Meet the Press

On a sunny mid-June morning in 1941, all seemed right in my 8-year-old world, centered as it was around a comfortable house in a Chicago Gold Coast suburb. The per capita income in Winnetka was (and is) among the nation’s highest.

But my striking brunette mother, 35, was teary-eyed and frighteningly solemn as she stared at brother Wally, 6, and me. (Infant sister Lisa was asleep in her crib.)

“There’s been a terrible accident, and I’m so sorry, your daddy was killed. We’re moving to Neenah, Wis., a lovely town where many of my Wausau friends live. Uncle Ben has found us a wonderful house, and you’re going to love it there.”

Wally didn’t get it, and his bossy big brother wanted to make sure he did. Through my tears, I sputtered, “Daddy’s dead and you’re not even crying!”

Soon, everyone was sobbing.

Our destination was a house, all right, but far from wonderful. The tired clapboard structure at 112 Third St. had rats in the coal bin, mice on the first floor and squirrels in the attic adjoining my bedroom. My mother dubbed it “The Snake Pit.”

It was all that the widow Drew and her brother, Ben Heineman, a struggling young Chicago lawyer starting a family of his own, could afford. But thanks to Heineman, his wife Natalie and Social Security, the four Drews could stay together.

Moves Like Jagger

It was another huge comedown for a Wausau heiress whose father – a lumber baron, bank director and Republican National Committee member – had lost the family fortune in the stock market crash. Broke and shamed in the early 1930s, he opened a desk drawer, took out a pistol and blew a large hole in his head.

My mother Marion’s privileged life – servants in Wausau, and boarding school and “finishing” school in New York – changed dramatically. But, she’d inherited a small trust that, combined with my dad’s salary as a Chicago coal salesman, handled the lower end of a Winnetka lifestyle.

But then, Ben Drew’s life ended. After spending too much time at the 19th hole after golf with a coal buyer, he was hit and killed by a train.

My father left precious little to his brood, the trust had run out, and my mother suffered her second, and much deeper, plunge in income. Almost overnight, the unemployed “North Shore Nancy” with live-in help became a broke single parent to her ragtag Neenah offspring.

A series of low-paying jobs included a stretch as a feature reporter and columnist for the Appleton Post-Crescent. We wore hand-me-down clothes and dreaded any calls from the grocer or milkman, who swore that they were cutting off our food for nonpayment of bills.

But Ben pitched in, and with his help and my mother’s prickly determination, all three of us graduated from Neenah High School and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Both siblings turned out very well indeed; sister Lisa and brother Wally achieved big corporate success. Wally became executive vice president of Kimberly-Clark Corp. and president of Menasha Corp., two of Wisconsin’s biggest companies. After top editorial positions at book publishers Doubleday, William Morrow and MacMillan, Lisa wound up as editor and publisher of Lisa Drew books, a prestige imprint of Scribner/Simon & Schuster.

And uncle Ben Heineman? That Wausau native and once-struggling Chicago lawyer became chairman of the Chicago & North Western Railway and later founder and CEO of its spinoff, a mighty 10-company conglomerate called Northwest Industries. He chaired commissions for U.S. presidents, was six-year chairman of the Illinois Board of Higher Education, life trustee of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Lyric Opera and University of Chicago and, at a black tie-optional banquet, was named Chicagoan of the Year.

And I became a journalist.

It was one of those monochromatic, wintry days with which chambers of commerce fill brochures, trying to convince people who love Wisconsin most of the year to hang around for February.

A fresh 6-inch snowfall sugared even branches’ thinnest twigs, and rounded Genessee Depot’s kettles and moraines into giant Henry Mooreish sculptures. I’d just survived my car’s slide into an unartistic roadside kettle en route from my desk at the Milwaukee Journal.

Pulled out of the ditch and back on my way, I found what I hoped was the sequestered estate of two internationally celebrated Wisconsinites. Eight, nine, 10 … yep! The snow-frosted rooftop verified that this was, indeed, the Ten Chimneys residence of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne.

Half of the most honored couple in the English-speaking theater, Fontanne had just recorded Anastasia for NBC-TV’s “Hallmark Hall of Fame.” That March 1967 performance was her first in decades without her spouse, who was directing at the Metropolitan Opera. As it happened, it was the last acting Lynn Fontanne ever did. At least professionally.

