Playboy Interview: Geraldo Rivera

In 1972, while still in his late 20s, at an age when most journalists are still chasing police sirens, Geraldo Rivera had established himself as the hottest, hippest, most seriously committed newsman on the New York scene. His powerful ten-part series for WABC-Tv's "Eyewitness News" on the abhorrent conditions at the Willowbrook State School for the mentally retarded on Staten Island generated an unparalleled response from local viewers, politicians and community leaders and earned him more awards than you could shake a camera at. A year earlier, a local Associated Press organization had cited Rivera for excellence and inscribed its citation to him as "a special kind of individualist in a medium which too often breeds the plastic newsman."

Rivera was anything but plastic. In his emotional Willowbrook exposè, he cried, fumed and nearly retched oncamera as he barged into the run-down institution's locked wards and revealed stark rooms overcrowded with small children, many of them naked, festering in their own feces and moaning like wounded animals. "This is what it looked like," said Rivera oncamera. "This is what it sounded like. But how can I tell you about the way it smelled?"

Willowbrook was only the first of many triumphs in Rivera's earnest crusade to use television as an instrument for social reform. After embarking on a purposeful and promising career as an attorney for minorities and the poor, in June 1970 he jumped professions, convinced that he could be much more effective as a TV reporter than as a lawyer. Eight years and 3000 stories later, his early inclination has been validated--at least by the response he has received to his impassioned reports on controversial issues such as the plight of migrant workers, the forgotten existence of the elderly, the hardships facing returning Vietnam veterans, the discrimination encountered by the physically handicapped, child abuse and the entire spectrum of the nation's drug crisis, from heroin to cocaine to the latest teen craze, angel dust. He has taken action on his own, as well, mobilizing the response to his Willowbrook series and forming One-to-One, a broad-based community organization for the deinstitutionalization and personalized care of the mentally retarded. "I'm not just in the business of making people cry," he has said. "I'm in the business of change."

Now, at 35, Rivera has reached a new stage of journalistic prominence: His special reports were recently singled out for star billing on ABC's flashy--though widely criticized--newsmagazine "20/20." This latest assignment provides Rivera with a regularly scheduled prime-time forum for his special brand of advocacy journalism and puts him in a unique position among broadcast journalists.

Born July 4, 1943, the son of a Puerto Rican father and a Jewish mother, Rivera grew up in Brooklyn and Long Island before heading West to attend the University of Arizona, from which he graduated in 1965. He returned to New York to prepare for his legal career and graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1969, after serving as vice-chairman of the Black and Brown Lawyers Caucus and working with two New York legal-aid operations: the Harlem Assertion of Rights and the Community Action for Legal Services. He received a graduate fellowship to the University of Pennsylvania and, shortly thereafter, became involved with the Young Lords, the first militant, grass-roots organization in the Puerto Rican community. When the Young Lords took over an East Harlem church at the beginning of 1970, Rivera received widespread media attention as their lawyer and official spokesman. Several months later, impressed with his voice, appearance and the fact that he was an "acceptable" Puerto Rican, WABC-TV offered him a place on its news team, and in almost no time, Rivera became the first young, hip, liberal minority face in a field dominated by lily-white, conservative father figures.

At the same time, Rivera also became the darling of the New York jet set. Following Willowbrook and his much-publicized second marriage to Edie Von-negut, the strikingly beautiful daughter of novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Rivera's career and social life took off on an apparently wild and unrestrained joy ride. In 1974, he became the host of ABC's late-night news-and-entertainment program, "Good Night America," and attempted to air his brand of social and political reporting in the midst of a stampede of movie stars, rock stars and other celebrities eager to reach his loyal and growing audience. Only moderately successful and moderately comfortable in the role of talk-show host, Rivera in November 1975 switched again and became the traveling correspondent for ABC's "Good Morning America." Once again a no-nonsense reporter and commentator, this time at the network level, Rivera brought back reports from two dozen countries and 75 cities at home and abroad before landing a featured position with Barbara Walters and Harry Reasoner on the "ABC Evening News" in July 1977.

The winner of a number of Emmy awards, as well as the DuPont-Columbia Journalism Award, the Scripps-Howard Foundation Roy W. Howard Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, Associated Press Broadcasters Association Awards, plus over 100 other humanitarian awards--and the author of four books to boot--he has garnered more glory in a shorter time than most journalists on television or in print. But Rivera's image is not without tarnish: He has been widely accused of being maudlin and melodramatic, and over the years he has gathered as many detractors, irate colleagues, ex-wives and outright enemies as he has walnut plaques and gold-plated trophies. Rumors of personal debauchery and professional scandal abound. He divorced Edie and married Sheri Raymond. A Playboy Researcher recently estimated that there are probably more Geraldo Rivera stories floating around than there are Polish jokes in the Midwest. To sort them all out, as well as to find out something about one of the few truly passionate figures left in what is rapidly becoming known as non-fiction television, Playboy sent free-lance writer Jim Siegelman to interview Rivera and bring back an up-to-date picture of the man and his work. Siegelman reports:

"When Playboy asked me to do this interview, I had just about had it with celebrity puff jobs, insider scuttlebutt and media types in general; but I'd spoken with Geraldo a few times back in the early Seventies and have always had a suspicion that he was different. So, curious to see what he was up to these days, and frankly interested in finding out whether any or all of the rumors swirling around him were true, I accepted the assignment.

"We met at the trendy Ginger Man restaurant across from Lincoln Center in Manhattan, where virtually everything having to do with Geraldo begins, as I soon learned, because it's midway between his office at ABC News and his apartment on Central Park West. After drinks, he invited me home to meet his wife, Sheri, and we promptly got down to some serious interviewing.

"Our conversations consisted of a number of long, hard sessions conducted over a three-week period, which was interrupted repeatedly while Geraldo flew off on assignments to, among other places, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Berlin and Milan. The interview was further complicated by the fact that part of my mission was to get to the bottom of a number of sticky rumors about his personal and professional life, and without pulling any punches, 1 think we both did a pretty fair job of making things as painless as possible for each other.

"Contrary to popular opinion, Geraldo struck me as quite candid and unassuming--and surprisingly unslick for a TV personality who has himself logged many hours as an interviewer. Several times, in fact, the interview almost turned on its head as Geraldo, the indomitable investigator, began questioning me about some research I'd been doing.

"As a man, he seemed repentant about some of the excesses in his past and genuinely and passionately committed to using television as a tool for social reform. Something in me tended to sympathize with his assessment of his critics, but I tried not to let him know. Instead, for Playboy's sake, and in the interest of history, I endeavored to be forceful and at times even downright rude in my questioning. I must say, he held up well from the beginning, when I decided to lead with my left (I'm a lefty), hit him with a backhanded interviewer's haymaker--and duck."

[Q] Playboy: There seems to be a fundamental contradiction in your public image. On the one hand, you have chalked up some remarkable successes in your campaign to use television as an instrument for social change. On the other, you have taken a lot of heat in recent years. In view of the outstanding work you've done and all the awards you've garnered, why do so many people think you're an arrogant, pushy son of a bitch?

[A] Rivera: Yeah, I have to admit things were much more adoring in the early years. Since then, there has been this feeling that I must be something other than who I say I am.

[Q] Playboy: When did you begin to detect that attitude?

[A] Rivera: I think it began when I got my first overseas assignments in 1973. I covered the coup in Chile, then the war in Israel; and I began getting an awful lot of negative letters that said, "Oh, look, now you're just another overseas foreign correspondent. You've deserted the people." A lot of that. I think a lot of people never got over the fact that my interests went beyond Spanish Harlem, the Lower East Side, central Brooklyn and the south Bronx, They saw my doing things other than ghetto reporting as an act of hypocrisy. That was the first step. Then I think I really opened myself up to it when I started doing programs that had entertainment mixed in with the reporting, about the time of Good Night America. I mixed heavy things and light things on the same show. I did a show on Broadway plays. I did another show with Hugh Hefner. I felt that I could do anything, that I had a lot of interests, that I could go from the President to the junkie. That's where I lost at least half of my critical support, right there. People began to picture me as more of a flippant person.

[Q] Playboy: Was that when you got the reputation of being arrogant and pushy?

[A] Rivera: That was in a New York magazine article, sometime around then, maybe a little earlier.

