Audition (34 page)

Frank was out. I got his butler and left the message with a callback number. From that day and for the next thirty years, Sinatra took a hate to me. I had invaded his privacy. I was no better than the worst gossip columnist, all of whom he despised. I wrote him a heartsick letter of apology explaining what had happened and asked Bennett Cerf to give it to him. Sinatra tore it up unopened.

He would not only talk about me with disdain from the stage in Las Vegas, he wouldn’t even be in the same room with me. At a tribute dinner several years later for Henry Kissinger, Sinatra, when he learned I was also to be seated there, refused to sit on the dais. Sad and embarrassed, the dinner chairman asked if I would mind not attending because Sinatra was such a big draw. That made me even sadder. Of course, I didn’t go.

My father and sister couldn’t understand this one-sided, ongoing feud and why the man they admired so much would behave so vindictively. I was hardly the only reporter to feel his wrath, but it hurt more because we had for so long considered him a friend of the family.

Pamela Hayward did not marry Sinatra. She went on to marry Averell Harriman, a former governor of New York and a very wealthy man. After his death she was very active in Democratic politics, and in 1992 she became President Clinton’s distinguished U.S. ambassador to France. But long after her marriage and Frank’s various marriages, Sinatra’s enmity toward me continued.

We finally more or less made up just a few years before he died. He was performing at a charity event for New York’s premier cancer hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering. The distinguished president and CEO of Sloan-Kettering at that time was Dr. Paul Marks and, as I’ve told you, the husband of my friend from Sarah Lawrence, Joan Marks. Joan and Paul had remained among my closest friends for all those years, and Paul knew how much pain and embarrassment Sinatra had caused me. So he took a chance and seated me at his own table along with Sinatra and his wife, Barbara. I held my breath waiting for Sinatra to make a scene. But he simply acknowledged me with a nod and a brief hello. I’m sure by then he’d long ago forgotten why I had made him so angry thirty years before. Our one-way feud was finally over.

But if I thought Sinatra’s distaste for me was disturbing, it was nothing compared to that of the new man with whom I was about to share a desk on
Today.

Exit Hugh, Enter McGee

I
N THE FALL OF
1971, to my surprise and sadness, Hugh decided to leave the show. He had been on
Today
for nine years and wanted to spend more time with his wife in their new home in Carefree, Arizona. He had arranged with NBC to continue doing a series of Specials on newsy, serious subjects that interested him, but unfortunately the Specials, though important, drew such small ratings that after a year or so NBC discontinued them.

Hugh’s departure from
Today
left a huge gap. I was very sorry to see him go, but a good deal sorrier when his replacement arrived.

We all thought Edwin Newman, a longtime NBC correspondent, would replace Hugh. Ed had often sat in as host during summer vacations. He had intelligence and a dry sort of humor and he fitted right in. But evidently NBC felt he was either too dry or too intellectual or too something, and started auditioning other men for the job.

Note the word “men.” Though I had been at the morning desk for seven years by then, I was not even considered for the job of host, cohost, or any title that would give me a position of equality. I had been hired to fill the woman’s role on the program and, although I’d certainly expanded the parameters of the job, it was still the “woman’s role.” If I left, another woman would replace me and the show would continue. The prevailing wisdom was not only that the men watching at home but also the women would never accept a female in an authoritative role. The host had to be a man.

That man was Frank McGee, a respected journalist, a fine reporter and writer. Frank was personable, with a wide smile and a commanding presence on the air. He had everything going for him, save for one thing—he hated our program.

I didn’t realize it at first. No sooner had Frank arrived than I left for Iran to cover the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy. Perhaps I was just too busy to pick up any negative vibes. I was swamped doing my homework for the trip and appearing on the
Today
show and
Not for Women Only
, plus taping a whole other week of
Not for Women Only
to run in my absence. In retrospect, my ignorance of Frank’s mood was probably good. I needed to concentrate on the upcoming whirlwind week in Iran.

