of her close association with that exuberant frat-boy clique, whose members included such Sinatra cronies as Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford, she acquired a reputation for being a carefree spirit, even a bit of a “kook,” a term very much in vogue in those days. Although MacLaine was married at the time, she rarely saw her husband, a
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businessman who preferred to live and work in Tokyo, and she didn’t let her marital status cramp her frolicsome lifestyle. According to those who knew her well, she loved to party on the fast tracks that ran through Hollywood and Vegas, and she had no qualms about burning her candles at all available ends.
In the late 1960s, MacLaine brought her movie-star clout into the political arena, where she became a crusader for various liberal causes.
She worked on Senator Robert Kennedy’s insurgent campaign for the presid
ency in 1968, and was a delegate at that year’s Democratic convention, the one that sparked the bloody confrontations on the streets of Chicago between antiwar demonstrators and the police. Four years later, she was once again a Democratic delegate, this time as an ardent supporter of the party’s nominee, Senator George McGovern.
I didn’t catch up with her until early 1984, when she was basking in the acclaim that had greeted her latest movie, Terms of Endearment.
In that film, she played an eccentric widow and possessive mother whose daughter is dying of cancer, and many critics hailed her performance as the greatest triumph of her career. But that wasn’t the only milestone in her life when I interviewed her shortly before that year’s Academy Awards ceremony. She was a few weeks shy of her fiftieth birthday, and had recently published a controversial book called Out on a Limb, in which she wrote about her belief in reincarnation and extraterrestrial beings. Although I talked to her about Terms of Endearment, I confess I was far more curious about her wacky metaphysics.
W A L L A C E : I’m told that good friends said, “Shirley, for Pete’s sake, don’t write about your karmic destinies.”
M A C L A I N E : It wasn’t for Pete’s sake, it was for Christ’s sake, it was for God’s sake, I mean, on your mother and your friends and everything that is sacred, don’t do this.
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W A L L A C E : Yeah, I mean that—that my daughter was my mother in a prior life and my karmic destinies probably indicate that I used to be a prostitute before, and—and you were a man at one time, and you believe in extraterrestrial beings.
And forgive me for being an old-fashioned—
M A C L A I N E : No, that’s easy, your attitude is easy. It’s very easy to be cynical like you are just now.
W A L L A C E : Skeptical. I reject the word—
M A C L A I N E : Well, it had a panache [sic] of sarcasm in it.
W A L L A C E : Okay, okay.
M A C L A I N E : A large dash of it.
W A L L A C E : Yeah. You really believe that you’ve lived lives before and—
M A C L A I N E : Oh yes, Mike. I don’t— There is no doubt in my mind about it.
W A L L A C E : Uh-huh. And you really believe in extraterrestrials.
Have they— Do they come visit you on the porch? (Reacting to MacLaine’s grimace) “Now you’re being unpleasant, Wallace,” is what you’re saying.
M A C L A I N E : Yes. This is what I was a little afraid of.
W A L L A C E : Hold it!
M A C L A I N E : Now, you don’t have to be that unpleasant. It doesn’t become you, you know? I mean, I’m just speaking of my own experiences and my own desires, and it’s a kind of childlike wonder that could really possibly speculate on other dimensions. What’s wrong with that? Some of I— I mean, we speculate on that dimension every time we pray to God or cross ourselves or kneel down and say, “Help me.”
Our interview ran on 60 Minutes the night before the Hollywood glitterati assembled for their annual gala, at which—as had been
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predicted—MacLaine won her first Oscar. In Terms of Endearment, the feisty widow she portrayed has an affair with her next-door neighbor, a former astronaut played by Jack Nicholson, and she talked about that with her customary candor in her acceptance speech. Directing her gaze at Nicholson, who was seated in the audience, MacLaine thanked him for guiding her through the joys of middle-aged sex.
My relationships with the people I’ve interviewed have varied from one person to another. Much of the time, they didn’t go beyond the interviews. We had our conversations, the pieces built around them were broadcast, and that was it. I never saw them again, or ran into them rarely, and then only by happenstance. On other occasions, the interviews led to more contact that at times evolved into friendships. And that was what happened with Shirley MacLaine.
