Out of My Mind (18 page)

If local and national television news broadcasts had to pay for the basic reporting of events that they routinely lift from newspapers, they'd go out of business. On any given night on any of the three network news broadcasts, half of what they report has been generated, not by their own sparse staff of reporters but by newspaper reporters. Television news is unconscionable in using newspaper reports without attribution. It is seldom that you read a newspaper story that appeared first on television.

We need a device that will play a half-hour television news show in fifteen minutes. I'll listen faster.

Two years ago, someone broke my car window, took some things from the glove compartment and a suitcase I had left on the back seat. Twenty years ago, I had a motorbike stolen from my garage. In the Army, at Fort Bragg, someone went through my footlocker and took $20 I had saved for the day I could get a twenty-four-hour pass. These were the only brushes with crime I'd had in my life until recently. Now, several thieves have taken something of great value from me—my name.

More than a year ago, people started sending me copies of an e-mail that was appearing on computers all over the country. It was a list of about twenty comments, each one or two sentences long, under my byline. The piece was titled, “In Praise of Older Women—By Andy Rooney.” It was sappy and obviously nothing I might have written, but harmless. While I didn't like the idea of someone using my name as his own, I didn't try to do anything about it.

Several months after I first saw the e-mail, a man named Frank Kaiser wrote asking why I had put my name on something he had written
in 2000 for his syndicated column called “Suddenly Senior.” I called Frank immediately and he accepted the fact that someone else had taken what he wrote and put my name on it.

There have been two other instances of someone distributing a list of opinions under my name. What would make someone write down a series of personal observations and distribute them using my name as the author? It mystifies me.

About a year ago, I became aware of a more serious theft of my name and it is so hurtful to my reputation that it calls for legal action against the thief. Hundreds of people have written asking if I really wrote the 20 detestable remarks made under my name that have had such wide circulation on the Internet.

The list of remarks begins: “I like big cars, big boats, big motorcycles, big houses and big campfires.”

It continues:

“I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some governmental stooge with a bad comb-over who wants to give it away to crack addicts for squirting babies.”

“Guns do not make you a killer. I think killing makes you a killer.”

“I have the right NOT to be tolerant of others because they are weird, different or tick me off.”

Some of the remarks, which I will not repeat here, are viciously racist and the spirit of the whole thing is nasty, mean and totally inconsistent with my philosophy of life. It is apparent that the list of comments has been read by hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of whom must believe that it accurately represents opinions of mine that I don't dare express in my writings or on television. It is seriously damaging to my reputation.

The only good thing to come out of this incident is the dozens of letters I've received from people saying they know me well enough to know I didn't write the comments. There must be many more, however, who are ready to believe I did write them.

I have tracked the e-mail back to an address in Tucson and a Web site called
CelebrityHypocrites.com
, which is owned by a man named
Dave Mason. Mr. Mason lists as his address, 405 East Wetmore Road, No. 117 PMB 520, Tucson, AZ 85705. I was in Tucson recently and foolishly went to that address thinking it might be Mason's home or business. I'd like to know more about Mason, but the address was a commercial mailbox business and I didn't wait around for him to show up so I could confront him. If it is Dave Mason who has stolen my name, I demand that he put out a retraction that reaches as many people as his fraudulent e-mail did.

Over the years, I never cared much for some of the most popular television comedians. Milton Berle never got to me and I couldn't stand Jerry Lewis. Until I saw him in action firsthand, I had been lukewarm about Bob Hope.

Enthusiasm isn't listed as a virtue in the Bible but it's one of the most attractive attributes a person can have. An entertainer who loves to entertain has a big head start appealing to an audience, and no one ever loved being on stage more than Bob Hope. Every time he got up in front of a crowd, he had a good time and it was catching; his audience had a good time, too.

