Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  After the package, with some two minutes left on the broadcast, Walters turned to Howard Smith in Washington, who noted dryly, “There were some other things that happened today.”

  The traditionalists at ABC News were appalled. They were particularly galled by Geraldo’s performance. “Roone later admitted to me that he had placed too much emphasis on the Son of Sam story after [David] Berkowitz’s arrest, that he had run two or three stories too many before cutting away to other news,” Geraldo recalled. “But these were not my decisions. These were not my stories. My story was a valid sidebar looking at the circumstances of the arrest, delivered perhaps with a shade more enthusiasm than what was comfortably allowed by journalistic convention. Still, I got the blame for the entire broadcast, and I carried the Son of Sam rap for years.”

  In fact, so appalled were the traditionalists that a group of them in the Washington bureau, including Brit Hume, Frank Reynolds, and Sam Donaldson, wrote a letter to Arledge in protest. The letter, while not mentioning Geraldo by name, raised concerns about the journalistic obligation to protect the rights of the accused by using words like alleged. It also questioned the tone of the coverage. The letter’s signers considered their declaration so sensitive that they did not even make a copy of it. They wrote it, signed it, sealed it in an envelope, and sent it to Arledge. Nonetheless, Frank Swertlow, a columnist for the Chicago Daily News, found out about the letter and summarized its contents in a column, which reportedly annoyed Arledge as much as actually receiving the letter did. A clear battle line seemed to have been drawn at ABC between those who believed in pure, unadorned news and those who were eager to employ flash and drama to enliven the news. Under Roone Arledge, ABC News became an aggressive pioneer in the tabloidization of network news. It was a harrowing journey, with several casualties.

  Putting Arledge in charge of the news was, indeed, a drastic move, but by 1977, ABC needed something drastic. Its news division had long been the also-ran of the networks, a laughingstock among elite news gatherers.

  The network was begun as an offshoot of NBC, when RCA owned what it called the Red and the Blue radio networks, but in 1943, government regulators forced RCA to sell one of them. Life Savers magnate Edward J. Noble bought the Blue network and renamed it ABC—the one RCA kept was NBC. By 1952, it was clear that television—not radio—was the wave of the future. But Noble didn’t have the money to expand into television, so he sold ABC to theater chain magnate Leonard Goldenson.

  For a long time, it was a distant third in the industry. “It was third only because there were three,” Goldenson once said. “If there were ten, it would have been tenth.” It was nicknamed the Almost Broadcasting Company, but during the 1960s and early 1970s, ABC made a name for itself in entertainment with shows like The Untouchables—then the most violent show on television—and Peyton Place, the first prime-time soap opera. The entertainment division’s success continued into the 1970s under Fred Silverman, with such hits as Happy Days and Starsky and Hutch. The sports division under Roone Arledge was also hugely profitable. The news division, however, always languished. It had gained some respect by hiring Harry Reasoner away from CBS in 1970 at the then handsome salary of $200,000, but the ratings were still anemic. Then in 1976, ABC stunned the industry by hiring Barbara Walters, for the then astronomical salary of $1 million, to co-anchor the Evening News along with its existing anchor, Harry Reasoner.

  Walters had come a long way since working on Igor Cassini’s short-lived NBC show. The woman who had “dated” Roy Cohn had become—through default—the co-host of NBC’s immensely successful Today Show and, as a result of the success of her fifteen-year run there, a major force in television.* But Walters was seen as a product of the entertainment division, which produced the Today Show, and not the news division, and the decision to elevate her over all the network’s seasoned correspondents was greeted with outrage. The Washington Post called Walters “A Million Dollar Baby Handling 5-and-10-Cent News.” CBS’s Richard Salant asked, “Is Barbara Walters a Journalist, or Is She Cher?”

