Audition (89 page)

In 1995 I was visiting London and once more requested a meeting. The princess invited me to lunch at her home in Kensington Palace. This palace is actually a group of small town houses connected to one another in a blocked-off area. On one side of Diana’s house was the home of Princess Margaret, the Queen’s sister. On the other side was the home of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, the Queen’s cousins. Diana was not particularly friendly with either of her neighbors.

I arrived for lunch on time at 12:30 and walked up a flight of stairs to the living room. On the landing was a lovely portrait of the princess, who was waiting at the landing. The living room was pale yellow. It was recently painted, she told me. As it happened I was wearing a yellow suit. Diana laughed and said how thoughtful it was of me to match the room.

This was a particularly trying time for her. She was separated from her husband but not divorced. Her unhappiness, which manifested itself in various ways including bulimia, had been written about in a blockbuster book by Andrew Morton. At first Diana disavowed any participation in the book, but later it came out that she had been interviewed on tape for it. At our lunch she said rather calmly that her husband and his family were trying to make it look as if she were mentally ill so they could send her away somewhere. These accusations had been rumored in the British papers, but it was very disturbing to hear the princess claiming them over the chicken salad. I thought she was exaggerating, but she believed they were true. She was certainly not mentally ill, she said, but the accusations were wearing her down. She also complained about her brother, Charles, Earl Spencer. She had needed a place to go in the summer, she told me, and had asked if she could take one of the houses on the family estate at Althorp Park (where she was later to be buried). Her brother refused her request. “There would be too many paparazzi,” he said. She was angry and hurt. I remembered this when the earl was giving his emotional speech at Diana’s funeral and proclaiming his great devotion to his sister. I recounted what she had told me on the air after her death, and Earl Spencer was furious and threatened to sue. But it was true and he knew it, so no suit followed.

Before I left Diana on that now-long-ago lunch, I asked once again if she would consider doing an interview with me, perhaps to explain how she felt at present and how she saw her life in the future. She didn’t want to do one now, she told me, but when she was ready, which would be soon, I would be the first. I left elated. She walked me down the stairs, not just to her entrance but to my car, where she shook hands with my dazzled driver. It was such a simple but thoughtful gesture—the beautiful Princess of Wales, walking outside her home to greet a driver she had never met. I could see why she was beloved by so many of the so-called ordinary people. As soon as I got back to my hotel, I called my office in New York and said I might very well be doing an interview with the princess. A half hour later they called back to say that news had just hit the wires. Two days before my visit the princess had evidently sat down to do an interview with a little-known BBC reporter named Martin Bashir. Martin, by the way, a fine journalist, now works for ABC in New York and we are friends. But at the time I was angry and extremely disappointed, to say the least. What I didn’t know was that Martin, being of Pakistani birth, was a friend of Dr. Khan, and this gave him special entrée to Diana, who trusted him. In a quiet, low-key way, he did a sensational job. This would be the bombshell interview in which the princess said there were three people in her marriage: herself, her husband, and Camilla Parker Bowles. This was also the interview that was said to have convinced the Queen that her son the Prince of Wales and Diana should get a divorce. One more thing: this interview was kept secret from her private secretary, Patrick Jephson, and was one of the major reasons, he later told me, that he quit her household. After her death Jephson wrote an extremely revealing book that described his devotion but also his frustrations in working for the princess. I did the first interview with him, but it hardly made up for never interviewing Diana.

Once her interview with Bashir had aired in Great Britain, ABC bought it for broadcast here. I was assigned to introduce it. I wrote to Princess Diana and said how deeply moved I was by the interview and that I wished I had been able to do it myself. She wrote back a thank-you note and said she hoped one day we still might do our interview. It never happened. The next time I reported on Princess Diana was at her funeral.

N
OW A GROUP OF PEOPLE
I could talk with again and again, each of whom I have interviewed at least twice. This list could actually be much longer, but to balance that small list of the impossible-to-get, I will keep it relatively short.

