How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am Page 14

  I don’t remember any explanation. I told the staff, and everyone was in a state of shock. I immediately took my things and left the building. Later, someone from NBC told me, “You didn’t have to leave right away,” but, of course, I felt like… well…

  It was shocking, because as was later reported we had been the highest-rated show on CNBC at ten p.m., eleven p.m., and one a.m., often beating CNN. Our program was also the only CNBC talk show to receive a nomination every year for a Cable Ace Award for Best Talk Show.

  A couple of weeks later, New York Newsday’s columnist Marvin Kitman wrote about the incident, and even more than ten years later, his kind words have stuck with me:

  “Charles Grodin, my favorite late night talk show since it debuted January 9, 1995, was abruptly taken from us two weeks ago. After 624 programs the show was sacked by ‘Mutual Agreement’ or whatever CNBC wants to call what happened the night of June 5th.…

  The actor/director/author went where no talk show has gone lately. Not only could he make you laugh, but he could make you think. It was an original concept to give an open mike to somebody who could not only speak his mind, but had a mind he could call his own.

  His monologues were fascinating because they were so rare.… He talked about injustice, welfare, the homeless, the poor. He was using TV to discuss issues. Using it as an educational tool… To be fair, as Grodin himself said, CNBC was the only place that allowed him to come on and talk about some of these things, and then ‘they only took me off for economic reasons.’

  He was one of the things that was good about TV, a genuine original, the closest thing we had to an Oscar Levant.”

  Marvin thought the reason for my cancellation was an interview I did with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the previous November about his book The Riverkeepers, which referenced CNBC’s parent company, General Electric, polluting the Hudson River. “It was the longest attack on a General Electric–owned network on GE for polluting the Hudson River,” Kitman wrote. “Not only had GE dumped PCBs, Kennedy explained, but it was now doing everything in its power not to clean it up. Why? The cost. ‘If it was $20,000,’ Kennedy said, ‘it would have been done 20 years ago. Now they estimate a billion.’ But that was nothing like Kennedy’s claim that ‘Every woman between Oswego and Albany had elevated levels of PCBs in her milk because of GE.’ I’m sure that must have thrilled them up there in Fairfield, Conn.”

  After the cancellation of my show, there was such an immediate, overwhelming outpouring of protests from the viewers that within about a week they called and asked me to come back to host a Friday night show at seven p.m. on MSNBC. Within a year and a half that came to an end as well. By that time I was ready to go, because five years of hosting a show, even if the last year and a half it was once a week, felt like enough.

  I should have seen the writing on the wall, because before we were canceled we were moved from ten p.m. to eleven p.m. and replaced by, of all things, reruns of Conan O’Brien, which followed Rivera Live, a programming concept that boggled a lot of minds. It was definitely an effort to ease me out. I no longer believe what I said at the time, that it was done for “economic reasons.”

  One executive at CNBC, Bruno Cohen, whom I liked, told me a sponsor had asked, “Is he going to keep doing those monologues?” Bruno told him, “That’s the best part of the broadcast,” so I probably offended more people than I can imagine.

  Since soon after I left MSNBC I was hired to be a commentator on 60 Minutes II, I never thought much about what Marvin Kitman had said. But in recent years I’ve run into two of my former friends from GE/NBC/CNBC at events. One looks at me like I stabbed him in the back. The other looks at me like he was on my side. I’ve since offered both these people to raise money for one of their charities, but my call wasn’t returned, confirming in my mind that what Marvin said in fact was true.

  Marvin Kitman summed up his column with the following:

  “Chuck, you did a super job for the last few years. You asked the basic question in your commentaries and interviews: What is going on here? You did it on national TV. It’s a credit to GE that it let you do it and a discredit to stop you in mid-sentence, metaphorically. This is a crazy time in history. We need people to sort it out. Some of us may not have liked your approach, but you were doing what TV public affairs should be doing, explaining the insanity of these times to us.”

  I now agree with Marvin Kitman that the corporation saw Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s, appearance as not in their interest, so they tried to stop free speech, but of course free speech is more important than any corporation, and it’s not as though Mr. Kennedy’s appearance had any impact whatsoever on the strength of GE. Free speech is one of the things that distinguishes America from so many countries, and any corporation that tries to stop it shames itself.

  Lousy Treatment of Kids

  Right around this time, when my son was ten years old, I became engaged in one of the most dramatic battles I’ve ever experienced. My boy tried out for and became a player on the fifth-grade travel basketball team.

  For those of you who may not know, schools generally have travel teams and intramural teams. You have to try out to be on a travel team. Intramural teams are for any of the kids who want to play. On travel teams the goal is to win. On intramural, while everyone would like to win, there’s an understanding that all the kids get equal playing time.

  Somehow I ended up on a kind of travel basketball oversight committee. While my experience on the Fifth Avenue co-op board in New York City made quite an impression on me, nothing had prepared me for the travel oversight committee. This hit harder because it was about kids.

