by Joe Muto
Bill lobbied the Second Floor hard—as hard as I’ve ever seen him push the executives for anything—to secure for himself the first interview with her. Palin’s choice likely would have been to go on the show of her new friend and confidante, Greta Van Susteren, but Bill twisted every arm in the building, sweet-talking, cajoling, threatening—and ultimately making the obvious argument that a Palin appearance on The Factor, the highest-rated show, would make the biggest impact. Bill’s argument won the day, and it was announced that Palin would appear first on The Factor.
On the morning of the taping, she made a pilgrimage to the seventeenth floor to pay homage to O’Reilly. A wave of excitement followed her as she promenaded down the hallway, with well-wishers shouting greetings to her. She winked and waved and finger-gunned her way through the crowd, beaming widely, the conquering hero basking in an adoring glow. She wouldn’t have looked out of place holding a bouquet and wearing a sash, like a homecoming queen making her way to the fifty-yard line at halftime.
I had to admit, as much as I despised her politics and the unbelievably stupid things that came out of her mouth, she was astoundingly charismatic in person, working a crowd as well as I’d ever seen it done. And she was even more good-looking than she appeared on television; cameras truly did not do her justice.
“Hey, governor!” I called out as she passed my desk.
“Hiya!” she called back, waving to Sam and me before walking into Bill’s office, her hangdog husband, Todd, skulking after her, seemingly oblivious to the furor.
I was assigned to help produce her segment that night, to put together a video montage of pundits on CNN and MSNBC disparaging her.
I was more than happy to help in this regard.
Bill’s intention was to play the clip for her to illustrate how the “left-wing media” was having a “conniption” over her hiring. I managed to cram several clips of people like Chris Matthews and Paul Begala calling Palin dumb and a liar into a neat twenty-second package. Judging from Palin’s annoyed look when the camera cut to her after the video finished playing, I did my job well.
Despite the fanfare surrounding her launch, it quickly became clear to everyone that Palin just was not working out. The one special she hosted, featuring old interviews with celebrities that had been edited and repurposed, drew criticism for her stiff performance, and garnered only modest ratings, not the blockbuster numbers the Second Floor had been hoping for. And her abilities as a pundit left much to be desired. She conversed entirely in shallow, empty platitudes, as if she’d just memorized a list of talking points instead of actually boning up on whatever issue was on her plate. She also, most infuriatingly for Bill, tended to play hard to get, turning down requests for appearances for little or no reason, and refusing to communicate with our staff directly, insisting that a high-up executive act as her intermediary.
A few months into her tenure, O’Reilly exploded with frustration when he was told for the third time in a row that Palin wouldn’t be available.
“I don’t know why this woman refuses to help us out,” he vented. “And when she does come on, she doesn’t say anything. It’s just the same BS talking points every time.”
After a year of dealing with her, even the conservative true believers on the staff who had previously been enamored of Palin had to admit she was every bit as uninformed as her liberal critics had charged. She never did the legwork required to be a pundit. Even the absolute laziest commentator we had would at the very least visit the Wikipedia page on the topic at hand, boning up on the details so they wouldn’t get caught flat-footed on air. But Palin seemed as if she couldn’t even be bothered to do that. And the fact that she made herself unavailable for pre-interviews meant that we producers could never brief her on the segment, making it that much more likely she’d get hit with an unpleasant surprise or unexpected question on live television.
The tension between O’Reilly and Palin eventually came to a head. It was a segment on Social Security. Palin was typically underprepared, reduced to reciting empty boilerplate and talking points. Bill interrupted her, pressing for more details on what she’d do to reform the entitlement. Palin snapped at him, chiding him for the interruption.
That was the final straw for Bill. He started criticizing Palin on-air—subtly, but consistently—openly complaining about her to other guests, constantly referring to her as an example of someone who dodged questions, and speculating that her favorability in polls was dropping because of her evasiveness.