[Q] Playboy:Were you arrogant and pushy?

[A] Rivera: Oh, yes. I was definitely arrogant and pushy, but I was other things, also. New York just ran two pages on my arrogance and pushiness. Arrogance is definitely part of my life. My defense against criticism has always been arrogance. I would always answer my critics by saying, "What do you know? When was the last time you were in the streets? What have you lived through? What have you seen?" That's one of the things that my wife, Sheri, has helped me learn, how to be humbler. She's said that to me so many times that I've really tried to make it part of my life. I try to explain things more now than just simply saying, "What do you know?"

[Q] Playboy: Would you say you overreacted to your critics in the early days?

[A] Rivera: I was and remain a very sensitive-person, and it hurts my feelings when I hear things about me. Back then, I would always react first, never thinking that what they were saying might be true.

[Q] Playboy: Such as?

[A] Rivera: Oh, I'm sure that in the beginning, in my first couple of interviews, certainly I exaggerated the harshness of my early life. I mean, we always had food and I was always in school. I didn't do real well, I was a tough guy, but a lot of people had a harder time than me. And I suppose there was some aspect of irresponsibility in a lot of my early political activism--although I think the times probably called for it, since there was certainly irresponsibility on the part of the Government and its policies. Take the Vietnam war, for instance. I'd talk about it as if it were a very simplistic phenomenon: a fascist involvement in a peasant civil war. Of course, it was far more complex than that. Then I remember once saying how, if push came to shove, I'd feel far more comfortable about allowing Patty Hearst and the Sym-bionese Liberation Army into my house than the FBI. That was irresponsible.

[Q] Playboy: Did you say that on the air?

[A] Rivera: I think so. In fact, I'm sure it was on Good Night America. That was probably the last of my radical overstatements.

[Q] Playboy: Overstatements are one thing, but what seems to bother your critics is that you often come across oncamera as heavy-handed and melodramatic. Do you ever see yourself that way?

[A] Rivera: Am I melodramatic? Am I heavy-handed? There are undoubtedly cases where I have been melodramatic and heavy-handed. But I think, generally speaking, my emotional involvement in the stories I do is sincere. What I put on camera is a sincere reflection of what I believe at the time the story is done. I don't act. People who think I do give me much too much credit as a manipulator and an actor, and I'm neither.

[Q] Playboy: What about the charge that your oncamera sincerity is a pose, a self-serving ruse?

[A] Rivera: How can you test the sincerity of a person? What am I going to do, get plugged into a lie detector so people can test whether I'm sincere or not? You know, I've been in this job for eight years now. After eight years, you'd think people would start to believe me. I've been at this for approximately one fourth of my life. I've grown up on television, to a large extent. It's very rare that people go through so much of their life In public. My positions have been published and republished and rehashed. Sometimes it hurts my feelings, I admit.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think people want from you?

[A] Rivera: That's a good question. Look, let's be honest about it. Television creates celebrities. It doesn't matter if you're a game-show host or Frank Perdue advertising chickens or a TV reporter. I am now a celebrity on television and I get paid substantially for what I do. When you do achieve success, there's a feeling that the person can't be sincere because he's so successful. Look at the difference between Geraldo Rivera's standard of living and the standard of living of so many of the people he talks about. If he were sincere, why wouldn't he give away all his material wealth to help cure all those social problems?

[Q] Playboy: And how do you answer that?

[A] Rivera: That's not an easily answerable question, because you become immediately defensive about it. I don't work for the Government. I work for a company that makes enormous profits. I give 60 percent of my earnings to the Government, and I've given a great part of what's left to the charities I've become involved with. I don't think my critics would be satisfied with anything less than my becoming a member of a monastic order, someone who only sallied forth to do Don Quixote's work and then came back to live a life of austerity and personal deprivation.

[Q] Playboy: Where do you think that attitude comes from?

[A] Rivera: I think it comes from a prevailing cynicism.. I think the people who think those things or who write about those things are products of the times. That's kind of tired now, but it's true.

[Q] Playboy: Speaking of the times, doesn't your commitment to social reform seem a little out of place in 1978? The past few years haven't exactly been a heyday of social progress, to say the least. Do you ever feel like an anachronism, a throwback to the Sixties?

[A] Rivera: I definitely think that after the war in Vietnam, after Watergate, we stopped being an outward-looking nation. People were no longer getting involved in things that didn't specifically concern them. The boundaries of their concerns started shrinking from the country to their state or city, their town or neighborhood, the four walls around their house, until finally they shrank right down to the "me" generation. I wouldn't say it's still all that way, but at least up until a year ago, people wouldn't become involved in anything that didn't concern them. It was pretty discouraging to watch. Remember, it was just a decade ago that people were marching in massive numbers in the streets. Hundreds of thousands of people got involved, and the net result of all that involvement was nothing. The war dragged on and became the longest, most bitterly unpopular war in American history. So I can explain where their discouragement comes from, but that doesn't make it any better.

[Q] Playboy: Would you say that the lesson of the Sixties has been that social reform isn't possible?

[A] Rivera: No. I think that the lesson of the Sixties is that social reform is a necessary process. But it's also extremely difficult to achieve. I think that people still believe that change is necessary, but there's a growing awareness that just the desire for change won't cause it. That it takes hard work. It takes going up to Seabrook in New Hampshire, if that's what you're into. It takes going out to Willowbrook, if that's what you're into. It takes going out to the reservation. It takes getting off your ass and getting involved in hard work and really being specific about the causes that you're supporting, not just going to a rock festival and smoking dope and saying, "Cool, brother."

The movement has become much more specific than it was, and expectations are lower now, but within that framework, there's still an enormous area for working to make things better. Now that I've traveled so much, I think that this really is the best country I've seen, in terms of fair distribution of wealth and resources, but there are huge areas in need of social reform. There are huge areas where miseries can be alleviated and inequities ironed out. That's the area that I function in, and I think it's as important today as it ever was.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think the people in a position to effect that kind of social change don't care anymore, or have they just found that the amount of work required is much more than they bargained for?

[A] Rivera: You know, if you had asked me that question a year or two ago, I could have given you an unequivocal answer. I would have said, yes, they're jaded. They're emotional dropouts. They don't care about any kind of involvement at all. But I see now we're in a period of extreme flux. Maybe this retreat from the extreme involvement and extreme disappointment of the Sixties is a recuperative period. Five years have now passed since the war and Watergate. Maybe now people will start to get involved again. When I do a story that touches a particularly sensitive chord in the public, I'm still amazed at the response it generates, people writing letters and calling to ask what they can do to help.

[Q] Playboy: Has that response increased in the past year?

[A] Rivera: Definitely.

[Q] Playboy: How do you account for that?

[A] Rivera: I don't know. I think Americans have an innate guilty conscience about the fact that this is such an opulent society, that we have been given so much to work with. They know that there are inherent imbalances and unfairnesses here, and I think most Americans have an intuitive sense of when things are fair. More importantly, most Americans want to be on the side that's fair.

[Q] Playboy: So you haven't become cynical?

[A] Rivera: No, I'm definitely not cynical. I am skeptical of easy answers to complex problems. I'm skeptical of cure-alls. I'm skeptical of messiahs. I'm skeptical of heaven-on-earth schemes. I'm skeptical of a lot of things, but I'm not cynical.

[Q] Playboy: Were you cynical in your more radical, firebrand days?

[A] Rivera: I was angry then, and a lot of that anger for a lime became enmeshed in cynicism; but then I came to television and found that television meant power, and with that growing power came an almost parallel growing sense of responsibility and a conscious effort not to abuse the power. How many people are in a position where they can really effect change? Probably a lot more than think so, but I really am in a very privileged position now. I can help influence positive change.

[Q] Playboy: And from that privileged position, what kind of long-range effect do you hope to have?

[A] Rivera: Just to make the world a little fairer, I'm sure. Who knows what the cumulative effect will be?

[Q] Playboy: How do you assess your track record so far?

[A] Rivera: I assess it probably mediocre to fair. I've done about 3000 stories; probably about 500 of them were about an issue that was truly relevant or significant. And maybe one in ten has had some real impact. So that's 50 out of 3000, which is only one in 60; but it's still 50 things where I've made some contribution.

[Q] Playboy: What would you say has been your greatest success?

