by Mike Wallace
M I L L E R : Well, it’s a defeat. It always is.
Miller devoted so much time and energy to the uphill struggle of trying to make a success of his marriage to Monroe that he all but abandoned his work. During the five years or so that they were together, his only creative achievement was a screenplay for The Misfits, a film he wrote primarily as a vehicle for his wife. In the movie, Monroe played an ex-stripper and recent divorcée who falls in love with an aging, washed-up cowboy and accompanies him and his bud-dies on a roundup to corral wild horses. As the story unfolds, she is appalled to learn that the captured horses are to be slaughtered and sold to a dog-food company. Miller created the character to give Marilyn the opportunity to play the kind of sensitive and vulnerable woman he knew her to be. But the project turned out to be the couple’s melancholy swan song. By the time The Misfits went into production in 1960, the Miller-Monroe marriage was falling apart, and they were divorced the following year.
I reminded Miller that from the time he hooked up with Monroe until their divorce, he neglected his life’s vocation to such an extent that he did not write one stage play. And I asked him if, in light of that fact, he agreed with friends and admirers who viewed his marriage to Monroe as a terrible waste of his time and talent.
“Well, you could say that, I guess,” he replied. “At the same time, she was a great person to be with a lot of the time. She was full of the most astonishing terms and revelations about people. She was a super-sensitive instrument, and that’s exciting to be around until it starts to self-destruct.”
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Marilyn Monroe was Arthur Miller’s second wife, and by the time they broke up, he was moving toward his third marriage. While The Misfits was being shot on location in Nevada, a group of photographers from the Magnum agency was on hand to take pictures of the production. One member of the Magnum team was a thirty-sevenyear-old Austrian woman named Inge Morath. She caught Miller’s eye, one thing led to another, and they were married in February 1962, six months before Monroe’s death.
When it came to marriage, the third time was the charm for Miller. With Inge Morath, he found the happiness and stability that had eluded him in his previous matrimonial ventures. (One longtime friend sardonically observed that what distinguished Morath from his two other wives was that “she was a grown-up.”) In 1987, the year we did our profile of Miller, he and Inge celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.
What was more, it was surely no accident that after his marriage to Morath, he resumed writing plays. In 1964—nearly a decade after his last work had appeared on Broadway—a new Miller play called After the Fall opened in New York. It was a transparently autobio-graphical drama, with the character of Maggie, a deeply neurotic and destructive woman, obviously based on Marilyn Monroe.
Miller went on to write more plays, and although none of them measured up to the tragic heights of Death of a Salesman, some were worthy additions to his growing oeuvre. When I interviewed him in the fall of ’87, he was still turning out plays with impressive regularity. Yet Miller was, by then, seventy-two years old, and since he had exceeded his biblical allotment of threescore and ten, I raised a question I almost never asked an interviewee.
W A L L A C E : You ever think about an epitaph?
M I L L E R : Epitaph? Never gave it a moment’s thought.
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W A L L A C E : Give it a moment.
M I L L E R : The first thought that occurs to me is “He worked awful hard.” But that’s hardly a recommendation. Everybody does, or a lot of people do.
W A L L A C E : And what did he work for?
M I L L E R : Oh, some little moment of truth up on that stage that people could feel made them a little more human.
And that’s what virtually all his obituaries said when he died at the age of eighty-nine.
J o h n n y C a r s o n
I S U S P E C T T H E R E A S O N I asked Miller about his epitaph was because it was around this time—the mid-1980s—that the question was being put to me with some regularity. My customary answer on such occasions consisted of three simple words: “Tough—but fair.” A bit laconic, perhaps, but that pretty much captures how I would like my life’s work to be remembered. A couple of decades have come and gone since I first came up with that response, for, like Miller, I have been blessed with longevity, and like him, I have been one of those obstinate octogenarians who refuse to stop working. In my case, I’ve kept at it simply because the challenge of doing stories for 60 Minutes continues to give me a profound satisfaction that I’m sure I never could have found in retirement.
When Miller died in February 2005, it was just a few weeks after the passing of Johnny Carson, whose death brought to mind the adroit answer he once gave to the question about one’s own epitaph.
At the time he addressed the subject, Carson was a mere boy of fifty-
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two who still had twenty-seven years of life ahead of him. (I mention this to make the point that we geezers aren’t the only ones who have to deal with that intrusive query.) The year was 1977 and the place was Harvard University, where he was being honored as the Hasty Pudding Club’s “Man of the Year.” During a news conference at that event, a young reporter asked him, “What would you like your epitaph to be?”
“Well,” Carson replied, “I’d prefer not to have one at all, where it never got to that point.” Then, after a perfectly timed pause, he said,
“I think something like ‘I’ll be right back.’ ”
That was exactly the kind of response we would want from a man who, even before he began his long association with The Tonight Show, had made his living as a host on television programs, a job that by definition entailed frequent breaks for commercials and other interruptions. Carson was then in his fifteenth year as the host of Tonight and was at the height of his reign as the king of late-night television. As it happened, a 60 Minutes camera crew was on hand to record his reply to the epitaph question, because we were planning to include his acceptance of the Hasty Pudding Club award in a piece I was doing on him.
