Authors: Carole Radziwill
The documentary accuses the U.S. government of funding the Khmer Rouge. This is serious journalism. There is no grander way, in my mind, to
arrive
.
It’s tense in the control room the night of the broadcast. We have a live Q & A panel set up after the show, with United Nations ambassador Thomas Pickering, Bobby Muller from the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, and senators John McCain and Bob Kerrey.
I sit through the show organizing fact index cards—going over every detail for the panel. If we didn’t get it right, we will know right away. Ambassador Pickering is visibly uncomfortable. Bobby Muller is visibly pleased. There are objections to several of our assertions, but after the show airs and after a long campaign by members of Congress, the United States changes its policy and sends several million dollars in humanitarian aid directly into Cambodia. In the scheme of things, not a life-changing amount, but it is groundbreaking.
From the Killing Fields
wins an Emmy and a duPont-Columbia Gold Baton—journalism’s Oscar.
I fell in love on this trip in the same heady way as with Augie Albanese at sixteen—remote and dreamy, blurred at the edges. This first assignment, like my first love and first heartbreak, the benchmark for everything after. I don’t remember the heat or the dust or mosquitoes or the anxiety I might have felt being alone and twenty-five in a distant pocket of Asia. I remember the refugee camps, the hospitals, young boys holding up heavy guns on their shoulders. I remember Sathern and guerrilla fighters and arranging interviews and chartered flights. It was an
experience
. The unique experience of stepping into something extraordinarily different and of acquiring an understanding of it. This is the lure for the curious—marked by their desire for information. A singular experience and nothing in my past to relate it to, so when I came back I had little more to tell my family than that I had stayed at the Oriental Hotel, where famous writers used to stay.
I was a long way from my internship, from Chris Nucci on the hurdy-gurdy in Kingston. I had been at ABC three years and wore the uniform of journalists now—khaki pants and a button-down shirt. I was making $24,000 a year as a PA. I was exactly where I wanted to be. All that angst about getting out of Suffern, and it had been as simple as getting on a plane. I was at the beginning of a whole new life. I was seeing where all of this would lead, enjoying the ride, and then a man walked into the room. Or, to be accurate, I walked into the room, and the man stood and reached for my hand.
How did a girl from Suffern meet a man with Polish royal lineage going back four centuries? Anthony Stanislas Albert Radziwill, a prince, like his father and grandfather before him. This is where fairy tales come in handy, because the real story is somewhat dull. No glass slipper, white horse, or wicked stepmother. We met at work.
In fact, we met over a murder. In March 1990, Lyle and Erik Menendez were charged with killing their parents with shotguns while they were watching television in their den. And almost everyone in the news business flew to Los Angeles to cover it. “
Primetime
needs to borrow you,” my boss had said after
From the Killing Fields
aired. “It’s four weeks in Beverly Hills, the Menendez murder.” I flew to Los Angeles and went to a suite at the Four Seasons—
Primetime Live
’s makeshift office—and met Anthony.
We had both been at ABC for three years. Anthony was working for
Primetime
with Sam Donaldson and Diane Sawyer, and I had just started with
Peter Jennings Reporting
. He was an associate producer when we met, and I was a production associate, a rung lower.
By this time I had adopted some things—a wry sense of humor and a brown-suede miniskirt, for instance, and the bravado gained by a bit of travel. I was just back from six weeks in Southeast Asia, and no one in the Four Seasons suite knew I’d never been so far from home.
I have seen some things now,
I was hoping to suggest in my manner.
I know some things, too.
We couldn’t have come from two points farther apart, Anthony and I, but I walked into the hotel suite flush with the slippery confidence of youth and an award-winning documentary under my belt. And he took it all in with his own brand of self-possession.
“Hi, Carole, come in,” Shelley Ross, the producer, greeted me. She was an attractive brunette with a short, tight skirt and high heels that shot sparks when she moved around the room. “This is Anthony,” she said. “You’ll be working with him. Are you up to speed on the story?”
I nodded. “I read the research packet on the plane.”
“Okay, good. Then let’s get started.”
Shelley was a barely contained explosion. Anthony was just the opposite, steady and calm, bent over a table with scripts. When she introduced him, he stood and reached for my hand. He wore pressed jeans and a button-down shirt, and he held on for a moment before letting go. “It’s nice to meet you.”
He was unremarkably handsome. He had a face you might linger on, possibly remember but not place. He was anonymous most of the time. The sort of man strangers wondered about—
What’s his story?
—but passed by. He had a straight nose, wavy, thick hair, and a strong jaw. A receding hairline from his father, his mother’s defined cheekbones. His shoulders were broad and strong. It was, in fact, impossible not to notice his muscular frame. He had a dark-featured European look—a man you might cast as the playboy count. His eyes were serious if you didn’t know him, playful if you did. He turned himself into a British lord, a French diplomat, in an eye wink, to
get
you. He had a subtle, deceptive sense of humor that hummed continuously below his surface. His eyes and his smile betrayed him—if you knew to look.
