That was when he reached out to me, hoping my broadcast would help him snag a job. Short and not particularly good-looking, Wojtowicz turned on the charm with me right away, speaking rapidly of his frustrations trying to find a job.
“They tell me they can’t give me a job because I’m an ex-con,” he whined. “But they can’t use that excuse. They could say I’m not qualified, but how could they justify that I’m not qualified, for example, to be a ticket taker or a cashier?” Then he asserted, “I’ve been in banking for eight years, so no problem—I could be a bank teller, no problem. I know all that stuff.”
As we walked and talked, the man everyone knew as Dog Day said he understood why people didn’t want him handling money, given that he was a convicted bank robber. But he said he saw no reason why he couldn’t get the job he really wanted—as a bank security guard!
“If I can hold off half the New York City Police Department and half the FBI for two days, I know I could guard a bank, or anything else,” he said confidently. “If I’m guarding you, who’s going to mess with you?”
Eventually, Dog Day Wojtowicz found a few odd jobs, including one cleaning toilets and providing other janitorial services on Park Avenue. Yet he never forgot what made him famous. Periodically, until his death in 2006, he would return to Brooklyn to stand in front of the Chase Manhattan bank, signing autographs and wearing a T-shirt proclaiming, “I robbed this bank.”
35
CHRISTIE BRINKLEY: THE KNOCKOUT WHO FOCUSED ON KNOCKOUTS
Christie Brinkley and me. 1982.
Blonde, blue-eyed cover-girl model Christie Brinkley is a dazzling beauty to this day, and has graced the covers of more than 500 magazines in her career. Playboy readers voted her one of the 100 sexiest women of the 20th century, and she has also been labeled “one of the 100 hottest women of all time.”
What few know about her is that this knockout in front of the lens was also enchanted with knockouts in the boxing arena. Early in her career, Brinkley had a passion for boxing, and spent a lot of time photographing fights. She was 27 when I wrote about her photographic interest for Parade magazine. Despite her success as a model, she said she got a greater thrill seeing one of her boxing pictures in print. Her first photo appeared in the boxing magazine Ring.
“It was an outstanding photograph of a fighter’s face flying off the side of his opponent’s glove,” she told me excitedly. It was the first time the glamorous model had gained recognition for something other than her sensuous beauty, and the $50 fee and credit line it brought her seemed to buy her more pride than the thousands of dollars she received daily for modeling shoots.
“Modeling is fun,” she told me at the time, “but photography is so much more challenging. I love to capture the action and to compose my pictures. It’s so stimulating.”
Brinkley said she knew absolutely nothing about boxing until friends invited her to join them in the third row at the heavyweight championship fight in October, 1980, between Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes in Las Vegas.
“I both surprised and impressed my friends by learning as much as I could about the fight,” she recalled.
She brought three cameras to the bout.
“There was such excitement—the whole audience was screaming,” she said. “It was like a concert. I could hardly load my film.” She remembered that her hands were trembling when, 30 seconds into the first round, Ali took a punch “that knocked the expression of confidence off his face.” Brinkley’s blue eyes radiated as she described the events of that night, admitting to being a bit squeamish when she first saw the blood and brutality of the sport.
“I was in tears behind the camera, but too caught up with what was happening to stop shooting,” she said. By the time Ali’s manager stopped the fight in the 10th round, Brinkley had shot 35 rolls of film. “Thank goodness I wasn’t on assignment,” she explained. “Most of my pictures were out of focus and poorly exposed. Also, because I didn’t know how to anticipate a punch, I got lots of shots of outstretched arms and faces with blank looks.”
Brinkley was clearly in focus herself at the post-fight party. There she met the editor of Ring, who had noticed her taking pictures during the fight. He offered to give her an assignment, which she assumed was simply a polite party gesture. A few weeks later, he actually offered her an assignment to shoot a fight at Madison Square Garden. Her greatest fear was that she would be resented by the cadre of male photographers there, who earned their living shooting the fights. She tried to hide her curvaceous body under a conservative tailored suit, and tucked her long blonde mane under a rimmed hat. However, despite her concerns, Brinkley was immediately accepted as one of the boys by the veteran ringside lensmen.
While most boxing photographers are out to catch the crucial punch, Brinkley said her interest was in looking beyond the brutality of boxing, and explained that she wanted to capture “the rich atmosphere in the arena and the human drama written on the faces of the people in and out of the ring.” Explaining further, she said, “I look for the shot of the guy who won after he was sure he was going to lose, or the wives of the fighters on the sidelines.”
Her efforts to capture the complete boxing experience in her pictures paid off at the November 1980 Roberto Duran–Sugar Ray Leonard fight in New Orleans, where Duran stunned the boxing world by quitting in the middle of the match. Afterward, the boxer maintained that he had a terrible stomachache. Yet no one recalled seeing any sign of illness during the fight—except Brinkley, who thought it was so unusual to see an icepack on Duran’s stomach that she took a picture. Her photo provided irrefutable evidence that Duran had indeed been ill before he threw in the towel.
