Tell It to the King

Every day of my life, from Monday to Friday, I get to meet the most interesting people in the world--writers, politicians, film directors, historians, surgeons, lawyers, professional athletes, comedians, singers, psychiatrists--and ask them anything I want. And I get paid for it. On top of that, I get to talk to callers from all over the country and tell them what I think about any issue from the Middle East to the major leagues. Between radio and television, I've probably interviewed more than 30,000 people and The Guinness Book of World Records has determined that I've probably logged more hours than any other talk-show host in the history of radio. It's my world and I wouldn't trade it for anything.

I want to welcome you to that world now, to tell you some stories about the great and the not so great, the talented, the brash, the funny and the frankly bizarre people who have passed through my professional, and sometimes my personal, life. They've given me plenty of laughs, some sadness and a lot of surprises.

•

Of all the guests I've interviewed over my 30 years in the business, if I had to choose my favorites by group, I would pick the comedians. But the problem with certain comics is that they're too safe, they're afraid to offend anyone. Rich Little came onto my CNN show one night just after we finished a segment on the PTL, and I asked him if he did an impression of Jerry Falwell. He started to do a little Falwell, and then he stopped. I said, "Do you do Tammy Faye Bakker?"

"She'd be very easy to do," he said, "but I don't do her."

"Why not?"

"Well, you know, people are very funny about religion."

"And you don't want to offend?" I asked.

"Right. In my business, you can't offend."

Well, of course you can. That's what puts comics on the cutting edge. This brings me to the subject of Lenny Bruce. When you talk about comics who run risks, obviously, Lenny's name leads the pack.

I met Lenny when I was doing a disc-jockey show in Miami in 1958. He came by one morning about seven o'clock and said, "I really dig ya," and he invited me to go and see his show. When I got my show at Pumpernik's restaurant in Miami Beach, he used to come onto my show all the time. Lenny would wear a prison uniform that a friend of his had sent him from Raiford state prison. But Lenny wouldn't just wear it. He'd ask cops for directions in it, and then he'd come onto my show. We had a big picture window at Pumpernik's and we could see him out in the street, talking with the cops in his prison uniform. Lenny would try to psych the cops by asking them for directions. He had it all figured out: The cop knew he'd look like an idiot if he called in and said that a guy in a prison uniform had come up to him on the street, but if he let him go and the guy really was a con, he'd look even worse. Then Lenny would come onto the show and do a monolog based on what was going on in the cop's head. "I'm an idiot either way," the cop would be thinking. "What's (continued on page 150)Tell it to the King(continued from page 90) the way out of this? Gotta do it the American way. 'Uh, fella? See that cop down there on the next corner? Go ask him.' "

Sometimes Don Rickles would be on the show with Lenny and would try to talk sense into him, usually a losing proposition. "Lenny," he'd say, "are you crazy? Is this gonna help your life, Lenny? Is this a major thing in your life with the Raiford uniform? Maybe it'll get you beat up, and then you can walk around the streets and beg. Is this gonna be a bit? Lenny, wear a suit. Dress up, stand on stage. Make a little money, take care of your mother."

Lenny was not known as a conventional joke teller. One time, when I had him on, I decided to confront him about it. "Lenny," I said, "one of the complaints about you is that you never tell a joke. Everything with you is a weaving of stories and insights, but do you ever just tell jokes?"

Lenny said, "OK. Joke. One of the great arguments of all time is between those who think that human nature is shaped by genetics (the way you're born is the way you'll be) and those who think it's shaped by environment (the way you're raised is the way you'll be). This is a story that maybe doesn't give you the answer but shows you the complexity of the questions.

"A family goes to Yellowstone National Park on vacation--mother, father and three children. On the way back to Los Angeles, the parents look in the back of the car and--Holy Jesus! They forgot the one-month-old kid. Hey, it happens. You gotta clean up, gotta worry about Smokey the Bear, so they left the kid.