Carson had to be coaxed into giving his consent to a 60 Minutes profile, and that did not surprise me. It had long been known that behind the genial facade he presented to the millions of viewers who tuned in to The Tonight Show, he was a deeply private man who had a reputation for being standoffish. In particular, he was wary of reporters who tried to pry into his personal life. So getting him to go along with our proposal was a hard sell, and even then the sale did not go through—or at least it did not go through at the time, as planned. Shortly after the event at Harvard, and before I had a chance to interview him, Carson sent word that he had changed his mind; he was no longer amenable to being the subject of a 60 Min-
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utes story. He offered no explanation, and we didn’t press him for one. His decision left us with no choice but to abandon the project, and that was how matters stood for the next two years.
In March 1979, I was a guest on The Tonight Show, and I seized the opportunity to rag Carson—in his own domain—about the way he had “chickened out” on us. I challenged him to reconsider his decision. “What are you afraid of?” I asked in a teasing tone. “What are you trying to hide?”
I really didn’t think that my lighthearted effort to shame him would work, but it did. Not long after my appearance on Tonight, Carson changed his mind again and gave us the green light to do a profile. When I interviewed him that spring at his home in Bel Air, I asked him about his flip-flop reaction to our entreaties.
W A L L A C E : Why are you doing this now?
C A R S O N : Doing what?
W A L L A C E : This. You walked out on us once before. . . .
C A R S O N : Well, I understood that you wer
e paying me a large amount of money for this.
W A L L A C E : You’re wrong!
Much of my work at that time dealt with the misdeeds of rogues and con men, like the ones I wrote about in Chapter Six. I was so deeply immersed in investigative journalism that it had come to be regarded by many as my raison d’être on 60 Minutes. Carson was well aware of that (he claimed to be an avid viewer of our show), and it was his turn to have a little fun at my expense.
C A R S O N : Why are you doing this now? I’m not running a boiler-room operation. I have no phony real-estate scam. I’m not taking any kickbacks. I did steal a ring from Woolworth’s
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once when I was twelve years old, and I think that’s why you’re here.
W A L L A C E : We’re doing this because you’re a national treasure.
That’s what they tell me, you’re a national treasure.
C A R S O N : And you know what the dollar is worth nowadays.
As the interview progressed, we talked about his reputation for being aloof and unfeeling.
W A L L A C E : There’s a stereotype of Carson. You know there is.
C A R S O N : Well, what is it? What is it?
W A L L A C E : Ice water in his veins.
C A R S O N : I had that taken out years ago. I went to Denmark and had that done. It’s all over now.
W A L L A C E : Shy, defensive.
C A R S O N : That’s probably true. I can remember when I was in high school—if I pulled out my old high school annual book and read some of the things, people might say,
“Oh, he’s conceited. He’s aloof.” Actually, that was more shy. When I’m in front of an audience, you see, it’s a different thing. If I’m in front of an audience, I can feel comfortable.
W A L L A C E : Why?
C A R S O N : I’m in control.
More than anything else, it was Carson’s nightly monologues that gave his program a distinctive edge over other talk shows. They were sharply written, and he delivered them with a crisp and precise timing that was one of his comedic strengths. The objects of his wit were not always amused by his put-downs, but he took care to keep
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the ridicule within certain parameters, and he had an unerring sense of where to draw the line. When I asked him about that, Carson cited the example of Congressman Wilbur Mills. Five years before our interview, Mills—who was then the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee—made a fool of himself when he got drunk and went on a moonlight romp in Washington’s Tidal Basin with a striptease dancer named Fannie Fox—aka “The Argentine Firecracker.” That escapade made Mills fair game, a most inviting target, and Carson put the wood to him in several monologues. But, as he made clear in our conversation, he abruptly stopped making fun of Mills when he found out that the congressman “was an alcoholic and had emotional problems and, in fact, was dependent on alcohol.”
Carson himself was known to have had some excessive encounters with the sauce, so when he alluded to Mills’s alcoholism, I couldn’t resist making the connection.
W A L L A C E : Of course, it takes one to know one.
C A R S O N : Ah, cruel. You’re cruel.
W A L L A C E : But there was a time—
C A R S O N : What?
W A L L A C E : Come on. There was a time when—
C A R S O N : I used to have a little pop? I sure did.
W A L L A C E : That’s right.
C A R S O N : I don’t handle it well . . . I found that it’s probably best for me to not really entangle with it, because I just found out that I—I did not drink well. And when I did drink, rather than a lot of people, who become fun-loving and gregarious and love everybody, I would go the opposite. And it would happen (Claps hands) just like that.