  It all started innocuously enough. The fifth-grade travel team was coached by a very nice man who was the father of one of the players. Even though we were having a big winning season, as time went on I and a number of others began to see that the best players were seldom on the floor together. The coach wanted to win but also seemed to have the intramural point of view, which meant giving more time to the players who didn’t start. One could call this a humanistic point of view.

  He was a great guy and all the boys liked him. Still, the oversight committee felt we should follow the established procedure when the fifth-grade team moved to sixth grade. We changed coaches and chose someone who not only had coached before and won but also wanted the best players on the floor as long as possible.

  This led to an extremely successful season in which we even won a tournament, but it also led to a different problem. Our sixth-grade coach, also a very nice man, wanted to win so much that the players who didn’t start got as little playing time as possible.

  A father of one of the boys on the team asked to meet with our committee. He sat at the table and read a letter he had written beseeching us to give his son more playing time. He then got up and left. It was touching to hear, and then the parents of other kids not in the starting lineup who weren’t getting much playing time petitioned our committee to address this, and we foolishly put in a rule that all the kids had to play at least eight minutes a game.

  Now parents of the kids coming off the bench would sit in the stands with stopwatches to determine if their kids were getting their eight minutes! Often they didn’t, and that’s when the real anger toward the coach and the oversight committee began to surface. I spoke to the coach, and the situation got somewhat better but was still not what was promised—those eight minutes for all the kids coming off the bench. Anger was building in our town of 18,000. Many people were no longer speaking to each other, or just barely. Mothers were crying.

  When the team got to seventh grade, the eight-minute rule was done away with as we investigated and found that none of our travel team competitors had that requirement. But totally unforeseen by anyone, the situation became even worse.

  To coach the seventh-grade team, we brought in a man who had done it many times before. He seemed a pleasant fellow, but as I see it, this character appeared to have an agenda. He planned to leave his position
to coach another team, the one we ended up playing in our opening game. It was somewhat shocking to see our coach coaching our opponent. He had turned the team over to his two assistants, a plan he’d had in place all along. They were both from the area and had played for the high school team years earlier.

  Early on, some of our best players were not starting, and not getting substantial playing time, and the team wasn’t winning.

  I took the two young coaches out to lunch and showed them some newspaper clippings from our previous year when we won a big championship. I didn’t want to get in their face. I just showed them the clippings, hoping they’d notice that some of our star players were sitting on the bench. It worked. One fellow said, “You see the same names over and over.” I said, “Uh-huh.”

  One was a very pleasant, laid-back fella, but the other was more of a tough, somewhat surly man. Very early on the pleasant fella moved on, as his work took him elsewhere, so the rough guy was in charge, and he took over in an aggressive manner we hadn’t seen before. Again, these were twelve-year-old boys who loved to play and had been wildly successful the past two years.

  Now, this hostile coach, for reasons I’m not qualified to even give an opinion on, was telling one of our best players, as nice a kid as I ever met in my life, to “get off my f— floor.” Everyone seemed to be losing their love of the game. It was so bad, I tried to have him removed. I contacted two families who were friends of ours who had boys on the team to support my effort, but they declined. One later wrote me and apologized, belatedly realizing I was right.

  Instead, a meeting was called where the coach spoke to the parents. I was so angry I not only didn’t speak at the meeting, fearing what I might say, I couldn’t even look at him. I do remember him saying, “I coach the way I was coached,” and then quoted some horrible stuff a coach had said to him. He did allow how maybe his methods weren’t age appropriate, but the hostility and anger from the coach and toward the coach remained in the air.

  I really fault myself for not confronting him, since he had the gall to call a meeting. In certain situations in the future I’m going to become more aggressive.

  In one game my son was noticeably injured and was limping up and down the court. The coach either didn’t notice or didn’t care. I walked over to him, said something, and he took my kid out of the game. My boy later was on crutches for quite a while.

  The coach continued with his difficult practice exercises, running the boys in what are called suicide drills, where they had to run as hard as they could up and down the gym. In one instance they had to do this five times for every point the other team scored above twelve.

  In one game we were ahead by forty points, and all the starters were kept in! Clearly, this guy not only wanted to win, it seemed he wanted to dominate and humiliate the other team.

  On other occasions our best players were benched, including one who now plays for a Division One college team. Division One includes the best teams in America. At one point this boy had a couple of games where he wasn’t up to his normal level, and the coach chose to read his statistics for those games to the team. Several of the players’ attitudes went from “He’s okay” to pure hatred.

  At another point this strange coach announced that he and the high school coach were going to scout the intramural teams, saying, “I don’t know how many of you could play in high school.” My son barely played in high school, even though he played for the number-one-rated AAU team in the state that went to the national finals twice. He even won an award.

  We were fortunate to get a great guy as eighth-grade coach, but by that time there was so much resentment in the town that some parents just pulled their kids off the team and started another team, weakening our regular team.

  The aggressive seventh-grade coach emerged once more in high school coaching girls, and from what I heard, nothing had changed. I sensed that many simply lost their passion for the game and stopped playing.

