Dish by Jeannette Walls Read Free Book Online

habits.”
    Wallace was accused of being a “muckracker and a scandal monger,” and of having a prurient focus on sex. “Why be afraid of it,” Wallace shot back. “As one of the basic drives in all human beings, it is a perfectly legitimate interest.”
    It was also a real ratings grabber: by 1957, the year of the
Confidential
trial,
Night Beat
had captured a then astonishing audience of more than 1.5 million New Yorkers a night and ABC asked him to take the show—the young medium’s first real foray into the world of tabloid journalism and the true precursor to the “tabloid television” of the eighties—national.
    Myron Leon Wallace was raised in what he would describe as a “Jewish/Irish section of Boston.” Brookline, Massachusetts, was hardly a working-class neighborhood; Wallace’s neighbors included John F. Kennedy and Leonard Bernstein. Both of Wallace’s parents had immigrated from Russia as children; his father Frank, who changed his last name from Wallik, was a wholesale grocer and later an insurance broker. Wallace, the youngest of four children, was a B-minus student with a fairly happy childhood, marred primarily by his severe acne, which scarred his ego as well as his skin. “In some strange way [it] helped form my personality and character,” he said. “You look into the mirror and you don’t like what you see.” Wallace’s brother, Irving, recalled that Mike“was a moody kid, very self-centered, an egoist who was always searching for the purpose in life.”
    Wallace graduated from the University of Michigan in 1939, married his college sweetheart, Norma Kaplan, and had two children, Peter and Chris. He held a number of jobs as a radio announcer, including one at a 500-watt station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the unlikely call letters WOOD-WASH—it was owned jointly by a furniture store and a laundry service. In 1946, after serving in naval communications during World War II, he moved to Chicago, where he did regular newscasts for the
Chicago Sun-Times
and appeared on leading daytime radio dramas, including
Road of Life, Ma Perkins,
and
The Guiding Light.
In 1948, he and Norma were divorced. “I married too young,” he said. His second wife was the beautiful and socially prominent actress Buff Cobb, whose grandfather was the humorist Irvin S. Cobb. In Chicago, he was the host of a number of television and radio shows, including
There’s One in Every Family
and
I’ll Buy That,
and, before their divorce in 1955, he and his wife co-hosted a breakfast-time television program called
The Mike and Buff Show.
    Still,
Night Beat
was merely a local show. When ABC head Leonard Goldenson came to Wallace and his producers and asked him to take
Night Beat
national, he was eager for the opportunity—and the exposure. It meant going from five days a week to once a week and a salary cut from around $150,000 to $100,000. “Leonard Goldenson was beginning to change the whole business,” Wallace recalled. “ABC was third. He needed attention for his network. He made us an offer we couldn’t refuse … it was the biggest mistake we could have made.” Wallace’s provocative questions worked well in New York, but Wallace wasn’t sure if they would play with a national audience. Moreover, he was concerned that the often controversial content of the show would upset network officials. “Unless this building shakes every couple of weeks,” Goldenson said, “you’re not doing your job.”
    The Mike Wallace Interview
went on the air in April 1957. It was broadcast Sundays at 9:30. Wallace took a cue from the legendary Edward R. Murrow and scheduled Joe McCarthy as his first guest. At the last minute, however, the ailing McCarthy—who would die about a month later—canceled and the bookers scrambled to get Gloria Swanson. The actress was too savvy to be tricked into saying something indiscreet, and the show’s debut was a disappointment. For his second national segment, Wallace was determined