As we wrapped up the interview, he told me how pleased he was that Amadeus had just won the Oscar for Best Film. “It’s wonderful to see a movie of such caliber get recognized like that,” he said. He expressed the hope that he, too, could wind up on the silver screen as one of his musical heroes.
“Maybe there’s another composer’s life that someday I might be able to interpret on the screen,” he smiled, with a sparkle in his eyes.
He never got to do that. Less than a month after our interview, Liberace was secretly diagnosed with HIV, and died of AIDS-related complications two years later at the age of 67. For me, I will never forget the day Liberace played the piano for me, and thanked me graciously for an “enjoyable” interview. I thanked him in turn for one of the most memorable interviews I had ever done—one that seems as fresh today as it did that sunny day in the studio in 1985.
short takes
At the heart of every story is a person. It is the people of all walks of life—the poverty-stricken and the rich and famous—of all faiths and religions, of all different shades of skin—who make the news; I’m simply the storyteller. And as a reporter, I’ve been fortunate not only to tell their stories, but to connect with many of them personally, including a couple of convicted murderers, a Mafia hitman, presidents and presidents-to-be. I’ve been to Hell and back, and was caught sitting in my car with a thousand-dollar-a-night prostitute; I’ve anchored the news in my skivvies and gotten the Concorde to land in the Hudson.
The best part of dealing with people directly is the gratitude they express when I meet them. Often I’ll hear, “I’ve grown up watching you—thank you for your good reporting.” I was most touched when an Italian immigrant, who had just become an American citizen, ran up to me to say thanks. “I have learned English by listening to you on television.”
There are so many personal stories I could share from my long career as a journalist—some uplifting, some sad, some simply a look behind the scenes of a life in reporting. It would take volumes to tell them all. Here are a few of the shorter ones that have stuck with me the most.
41
THE ANGEL OF THE EVENING
Leaving the night shift one evening, I was approached by an attractive woman who asked if I would like to party. She was a working girl, attempting to proposition me for a sexual encounter. Being the reporter I am, I quickly turned the tables on her with a proposition of my own—an interview. It took a little sweet-talking on my end to get her to agree to such an unconventional request, but in the end she agreed to join me in my car, where I recorded a ten-minute interview.
She called herself the “Angel of the Evening.” She explained that she was a housewife from Kentucky with two kids and an unemployed husband, who came to New York City a few times a year. She told me she made about $1,000 a night, and each time would return home with $15,000–$20,000 in cash.
The interview was terrific—but I had some explaining to do to a skeptical colleague, who spotted me sitting in my car with an attractive woman at 2 o’clock in the morning.
42
“MY HOSTAGE”
Journalists can get very possessive when we feel we have something exclusive. Sometimes this can push us to ridiculous extremes. In 1985, after Islamic extremists released 39 hostages from the recently hijacked TWA Flight 847, the hostages were flown from Beirut to Rhein-Main Air Base in Germany for medical check-ups. I was among a mob of reporters outside the hospital, clamoring for interviews. Observing one of the former captives out for a stroll, I attempted to flag him down for an interview. As I approached him, however, a producer from The Today Show appeared out of nowhere and grabbed his arm.
She turned to me, fire in her eyes. “You can’t have him,” she declared fiercely. “He’s my hostage!”
43
THE NEWS IN BRIEFS
It was a stifling July night when the police and fire radios bellowed an urgent call to the airport in Charleston, West Virginia. A commercial airliner had just overshot the runway and there were reports of injuries.
Alone in the two-man Capitol Bureau of WHTN-TV, I grabbed a camera and portable light and raced to the airport, where I discovered the light’s battery was dead. I piggybacked off of competitors’ lights, shooting while they were shooting to capture images of emergency operations, dazed passengers running to the terminal and a plane that had miraculously stopped short of running off the mountaintop runway. It was the big story of the night, and I had less than two hours to get it on the air.
By the time I returned to the studio, I was dripping with sweat, and my clothes felt like a wet towel. The studio was vacant but for myself and an engineer who came in to put my segment on the air, so I removed my jacket, shirt and pants and hung them up to dry, running barefoot and in my skivvies into the darkroom to hand-develop the film I had shot. Once the developing process was done, I wrapped the film around a drum made of dowel sticks, turned on a fan, and rotated the drum by hand to dry it. A rather primitive procedure, by today’s standards!
Breathlessly, I dashed back and forth to the newsroom, calling police and hospitals and checking the teletypes for the latest information while attempting to write a script. The film wasn’t quite dry when we went on the air at 11. The lead anchor in Huntington headlined the story at the top of the broadcast, telling viewers I had just returned from the scene and would be along shortly with film. (This was 1959, and there was no technology yet that would allow us to go live from the scene of breaking news.)
It was about five minutes after 11 when the film was finally dry. There was no time to edit it, or do anything else, for that matter—except get into the studio. I dashed into the newsroom and threw on my shirt, tie and jacket, not bothering with shoes or pants. Charging downstairs, I threw the film to the engineer while still buttoning my shirt, and was barely behind the desk when the anchor cut to me for the latest details. I was still perspiring heavily; sweat dripped visibly from my brow. A few seconds into the story, my horn-rimmed glasses fogged up, and anyone watching my eyes would have found themselves staring into two gray pits. The only thing that saved me was that we cut almost immediately to the film I had shot, giving me an opportunity to wipe my glasses.