"They're halfway home, and now here's the dilemma. If they turn back to get the kid, the father blows his sales meeting in the morning, the monthly sales meeting for the May sweep at the car dealership. He'll never get that day back, but he can always have another kid. They go on to L.A. and they leave the kid in the park, and the kid is raised by wild dogs for 18 years. One day, one of the dogs, in a fit of logic, realizes they've done wrong and that the kid doesn't belong with them, so they leave him out on a highway and split. Now this kid, who's spent one month as a human child and 17 years and 11 months as a dog, is picked up by passing motorists. The kid enrolls in the University of Chicago, graduates Phi Beta Kappa. Valedictorian. He's called the most promising student in Chicago in ten years and is hailed by the president of the university as a young man with an unquestioned future. And--bam!--one day, he's killed chasing a car."

Pure Lenny.

Another thing I liked about Lenny was that he was the first guy I knew who would just say anything. Once, we were out to dinner at Joe's Stone Crab in Miami Beach--I was with my first wife, Alene, three other couples and Lenny and Honey. We were all talking about the merits of marriage and the subject came around to what we liked best about our mates. The rest of us were coming up with things like "He has a great sense of humor," or "I like the way she thinks." Lenny sat there and said, "Honey is the best blow job in America." This was 1960. "That'll keep you home," he said. "Any time I think of straying, I think, She'll go down on me anywhere. Please pass the cole slaw."

Then there's Mel Brooks. As a comedian, Mel Brooks is in a class by himself; he has that special kind of genius that allows him to get into a character and improvise. On any given night, Mel might come onto my show and be, for instance, the 2000-year-old man. He would find a way to fit the character to the circumstances. Mel was my guest the night the United States put a man on the moon. I said to him, "We're on the moon. What a historic night. You're 2000 years old. How do you feel about this?"

"Ah, I love the moon," he said. "The moon is my favorite thing in the whole universe."

"Why?"

"For 311 years, I thought I had a cataract. One night, a guy named Irving said, 'Isn't the moon beautiful tonight?' I said, 'The wha'?' He said, 'The moon.' I said, 'The moon? It's not a cataract?' "

Then I asked him if he'd known Moses.

"I helped him," he said. "Helped him get out of Egypt."

"How?"

"Moses had a speech impediment. He stuttered. When he was standing in front of the Pharaoh, it was embarrassing. There was 'Luh, l-luh, l-luh, l-luh.' So I hit him in the back: 'Let my p-puh-people go.' He died a hunchback."

"He died a hunchback? From what?"

"From carrying the tablets. 'Thou shalt not' alone was 83 pounds."

What I love about Mel is that you can ask him a question that's impossible to answer and he stays right in character. I asked him if he'd been there the night Christ died.

"Yeah, I was there," he said. "I was on the hill at the Crucifixion."

"How'd you feel?"

"Terrible. I went home--couldn't eat my rice pudding. I couldn't eat it, couldn't touch it, couldn't go near it."

Out of character, Mel can be even funnier. I once showed him a picture of my daughter, Chaia, and he said to me, "This is a curse."

I said, "What do you mean, a curse?"

"The worst curse in the world is a pretty daughter," he said. "This girl is gonna break your heart. With an ugly daughter, they're always there: 'Pa, whaddaya need?' Saturday night they're home. 'Whaddaya need? I'll make you dinner, Pa.'

"I'll tell you another thing," Mel said. "You got an ugly daughter, you don't need a clicker to change the television channels--they get up and do it for you. They'll sit there and they'll turn it all day long. This one," he said, looking at the picture, "this one, you'll be in a nursing home when you're 55 years old. She's gonna visit you. She's gonna come visit you in the nursing home, in a Porsche, with a guy named Lance. Lance is gonna look out the window the whole time he's there, with sunglasses on, impatient. She's gonna lean over and say, 'Don't dribble your food down your chin, Pa--Lance doesn't like that.' "

All that out of one photograph.

•

If there's one person I'd give anything to interview, it's Laurence Olivier. I've done so many interviews about him, I've had so many actors discuss him, that I don't think I'd ever run out of questions. Tony Randall said he'd swim the Atlantic to work with him for free. Charlton Heston's biggest thrill in show business was not the Academy Award he won; it was completing a scene with Olivier in the movie Khartoum and having him say, "Great work, Chuck."

Olivier is not a Method actor. He works off a higher intelligence, according to Anthony Quinn, who told me a funny story about him. They were doing Becket, and Quinn was really thrilled, because he was working with Olivier and because his name and Olivier's were both above the title on the marquee--which any actor would kill for.