[A] Rivera: That's a hard thing to decide; I don't really keep a list.

[Q] Playboy: What about Willowbrook? What is the situation there now compared with how you first found it?

[A] Rivera: Well, the population of the institution was 6500--inhumanly overcrowded. Now it's 1200. There are now Federal court orders modeled on the New York court order upgrading care of the mentally retarded that are being applied in at least eight states; and there has been an upsurge of community living centers under the banner of the Association for Retarded Children. But probably more importantly, there was a feeling in the early Seventies and before that if you had a retarded relative, it was cause for embarrassment, like tuberculosis was at one time, or V.D. It was a horrible thing. Now people who are involved with mentally retarded people are not nearly as humiliated or embarrassed to admit it or to talk about it in public, to group together and demand of the Government their rights to join voluntary organizations. There's a genuine motivation now to get together and improve the situation in an activist way, whereas before there was a shying away from it. Even the Kennedys, although they've done huge work in this area, were not very free in the early days with the information that Rosemary was retarded. Only later did they make that public, then use it as the basis for their involvement in this cause. Their involvement has been wonderful since, but they went through an evolutionary process.

Since you ask about my track record, I was thinking that today there were a whole bunch of Puerto Rican people in the park having some kind of festivities. And I thought that just my being on TV has been something of social progress, not only to Puerto Rican people but to whoever I am and represent. I'm different, and I think I've been part of a liberalizing phenomenon in the history of broadcasting. So there has been progress on the one hand, but there has also been excruciating frustration and disappointment. Some things have just taken so damn long and will probably take the rest of my life to change the slightest bit.

[Q] Playboy: Even with TV as your tool?

[A] Rivera: You know, I look on television with a certain suspicion now. I mean, how potent is it? Sometimes I wave my sword and it flops around like it's made of rubber. That's the main reason I wanted to move from local news to national news. I definitely felt that frustration as the predominant fact of my professional life. I was a blower of smoke rings. I didn't have the reach and the power to cause significant, substantive, lasting change. It's easy to point out problems, to highlight and dramatize them, but it's hard to correct them. Drug addiction is a classic example. I've done more heroin, antiheroin, heroin-smuggling, heroin-using, heroin-this, heroin-that stories than anyone in the history of television. But people are still using heroin. At most, all we've managed to do is blunt the outer edge of the epidemic.

[Q] Playboy: What made you decide to take on the heroin issue?

[A] Rivera: In 1972, 1973, it became almost chic in certain areas to be into heroin, because the world was such a fuck-you proposition that you might as well go with the heaviest kind of self-administered poison you could find. I did a three-part series, "Drug Crisis in East Harlem," in which I'd go up to a drug addict and I'd say, you know, "You're killing yourself. What's this about? For what? Are you a big man because you're doing this?"

[Q] Playboy: Did they answer you?

[A] Rivera: No. None of them could. Most of them ended up saying, "You're right, man." No one could really say anything that would make somebody else want to be like they were. And the image of them was always so unappealing. I was very careful not to romanticize the situation and to condemn it in a way that I thought I had the standing to do. In my neighborhood on the Lower East Side during that period, three out of four men between the ages of 18 and 25 were engaged in heroin activities. They were either mainlining or skin popping or at the very least snorting.

[Q] Playboy: Do you always take such a strong stand on the stories you do?

[A] Rivera: No, not always. There are times when I'm just a recorder and a communicator of what is going on, because the situation I'm in may be too ambiguous for me to make a judgment. Then I simply collect the data and present it. Panama is a good example. There were just too many sides to the Panama Canal story, and almost every side had a certain amount of equity. For me to take one side and say the other sides were morally, politically or philosophically bankrupt would have been the height of presumption. So I reported Panama more than I commented on it. I was very evenhanded in the amount of time I gave the various factions.

Other times, it's easy for me to become involved in a particular issue and say, "This is where I stand." There's no one in the world who can tell me that the mentally retarded need to be institutionalized or that babies should be born addicted to heroin or that migrant farmers have to work for three dollars a day or that blacks have to be discriminated against in the South because it's traditional. In the case of greyhound racing, which I reported on for 20/20, there's no one in the world who can convince me that there is a need for an industry that captures wild jack rabbits and then ships them to 40 states for the sole purpose of being torn apart by other animals for entertainment.

[Q] Playboy: Playboy was happy to see you take a strong stand on the rabbit issue.

[A] Rivera: Thank you. The point is, I much prefer to take a stand, to play the role of commentator as opposed to reporter, but only when there is a fundamental unfairness that I have to show people, when there is someplace that society or that situation or that region can move in order to make things better. That role is important to me. As a reporter, you don't really move society anyplace. You inform, which is an important role and certainly not one that I would degrade. It's just that as a commentator, I can become more involved in the process of positive social change. I want to do stories on which I can be effective. I don't want to just do stories to grandstand and say, wow, it's a great story. That's not really where it's at.

[Q] Playboy: Does it bother you that your professional style probably violates every canon of objectivity taught in journalism schools?

[A] Rivera: Objectivity, I'm certain, was invented by journalism schools. It has very little to do with real life. There's no such thing as an objective person, and if they teach that in journalism schools--I don't know, because I never really went to journalism school--then they're doing a grave disservice. They're making people be something they're not. They're making people blind to reality.

[Q] Playboy: You take your responsibility as a journalist pretty seriously, don't you?

[A] Rivera: I am very appreciative of the power of the media. The media definitely influence events, even if people don't admit it. They're not benign observers.

Let me give you an example. In my coverage of Panama, I reported every point of view, and toward the end, I was clearly in favor of the treaty. I felt that, regardless of my own personal or political feelings, or of the identity I felt with the students or the Panamanian left or with the whole sense of Panamanian nationalism versus U. S. imperialism, the treaty was the best possible compromise. I realized that it was as good as it was going to be, and even as weak as it was, it was barely going to get through the Senate anyway. The vote was so close at that point it could have gone either way, and I knew while I was down there that if I continually focused on the radicals and on the suppression by Torrijos of the political activists within his own country, then I might be in part responsible for the Senate's rejection of the treaty, which would probably have led to physical violence and to bloodshed. The day the treaty was signed in Washington, the Panamanian National Guard came down on the students and started belting them with rubber hoses. That was also the day that I got arrested, but we really played the whole thing very mellow. We could have made a lot more of that than we did, because they roughed me up, really belted me around.

[Q] Playboy: What were you doing when you were arrested?

[A] Rivera: We were filming an antigovernment demonstration, and they didn't want to be embarrassed on the day that General Torrijos was in Washington with President Carter and the leaders of all the other Latin-American countries. So they picked me up, but, you know, they were so unsophisticated. They thought that was the way to prevent bad publicity, and it was really the way to generate bad publicity. I could have made the whole country pay for the stupidity of 12 secret policemen. But we downplayed the whole incident. That was the day I decided that I had to be very careful about what I said, because I could defeat the very thing I wanted to achieve. Later, I had dinner with some people from The New York Times and The Washington Post, and we all felt the same way.

[Q] Playboy: All of you? Doesn't that smack of a little too much media power seated around the table discussing strategy?

[A] Rivera: It was tremendous, if you think about it. There was ABC News, the Times and the Post having dinner together. You don't have to be a real student of the media to understand that that is a lot of power. And we all realized, you know, we could have a great story and sink the whole thing. We talked about that the day before the Senate voted, when a group of radicals informed us that they were going to go to the U. S. embassy and throw paint on the walls. We started thinking what a better story we would have if there was violence following this paint-throwing incident. Then we just stopped and said, wait a second, if there's violence, these people in the Senate are going to ask what we're doing. We're giving back this property to a bunch of anarchists who are worse than dictators! At least we can deal with dictators. Then we stopped hoping for violence and started hoping for passivity, even if our stories wouldn't be as dramatic or vivid.

[Q] Playboy: Did you convey to any of your sources what would be better for them?

[A] Rivera: There were definitely some conversations that went on, yes, a very careful explanation of the mentality of the Senate and the problems that President Carter was dealing with.

[Q] Playboy: In a situation of power like that, didn't you feel a conflict between your personal views and your responsibility as a reporter--which you admit you were on that story--to stand back and be as neutral as possible?

