My Remarkable Journey (25 page)

E
XECUTIVE
P
RODUCER
, L
ARRY
K
ING
L
IVE

People were coming in from all over for the wedding. I had to set up a situation room at the Wilshire to call everyone and
tell them this formal affair wasn’t going to happen.

We decided to get married in the hospital room the day the doctors arrived from New York.

I suppose if you can propose marriage with one of you in a hospital bed you can certainly get married with the other one in
a hospital bed.

It was crazy. I was feeling vibes from some of his friends. Some of Larry’s friends were skeptical of me. Not so much Sid
and Asher. But his attorney was giving off this vibe:
Who does this girl think she is, marrying Larry without a prenup?
It felt like he thought,
Here’s this young chick who’s going to say “Boo!” to Larry, give him a heart attack, and get his money
. But if Larry had died, I wouldn’t have taken anything. I was doing very well when we first crossed paths. I had my own money.
I just knew that this marriage was right. It may sound strange when I describe the wedding. But I wouldn’t change anything
about it.

Larry was lying in the bed. Monitors were hooked up to his heart. I was standing by his side with not a lot of makeup on.
Herbie was dressed in shorts and black socks. Chaia was there. My parents were there. By then, they weren’t up in arms. They
knew I was in love. The whole thing was silly. Larry’s hair was all skattywampus. My mom and dad have pictures. Those pictures
would probably be humorous to look at now.

I thought I’d married Herbie because Herbie was right next to me. Shawn was like two feet away.

I kept thinking,
I hope he lives.

That hospital room was packed. There were so many people that I thought Larry and Shawn wouldn’t even remember who were there.
We didn’t have cellphones with cameras in those days. So I wrote the names of all the people who were in the room on a yellow
legal pad just so Larry and Shawn could remember. I framed it and sent it to them.

It sounds crazy, but I wasn’t surprised the wedding happened like it did. Larry really wanted to get married and there was
a lot of stress when it got called off. Getting married made him feel better.

The whole thing was nuts. It’s not only crazy talking about it now, it was crazy while it was happening. I was in a swirl.
At any second I might have another bypass surgery. Or else I was going to fly to New York for a different procedure.

Dr. Isom arrived with a Russian specialist named Shaknovich on a medevac. I’ll never forget. Shawn was crying. And Shaknovich
said, “Please, tears are premature.”

What a great line! Talk about eloquence. It made me trust him. Shaknovich said he could open the artery through angioplasty.
I signed a waiver saying that UCLA would not be held responsible if anything happened to me. Then Shawn and I made plans to
fly back to New York on the medevac with Isom and Shaknovich.

I get post-event migraines—they always hit after tension. I got a hideous migraine that day. So I got the bed on the medevac.
Larry was sitting in the seat.

We got to New York, and they opened the artery through angioplasty. It’s not an extremely invasive procedure. They go through
the groin. I was released a day or two afterward.

When we got back to L.A., we had a second wedding. Ted Turner was best man. Jane Fonda was a bridesmaid. We went through the
ceremony again. Then we had a fun party. Al Pacino recited an E. E. Cummings poem.

It’s called “Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond.” Al did it by heart. We have it framed in our living room.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

We also had Don Rickles do a bit. He was really funny. We had Mormons and Jews. Rickles said the Mormons had arrived by covered
wagon. It’s a good thing Mormons have a great sense of humor.

T
HERE
’
S ANOTHER THING
I never understood about God: His rules concerning sex.

Mark Twain had it dead on when he summed up the problem in
Letters from the Earth
. God gave you all this desire, aptitude, and biological need. And then he said,
You can only do it with one person your entire life
.

Makes no sense.

Lenny Bruce had it right, too. Lenny used to say, “What if you raised kids with the rule that elbows cannot be touched by
anyone except your spouse. Only married people can touch elbows. The genitals would never even be mentioned. You could do
anything you wanted with genitals. But when you go out, you’ve got to cover your elbows. A guy would come home one day, find
his wife touching elbows with another man and kill him. Why? Because that’s how he’s been taught to react. It’s the same as
prejudice.”

I wonder how kids would see sex if they weren’t told anything about it. When I started in radio, every Saturday was children’s
day at Pumpernik’s. People brought their kids in and I would interview them. It was sort of like the show Art Linkletter had:
Kids Say the Darndest Things
. One day, we had a genius on. He must have been about eleven. I think he was already at Michigan State University tutoring
the football players. The kid was amazing. I asked him, “What do you wonder about the most?”

He said, “Sex.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

He said, “I know that my mother and father have sex. And I know when they’re going to have it because they look at each other
in a certain way, and then I go into my bedroom, and they go into their bedroom. But I don’t know what’s exciting about it.”

He was smart enough to know about it, but not old enough to know what it really was. His mother was a teacher. She told me
that when he asked what an orgasm was, she had to tell him, because he knew such a thing existed. She said it’s like having
to sneeze and then sneezing. In fact, that’s exactly what it is. There’s all that preliminary sound and buildup. I think about
that a lot when I sneeze.

