Truth Be Told Page 5

  To me, wealth was the evening. Wealth was having Sidney Poitier read this poem written by my youngest son, Cannon.

  Portrait of My Dad

  When my dad is late, his eyes are like burning fire moving furiously in a black pot.

  Oh, Dad, you are a clock screaming let’s go with a gnarled voice in the morning sky.

  Sometimes, you are a baseball flying to different ballparks in the night sky.

  Other times, you are an ocean flowing with the wind and the fish.

  One thing I really like about you is your sport competivity. It runs every day with excitement.

  Oh, Dad, you are a clock screaming let’s go with a gnarled voice in the morning sky.

  Without you, the world would break in pieces and the sun would never shine on Earth.

  Oh, Dad, you are a clock screaming let’s go with a gnarled voice in the morning sky.

  I looked around and saw friends. My producer, Wendy, Ryan Seacrest, and a long table of others. Wolfgang Puck was in the kitchen cooking. Every time I wondered how the evening could possibly improve, it got better.

  Toward the end of the dinner, Shawn noticed that the conversations were clustering at different parts of the table. She thought it would be good if everyone could come together. So I got up and said, “Thanksgiving has just passed. I’d like to ask everyone at the table to take a moment and tell us what they’re thankful for.”

  Sidney Poitier told this amazing story of his unexpected and premature birth. He was born while his mother and father were in Miami to sell a hundred boxes of tomatoes they’d grown back in the Bahamas. And he came out weighing less than three pounds. His father had already lost several children to disease and stillbirth. So he went to the undertaker in the “colored” section of Miami and came back with a shoebox for a casket. But his mother went to a fortune-teller who said the shoebox wouldn’t be necessary. “Don’t worry about your son,” the fortune-teller said. “He will travel to the corners of the earth and walk with kings.” The story went on for twelve minutes. These few sentences do his eloquence little justice.

  Everybody’s reflections were moving—and nobody mentioned money. Seventy-nine year old Ernie Banks and his wife gave thanks for being able to recently adopt a two-year-old. It turns out that Carlos’s assistant was born very late to her parents and didn’t grow up with much family. She gave thanks that Carlos’s son would call her “cousin.” Shawn was nearly crying as she spoke about her parents, who had helped her through what had been a very tough year. The mood of the room became so intimate that the servers could sense it and they stopped coming in.

  Carlos asked to be left to the end. I noticed him writing some notes as the others spoke and I saw how seriously he takes what he says even at a dinner party. He wanted to make sure his words were as meaningful as the gift he brought Shawn: his wife’s favorite serving plate. In the best way he could, he’d brought his wife to the dinner.

  The biggest commitment that he has with himself, Carlos said, is to learn something different every day. He doesn’t want a day to go by without learning something new. He wanted to thank us for having given him the opportunity to learn so many new things.

  “This,” he said, “has been one of the most memorable days in my life.”

  At age seventy-seven, I was still making friends like Carlos Slim. Which made me feel like the richest man in the world.

  4

  Music

  Musicians were guests on many of the shows that aired over my last two weeks. Jon Bon Jovi brought along a pair of bright red suspenders for me to wear on my final show. Celine Dion sang John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Barbra Streisand opened up her home. Garth Brooks took the time to talk with people on our staff in a way that made them feel as special as he is. Stevie Wonder composed a song for me. It had a rhyme I wasn’t quite expecting.

  Larry, I’m gonna miss ya.

  If you were a woman, I’d kiss ya.

  I’ve always had an affinity for musicians. I’ve never really thought of this until now, but in a way it was a musician who gave me my start—or at least a sense of what I was to become. The first celebrity I ever interviewed was a singer. I never even asked for the interview. Bobby Darin just showed up one morning out of the blue.

  I’d just left my first job for another station. The new station worked out a deal for me to broadcast live from a deli in Miami Beach called Pumpernik’s. The hour after breakfast was slow at the restaurant, and the owner figured the show might bring some traffic. It was a very simple setup. After the early morning broadcast from the station, I walked over to the deli and picked the show up from there. The deli had an elevated platform with a table, a couple of chairs, and a microphone—that was it. Jerry Seinfeld said that when he watched Larry King Live he always felt like the show was coming from a deli. That’s probably because my style was formed at Pumpernik’s. I hadn’t done much interviewing before then. All of a sudden I was talking to anyone who came over—waiters, plumbers, conventioneers. An eight-year-old kid could venture over to the microphone. Anything could happen. There was no way to prepare. I never knew who was going to be in front of me. Fifty-three years later, my ideal guest would still be someone interesting who walks over and surprises me.

  After about two weeks, Darin walked in. He had trouble sleeping at night, and he’d heard me promote the show from the studio early that morning. I loved “Mack the Knife” but I really didn’t know anything about him. We spoke for an hour on the air, then took a long walk along the beach. Darin started confiding in me. He was born with a rheumatic heart and he knew he wasn’t going to live a long life, so he tried to pack everything he could into every single day. The conversation was the kind you’d have with an old friend. It was as if, on that day, he showed me the music that was inside me.

