Tick... Tick... Tick... (14 page)

The hour-long show premiered on Tuesday, January
4
,
1977
, at
8
:
00
P.M.
—
up against two of ABC's biggest hit comedies,
Laverne and Shirley
and
Happy Days
. Hewitt was on another suicide mission, not unlike the one he narrowly survived in the late
1960
s, against
Marcus Welby, M.D.
Despite surprisingly decent reviews (John Leonard, of the
New York Times
, called it, ironically, “more like the late, lamented
Life
” than its actual
People
magazine model) the show was quickly canceled, with a
29
share—a ratings achievement that today would make it the biggest hit on television. One effect of the show, it turned out, was to anger the
60 Minutes
correspondents, who resented Hewitt's involvement elsewhere. Wallace, notably, raged against Hewitt for failing to spend more time in the
60 Minutes
office.

Now that Hewitt had gotten a taste of success, his long-held passion for money and power clicked into high gear. He wasn't subtle about wanting an ownership position in a show he produced.

“I want Norman Lear money,” he was fond of saying, in reference to the enormous financial windfall afforded the producer of another CBS hit series,
All in the Family,
after it was sold into syndication. Instead he got Hewitt money, which was by then in the hundreds of thousands of dollars—a lot for a TV news producer, but nothing compared to the titans of industry he most admired.

 

In
1977,
Hewitt's cravings for money and power led him to Patsy's Restaurant on West
56
th Street with ABC's flamboyant entertainment chief, Fred Silverman. Hewitt had known Silverman from his days as a programmer for CBS. Silverman was working to improve the ratings of ABC's new show,
Good Morning America,
which was up against the hugely successful
Today Show
on NBC. Silverman wondered if perhaps he could convince Hewitt to leave
60 Minutes
to run this shaky enterprise.

“Sure,” Hewitt said over a plate of Patsy's pasta, “on one condition. I get to own half the show.”

According to Hewitt, Silverman considered the proposal seriously enough to take it back to ABC and weigh the economics, but eventually reported back to Hewitt that such an arrangement would be prohibitively expensive. (In
2004
Hewitt suggested that he would be at least $
1
billion richer today had that deal gone through.)

By then, other networks were scrambling to imitate the formula that had given CBS its windfall. NBC had previously launched a magazine show called
Weekend,
which aired once a month in the Saturday-at-
11
:
30
P.M.
time slot, alternating with
Saturday Night Live,
then a burgeoning pop-culture phenomenon. But unlike
SNL, Weekend
never took off.

In the spring of
1978
, at the behest of ABC News president Roone Arledge, ABC launched its own newsmagazine show,
20/
20,
which seemed to be trying hard to resemble
60 Minutes
, at least in ratings. As cohosts the network picked former
Esquire
magazine editor Harold Hayes and Australian critic Robert Hughes. ABC let them loose on would-be “gotcha!” investigations, such as one by Geraldo Rivera (a young, confrontational ABC News hotshot who appeared to be modeling his career after Mike Wallace) into how racing greyhounds were being given jack rabbits to use as bait for training purposes. After one episode, Arledge realized the mistake in direction—“I hated the show,” he told the press—and quickly replaced Hughes and Hayes with the amiable former
Today Show
host Hugh Downs. Despite ABC's protests that it wasn't imitating
60 Minutes
, its story selection and approach didn't differ that significantly; much as
60 Minutes
had begun in
1968
with Mike Wallace's report on the bioterrorist threat,
20/
20
kicked off with a sensational two-part report on nuclear terror.

 

Hewitt was not out of line to covet millions; in the spring of
1976
, ABC's Arledge had ponied up $
1
million a year to lure Barbara Walters away from NBC to coanchor the evening newscast with Harry Reasoner—making her the first seven-figure player in the news business and raising the bar for everyone else. Hewitt and his correspondents, already feeling the heady thrill of high ratings, sensed the possibility of similar riches in their future.

But the first person to feel the impact of the Walters bonanza was Harry Reasoner, who suddenly found himself cohosting an evening newscast he'd previously called his own. By early
1978
, he'd started talking with CBS about a possible return, and in May, Reasoner announced he would resign from ABC to produce documentaries at CBS. By that time the
60 Minutes
slate was full; Rather, Safer, and Wallace dominated the show, and Reasoner was forced to take an office at the fading
CBS Reports
documentary unit while he bided his time for an open slot.

