Audition (59 page)

There was also a negative fallout from the Castro
Special.
While Castro was happily playing the entire five hours of the interview over and over again on Cuban television, leaving out the personal questions, some of the many Cubans living in America were furious at me for giving him airtime. I got hundreds of letters, some benign, from people with friends or relatives in Cuba or in Cuban prisons, asking me to intercede with Castro on their behalf (I forwarded those letters to Cuban officials), but others contained threats against me. I took those threats very seriously in part because my father was being cared for by Cuban nurses in the nursing home. They had been very cool toward me when I’d visited. Did they know I’d just been interviewing Castro? They certainly knew now. I was also very concerned about the safety of my daughter. ABC was as well, and hired a bodyguard to take Jackie to and from school. The letters gradually tapered off, and after I was advised that the threat had passed, we returned to a normal routine.

Just when I thought things were back to normal, my frail father died. He was eighty-one years old. As it happened, I was having lunch with George Steinbrenner on August 15, 1977, when I got the call. I was heartsick but not surprised. I flew immediately to Florida to find that my mother, too, had been emotionally prepared for his death. Perhaps she was even relieved. For a long time she had watched him become progressively weaker and more dispirited and, for just as long, she had felt helpless to do anything about it.

Since we had never really observed our religion, we didn’t sit shiva—the seven-day Jewish ritual of mourning—for my father. Instead we had a simple graveside service. I stayed with my mother and sister for a few days, then returned to New York. I had contacted the major papers, and my father’s obituary ran in all of them.
Variety
, the only one that would have mattered to him, gave his life a rave review, which included this wonderful line: “He believed in full lighting.” What better epitaph for a showman?

I should have had a memorial service in New York, but I didn’t. It had been such a long time since my father left New York that I was afraid that no one would come. I envisioned my mother and sister and me sitting alone in an empty hall. Empty seats had always made my father angry. He would have hated not having a full house.

I realize now that that was a mistake. Of course people would have come. Just look at the number of people who came to the dedication of Lou Walters Way, the street-naming tribute arranged by Mayor Bloomberg. My father was finally honored and remembered. I should have done it sooner.

As for Castro, I saw him again two years later when he came to New York in October 1979 to address the United Nations. He invited me to dinner at the Cuban Mission on Lexington Avenue, and I asked if I could bring other members of the media to meet him on an informal basis. He said to bring anyone I wanted. This started the rumor that because I was acting as Castro’s hostess, we must be having an affair. I don’t want to disappoint anyone, but let me say once again, Castro and I were most definitely not lovers. No romance. Not even a pass.
Nada.

It was quite a dinner, though. Roone, of course, came from ABC News, as well as friends like Katharine Graham, Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, and Henry Grunwald, the brilliant editor of
Time
magazine. I asked the top editors of the other major magazines and newspapers in New York, all of whom came with the exception of A. M. Rosenthal, the managing editor of the
New York Times.
He alone refused, saying he wouldn’t be in the same room as Fidel Castro. I didn’t invite any correspondents from CBS or NBC because I thought I might get a new interview with Castro out of the evening, and I didn’t want any competition. Not a nice gesture on my part, but then again, television is a tough game, and you don’t win by always being Ms. Nice Guy.

Well, I didn’t get any interview, but after Castro agreed to talk on the record, all my print friends suddenly produced notebooks and for an hour grilled the Communist leader. He was as charming and funny as I remembered him—and just as good a short-order cook. After the interview, he went into the mission’s kitchen and cooked us all a delicious lobster dinner. He followed up the next day by having a live lobster delivered to each guest. Lobster diplomacy.

It was to be twenty-five years before I saw Fidel Castro again. I had repeatedly asked for a new interview but never received a response. All I got from him was a Christmas card every year, hand-delivered by an official from the Cuban Mission. The card usually came by April, and I always hoped it would include an invitation to return to Havana. In October 2002 it finally did.