Fontanne, who was about 80 – she was always secretive about her birth date – had agreed to promote the show in Wisconsin’s largest newspaper. It was then (and remained) one of the few interviews the Lunts gave at Ten Chimneys to Wisconsin media.

After making a classic theatrical entrance, sweeping down a staircase, Fontanne greeted her visitor and inquired, in her theatrical British accent, “Would you like to see the property?” Was she kidding? For four decades in quaint cottages on these lush, sprawling acres, the era’s finest playwrights crafted the vehicles in which the Lunts toured and played Broadway.

With my nervous help, she pulled on a long mink coat and hat. And off we teetered, past snowdrifts, down slick tire tracks. Fontanne clutched my arm, her mink brushing the snow. Deciding fast that I preferred guiding her to safety more than an eyewitness account of a legend breaking her neck, I clutched right back.

Soon, we arrived at a cabin straight out of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. There, we found Lunt, stretched on his back on a plank between two ladders. The latter-day Michelangelo was rosemaling the ceiling (painting in the colorful Norwegian style). He, too, survived, eventually climbed down and helped provide what was probably my most memorable interview in a long, lucky career.

In a performing style they helped develop and then refine, the couple “overlapped” their answers. As an acting technique, that proved far more natural than what had been, pre-Lunt, traditional. If not quite up to the arch drawing room ripostes their pal Nöel Coward wrote for them, their dazzling repartee sounded hip, indeed, to this Milwaukee rube.

Last September, my memories of that magical February day competed successfully with the faux reality of a Milwaukee Repertory Theater imagining of life at Ten Chimneys. I much preferred my “original cast” visit to the Rep’s version of playwright Jeffrey Hatcher’s fictional Ten Chimneys. Mildly amusing, it was stock exploitative “docudrama,” a made-up story about very real Wisconsin people.

After the play closed, the theater staged another docudrama about a celebrated – but this time temporary – Badger, iconic Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. I know and admire David Maraniss, who wrote the book on which Lombardi was based, but I didn’t join the throngs of Packers fans who made it a major Rep hit.

As it happened, I also knew Lombardi. While assistant sports editor of the Appleton Post-Crescent, I assigned myself to cover the brand-new Green Bay coach’s talk to the Neenah Rotary Club in early 1959.

I knew very little about Lombardi then, but I learned plenty that day. Noting the Packers’ 1-10-1 record the previous year, I cockily confronted him with my belief that he had inherited a rotten offense. “Obviously,” I pontificated to this gnarly and unsmiling onetime member of Fordham University’s famed Seven Blocks of Granite line, “your first job will be to fix that.”

There was silence from the coach and a furious glare that could bring brutal football Hessians to tears. After an uncomfortable pause, Lombardi emitted a roar that seemed to rattle the Valley Inn windows: “Get this, sonny! The first thing I’m building is a DE-fense.”

I simultaneously gulped and controlled my bladder. Things didn’t improve much from that rough start. But the Packers’ new coach had made it clear that he was to be treated with godlike respect.

Later, as his teams were piling Super Bowl trophies on top of NFL championships, I found myself seated next to Vince and Marie Lombardi at a St. Norbert College production of the classic musical Guys and Dolls. I noted that the transplanted New Yorkers weren’t much amused with a production that couldn’t possibly meet their Broadway standards.

My Lunt and Lombardi interviews were among hundreds of fascinating experiences in a charmed career that included one-on-one home visits with Woody Allen, Julie Andrews, Mae West, Robert Wagner, Walter Matthau and Larry (J.R.) Hagman. And three memorable meals at Bob Hope’s Toluca Lake mansion.

There were also dozens of other private interviews – Johnny Carson, Joan Rivers, Barbara Walters, Caroline Kennedy and the leading TV journalists of the time: Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, among many others.

I know this name-dropping suggests I am pretty full of myself. Perhaps that was true when the Journal was running my nerdy picture atop my column four or five days a week. But reflecting now on a challenging career doing what might have been the only thing I’m qualified to do, I realize how lucky I was.