  Abusive coaches who drive kids out of sports aren’t unusual. What a disgrace that these apparently unhappy people are put in positions of power—over kids! And they often have no awareness of how inappropriate they are. In fairness, I don’t believe our abusive coach realized it, as I’ve heard that he’s a very nice guy when he’s not coaching.

  Mistakes can be made. The wrong people can be chosen to coach. The real disgrace is that it’s allowed to continue once it’s recognized, because people didn’t stand up and say, “Enough!”

  A postscript: In eighth grade the fellows who ran the Parks and Recreation Department of the town who oversaw everything sports-related through eighth grade decided that one of our starting players couldn’t play since he was unable to come to the tryouts because of a football injury. I called them and made a case for him, but they said, “If you don’t come to the tryouts, you can’t play—no matter what the reason.”

  By then I’d had it! I called a meeting of town officials and the Parks and Recreation people. The eighth-grade coach came and supported my position that the boy should be allowed to try out when his injury had healed. The high school coach came and also agreed with me, as of course did the boy’s father.

  The Parks and Rec people said about me, “He wants this boy to have another chance to try out because he’s one of the stars, but he wouldn’t be for it if he was just another kid who was injured, and a rule is a rule.” I said, “I’d be for giving any kid a chance to try out if he was injured when the tryouts were held.” It was a standoff. The town officials said they’d let us know of their decision in a day or two.

  I then got in my car and headed to New York where I was working for 60 Minutes II. Driving in, I thought to myself I could have made a better case, so from my car I called my assistant and dictated an e-mail I wanted her to send to the town officials. In it I told the whole story of the past three years and the drama and trauma, and basically said, “Enough is enough!” They decided to let the boy try out. He made the team and had a great season! I guess all’s well that ends well, but not really.

  Highly Unusual

  Experiences

  That Make Me Not Miss

  Show Business

  I once worked with a star actor who replaced another star in a play I was featured in. After the stage manager ran through a rehearsal of a scene with the two of us, the actor asked me what I thought. I said I didn’t think it was appropriate to comment on what a fellow actor was doing.

  He said, “I’m asking you!” I replied, “I think you’re coming off too angry.” He said I’ll give you a buck for every laugh (and then he said the star’s name he was replacing). “I’ll give you a buck for every laugh I don’t get that he got!” Well, on his first night in the scene with me, he didn’t get one laugh, and then he was angry at mefor the rest of the run, and I didn’t even ask him for some bucks!

  Another star who followed that actor in the play once told me he wanted to see me in his dressing room after the performance. He was livid as he circled me—I was standing in the center of the room. I had no idea what was going on and told him so. He said, “You’re trying to make me look gay! I told him I honestly had no idea what he was talking about. I think he saw I meant it, and amazingly, he immediately dropped his anger and walked away.

  I later learned that irrational outbursts were not unusual for him.

  One of the strangest experiences I’ve had came early on in the first play I wrote. It was done in Nyack, New York, in 1971, and all the actors were asked to wear their own clothes, as if they were going to a social gathering.

  One actress showed up at dress rehearsal with a dress that looked as if it were made of a hundred shiny mirrors shooting light in every direction.

  I drove most of the cast from New York City to the theater in Nyack and back. On the way home after the dress rehearsal I said to the actress, who was sitting in the backseat, “Would you wear a dress that’s, uh, a little more conservative?” She said, “That’s the only dress I have.” I said, “That’s your only dress
?!” She said, “That fits. Yes.” I said, “Buy a dress, and I’ll pay for it.” She said, “There won’t be time for alterations.”

  I suddenly felt I was in the middle of some neurotic game, so I stopped talking about it. When I dropped her off at her building she said, “So what do you want me to do about the dress?” I said, “I’ve said everything I can say.”

  At the next rehearsal, she showed up with exactly the kind of dress that was needed.

  Ironically, this actress went on to become quite famous, but recently when I mentioned her name to another actress, she just about turned white. I chose not to pursue the conversation, but I’m sure I’m not the only one, for reasons best known to the actress with the mirrored dress, with whom she chose to play strange games.

  I recently looked up my name in a memoir she wrote, and her description of the play was that it was written by the actor Charles Grodin, but the money wasn’t there to take it to New York, which I took as a subtle dig. I’d never had a thought about New York at that time. Again, it was my first play. Ironically, twenty-one years later it did open in New York and was very successful, with a good review from the New York Times, which she chose not to mention in her memoir. In fairness to her, she may not even have known that.

  One leading lady was going through a difficult time with her boyfriend during filming a movie and barely spoke to me or anyone else for months. Not fun. I was the writer and male lead of the movie, and one day the leading lady, whom I had chosen for the role, said to me, “Why do you have all the lines in this scene?” They were expository lines that were needed to explain the complicated plot. I said, “Would you like them?” She said yes, so I gave her all the expository lines, and when she saw herself on the screen looking at the dailies (the previous day’s shooting), she looked at me like I had pulled a fast one on her. In fact, I was just trying to get through the day with her.