Cher. She always has something new to say that is amusing, candid, and sometimes wonderfully outrageous. Over the years, in the course of several interviews, she has talked with me openly about her early struggle with reading and writing when she didn’t know she was dyslexic; about her difficult marriage with Sonny Bono, who wanted to control her life; about her love affairs; why she likes men much younger than herself; her feelings about aging (she’s against it); and almost any subject I wanted to bring up. She lives by her own standards and lets others live by theirs. Cher may change her costumes, her hair color, and even her attitude, but she is always the same delight to talk to. I think this goes for her onstage performances, as well. (My daughter, by the way, will travel many miles to see Cher perform.)

Bette Midler. I could say practically the same thing about Bette as I said about Cher. And I will travel many miles to see Bette perform. She can be hilariously funny and seriously touching. She is such a talent that when she sings “Wind Beneath My Wings,” it brings tears to my eyes. Watching her as Delores Delago, the bawdy mermaid in a wheelchair, I also get tears, but this time from laughing. Bette, in her stage act, sometimes tells dirty jokes, imitating the risqué singer of the past, Sophie Tucker. Bette even named her only child Sophie. The whole performance has special meaning to me because, as I have said, Sophie Tucker appeared at the Latin Quarter as its star attraction year after year. I knew her well and to this day can sing her theme song, “Some of These Days.” Bette has much more talent than Sophie Tucker, but she has the same delivery and love of a great joke, no matter how offensive. I also adore her humor about herself. I once asked her in an interview, on a scale of one to ten, how she would describe her looks. “On a scale of one to ten?” she said. “Oh, I think I’m about a fifty-five. I think I’m a happening girl.” She sure is.

I have a special feeling about Michael Douglas and his beautiful wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones. It is not just that we three share the same birthday, it’s more of a family thing. I’ve known Michael’s father, Kirk, and his wife, Anne, for many years. Kirk is now in his nineties, and when he was in his seventies he wrote a very honest memoir about his early life as a poor Jewish boy, called
The Ragman’s Son.
I did the first interview with Kirk when the book came out. I particularly remember it because it was during the time my mother’s health was beginning to fail and I was traveling back and forth from Los Angeles to New York. At the same time as I was interviewing Kirk, I was also talking on camera with Michael about his own hugely successful career. (He was on one of my Academy Award
Specials.
) I have probably done at least four interviews with Michael. There was never a time when he wasn’t thoughtful and candid. I interviewed him during a troubled period when his first marriage was ending. Then I rejoiced when he married Catherine, and I interviewed them both. I consider them friends. Last summer I attended a preview of Michael’s latest movie,
The King of California.
He plays an aging man with a long beard. It is an extraordinary performance. I congratulated him, and he whispered in my ear, “When I look at myself in this movie, I see my father.” “Yes,” I said, “but you are a much better actor.” (Forgive me, Kirk, but he is.)

Tom Hanks. He is the same off camera as on. He is intelligent, unpretentious, and, of course, a great talent. It is amazing to think that in our first interview back in 1989, he said he had fears of not making it. Tom had a difficult childhood; his father and mother divorced when he was five, and Tom went with his father as he moved around the West Coast from job to job and from wife to wife. Yet he described his childhood as being as nice and “normal” as possible. “It was almost like being a celebrity because when I was ten and in yet another school, it was like, ‘Who is this kid?’ Frances, my dad’s then wife, was Chinese. That was something that we really never thought about. It was a fact. But other people reacted amazed. But then when you add up that she’s also my third mother, and this is the tenth house that we’ve lived in, and I’ve been to eight different schools, people would just sort of look at us and just shake their heads, because they didn’t know what made us tick.”

With that heritage Tom should be one of the most neurotic actors around, but instead he is a family man who has been married to the actress Rita Wilson since 1988. About his career, he said, “Hey, this is what I do and it’s not a big deal. I’m not a rocket scientist and I don’t have state secrets that I have to keep from everybody. I think they expect demons, some terrible thing, some drive, some bad side, otherwise how would I get to be in this position that I’m in now? Obviously, they think, something very, very deep and some psychological thing makes him go off and do this as a job in the first place and that’s not really it.”

