Audition (22 page)

There were about one hundred people gathered in the hotel lobby at 4:15, but not Pat Fontaine. Al dispatched a crew member to her room, who quickly reappeared to report that Pat was passed out in bed. “I couldn’t wake her up,” he announced. So Al sent two women to haul poor Pat into the shower, pour coffee into her, and dress her, all in twenty minutes. Her wobbly appearance at the top of the stairs did not inspire our confidence, but it did inspire her to break into a grin when she saw the priest below. “Father Chuck, you are one swinging mother priest,” bellowed Pat to her drinking companion of the night before. Pat managed to get through the program. Father Chuck was very quiet on the ferry.

In spite of my limited on-air experiences, to my joy when we got back from the bat capital, Al assigned me to broadcast features at least once every few weeks. And slowly, slowly, I honed the skills that would sustain me in this business from then on.

I learned to speak more slowly and to smile more. I was far too intense during interviews. I had to learn to lighten up on camera, which I eventually managed to do.

All the stories I did then were about women—reporting on the rise of political conservatism at several women’s colleges, reporting from a reform school for young women in Michigan and from a school for policewomen in New York. I can still do the “bunny dip” from an insider report I did as a bunny at the Playboy Club in New York, “A Night in the Life of a Playboy Bunny.” I was not very recognizable, and the customers thought I was a real waitress. We used only one hidden camera to record my stint as a rabbit. The other bunnies and I wore the same uncomfortable but flattering costume—a tight-in-the-waist sort of corselet (that pushed up the almost-exposed bosom), black stockings, and very high black heels. The sexy effect, depending on how you looked at it, was either enhanced or diminished by the bunny ears and bunny tails we also had to wear. But the trick was to master the “bunny dip” while serving drinks without dipping your boobs into the wineglasses. Here’s how you do it: keeping your legs together, slightly bend your knees and shift a bit to the right while leaning slightly backward. The squared-off position protected your cleavage but it was murder on the thighs. I didn’t really enjoy doing that story, which took two days of filming. But I can still do the “bunny dip.” Hugh Downs said it was the first time he knew I had legs.

I learned a more sobering lesson at a Catholic convent just outside New York. The nuns invited me inside their peaceful, quiet world so that viewers would understand that giving up a secular life did not make them freaks. A young novitiate was assigned to show me around, and, to my discomfort, she began to talk to me about the deep conflicts she was feeling. The poor young woman was so desperate that when she drove me to the train station at the end of the day, she suddenly turned to me and asked: “Do you think I should stay here and become a nun?” I didn’t know what to say. Clearly she was looking for someone to make the decision for her, but clearly I didn’t want that person to be me. I think she was extremely disappointed when I told her the answer to her question required a lot more wisdom than I possessed, but that I was sure she would find her own way. On the train back to New York I could still see her troubled, young face and felt that somehow I had let her down.

That was one of the first times I truly began to understand the power of television. Because people saw me and others on their TV screens, they automatically assumed we must have some sort of special wisdom. Otherwise we wouldn’t be on the air. Television not only validated our opinions, it made us all-knowing. The truth is that while we may be more articulate, we may be just as confused about things as the people watching at home.

Television imbues us with an authority that often makes me uncomfortable. On a political panel much later, I told the audience, “Please remember, just because we’re on television, we are not gods.” That prompted John Chancellor to say with a smile, “Speak for yourself, Barbara.”

By the way, the novitiate wrote me a few weeks after our encounter to say she had left the order. I felt terrible and tried desperately to remember what, if anything, I’d said to her that may have influenced her decision. I felt so responsible for her life, while I was having difficulty figuring out my own.