I made a living venting my opinions, some half-baked, and firing questions, many dumb, at hundreds of people, many smarter and more interesting than I. I was blessed to have been a white male in the 20th (American) century, working while print still had a mass following.

And lucky indeed to have worked on one of the nation’s most prosperous and honored newspapers, the Milwaukee Journal, in its golden age. A paper that sent its television and theater critics – jobs I held at various times – to Hollywood and New York for six weeks a year. And, periodically, to London and Las Vegas.

In those heady days for print, the Journal and other papers in the nation’s 50 or 60 biggest markets believed staff members had a better sense of their readers’ tastes and interests than the artsy-smartsy print press from the coasts. In response, the TV networks and movie studios staged regular “press tours,” bringing critics and columnists from “flyover America” to Hollywood and New York to mingle with and interview stars, producers, directors and executives.

The papers paid for transportation and hotel rooms; the networks – eager for wide coverage of expensive shows – tied press conferences to meals, often in fancy locations. I learned fast that if you skipped network meals for ethical reasons, you missed good stories. Reluctantly, the Journal went along.

One memorable night on the old Queen Mary luxury liner, anchored off Long Beach, Calif., I found myself seated for cocktails and dinner next to the aging but still feisty actor Robert Mitchum. Why on the Queen Mary? Mitchum was playing a ship’s captain in the World War II miniseries “The Winds of War,” and ABC said some of the series was shot there.

Always disdainful of the press, Mitchum had given himself an afternoon’s head start on cocktail hour, breaking a rule that shipboard drinking begins after “the sun sinks under the yardarm.” When I asked him a question he characterized as “stupid,” Mitchum added, “And where did that come from, your (bleep)?”

Immediately, two ABC flacks lifted him out of his chair and the room, and eventually off the ship, missing dinner and the general press conference. My colleagues were not amused.

Interview meals weren’t always glamorous. Catching acerbic actor Walter Matthau in his Pacific Palisades mansion before one of his trips to the Santa Anita racetrack, I was asked to join him in the kitchen. There, Matthau dined on a steak; I got cheese and crackers.

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Born at the University of Chicago’s Lying-In Hospital in 1932, I grew up on that city’s south side and in the ease of suburban Winnetka before my dad’s death drove us to Wisconsin.

Once I got to UW-Madison, I became the Daily Cardinal managing editor. I also ran the newspaper engraving machine and drove a Yellow Cab to scratch out room and board. After graduation, the Kewanee Star-Courier in Illinois hired me, then 20, as sports editor.

As a political science major, however, I hadn’t learned the copy-
editing skills to make tight daily deadlines. On the evening of my third day in Kewanee, the managing editor came to my rooming house smelling of alcohol, plopped down on my cheap bed and made a life-altering announcement.

“Mike, I’m sorry,” he mumbled, avoiding my worried stare. “You’re not going to make it on our paper.” Then, the gratuitous coup de grace: “Probably nowhere else in journalism either.”

Stunned, I called my newswoman mother for advice. She spit it out without a pause: “Tell that SOB you want two weeks’ pay and train fare home. We’ll figure this out.” I got a week’s pay and was shown the door.

Back in Neenah, I healed the ulcer that bounced me out of ROTC and the Korean War. Soon, I was offered the sports editorship of the Neenah-Menasha News-Record. But a former Cardinal colleague with shaky emotions had the job. I certainly didn’t want him to suffer what I just had, so I turned it down. Several months later, he jumped out of a hotel room window in Milwaukee.

Thank God I didn’t have that on my conscience.

Before long, I climbed back on journalism’s slippery pole for two Ohio dailies, where I handled half a dozen beats, and five years on Appleton’s “Roast Pheasant,” as we sarcastic ink-stained wretches called the Post-Crescent.

Besides sports, I wrote reviews and editorials, and in 1961, I moved to the Milwaukee Journal copy desk and then its feature department. At the time, the Journal was often ranked among the nation’s top 10 newspapers, and I was awed and energized by its talented writers: Harry Pease, Bob Wells, Don Trenary, Cleon Walfoort, Wade Mosby.