[A] Rivera: No. I am not a stand-back-and-be-neutral person and I made my feelings clear. ABC reports were being shown in Panama on the Armed Forces network, and I told them, "Listen, if you believe in me and my reports, then cool it, because you're going to sink the treaty." That kind of influence is certainly open for abuse. I don't think I have abused it, though. I think I am responsible.

[Q] Playboy: Do those kinds of situations arise frequently in your work?

[A] Rivera: It happened in Nicaragua, too. I was talking to a group of radicals and I said, "Listen, I'm just here to cover what is going on, but if every time I get out of my car people are going to shoot bullets in the air, then your story is not going to get on American television. The only story that is going to get on is General Somoza's, and if that is what you want, fine, I'll go back to the hotel."

[Q] Playboy: It would seem you were giving them a crash course in the proper use of the media.

[A] Rivera: People need information and education, always, and I like the idea of being an educator; but, more than that, I really think of the power of the media as almost a fourth branch of Government. I definitely think of it as the executive, the legislative, the judicial and then the media.

[Q] Playboy: We're sure many people would agree with you; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for one, has questioned that kind of unbridled media power. In his address at Harvard last spring, he said that the press had become the greatest power in the West, but he asked, by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible? Are you at all concerned that you are not an elected representative of this branch of Government?

[A] Rivera: Well, as a broadcast journalist, you are elected in an indirect way by the fact that people opt either to watch you or to watch somebody else. I think it is a pure democracy in that sense, a democracy that works on an almost nightly basis. It is pure choice.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see TV ratings as a form of voting?

[A] Rivera: I think that I have been voted on more than almost anybody else in office: 3000 stories, and people have had the choice of listening and agreeing, listening and disagreeing or not listening at all.

[Q] Playboy: How do you know if people agree or disagree with you?

[A] Rivera: It varies, of course, from story to story. I'd have to say that, in general, people are a bit more conservative than I am.

[Q] Playboy: Do you have many battles with the top brass at ABC?

[A] Rivera: My biggest fights at ABC have been with the legal department, arguing over the possibility of being open to lawsuits. They're extremely conservative. There are two floors of lawyers over there at 1330 Avenue of the Americas, and their job is to keep ABC out of trouble.

[Q] Playboy: They must love you.

[A] Rivera: Oh, yes. I bet I'm 50 percent of their work. There was a time when I estimate I was spending about one fourth of my energy arguing with ABC's lawyers. Being a lawyer has helped me tremendously there, because when they throw a law at me, I know it as well as they do. I've kept abreast of new communications laws, libel laws, antitrespass laws.

[Q] Playboy: How often do you win?

[A] Rivera: I win. Sometimes they make me change or modify something, but they only really beat me down one time that I can recall. That was on a story I did about aspirins' causing ulcers. We had both sides represented. We had an aspirin spokesman saying all the wonderful things aspirins do. Then we had people who had bleeding ulcers and other problems. The lawyers killed the story.

[Q] Playboy: Completely?

[A] Rivera: Completely. That was the only time I lost. I must have had several hundred run-ins with ABC lawyers.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't there anything you could do?

[A] Rivera: I could have gone to the other media. Very often, I've said, if you don't let me do this story, I'm going to call a press conference and tell everybody why it didn't go. Looking back, I should have called a press conference. I regret that now.

[Q] Playboy: It seems you have the potential to put your network in a very uncomfortable position.

[A] Rivera: It has a tiger by the tail. I think that what has happened is that I now have more credibility than my network.

[Q] Playboy: Would Roone Arledge agree? As your boss at ABC News, he seems to be second only to Fred Silverman as the most controversial man in television these days.

[A] Rivera: Roone is my ally. He's an activist and he has really had a bum rap over there--more than I have.

[Q] Playboy: Within ABC, you mean?

[A] Rivera: Within and without. He started getting bad press from day one, from the second it was announced he was moving from head of sports at ABC to take over the news. Yet ABC News under Arledge is much better than it ever was. Stories are covered in greater detail; we're more aggressive and more competitive. That's his leadership.

[Q] Playboy: How did Arledge become your ally?

[A] Rivera: I was boycotted by ABC Network News for years. They told me I wasn't ready to leave local broadcasting, even after my Emmys and my national exposure. It was pure bullshit. So I went to ABC Entertainment and got them to do Good Night America--and I moved from there to Good Morning America, which is also under the jurisdiction of the entertainment division. I had to do an end run around the network-news people. So when Roone was appointed head of news, the first thing he did was offer me a job on the ABC Evening News.

[Q] Playboy: Your latest project, 20/20, has had its ups and downs. It has been widely criticized for its mixture of news and entertainment. Do you think the TV-newsmagazine concept--as ABC has done it--is viable?

[A] Rivera: I definitely think it's viable. The phenomenon of news documentaries' not being watched by as many people as watch entertainment programs is a real thing that news people have to deal with. If a news program like 20/20 can reach more people in prime time by having one light segment along with three serious ones, I don't see anything morally wrong with that.

[Q] Playboy: Yet you're appealing to people when they've just got home from work, when, the surveys tell us, all they want to do is tune out the real world and slip into some mindless sitcom or cops-and-robbers show. Can your brand of journalism be as effective in that format and time slot?

[A] Rivera: I can't answer for prime-time television. I'm not a spokesman for the industry, and a lot of what's on television these days is really repugnant to me. I think it's lousy, flaky, frivolous and superficial. But if a program is entertaining as well as informative, what's wrong with that? When it began, 20/20 was universally condemned by the critics, yet what was up against it in that time slot? At least with 20/20, there were two or three segments dealing with important issues. If people watch because the show looks good and is presented well and has upbeat theme music, I'm not outraged by that at all.

[Q] Playboy: What about other recent trends in television? We suppose you've heard about TV's "new sexuality."

[Q] Rivera: You couldn't miss it. It's on the cover of every magazine. Every magazine that condemns television for having too much sex has had a picture of what's-her-name, Suzanne Somers, with her tits hanging out. Television's trend toward sex sure sells magazines.

[Q] Playboy: We take it you're of the opinion that sex is here to stay.

[A] Rivera: Sex is definitely here to stay, on television, anyway. And well it should. I think there should be provisions, however. Family hour is not a bad idea, though most people in television think it's horrible and a form of censorship. I think children should not be exposed to some things before they're really ready. They need a little breathing space before they get hit by the heavy sex.

[Q] Playboy: You've always expressed a concern about children--poor kids, retarded kids, "the littlest junkies" who are born addicted to heroin because their mothers are addicts. Do kids touch you in some way that adults don't?

[A] Rivera: I think kids are terribly important because they're so vulnerable. I can stand up to anybody, I would stand up to anybody; but a kid can't, he's defenseless. It's not a fair fight when something happens to a young kid or when someone does something to a kid that affects his life in some drastic way.

[Q] Playboy: What about your own childhood? Do you have any idea where your sense of social justice and responsibility came from?

[A] Rivera: My parents had a lot to do with that. My parents are very ethical people. They believe in good, not cute or slick or any of those things. They're not in any way manipulative people. They're open, honest. For a long time, I rejected them. I thought, What did they give me? They gave me a legacy of being Jewish and Puerto Rican, which stank. They gave me poverty, which was a pain in the ass. They gave me the worst schools. That's the way I saw it, then I realized that they gave me everything. They gave me love. They gave me a sense of fairness. They gave me a sense of rooting for the underdog. They gave me a sense of the importance of formal education as opposed to street savvy.

[Q] Playboy: Tell us about them.

[A] Rivera: Both of my parents are stereotypes of their racial-ethnic backgrounds. You have to see them, really, it's almost comical. My father is totally a Puerto Rican man in the way he looks, talks and acts, his genteel mannerisms, his machismo everything. He is very, very Latin, a romantic, a dreamer, a lover of humanity. He came here in 1937 from Bayamon, Puerto Rico. He had been valedictorian of his high school class in Puerto Rico, and the first job he got here was as a pot washer in Stewart's Cafeteria at the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. That's where he met my mother, who was a counter girl in the same restaurant. Her name was Lily Friedman and she was born in Newark, New Jersey, of eastern European Jewish parents. She is as typically Jewish as my father is Puerto Rican. She's much more practical than my father. I used to be fond of saying that I was my father from the waist down and my mother from the waist up.

[Q] Playboy: That must have been some marriage.

