We called Dick Cavett in America. Cavett hosted a talk show for ABC and we had already shared a production with him when we tried out the new-fangled Atlantic satellite in an attempt to do the first transatlantic talk show. Cavett had Bette Davis and Mort Sahl in New York; I had Jonathan Miller and Jackie Stewart in London. It was a good idea, but the technology of the time did nothing to enhance our ambition. The delay was such that Jonathan Miller worked out if he died in our London studio, it would take another four or five seconds before the event was registered in New York.
During our collaboration with Cavett’s company, Richard and I had visited New York to scout the set-up. Dick Cavett was a small handsome man who worked as a writer for Jack Paar before getting his own talk show. I admired him but didn’t much like him. He was too poised and self-contained to be approachable. He was an adroit performer, different from Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin and the rest who were around at the time, in that generally he saw the interview as a means of extracting information rather than a scripted contrivance for cheap laughs. He also managed to plug products without sounding as if he was being paid a fortune to do so. Indeed, he would rattle through the adverts like a man renouncing his religion at gunpoint.
We watched him record a show featuring John Lindsay, then the young and sexy mayor of New York. Cavett’s show was in trouble. The network had told him to improve the viewing figures or suffer the chop. Mayor Lindsay was also having problems running the Big Apple.
Cavett asked, ‘Tell me, Mayor Lindsay, what is it like to be a failure?’
Lindsay grinned and said, ‘Let’s wait until the autumn and have a joint press conference.’
Interviewing Philippe Cousteau, son of underwater explorer Jacques, Cavett picked up a length of bone, polished like ivory, from the table and, commenting on its mysterious beauty, handed it to an ardent member of the women’s lib movement who was also on the show. She handled it lovingly and commented on its smooth texture.
‘Do you know what it is?’ Cavett asked.
She shook her head.
‘A walrus’s penis,’ he said.
It was worth the trip to New York for that one moment.
Cavett and the network jumped at the idea of an Ali and Frazier confrontation. It would be done from Cavett’s studio and go out on the eve of the fight both in the States and Britain. Both fighters agreed to the deal and Richard and I booked in for a week’s preparation before the event. That was when I began to feel that my misgivings about Cavett were justified. I felt he wanted to take over the show, to make it appear not so much a joint production, more a Dick Cavett event with the country cousin from England making a fleeting appearance. We relied on Cavett’s organisation for our basic research because, in those days before the internet, access to research was a tedious and time-consuming business. Moreover we needed to get together with Cavett and his production team to plot the interview, to work out who talked to whom and when.
With a couple of days to go and having been continually stalled by the Cavett office, we were finally convinced that the so-called collaboration had, in fact, become a contest. What we were experiencing, of course, was the ultra competitive cut-throat business of American television. By contrast, British television was a benign industry, mollycoddled by the knowledge that any share of a three-channel market was substantial enough to keep everyone happy.
I managed to get Cavett on the phone and asked him how we would manage dividing the interview. He said he thought we might wing it. I said we had both been in the business long enough to know that winging it was not the way to make a successful show. We left it at that.
On the day of the recording I was angry, disgruntled and not at all happy with the prospect of doing a show that was our idea but which had been effectively hijacked. I was made to feel even farther from home when, while sitting in make-up, I was approached by one of Cavett’s staff who said, ‘Dick wanted you to have this.’ He handed me a document which contained a plan of how the show would go and included smart replies and gags to the responses his questions might provoke.
Looking back at a recording of the show, you might come to the conclusion I was superfluous to requirements and I wouldn’t argue with you. Such was the solo nature of Cavett’s performance that, during a commercial break, Ali turned to me and asked, ‘What are you doing here, man?’
‘That is a very good question. I don’t seem able to get a word in,’ I said.
I didn’t mention the fact I was too busy thinking of ways of killing Cavett after the show to worry about a silly thing like being made to look a spare part in front of fifty million people.