With a wife and two darling daughters, Polly and Pam, to feed, I grabbed every reviewing assignment that came along: the Beatles in Chicago, Frank Sinatra there and in Madison and Milwaukee, Elvis in Las Vegas, the Rolling Stones here and road-show versions of hit musicals.

After the Stones performance, I interviewed Mick Jagger backstage. “What’s the secret of your success?” I wondered. Jagger stared, somewhat bemused, at his bald questioner and responded with disdain, “Why sex appeal, of course!”

A jazz fan, I remained puzzled.

With big help from synopses and chutzpah, I staggered through critiques of plays in Yiddish and German, neither of which I understood. And country-western and rock ’n’ roll concerts, which I loathed and whose fans convinced the paper to reassign me. Plus hundreds of celebrity interviews, including a strange meeting with the late star reporter, Mike Wallace.

His death in April recalled the remarkable evening I’d spent alone with him 28 years ago in his Manhattan townhouse. On that chilly October night, I stared in deep puzzlement across a bare living room at the surprisingly fragile “60 Minutes” cross-examiner. Except for our chairs, a TV and piles of cardboard boxes, the room was empty.

Picking at his TV dinner, Wallace appeared bone-tired and, despite the thick shock of black hair, older than his 66 years. “Do you dye your hair?” I asked in my toughest Mike Wallace delivery. “Hell no, look at these roots,” he laughed, bending over. They were coal black.

But could this aging lion be the intrepid reporter whose name (as in “Mike Wallace is here to see you”) had struck terror into both the guilty and the innocent for two decades? (And would for two more.)

Where was the resonant baritone that could terrorize the terrible and woo big-time charmers? The voice that sparingly critiqued the George H.W. Bush-Geraldine Ferraro vice presidential debate we were watching, was uncharacteristically flat.

That was understandable. Wallace was on leave from rooting out international scoops. He was spending long days in a Manhattan courtroom while a murderer’s row of high-priced lawyers accused him and CBS News of libeling U.S. Army Gen. William Westmoreland.

Westmoreland demanded a retraction of Wallace’s charges that the general was fudging American casualty figures in the Vietnam War. The proud general also wanted $120 million in damages. (The lawsuit was settled out of court.)

Wallace also was weathering another life-altering experience, he told me. His third marriage had ended after 28 years. That explained the boxes. He was moving out of the couple’s home and, he hoped, moving on, with Mary Yates, the widow of his former producer, Ted Yates. (Mike and Mary later married, and she survives him.)

So why, amid all this stress, did Wallace agree to meet the Milwaukee Journal’s broadcasting columnist? Probably because Mike was expected to promote his latest book, Close Encounters. Its editor was my sister, Lisa Drew.

The next time I saw Wallace, at Milwaukee’s old Pieces of Eight Restaurant, he confided that he didn’t remember a thing about our evening together. Or little else from that entire fall.

A lifelong victim of depression, he told me and later wrote that he’d suffered a nervous breakdown, attempted suicide and spent weeks recovering in a mental hospital.

Bob Hope, who probably had entertainment’s biggest personal public relations machine, was the entertainer I spent the most time with. He regularly phoned the press, sent broadcasting columnists trinkets for Christmas and tossed lavish dinners at his Toluca Lake estate in California for 100-plus of his “dear friends” in the media.

The parties were held outside, next to a huge swimming pool and a wedge shot from his private par 3 golf holes.

Instead of circulating among the guests, he’d have writers from the bigger papers rotate into his table for one course. One year, I got the dessert slot and sat down next to Bob. Immediately, he asked if I could ride along in his golf cart when he played a charity event in Wisconsin two months later. I said I would and then promptly forgot, figuring he would, too.

Hope called in three months, promoting a TV special. Immediately, he asked, “Why didn’t you show up for my Wisconsin golf game?”

Another NBC superstar, Johnny Carson of “The Tonight Show,” was Hope’s media opposite. Charming and self-assured on the air, Carson was deeply shy and avoided Hollywood parties and the press.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, his only newspaper interview in a four-year period was with the Journal. It wasn’t because he disliked me any less than the rest of the press corps. The Milwaukee NBC affiliate (WTMJ) had decided it wasn’t going to carry “Tonight” live. (Local stations can make more money from their own programming. Channel 4 would be one of the rare NBC affiliates that ever delayed the mighty Johnny Carson.)