It wasn’t my best presentation, but I got the story on the air—and viewers never suspected that I was coming into their homes wearing my BVDs.
44
THE WITNESS
It’s amazing, people’s weakness for their ten seconds of fame on-camera. While covering a story about a fire in a South Bronx apartment—which police later discovered to have been arson, intended to cover up the robbery and murder of an elderly woman—a young man approached me to tell me he had seen a man running from the apartment, carrying a television set. He said he gave chase, but failed to catch him. Naturally, I put him on-camera to describe exactly what he claimed to have seen.
It was a good sound bite—but as it turned out, he wasn’t quite the neighbor he had claimed to be. The next day, detectives showed up at the studio, and asked to view the video. My eyewitness, they said, was the man they suspected of robbing and killing the elderly woman, and setting her apartment on fire.
45
BLAMING THE NEWS
In the seventies, Peter Mocco, then-mayor of North Bergen, New Jersey, was indicted by a grand jury on corruption charges. Some of the evidence leading to the indictment was uncovered in a series of investigative reports I did for WNEW-TV, which the U.S. Attorney for New Jersey credited as relevant in the probe. The charges—of criminal conflict of interest and conspiracy—stemmed from Mocco’s alleged involvement in arranging for the township to do business with a company in which he was accused of having a private interest.
From reliable sources, I had learned in advance that the grand jury was about to indict Mocco, and I broke the story exclusively on the air. Days later, after Mocco was arrested and formally charged, he claimed the indictment was the result of my report, and threatened to challenge WNEW-TV’s FCC license. His argument—which ultimatel
y failed—was that once the jurors heard the news on television, “they felt obligated to indict.”
46
A BREAKING STORY THAT HIT HOME
I was just finishing the weather report on my local noontime newscast when my producer burst into my earpiece to alert me to a breaking news story coming up. A writer slipped the copy into the teleprompter, which I began reading cold on the air, relating how firefighters were battling a stubborn blaze in a high-rise building in Fort Lee, New Jersey. The blaze had gone to several alarms and people were being evacuated from the building. Suddenly I found my delivery slowing and my pulse quickening as new information brought me to the realization that the fire was actually in the building where I lived! Oh my God, I thought, trying to keep my delivery calm. I couldn’t get to a commercial break fast enough. At the break I called my son, who was living with his mother in an adjoining building. He said he had just heard my report on TV, but aside from hearing the fire engines, he knew less about the fire than I did.
After the break, I read an update on the fire, reporting that there had been no injuries and that the fire had been confined to the 21st floor. My apartment was on the eighth floor, and was undamaged. Still, it was one hell of a way for me to get the news that struck so awfully close to home.
47
HURRICANE CALLING
It was a couple of weeks before Christmas in 1975. I had just completed an exclusive report stating that Rubin “Hurricane” Carter would soon be released from prison to await a second trial for murder. I had barely left the studio when a production assistant came running down the hall to inform me that I had a collect call in the newsroom from Trenton State Prison, from someone named Hurricane.
“Marv, is it true?” the excited voice asked when I picked up. My report was the first he had heard of Governor Brendan Byrne’s intention of releasing him and his co-defendant, John Artis, under a form of executive clemency, pending the outcome of their upcoming appeal for a new trial.
I had met previously with the former middleweight boxer at New Jersey’s maximum-security prison, where he had already served nine years of a life sentence for a crime he told me he didn’t commit. Carter and Artis were found guilty of the murders of three white people in a Paterson, New Jersey bar in 1966; claiming they had been framed, they argued that their conviction was based on flawed and circumstantial evidence. Carter became an international symbol of racial injustice, inspiring Bob Dylan to write the song “Hurricane” and jumpstarting a movement, spearheaded by Muhammad Ali and a legion of other celebrities, to get him and Artis freed.
Complicating the case were tales of Carter’s fits of rage and violent nature, something that would continue to dog him long after the trial, and to which he would make reference in his autobiography, The Sixteenth Round. One major source of controversy was the circumstances surrounding the beating of Carolyn Kelley in 1976, while Carter was awaiting retrial. Kelley had been one of Carter’s biggest supporters, and devoted more than a year of her life to raising funds for Carter’s defense. During an argument in a Maryland hotel room, however, Carter punched Kelley, flooring her, then kicked her in the back.
Carter initially denied hitting her, and later offered different versions of what had happened that night—including one in an interview with me, conducted while Carter was out on bail, that would be brought up many times over the years. In his autobiography, he claimed that Kelley had faked the beating because they were having an affair, and she wanted to blackmail him out of $100,000. In my interview, however, he set the figure at a quarter of a million dollars, and told me Kelley had turned on him because he wouldn’t give her the money.