Brinkley won other praise for her photographs. “Her work stands up to her looks,” one photographer said. “It’s of the highest professional caliber,” said another. The then-editor of Ring, Randy Gordon, was impressed by the sensitivity of her pictures, noting her “marvelous sense of timing. She could almost feel when the guy is about to let the punch go, and get a picture of one fighter’s fist on the other guy’s chin, with the face all distorted.”
While she said that she never wanted special treatment, Brinkley admitted she was always grateful for those rare moments when her good looks gave her the edge over other photographers—like the time she watched a young fighter take such a terrible beating that the referee had to stop the fight. As the defeated boxer slumped in the corner, Brinkley jumped into the ring to get some close-ups. “His face was badly mauled,” she recalled. “He looked as if he had been in an auto accident. Suddenly there was movement in one of his closed, puffy eyes. It opened and shut in a wink as he looked up at me and pursed his swollen lips. How many photographers can say they have a picture of a defeated boxer throwing them a kiss?”
Brinkley also told me she believed her photography helped her become a better model. For one thing, she said, it helped her to be more patient, and enabled her to develop a better understanding of just what a photographer looks for. It has certainly paid off for her. These days, Brinkley continues to model and act in film and television, owns exclusive lines of jewelry and skincare products, and is successfully involved in real estate—leaving her with a reported knockout worth of $80 million.
36
EDDIE FISHER: THE KISS I NEVER SAW COMING
I had to coach Eddie Fisher before a live broadcast of Midday Edition in 1982.
Described by some as “the Frank Sinatra of our time,” Eddie Fisher was one of the most popular singers of the early 1950s. From the beginning, his life seemed to contain all the elements of the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story, a fairy tale about a poor Jewish boy from Philadelphia who grew up to sing for princesses, dine with presidents and marry not one, but three of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars. He had talent, popularity and money—until he made the journey from star to has-been, from millionaire to bankrupt, from heaven to hell.
In November of 1981, Fisher came to the studio to tell his story and promote his memoir, Eddie:
My Life, My Loves. It proved to be one of the most challenging interviews I ever did. And for the first time in my career—and quite uncharacteristic for me—I had to admonish and lecture my guest.
Fisher appeared sleepy when he showed up with two publicists for a morning taping of the interview, to be used on a future broadcast of the syndicated show Midday Edition. Still boyish-looking at 53, thanks in part to a facelift, Fisher was very laidback as I told him about the format of the interview and what I hoped to cover in the four minutes allotted for the segment.
We began the interview. “In a brutally revealing autobiography, Eddie Fisher talks candidly about his life,” I said as part of my introduction, then welcomed Fisher and led into my first question by noting that he was the guy who had it all, and blew it. “What happened?” I asked. Fisher twisted uncomfortably in his chair. A nervous smile pierced his lips and, after a slight pause, I got a “Well, umm,” then another pause.
“I took a fork in the road,” he said finally, then followed it with another strained laugh, adding, “I don’t know, I think I got married.” He seemed to be rambling already.
“Were your marriages the problem?” I asked.
There was another pause, then, “I…umm…ahh, I got away from music,” he said. “I got interested in other things…that we really don’t want to talk about.” He dropped further back into his chair. “We want to talk about music.”
“Okay,” I said, “let’s talk about music. What happened to the man and his music?” Again rambling, Fisher repeated what I had just said, then retorted, “I just told you, I—umm”—another long pause—“some other things took priority, which was a mistake.” Trying to hold the interview together, I asked Fisher to elaborate about some of those priorities, but still he had no answer for me. “I’ve talked about it so much, and—ahh—umm…”
At this point I had already realized that the interview was terrible, and would have loved to start over. But we had to prepare the studio for our live broadcast. We had two minutes left for the interview, and I still hadn’t learned anything about Fisher’s scandalous divorce from Debbie Reynolds, or his volatile marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, who had humiliated him when she ditched him for Richard Burton. I was hoping he would tell me, as he had written in the book, that living with Elizabeth Taylor “was like living in the eye of a hurricane,” or that he would repeat any of the other dirt he had dished in his memoir, like the story he told of confronting Burton after learning that he and Taylor were having an affair during the filming of Cleopatra.
“Richard, leave my wife alone,” he told the actor—to which, according to Fisher, Burton replied, “You don’t need her. You’re a star already. I’m not. She’s going to make me a star. I’m going to use her, that no-talent Hollywood nothing.”
I also knew that Fisher’s career began to tumble after his divorce from Taylor, after which he got hooked on methamphetamines in so-called “vitamin cocktails” supplied by “Dr. Feelgood,” Max Jacobson, the man who shot up the stars. He blew money carelessly, living so high on the $20 million he earned in his career that he finally hit bottom and filed for bankruptcy. All of this was fascinating stuff, and would have been very compelling for our viewers to hear—but he told me none of it during our interview. The only decent quote that came out of it was when Fisher acknowledged that he was his own victim.
“I thought I could do anything,” he confessed. “I was very young, and I thought I knew everything. I thought I had everything. But I didn’t know everything.” He said he should have focused on his singing and “not let my head get turned away in another direction—but we all make mistakes.” On the verge of making another comeback, Fisher declared, “I consider myself one of the luckiest people on the face of the earth.”