Then, in mid-2011, video surfaced of Palin—who at the time was flirting with a presidential run by embarking on a bus tour—giving a nonsensical and garbled description of Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride:
“He who warned, uh, the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms uh by ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free and we were going to be armed.”
I pitched the video to Bill at a meeting, and he loved it, playing it on the air that night with a bemused smile. He eventually went on to defend Palin—saying she’d come close enough to historical fact and should be cut a little slack—but the mere fact that he’d played the video amounted to an escalation in the cold war between the two conservative titans, and it did not go unnoticed by management.
Gayle pulled me aside the next day.
“Joe, could you please not pitch any Palin videos like that to Bill anymore?”
“But Bill loved it,” I protested. “He accepted it right away.”
“That’s the problem,” she said. “The Second Floor called after the show, and they were pissed that he used it.”
“Why don’t they just tell Bill not to use the video? Why is it up to me to keep it from him?”
“You know Bill,” she said, shrugging. “He’s going to do what he wants to do.”
April 11, 2012—6:52 P.M.
The two security guards stood sentry as I dug through the drawers of the desk that had been my home base for almost five years, gathering up anything I couldn’t live without. The seventeenth floor was blessedly empty, with no one around to witness the humiliating end to my career.
And it was the end of my career at Fox. I had no illusion that the paid suspension was anything but a precursor to my eventual firing. They didn’t have enough evidence to fire me on the spot, but I knew they’d scrape it together eventually.
It dawned on me with a jolt of irony that I had nowhere to stash the things I was gathering—Rufus still had the duffel bag with my iPad. It had been an unnecessary precaution to ditch it with him, as it turned out. They didn’t need to see the Gawker post I’d written and saved on my shiny Apple device. My fate had been sealed months earlier, when I’d simply viewed the clips, laying down a digital trail of bread crumbs that they easily followed to my doorstep.
One of the security guards cleared his throat behind me.
“Is this going to take much longer?” he asked.
I looked at the small collection of junk I’d amassed over the years. A wooden statue depicting the Notre Dame football stadium. A George W. Bush bobblehead. An unintentionally racist Barack Obama Chia Pet that I’d never had a chance to plant. A pile of books from authors desperate to get on the show. Obsolete videotapes with compilations of Natalee Holloway spinning a flag, and the Duke lacrosse team practicing.
I didn’t need any of it anymore.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I think I’m done here.”
CHAPTER 17
Take Me Out to the Buffet
Papa Bear swaggered into the Yankee Stadium luxury box like John Wayne walking into a saloon. He swept the room with his eyes, and locked them on me.
“Muto, you look like a cab driver,” he announced loudly, grinning. Everyone laughed, including me, more from surprise than anything else. It seemed like a total non sequitur. I don’t know what exactly it was about my casual game-day wear—T-shirt and a ball cap�
�that reminded him specifically of a cab driver, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t meant to be complimentary.
Jesse Watters came over and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Muto, as long as you’re a cabbie now, I’m going to need a ride back to Long Island after the game. Don’t drink too much.”
I shook my head and took a swig of my Coors Light. “Free beer, dude. For nine innings. The grounds crew is going to have to wheel me out of here in a cart.”
It was the summer of 2011, at the Factor staff’s annual baseball outing, and most of us were already a beer and a half in before O’Reilly even showed up. We had waited until the day’s show taping was done, then shed our work clothes for Yankees T-shirts and caps,61 and piled onto the D train for the trip to the Bronx.
Bill lagged behind us because he insisted on taking his town car to the game, preferring to let his driver, Carl, battle the rush-hour traffic rather than braving the crowds on the subway.
“He likes to drive because he can yell at Carl for going too slow,” one of my fellow producers had speculated as our train headed uptown. “He’d feel too helpless on the subway. What’s he going to do if the train goes too slow? Scream at the conductor?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” I said. “Either way, we’re going to beat him there.”
Though after twenty-five minutes in the jammed subway car, the air thick with the summer-humidity-induced body odor of two hundred stadium-bound commuters, I decided O’Reilly probably had the right idea, traffic or no.