  Reasoner particularly felt slighted. He complained to people that while ABC’s news department desperately needed new equipment and new staff, the network had gone out and squandered $1 million—five times Reasoner’s salary—on a woman with no hard news background. Reasoner had been lured away from CBS’s elite group of 60 Minutes correspondents, and he had expected to be sole anchor. It was a humiliating setback. Furthermore, his marriage, which would end in divorce a few years later, was deteriorating. He felt thwarted and unhappy at work and at home. He barely spoke to Walters off the air; on the air, the chill between them was perceptible. Reasoner looked for opportunities to slight. Once, for example, Walters commented on air, “Henry Kissinger didn’t make too bad a sex symbol.” “You would know more about that than I would,” Reasoner shot back. The quarreling between the two was so constant they became known as “the Bickersons.”

  “He felt I was hired for the wrong reason. He was terribly unhappy about it,” Walters later said. “I’d walk into the studio and Harry would talk to everybody there except me. He cracked jokes with all the guys about the latest baseball scores, and he would go across the street every day to Café des Artistes [a restaurant that was a favorite of the ABC crowd] and spend an hour before the show and an hour after complaining about me. Had I known how violently opposed he was, I wouldn’t have come. It was the toughest period of my life.”*

  Resolving the anchor situation was Roone Arledge’s first big challenge. He realized quickly that it would be impossible for the two anchors ever to work together harmoniously. He also felt Walters was misused in the static role of anchor. “Barbara was great at so many things that reading the news opposite a grumpy guy who didn’t want her there was not in her best interest,” Arledge’s boss, Leonard Goldenson, said. “But there was no way I could take Barbara off that program and keep Harry on it without leaving her tremendously damaged. So poor Harry had to go.”

  Walters, however, had a clause in her contract giving her virtual veto power over a new anchor. To circumvent this, Arledge decided to dispense with the anchor system altogether and instead create a series of “desks”—headed up by Peter Jennings in London, Frank Reynolds in Washington, and Max Robinson in Chicago—who would divvy the broadcast’s introductory newsreading assignment more or less evenly. The format, which debuted on July 10, 1978, left Walters without a formal role in the nightly broadcast. Reasoner called it, “the Arledge shell game,” and went on to say, “He more or less successfully concealed from the public the fact that Barbara was no longer any kind of anchor.”

  By then, however, Arledge had already launched The Barbara Walters Specials that would prove such a distinctive, and commercially successful, blend of entertainment and news. The first, which aired on December 14, 1976, featured Walters interviewing Barbra Streisand and her then boyfriend Jon Peters, and Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn. The critics panned it. “If this is a preview of future Walters specials,” Variety noted, “she may be doing irremediable damage to the reputation she’s trying to cultivate as a journalist.” The public, however, loved it. It pulled in thirty-six percent of the TV audience—a record for a show of its type. The celebrities were more popular than the politicians. “As time went on, we found that the audience didn’t want the political [guests], no matter who we did,” Walters recalled. “We had King Hussein and his wife, Queen Noor. We had Vice President [Walter] Mondale. That’s not what they wanted. They wanted television stars, movie stars.”

  Arledge’s second major task was to create a news magazine. By the late 1970s, 60 Minutes was the envy of the other networks. It received more awards than any other television show—including Emmys, Peabodys, and Polk awards. It was a source of great pride for CBS and, more important, it made money.

  Taking the news-as-entertainment—very profitable entertainment—further, Arledge decided ABC needed its own 60 Minutes. Unlike the CBS show, however, Arledge wanted ABC’s news magazin
e to be younger and hipper, infused with Arledge’s signature flash and dazzle. Bob Shanks, who had worked on late-night and early-morning programming, was named executive producer of what would be 20/20. For potential hosts, he turned to some of the biggest names in print, auditioning Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post, writer Pete Hamill, television critic Marvin Kitman, and Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein. Ultimately, he decided on a co-host format and chose Harold Hayes, the legendary former editor of Esquire magazine, and Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic for Time magazine. The similarity in their names—Hughes and Hayes—was confusing enough. On top of that, Hayes had no television experience. Hughes had some, but not a great deal, and his Australian accent was so thick as to be almost unintelligible to the viewers.

