In more modest days CBS News had rules about screen credits. The front credits could not contain anyone’s name, and the back credits could not be longer than thirty seconds. All credits were to be approved by a vice president; and no administrator, including vice presidents, could take any screen credit, ever. It was different Read More
Some eight years after World War II, radio gave way to television. Walter Cronkite became the most noted broadcast correspondent on television succeeding Edward R. Murrow, the most famous radio correspondent. It was not easy for Murrow or any of the radio correspondents on his team. Words now had to work with pictures, and radio Read More
Before portable electronic cameras, before computers, before digital editing—when television was young—we were strung together on the Parthenon by three cameras connected to the control truck by long cables. The first camera established the Parthenon from the front. The third would take close-ups of the royal couple. The second camera was a long shot down Read More
I went to Versailles where the curator suggested Princess Grace of Monaco might do a tour of the Chateau similar to the Tour of the White House. For that permission, he expected CBS to raise funds for the restoration of the castle, and there also might be petites remerciments for those who helped. A Grimaldi Read More
On St. Valentine’s Day 1962, one out of every three Americans saw A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy. The worldwide audience was over one hundred million. She didn’t want to do the broadcast, and neither did I. Her press secretary later told me that Mrs. Kennedy preferred a book rather Read More
A few weeks later the Cold War intervened. Germany was divided between east and west. Berlin had been split into an Allied command and a Soviet zone, and the Germans of the east were flocking the west by the thousands. Berlin itself was isolated, cut off from American ground and rail supplies, except by one Read More
On my way back from Salinas, I stopped in New York and signed a generous contract Tom Ryan had negotiated. Although my job would not start until October, I would be given a full year’s pay. Sig needed me. I rented an apartment from plans in a building then being erected. The rental included a Read More
Our last two years in France were spent at 1 bis rue de Martignac, 7th Arrondisement, Paris. We lived in thirteen rooms furnished in authentic Louis XVI furniture. Our bedroom windows looked out to the L’Eglise de St. Clotilde, a double-spired church where Saint Saëns had been the organist. The buttresses across a narrow street Read More
CBS and Mike Burke paid for the move from Posillipo to Paris. He saw that the Paris news bureau found us an apartment and arranged to have our baggage moved into the building. It took four months before I discovered his reason for wanting me nearby. One night he took me to meet an old Read More
We were still in Italy when Mike Burke, the head of CBS Europe, asked me to evaluate a pilot film made by David Schoenbrun, the Paris bureau chief. David very much liked himself and his job. When David summoned government officials he had himself announced as le télévision americain: he was all three networks in Read More