But we weren’t going to let a crowded subway car dampen our enthusiasm. Working for Fox News afforded us so few perks that we’d be insane to not take full advantage of them whenever given the opportunity. And the luxury boxes at the new Yankee Stadium were ripe for advantage taking. Our box actually belonged to the YES Network, the Yankees-owned cable channel, but through some series of associations I didn’t quite understand, it was available for O’Reilly’s use for one game a year. We reached the box by flashing our tickets (shiny and embossed with gold foil, with an impressive face value of $230) at a private entrance. We were ushered into an elevator and taken up to a hallway that looked as if it had been somehow airlifted out of a high-end Midwestern convention center and dropped into the stadium. Corporate-looking middle-aged white guys in khakis roamed the corridor, polo shirts tight across their paunches as they checked their tickets, searching for the right room number. Judging from the volume of their voices, a lot of them were well on their way to becoming heroically drunk. No mean feat, considering that the National Anthem had yet to be sung.
The luxury box was almost double the size of my tiny West Village apartment, with its own bathroom, a lounge area with plush leather chairs and flat-screen TVs, an outdoor terrace with a dozen seats overlooking home plate, and—most important—a large kitchen with marble countertops and a fully stocked fridge overflowing with ice-cold beers. I pounced on the booze right away. If my years as a journalist had taught me anything, it’s that you take the free drinks while the getting is good.62
Everyone on the O’Reilly staff was a very accomplished drinker, with one surprising exception: Bill himself. The man is a complete teetotaler. Which makes sense when you think about it. He’s angry and volatile enough when he’s stone-sober. Why would you want to add alcohol to that equation? I can’t imagine the results, but I’m sure it would involve the NYPD using old-timey biplanes to shoot him off the side of the Empire State Building.
Bill’s real weakness was free food, which excited him to no end. While the rest of the staff perked up at the prospect of an open bar, nothing floated Bill’s boat more than a hot buffet. True to form, no more than thirty seconds after entering the room and making the snap decision that I somehow looked like I should be sitting behind the wheel of a taxi, he’d beelined to the spread of hot dogs and chicken wings and was happily filling a plate.
I had to admire his gusto. The man made upward of fifteen million dollars a year. He could afford to spend thousands of dollars per meal and eat like a king every day of his life. But put him in front of a spread of gratis junk food and he acted like he’d just won the lottery. It was actually a little bit endearing, and gave credence to his repeated insistence that he was basically a down-to-earth guy, a man of the people, one of the folks.
On another occasion, I joined a few other staffers to accompany Bill to a charity St. Patrick’s Day cocktail party thrown by the Kelly Gang, a group of media figures who share the eponymous surname. The event was at Michael’s, a ritzy midtown restaurant known for being a clubhouse for media types who (A) like to power-lunch and (B) are steely and steadfast enough to avoid succumbing to crippling paroxysms of one-percenter shame when confronted with the ludicrously priced food.
The New York Post gossip pages are perennially full of rage-inducing anecdotes about barons of media—often fresh from laying off journalists—lunch-schmoozing at Michael’s over Cobb salads, which are, as of this writing, thirty-six dollars apiece. Those not blessed with high incomes or laxly monitored expense accounts have to make do with Michael’s breakfast, with its reasonable-by-comparison twenty-three-dollar eggs Benedict.
As someone who was still pretty close to the bottom of the media food chain, I was eager to see what it was like for those at the top. But O’Reilly had no interest in glad-handing. I was hoping I’d see him work the room a little, interacting with the editor of The New Yorker or the producer of the Today show, but instead he sequestered himself at a table in the corner and listened impatiently while NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly gave a welcome speech. When Kelly finished, to plenty of sincere applause, O’Reilly sprung from his seat and practically knocked the lawman over in his haste to get to the buffet, where he was literally the first in line, impatiently watching as waiters pulled lids off the steam tray platters.