Lee and I got engaged in the summer of ’63. All the old terrors about marriage returned, but this time I was determined to overcome them. What I wanted more than anything was to have a baby, and I knew Lee would make a great father, having seen his close relationship with his two children, Carol, who was then seventeen, and Zev, sixteen. I became especially close to Carol, who was in that awkward adolescent stage. Today she is an accomplished nutritionist who wrote a highly acclaimed book in 2002 on controlling diabetes (she has diabetes herself ), and we are still in touch. I sign my e-mails to her “the wicked stepmother,” which I called myself from the earliest days of our relationship. Obviously, she doesn’t agree—at least I hope not. Lee’s children were a bonus in the relationship and in no way a detriment. Then, too, there was the stability (that word again) that I envisioned marriage would bring.

My parents were changing their lives again, through no fault of their own. The owners of the Tropicana in Las Vegas had decided they didn’t need my father anymore. The Folies-Bergère he’d brought from Paris were firmly established and the hotel executives decided they could produce the show themselves. So they let him go.

It would have been nice if my parents and Jackie could have stayed in Las Vegas, where they had established a good life. My father was almost seventy, and he should have been able to retire, but he didn’t have enough money. So he accepted a job producing shows at the Carillon, a popular modern high-rise hotel in Miami Beach, and moved my mother and sister back to Florida.

I began to dread the sound of the phone, anticipating my mother’s unhappy words. But though I hated the litany, her complaints were valid. Without consulting her, my father had gone off and bought a house way outside the city. My mother didn’t drive. She had no friends. She and Jackie were stuck there, left to spend the whole day in front of the television set.

It was on one of my trips to that cheerless house in the summer of ’63 that my father came up with yet another grandiose scheme: an aquacade. The last successful aquacade had been almost twenty-five years before at the 1939 World’s Fair, a musical extravaganza in a huge swimming pool with fantastic synchronized divers, a water ballet, and fireworks. Others had since tried—and failed—to mount similarly successful water shows. This did not discourage my always optimistic father. “A show is a show,” he told me. “You give the people something spectacular and they’ll come.”

There we were—again. My father and a new dream but no money. And there I was, with his dream and $5,000 in savings in the bank—$5,000 he wanted me to invest. As Yogi Berra would say, it was déjà vu all over again. I didn’t know what to do.

So I turned to Lee.

We had dinner with my father in Florida. Lee listened carefully while my father raved on about his plans: a Latin Quarter revue in the water with pretty girls, lavish costumes, music, color, excitement—the best water show ever in America.

“What would you do if you had only five thousand dollars to your name?” Lee asked him.

“I’d invest it in the aquacade,” my father replied. Well, that was no surprise to me, but it seemed to satisfy Lee.

“Give your father the money,” he said.

I was still clinging to my definition of Lee as a businessman, so I did as he suggested and handed over my savings to my father. What I refused to acknowledge was that my father and Lee were more alike than they were different. Both of them lived for the next show. Their attitude was, and I suppose had to be, “This time, surely, it will be a hit.” They felt it. They knew it. All they needed was the money to produce it.

The aquacade flopped. It didn’t create a ripple. My $5,000 was gone, as was all the money my father had scraped together to invest in his new dream. But with it all, in retrospect, I’m glad I loaned him the money. I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself if I hadn’t let him try. And I was working. I could start to save money again.

I also didn’t blame Lee. Many people had been seduced by my father’s dreams. Some of those dreams had paid off spectacularly, just not this one.

But I was becoming increasingly uneasy about our engagement. It had nothing to do with Lee and the aquacade. It was about my own dream that somewhere out there was the perfect man whom I would deeply love. That person just wasn’t Lee. Although he was indeed handsome and kind and I couldn’t find any real faults, somehow it wasn’t enough. Once more I felt hemmed in. So, at the end of the summer of 1963, I broke our engagement.

Here we go again.

Naturally I wasn’t at all sure I’d made the right decision. There were days when I missed Lee, and days when I didn’t miss him at all. I didn’t think we’d be happy together, but I knew I wasn’t happy without him.

Then came Friday, November 22, 1963. The day no one who was alive at that time will ever forget. I was eating lunch in the little office at NBC that I shared with another writer, Bob Cunniff, when Hugh Downs suddenly burst in.