"When you're an actor," Quinn told me, "you naturally assume that other actors work the way you do. Rehearsals are going very well, and I assume that Olivier is going back to his dressing room and becoming Becket. Because I'm certainly becoming the king, which is my role. So I'm tough to live with the last two weeks, because I've become the king. I start to think about what the king was like when he was a child, what the king would have done the morning of this scene, and so forth. I assume that Olivier's doing the same thing, because we're really cooking in rehearsals.

"And now it's opening night. And I am as much the king as I can be--I'm 98 percent the king. I'm sitting on the throne. There's electricity in the house. Olivier is standing next to me, and the archbishop is stage center, making a speech, and I'm listening to him. Olivier is also listening and he will respond in about a minute.

"Suddenly, he starts tugging at my robe. This isn't in the scene. I don't know what to do. Has he forgotten something? He keeps tugging. I lean forward and he leans over to me and says, 'Tony, where the fuck do you get good English beer in New York?' The next minute, he's talking to the archbishop, perfectly in character. I couldn't believe it."

I'll tell you an Olivier story that most people probably don't know. Olivier was originally supposed to play the title role in The Godfather. He was all set to go, and then he got sick, and they gave it to Marlon Brando. Robert Duvall, who had seen Olivier test for the Godfather, said Olivier was incredible. He didn't put anything in his cheeks, but he had a perfect Italian accent. Duvall said, "He had a sneer on his mouth, with happiness in his eye."

Duvall also told me what it was like working with Brando. I asked him, "When you're working in a scene with him, is he the character or is he Brando?"

"That's a good question," Duvall said. "We're actors and we react off one another, but we're sane human beings, too. We know there are lights and a crew, and I know that's Marlon and he knows I'm Robert. So when he was acting in those scenes, we all knew it was Marlon Brando. Except sometimes."

I asked him what he meant.

"Sometimes he was so great," Duvall said, "that he was Don Corleone, and he scared us. There was this scene where he turned around and said, 'No!' We had suggested something, and he was supposed to say no; but we all stopped cold--me, James Caan, Al Pacino. We were frightened to death: Corleone was mad at us. It was because of moments like that one that we all came to watch Brando when we weren't in the scene with him."

Brando is a little out of it now, though. Tommy Thompson told me a revealing story about him. Thompson was a wonderful writer who wrote Blood and Money and later died of cancer. Brando was his good friend. Apocalypse Now had just come out, and it was playing to wildly mixed reviews: They loved it, they hated it. Meanwhile, Brando was in Tahiti. Thompson flew to Tahiti, Brando met him at the airport and drove him to his place in a pickup truck.

"I wanted to say something nice to him," Tommy told me. "So I said, 'Marlon, I saw you in Apocalypse Now. You were terrific.' And Brando said, 'Is that the one where I was bald?' "

•

I would have to say that one of my favorite politicians was Hubert Humphrey. Over the years, I got to know Hubert well and came to love him for his humanity as much as for his political convictions. The last time I interviewed him was five weeks before he died. We were discussing loneliness and greatness and how the public's impression of fame or greatness can be so different from the private realization--as we learned that Lincoln suffered from depression or that Churchill, too, had moments of great despondency. Humphrey told me he had checked into Sloan-Kettering just before the holiday season--they had diagnosed cancer and were going to begin treatment--and he called his wife, Muriel, and said, "Go visit the kids. I'm going to start this treatment tomorrow morning; I want to be alone and get a good night's sleep. No sense your staying here."

"So I'm in this private room in Sloan-Kettering," he told me, "and I pick up the phone and call the switchboard. I say, 'This is Vice-President Humphrey. I'd like not to be disturbed.' Then I read a little, and I've just turned off the light to go to sleep when the phone rings. I say to myself, Damn. I pick up the phone and it's Richard Nixon. He's in San Clemente, recovering from phlebitis, and he's all alone. He's all packed to go spend time with the kids. And we talk for two hours. We talk about old times, we talk about cancer, we talk about Watergate. We were just two old warriors."

I was almost crying when Humphrey told me that story. Here were two men who'd run against each other for the Presidency in one of the closest elections in American history, and who couldn't be more different from each other. Now it's nine years later; one of them is dying of cancer, the other is out of office, in disgrace. And they're both alone, commiserating with each other.