Furious, the network moved “Tonight” to Channel 18, and an equally annoyed Carson invited me to his Burbank office to promote the cross-town switch. Upon entering Carson’s sanctum sanctorum, I noticed a full drum set next to Johnny’s desk, where he worked off his celebrated tension. Johnny was extremely nervous, chain-smoking and working his way through a lot of coffee. Or something.

He tapped his fingers, fidgeted in his desk chair, paced and winked at me nonstop. Or so it seemed. He was actually blinking, as if he’d just caught a handful of sand in the face. There was an astounding contrast between the always-cool TV host, who handled presidents and superstars with aplomb, and the nervous Nelly in front of me.

He requested that I not use my tape recorder, the only time that anyone ever did. Strange, I thought, that he’d prefer not being quoted accurately. And he wasted no jokes or witty observations on me.

Neither did Woody Allen, who invited me to his Fifth Avenue New York penthouse to promote his latest film. There was one major problem: I’d brought Lisa, who adored Allen’s movies and New Yorker pieces, and probably wanted to sign him for a book deal.

When the doorman phoned to announce me and the “young lady,” Woody objected: “He’s supposed to be alone.”

After a five-minute back and forth, Allen yielded, and we took the elevator directly to the penthouse. Arriving in his living room, I was stunned by a spectacular view of nearly the entire New York skyline, with Central Park in the foreground.

For an hour, Woody plugged his film and Broadway projects, without much more than a small quip. He expanded on how much he hated Hollywood and loved New York. (A theme in many people’s favorite Allen movie, Annie Hall.) After an hour, we got up to leave, and Woody said he would ride down with us.

“I’m due at my psychoanalyst in five minutes,” he explained.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry that we’ve made you late,” I replied.

“Don’t worry about it, I see her three times a week.”

On the ground floor, he rushed into the backseat of his waiting limousine, which sped off.

“So what did you think?” Lisa wondered.

“Well,” I replied, “I’ve never heard anyone so in love with New York.”

Always the realist, the book editor shot back, “But of course. He gets the best seats for plays, concerts and Knicks games, has that fabulous view and immediate access to Central Park. And his limo takes him everywhere!”

When I interviewed Joan Rivers, then a regular performer at Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel, she was working, hugely pregnant, at a New York cabaret. She asked to be interviewed in the back of a coatroom so that Burt Lancaster, who had to leave before her next set, “wouldn’t see me watching him go. He’s a big star,” she said, “and that might embarrass him.”

After a few questions amid the coats and umbrellas, Rivers suddenly grimaced and announced, “We must end this right now! I’m about to have a baby!”

The next morning, the New York papers announced that she had delivered daughter Melissa.

I met Caroline Kennedy, another of Lisa’s authors, at a press conference for a PBS series on New York’s Metropolitan Museum. The daughter of the late president and his wife, Jacqueline, was acting as the Met’s TV publicist.

I’d introduced myself to her as the brother of Lisa, who was then executive editor of book publisher Doubleday and Co. as well as Jacqueline Kennedy’s boss and friend. After we chatted for a bit, a colleague of mine, who wrote gossipy stuff for a Philadelphia tabloid, approached to ask Caroline personal questions about the late president.

“Miss Kennedy is here to talk about the Met,” I said, uncharacteristically stifling free inquiry. He walked off in a huff, Caroline said thanks, and that, I thought, was that.

The next day, Jackie Kennedy sent Lisa an office memo asking her to thank me for “playing Sir Lancelot to Caroline.”

Life wasn’t always serene on the fringes of the rich and famous. During an interview in CBS anchor Walter Cronkite’s surprisingly small New York office, I asked, “What is the worst part of your job?”

Then “the most trusted man in America,” Cronkite snapped back, coldly, “Interviews like this one.”

I don’t remember my next question to the man I’d long admired. But I forgave him for his disdain of losing precious preparation time from that night’s newscast.

Then there was the time I asked monumentally self-involved sportscaster Howard Cosell, on Phil Donahue’s syndicated talk show, “Why did you wait until you made yourself rich broadcasting boxing to start attacking the sport as corrupt?”