“The Kelley matter affects me very horrendously,” he told me, noting that because he was out on bail at the time, anything of a scandalous nature would get him back behind bars. Though Kelley never filed charges, Carter feared that her allegations would turn off the thousands of people who had come to help him. “But we’re going to deal with it,” he declared, looking straight into my camera. “We’re going to keep on going…I’m going to win, ’cause I don’t know how to quit.”
During his six-week retrial, Carter kept up this cautious optimism, telling me that despite his wrongful conviction at his first trial, he still had faith in the criminal justice system. Those hopes were dashed when the jury of eight men and four women returned a verdict of guilty on all three counts of first-degree murder. It was a shocker—pain and anguish were clearly visible on the boxer’s face. But in 1985, after Carter had spent a total of almost 20 years in prison, a federal judge overturned his and Artis’s convictions, claiming the prosecutions had been “predicated upon an appeal of racism rather than reason, concealment rather than disclosure.” Carter enjoyed 28 years of freedom before his death at the age of 79 in 2014.
48
WATCH WHO YOU’RE TURNING YOUR BACK ON
A cemetery seemed the perfect backdrop for the opening to a documentary I was filming, dealing with the high number of cancer deaths in New Jersey. The crew and I stopped in the cemetery office in Roseland, New Jersey, to ask permission to shoot on the premises. We waited for a while—and when no one showed up, we entered and began shooting discreetly, making certain we only had the backs of tombstones facing the camera, so as not to reveal any names.
After several minutes we were approached by a priest from the local archdiocese, who admonished us for filming there without permission and demanded that we leave immediately. I apologized for the intrusion and we began to pack up our equipment. Defusing his anger, he explained that he wasn’t upset because we were trespassing, but was concerned because of where I had been standing. He explained that my back was to the tombstone of the son of a noted Mafia figure, who lived in a nearby gated estate that was rumored to have a gas chamber where he purportedly exterminated people who crossed him.
“He would be most displeased,” the priest cautioned, “if he saw somebody’s back to his son’s grave.”
49
JACKIE O’S ONE-WORD EXCLUSIVE
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the woman we had come to know and love as Jackie, was a radiant First Lady. She was elegant and glamorous, a photographer’s dream. Almost ten years after the assassination of President Kennedy, she was married to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and living in New York with her children, John Jr. and Caroline, where they remained under the watchful eye of the Secret Service.
But there was another eye always on them, too—one pressed to the viewfinder of a camera. Notorious paparazzo Ron Galella became Jackie’s nemesis as he stalked her and her children, earning a comfortable living off of the pictures he took of them. For years, Galella hid in bushes and behind coat racks in pursuit of candid Jackie shots. He would often say that his subjects were more like “targets,” and Jackie was his favorite—“the perfect model of wife, mother, woman.”
I had known Galella for years, and he would boast to me about how much he loved the chase and even claim that, despite her protests over his intrusiveness, Jackie actually loved his photographic stalking. Secret Service agents were concerned, however, that Galella was getting too close. He took pictures of John Jr. riding his bicycle in Central Park, and on one occasion jumped into his path to get a closer shot. Another time he interrupted Caroline during a tennis game. And he was accused of coming “uncomfortably close” to Jackie, pursuing her in a boat as she swam.
At one point Galella came so close, he was arrested by agents. That prompted him to file suit against them and Jackie, arguing that they’d violated his rights and his ability to earn a living. Jackie countersued, claiming invasion of privacy. That paved the way for a six-week trial in federal court that The New York Times called “the best off-Broadway show in town.” It was certainly filled with drama as Jackie described in detail how Galella terrorized her and her children, relentlessly invading their privacy. In return, Galella complained that she was interfering with his livelihood and violating his First Amendment right to photograph any public figure.
He even claimed Jackie had told her Secret Service detail to “smash his camera”—something she categorically denied.
“But,” he noted, “she always kept a Galella smile on her face.” The photographer left court each day with a bravado-filled swagger, always eager to talk to reporters about how he was the victim in the case.
Jackie, on the other hand, would invariably dodge the media, flanked by her legal team, and dash into a waiting car. I had become friendly with her lawyers, who were complimentary of my reporting of the trial, and I appealed to them to let me have a brief interview with their client. Several weeks into the trial, they agreed to give me an exclusive with Jackie if I asked her only one question. As she came down the courthouse steps, I eagerly approached her and asked, “Mrs. Onassis, are you pleased with the way the trial is going?”
With a faint smile, she responded with a simple “Yes.”
That’s it? I thought. If only I had phrased the question differently, perhaps I would have gotten a few more words out of her! I attempted another question, but her attorneys shut me out, reminding me that I had agreed to ask only one. What the heck, I thought—at least I got a yes out of her, and after all it was an exclusive yes!
The trial ended with the judge ordering Galella to stay 50 yards away from Jackie and 75 yards from her children. Galella appealed the decision, and a higher court modified the restriction to 25 yards. By his own admission, Galella subsequently violated that ruling “a hundred times”—but following several more years of wrangling and the threat of jail time and a $120,000 fine, he finally turned his lens away from Jackie. His dramatic courthouse encounter with the former First Lady was highlighted in the HBO documentary Smash His Camera—in which I play a cameo role, achieving my one-word exclusive with Jackie.
As I Saw It Page 23