It’s amazing to me how hung up we are on sex. I think it stems back to the Puritans. I’ve always felt sex is a private matter.
I just don’t see its relevance in public life. Why should it matter if the man who replaced Eliot Spitzer as governor of New
York had other women, and his wife had seen other men, if they had an agreement about it? Why should it matter if the married
governor of New Jersey is gay? That’s between him and his wife. What does it have to do with the way he governs?

When the news broke about Bill Clinton’s affair with an intern in January of 1998, I knew we were in new territory. Then I
heard the name and saw the picture. Monica Lewinsky. Monica’s parents were mentioned. And I started thinking,
I know her, I know her
. Then I made the connection. I had gone out with Monica’s aunt—her mother’s sister. My thoughts went from
I know her, I know her,
to
I really
knew
her
.

I didn’t want to talk on the air about what might have gone on between Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. I don’t care who
people have sex with, and it was really none of my business. The way I saw it, it was a matter between Bill and Hillary and
their daughter. But there was no getting around the fact that it would be the topic on my show for a long time to come.

I can remember the president of CNN once asking me to write down questions that might be appropriate to ask about the private
lives of candidates. I told him I couldn’t do it. There are no rules. The situation surrounding every interview is different.
While I generally don’t like to talk on the air about who’s having sex with whom, the topic of Clinton and Monica Lewinsky
was certainly not the first time I’d gotten into sex on the show. There was the Jim Bakker–Jessica Hahn scandal. There was
the 1988 presidential campaign when Gary Hart dared reporters to follow him around if they didn’t believe his denials of an
extramarital affair. Not long after, photos of him with the model Donna Rice, onboard a boat called
Monkey Business
, appeared in the
Miami Herald,
and Hart was forced out of the campaign. I spent an hour interviewing Judith Exner about her relationship with John F. Kennedy.
She was in her fifties at the time, fighting cancer, and she wanted to go on the record to separate fact from fiction.

She mentioned times and places. But to me, that interview wasn’t about sex. It was about what a different country we had become.
I was fascinated by Judith Exner. I was fascinated by how public she and Kennedy were, yet their meetings were never reported.
The name Judith Exner never appeared in the media when Kennedy was alive. Writers wouldn’t even mention that Franklin Roosevelt
was in a wheelchair when he was president. David Brinkley told me that when he was young, he got assigned to the Washington
pool of reporters working the White House. The first time Roosevelt came into the room in a wheelchair, he was shocked.
What? Our president is in a wheelchair?
Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down, and he was lifted up so he could stand behind the podium when he gave speeches.
“Why don’t we write about this?” Brinkley asked a few reporters. The other journalists all said the same thing. “Why? What
does it have to do with the decisions he makes as a president?”

Exner told me she would sit with President Kennedy for lunch, then he’d get up, do a press conference, and walk back to her.
Nobody asked, “Who’s that?” While he was senator, before he announced his candidacy, he brought her to the home he shared
with Jacqueline Kennedy in Georgetown—which really unnerved her. I asked Ben Bradlee about some of this. Ben was a close friend
of Kennedy’s before Bradlee became the editor of the
Washington Post
. He said he didn’t know, and he didn’t care. We were a different society back then. In that realm, we’ve taken an enormous
step backward. When tabloids started selling sex stories, we began to go in reverse.

Once you start broadcasting what’s appearing in the tabloids, you’re swimming in the same water. Gennifer Flowers provided
a few more details than I wanted to know when she said on the air that she had sex with Bill Clinton while he was the governor
of Arkansas. It was relevant to Flowers because it was spicy and she was trying to sell a book. But I would try to keep the
conversation on a higher level. Sometimes it wasn’t easy.

I once asked Flowers how she might explain why such a bright person and brilliant politician would get into situations like
this. You know, why do bad things happen to good people?

“I think,” she said, “he was thinking with another head instead of this one.”

We had Linda Tripp on the show. You had to have Linda Tripp on. Without Linda Tripp, there was no story. I didn’t like Linda
Tripp because I thought she was pretending to be Monica’s friend, but actually trying to destroy the president. That probably
showed in my questioning. She’s the one who encouraged Monica to save the blue dress with the semen stains. She’s the one
who taped her phone conversations with Monica without Monica knowing—although she wouldn’t use the word
taped
when she came on my show. She was facing a criminal proceeding in Maryland for making the recordings, and so she had to use
the word “document” to avoid incriminating herself.

I suppose that since Bill Clinton was saying that oral sex wasn’t included in his definition of sex, I guess Tripp could turn
the word
taped
into
documented.

Monica looked like a victim to me. She was an intern, and the power of the presidency is enormous. How must he have appeared
to a twenty-two-year-old kid? I can remember when Monica showed up at a book party I had in Washington in the midst of the
scandal. I thought Tim Russert would faint. Paparazzi were running down the street. Monica was probably the most famous woman
in the world at that point. Wolf Blitzer came over to talk to her. She said to Wolf, “When you were at the White House, you
never noticed me.”

There must have been incredible pressure on her. She was out of her league, just like I didn’t belong in Lou Wolfson’s league.
When you step out of your league, what do you do? You get in trouble. One minute, she was an intern. The next, she was at
the center of an investigation and being watched by everyone in America. I’ve got to come out and say it. I think Kenneth
Starr created more of a mess with his investigation than Clinton did.