Furious, an ashen Cosell jumped up, strode to where I was sitting, pointed a finger in my face and berated me for what seemed like an eternity on national television.

Attending the 47th birthday party of my favorite singer, Sarah Vaughan, after her midnight show in Las Vegas, I asked if I could give her a birthday kiss.

“Of course,” the “Divine One” purred sweetly, “if I can tell you where.”

I shut my unprofessional kisser and slunk away.

Another night after a 1 a.m. show in Vegas, I interviewed country-western singer Roger Miller (“King of the Road”), who concluded by asking if I wanted to fly with his entourage in his Learjet to Los Angeles. “We can find lots more action there,” Miller said.

I declined. A year later, I read a verbatim account of that exchange in the New Yorker, which had a staff writer spending a week with Miller. The singer was drinking a case of Coke a day and barely sleeping.

Back in the days when Lake Geneva had a Playboy Club that brought in big-league entertainment, the Journal sent me there for reviews and interviews.

After a Tony Bennett performance, I was told to go to his suite for our meeting.

I entered to find Bennett and his second wife, Sandra Grant, in the midst of a bitter squabble, my clue to their impending divorce.

In Lake Geneva, I also interviewed Sammy Davis Jr., who said he was giving me a “huge exclusive, the first time I’ve talked about this. I’m leaving the United States to live in the Caribbean. I’ve had it with America’s racial prejudice.”

A few days after my story was picked up by the wire services, I received a clipping from the Miami Herald that quoted Davis telling a Miami reporter the same thing, days before my “scoop.” That, and the fact that I don’t think Davis ever followed through on his plan, cured me of calling anything “exclusive.”

And then there was the time I rode atop a convertible in a Wisconsin Avenue parade, seated next to then-Journal editor Sig Gissler.

Both of us were pretty much ignored until I heard a shrill voice yell, “Mike Drew, over here!”

“At last,” I thought, turning to give my lone fan a pope-like wave.

“Your column sucks!!”

Gissler was greatly amused. For the next parade, he replaced me with Dennis Getto.

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When my column ended in 2006, I learned fast that whatever bit of local celebrityhood I had was fleeting. Suddenly, my opinion had no more weight than the gent on the next barstool. But I had a long ride doing something I enjoyed that was constantly challenging.

And I’ve been blessed with a long life and good health. I still can walk hilly golf courses, play tennis doubles and, with the help of a smart and strong crew, race our sailboat on Lake Michigan.

Most importantly, I’ve been supported by two wise wives – not simultaneously. Miraculously, Joanie and Alice have become friends who find lots to discuss at regular family gatherings. When I asked a daughter what they talk about, she responded, “What a bad lay you are.” Another offered, “Misery loves company.”

When the Calatrava addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum opened, my uncle Ben, who by that time had been immensely successful in Chicago and nationally, brought his beloved wife, Natalie, here for the event. Walking through the museum, Ben asked me to guess what was his proudest achievement.

Being one of Chicago’s leading benefactors to major public institutions and arts groups? And Chicagoan of the Year?

“No.”

How about donating a contemporary glass collection valued at $10 million to the Corning Museum in Corning, N.Y., which erected a wing to house it? Not that either.

Or playing such an important role in the lives of the impoverished four Neenah Drews? Nope, though he was delighted with how that turned out.

“The proudest thing I ever did,” he said, “was pleading with the Milwaukee County Board to buy this property for a very attractive price. It became your present Downtown lakefront, including the ground where the War Memorial and Calatrava stand. This land used to be a North Western Railway switching yard.”

Ben had envisioned Milwaukee’s lakefront matching Chicago’s in beauty and public usage. In his downtown Chicago penthouse hang several Milwaukee Journal and Sentinel cartoons with Ben, hat in hand, begging county officials to keep the lakefront away from developers.

The man who rescued his impoverished sister and her three kids from the depths of poverty also rescued the Milwaukee lakefront.

In retirement, I’ve found similar joy in volunteering, on a far smaller scale. A good job rewards you monetarily and, if you’re lucky, psychologically. But trying to repay the advantages of a fortunate life can provide far deeper satisfactions to both heart and soul.