The taping session ended. I thanked Fisher for coming in, and said goodbye to him and his publicists, who didn’t look too happy. I dashed back to the newsroom to check my script for the upcoming live newscast. A few minutes later, an embarrassed Fisher showed up and asked if there was any chance we could tape the interview again. He was apologetic for not being very responsive the first go-around. My producer told me another taping was okay if Fisher was willing to wait until after our live broadcast. Fisher and his publicists were thrilled, and agreed to wait. About 20 minutes before our broadcast, however, my producer informed me that our scheduled live guest for that day had failed to show up. “Do you think Eddie can go live?” she asked. I hesitated, then said that it was worth a shot—but I wanted to talk to him first.
Pulling Fisher aside from his publicists, I picked up on what he had told me during the interview, that he considered himself lucky.
“Well, today is your lucky day, Eddie,” I said, “because you’re going to get a second chance to do that interview. Are you up to doing it live?” Fisher’s face lit up and his eyes widened.
“Live? Oh, yes, I’m ready. I love you, Marv,” he declared. But we weren’t done. I told him how disappointed I was that he hadn’t been responsive to my questions in the first interview.
“You’re promoting a book, and it should be expected that you are willing to talk about what you have written,” I counseled. In no uncertain terms, I added, “If you want to embarrass yourself, do it somewhere else—not on this network, on my program or to my viewers.” Fisher was most apologetic, and assured me he would handle the live interview better.
Seconds before the segment went live, I again encouraged him to be upbeat and responsive. He smiled affirmatively. I began by showing a photo I had taken with him 25 years earlier, when he had just gotten out of the Army. “Look how adorable I was,” he laughed. Holding his head up and no longer slumped in the chair, Fisher said he felt great, declaring, “I gotta sing, I gotta sing!” Raising his arms, the iconic tenor took me by surprise as he burst out with lyrics from the hit Broadway musical Cats, bellowing, “Midnight—not a sound from the pavement.” Seizing a moment when I wasn’t on-camera, I blinked my eyes, nodded my head approvingly and gave him a thumbs-up. This was a different Eddie Fisher, a different interview. “Wait a minute,” he beamed with a smile. “Did I just do that? I’m crazy—I feel wonderful.”
Though he never did get into his relationships with Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor or Connie Stevens, he was much more forthright than before about his failures.
“I got lost,” he confessed. “I got involved with women, with gambling, and I loved buying women jewelry—rubies, diamonds and emeralds—and I loved to give it all away. I was a victim of Eddie Fisher, whatever that means.” He exuded energy and there was a sparkle in his eye as he went on. “Singing is my true love,” he said. “I feel like I’m sitting on top of the world right now, because I’ve been given a second chance.” I wrapped up the interview with a quote from Fisher’s memoir: “A future of promise is possible only when you have made peace with the past. Eddie Fisher has made that journey, and we wish him well.”
The broadcast was over and the lights came down. Fisher’s publicists couldn’t have been happier. Fisher himself was thrilled with the interview—just how thrilled, I was about to find out. “I love you, Marv,” he declared again, embracing me. Abruptly, he gave me a kiss like I’d never had before: a soul kiss, in which he placed his tongue in my mouth. I immediately recoiled in surprise as Fisher laughingly told me, “The only one I ever did that to before was Dean Martin.”
Well, at least I was in good company!
37
THE HOLOCAUST DENIER: A DIFFICULT INTERVIEW
Dr. Robert Countess.
In commemoration of the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in the spring of 1993, I invited a Holocaust survivor and a historian to join me on my weekly newsmaker program, PIX11 News Closeup. It was a time when anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism were on the rise, and one in five Americans did not believe that the Holocaust had ever occurred. In light of the graphic images from the concentration camps, the tales of Holocaust survivors and the bodies of six million Jews, I found this incompr
ehensible; yet in the interest of fair journalism, I decided to invite a Holocaust denier on the program as well. Jewish groups were not pleased, claiming that “to engage them in debate would give them the undeserved legitimacy they crave,” but I felt it my responsibility to cover both sides.
My guest was Dr. Robert Countess, a revisionist historian. Countess was active with the Institute for Historical Review, an organization at the center of the international Holocaust-denial movement. I began my interview by noting that in journalism school they taught us that there are two sides to every story—but as the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow once observed, some stories just don’t have another side.
“The Holocaust,” I said, “is one story that doesn’t appear to have another side.”
Almost before my sentence was finished, Countess shot back, “I would say that every story has three or four sides.” I insisted that I was simply interested in hearing his side, to which Countess responded by flat-out denying that there had ever been a systematic policy to exterminate the Jews during World War II.
“There was a Nazi effort to relocate Jews out of Germany control,” he asserted, “but never any talk of extermination.” He went on, explaining that the Jews had simply been sent to internment camps until they could be settled elsewhere.
“Was Auschwitz a death camp?” I asked.
He quickly answered, “No,” then modified his answer. “Yes, in the sense that people died there—mostly from typhus,” he said.
As I Saw It Page 21