  Musicians are always giving us gifts. One of the best is that they can bring us back in time and make us feel young again. At breakfast the other day, I recalled a song that Bob Marley sang. It was called “Kaya.” I have a daughter whose name is pronounced the same—Chaia. As I was telling the story, I could see my daughter singing that song. I was back in the moment. I could hear Chaia’s eight-year-old voice. “Got to have ka-ya now ...” She loved that song—and had no idea that it was about marijuana.

  Then my mind flashed ahead and I could picture exactly where Bob Marley was sitting when I interviewed him. I could see him right down to the beads in his dreadlocks.

  Then my mind fast-forwarded years later to a college kid who asked me in disbelief: You met Bob Marley?

  Well, of course I met Bob Marley. It was no big deal. He was doing a concert in Miami, we gave him a call and he came over to talk.

  You met Bob Marley?

  As if Bob Marley was from another century. Then it hit me. It was another century. Chaia is not eight years old anymore—she’s forty-three. Bob Marley has been dead for thirty years. And not only did I meet Bob Marley, I met Louie Armstrong! As soon as I snap away from the warmth of those moments, I feel old. And do you know what old feels like? Old is when you ask George Burns if he’s got arthritis and he replies: “I was the first.”

  It’s a strange sensation, to be swept back in time in one instant, then feel ancient the next. I don’t know if I can describe it. Maybe you have to be in my shoes—but maybe not. Maybe I can get the feeling across simply by telling stories about many of the musicians I’ve met and the music they’ve made. That way, you’ll be back in all those moments with me. And when you add them up, you’ll see what I mean.

  America the Beautiful

  Songs come up randomly. This is a good one to begin with. I don’t think I ever heard a better rendition of “America the Beautiful” than Ray Charles’s. It’s more than a good singer singing a good song. Ray went beyond the song. Here’s what amazes me about it. The America that Ray Charles grew up in was not a beautiful place—not if you were black.

  There was nobody better than a blind man to show how ridiculous it is to discriminate because of s
kin color. He told me a story that’s so sad it’s funny. He remembered going to a school for the blind as a boy in Florida. At this school, the white kids were placed on one side of the room and the black kids on the other. They couldn’t see each other’s skin color. But they were separated.

  I’ve always wondered if he needed to be blind to sing “America the Beautiful” the way he did. He knew prejudice—but he didn’t see it. Maybe if he’d seen it, the song would have come out differently.

  Day-O

  Harry Belafonte’s voice reminds me of the day he changed everything on Miami Beach.

  I went to set up an interview with him at a new hotel where he was going to perform. Jackie Gleason owned a piece of this hotel. Black entertainers worked in Miami Beach in the early sixties—but they never stayed in Miami Beach. They weren’t allowed. They stayed at the Sir John, a swank hotel in the black area of Miami.

  Harry was going to open Friday. On Tuesday, he arrived for rehearsals and walked to the hotel counter to check in.

  “Hello, Mr. Belafonte,” the clerk says. “So excited to have you here. We have a car to take you to the Sir John where you’ll be staying.”

  Harry says, “Why am I staying at the Sir John?”

  “That’s where our Negro entertainers stay.”

  Harry says, “Not this one. I stay where I work. I’m not working at the Sir John, and I’m not staying at the Sir John.”

  There’s a panic behind the desk. Calls are made. Finally, they get Gleason on the phone. “What kind of bullshit is this?” Jackie says. “Check him in.”

  “OK.” The clerk turns to Harry and says, “We’ll make an exception for you.”

  This was huge. I ran to the pay phone to call the Miami Herald. It was gigantic news—and Harry wouldn’t stop pushing it.

  “I’m with twelve people,” he says. “Six men and six women. They sing and dance behind me. They stay where they play, too.”

  It was like Jackie Robinson bringing in a whole team of black ballplayers to a ballfield that had never allowed blacks to play.

  All the singers and dancers were checked in. Reporters started running in from all over. Everybody was going crazy. The feeling in the lobby that day is impossible for a young person today to imagine.

  Malice in Wonderland

  We taped an hour with the rapper Snoop Dogg last summer. I drove around in his car—a ’67 Pontiac. The paint job cost twenty-five grand. We had cornbread, chicken and waffles. It was a blast. Fog machines were going when he walked on the set.

  When the taping was over, Snoop left just before the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney came in to do the live show.

  When Romney heard he’d just missed Snoop Dogg he couldn’t believe it. “Ohhhhh,” he said, “I really wanted to meet him.”

  The two of them together—that’s a picture I’d like to have.

  I’d lived through Nat King Cole not being able to have his show televised in the South. I can remember when Joe Kennedy wouldn’t let Sammy Davis Jr. sing at President Kennedy’s inaugural. And I’ve seen Mitt Romney upset that he didn’t get to meet Snoop Dogg.

  Did all this really happen in a single lifetime?

  Hello, Dolly!