The shah of Iran was throwing a huge anniversary party at Persepolis, the ancient desert capital of Persia. He had invited every king, ex-king, and head of state or government on the planet. And some seventy came, including the kings and queens of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, and the Netherlands, Prince Juan Carlos of Spain, King Constantine of Greece, King Hussein of Jordan, President Tito of Yugoslavia, President Ceauşescu of Romania, President Marcos of the Philippines and his shoe-loving wife, Imelda, and my old “friend” Princess Grace of Monaco and her husband, Prince Rainier. There was even an emperor, the tiny, ancient Haile Selassie of Ethiopa (his imperial title included “Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah”), who brought along his even tinier Chihuahua, Chicheebeel, in a diamond-studded collar.

Among the high-profile invitees not there were President Pompidou of France, President Nixon, and Queen Elizabeth. Though I didn’t find out until later, there was concern about terrorist attacks. The first armed uprising against the shah (which would end in the Islamic revolution and his exile eight years later) had occurred just a few months before the celebration, and others followed. Banks and movie theaters were attacked, police officials were assassinated, and just days before the gala, fundamentalist insurgents threatened “to drown the Persepolis events in a bath of blood.” Perhaps that was among the reasons President Pompidou sent his prime minister, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, President Nixon sent his vice president, Spiro Agnew, and Queen Elizabeth sent her husband, Prince Philip, and daughter, Princess Anne. (No one seemed to care about the safety of us journalists.)

If the list of Persepolis guests was newsworthy, the luxuries about to be heaped on them were even more so. The press was having a field day describing the over-the-top lavish, air-conditioned blue-and-yellow tent city that housed the VIPs. Instead of keeping the theme ethnic and Persian, which would probably have been very charming and even meaningful, little in the tent city was Persian. It was wall-to-wall French.

The tents had been designed by Jansen of Paris, the hot interior decorator at the time who did “everyone’s” châteaux in France. His firm brought in custom china from France (Limoges, bearing the shah’s family coat of arms), custom crystal glasses (Baccarat, encrusted with the imperial crown in gold), and linens (Porthault, the most elegant linen maker in Paris). Even hairdressers were flown in from Paris. So was the food—from Maxim’s. The only Persian touches were the handsome carpets on the floors of the tents, the handwoven “carpet portraits” of each head of state, and the mounds of Iranian caviar, two tons, some said, for the banquet, which the chefs from Maxim’s served with poached quail eggs.

The lavishness and the emphasis on Western taste turned out to be a major mistake, though no one knew at the time just how great a mistake it was. While the shah was trying to show the world how he was Westernizing Iran, the Shia mullahs in Iran were slamming him for his infidel efforts. Ayatollah Khomeini, who would later lead the Islamic revolution, was already pronouncing the festivities an “evil celebration” and, from his exile in Iraq, warning the shah that “an even darker future, God forbid, lies ahead of you.” He was right. But we reporters didn’t know that the Persepolis indulgences would become a major milestone in the shah’s eventual downfall and bring us the fundamentalist Islamic regime that exists in Iran today. We were there to cover a party.

I was assigned to broadcast the shah’s homage to Iran’s past, live, from Persepolis. This was primarily a massive parade of some eighteen hundred troops in period costumes along with assorted chariots, horses, water buffalo, and camels. The 2,500 years of pageantry were so promising that our program added an extra hour. That meant I would be on live for three hours. A challenge under any circumstances, and it became more so because no sooner did we arrive in Persepolis than my researcher-writer, Doreen Chu, got sick. Really sick. We were staying in students’ dorms in the nearby city of Shiraz, and Doreen repaired to her bed, leaving me on my own with a three-hour live broadcast ahead, no rehearsal, and no one to stand off camera and hand me research notes. Then two good things happened. One, I met a very nice male reporter from the BBC, whose name, sadly, I can’t remember, who was also staying in the dorm. And I became friendly with Sally Quinn, a witty, very good feature writer for the
Washington Post.
Sally and I stuck together for the duration, comparing notes and sharing information—the hot water didn’t work in the tents, the toilets were sluggish, the tents, all decorated differently, were absurd. Sally was reporting in print. I was reporting on television. Still, we were a big help to each other. It was my new friend from the BBC, however, who saved my life.