  As the show’s star correspondent, Arledge chose Geraldo Rivera. In the late 1970s, 60 Minutes’s cast of graying Cold War-era journalists in their tailored suits and trenchcoats was decidedly unhip. Geraldo, with his relative youth and his unapologetically open liberal politics, would be a hip, ethnic version of Mike Wallace.

  When Geraldo first burst on the scene, he was seen by many as a welcome alternative to the largely Anglo-Saxon cast of television reporters who saw themselves as the direct descendants, if not the contemporaries, of Edward R. Murrow. Half Jewish, half Puerto Rican, a former lawyer for the street gang Young Bloods, a former advocate for the legalization of marijuana, in 1970, at age twenty-seven, Rivera had been tapped by WABC-TV news, which was trying to increase its ethnic representation.* There, Geraldo almost instantly became a hit. His award-winning 1972 exposé on the grim conditions at Willowbrook, a mental institute on Staten Island, brought him national accolades. Geraldo seemed to be an updated version of the turn-of-the-century crusading journalist. Newsweek called him an “outspoken young mod with a passionate commitment to social reform.” A fawning profile in Life that year explained how to pronounce his name (“Hair-ALL-dough”). “He is the golden Puerto Rican,” panted New York magazine. “His shoulders taper to hips so minor he has to hold up his jeans with a strip of video.”

  He became a celebrity in his own right. Geraldo had joined Good Morning America in 1975 and started a late night show called Good Night America, in which he explored sensational tabloid topics like UFOs, the Kennedy assassination, the Bermuda Triangle, and prostitution. When Good Night America was taken off the air in June 1977, Geraldo was so angry that he threatened to leave ABC. Much to his surprise, ABC accepted his resignation before Roone Arledge tapped him, first for the News Department (the week after his Son of Sam reporting, Arledge sent him off to Memphis to cover the death of Elvis), then for 20/20.

  The news magazine debuted on June 6, 1978. The show included political cartoons, a Claymation Jimmy Carter singing “Georgia on My Mind,” and, as segues into and out of commercials, the definitions of supposedly obscure words like exegesis. There was even a gossip segment called “Cries and Whispers” that featured a couple exchanging secrets in bed. The lead story was a virtual parody of investigative reporting by Geraldo on how rabbits—cuddly, pink-eyed, helpless rabbits—are killed in the training of greyhounds. Wearing a red bandana around his neck and an open-collar Western shirt, the reporter looked into the camera and with grim indignation intoned, “The rabbits don’t stand a chance.” The debut show also included an alarmist segment on terrorism, an irreverent review of the week’s news called “The Wayward Week,” and dazzling graphics. Washington Post critic Tom Shales called it “probably the trashiest stab at candy-cane journalism yet made by a TV network. 20/20 managed to take a gross leap backward and a garish leap forward at the same time, and if at first it gave us the giggles, it may on second thought justifiably give us the creeps.”

  Roone Arledge had viewed an early version of the premiere and had ordered some changes. The evening the show was broadcast, however, he was out on a date with Ethel Kennedy, and the next day he was so embarrassed by the reaction to the debut of his news magazine that he claimed he hadn’t seen it before it was broadcast. “Frankly, I was appalled,” he told the Washington Post. “I hated the program,” he said to the New York Times.

  Arledge fired Hayes and Hughes, demoted Bob Shanks, and hired the staid but reliable Hugh Downs as anchor. He also eliminated the bizarre graphics and lead-ins, and the show’s second episode—restrained and conventional, with a piece by Geraldo on the homeless—bore virtually no resemblance to the first. “Roone Arledge didn’t become the Toscanini of TV sports technology without learning when to hit the stop-action button,” wrote Harry Waters in Newsweek. “In went Hugh Downs and a journalistic sobriety that, while not as slick as CBS’s ‘60 Minutes,’ at least tapped the program’s potential.”