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Even though two years had passed since Carson’s award from Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club, we chose to end the piece with our footage of that event. Being honored by that citadel of Ivy League prestige had to be a heady experience for a fellow who had attended the state university in his native Nebraska in the late 1940s. In his acceptance remarks, Carson acknowledged that in his droll and cavalier way.
“This is really lovely,” he told his Hasty Pudding hosts, “but more important than that, I want to thank the club for letting me and my wife stay in the master’s residence last night at Elliott House. You really don’t know what that means. It’s the first time I’ve scored with a chick on a college campus since 1949.”
We repeated our profile of CarsoninMay 1992, when, after thirty years on the throne of late-night television, he finally passed the crown to his successor, Jay Leno. We broadcast the piece just a few nights before the cheery and familiar introduction—“Here’s Johnny!”—was heard for the last time. Inthe years since then, Carsonsteadfastly shunned the limelight, including the one that emanated from 60 Minutes. I tried onseveral occasions to persuade him to let us do anupdate of our 1979 story, one that would allow us to take a look at what he’d beendoing with his life since he left The Tonight Show. His replies were always courteous, evencordial, but the answer was always the same: Thanks, but no thanks. Once he crossed over into retirement, Johnny Carson became an even more vigilant guardian of his privacy.
M e l B ro o k s
I ’ V E I N T E R V I E W E D S O M E O T H E R C O M E D I A N S over the years, from Steve Allen in 1957 to Billy Crystal in 2002. I discovered
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early on that interviews with comedians can often be erratic and mer-curial, and that’s the main reason I’ve been inclined to avoid them or at least approach them warily, with my guard up and all my reflexes on full alert. A good interviewer does his best to control the verbal exchange, to follow the agenda he has put together for the occasion. But comedians resist that. They live for humor and revel in distraction.
Being compulsive jokers, they will say or do almost anything to get a laugh, even (or perhaps especially) if it’s at the expense of the poor souls who are trying to interview them.
As I noted a few pages back, when I interviewed Carson in 1979, he had gentle sport with me for my heavy concentration on investigative stories. It was really quite harmless, but beneath the whimsy, there was a tacit message. In effect, what Carson was saying to me was this: I’m wise to your tricks, Wallace, so don’t try to probe too deeply into my life. I’m not one of your crooks or con men.
Twenty-two years later, when I sat down with Mel Brooks, he quickly took control. The interview was designed to be the center-piece of a 60 Minutes profile of Brooks to be broadcast just before the Broadway opening of his musical The Producers, based on a 1968
movie he had written and directed. At first, when I tried to talk about the show, he preferred to focus on my jewelry and wardrobe.
W A L L A C E : Tell me something. The show—
B R O O K S : Is that a hundred-dollar watch? Let me see that watch.
W A L L A C E : It’s about a forty-dollar watch.
B R O O K S : It’s a beautiful watch.
W A L L A C E : Isn’t it?
B R O O K S : Yeah, I love that.
W A L L A C E : It’s a forty-dollar watch.
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B R O O K S : Really?
W A L L A C E : Yes, lights up in the dark.
B R O O K S : What a cheap son of a bitch you are.
W A L L A C E : You got that right. You’re a great judge of character.
Tell me this—
B R O O K S : What did you pay for your jacket?
W A L L A C E : I don’t know. This is hopsack.
B R O O K S : Hopsack is like fancy burlap, right? Am I right?
W A L L A C E : That’s exactly right. T
hat’s exactly right.
B R O O K S : It’s like burlap shrunk down. Did you know that six months ago, that your jacket carried coffee beans? Do you realize that? And I’m telling you, that came from Colombia full of coffee. Wait a minute. (Sniffs Wallace’s sleeve) He reeks of Colombian coffee!
I didn’t mind playing straight man to Mel Brooks. As a young man, he was one of the gifted writers who created skits for Sid Caesar’s television show, a stable of talent that included such once-and-future hotshots as Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen.
He eventually moved on from television to film, writing and directing such loony, over-the-top comedies as Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. But his boldest and most outrageous movie—
and one that many critics and fans regard as his best—was his first feature-length film, The Producers.
The movie’s two main characters are a has-been producer and his accountant, who come up with a scheme to bilk thousands of dollars out of naive investors, most of whom are elderly widows just a few gasps away from their final breath. In order for the swindle to work, the new show for which they’re raising wildly excessive funds must be a surefire flop, a guaranteed loser. Their search for such a property
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leads them to an unreconstructed Nazi who has written a play called Springtime for Hitler, an engaging and nostalgic look at the leader of the Third Reich and his fun-loving cronies. The twist comes when, in the production of the play, Der Führer is portrayed as such a bum-bling buffoon that the audience responds to him with gales of laughter and applause. As a result, the show is a hit, the scam is exposed, and our two heroes are sent off to prison.
Brooks received an Oscar for that year’s best original screenplay, and although The Producers was not as big a box-office success as some of his later films, it did become a kind of cult classic. And that was that until three decades later, when he decided to revive the story as a Broadway musical.