Coming back from the commercial break, Ali announced to our host that he wasn’t going to bother answering his questions for a while because he was going to speak to his friend from London, who was not only a better interviewer than Mr Cavett, but also much better looking. That let me in and it was a generous gesture, which contrasted vividly with his cruel taunting of Frazier.
I had grown to like Joe Frazier. In the run-up to our interview I visited his training camp in Philadelphia and persuaded him to let me spar with him. Philadelphia became Frazier’s home once he left South Carolina. Angelo Dundee, Ali’s trainer, once said, ‘Philadelphia is not a town. It’s a jungle. They don’t have gyms here, they have zoos. They don’t have sparring sessions, they have wars.’
I have never felt as alien as I did when I entered the ring in Frazier’s gym. I was kitted out in a white T-shirt with ‘Smokin’ Joe’ across the front. It should have said ‘Piteous Parky’, which is what I looked like, or ‘Petrified Parky’, which is how I felt. The wise guys at ringside who had come to see Frazier work out regarded me with amused contempt.
Smokin’ Joe inspected my stance and suggested a round or two with me throwing rights, which he would duck inside and pretend to hit me around the body while making all the right grunting noises but pulling the punches so as not to put me in hospital.
Choreographed thus I began to feel comfortable in my new surroundings, dancing with my new-found best friend. I thought I would liven things up a bit by trying a different routine, which involved me feinting with my right and trying a left jab that found its target. I shall forever remember what happened next. Frazier looked at me, smiled and then cuffed me on the head guard. It was no more than a gentle reprimand but the fact is for the next few seconds I heard bells and thought I had walked into a door. Smokin’ Joe’s manager called time and told him to get some serious work done on the heavy bag.
I watched with a mixture of fear and admiration as he launched a two-handed assault on the equipment, each blow making a noise like a door slamming.
Frazier and Ali were made for each other in more ways than one. As boxers, they could not have been more different. Norman Mailer called Frazier ‘a war machine’. He was the battering ram, Ali the rapier. Frazier came at his opponent in a low crouch, taking three shots to get two in, remorseless, indomitable and savage. His punches were fearsome and damaging and he could fell a man with either hand. Ali was upright, beautifully balanced, jabbing and weaving with a clear disdain for the cruder aspects of boxing. He fought with his head pulled back as if being hit on the face was the ultimate insult. He didn’t so much beat an opponent as teach them a lesson.
In the shadowy world of heavyweight boxing there are some encounters you can witness and come to the conclusion that one or the other fighter, for whatever reason, is not giving of his best. No one, not even the looniest conspiracy theorist, could watch the three Ali–Frazier fights without understanding that both fighters regarded each other with something approaching complete loathing.
Ali hated Frazier because of what he saw as his disrespect for his religion. He chided him because the white population supported Frazier more than Ali. He characterised Frazier as an Uncle Tom, called him ugly and stupid.
What incensed Frazier was Ali posturing as a representative of the downtrodden black man. Frazier was the twelfth son of a South Carolina field worker who peddled bootleg liquor on the side, Ali middle-class by comparison. Joe Frazier was shiny black, Muhammad Ali milk chocolate because of an Irish great-great grandfather. Ali, with his looks and his showmanship, had danced his way through life; Frazier had slugged it out in working boots.
It was
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
. If Sidney Poitier or Ali walks through the door, that’s one thing. If Joe Frazier turns up, then it’s going to be a different ending.
The studio confrontation we devised was certainly an event but little else. All we learned was what we already knew, that each man shared an implacable hatred of the other. Nor had the show done anything to cement Anglo-American relations, Mr Cavett being swept away in a limo before I had the chance of a word in his ear.
In many ways the fight was like the interview, the anticipation being of a higher order than the actual result. Ali won on points and went on to defeat George Foreman and fight Frazier for a third and final time in what became known as the Thrilla in Manila.
Our trip to New York hadn’t worked out quite as we had planned, but we had pulled it off, even if it involved a loss of innocence on our part. A couple of other things made it all worthwhile.
