Most Talkative: Stories From the Front Lines of Pop Culture (20 page)

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One of my favorite stories as a
48 Hours
producer was a profile of Don Imus that I produced with Dan Rather. The plan was for Dan and me to join Imus for (a little under) forty-eight hours in Monument Valley, Utah, as the famously abrasive radio personality took pictures for a new coffee table book celebrating one of his passions, photographing gorgeous Western scenery. (Who knew?)

48 Hours.
“Shirtless Tuesdays” with colleagues Mary Noonan and Diane Ronnau—I was the only one who complied.

I spent sleepless weeks before the shoot fretting about being entrusted with taking Dan Rather on location with no “adult” supervision. This was a very big deal, and, if I may say, a mark of my reputation at the time that I was even being allowed outside the building with Dan, whom I barely knew. Dan’s legend preceded him: He had a heart of gold but could be tough and exacting and maybe a little on the edge of losing it sometimes. Oh, and he seemed to be a magnet for crazy.

Things
happened
to Dan Rather. This was the man who’d been punched at the ’68 Democratic National Convention. This was the man who’d been taken for an endless taxi ride in Chicago by a possibly unstable cabbie trying to jack up the fare, resulting in Dan hanging out the window and shouting to people that he was being kidnapped. This was the man who’d been mugged on the street by a disturbed stranger who kept demanding, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?!” (which in turn inspired a hit song by R.E.M.). Even though Dan had gone some years without a bizarre incident, I didn’t want any of that going down on my watch.

I was summoned to Mr. Rather’s office overlooking the set of
The CBS Evening News
, the very setting of my humiliating ejection as an intern years earlier. I came prepared to brief him, in detail, on our plan. Dan’s a tall guy, a massive anchorman with a very large head (all anchormen have exceptionally large skulls, by the way, with the exception of Matt Lauer). He smelled, of course, of lotion. Fully lubed for his broadcast and half-listening to me while knotting his tie, Dan was encouraging and kind, yet authoritative. He said he’d known Imus for years and this would be a breeze. “Sounds simple enough, Andrew,” he said with a wink. He liked to wink and I like to be winked at, which I thought should work well. After that meeting, I couldn’t reconcile the stories of Dan’s nutbaggery with the steady, trustworthy anchorman who’d just put me at ease.

A few days later, I boarded Mr. Imus’s Gulfstream jet, which was to carry us out west for our photography adventure. Dan hadn’t shown up yet, but Imus had, and he seemed as geared up for Mr. Rather’s arrival as I was. Imus and I had spoken already on the phone for a preinterview, and in the course of our conversation the shock jock had revealed himself to be nothing but a pussycat, tickled that Dan was coming on this journey. In person, he was a gracious host to me. “What kind of mood is Dan going to be in this weekend?” he joked. I told him Dan couldn’t wait for the trip, which Dan hadn’t actually said but seemed okay to convey in the interest of keeping our subject pumped up. Moments later, The Anchorman arrived, enthusiastically bounding up the stairway to the small plane and totally supporting my claim that he was stoked. I sat in awe, listening to the two broadcasting legends as they discussed the news that was dominating the morning’s headlines: Frank Gifford getting busted with a woman in a hotel. Gossip! Of a celebrity nature—I was glad it wasn’t politics they were discussing, and their tone was one of gentlemen who are quite pleased it was someone
else
getting busted in a situation like this. I didn’t hear a ton of sympathy for Kathie Lee, either.

The whole weekend was basically a rugged denim fantasy. I was with a manly broadcasting legend and we were driving around a rocky American landscape shooting a grizzled radio legend while he took pictures. We are were in the middle of nowhere, under an orange ball of blazing autumn sun with just a nip in the air, surrounded by endless blue sky and natural mountainous sculpture. And we were all wearing the uniform of virility, two-piece denim suits. Dan and I were in a car following Imus, and when he stopped to snap a picture, we jumped out of the car and watched. But back in the car, it became a Dan Rather open mic, a super-personal one-on-one celebrity interview.

“Does Richard Nixon hate you? Do you ever see him?” I asked. He said they didn’t see each other for twenty years and then ran into each other crossing a random street in New York City but didn’t speak.

“What’s the deal with Barbara Walters?” He said she was the most competitive person he’d known and had once high-heeled him in the foot running to interview someone.

“What’s the most dangerous situation you’ve been in? Most embarrassing live TV moment? Why haven’t you ever been on
Oprah
? What do you really think of Connie Chung? Tell me about the guy who mugged you.” I was like a ravenous dog, and he answered every single query. “Oh, wait—Have you met Princess Di?” Yes, I was exactly this annoying. But this was a legend, and we were out in God’s country, alone together, and I had to ask every damn thing I could think of while I had the chance. (Unfortunately, today I can’t remember many of his answers. And that kills me, because I do remember an entire catalog of Captain and Tennille lyrics.)

With every passing moment, I became even more of a Dan Fan. He seemed like he was in the zone with me, too. “This is so beautiful. Why don’t we stop the car and I’ll take a picture of you, Andrew, that you can send to your mom to show her where you were?”

“Dan, will you be my daddy?” I asked. In my head, of course. We stopped the car and Dan carefully knelt on the dusty ground to get the best possible picture. Our cameraman took a picture of Dan taking a picture of me—a moment so meta and surreal you might not believe it if I didn’t have the evidence.

