Gates Gary Paul - Between you and me: a memoir

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

BETWEEN YOU AND ME

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M i ke Wa l lac e

W I T H

GARY PAUL GATES

N E W Y O R K

Copyright 2005 Mike Wallace

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

For information address Hyperion, 77 West 66th Street, New York, New York 10023-6298.

ISBN: 1-4013-8357-2

first ebook edition: october 2005

T o D i c k S a l a n t, w h o, b a c k i n 1 9 6 3 a s P r e s i d e n t o f C B S N e w s , g av e m e t h e j o b a n d t h e l i f e h e k n e w I y e a r n e d f o r

c o n t e n t s

B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

I N T R O D U C T I O N

BACK IN THE 1950S, WHEN television was black-and-white and still a relatively new late-night diversion for folks who wanted a news update followed by some entertaining talk in their bedrooms, my colleague Ted Yates came up with a notion for an interview show that just might get their attention.

At the time I was anchoring and Ted was producing the eleven oclock news on Channel 5, the New York station that also carried two showbiz icons of the time, Ernie Kovacs and Soupy Sales. The station manager agreed that it was probably worth a try. (Back then it seemed everything was worth a try.) So in October of 56, we combined our news update with the experiment we called Night Beat.

It was Yates who came up with the title, and it was also he who B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

gave our innovative venture its spark. A lanky ex-marine, Ted had the manner and fearless temperament of a cowboy. He came by it honestly. BorninWyoming, he had spent much of his childhood in Cheyenne, close to the open land and cattle herds of the region that used to be known as the Wild West. But his family eventually moved east, and so instead of a life in the saddle and a home on the range, he wound up inNew York, pursuing a career intelevisionnews.

By the time Night Beat went on the air, the two of us had been working together at Channel 5 for about a year. Wed also become close friends, and that continued through the years ahead, even after he and I went our separate ways in TV journalism. But Im sad to say that Teds life came to a tragic end in 1967. In June of that year, when he was filming a story for NBC News on the Six-Day War in the Middle East, and while under fire in East Jerusalem, he was shot in the forehead and died the next day. I thought of him thenand remember him nowas the bravest man Ive ever known.

Night Beat was a radical departure from the usual pablum of radio and television interviews. We agreed that, properly primed with solid research, I would ask our guests the kinds of questions that folks in the TV audience might want to ask for themselves if they had the chance: nosy, irreverent, often confrontational. Within just a couple of months, we knew we were on to something special. The viewers told us so, the TV critics did the same, and best of all, the famous and infamous figures of the timepoliticians, tycoons, entertainers, athletes, just about everyone of any consequence in New York, it seemedwanted the chance to test themselves against our role-playing arrogance.

Night Beat quickly became a prime topic of conversationa lot of it noisy and argumentativeat dinner tables, cocktail parties, and saloons all over the city. My anonymity during prior years of radio and

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

television work suddenly morphed into shouts from cabdrivers: Give

em hell, Mike, go get em. The reigning queen of TV at the time, Faye Emerson, said it best: There is no such thing as an indiscreet question. And for our M.O., we appropriated a dictum from playwright-cumsocial critic George Bernard Shaw:

The ablest and most highly cultivated people continually discuss religion, politics, and sex. Its hardly an exaggeration to say that they discuss nothing else with fully awakened interest. Common and less cultivated people, evenwhenthey form societies for discussion, make a rule that politics and religion are not to be mentioned, and take it for granted that no decent person would attempt to discuss sex.

Sid Caesar parodied us on his NBC show, then the most popular comedy series on television. We got into public hassles, one of the biggest triggered by a Q&A with the fiery union leader Mike Quill, who bristled when I asked about his Catholicismhe still bore scars from the labor battles of the 1930s, when hed been accused of greater fidelity to Moscow than to Rome. (He was often referred to in those days as Red Mike.) The sublimely gifted Irish actress Siobhan McKenna helped us no end by making an offhand remark that infuriated Jews; her apology doubled our audience.

Within six months ABC came calling to offer us a network slot for a weekly nationwide broadcast. What we gleaned from all this and what followed at ABC, and later at CBS, is what youll read about here: tales from all manner of characters weve persuaded to talk to us down the years, presidents and First Ladies, dictators and demagogues, preachers, painters, musicians, movie stars and comedians, con men and other assorted crooks.

This is the second memoir Ive done with Gary Paul Gates, a former CBS News colleague and longtime friend. Our first was called Close Encounters, published in 1984, and while the main focus in

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B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

that book was on my earlier career in broadcasting, this new one deals almost entirely with the famous and infamous Ive interviewed, and with behind-the-scenes stories that relate to those encounters.

Of course, some overlap has been unavoidable. When weve revisited a subject we wrote about earlier, mainly weve added new information not previously available; weve also brought to it a fresh perspective. After all, people change and so do their reputations, some for better, others for worse. Gary and I have changed, too; were twenty years older, and at least one of us claims to be a little wiser.

Anyway, I hope youll enjoy the tales we tell, for weve had a hel-luva good time reporting them.

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O N E

P R E S I D E N T S

J o h n F . K e n n e d y

D r e w P e a r s o n

C l a r k C l i f f o r d

IN MAKING THE JUMP FROM a local program to the showcase of a coast-to-coast broadcast, Ted Yates and I were determined to maintain the candid, sometimes combative style wed introduced on Night Beat. But that proved easier said than done. Part of the problem was that wed lost the element of surprise wed enjoyed when Night Beat burst on the scene the previous fall. Our reputation had preceded us to ABC, and more than a few of our prospective interviewees were wary of being grilled on network television by a guy B E T W E E N Y O U A N D M E

who had been described by one captious critic as Mike Malice and by another as The Terrible Torquemada of the TV Inquisition. This meant we had to work that much harder to find the kind of characters who might interest a national audience. But Im happy to say that during our first few months at ABC, we were able to book a diverse gallery of guests for The Mike Wallace Interview, ranging from the highbrow (Philip Wylie, Margaret Sanger, and Frank Lloyd Wright) to the lowbrow, a group that included a mobster (Mickey Cohen), a stripper (Lili St. Cyr), and a pair of Hollywood sirens (Jayne Mansfield and Zsa Zsa Gabor).

Still, there were problems to confront. It didnt take us long to discover that in moving up to a network broadcast, wed ventured into terrain far more treacherous than what wed been accustomed to at Channel 5. Now that we were playing to a national audience, the stakes were higher, and there were times when we ran into the kind of dicey situations that provoke threats of libel suits.