Between You and Me
Read Between You and Me Online
Authors: Mike Wallace
B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E
BETWEEN YOU AND ME
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M i ke Wa l lac e
W I T H
GARY PAUL GATES
N E W Y O R K
Copyright © 2005 Mike Wallace
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. Printed in the United States of America.
For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023-6298.
ISBN: 1-4013-8357-2
first ebook edition: october 2005
T o D i c k S a l a n t, w h o, b a c k i n 1 9 6 3 a s P r e s i d e n t o f C B S N e w s , g av e m e t h e j o b a n d t h e l i f e h e k n e w I y e a r n e d f o r
c o n t e n t s
The General and the Whistle-blower
. . . And Other Celebrated Characters
B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E
I N T R O D U C T I O N
BACK IN THE 1950S, WHEN television was black-and-white and still a relatively new late-night diversion for folks who wanted a news update followed by some entertaining talk in their bedrooms, my colleague Ted Yates came up with a notion for an interview show that just might get their attention.
At the time I was anchoring and Ted was producing the eleven o’clock news on Channel 5, the New York station that also carried two showbiz icons of the time, Ernie Kovacs and Soupy Sales. The station manager agreed that it was probably worth a try. (Back then it seemed everything was worth a try.) So in October of ’56, we combined our news update with the experiment we called Night Beat.
It was Yates who came up with the title, and it was also he who B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E
gave our innovative venture its spark. A lanky ex-marine, Ted had the manner and fearless temperament of a cowboy. He came by it honestly. BorninWyoming, he had spent much of his childhood in Cheyenne, close to the open land and cattle herds of the region that used to be known as the Wild West. But his family eventually moved east, and so instead of a life in the saddle and a home on the range, he wound up inNew York, pursuing a career intelevisionnews.
By the time Night Beat went on the air, the two of us had been working together at Channel 5 for about a year. We’d also become close friends, and that continued through the years ahead, even after he and I went our separate ways in TV journalism. But I’m sad to say that Ted’s life came to a tragic end in 1967. In June of that year, when he was filming a story for NBC News on the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and while under fire in East Jerusalem, he was shot in the forehead and died the next day. I thought of him then—and remember him now—as the bravest man I’ve ever known.
Night Beat was a radical departure from the usual pablum of radio and television interviews. We agreed that, properly primed with solid research, I would ask our guests the kinds of questions that folks in the TV audience might want to ask for themselves if they had the chance: nosy, irreverent, often confrontational. Within just a couple of months, we knew we were on to something special. The viewers told us so, the TV critics did the same, and best of all, the famous and infamous figures of the time—politicians, tycoons, entertainers, athletes, just about everyone of any consequence in New York, it seemed—wanted the chance to test themselves against our role-playing arrogance.
Night Beat quickly became a prime topic of conversation—a lot of it noisy and argumentative—at dinner tables, cocktail parties, and saloons all over the city. My anonymity during prior years of radio and
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
television work suddenly morphed into shouts from cabdrivers: “Give
’em hell, Mike, go get ’em.” The reigning queen of TV at the time, Faye Emerson, said it best: “There is no such thing as an indiscreet question.” And for our M.O., we appropriated a dictum from playwright-cum–social critic George Bernard Shaw:
“The ablest and most highly cultivated people continually discuss religion, politics, and sex. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that they discuss nothing else with fully awakened interest. Common and less cultivated people, evenwhenthey form societies for discussion, make a rule that politics and religion are not to be mentioned, and take it for granted that no decent person would attempt to discuss sex.”
Sid Caesar parodied us on his NBC show, then the most popular comedy series on television. We got into public hassles, one of the biggest triggered by a Q&A with the fiery union leader Mike Quill, who bristled when I asked about his Catholicism—he still bore scars from the labor battles of the 1930s, when he’d been accused of greater fidelity to Moscow than to Rome. (He was often referred to in those days as “Red Mike.”) The sublimely gifted Irish actress Siobhan McKenna helped us no end by making an offhand remark that infuriated Jews; her apology doubled our audience.
Within six months ABC came calling to offer us a network slot for a weekly nationwide broadcast. What we gleaned from all this and what followed at ABC, and later at CBS, is what you’ll read about here: tales from all manner of characters we’ve persuaded to talk to us down the years, presidents and First Ladies, dictators and demagogues, preachers, painters, musicians, movie stars and comedians, con men and other assorted crooks.
This is the second memoir I’ve done with Gary Paul Gates, a former CBS News colleague and longtime friend. Our first was called Close Encounters, published in 1984, and while the main focus in
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that book was on my earlier career in broadcasting, this new one deals almost entirely with the famous and infamous I’ve interviewed, and with behind-the-scenes stories that relate to those encounters.