Castro was seventy-six by then. He had outlasted nine U.S. presidents, all of whom wished he would vanish off the face of the earth, and was in the midst of his tenth, Bill Clinton. When we met back in the Palace of the Revolution, Castro told me I looked very well. “You look well, too,” I said. “Only you have gotten grayer and I have gotten blonder.” His ever-faithful translator, Juanita, was back at his side and I was happy to see her, still lovely but now gray-haired herself. We hugged each other, remembering our wild trip through the Sierra Maestra so many years before.

Back in 1977 Castro told me that he would shave off his beard if the United States lifted the trade embargo against Cuba. In 2002 he still had the beard and, save for some shipments of food, the United States still enforced the trade embargo. The U.S. government also forbade American tourists from visiting Cuba, though some did, illegally. Other countries had softened toward Communist Cuba, and more than a million European and Canadian tourists a year were availing themselves of Cuba’s sunshine, beaches, and rum. Tourism is now Cuba’s biggest business.

Was that why he was now wearing a business suit, I asked, instead of his trademark military uniform?

“Barbara, precisely in order to seduce you and for you to be kind to me, to have pity on me,” he joked. “You have more questions than the U.S. Air Force has missiles.”

So his sense of humor remained intact. As did his absolute power. Before our arrival we had requested an interview with Juan Miguel González, the father of Elián González. Elián, you will remember, was the five-year-old refugee from Cuba whose mother had drowned at sea while fleeing to America in 1999, thrusting Elián into the center of a highly publicized, impassioned custody fight between his vehemently anti-Castro relatives in Florida and his father in Cuba, championed by Castro. Elián, whose Miami relatives appealed his extradition to Cuba all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, had been returned to his father, Juan Miguel, in 2000.

The drama had riveted the United States for months, but our request to interview the father in Cuba had been turned down—until my interview with Castro. The next morning Juan Miguel was sped to Havana in a government car. Elián was “very happy” to be back in Cuba, his father told me, producing a picture of the boy, then just shy of nine. “He’s almost as tall as I am. He’s doing karate at school. He’s a green belt.”

That good news about Elián was hardly surprising. He had become a poster child for Cuba and appeared often at Castro’s side in film clips of national holidays. Castro himself was said to have five sons and many grandchildren, including a set of triplets, but, as in my past interview, he wouldn’t admit to any relationships. When I asked him why, after all these years, he replied, “It’s prohibited to go into my personal life. It’s not our way.”

“What’s to hide?” I said.

“It’s my human right,” Castro joked. “I cling to my human right to defend my privacy.”

I kept asking. And finally he admitted. “Yes, we have descendants and all that.”

I pressed him about the triplets.

“Well, I think there are some triplets around. I’ve heard they exist.”

That was it for anything personal about Castro.

Castro presented me with a farewell gift when we left Havana—a picture book of old combat photos from the Bay of Pigs, titled
Memories of a Victory
. The text was in Spanish, of course, as was the attached note, translated here: “For Barbara, in whose terrible hands I fell again after 25 years. I promise that I will never try to escape. It’s impossible, and I think with affability about our next meeting, arranged for 2027.” It is signed “Fidel Castro” and dated October 7, 2002.

Whatever you think of his politics and ideology, he has cut a huge figure in modern history. When he was taken seriously ill in July 2006, no one knew for days whether he was even alive. I was working on this memoir when I heard the news that he was in the hospital for surgery and immediately e-mailed the Cuban foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, to express my concern and ask him to extend my wishes to Castro for his speedy recovery. Lest you think this was a purely beneficent gesture, I also sent a separate e-mail requesting an interview when and if Castro was strong enough.

I received no reply from Fidel Castro and now I never will.