•

I was with Barry Goldwater at the Republican Convention that nominated Nixon to run against Humphrey. The Republicans gave Nixon a party the night before the nomination that turned out to be a pretty wild night. We all had a lot to drink and started talking about women, as men do when they have too much to drink. Goldwater started telling stories about a German girl he'd slept with five or six years before.

Shortly after Kennedy had been in Germany giving his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, Goldwater went over on a fact-finding tour. He said, "There was this German girl, a secretary from our embassy, who was unbelievably gorgeous." He described a cross between Ursula Andress and Romy Schneider. "I was over there alone for seven days and on the sixth day--Barry did it." That's the way he spoke about himself--in the third person.

"Now I'm back," he said, "and as the opposition-party leader, the perfunctory courtesy is to call on the President to discuss my visit to Germany. And then we're supposed to hold a mini press conference in the Rose Garden for ten minutes. I walk into the White House, and Dave Powers meets me in the Oval Office. Kennedy comes out of the shower--Jack showered four times a day. He had a thing about it, showered and changed clothes four times a day. Jack's brushing his hair and he looks right at me and says, 'You made her, huh? You son of a bitch, you made her.'

" 'What are you talking about?' I say.

" 'Ursula.'

" 'Ursula?'

" 'Yeah, Ursula. The embassy secretary. I tried for five goddamn days. I had Jackie go shopping, I sent her notes. Nothing. And you, older than me, with your white hair, you made her.'

"So I say, 'How do you know?'

" 'I'm the President; how the hell do you think I know?' "

•

When Robert McNamara, Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, did my show, I said to him off the air, "You all knew about the women, didn't you?"

He said, "Yeah, but it was a different era."

"How wrapped up in women was he?" I asked.

McNamara then told me this story about Kennedy that took place at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Khrushchev had sent us two conflicting cables, the second containing a proposal we could not accept. It was Robert Kennedy who came up with the brilliant idea of sending a cable back as if we hadn't received the second. Kennedy's cable put forward our proposal and was delivered with a grim warning that we needed a positive reply within 24 hours."

So now, according to McNamara, they were waiting to hear from Khrushchev. And it was coming down to the hour, literally, when Khrushchev had threatened to start World War Three. People were running back and forth between the briefing room and the Oval Office, and there in the office were McNamara, Rusk, the Kennedys and the chiefs of staff. In the middle of all this, a good-looking lady walked in with a bunch of files and dropped them on McNamara's desk. John Kennedy looked up, looked down, looked up again. Then he said to McNamara, "Who's that?"

"She's filling in today," McNamara said. "You know, we're really swamped, so they sent her over from Commerce."

Kennedy leaned over to McNamara. "Bob, I want her name and her number," he said. "We may avoid war here tonight."

•

Ted Koppel once told me a good story about Henry Kissinger. It seems Kissinger was flying to a major conference in Europe, and during the last hour of the flight, one of his aides was feverishly trying to get his attention. Kissinger kept shooing him away, telling him to be quiet and leave him alone. The aide looked more and more perplexed and finally wrote out a note, which he handed to Kissinger as he was about to walk down the stairs off the plane. Henry took the note and Ted watched him stop at the top of the stairs, look down and see that his fly was open. He zipped it up quickly, and when they arrived at the conference, Kissinger said to Koppel, "That boy is going far, that aide. Those are the things you look for, Ted. The rest is bullshit."

•

I first met Mario Cuomo when he was lieutenant governor of New York. He came onto the show and told me he'd listened to my radio show for years. Our friendship grew from there.

I love the stories Mario tells about growing up the son of poor immigrants--which are no exaggeration, by the way. During his campaign for governor, he told me, he got a call from his mother: "Mario, are you against capital punishment?"

"Yeah, Ma."

"Mario, the whole neighborhood's for it. Everywhere I go, they're for it."

"Well, I'm against it. What do you want me to do, Ma?"

"Say you're for it," she advised, "and then don't pull the switch."

We were up at the governor's mansion one night--Mario, Herb Cohen and me--and the butler came in about one A.M. and said, "Would you gentlemen care for an aperitif before retiring?"

We ordered an after-dinner drink, the butler left the room and Mario turned to us. "Did you ever in your life think that anyone would come over to you and say, 'Would you care for an aperitif before retiring'? Franchot Tone had that said to him--not an Italian from Queens and two Jewish guys from Brooklyn. That ain't the corner."