[A] Rivera: It was. They got married in 1940 and my father nominally converted to Judaism and changed his first name from Cruz to Allen, because Cruz in English means "cross," which is not exactly a very good Jewish name. It didn't matter, though; my grandparents on my mother's side were knocked out with shame. To them, this Puerto Rican was just a brown nigger. My grandfather died almost immediately. My grandmother died when I was very young. The day I was born my father was drafted into the Service. We lived in Williamsburg in Brooklyn at the time, which was then divided almost evenly between Puerto Ricans and Jews. The identity problems were enormous. It was like being black and white; I encountered resistance from both groups. I can remember one fight I got into where I was simultaneously called a dirty Jew and a lousy spick. I mean, that's tough. Then around the time of the Korean War, my father got a job in a defense plant in Long Island and we moved to West Babylon, where I lived until I was 17.

[Q] Playboy: Were you bar mitzvahed?

[A] Rivera: Yes, I was 13.

[Q] Playboy: Did you learn Hebrew?

[A] Rivera: Oh, yes. I remember the broches, the prayers and all that.

[Q] Playboy: Do you remember any of the details of the ceremony?

[A] Rivera: I can picture my bar mitzvah almost exactly. It was in the volunteer-fire-department hall in Lindenhurst. A reformed congregation had just started and I was the first person bar mitzvahed there. It was traditional, except that the Puerto Ricans at the bar mitzvah outnumbered the Jews by at least four to one. I have a wonderful picture of me at my bar mitzvah with all these Puerto Ricans standing around. They were a riot, because it was their first experience with Judaism and they were so wonderfully tolerant. They didn't know what to do at a bar mitzvah, but they were very happy to be there. They were all given yarmulkes to wear, because that is part of the ceremony, and during the most solemn parts of the service, they all removed their yarmulkes and placed them over their hearts, thinking that was the way to show respect. They were trying very hard to be ecumenical but suffering from a lack of information.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of identity did you feel as a teenager?

[A] Rivera: Blue collar by then. Blue-collar tough guy.

[Q] Playboy: What happened to the nice little Jewish boy who was just bar milzvahed in the Lindenhurst fire hall?

[A] Rivera: By the time I was in high school, I had started my period of religious waffling. There was intense pressure from the Catholic environment we lived in, and I got much more into local gangs, the clique that ran the school, things like that.

[Q] Playboy: Were you comfortable in the gangs?

[A] Rivera: Very comfortable. I was a semi-hood, a hubcap stealer. I used to have about a fight a week. One of the last people electrocuted in New York was a classmate and a pal--also a cop killer.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever get busted?

[A] Rivera: I was arrested once for stealing tires. It was ridiculous. It held up my admission to the bar.

[Q] Playboy: Were you a good student?

[A] Rivera: I was a good athlete but a terrible student. I was so bad in high school that I had to take remedial English and math, because that was the only way I could possibly get into college. The principal of my high school had served as a Navy captain in San Juan, and he had real affection for Puerto Rican people. He advised me to go to the Merchant Marine Academy, because that was where he had gone.

[Q] Playboy: Did you like that idea?

[A] Rivera: I was very enthusiastic about it. I saw it as my ticket out of the limited world I was in. But during my third semester at Maritime, I decided that that was for the shits. I told them that I was leaving and asked if I could have more liberal courses than marine transportation and navigation. I started taking all English courses, and I had this Ivy Leaguish English professor who wore all the things I was not familiar with: cardigan sweaters, cushiony shoes; he smoked a pipe. He was the only one there who spoofed the military life. That's really when I started writing. He is the person I credit with making me literate as opposed to illiterate, which I was until that time.

[Q] Playboy: Was that when you transferred to the University of Arizona?

[A] Rivera: First I moved out to California for a while and became a clothing salesman. Then I enrolled at Arizona.

[Q] Playboy: Did you like collegiate life?

[A] Rivera: Well, that was my most obscure and embarrassing period.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Rivera: It was still early Sixties, remember, and at that time, Mexicans had the same stigma in the Southwest that Puerto Ricans did here. I was always mistaken for a Mexican. I remember getting blackballed by the Sigma Nu fraternity because of that. It really hurt me badly. I spent those two years trying to be like all those people who were giving me the cold shoulder. It was a bad time. It was hard enough just trying to be an American. Bass Weejuns were the big shoe, and I couldn't afford Bass Weejuns, so I got a Bass Weejun knockoff that I could wear without socks and madras shirts. Of every period in my life and every choice I made, that was the biggest waste of time.

[Q] Playboy: Where did you go from college? Did you have any career in mind?

[A] Rivera: No. I had vague ideas of going to Africa and starting a revolution.

[Q] Playboy: Where did you get those ideas?

[A] Rivera: Don't ask me. The civil rights movement, maybe? You know, if I were to piece it together, how the fuck did I ever think that I wanted to go to Africa? But by the time I graduated, I had already gotten married to my first wife, Linda. It was her father who said to me, "Why don't you go to law school?" So I took the legal aptitude tests and applied to Brooklyn Law School, because it was the law school that I thought was the worst and therefore the easiest to get into. I really studied hard there. I graduated fifth in my class.

[Q] Playboy: You must have buckled down.

[A] Rivera: I did, but that was also when I became politicized. The antiwar and civil rights movements began merging then, and I was working as a law student for the Harlem Assertion of Rights. I was also really getting into being Puerto Rican. I became intensely involved in my neighborhood on the Lower East Side, even while I was still working weekends and nights in a department store.

[Q] Playboy: Did you ever consider going uptown to one of the big law firms?

[A] Rivera: The opportunity never presented itself. I was in a bad law school to begin with and I never sought it out. Maybe it was because I didn't want to be blackballed as I had been by Sigma Nu, I don't know. Maybe that was the turning point in my life, when I look back on it. So I decided to just say, "Fuck it. They don't want me and I don't need them." Then I became a very different person. I went from being Gerald, the name I had been using, to Geraldo, which was what my father's relatives always called me. That was about the time Lew Alcindor became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

[Q] Playboy: What did you do when you graduated from law school?

[A] Rivera: I graduated in the spring of '69--I think I was the only Puerto Rican in the country to graduate from law school in 1969--and by that time, I was already representing a lot of poor people, just regular landlord-tenant cases or people who had been arrested on the Lower East Side. I used to have clients sleeping on the floor of my apartment. I had at least one full-blown jury trial every week. I was enormously busy, but it was the best year of my life. It was the first time I ever felt really effective. Racism was my enemy and I had a weapon now as a lawyer. I was using the law as an instrument for social change.

[Q] Playboy: When did you become involved with the Young Lords?

[A] Rivera: That was in the fall of '69. The Young Lords were the first real militant, grass-roots organization in the Puerto Rican community. They were a lot like the Black Panthers, but the leaders were a much more elite group than most of the followers were. They started community-service programs, free-breakfast programs, day-care centers, lead-poisoning-treatment centers.

[Q] Playboy: Were you involved in any landmark cases with them?

[A] Rivera: Their most famous action--in fact, the one that led me to my present job--was when the Young Lords took over a church in East Harlem and held it for 11 days. It belonged to a Puerto Rican Methodist congregation that had prospered and left the neighborhood and came back to the church only on Sundays, so the building was dark six days a week. The Young Lords seized the building and opened it for day-care and free-breakfast programs. I was their spokesman; they didn't give interviews.

[Q] Playboy: Were you nervous about all the excitement?

[A] Rivera: I was much more revolutionary matter of fact than nervous. We had a very good reason to be there. We had justice on our side, and that's the way I told it. I felt extremely proud to be representing the Young Lords, because it was the first dramatic case of Puerto Rican self-expression to hit the media.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about Puerto Rican independence today? Are you still for it?

[A] Rivera: Yes. I think Puerto Rican independence is necessary for the preservation of the Puerto Rican people as a cultural entity. The genetic pool that makes up what we call Puerto Ricans is so varied and has been so mixed over the years. It started with the Spanish and the Indians; then the slaves were brought in; then the pirates came. There are so many different races and creeds and colors in this mixed breed of people, and all they have in common, aside from their language, is the island of Puerto Rico, now the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. I think today, with the American occupation and later political affiliation with the Puerto Ricans, and with English making such a heavy penetration into the island's life, there remains a real danger of total assimilation, which would result in the loss of any kind of feeling of national heritage. The main reason I want Puerto Rico to be an independent nation is to preserve that homeland. Right now, Puerto Rico is neither an independent country nor a state of the U. S. Its ambiguous position works against its cultural identity.

