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Show Tte Salt Lake Tribune Sunday, September 30, 1964 S19 Controversial Mike Wallace tries to sum it up by Peter Gomer Chicago Tribune Writer CHICAGO 60 Interviewing Minutes star Mike Wallace has been UPON DECIDING HE could browbeat Buff into becoming part of a radio interview good husband-wif- e team, Wallace sold the idea to WMAQ, and the pair did the The Chez Show nightly from the lounge of the Chez Paree. By 1951, CBS scouts tipped the home office about Mike and Buff and they went to New York to star in their own network television show. It enjoyed a three-yea- r run, but by then the mard riage also was over. The bickering we did on the show turned into the real thing, Wallace says. By 1955, Wallace was 36, his personal and professional life a shambles. To pay bills, he hawked Fluffo shortening. He lacked focus and sense of purpose. Chicago and Utley had brought out his best. Then, on a vacation in Puerto Rico, he met an attractive painter, Lorraine Perigord. Like Wallace, she was divorced and had two children. Within months, they married. The couple recently separated after 29 years of marriage. About this time, Wallace won a news job as anchor on a small New York independent TV station. This led to Night Beat, the inquisitional late-niginterview show that made Wallace famous. WaBacked by llaces job was to make his subjects compared to performing a heart transplant on Christiaan Barnard. Courteous but wary, Wallace listens intently, scrunching his eyes in concentration. He never rises to bait, but politely praises sensible questions that deserve answers. Then he responds forthrightly, without ever saying anything he might regret later. Even at 66, when Wallace generally is perceived as having assumed Walter Cronkites unofficial mantle as senior heroic figure at CBS News, that elite and sometimes controversial bastion of egos and excellence, Wallaces days hardly are halcyon. Nobody ever sued Cronkite for $120 good-nature- million. Well win, if substance is the issue," Wallace says, referring to the imminent trial of the record-breakin- g Westmoreland libel suit. The of that substance the truth broadcast was dead accurate. I stand by it 100 percent." The program was the January 1982 CBS documentary, The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception, which Wallace narrated. CBS charged that Army Gen. William Westmoreland and other officials cooked the books (Wallaces term) and d enemy troop strength to make it look as though the United States was winning the war. Westmoreland labeled the program a prepos and sued. NO f iO litigation, n Wallace t been using his Close newly pubhsned memoirs Encounters (Morrow, $17.95), and by Gary Paul Gates the subsequent publicity tour to present the CBS case in a favorable light. Some reviewers, though, are seizing on the book to whack Wallace for his gaudy background as a pitchman and minor showbiz celebrity. (He once was accused of having practically wallowed in schlock.) Once again he hears critics accusations that he's more an entertainer than a journalist. His title of correspondent is being called a misnomer. Its said that his producers do the actual reporting of the stories that he covers, that he flies in at the last minute, interviews whomever they point him at, and asks the questions they prepare. Wallace has been fighting these charges for much of his 45 years in broadcasting. But they still infuriate ht under-reporte- him. Ive always said that 60 Minutes is a producers broadcast. Theyll work several months on a story, then Ill come in, find out whats going on, and do the key interviews. Its the only practical way for us to work. This year Ill cover about 34 stories. WHEN I GOT into radio in 1939, 1 read commercials, did news and lots of different shows. Many of us made the transition to news Douglas Edwards, for exanv pie, with whom I worked at WXYZ in Detroit. Just a few days ago, Walter Cronkite was telling me how he once had done PR for Braniff Airlines before moving to UPI. Harry Reasoner also did PR, I believe. We all squirm. Seeking publicity, they streamed to his stark set, pitch black except for a white klieg light that glared over Wallaces shoulder into 1 Mike Wallaces memoifs Close Encounters, just recently been published. by Gary Paul Gates, have switched to news, but I was more laggard than they. Im not suggesting that the way I came up was the best way. My son (Chris Wallace, White House correspondent for NBC) has come up a better way college, Boston Globe, Chicagos Channel 2, then New York. Chris determined early on what he wanted to do. I didnt. But those early years did help me, and not just with my voice and stage presence. By doing a variety of chores, I derived an understanding that helped me fill my vessel differently from some reporters. THEN, WITH A reputation for doing investigative stuff, I was able to demonstrate my fiddle had more than one string. So Id spin off and do a Beverly Sills or a Shirley a Mikhail Baryshnikov or a Vladimir Horowitz. Always reticent about his personal life, Wallace is quick to point out his mistakes and even quicker to share credit for the success that now earns him about $1 million a year. But Wallace, as interviewee, remains very, very careful. Even the queer structuring of his memoirs, with Wallace and Gates alternating chapters, shows this. Gates plays tough reporter and straight biographer, while Wallace responds with reactions and grace notes about what it all meant and his famous interviews. had married Norma Kaplan, his college sweetheart. They had two children, Peter and Christopher, but the marriage lasted only until 1947, six years after Wallace and his family had moved to Chicago. ticket Wallace enjoyed it, especially when a young actress named Dorothy Buff Cobb walked in to chat. e, He spent a decade here (until 1951) ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH Wa- except for a stint in the Navy during llaces history knows that he is no World War II. His best work was as a newswriter and broadcaster for a stooge who is incapable of asking his own questions. Reared in the Boston program called The Air Edition of the Chicago Sun, for which he was suburb of Brookline of Russian-Jew-is- h tutored and influenced as so many Leon Wallace immigrants, Myron Clil-to- n were his editor, youngsters by discovered microphones in the Utley. of and the theater speech department Brash and ambitious, Wallace also University of Michigan, where hed gone to major in English. Ive never hosted Famous Names on Chicahad a voice lesson in my life, he says, gos WGN, broadcast live from the but his uncommonly resonant, sexy Balinese Room of the Blackstone Hobaritone proved early on to be a meal tel. Although basically A professor helped Wallace land an announcing job in Grand Rapids upon graduation. After only nine months, Wallace moved to Detroit, and his voice was heard on the network for the first time, most notably on the legendary serial: The thundering hoof-beaof the great horse, Silver, the Lone Ranger rides again! Before leaving Detroit, Wallace "... ts We got married in grandfather was Irvin 1949. Buffys S. Cobb, hu- morist, writer, figure. Her father was Frank Chapman, then the husband of the opera star Gladys Swarthout. So when I joined that family, I was awash in celebrated and almost fabled people in the arts and letters. the eyes of his victims. THE CAMERAS MOVED in tight, searching, as Wallace says, for tentative glances, nervous tics, the beads of perspiration the warts and all. Not to put too fine a point on it, but for the times this was revolutionary. Wallace learned what questions to ask and when, how to build and pace an interview for maximum dramatic impact He learned how to listen, when to frown, grimace or raise an eyebrow. He used his cigarette like a blunt instrument. Night Beat brought out his best and his worst and its echoes still linger every Sunday night for the 40 million viewers of 60 Minutes. Only on Night Beat, Wallace says, did his prosecutorial zeal turn into something that resembled sadism. It was with A1 Capp, the cartoonist who created Lil Abner. He loved going on television and saying outrageous things. But I noticed that each time he fired one of his broadsides, he a kind of giggled nervous, reflexive semi-laugAfter it happened a few times, Wallace asked him about the giggle, comparing it with a nervous tic. I don't know what youre talking about, Capp replied with a tight, anxious smile. But no giggle. I ASKED ANOTHER question, Wallace says, and Capp said something calculatedly offensive, and giggled again. So I asked: Didnt you hear it that time, Mr. Capp? No, Capp replied. See Page Column 1 |