I met Bob Hope several times. For five years of my life, I wrote for Arthur Godfrey. In 1955, Godfrey was at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago broadcasting his hour-and-a-half morning radio show. He heard that Hope was also staying there and told me to go to Hope's room and ask him if he'd come to Godfrey's suite and do the show with him.

I was uneasy about my mission because I couldn't imagine that Hope would want to spend an hour and a half doing a radio show for nothing, but I was wrong. When I told him that Arthur wanted to talk to him on the air, he didn't hesitate. “Sure,” Hope said. “What room's he in?”

In the hotel room that day, it was apparent that it didn't matter to Bob Hope whether he was on television playing to 20 million people or in a small room with four. When he was on, he was happy.

Arthur greeted him and Hope sat down, took the microphone in his hand and immediately reached into his file-catalog brain for Chicago jokes, hotel room jokes and President Eisenhower jokes.

“I was in The White House last week. Ike misses the Army. He wants them to set up a tent in the Oval Office.”

On hotel rooms:

“The house dick knocked on my door last night,” Hope began. “He said, ‘You got a woman in there?' I said, ‘No, I got no woman in here,' and he said, ‘Sissy!' ”

Before Hope left Godfrey's room, he had rattled off, with machinegun speed, dozens of jokes that had us all in stitches. We all had a great time listening to them because Bob Hope had such a great time telling them. He was his own best audience.

On the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day Margie and I sailed on the Queen Elizabeth to Normandy for the celebration. Bob Hope and his wife were aboard. I talked to them several times and was ashamed of myself for being surprised to find that Bob's wife, Dolores, was so charming, attractive and talented.

Although I think they might have been able to afford to pay for the trip, each of them performed in front of a small audience in the ship's first-class dining room. I assume they were singing for their supper—and stateroom.

With an orchestra in the background, Bob, then ninety walked to the middle of the swaying ship's floor and had a great time rattling off a hundred or so predictably funny jokes. He seemed to remember them without any trouble. The orchestra leader had worked with Bob a lot over the years and when I saw his lips moving twenty feet behind Bob, I was puzzled. It turned out that it wasn't music he was holding in front of him, it was pages of Hope jokes. Bob had a small radio receiver in his jacket pocket attached to an earpiece. The orchestra leader read a few
lines of a joke, Bob remembered the rest of it and told it, just as if he was ad-libbing, to the roaring approval of the crowd.

Bob Hope got back as much as he gave in his performances to American troops around the world but he was one of the most genuinely entertaining entertainers who ever lived.

It isn't good form for a writer to use what he puts down on paper to further his own interests but I want to make an exception. For more than two years I tried to collect money owed me by a speakers bureau called The Program Corporation of America in White Plains, N.Y.

I spoke at Indiana State University in Terre Haute. The embarrassing thing I have to reveal is that I was to be paid $20,000 plus expenses. That's more than I was paid for the whole first year in my first job.

It's fun to go to a college town and interesting to meet students and some of the faculty. I am amused to assess college presidents, too. They should be smarter than I am and I try to determine whether or not that's true. Sometimes it is but occasionally it isn't.

Instead of calling me directly to ask if I'd come there to speak, Indiana State officials made the mistake of going through the speakers bureau, headed by a man named Alan Walker.

To get to Terre Haute, I paid $386 for taxis and my airplane ticket, flew to Indianapolis and drove to Terre Haute, where I had an interesting lunch with twelve people at the president 's home. Later, I spoke to a crowd of about 1,000 people. I'm not a great speaker, but I wasn't bad and it was a satisfying experience. Money was the last thing on my mind.

Five weeks later, I was paying the American Express bill for my plane ticket and it occurred to me I hadn't been paid. I felt it was beneath me to beg for money myself so Susan Bieber, who works with me, called the university. They had sent Alan Walker their check for
$30,000—not the $20,000 he had told me. I had not known that he was taking an outrageous $10,000 off the top. It wasn't smart of me or Indiana State University.