Mario has never told me he wants to be President. We all guessed for him. One night at dinner, there was a lull in the conversation, and out of the blue, I said to him, "Mario, cut the bull. Are you gonna run for President?"

"Nobody ever asked it like that," he said. Then he added, "Larry, I don't know how to tell this to you: Governor of New York ain't bad. A couple of years ago, I was working in the back of my father's grocery store. I'm the governor of New York. It's all right, Larry. If I never do anything else, this is OK.

"Besides," he added, "do you realize that if I'm elected President, the summer White House is in Rockaway?"

•

William Casey liked Cuomo quite a bit, which shocked me. "I met Mario at a St. John's alumni dinner, where I sat next to him," Casey said. "I had a great conversation with him. Mario's my kind of guy. Maybe I don't agree with him on everything, but I could like him."

"What about George Bush?" I asked.

"Well," he said, "I'm not so sure Bush is my kinda guy."

I asked him how he thought Cuomo would do in an election against Bush, and Casey said, "Cuomo would murder Bush. He'd wipe him out."

"You're kidding," I said. "You'd pick Cuomo over Bush?"

"No contest."

The conversation got around to politicians' weaknesses, and I asked him what he thought Ronald Reagan's biggest weakness was. Casey said, "Ronald Reagan is totally incapable of firing someone. And he's absolutely incapable of dressing someone down. He can get mad at a situation and say, 'What went wrong here?' But he could never call you into the office one on one and dress you down."

When David Stockman blasted Reagan's economic policy in The Atlantic Monthly, Casey was livid. He told me, "I called Reagan this morning and I said, 'It's got nothing to do with me, it's got nothing to do with the CIA; but this guy, Ronnie, is a son of a bitch. He's a prick. Bury him.' You know what he did? Reagan called Stockman into his office, and as soon as he walked in, he said to him, 'They took you out of context, right, David? They didn't print the whole thing. What you gave them was good and bad in balance and all they printed was the bad, right? I know the way they work.' " Casey was furious. Reagan immediately took Stockman off the hook, the whole meeting was relaxed and Stockman never got yelled at.

Other than that, Casey was a great admirer of Reagan; they were both hawks. "But, Jesus," he said, "you gotta lop guys off. Stockman stabbed us in the fuckin' back. Ey. Ey." That's the way Casey talked: "Ey, Jesus Christ. He lets them off the hook. It's not easy to be an ass reamer. I'm an ass reamer. Nobody likes to bust someone down. But Stockman? On your ass, you're gone." That's New York talking.

•

I became a baseball fan in 1944, when I was ten years old. Baseball is a flawless game, though fans of football, basketball and hockey may argue with me. On the other hand, the men who play it are anything but perfect.

Meeting Stan "the Man" Musial was one of the biggest thrills of my broadcasting career. He was the best hitter I ever saw. When Roger Kahn was on my show, we tried to explain what Musial meant in Brooklyn as a visiting ballplayer. We worshiped him; our pitchers never threw at him; and getting him out elicited a collective sigh of relief. He got his nickname in Brooklyn, not in St. Louis. Out in front of Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis stands a huge statue of Stan that was erected after his playing days were over. I asked him what it felt like to walk past a statue of himself. He said, "It's funny, but when I'm going in to watch a game, I never think about it. But sometimes I'll be driving home from a restaurant late at night. I'll pull into the parking lot and drive around it and say, 'Holy Cow.' " Stan's father worked in the mines in Donora, Pennsylvania, and now here he was, probably one of the few people on earth to have statues built to them while they were still alive.

If anybody in baseball had confidence in his abilities, it certainly was Stan the Man. Joe Garagiola once told me a story that proved the point. Garagiola was in the dugout one day when Wally Westlake went over to Musial and said, "Stan, I gotta tell ya, I had a great night's sleep last night--I mean, a perfect night. I woke up this morning and my shower was perfect, the bacon and eggs were perfect. It was a beautiful day and my drive in to the ball park was just wonderful. I hit four home runs in batting practice. I'm in the line-up and I can't wait to walk up to the plate. I feel it in my bones; I'm gonna get three hits today. D'ya ever feel that way?"

And Musial said, "Every day."