  I’m always amazed where music comes from. There are probably more melodies than there are grains of sand in the desert—each containing its own story. Many of those stories are too mysterious to be understood. It was useless to ask Louie Armstrong about his music. “I don’t know what I do,” he told me, “I just know that I do it.”

  Ma Cherie Amour

  It’s my favorite Stevie Wonder song. I never get tired of it. Ask him where his music comes from, and he’ll tell you he’s simply the vehicle for a higher power. But that higher power seems to delight in throwing down obstacles to make the music better.

  Stevie told me that when he first wrote the song, it was about his girlfriend. It was called “My Marsha—I Wish That You Were Mine.”

  But then he and Marsha broke up.

  I Walk the Line

  Everything about this song came backward. Johnny Cash told me he decided to record a melody he’d been strumming on his guitar. He was using a Wilcox-Gay recorder—the kind popular in the Air Force back in the fifties. Somehow he inserted the tape backward and when he replayed the melody and the sound came through the speakers he couldn’t figure out how he’d done it. The sound kept haunting him—just wouldn’t leave his mind. Then he put words to it: “Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”

  He didn’t think the song was any good. He was on tour the first time he heard it on the radio, and he immediately called Sun Records and begged them to stop making the record. “Please don’t send it out to any more radio stations,” he said. “I just don’t want to hear it anymore.”

  “Well,” he was told, “you’ll have to keep your radio off because it’s playing everywhere.”

  In another week it was number one.

  Best That You Can Do

  Peter Allen told me how he was struck by the inspiration for the theme song to the movie Arthur. He was flying into New York one night—a beautiful night. He could see the moon. Bright stars. But he couldn’t see the city because of a very low layer of clouds below. The pilot said, “We’re going to have to circle a few times.”

  Peter took out a pencil and wrote: When you get caught between the moon and New York City.

  God Bless America

  Irving Berlin didn’t like it when he wrote it. He put it away in a drawer, and it stayed there for twenty years. Then one day, Kate Smith called him up. She had a July 4 show coming up. The conversation went something like this.

  “Irving, you got something?”

  “I wrote something a long time ago, but it’s no good—too sentimental.”

  “Let me see it.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Let me see it . . .”

  The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)

  It was ninety-five degrees in Chicago and the air conditioner was broken in the hotel. Mel Tormé told me he wrote that song just so he could think of something cold.

  Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive

  Johnny Mercer never wrote a lyric before he got the tune. He had Harold Arlen’s tune in his head when he walked into an elevator. Then the elevator got stuck.

  Misty

  Erroll Garner played piano in a very distinctive style. Never took a lesson. He was in a car with a friend. They were driving along and Earl started singing this melody.

  The friend said, “That’s pretty.”

  Garner said, “I heard it somewhere on the radio.”

  They drove a little further and Garner kept taking the melody forward.

  “You sure you heard that song?” the friend said.

  “I guess. It’s in my head.”

  “Why don’t we write that down?”

  Earl didn’t know he’d composed a song. Music just swirled through him.

  Yesterday

  Eric Clapton tells the story about going backstage to meet the Beatles for the first time. Paul McCartney was strumming a beautiful melody on the guitar. He didn’t have the lyrics yet. He was singing: Scrambled eggs ... everybody calls me scrambled eggs.

  “Stupid words,” he said. “But what do you think?”

  I Write the Songs

  Ever go to a Barry Manilow show? Every song has the emotion of a closing number.

  An interesting thing about Manilow: He was famous for singing “I Write the Songs.” But he didn’t write that one. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys did.

  Take the “A” Train

  Not many people know it, but Duke Ellington also wrote a Catholic mass.

  Oh, What a Beautiful Morning

  This comes from the play Oklahoma! written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Not much was expected from the show. The play was a remake of a western that opened up on Broadway in the thirties.

  The songs were beautiful, but one of the critics noted that
the first one didn’t come until fifteen minutes into the show.

  So Rodgers and Hammerstein went to their hotel room and wrote “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” They couldn’t restage the play. So they just had the male lead, Curly, open the show by walking out onstage and singing.

  When you see a musical now, with the music completely integrated into the plot, you know where it comes from.

  I Will Always Love You

  Whitney Houston made it famous. But it was Dolly Parton’s song. When I asked Dolly if she liked hearing other people sing her songs, she said it was thrilling.

  The first time she heard Whitney sing it she thought, “Is that my little song?”

  But that’s how you know a song is special. Like Stevie Wonder says, a song is great when it opens itself to various interpretations.

  MacArthur Park

  This was a Jimmy Webb song. Sinatra loved Jimmy Webb, and Sinatra was crazy about lyrics. He used to talk about lyrics all the time—dissected every lyric he sang.

  But he could never get “MacArthur Park.”

  Frank said, “‘Someone left the cake out in the rain . . .’ What the hell does that mean?”

  Remember

  Luciano Pavarotti told me that singing was much more than having a great voice. He said his father had a better voice than he did. But that was all his father had. It’s how you use the voice, Pavarotti explained. It’s the phrasing and the intonations that bring a personality to the voice so that it can’t be confused with any other.