A month after my inquiry, I got this letter from Walker: “My accounting department is now processing the payment which will go out to you no later than June 2.”

Over the next few months I received half a dozen letters or phone calls from Walker. He most frequently called at 7 or 8 P.M., after he was sure I'd left, and he'd leave a message that he had tried to contact me. On June 11, at 8 P.M., he said: “A check will hopefully be going out next week . . . certainly it will be no later than the week after . . . so keep a lookout for it.

“$2,500 will be issued to you in July and $2,500 in August. In September, we will send you the remaining amount to fulfill our financial obligation to you.”

On Aug. 18, a letter signed, “Assistant to the President,” sounded as if he wrote it himself. It said: “Mr. Walker is out of the country on a business trip to the Middle East and is scheduled to return at the end of the month. I have put a check on Mr. Walker's desk waiting for his signature to be sent to you . . . ”

At a convention in Tucson, I met Mike Leonard of the
Bloomington Herald Times
. Mike wrote a column about my problem that went out on the Internet and I was besieged with phone calls from news people who were also owed money by Walker. Lynn Scherr from ABC News and Linda Ellerbee both called. Charlayne Hunter Gault of CNN had sued Walker for $78,000. Linda Greenhouse, who covers the Supreme Court supremely for the
New York Times
, had flown from Washington, D.C., to Washington State to speak and was never paid.

I drove to White Plains with a camera crew one day and parked outside Walker's house. I was going to do a Mike Wallace. There were five cars in the driveway. With the camera rolling, I knocked on his front door. I planned to say simply, “I came to get my $20,386.”

No one came to the door and we left and drove to Walker's office. He wasn't there, either. I had failed my Mike Wallace confrontation test.
We were able to determine that the registration on several of the cars in the driveway had expired. So too, I'm afraid, have my chances of getting paid for my speech at Indiana State University. All I got for my work was that free lunch at the university president's house.

There was finally an end to the story in 2005. Alan Walker was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

It's dismaying that most Americans get their news of the world from television because television gives them so little of it. There has been a relentless chipping away of the quality and quantity of news broadcasts in general, and foreign news has suffered the most.

In the beginning of television—I'm old enough to have been in on it—news was offered almost as a public service. Men like William Paley at CBS, David Sarnoff at NBC and Leonard Goldenson at ABC, who founded their networks, were businessmen but they seemed to have a sense of obligation to give something back for what they were getting that doesn't exist among media moguls today. They gave the public news in exchange for their licenses to make hundreds of millions on their entertainment shows.

Time taken from the news content of broadcasts to make way for commercials and network promotions for other shows has doubled. The news broadcasts at every network and local station are minutes shorter than they were. Without the commercials and promos,
60 Minutes
is 41 minutes. The half-hour evening news broadcasts are really only 19 minutes long. Nineteen minutes is the time they have to tell us what has happened in the whole world. Is it any wonder that Americans are ignorant of what's going on?

Jim Lehrer's
NewsHour
on public television is good, but the broadcast has limited facilities and not many reporters of its own.

The networks all subscribe to services that tell them what news their audiences want to see and hear. This accounts for why there are more stories about miracle cures in the world of medicine, spurious though they may be, and fewer stories about what's happening in the world. It accounts for why the sick story of Michael Jackson and small boys dominated news broadcasts in 2004 on the day our President was making an important speech in the British Parliament. Americans tell the pollsters they aren't interested in foreign affairs so news broadcasters don't give it to them. At one time, CBS, NBC and ABC each had bureaus in a dozen foreign cities. The reporter in Moscow lived in Moscow and knew Russian. The correspondent in Berlin, Buenos Aires or Tokyo knew the country and knew the people. Now, all the foreign bureaus seem to be in London. The television correspondent flits to where the story is for the day, has his picture taken in front of some landmark that Americans associate with the country he's in while he says his piece. The reporter is more of an expert on travel than on Afghanistan, Seoul, or Taiwan.