•

Nineteen eighty-seven was the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson's integration of the major leagues. Everybody talks about how Jackie held in his anger at all the racial slurs and physical abuse he had to take as the first black in the majors. Jackie was a fierce competitor, however, and not too many people talk about what he was like once he had successfully broken the color barrier and his competitive feelings began to come out.

Leo Durocher, the Dodger manager who later went on to the Giants, told stories about Jackie off the air that no one would have believed and that we certainly couldn't have talked about on the air.

"When Jackie played against us," Durocher said, "he would yell over things to me like 'I smelled your wife's cunt last night, Leo. Your wife fucks black guys, Leo--the darker, the better.' "

Enos Slaughter told me a story that illuminates this side of Jackie as well as anything I can recall--and I give Slaughter credit for telling it like it happened, even though he comes off as the bad guy. "I was raised in North Carolina and I never played against blacks," he told me. "I was a segregationist, like everyone else."

When Branch Rickey brought Robinson up to the Dodgers, Slaughter said, "All of my friends asked me, 'You're not gonna play against no fuckin' nigger, are ya?' "

The first time Slaughter played against Robinson, Jackie was playing first base. Slaughter told me he hit a ground ball to Robinson and they raced for the bag. Slaughter said, "I deliberately stepped right on his foot. He got there first and I was out, but I could have stepped anywhere on the bag. I aimed for his foot and spiked him. Blood came spurting out. I walked off and said to him, 'Take that, nigger.' All Jackie said was, 'I'll remember that.' He was in tremendous pain, but he held it in, and I didn't think anything of it at the time.

"Two years later, in Ebbets Field, I hit a single off the right-field wall and tried to stretch it into a double. Robinson was playing second then. I went sliding in, and he took the throw from the right fielder. He made no attempt to tag me on the leg for the put-out, which he could have done easily. Instead, he whirled around and smacked me in the mouth with the ball in his glove. Six teeth went flying, there was blood all over me and I later had to have gum surgery. As he walked away, Jackie said, 'I told you I'd remember.' "

•

Jimmy Piersall was a great baseball player, but he is probably going to be remembered more for his bouts with mental illness, as memorialized in the book and the movie Fear Strikes Out. Piersall had a funny line once. I was in the booth with Jimmy and Harry Caray, when they were the White Sox announcers, and the Sox were playing the Orioles. So we were doing the game together for a while, and a player bunted. Piersall said, "I never would have bunted in that situation."

"Jimmy," said Harry, "you're crazy."

"Hold it," Piersall said. "I'm the only man in this ball park with a certificate of sanity. I was released from an institution and I've got the papers to prove it."

•

Then there's Joe DiMaggio, one of the last living legends. I had an amazing discussion with him a couple of years ago. I had had Art Garfunkel on my radio show, and DiMaggio had heard it. He said, "Nice show last night, Larry."

I thanked him.

"You know," he said. "I like those guys, Diamond and Garfunkel. But I still don't know what they meant in the song." He was talking about the now-famous lines in Simon and Garfunkel's hit song Mrs. Robinson: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you" and "Joltin' Joe has left and gone away." Joe leaned toward me and said, "I'm still here."

I opened my mouth to say something, but he held up a hand. "I know you're going to tell me it's about how heroes are gone, myths are gone. I know, I ain't dumb," he said. "I was gonna sue. But my lawyer told me that this was the highest of compliments. I don't understand it, though. If I were dead, that would be one thing. But I'm still around."

•

If baseball is my favorite sport, then my favorite sports announcer of all time has to be the voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Red Barber. Announcers couldn't do remote broadcasts in the Forties because of wartime travel restrictions, so Barber would announce games off the ticker, the way Ronald Reagan did. Reagan always tells the same old story of how he would say the batter was fouling off pitch after pitch, because the ticker had broken down and he had to fake it. We all laugh at that story, but what Reagan is telling us is that he lied. Red wouldn't lie. Red would say, "The machine is jammed."

When I finally got to interview him a few years ago, I asked him, "Why didn't you have the guy foul off a few pitches?"

"Why would I," he said, "report to you something that wasn't happening? I'm a reporter. All I know is that the machine jammed. I don't know what's happening in the game."