  Nonetheless, Arledge continued to think he could revitalize ABC News by importing people from outside television. He hired Carl Bernstein—whom he had earlier interviewed to be the host—to be ABC News’s Washington bureau chief. Bernstein, for all his genuine investigative accomplishments during Watergate, not only had never worked in television but also had never held a management position and indeed, while at the Post, had tended to be contemptuous of managers and bureaucrats. Furthermore, since the success of All the President’s Men, which became the best-selling nonfiction book to date, and the release of the movie version starring Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein, the reporter had come to think of himself not as a journalist but as a celebrity.

  The disaster that followed seemed inevitable. “He’d have his clothes on all backward like he just got up, and he’d have come back from New York where he stayed some place dancing with Bianca Jagger and he was full of show biz stories and name dropping,” said Washington producer John Armstrong. “Bernstein became a joke,” said Charles Gibson. “He tried to bluff his way through the job and people would ignore him. He spent more and more time in that office, with nobody going in there and nobody talking to him.” Once, while working on a story in England, he borrowed £500 from a producer and lost it all gambling. After fourteen months, Arledge removed him as bureau chief and made him a correspondent, where he fared somewhat better, but parted company with the network in 1984, and devoted much of his time to writing and lecturing about the evils of gossip.

  ABC also hired Ron Reagan Jr., the son of the President. He was widely liked by colleagues, but some remember with amusement that during the height of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign against drug use, he was growing his own pot. “He told me that when the Secret Service agents came to tell him that his father had been shot,” recalls one co-worker, “he was absolutely terrified because he thought they were coming in to bust him.” When called for comment, young Reagan denied that he grew pot, but admitted that he smoked it.

  But Geraldo remained Arledge’s most memorable—and controversial—hire. He was, to begin with, notoriously promiscuous, even in the sexually uninhibited world of television journalism. “I was like a pig,” he once admitted, “a grunting, voracious pig in heat.” He once did a report on hookers and then, by his own account, took the services of two of them for free. He once had sex in the boiler room with two college interns. In his autobiography, Exposing Myself, he boasted of bedding Bette Midler, the former Canadian Premier Pierre Trudeau’s wife Margaret, and Marian Javits, the wife of the well-known senator Jacob Javits. He had Mick Jagger and Rudolf Nureyev dancing provocatively in his Lower East Side apartment, where his walls were painted all black. He even seemed attractive to the remote Barbara Walters, on one occasion declaring that he thought she had “great tits.” He later added, “I’m a big fan of hers…. She’s a sexy woman. She’s a real good lookin’ old broad.”

  It wasn’t just his unchecked libido that annoyed his critics, it was the way he injected his testosterone-fueled personal style into his reporting. As a roving correspondent for 20/20, Geraldo pioneered a form of participatory, point-of-view television journalism that had its print counterpart in the Gonzo school of New Journalism originated by Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe. The stories Geraldo did tended to fall into tw
o categories: one was what could be called Geraldo Goes on an Adventure; the other could be called Geraldo Investigates. In the former category, the correspondent ran with the bulls at Pamplona, swam with whales in the Caribbean, descended in a shark cage off San Francisco, boxed with Mohammed Ali, and shot hoops with Johnny Matthis. In the investigative category, Geraldo explored traditional news magazine topics like Agent Orange and fetal alcohol syndrome. But he also ventured into what had previously been considered tabloid territory, including his hugely successful “Elvis Cover-up.”

  While Geraldo’s investigative stories received considerable attention, they were also often attacked as irresponsible and unfair and lacking journalistic credibility. He and ABC were sued by a group of Chicago businessmen he had secretly taped with a hidden camera, which is illegal in Illinois, in a story accusing them of buying slum tenements, insuring them, and then burning them down without regard for the tenants. He was sued by an Ohio judge he accused of accepting sexual favors from prostitutes in exchange for lenient sentences and then sued by one of the women he had interviewed for describing her as a “hooker.” And all of those compromised broadcasts took place in just one year. Rivera won the case in the hooker story. The arson case was settled out of court.