Of course, some overlap has been unavoidable. When we’ve revisited a subject we wrote about earlier, mainly we’ve added new information not previously available; we’ve also brought to it a fresh perspective. After all, people change and so do their reputations, some for better, others for worse. Gary and I have changed, too; we’re twenty years older, and at least one of us claims to be a little wiser.
Anyway, I hope you’ll enjoy the tales we tell, for we’ve had a hel-luva good time reporting them.
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O N E
P R E S I D E N T S
J o h n F . K e n n e d y
D r e w P e a r s o n
C l a r k C l i f f o r d
IN MAKING THE JUMP FROM a local program to the showcase of a coast-to-coast broadcast, Ted Yates and I were determined to maintain the candid, sometimes combative style we’d introduced on Night Beat. But that proved easier said than done. Part of the problem was that we’d lost the element of surprise we’d enjoyed when Night Beat burst on the scene the previous fall. Our reputation had preceded us to ABC, and more than a few of our prospective interviewees were wary of being grilled on network television by a guy B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E
who had been described by one captious critic as “Mike Malice” and by another as “The Terrible Torquemada of the TV Inquisition.” This meant we had to work that much harder to find the kind of characters who might interest a national audience. But I’m happy to say that during our first few months at ABC, we were able to book a diverse gallery of guests for The Mike Wallace Interview, ranging from the highbrow (Philip Wylie, Margaret Sanger, and Frank Lloyd Wright) to the lowbrow, a group that included a mobster (Mickey Cohen), a stripper (Lili St. Cyr), and a pair of Hollywood sirens (Jayne Mansfield and Zsa Zsa Gabor).
Still, there were problems to confront. It didn’t take us long to discover that in moving up to a network broadcast, we’d ventured into terrain far more treacherous than what we’d been accustomed to at Channel 5. Now that we were playing to a national audience, the stakes were higher, and there were times when we ran into the kind of dicey situations that provoke threats of libel suits.
One such dustup occurred when I interviewed the muckraking Washington columnist Drew Pearson. In those days, almost all the media power was in print, and no one was more powerful than the syndicated columnists. While many Washington columnists saw themselves as pundits and preferred to pontificate instead of investi-gate, Pearson was a journalistic throwback to the old school. He spe-cialized in finding skeletons in Beltway closets, and he found enough of them to make him the most feared reporter in Washington. To go along with his zeal for exposure, Pearson had a reputation for shooting from the hip. At least two presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman—had publicly accused him of being a chronic liar, but when it came to that particular allegation, nothing came close to matching the extravagance of a Tennessee senator named Kenneth McKellar. In a speech on the Senate floor, McKellar denounced
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Pearson as “an ignorant liar, a pusillanimous liar, a peewee liar, a liar during his manhood, a liar by profession, a liar in the daytime and a liar in the nighttime.”
In our interview, I naturally asked Pearson if any of those pungent adjectives accurately described him, and he naturally denied that he was any kind of liar. We then talked about politics and the next presidential election. The two of us shared the conventional wisdom that Richard Nixon was the probable Republican nominee, and when we turned our attention to who was likely to oppose him in the general election, I noted that “the Democratic glamour boy would seem to be Senator Jack Kennedy.”
Although I didn’t know the senator from Massachusetts well, I felt a certain kinship with him because we shared a common background. As boys growing up in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Jack Kennedy and I had lived in the same neighborhood. Let me digress a moment here to elaborate on that connection.
Over the years I’ve often described the Brookline of my youth as
“an O’Connor and Goldberg town,” and our two families exemplified that. I was the fourth and last child of Frank and Zina Wallace, both of whom were Jewish immigrants who came to America from the shtetls of Tsarist Russia in the late nineteenth century, some four decades after Kennedy’s forebears emigrated from Ireland. My father eventually became a successful insurance broker, and by the time I was born in 1918, our family was settled in Brookline, which had become a haven for upwardly mobile Jews and Catholics who were still not welcome in the snootier sections around Boston, a city then notorious for its class-conscious snobbery. Rather than storm the social citadels erected by the haughty Brahmins and other Yankee Protes-tants, the families of immigrants from Ireland and Italy and Eastern Europe chose to converge on communities that were more tolerant,
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and none was more attractive in those days than the upscale suburb of Brookline.
Joseph and Rose Kennedy moved to Brookline shortly after they were married in 1914, and began raising their large family just a block or so away from our home on Osborne Road. Jack Kennedy was one year older than I was, and we attended the same neighborhood school. More often than not, when I’ve told people that Kennedy and I went to the same elementary school and that its name was Edward Devotion, they’ve assumed it was a Catholic school, which reveals how little they know about Brookline’s glorious history.