“So what is it?” I asked.

“It’s because it’s fun,” Tom answered, “and I think I’m pretty good at it. I deliver the goods, which is what a bricklayer does when he’s hired to lay bricks or take a mattress off the truck. He’s paid to take the mattress off the truck. I take the mattress off the truck and this is, ‘Wow, look how that guy takes those mattresses off the truck!’”

I asked, “What’s the best thing that success this past year has given you?”

“Probably a certain amount of confidence,” he replied. “I feel as though I finished my master’s now. I have that bachelor’s and now I guess it’s time to go for the Ph.D.”

Two Academy Awards later Tom not only has his Ph.D., he could teach the course. But he doesn’t. He remains a hardworking, happily married, funny, and very nice man.

George Clooney. I don’t have to tell you why I like George. He is open and very funny to talk with but also thoughtful and committed to the values in which he believes. His movies show both sides. The first time I interviewed George was in 1995. After years of struggling for success in a series of television flops, he had landed his big break in the medical series
ER.
Unlike many stars of television, George successfully made the transition to films. His first big hit was
From Dusk Till Dawn
, and our conversation took place just before its release. Two things I remember most from that interview. One: he had a pet pig—not a piglet—a big fat pig named Max. Max was inside, not outside, the house when George introduced us. (Max has since died.) The other thing is his answer when, knowing he was divorced and a bachelor, I asked if he wanted to remarry. Most of the time, when I ask this rather prosaic question, the answer is, “Yes, when I find the right person.” This is usually followed by a poignant expression of a desire to have children. Not George, who said he would never marry again. When I asked why, he said simply that he was not good at it. Nor did he want children.

The last time I interviewed George was in 2006. I asked then if the women he took out ever expected or hoped he would marry them and if so what did he tell them. “You know what’s funny?” he said. “It is because of you that I don’t have to. It’s already out there. So you’ve done all the work for me, and I thank you for that.”

You’re welcome, George.

Tom Cruise is someone I have interviewed many times and probably will interview again. Yet, while Tom wants to be open and candid, he has learned over the years to deflect with a laugh any question that makes him uncomfortable. He doesn’t dodge tough questions about Scientology or his love for his wife, Katie, but anything that may make him explore himself is handled with a big grin and that forced laugh. But let me say this about Tom. Raised by a single mother and three sisters, he could not be more considerate toward women. His Scientology beliefs, however controversial, have inspired him to live his life trying, as he has often said, “to do good. I try to help people any chance I get, wherever I have the opportunity to give back to the life that I have.”

He is, in short, one of the nicest people I know, even though I usually walk away from one of our interviews wondering what, if anything, I got.

Angelina Jolie. It’s not just that I applaud her work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and her personal commitment to raising what are now four young children. I really like her.

I first interviewed Angelina in July 2003. She was plugging
Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
, a sequel to her highly successful adventure film,
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.
(Hardly a milestone in one’s career, unlike
Girl, Interrupted
, for which she’d won an Academy Award three years before.) Her bizarre three-year marriage to actor Billy Bob Thornton (during which she’d worn a vial with drops of his blood around her neck and added his name to the many tattoos on her body) was officially over. She had adopted a little boy from Cambodia, whom she named Maddox.

I thought Angelina was gorgeous. I also thought she was unusually open. In one of the more startling interviews I’ve ever done, she told me of her recurring thoughts of death as she was growing up (at fifteen she took home courses in embalming) and of cutting herself with knives because it made her feel better. “I was self-destructive, always,” she said. “I didn’t feel close enough to another person. I didn’t feel alive enough. Early on in my first sexual relationship, I brought knives out and had a night where we attacked each other. It was so stupid because I still have a mark next to my jugular vein. But it was a release of some kind. It felt so primitive, and it felt so honest. And then I had to deal with not telling my mother, and hiding the gauze bandage that I wore to high school.”