Once it came that winter, Reasoner realized that
60 Minutes
was not the show he'd left behind. Gone was the rapport that existed between Wallace and himself, replaced by a level of intense rivalry and competition that didn't sit well with Reasoner's laconic style. The three marquee correspondents fought bitterly over everything—stories, producers, and Hewitt—and long stretches of silence were commonplace. The battle for producers had become a regular cause for closed-door meetings, in which the best of the bunch were horse-traded for lesser lights. Wallace didn't mind his reputation as the most wildly competitive of the group; if anything he nurtured it by grabbing the best producers and stories for himself whenever and however he could. And story ideas—supposedly protected by the “blue sheet” system devised in the show's infancy—were now fair game,

 

From all this backstage skullduggery there emerged one agreeable new element: the return of Andy Rooney to CBS and
60 Minutes
. Rooney had left the network shortly after Reasoner, for a job at PBS's
The Great American Dream Machine
. Later he joined his old pal at ABC, and now that Reasoner had returned to CBS, it made sense for Rooney to come back, too. This time the show would make more use of Rooney's growing gifts as an on-air personality. Hewitt had always wanted more humor and commentary on
60 Minutes.
At one point he even thought about having Rooney write a cartoon strip for the show; the notion of Rooney's wry wit as a weekly insert seemed a logical idea. And so, on a slow Sunday in July
1978
, “Three Minutes or So With Andy Rooney” made its first appearance on
60 Minutes
, filling in for the “Point-Counterpoint” feature. Rooney devoted that first segment to driver safety over the July Fourth weekend—spotlighting the odd, counterintuitive fact that more people died in the four days after that weekend than during it.

R
OONEY
: This suggests two things. One, no matter what we do, whether we're climbing ladders or driving cars, a lot of people die doing it. And second, considering the number of people driving somewhere over the Fourth, the chances are that, car for car, it's one of the safest weekends of the year to be going someplace.

The camera returned to two grinning correspondents.

 

R
ATHER
: I'm Dan Rather.

W
ALLACE
: I'm Mike Wallace. We'll be back next week with another edition of
60 Minutes
.

 

Thus another
60 Minutes
tradition was born.

From all that on-camera smiling, it no doubt appeared to audiences that
60 Minutes
was the sort of place where everybody got along and went out for dinner after work and hung out in the hallways trading stories about the weekend. But even with critical success and ratings always on the rise, it remained a rancorous headquarters, with everyone going in separate directions. Rather stayed out of the line of fire by indulging his longstanding love of travel; he often disappeared for days at a time, having little contact with Hewitt or other executives. Wallace was on the road just as much, and when time permitted he preferred to relax at his vacation home on Martha's Vineyard. Safer, the cosmopolitan urban dweller, used his spare time to paint, read, and soak up high culture and good wine. Hewitt, now divorced from his second wife, Frankie, had started dating former
Washington Post
reporter Marilyn Berger; Mike Wallace had fixed them up. (“Just what I need, a journalist,” Hewitt cracked when Wallace told him about this attractive reporter he thought Hewitt should date.) He now owned a weekend home in Bridgehampton, where he relished his access to the power brokers who spent their spare time relaxing on the lush confines of the Long Island Sound. The last thing any of these men wanted to do was toast the fruits of their labor together.

On Sunday, November
26
,
1978
,
60 Minutes
became the highest-rated show on television for the first time in its
10
-year history.
All in the Family
and
Alice,
the two shows that followed it on CBS on Sunday nights, ranked second and third in the ratings, respectively. This also marked the first time in the history of television that a regularly scheduled nonfiction program ranked number one—and would have been cause for celebration anywhere else in television except
60 Minutes,
where everyone was too busy battling for the lead position on next week's show.

Chapter 11

Did You See That Great Piece on
60 Minutes
?

Av Westin could have been Don Hewitt. Much like Hewitt, Westin was something of a
wunderkind
producer at CBS News in the
1950
s and
1960
s, only to find himself in the
1970
s in the position of many other middle-aged news producers—without a show to call his own. Unlike many, Westin was honest enough to admit that he'd had one good idea fewer in his life than Don Hewitt, and thus resigned himself to a less exalted fate. A good-natured guy with prodigious producing talents, Westin continued to make his mark in broadcasting, first as a producer in public television in the early
1970
s and eventually back in network news as executive producer of ABC's
World News Tonight.
In August
1979
, as Hewitt's show continued to beat the competition, Westin was appointed by ABC News as vice president to, among other things, oversee the overhaul of the troubled
20/
20
.