My feelings about Puerto Rican independence are the same as my feelings about the state of Israel. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, it has been much easier for Jews throughout the Diaspora to be Jews, even if they never see Israel, even if they're Ash-kenazic Jews from eastern Europe or Sephardic Jews from Spain. Israel is their homeland.

[Q] Playboy: How did your involvement with the Young Lords land you a job in television?

[A] Rivera: I met a lot of media people during that time, including Gloria Rojas, who was then a reporter for WCBS-TV in New York. About two months later, she said to me, "Why don't you come be a television newsperson? ABC wants you." I said, "What do you mean, ABC wants me?" And she said, "Frankly, they want a Puerto Rican person and they know you speak well and why don't you come try it?" That was about the time affirmative action was beginning to catch on. I had never considered being a media person, but Gloria talked me into it by saying I could be more effective in doing the things I wanted to do by being in the media than I could by being a lawyer. She said, "Every day, I talk to hundreds of thousands of people." And it was true. It took me less than a week to decide to change professions. My parents had a heart attack.

[Q] Playboy: What was it like when you went to meet the brass at ABC?

[A] Rivera: It wasn't as if I had an interview at all. We spoke awhile and I talked a little about my legal career. They had been briefed on everything. They were just sizing me up, not as an intellect or a particularly gifted person but as a piece of meat. I was Puerto Rican and they had a slot to fill. They hired me, but they didn't want to put me right on TV with no experience, so they sent me to the Columbia School of Journalism for a three-month crash course with other minority students from around the country. It was all very practical. There were no white people in the course. Everybody was an outsider--either black or Puerto Rican or Mexican--and the people who were teaching us were not traditionalists. We were a very hip, very radical group.

[Q] Playboy: When you entered television, did you take any flak from people in the streets who thought you were selling out?

[A] Rivera: No, not truly. The flak came from my so-called colleagues at ABC. They were resentful of the fact that a person with no journalistic training was being hired strictly because he was an acceptable Puerto Rican. I got iced out at the beginning. No one talked to me, except for the two blacks on the staff. And ABC shut me out in its own way, because it wouldn't let me cover any important stories. They were afraid of what I'd do with anything that had the slightest political connotation, so they sent me to cover fashion shows, car shows, things like that.

[Q] Playboy: When did you get your break?

[A] Rivera: My break came one day when I was walking down Bleecker Street with a camera crew on my way to cover a fashion show in the Village. We looked up and there was a guy on the roof of this hotel, obviously getting ready to jump. We started rolling the camera and the guy jumped and landed on the corner of MacDougal and Bleecker. Then the guy's twin brother came rushing outside, shouting that his brother and he were both heroin addicts with $150-a-day habits and that they had just come to the end of the road. I knew exactly what questions to ask him, because I was from Avenue C and there's a zillion junkies down there. I took the story back for the 11-o'clock news and they let it run three minutes and seven seconds--which was unprecedented for me. After that, I remember, I went back to the newsroom and it was obvious that I had an expertise the other people didn't, an ability to ask questions about subjects with which they had no familiarity.

[Q] Playboy: What kind of response did you get to that story?

[A] Rivera: I don't recall a particularly dramatic response, but I remember that one of my colleagues, so-called, subsequently came up to me and said, "You'd better take that story and stick it in your hat, buster, because you're never going to have another one like it." From then on, I became the ghetto reporter, but that was OK, because up until then, the only time you ever saw ghetto people on TV was when there was a riot or buildings burning or mass murders.

[Q] Playboy: Your award-winning coverage of Willowbrook has been well documented. You've told how a doctor friend who worked there put you on to the story. But can you recall how you felt when you first walked into that gruesome scene?

[A] Rivera: I felt so many emotions. I felt absolute shock, because it was worse than anything ever. Worse than war, worse than anything on the Lower East Side, worse than tenement fires or overdose deaths or any kind of violence. It was worse than child abuse: Those kids were helpless and they were being made more miserable even than their fate had dictated by total negligence. So first I felt shock, caused partly by compassion and partly by a lack of information. Then it turned to outrage, because it takes so little time to realize that it doesn't have to be that way. It wasn't just a question of lack of funds. It was a question of commitment to changing the way the state was caring for the mentally retarded. And for that you needed an outsider--such as a reporter--because the people living in that shit had come to accept it as the norm. The parents were too close to it. They were embarrassed by the fact that they had institutionalized their kid, embarrassed to admit that their flesh and blood was mentally handicapped.

[Q] Playboy: When you were reporting Willowbrook, did you feel that perhaps you should hide your own emotions and try to be objective about it?

[A] Rivera: No. You know, it took me all day to finish that first report, and I got to the office late, an hour and a half before air time, still filled with the thing. I didn't talk to anybody. I told them how much time I needed and went on the air and--poof!--exploded. I was very emotional and passionate and outraged. I was pissed off and that really came across. And people saw the film and everybody was pissed off. We got 703 phone calls in the first ten minutes, people asking what they could do or just saying, you know, "This is terrible."

[Q] Playboy: How did the people at ABC deal with that?

[A] Rivera: It made everybody step back and say, "Let him alone." I was filled with a moral fury and they knew not to mess. We were showing faces of kids in the institution. We had committed a criminal trespass. We had stolen a key. They knew all those things, but they knew if they came near me, there would be an explosion.

[Q] Playboy: Did anyone try to stop you?

[A] Rivera: No way. I think there was a sense that this was a really big story, also an appreciation of the fact that I was crazy. One time, somebody asked me a question about something technical and I exploded and yelled, "Don't come near me! Don't come near this editing room!"

[Q] Playboy: Are incidents like that the reason you've been labeled hypercharged and overemotional? After all, you've cried oncamera, you've gotten sick to your stomach oncamera.

[A] Rivera: I got punched in the nose oncamera, too.

[Q] Playboy: You did?

[A] Rivera: Yeah. Got a bloody nose doing a story about single-room-occupancy hotels, where they take all the people on welfare or from mental institutions and all the money goes right to the landlord. There are no clean linens, no sanitation, no garbage pickup, nothing, and rats, roaches everywhere. I was totally appalled when I saw it.

[Q] Playboy: Who hit you?

[A] Rivera: One of the tenants invited me in, so I wasn't committing trespass; but they had a uniformed guard there and the guy said, "You can't come in with your camera." I said, "This guy's invited me in. I can go in. And I'm Geraldo Rivera and I'm going in." He gave me an overhand right, landed right on my nose--my first bloody nose in memory. My immediate response was, I'm Geraldo Rivera and this guy has just punched me in the nose. Then I started fighting him oncamera.

[Q] Playboy: There you go again. That's not exactly what TV newsmen are supposed to do. Has it occurred to you that you might have the wrong temperament for the business you're in?

[A] Rivera: Yeah, it has occurred to me from time to time. But you know what I find? I find that people relate to real emotions more than they relate to a person who restrains his emotions or doesn't really feel any emotion. To me, if you go to the scene of any kind of disaster and you aren't emotionally involved, at least inside yourself, then all you're doing is using the disaster for your story. It's the fodder, and to me, to be that kind of scavenger of disaster is too much of what news is about. You have to feel a brotherhood with those people, a real sympathy. Otherwise, you're just exploiting them.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't there a danger that after 3000 stories and eight years of this, you're going to get numb to their situation?

[A] Rivera: No. I don't get numb. I really don't. I get numb to bullshit stories, to political stories, to features and fashion shows and the Saint Patrick's Day parade--all that crap. But I feel the Wil-lowbrook story. I feel the heroin story. I get numb to foreign-policy stories, to all Washington stories. I've seen the tactic of civil disobedience used for so many really silly issues and selfish issues that I'm sort of numb to that. And you know what else numbs me? The physical requirements of putting a story together. The airplanes numb me. The no sleep numbs me. The seven-day weeks numb me. And because I think of myself as an emotionally honest person, the fact that people don't see me that way also numbs me. Critics don't see me that way, a lot of them; and I haven't gotten over the fact that everyone doesn't love me. That has a certain numbing effect.