Red told me he thought Pee Wee Reese was one of the bravest men he ever met, because of how Reese reacted to a situation with Jackie Robinson. Red was in the locker room in Chicago when they were informed of a death threat against number 42, which was Jackie. The FBI took the death threat very seriously. They said they were going to comb the stands and suggested that Robinson not play that day. Robinson said, "How can I not play?"

And Reese said, "I've got an idea. We'll all wear number 42. They won't know who to shoot at."

Reese didn't realize what a great moment that was in race relations, in life, in honor, in tolerance. He was just a man of average intelligence, but a team leader.

•

Switching to football, Don Shula is a great man, in my estimation. He used to be a great curser, too, but he mellowed. He had to, after some of the things that happened when he was in his first year with the Dolphins. I had been doing the color on the Dolphin broadcasts for the previous two years, when George Wilson was the coach. Wilson was a very nice guy and had almost no rules as far as the press was concerned. My job consisted of doing pregame and half-time commentary and locker-room interviews. The first game of the season, Larry Csonka got hurt and was down in the medical room being wrapped. After the game, I went down with my microphone to interview him. I didn't know that the medical room was off limits to the press under Shula's setup, because it hadn't been that way under Wilson.

I was interviewing Csonka, on the air, live, when Shula came in the other side of the room and started yelling in my general direction, "Get the fuck out of the fucking medical room!" And we had just won, too. It was a live mike and he was screaming at the top of his lungs, so I knew it went out over the air.

Csonka said to me, on the air, "Who do you think he's talking to?"

"Probably me," I said. "We'll be right back, folks."

I went outside the medical room and Csonka, who was a hell of a guy, came outside with me and finished the interview in the hallway. I folded up my gear and as I was leaving, walking back across the field toward the elevator, I saw Shula come up alongside me. He asked me kind of sheepishly, "Was what I said on the air?"

I nodded. He asked, "I said it twice, didn't I? What did you say about it?"

"I didn't say anything, but Csonka said, 'Who do you think he's talking to?' "

He smiled and said, "OK, I gotta watch that." Then he suddenly grimaced. "How the fuck could you not know the fucking medical room is off fucking limits?"

I said, "Well, I didn't, but I know now."

After that, we became good friends, and I watched him mellow.

•

I've met a lot of smart athletes in my time; but of all the intelligent sports figures in the world, without a doubt, the smartest one I've ever known is Muhammad Ali. Ali also may be the best public-relations man who has ever lived, bar none. He was certainly the best ticket seller of this century. He is also one of my favorite people on earth. He has a kind heart and deep convictions. His quote on the Vietnam war was the best one-line summation of that conflict I ever heard: "White men sending black men to kill yellow men."

For a while during the Sixties, Ali wasn't fighting, because the Government had taken his title away. He requested conscientious-objector status, saying he had nothing against the North Vietnamese, and as a result, was denied the right to fight professionally. (George Carlin put it all in perspective: "The Government said, 'If you won't kill people, we won't let you beat 'em up.' ") During that period when he wasn't fighting, he came onto my show and talked about his PR skills. He told me how he had hit upon the idea of forecasting fight results and being pompous about it, which he said happened quite by accident.

Ali, still known as Cassius Clay, was about to go into his first fight, in Louisville on a Friday, and that week he appeared on a local sports talk show to promote the fight. Gorgeous George was scheduled to wrestle in the same arena that Saturday, and they appeared on the show together. Ali said, "I went on that show and I said, 'It's my first fight, I'm the Olympic champion and I'm sure looking forward to it. I know that I've got a tough opponent, but I'm going to do my best, and I hope to embark on a professional career.'

"And then the announcer said to Gorgeous George, 'And you're wrestling the Samurai Brothers on Saturday.' George said, 'I'm gonna kill 'em! I'm gonna take their heads and pound 'em into the ring! I'm gonna bring venom and menace and horror to Louisville Saturday night!'

"I won my fight on Friday," Ali said. "George wrestled Saturday, and I don't know who won. But I looked at the attendance: I drew 4000 and he drew 13,000. I said to myself, There's something to this."

•

I knew Rocky Marciano pretty well, too, and I liked him a lot. Rocky was a great guest, but he was also the world's cheapest man. He never picked up a check. He didn't trust banks.

Rocky was so gentle and sensitive I could never figure how he could be such a killer in the ring. He hated training and he didn't much care for boxing. He wanted to be a baseball player more than anything else in the world. I asked him, "Did anybody ever scare you?"