At the end of the shoot, as we drove to our departure spot at a landing strip in the middle of nowhere, I felt like I’d climbed to the top of some sort of Broadcast Journalism Peak.
I’d worked with Dan Rather in the field
. As we’d been previously instructed to do, we parked our rental car on the edge of the landing strip, locked our keys inside, and boarded the private flight for home.

The plane turned to taxi, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Not only had I had the time of my life as a one-man captive audience to a TV news legend, we had also survived the shoot without incident. No one had mugged Dan, I hadn’t screwed up, Dan seemed relaxed and pleased, and I had the footage I needed for a great piece on Don Imus. I reclined my luxurious leather seat and had just popped the top on my first can of free limitless Diet Coke when suddenly the plane lurched under me and I noticed that we were tilting—sinking, actually—into the tarmac. The huge plane had hit a sinkhole in the asphalt of a runway ill equipped for aircraft this size.

I had rejoiced too soon, and now the earth was eating Dan Rather! It was sucking The Anchorman—and me—into the ground!

“Is the National Desk aware of what’s happening?” Dan breathlessly inquired of me seconds later. “What’s the plan from New York?”

“Um…” I stammered, when what I wanted to say was, “I am sitting here right next to you and haven’t had time to alert the media that we have a sunken anchorman.” I felt that I should have had a better answer, that I should have had a plan in place for dealing with a situation like this. But how can you plan ahead for the ground opening up underneath you?

I called my executive producer in New York and explained what had happened. The EP spoke with Dan, then wished me luck as the pilots scrambled to find another jet to take us back to New York. They found one a short drive away in Billings, Montana. Exiting the plane, I now saw that the earth hadn’t exactly tried to swallow us but, more accurately, had taken a nice bite out of the plane. Dan and I grabbed the flight attendant, who grabbed her tray of veggies and dip, and we all headed back to the car we’d left on the edge of the runway.

The car! We’d dutifully locked our keys in the car an hour before, and now we had to break into it. Luckily, a newsman on the road always has a recently dry-cleaned garment on a crappy wire hanger, so a few intense rental-car-damaging moments of jamming and probing later, we got inside and raced out of there hoping to get to Billings on time. My fears that our not-so-near-death experience had ruined what was otherwise a grand weekend flew out the window as Dan, clearly in high spirits, sang in the car—songs like you’d hear at camp around the fire—and let it be known to all of us that he had Knicks tickets for that night and was confident that if we hustled, he’d still make the game. We were served nibbly bits by the flight attendant, and then the three of us kicked out a sing-along jam that lasted the whole way home from Billings. Best. Trip. Ever.

By the way, The Anchorman made it to Madison Square Garden in time for tip-off. But it was all downhill for me at CBS from there.

They say you can never go home again, but I sure as hell tried. I returned to the morning show in 1999 as a senior producer running their entertainment unit. My life became a resounding chorus of “NO” coming from every publicist in America.
“No, Julia Roberts can’t come to the studio, she’s on Regis that day. Tom Cruise? Yes, that would be NO!”
The last time I’d been at
CBS This Morning
, we’d consistently been number three. By this point, we were probably number nine: Competing with
Today
and
GMA
had been hard enough, but in the couple of years I’d been away, the competition for bookings had also started to include
Entertainment Tonight
,
Access
,
Regis
,
Rosie
, and a host of others. It was brutal.

I logged countless hours backstage at awards shows, which sounds fun but wasn’t. I’ve spent a noticeable percentage of my life at the Oscars, the Grammys, and even the friggin’ Country Music Awards, and it was tuxedo warfare. To make these evenings as punishing as possible, the awards producers made everyone backstage—including our poor camera operators and sound guys—wear black tie to impart an air of glamour to every hideous occasion. The morning after every sleepless award-show night, my bosses in New York expected an upbeat, flashy piece that featured Mark McEwen, yukking it up with all the big winners. Nobody knew the hell associated with delivering on that promise.

Backstage at the awards, each show has a little makeshift room constructed of what’s called pipe-and-drape—which is exactly what it sounds like, curtains hanging from pipes, all lined up in this little velveteen shantytown. Every show creates a staging area commensurate with the show’s status.
Entertainment Tonight
and
Access
always did it up big. They’d haul in huge lighting rigs with portable spaceship set pieces, photo booths, comfy couches, and In-N-Out Burgers. Naturally, that’s where every big star stopped first. Mary Hart and her tribe of blond producers always looked like they were having so much
FUN
, laughing and schmoozing with the stars. At that time in my life I probably hated Mary Hart more than that woman who suffered seizures triggered by hearing Mary Hart’s voice. Today, of course, I look back on my hostility as wasted energy, but at the time,
ET
was everything we were not, with their big budget, and ratings, and power. And free-flowing burgers.

Backstage at an awards show with Mark McEwen

Over in Morning Show Alley, we’d be in the corner behind
Today
and
GMA
— shows that needed no other set dressing than their superstar anchors. Katie Couric adorably perched in a director’s chair was like catnip that lured in frisky members of the glitterati. By contrast, our CBS area usually consisted of a blue curtain, a plant of the fern variety, a couple lights, and—in later years—a bowl of loose LifeSavers. We were very proud of the candy jar because occasionally
the stars would take a piece
! That meant they
liked us
! “Candice Bergen ate a LifeSaver!” we would marvel. At the time, we never saw any irony in choosing that particular candy. And even though the stars straggling by our tent genuinely liked Mark McEwen, we were always last in the rotation, and that meant people were usually sick of giving interviews by the time they got to us. You know what makes for lousy television? One-word answers.