We saw in a listings magazine that a pianist called Ellis Larkins was appearing at a club after a long illness. Larkins was a jazz pianist with a gentle filigree style of playing. He had also recorded a session with Ella Fitzgerald that, to this day, remains the apogee of the accompanist’s art. As Richard and I sat and admired Larkins’ set, a large handsome man, in a fedora and camel-hair, belted overcoat, came into the club and tipped his hat to Ellis. The pianist smiled and nodded a welcome. He then segued seamlessly into ‘Every day I have the blues’ and the stranger, settling into the curve of the piano, began singing in a rich, smooth voice. It was the legendary Joe Williams and we sat enraptured until an hour later he tipped his hat to Ellis and walked off into the night.
Then I had a phone call from a friend who asked if I would like to meet Hugh Hefner. Certainly, I said. One of Mr Hefner’s assistants rang me. She sounded like she was wearing the uniform. Mr Hefner would like to invite us to California to join him in his latest play pen. The visions of sun and talk and gorgeous girls seemed irresistible, but I had to turn it down.
‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘but this coming weekend I have to be home.’
Obviously not accustomed to being knocked back, the woman said, with a bit of edge in her voice, ‘It must be important.’
And I said, ‘Yes it is, you see I’m playing cricket for Datchet on Saturday.’
There was a pause. Then she said, ‘You’re doin’ what?’
It would have taken too long to explain and, in any event, she would never have understood.
Twelve months later I interviewed Muhammad Ali again, a one-man show in which I was on the receiving end of the kind of angry disdain he had shown my sparring partner in New York. In a lifetime of interviewing people, this was the most unforgettable encounter of them all.
24
ALI IN AUTUMN
‘Now God is involved, now you are fighting a spiritual, holy war when you face me now.’
Muhammad Ali, Parkinson Show, December 1974
I met Muhammad Ali and his entourage at the Mayfair Theatre where we were to record a one-man show. He was accompanied by a line of bodyguards wearing dark suits and shades. Ali nodded towards them and said, ‘This is Brother . . .’ and went along the line. I moved forward with hand outstretched. They looked away.
Ali was celebrating his resurrection. He had beaten George Foreman in what was known as the Rumble in the Jungle and was now world champion. It wasn’t simply that he had beaten big old ugly George but had humiliated him. As the best of our sportswriters, Hugh McIlvanney, wrote: ‘We should have known that Muhammad Ali would not settle for any ordinary old resurrection. He had to have an additional flourish. So, having rolled away the rock, he hit George Foreman on the head with it.’
We had decided this would be the interview when we sidestepped the showboating and tried to concentrate on the nature of the man. The problem with interviewing Muhammad Ali was you could never be sure who was going to turn up. This was a man who reinvented himself every morning when he woke up.
What we needed was a quiet studio for a serious one to one; instead we were in a West End theatre crammed with worshipping admirers and an atmosphere ripe for ballyhoo. It all went more or less to plan until I produced a book written by Budd Schulberg, a friend of Ali’s. I said it was a fascinating book, pointing out one or two contradictions in his personality made all the more pertinent because Schulberg knew him well and was a friend.
Ali bridled and said Schulberg was an ‘associate’ not a friend.
I put to him a quote from the book: ‘He [Ali] is devoted to a religious movement that looks on the white race as devils, whose time of deserved destruction is at hand and yet he’s got more genuine white friends than any black fighter I have known.’ Again, Ali insisted they were not friends but ‘associates’. I pushed him further and asked him how he regarded Angelo Dundee, his trainer for many years. He said he was an ‘associate’.
He then launched into a diatribe about how whites hated blacks, which included the observation that I was too small mentally and physically to ‘trap’ him on my TV show, which, in any case, was a joke. This was the first time I had seen Ali become really angry. The eyes were bright with rage. I had witnessed the play acting when he was fooling around or selling tickets, but this was different.
The audience sensed it, too. This was a side of Ali they hadn’t seen before. In America Ali divided the nation; in Britain he was generally admired both as a prize-fighter and an amusing talk-show turn. The Ali on stage at the Mayfair Theatre was someone else, angry, racist and confrontational.