"Oh, yeah. George," he said. "George was the neighborhood bully when we were kids. I used to be afraid to walk home from school, because if George got me, he'd beat the hell out of me."

"So you were really afraid of this kid George?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah. George was a tough guy. I'll tell you the truth. Twenty years later, I'm the heavyweight champ, and there's a dinner for me in Brockton; George is at the cocktail party--he's an automobile dealer now. And he comes up behind me and taps me on the shoulder. I turn around and he says, 'Rock, you know--'

"I ducked so fast I spilled my drink."

•

During the Sixties, I got to know and to interview most of the major black political leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown and Huey Newton. The black leader who opened my eyes the most was probably Malcolm X. He gave me an understanding of the black movement. There was a fire in Malcolm, and I thought of him as the poet of that movement. He was very light-skinned, with red hair. "Do you think, Mr. King," he said to me, "if you were my color, you'd have your job? In your wildest dreams?"

That kind of put things in perspective. Malcolm was the first to say to me, "I never see my people in a commercial. Did you ever think about that, Larry?" Before he said that, I had never thought about it. Now we take these perceptions for granted, but just 25 years ago, they seemed unheard of.

I flew back from Chicago recently and the pilot and copilot were both black. Twenty-five years ago, there would have been peril on the plane. Even ten years ago, something happened that I'll never forget. I was flying to Dallas in first class, and sitting next to me was a white pilot who was "deadheading"--flying to Dallas, where he was going to pick up his plane. He recognized me and he happened to be a fan. He said, "Larry, you know who the pilot is today?"

I don't remember the guy's name, but he was a black pilot flying left seat, and there weren't many black left-seat pilots back then, because they had been very late getting into the system. "Watch this guy," he said. "He puts on a good show."

I had no idea what he meant. After we got up into the jet stream and were cruising along, the black pilot came out, put his pilot's hat on a shelf and stretched so we could all see his captain's insignia. Then he walked out into the aisle, where everyone could see him plainly. "Ain't dis a lovely day to go flyin'?" he said in his best Uncle Remus accent. "Holy Moses, what a day we's been havin' up front in de cockpit. Ain't it wonderful, folks? I's flyin' dis plane to ... uh ... uh ... uh ... Dallas. That's where we's goin', Dallas." This is a true story. That was one nervous first-class section for the rest of the flight.

•

And, finally, I must say that I have a favorite story of my own. A lot of unusual things happen to me on the air, but nothing compared with what happened one night in the fall of 1975. You may remember Marilyn Chambers, the star of Behind the Green Door and other adult movies. Well, Marilyn was on my radio show in Miami, talking about--what else?--sex. She said, "Sex is a commodity to me. You have your voice, you use it. I have my body, I use it. It doesn't mean any more than that to me."

She stayed to the end of the program, and we were getting ready to break for the news. Perhaps to illustrate her point, she asked me, on the air, "Do you want to make love during the news?"

While I was fumbling for an answer and trying to find my voice, she added matter-of-factly, "How long is the news, anyway?"

"Six minutes," I said, grateful for a question I could answer with a straight face. "And another minute of local."

"Let's do as much as we can in seven minutes," she said--and then she began taking off her clothes. Finally, all she had on was a slim gold chain around her waist.

I didn't know what to do. Chambers certainly was attractive, but--make love? Right there in the studio?

"Come on," she said. "The subject of this show is sex, isn't it? Don't you think it's appropriate?"

So I gulped and said OK. I broke for the news and I asked the engineer to leave the control booth. The idea was that we would make love and then I would talk about it on the air after the news. Except--well, you know what comes next. I couldn't do anything. It was just too public, too exposed. It was weird.

When the news ended, we went back on the air and talked about what had happened. She said, "Why couldn't you get excited? I was willing to do anything. In fact, I like you. We could have fun. Do you want to go out after?" I said no, thank you.

When the morning disc jockey came on, Chambers was still naked. She started dancing around for him and then went over and danced right into his face. The poor guy didn't know what to do. She said to me, "It's like you taking your elbow, Larry, and rubbing it up against somebody."

Well, maybe not exactly.

"We were talking about marriage. Lenny Bruce said, 'Honey is the best blow job. That'll keep you home.' ''