[Q] Playboy: We're back to that contradiction again: You do all this significant TV journalism, and yet something about you makes the critics salivate and bare their fangs at the mention of your name. Could it have anything to do with your much-publicized image as a jet setter and a swinger?

[A] Rivera: Oh, I definitely went through the jet set.

[Q] Playboy: When did that start?

[A] Rivera: Around '74, when I started doing Good Night America. A lot of entertainment people were on the show and I really started living it up in a heady environment that I could never exist in before. I started getting invited to every party, every Senator's and duchess' thing, or flying to some bash in Mexico.

[Q] Playboy: Did you go to them?

[A] Rivera: I went to most of them, yeah. I went to a lot of them.

[Q] Playboy: Were you at ease in that crowd?

[A] Rivera: Was I truly at ease? I don't know. I certainly appeared comfortable, which is almost the same thing.

[Q] Playboy: Did you enjoy yourself?

[A] Rivera: Sometimes. I enjoyed the libertine aspects of it, clearly, the sensuality of it, the pleasures. I enjoyed living out the fantasies that almost everyone has, especially people who have been brought up in a world that's alien to the world you read about in all the columns. Yeah, I definitely lived through a phase where I totally enjoyed it.

[Q] Playboy: You talk about it now as if it were a passing thing.

[A] Rivera: It was definitely a phase I went through. If I had to make a demarcation, I'd say it ended in the fall of '75, when Good Morning America began. Now we never go to parties. Invitations stack up. We never go to any.

[Q] Playboy: What happened?

[A] Rivera: I outgrew it. It wore real thin. It wears out real quick.

[Q] Playboy: Was there a particular scene or event that turned you off?

[A] Rivera: I'll tell you one thing. There was a party for the other daughter of Ingrid Bergman. Not Pia Lindstrom, her sister--young, dark hair. She was in New York and the party was at Orsini's. After the party, we all went down to my house on the Lower East Side, which was a kick, because there was this convoy of limousines. Mick Jagger was there and Rudolf Nureyev and there was the wife of a Senator--I really shouldn't tell you the story, because there are other people involved.

[Q] Playboy: Go ahead. No one's listening.

[A] Rivera: Only millions of people. Well, anyway, people were coming on to me, people of both sexes. And there were all these people that you read about, I mean that the people who follow those things read about. It was just so, I don't know, alien. Yet, in one sense, it was the logical culmination of that phase I was in. It was the high point or low point--however you look at it--of that era. I don't think I want to go into it any more specifically than that.

[Q] Playboy: It must have been around that time that all the Geraldo Rivera stories started circulating in the media and in the gossip columns. Since you're beyond all that now, maybe this would be a good time to lay them to rest, if you can.

[A] Rivera: Ok. Just list the things and if they're true, I'll tell you, and if they're not, I'll debunk them.

[Q] Playboy: You've already admitted that your personal life was more or less profligate for a while.

[A] Rivera: Yeah, my personal life was wasted, but the fact was I worked long, hard hours during those years, and my personal life did not affect the product or the sincerity of what I did. I justified it by saying the professional me is one thing. What I do in my off hours is my business.

[Q] Playboy: Did your marriage to Kurt Vonnegut's daughter, Edie, take place around that time?

[A] Rivera: No, I met Edie before all that happened, back in 1971, at a party that Andy Warhol gave for fashion designer Giorgio Sant'Angelo. A local arts critic invited me to the party, and I was standing around, not relating to anybody, when she walked in wearing this big sheepskin coat. She had just come from Jamaica, where she had been living.

[Q] Playboy: Did you hit it off right away?

[A] Rivera: In one day. She moved out of her father's place to my place on the Lower East Side.

[Q] Playboy: Did you take any flak from her dad?

[A] Rivera: No. Nothing at all. He is very liberal in that sense. I came to appreciate and admire Kurt. It was kind ot a geometric progression, because I learned the man and his work at the same time. I came to love him in a different way than I loved Edie. He's such a gentle man. He taught me to be on the side of the people who have the least. Morally, I tend to believe it's the weak ones who need your help, the unprivileged or the underprivileged. My parents taught me that, but a lot of that was Kurt's teaching, too.

[Q] Playboy: That marriage didn't make it, though, did it?

[A] Rivera: No. It was hard for me. The problem was that I was also getting famous at the time, and fast, real fast. Edie and I got married in December of '71 and Willowbrook was January of '72. So everything was happening at the same time. We were still living on the Lower East Side, even though I was as famous as can be, and the people there loved us. Edie lost her wallet once and it was returned. We left the door open a couple of times and people would close it and leave us notes. They were totally protective of us. That's when I started getting flashy and wearing satin pants and velvet jackets and doing things socially.

[Q] Playboy: And you got screwed up?

[A] Rivera: Yeah, I was definitely leading a schizophrenic life, in that sense. I separated my personal persona from my professional persona, which was totally sacred to me. The work that I was doing was right on point. I did things that had never been done before and I was getting results. On the other hand, personally, I was just a real fuck-up.

[Q] Playboy: What do you mean by that?

[A] Rivera: My personal life became grab-it-when-you-can-get-it. It was not something I could regulate. I mean, I was not monogamous. That was the only thing I did badly.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Rivera: Well, that's one of the problems with Hispanics generally. The male domination, the unilateral monogamy, the fact that a husband can kill his wife if he catches her cheating, but a wife has absolutely nothing to say if her husband has a mistress.

[Q] Playboy: Do you see that as a strong part of your make-up or did you just seize on it as an excuse?

[A] Rivera: Like they say at the track, pick 'em. I really only grew out of it maybe three years ago. You could go on forever like that, but that's not where it's at for me anymore.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you're finally pulling things together?

[A] Rivera: Yeah, but it's taken me a long time. Just look at what I went through and what I put other people through. It was because everything was open to me. You know, a person who is not a handsome person, not a rich person, not a privileged person, suddenly had the world coming at him. I remember very famous women coming to me with their daughters--famous people, ballerinas, movie stars, politicians' wives--trying to fix me up, knowing that I was married. Everything was available and I was not strong enough to resist. I had never lived through anything like that, that fantasy existence. That's really what sank that marriage. Edie is a wonderful person, an extraordinarily sensitive person and an extremely talented artist. I think of her only with soft feelings. I feel that I totally victimized her.

[Q] Playboy: It sounds as though you were a real rat for a while.

[A] Rivera: I take total responsibility for that period. It just came together and, I guess, exploited weaknesses that were inherent in me. I mean, I didn't have lust only in my heart; I had it all over my body.

[Q] Playboy: While we're tracking down rumors, what about the stories about your homosexuality?

[A] Rivera: You left a couple of rumors out. I'll mention them to you next. I really don't know where the homosexuality one came from. Maybe because I was in After Dark magazine with tight pants on. I didn't know what the magazine's audience was. I've always been for gay rights. I still am, and if I were, in fact, gay, I would not hesitate to admit it. It's just something I never got into. I was never really accused of it, except by Screw magazine. It had a headline--"Does Geraldo Rivera Suck Cock?" I had done a V.D. program on Public Television and we devoted a whole hour to homosexual venereal disease. The story had nothing to do with the headline, but that's all people remembered. I hung it up on my wall.

[Q] Playboy: What rumors did we leave out?

[A] Rivera: I think the most vicious rumor was that my real name was Jerry Rivers.

[Q] Playboy: Where did that one come from?

[A] Rivera: I think it probably came from the Daily News article that published it. It's absolutely untrue.

[Q] Playboy: What was the point, that you were a little wimp from Long Island masquerading as a tough P.R.?

[A] Rivera: Yeah, as a Puerto Rican. My parents suffered the most from that, because it reflected on them. Their friends read those stories.

[Q] Playboy: But in the past, you have admitted using the name Riviera when you were in the Southwest.

[A] Rivera: Right, in college, but there's a quantum leap from that to Rivers and what Rivers implies. Gerald Rivera is on my birth certificate. My family has called me Geraldo since I was 16 years old.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think people are out to discredit you?

[A] Rivera: What else do I give them to write about these days? I don't go out. I'm not a libertine anymore. I work harder than almost anybody I know. I've really become a pretty boring person personally.

[Q] Playboy: OK, if you say so. Now can we get back to the rumors?

[A] Rivera: Go ahead, I've got plenty. Have you heard the one about my being Tony Orlando's brother? I'm not.