But Westin—nothing if not practical—told his colleagues at ABC News that Hewitt had something going for him that they could never hope to have with their show, or any other newsmagazine they might develop: a protected time slot. Perhaps if ABC or NBC had dared to dabble in a Sunday night newsmagazine back when
60 Minutes
first moved to the
7
:
00
P.M.
slot, they might have had a chance. Now it was too late—
60 Minutes
owned that hour, and no one else would ever get it back.

That wasn't the only explanation Westin offered for the success of
60 Minutes
. His thoughtful insight into the show's mammoth ratings was as dead-on accurate as it was depressing to news purists.

“The thing about
60 Minutes
,” Westin later recalled telling his bosses, “is that people start the weekend off feeling very noble about themselves. They think, ‘I'm going to finish that book,' or, ‘I'm going to go to a museum,' or ‘Maybe I'll paint a picture.' But by Sunday night, most Americans, weary from the workweek, haven't bothered to do much of anything to tax their brains. So then along comes
60 Minutes
, and it's at
7
:
00
on Sunday night, and it's a chance to do something a little constructive—maybe to learn something, or see something interesting, or watch something other than a ballgame or a movie. And since
60 Minutes
tells stories in such an interesting way, it's not a painful experience. Then, when they get to work the next morning, they have something to talk about at the water cooler. They can say, ‘Did you see that great piece on
60 Minutes
last night?' And it makes them feel a little better about themselves.”

That, Westin explained, is why
60 Minutes
worked—and why no matter what he or anyone else did to compete, they were bound to end up just a little less successful than Hewitt and his tigers.

 

Harry Reasoner negotiated his return to
60 Minutes
in January
1979
at the height of its ratings and earning power.

By then
60 Minutes
had become the network's only consistently top-rated broadcast; according to a
New York Times
calculation, the show was able to charge $
215
,
000
for each minute of commercials, but it cost less than $
200
,
000
a week to produce. With six minutes of paid commercial time per hour, one estimate put the show's profit for the
1979
–
1980
season at $
25
million.

Soon after he came back, Reasoner observed to colleagues that Hewitt hadn't calmed down—an understatement, as always, from the mild-mannered Reasoner. In May
1979
, Hewitt was married for the third time, to Marilyn Berger—Wallace's matchmaking had paid off. Reflecting Hewitt's highly developed champagne tastes, the couple were wed on
La Belle Simone,
a yacht owned by Levittown tycoon Bill Levitt and his wife, Simone. Soon afterward, with the new Mrs. Hewitt flirtatiously leading the way, he managed to ingratiate himself on a Hamptons street corner with CBS owner William Paley, who had a house near Hewitt's. Paley unhesitatingly befriended the creator of one of his network's newest and biggest sources of profit. (The Hewitts remained close friends with Paley for years afterward; Hewitt proudly repeats that he and his wife were present in the hospital when Paley died in
1991
.) By then Hewitt was
57
years old, but he had enough energy to devote his usual long hours to the show and still find time to court the rich and famous—the club he'd always longed to join.

Reasoner's colleagues, who were knocking out upward of
30
stories a year, seemed similarly vigorous. All three had become famous—more so than Hewitt—and the show's success gave the correspondents wide leverage to continue their headline-earning investigations. It also opened doors to celebrities who had never talked on television before. Stars knew they'd get fair treatment from the show, as well as a kind of gravitas not afforded elsewhere. And the timing continued to be impeccable—not just the timing of the stories but the correspondents themselves, whose instincts for being at the right place at the right time remained unparalleled.

On January
14
,
1979
, the show aired Morley Safer's interview with Katharine Hepburn, the legendary—and legendarily reclusive—actress, who had granted Safer a session after meeting producer Jim Jackson and him in London, for reasons Safer could only surmise. Maybe she loved
60 Minutes
, he thought.

Nevertheless, Safer almost botched the interview, Hepburn had warned him that if he arrived at her East Side townhouse even one minute after the scheduled
12
:
00
noon interview, she would cancel it and send the camera crew home.

On the day of the interview, Safer got into a cab with what he thought would be plenty of time to get there. But by
11
:
50
, he was still caught in traffic; at
11
:
55
, he still hadn't reached her front door. With seconds to spare, Safer realized he had no other option; he jumped out of the cab blocks away and raced all the way to her house, arriving breathless and terrified at her front door at precisely
11:59.

“Mr. Safer,” Hepburn said as she answered the door herself, “you are a very lucky young man.”

Safer's luck continued once the interview got underway, as he explored the eccentricities of the idiosyncratic actress.

 

H
EPBURN
: I won't go to a restaurant now.

S
AFER
: You don't go out to restaurants?