Yet the chummier we became, the more I intuited that what she had in mind was something more than friendship and her intentions became transparent when she began sending me thoughtful gifts of one kind or another. I remember, in particular, a wonderful cable-knit tennis sweater she bestowed on me. And after I casually mentioned to her that I was fond of ice-cream floats, she began arranging for those confections to be delivered to my office with some regularity. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by all this attention, because I knew Shirley had a reputation for being attracted to journalists. Back in the days when she was a political activist, she was romantically linked with the columnist Pete Hamill, and before that, she had an affair with Sander Vanocur, who was then a top correspondent for NBC News. But it soon became clear that the design she had for me went beyond a mere fling. She was very close to her mother, who, as a young woman, had given up her dream of becoming a star actress to raise a family, and who then encouraged both Shirley and Warren to pursue careers in show business. Now, these
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many years later, Shirley told me that her mother firmly believed part of her daughter’s karmic destiny was to become the next Mrs. Mike Wallace.
Well!!—as Jack Benny would have put it. Yet I must point out that there was nothing unseemly in any of this. Our flirtation, such as it was, took place in the spring and early summer of 1984. By then Shirley had divorced the businessman who lived in Japan, and my twenty-nine-year marriage to Lorraine had recently come to an end, so each of us was unattached and therefore fair game. Even though we went out a few times, Shirley and I never became intimate. In fact, one of our first dates became a triple date of sorts when we were joined by Mary Yates, who, it turned out, was destined to become the next Mrs. Wallace.
I’m happy to say that my friendship with Shirley has continued to flourish, and to this day she and I remain pals. I also had the pleasure of interviewing her again in 2000, when we did a 60 Minutes update of the story we’d broadcast sixteen years earlier. She had just finished another book about her bizarre reincarnations called The Camino: A Journey of the Spirit, and we talked about some of the men who had been lovers in her current life and in previous existences.
W A L L A C E : You wrote that you had an affair in this life with Olaf Palme.
M A C L A I N E : With—this lifetime, yeah.
W A L L A C E : Yeah. Who was at the time—
M A C L A I N E : Swedish prime minister.
W A L L A C E : Prime minister of Sweden. Who, in a past life, Olaf Palme, was Charlemagne.
M A C L A I N E : Yeah. Well, that’s what it said in my vision.
W A L L A C E : With whom you also had an affair.
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M A C L A I N E : Yes, but one of many.
W A L L A C E : Back when you were a Moorish girl.
M A C L A I N E : That’s right.
W A L L A C E : And you witnessed androgynous people giving birth to androgynous children.
M A C L A I N E : Yes.
W A L L A C E : And you were androgynous.
M A C L A I N E : Yes.
I pointed out that many people, myself included, found her “recollections” preposterous. I asked if it bothered her to be regarded as a
“nutcase.”
“Listen,” she declared, “they said that about Christopher Colum-bus. They certainly said it about Jesus Christ. Ho-ho, they killed him for it. I mean, they say it about everybody who’s innovative. I think I’m innovative. I’m old enough to have earned the right to be innovative and get a big kick out of the people who think I’m a nutcase.”
Just the sort of answer I should have expected from a lady who insists that she had carnal relations with (among others) the first ruler of that vast and ambitious enterprise known as the Holy Roman Empire.
V a n e s s a R e d g r av e
B A C K I N T H E 1 9 6 0 S , W H E N she became vigorously engaged in politics, Shirley MacLaine embraced strong liber
al positions on most of the hot-button issues that blazed across that turbulent decade and beyond, well into the 1970s. But her left-wing convictions were
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downright moderate compared to those of a British actress I interviewed in 1979. Even “radical” is probably too mild a term to describe the inflammatory Marxist views of Vanessa Redgrave. In that respect, the American movie star she most closely resembled was not MacLaine but Jane Fonda, and I made the comparison in our 60
Minutes profile of her. Like Fonda, I said in my on-camera open to the story, Redgrave is “an actress who puts her political beliefs up front, before her acting career, and her money where her mouth is.”
In addition to their passionate commitment to left-wing causes, the two actresses had similar pedigrees: Both of them were daughters of renowned actors. In fact, on the night Vanessa was born in 1937, her father, Michael Redgrave, was playing Laertes in a London production of Hamlet that starred Laurence Olivier in the title role. At the curtain call that evening, Olivier proclaimed to the audience,
“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight a great actress has been born.
Laertes has a daughter!”
The daughter of “Laertes” had no trouble fulfilling that prophecy.
Her initial success was on the stage, where, thanks mainly to her work with the prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 1960s, she became known as one of England’s leading classical actresses. Redgrave then brought her distinctive elegance to a number of movie roles. Her first major film was the 1966 cult classic Morgan, in which she earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance as the ex-wife of a demented artist who goes to extreme lengths to prevent her from marrying another man. Two more Oscar nominations rapidly followed, one for her portrayal of the avant-garde dancer Isadora Duncan in 1968 and the second three years later, when she was cast in the title role of Mary, Queen of Scots.