[Q] Playboy: How do you deal with gossip like that? Do you fight back?

[A] Rivera: No. I once had a long conversation with Gay Talese about that after a particularly hurtful article. He said, "Whatever you do, don't ever respond." So my rule has been if people attack me personally, I don't respond. Only if they attack me professionally, then I respond like an avenging angel. I'm not talking about subjective criticism, I'm talking about saying I didn't tell the truth or that my facts were incorrect. I won't take slander professionally.

[Q] Playboy: Have you been slandered professionally?

[A] Rivera: Oh, yes. I can give you an example. When we were in Israel during the '73 war, we were coming back from the Golan Heights one day. We had already been as close as the Israeli army got to Damascus, maybe one kilometer from the front line; and we were coming home, when all of a sudden, the Syrians started shelling. They were bracketing the road. Shells were landing on both sides of the car, and we got out of the car, cameras rolling, shells blowing up behind me. I did the stand-up report right there. "We're here ... things are blowing up." True drama, really great stuff. We put it on the satellite that night, and when I came back from Israel, the story was all over New York that I had staged that incident, that it had never happened. And this is where in the same frame of film you see me in the foreground and an artillery shell exploding 50 yards away.

[Q] Playboy: How did they say you'd done it?

[A] Rivera: It didn't matter how I'd done it. The rumor was enough. Every newspaper and magazine in the country called me with that allegation. I had no idea where it had come from. So I denied the story. ABC News denied the story. We made the film available to everyone and they saw that it was physically impossible to have faked it. It would have cost us millions of dollars in opticals just to stage an artillery attack. So, anyway, months passed. A TV Guide guy interviews me and, because he likes me and has spent a lot of time with me, he tells me who made the charge. I confront the person with the charge.

[Q] Playboy: Will you tell us who it was?

[A] Rivera: I'd rather not. It was another New York newsman. Another ABC newsman, in fact. He admitted it and I knocked him down.

[Q] Playboy: You punched him?

[A] Rivera: I punched him a multitude of times about the head and body. He was knocked down. I got on top of him and grabbed him by the throat and I had my right hand cocked. I said, "I never felt more like killing someone than I feel like killing you right now." Then I just got off him and walked away and that was the end of it.

[Q] Playboy: Why do you think he started the rumor?

[A] Rivera: I think he was motivated totally by jealousy. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me professionally, and that's the way I responded. I thought I was going to get arrested for assault--though he did touch me first.

[Q] Playboy: Wasn't there another media uproar over your coverage of the Son of Sam last year?

[A] Rivera: Yeah, they said I didn't use the word alleged killer and I did use the word fiend in describing Berkowitz. But, in fact, I did use the word alleged and, once again, the letter that started the whole thing was written by my colleagues at ABC. Then they leaked it to the papers, as they always do. Maybe I did say the word fiend, but what I said was so moderate compared with, say, the New York Post or the Daily News.

[Q] Playboy: Who was responsible for the letter?

[A] Rivera: The Washington bureau of ABC. I call them the prep schoolers, that's what they are. They were far more comfortable in the era of trench coats and faceless people.

[Q] Playboy: When did you begin to emerge from that period of debauchery?

[A] Rivera: About November '75, when I started on Good Morning America. I was then free to be a newsman again. I didn't have to court the celebrities anymore, always thinking in the back of my mind, Wouldn't it be great if this person would be on my show? I'm so glad to be out of that. I never have to be beholden to any celebrity ever again. If they turn me on and I turn them on, in terms of being friends, that's cool. But I'm not going to plug anyone's movie, because I don't plug movies anymore. I have no time for that. I'm serious now.

[Q] Playboy: When did you meet Sheri?

[A] Rivera: I met her years ago. At the time, she was the wife of someone I knew in Los Angeles, and she was my only woman friend for about four years before we got together. I would call her up and she would call me up and we'd rap about things, even during the height of that period when I was running around. Then there came a time when she was getting out of her marriage and I had moved to Los Angeles. We started living together' and we got married the last day of 1976.

[Q] Playboy: Has she been a good influence on you?

[A] Rivera: She's been a fantastic influence. First of all, she's organized, I'm not. And she really is an objective person, as far as that's possible, and I am not objective. We're not only lovers, we're comrades, confidants. I'm a romantic, she's practical; that really is a match made in heaven. I definitely think of our relationship as a lifelong relationship.

[Q] Playboy: You seem to be leading a very quiet life these days.

[A] Rivera: Yeah, we really have a very quiet private life.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever feel the need for more action and excitement?

[A] Rivera: Yes, definitely. I'm still wild, in that sense. I'm a boxer. I still ride my motorcycle. I love sailing, basketball.

[Q] Playboy: What about your old friends; do you still see them?

[A] Rivera: My old friends are the only ones I do see. I make new friends very reluctantly. Generally, my friends are the friends I had before I was well known.

[Q] Playboy: What about the jet setters with whom you used to run?

[A] Rivera: If I see them, I'm polite. They're polite with me, but lately even the invitations have started to trickle off.

[Q] Playboy: No regrets?

[A] Rivera: No regrets at all. It's something to experience, but I don't miss it. It's a cliche to call it shallow, but it is.

[Q] Playboy: Do you ever wonder how a nice stay-at-home guy like you ever got caught up in something like that?

[A] Rivera: One of my greatest strengths is my total social mobility. I am now a classless person. I am a raceless person. I'm not a white person, not a black or brown person. I'm a rainbow person. I cross boundaries freely. I have total freedom of choice, and my choice now is to live in my off time a relatively rural, active, sportsmanlike life at our place in California. I don't like "the scene" anymore. I don't know, maybe in the years ahead, there will be some new scene that will turn us both on.

[Q] Playboy: What about the future? You can't always be a hip young TV journalist, you know.

[A] Rivera: Hell, no. I might always be hip, though. I think that as long as I maintain discipline, my choices will only increase as I get older. I've gone beyond the phase of my career where I'm a youth person. My audience has matured with me. I hope I keep getting better at what I do. I know I am certainly more professional about what I do now.

[Q] Playboy: In what ways?

[A] Rivera: I have consciously reduced the level of rhetoric in my work. In the early days, when I was involved in the antiwar movement, there was a lot of rhetoric and demagoguery, a lot of overstatements and exaggerations. There has definitely been a very conscious scaling down of language on my part. Now when I identify a bad guy--for lack of a better term--I am specific about what this entity, person, organization, corporation or government is doing that is wrong. I define exactly why it is wrong and how it can be corrected. I research my material much more carefully and I'm very conscious of the impact my words have, that my appearance has, that the arrangement of segments within a story has. I'm very conscious of the responsibility that comes with 20,000,000 or 30,000,000 people watching and listening and believing in what I say.

[Q] Playboy: Sounds as though you've tightened up your act a bit.

[A] Rivera: I've tightened it up, but it's the same act.

[Q] Playboy: Would you still call yourself a radical?

[A] Rivera: The way civilization defines the term, I don't think I'm a radical anymore. I'm more of a moderate. I'm just a radical within the Ivy League halls of broadcast journalism.

[Q] Playboy: Do you worry about growing old in this age of disposable media stars?

[A] Rivera: I'm not worried about the sex-symbol business. I'm not worried about getting old. I'm just worried about continuing to make a difference.

[Q] Playboy: You were once quoted as saying you wanted to be the first Puerto Rican mayor of New York. Do you still?

[A] Rivera: That was a long time ago. Mayor is a shitty job.

[Q] Playboy: What about national politics?

[A] Rivera: Look at me. I've been married three times. I lived through that whole decadent period. Even if I were electable, I still think I could be more effective and influential outside Government. It's not really outside. It's only outside Washington. It's not outside the hearts and minds of people.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any big stories you'd really like to get your hands on?

[A] Rivera: I want to be the first reporter in space. I'm looking forward to taking the space shuttle. It's just a few years away and I think I can make it if I stay in shape.

"I was definitely arrogant and pushy. I would always answer my critics by saying, 'What do you know? When was the last time you were in the streets?'"

I don't act. People who think I do give me too much credit as a manipulator and an actor, and I'm neither."

"Mick Jagger and Rudolf Nureyev and a Senator's wife came over to my house on the Lower East Side.... People of both sexes were coming on to me.... It was the logical culmination of the phase I was in."