H
EPBURN
: I don't go out to restaurants because they charge $
60
a meal, and I can serve you here anytime you want to come. You give me $
60
and I'll give you dinner.

S
AFER
: Are you a bit of a—how should I say this—

H
EPBURN
: Tight.

S
AFER
: Tight?

H
EPBURN
: No, I'm not tight, I just don't like injustice . . .

S
AFER
: If you hadn't been an actress, what would you have been?

H
EPBURN
: I never thought. I would have tormented some man, I suppose, and had about eight children. And tormented them.

 

After the interview, and out of view of the CBS cameras, Hepburn took Safer on a tour of her home's private quarters, including the part of the house where she'd lived with Spencer Tracy.

Not to be outdone, of course, Mike Wallace swooped down in late April with a breaking-news interview of his own. Just as Wallace was about to interview Johnny Carson, the elusive host of NBC's
Tonight Show
—after months of negotiations—newspapers around the country bannered the news that Carson might be leaving the show because of a contract dispute with Fred Silverman, the head of the network. Wallace was able to capitalize brilliantly on the interview and do what
60 Minutes
had come to do best: get noticed. Guests had become so familiar with the show's routine that they knew precisely how to handle interviews. A master like Carson clearly relished the chance to cross comic swords with Wallace.

 

W
ALLACE
: Is there anything you'd like to say to Mr. Silverman?

C
ARSON
: I hope when this show is seen that you're still with NBC.
(Laughs)
I'm as cruel as you are.

W
ALLACE
: Is it a—is it a fact—

C
ARSON
: What—what—what—is what a fact?

W
ALLACE
: Is it a fact that in the middle—

C
ARSON
: Boy, you're getting warmed up now, aren't you?

W
ALLACE
: Yeah. Is it—

C
ARSON
: Takes you a while, but, boy, when that cruel streak starts to come up, you're murder.

 

For all the scoops and quotes and exposés and headlines, the success of each story always came back to what made Hewitt happy: great characters and human drama. And sometimes the best of these came in the form of pieces about unknowns, men and women who earned a showcase on
60 Minutes
for their achievements, not their failures or their fame. Which is what led Morley Safer, in the fall of
1979
, to the memorable story of a Chicago schoolteacher named Marva Collins, who had started the West Side Preparatory School in
1975
, an alternative school for inner-city kids. Collins was an extraordinary but largely unrecognized character doing something groundbreaking and important; Safer's spotlight on her would earn her unimagined fame and financial support. (The story also marked probably the first appearance of what would become a staple of television news—the profile of the inspirational inner-city teacher. In the years to come, would-be Marva Collinses showed up with regularity on every newsmagazine and evening news program.)

The Collins story also reminded viewers—and Hewitt as well—of Safer's singular talent among the
60 Minutes
crew. While Wallace soared with his interviews, and Rather scored with his dogged determination, Safer brought to certain stories a unique voice that reflected his personal gifts as a writer. Despite a team of talented producers, no one could ever mistake Safer's words for anybody else's. Safer claims to have written the first draft of every story he did for
60 Minutes
until approximately
1999
, when at last, he says, he entrusted the task to producers. The Collins story was a perfect example of Safer's poetry:

S
AFER
: You have it all here on West Adams Street, all the familiar big-city blight: the forever broken windows, the burned-out flats, the disemboweled abandoned cars—all that look and smell that even a crystal afternoon cannot change. And up the street or around the corner, you have a school that, for whatever reason, does not teach, and children who, for whatever reason, do not learn—castaways to that ever-growing legion of unskilled black teenaged unemployed. And then you have
3819
West Adams, just another tired-looking house with a blank face staring out at a mean street. But come on in
3819
, come on in and take a look. And what you find on the inside could not be more different from what you see on the outside. Come on in and take a look: alert and challenged children being pushed way beyond the boundaries most school systems set.

Without flowery language or far-reaching metaphor, Safer could set a scene with words that created as much a mood as any picture, and with subjects like Collins, he was giving distinction to
60 Minutes
as something more than just a muckraking institution out for headlines.

 

At a few minutes after midnight on October
21
,
1978
, Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd turned to each other on the “Weekend Update” segment of
Saturday Night Live
and began a sketch called “Point-Counterpoint.” Savvy viewers recognized it perhaps as an arcane reference to the
60 Minutes
segment of the same name, in which Shana Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick had been trading barbs for years. Curtin led with a strong opinion, but the memory of it pales next to what followed, when Aykroyd looked dryly into the camera and intoned, “Jane, you ignorant slut.”