The Historic Interview: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin

T
HE QUESTION
I am most often asked is: Of all the interviews you have done, which is your favorite? Well, “favorite” is not a word I would use, but if I had to choose the one that meant the most to me it would be the late president of Egypt, Anwar el-Sadat. He changed the world. At least he tried to. In bringing about peace, if not friendship, between Egypt and Israel, he took the first great step toward compromise in what remains one of the most contentious and complicated areas of the world. Sadat had foresight, courage, and charisma. He was, in physique, a slim, small man, but in his heart he was a giant.

If I also had to choose the time in my professional life that meant the most to me, and of which I am proudest, it would be those same years in the midseventies in the Middle East. I played a small part in those difficult, tumultuous, and now historic times, and I cherish the memories.

A month after my father’s death, I went to Beirut to interview Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. I had been trying to get an interview with the elusive head of the PLO for years, and in September 1977 he said yes. There was no ABC newsmagazine like
20/20
back then, and so the interview was scheduled to air on ABC’s Sunday-morning news program
Issues and Answers
.

At that time in the eyes of the West and Israel, Arafat was the number one Palestinian terrorist for his violent campaign to secure an independent Palestinian homeland. At the same time he was a hero and champion to the Palestinians, many of whom had either fled or been expelled from Israel and now lived in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon. Arafat was a powerful figure in the bitter mosaic of the Middle East.

It was a very uneasy time in Lebanon. To simplify what was a very complicated struggle, the country was winding down from two years of civil war between Christian and Muslim militias. At the same time the PLO was also launching rocket attacks into Israel, and Israel was responding in kind.

Although the situation was volatile, I was concentrating so hard on what I was doing that I didn’t consider the danger. I was also in good hands in Beirut. To work with me ABC had sent a very talented and nice senior news producer, David Jayne, who had spent considerable time covering the war in Vietnam. Also along on his own assignment was Larry Buckman, an ABC radio correspondent.

We waited for days in the ravaged city to see Arafat. Once a beautiful and prosperous banking center for the entire Middle East, Beirut had been all but destroyed by the violence. The modern buildings in the city’s center stood empty, their windows shattered, as did the abandoned resort hotels along the Mediterranean. (The images of Beirut in 2006 following the Israeli air strikes against Hezbollah, another pro-Palestinian terrorist organization, looked eerily similar.) While we waited to see Arafat, the PLO took us on what Moshe Dayan had told me would be a propaganda tour of some of the refugee camps. We filmed the camps, and propaganda or not, there was no denying that the Palestinians lived in squalor. Human waste ran through the streets and alleys, and there was garbage everywhere. Little children cried out, “Revolution until victory!” the PLO’s anti-Israeli slogan, as they ran through the litter with wooden rifles, pretending they were shooting Israelis.

Because there was no satellite transmission at that time between Lebanon and the United States, ABC chartered a plane and David Jayne flew the refugee camp footage to Amman, Jordan, where he could transmit it to New York. Then he returned to Beirut.

Our meeting with Arafat took place suddenly one evening when, without any explanation, we were put in a car and driven by a circuitous route through the city—I know we went down several blocks more than once, occasionally in opposite directions—until we stopped in front of a very ordinary apartment building with washing hung out to dry from the windows. That was the PLO’s tactic then (and later, Hezbollah’s) to blend in with the civilian population.

Arafat was waiting for us in a heavily guarded apartment up three steep flights of stairs. His head was bare when we entered, and I remember being struck by the fact that he was bald. I’d never seen a picture of him without a cap or his kaffiyeh. When it was time to talk he then put on his kaffiyeh.

The long-awaited interview turned out to be as limp as his handshake. He played the same game he always did, coming close to saying he would recognize the right of Israel to exist, then backing off. Arafat always held out the possibility of peace in public interviews, but we knew he took it back in private interviews with his own people. Still, we were happy just to have the interview, and the next day David Jayne set off once again to Amman, taking along Larry Buckman, to satellite the footage to New York. I was going to go with them but at the last minute decided not to. It didn’t seem to make sense for me to go to Jordan for one day since I needed to be back in New York to appear on the program on Sunday, so David and I agreed we would meet in Paris on Friday for the flight home.