Back at the table with a plate stacked high with corned beef and cabbage, he looked at the half dozen staffers who had accompanied him. We were all nursing drinks, while he was the only person at the table eating.
“What are you guys waiting for?” he asked, forking potatoes into his mouth. “Free food!”
I went back to the bar for another Jameson on the rocks.
Outings with Bill were both awkward and rare. Endlessly opinionated and gregarious on TV, he was just the opposite in social situations, seemingly struggling for nonwork topics to chat about. The rareness stemmed from his totally understandable desire to avoid uncontrolled situations. As both the most famous and the most hated face at Fox News, it was potentially dangerous for him to just go to a bar with the rest of the staff. Bill’s sheer size alone was usually enough to preemptively shut down most hecklers, but you never knew when some drunk loudmouth might build up enough courage to pick a fight—a skirmish that would almost certainly not end well for the drunk, who would quickly find himself dealing with six feet four inches of fist-swinging Irish fury.
Not that I ever witnessed Bill fight anyone. On the rare occasion that he came to a bar with us, he tended to take himself out of the situation early, before anyone could get liquored up enough to even consider speaking out of turn.
—
The mere existence of this book, and almost everything I’ve written in it up to this point, is probably going to make this next line surprising, but I assure you it’s true.
I actually like Bill O’Reilly.
I’m pretty hard on him in this volume, to be sure. But for all of his peccadilloes, all the yelling and outbursts and sordid allegations and yelling, there are some redeeming qualities.63
For starters, he seems like a good father. I have no doubt he’s a strict disciplinarian, and I imagine that toilet training at his hands was a nightmarish ordeal, leaving emotional scars that years of therapy will probably only begin to scratch the surface of—but that being said, Bill has, by all appearances, served his two young children well. In an industry not known for being family-friendly, he always made a committed effort to leave the office at a reasonable hour.
He a
lso never mentions his kids on the air. In five years working for him, countless hours of TV and radio, I’ve heard him refer to his children maybe twice, and both times it was in the most broad, generic terms possible. Some might view this as heartless or cold, but in the era of Sarah Palin, who waves her disabled child around like some sort of antiabortion mascot, or Glenn Beck, who once disgustingly implied that ObamaCare might lead to the euthanization of his daughter who suffers from cerebral palsy—leaving your kids out of your political commentary and out of the spotlight is a mercy.
To be fair, with his kids getting older, Bill does seem to be easing up a little on the overprotectiveness. His daughter appeared with him in a 2011 cameo on the TNT show Rizzoli and Isles. But since child psychologists are still divided over whether small roles on basic-cable lady-cop procedurals are deleterious to child development, I guess we can give Bill a pass on that one.
Bill’s also a self-made man. Years ago, Al Franken picked a fight with him, saying that O’Reilly’s upbringing in Levittown, Long Island, was not as impoverished as Bill had implied in some of his books. I think this fight is beside the point—whether Bill’s roots were working class (as he says) or middle class (as Franken claimed), he’s still an astounding success, leaps and bounds beyond where he started. But he doesn’t let the wealth go to his head. Between The Factor, the books, the personal appearances, and the radio talking points, he easily clears twenty million dollars a year. But like the world’s tallest, angriest leprechaun, he hoards his gold, preferring to live modestly. His aforementioned awkwardness at social events (and love of buffets) leads him to mostly eschew fancy restaurants. As a teetotaler, he has no taste for expensive wines or liquors. His on-air clothes are all bought and paid for by Fox News, and his downtime clothes are typical, reasonably priced, suburban-dad khakis and polos. He prefers cheap watches; I actually heard him berating Neil Cavuto once for wearing a Rolex: “That thing is ridiculous. See this—it’s a Timex. Cost me one hundred bucks. You know what it does? It tells the time. That’s all I need.” And even though his house is in Manhasset, a much tonier part of Long Island than where he grew up, it’s just large enough to fit in with the neighborhood—no obscene McMansion for him.