“Have you heard?” he said. “There’s a report that President Kennedy has been shot.” The next report confirmed his death.

Within hours the breaking news was of the arrest in Dallas of Lee Harvey Oswald, an ex-marine, for allegedly killing the president.

Television came of age that dark day. All entertainment programming was canceled, and for the next four days NBC and the other networks carried live saturation coverage of the national tragedy. During what became known as Black Weekend, television turned from being the “boob tube,” as it was sometimes known, to a cohesive national gathering place for a shocked nation.

NBC needed every able body it had to cover the young president’s state funeral, beginning on Sunday, November 24, two days after the assassination. So I became an on-air reporter. I was assigned to a position outside the Capitol to cover the arrival of the horse-drawn caisson carrying the president’s coffin from the White House. There was profound silence all along Pennsylvania Avenue that day, broken only by the muffled roll of funereal drums and the clip-clop of the horses’ hooves pulling the caisson.

Hugh Downs was anchoring the
Today
show from an NBC studio in Washington, and he had to coordinate and comment on every report that came in from the various reporters in the field. He also had to deal with the surreal pictures coming in from Dallas, which only NBC captured live, of Oswald being shot to death in the basement of the police station by a local nightclub owner, Jack Ruby. As the footage of the murder was played over and over again, interspersed with live images of the funeral cortege, Nielsen, the television ratings service, estimated that 93 percent of all television sets in the nation were tuned in to the coverage. Ninety-three percent. There hasn’t been anything like that since.

I remained at the Capitol where President Kennedy was lying in state in the rotunda. My job was to report on both the dignitaries and the long lines of everyday people arriving to pay their last respects. I found an old film clip from that day. I’m wearing a black coat. I have long dark hair, and I am saying, “These are the honor guards who have been guarding the casket of President Kennedy. If I feel or seem a bit choked up, it is because I have just left the last guard.”

This was the first time I’d reported a national news event. But aside from that small piece of film, which brings back a moment of the event to me, I went through the day—and the night—in a fog. I was at the Capitol, it seems, for at least eight hours. More than 250,000 people filed past the casket, and the viewing hours had to be extended late into the night and the early morning. Eventually we moved inside the rotunda, where we reported live from 2:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. The lines of people paying tribute to the president seemed never to end.

When we went off the air and other correspondents took over, Hugh and I went back to our hotel, completely wiped out physically and emotionally. The next day I returned to New York and watched the rest of the funeral on television—the caisson carrying the president’s coffin from the White House to Saint Matthew’s Cathedral, followed on foot by Mrs. Kennedy flanked by Robert and Edward Kennedy. The images remain indelible: little John-John Kennedy, turned three that very day, saluting his father’s coffin from outside the cathedral; the expressions of such wrenching sorrow on the faces of the Kennedys that you wanted to turn away.

Like everyone else from coast to coast, I shared the same state of depression and shock. One single, sunny day in Texas. One deranged man. And suddenly Kennedy was gone, his assailant murdered, and his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, the new president.

A few days later I was in my apartment washing my hair when the doorbell rang. I went to the door with a towel wrapped around my head and there was Lee. “Life is too short,” he said while water dripped from my head to the floor. “Let’s get married right now.”

I understood completely. What did it matter that we hadn’t talked for the three months since I’d broken the engagement? Every doubt I’d had, every reservation about this or that, now seemed so petty compared to the glimpse into the brevity of life we had all just experienced. I can only imagine how many women got pregnant during those few days or how many couples decided not to divorce or got married. I was one of them. “Yes,” I told Lee. “Let’s get married.”

The whole thing happened so quickly this time I didn’t have time to get cold feet. My father flew up from Florida while my mother stayed behind with Jackie. Marilyn Landsberger, my wonderful friend who had welcomed me into her home after my first marriage broke up and was now married to a very nice man named Seymour Herskovitz, offered their apartment for the wedding. And on December 8, 1963, just two weeks after the Kennedy assassination, I became Mrs. Lee Guber.

Thirteen Weeks to Thirteen Years