When the show went on the air at 7:00 a.m. on October 15, the viewers saw me sitting in a glassed-in booth facing the desert. From there I described the horsemen, chariots, and floats going by. I seemed positively brilliant, rattling off the passing of every dynasty since 559
B.C.
, including the Achaemenid, the Seleucid, the Parthian, the Sassanid. Here’s some more. The Tahirid, the Saffarid, the Seljuk. On and on. What no one noticed, because the camera was basically on the parade, were the earphones on my head, which connected me to my friend from the BBC.

It’s not that I hadn’t done my own homework. I had, but I couldn’t have mounds of notes in front of me with no one to sort them and be seen reading from the notes. My BBC pal, on the other hand, broadcasting for the radio, had all his homework in front of him and could read every fact. So much of what he said I said, with my own additions, ten seconds later. I didn’t say it quite in his voice, but there were times in the broadcast when I had a distinctly British accent. The problem was that the BBC did not have commercials and we did. Every time I said, “We’ll be back after this message,” Joe Garagiola in New York appeared on the screen, at one point promoting Lipton onion soup, at another, Blue Lustre rug shampoo. By the time the camera came back to Persepolis, my BBC friend was way ahead of me and I’d lost at least a century of history.

“When we last left you, you could see the breakup of the individual remote villages in ancient Persia,” I’d say. “Well, now they have all been united and it’s no longer 1000 but 1100.” Sometimes, if the commercial was a minute and a half long or when Frank Blair read the news, the interruption was even longer, and we’d lose five hundred years. I had to keep listening to my friend from the BBC so that when we came back, I could catch up and say: “As I was saying five hundred years ago…” What’s a century here or there?

On the other hand nobody much cared because what the viewers were looking at were the horses and the costumes and the whole panoply of VIP guests we kept cutting away to. The viewers didn’t care whether it was 2,500 years ago or last month.

Did I send thank-you flowers to my friend from the BBC when the last chariot passed by? Did I buy him a rug? I hope so. He literally made my day. For three hours, I was a distinguished authority—and live. I was a great success. The afterglow was short-lived, however. When I returned to New York, the party was over. Hugh was gone and Frank McGee was about to make my life miserable.

Frank considered his assignment to be a comedown. He’d been partly anchoring the evening news, one of the three rotating anchors who took over the highly respected
Huntley-Brinkley Report
after Chet Huntley’s retirement in 1970. NBC assigned him to
Today
when they decided too many anchors spoiled the broadcast, and reduced the anchor slots to David Brinkley and John Chancellor. So Frank naturally felt diminished. And understandably so.

McGee did not consider
Today
to be a serious news program. He was following Hugh Downs, who was, in his opinion, not a newsman, having been host of a game show. To make matters even more unacceptable for Frank, he was now being asked to share a desk, not with a male colleague, but with me, a mere woman, whom he couldn’t possibly regard as an equal. Even the beloved Joe Garagiola earned his disdain during interviews on the set. “He asks questions I wouldn’t ask out of professional vanity,” McGee was quoted in a magazine article.

On camera McGee was pleasant and gave me a tight smile in the moments when we were casually chatting. The audience could not detect anything wrong. Off camera he and I shared the makeup room as Hugh and I had, and there he was distant, bordering on rude, and spent as little time in my company as possible. I could live with that because he was good for the show. The ratings were nearly as high as they were during the high points of Hugh’s tenure, and that was enough for me.

To Frank’s credit he did add some gravitas to the program by instituting a series of daily interviews from New York with Washington politicians or newsmakers. He and I sat side by side at the desk and asked questions in turn.

But Frank couldn’t stand it. He felt
my
questions were interrupting
his
questions, and that his were far more important. The producer of the program, however, liked the two of us asking questions. He wanted to keep things as they were. (The producer by then was Stuart Schulberg, brother of the acclaimed author of
What Makes Sammy Run
and screenwriter of
On the Waterfront
, Budd Schulberg.)