The story could go anywhere from here. We could lock eyes and ooze passion and show up in the next scene with arms tangled, knees bumping, clothes flung to the floor during a late-night editing session. The ABC “office,” after all, was attached to his hotel suite. He could be preoccupied in this introduction and not even notice me. Or we could work closely together, talk too much, develop the sort of friendly relationship that rules out other possibilities.
The smallest detail can change your life. If I had not been called on that project. If I had met him in a large group of people—noisy, in a restaurant—perhaps nothing would have come of it. If he had not said to Shelley loud enough for me to hear, “Things are starting to look up,” maybe I would have returned to New York and lived a different life—a more predictable one. I might have moved to the suburbs and had children. Traded work afternoons for soccer games.
I was new to this business and infatuated with it all. I was just beginning to climb the mountain and looking as far as the foothold in front of me. Anthony was ahead of me, and I think of him smiling down at me that afternoon, a bit bemused.
He was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, and was sent to elite boarding schools in London. His family had a country home in Henley on the Thames and a townhouse in London that stood in the shadow of Buckingham Palace. His parents divorced when he was thirteen, and when he was sixteen his father died, and he moved to New York to live with his mother. He finished high school at Choate in Connecticut and went on to Boston University.
He was a prince and the son of a prince, the nephew and godson of a president. He brought centuries of history with him wherever he went. He had a name that was spoken with expectation, a name that made people pause. A name people whispered behind him when he walked into a room. The men around his dinner table, around his Christmas tree, on the yachts of the family vacations, are in history books.
In my childhood pictures, kids played on a rusted swing set or piled on a tattered love seat against a wall in an otherwise empty room. In his, there were wooden toys beneath a Chippendale table, a prince and a president playing backgammon across the room. A glamorous young mother posed with her sister and the vice president. You could see another world in the easy way he walked. The delight he took in movement, his arm stretching out to reach me, legs unconsciously slack and relaxed, an easy smile—I sensed order. He suggested security and straight lines. In my world there were no guidelines, no footsteps ahead of me, no safety net below to catch me.
In the hotel suite the first afternoon he was introduced simply as Anthony. Someone told me later in the secondhand way someone always did:
John Kennedy’s cousin. Jackie Onassis’s nephew. His mother, Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill.
Counting backward on the family tree. He carried it effortlessly, the weight of this name, while I was struggling to escape weightlessness.
There was a buzz around him that he seemed unaware of, and later I learned to seem unaware, too. He moved around a room as though in a perfectly timed waltz, delivering the right lines to the right person, turning this way and that. He knew how to work around the heavy name and introduced himself immediately to anyone new, rolling his name off with unassuming ease. He instinctively knew to stand when a woman walked into a room.
He had a steady calm about work: he approached it with an elegant balance of duty and fun. None of it—the hours, the crime, the politics of network news—seemed to affect him. You would never turn a corner to find him in heavy conversation—gesturing and whispering in the hallway. He seemed to transcend it, while still being part of the team.
But he was also a bit reserved, distant. We worked side by side, on many occasions the only two people in the suite. Yet he was the one on the team I felt least connected to. It was my first time in Los Angeles. There was a pack of us in our twenties, with expense accounts, and we took advantage of it, going to different restaurants and bars every night, exploring the city. He kept apart from all of that, and I liked it about him. He was there to work on a project, and he spent his free time at the gym. We were comrades in arms, the whole bunch of us, for those three or four weeks, but he was the one I doubted I’d see again.
One afternoon it was just the two of us in the suite—he reading transcripts, I logging tapes, and the television on low. A news anchor announced a birth in his famous family—his cousin had had a baby girl. I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t react, but a few moments later he got up quietly and walked to the bedroom. He closed the door, but I could hear him on the phone excited.
Congratulations!
I remember wishing that we had met covering the Gulf War instead of a murder story. Wished his mock-serious eyes and cocked eyebrow had met mine over the blast of rocket-propelled grenades. A war is sweeping and dramatic, with heroism and bravery. I picture soldiers doubled up in bunkers over Anthony’s deadpan impressions of Saddam Hussein. But we exchanged our first glances over two people shot dead eating blueberries in their den. The younger son stopping to reload his shotgun so he could finish off his mother, who was crawling away. It was great television. Beverly Hills, rich private-school kids shooting their parents. We met because this was a story people watched and advertisers flocked to, making it profitable for everyone. We were in the business of telling profitable stories. We would get to do the serious ones, but flashy murder and celebrity profiles would pay our salaries.
Our courtship starts and stutters. We meet on the murder story and four weeks later board separate planes to fly back to New York. There is an inauspicious parting—me running up to the suite at the last minute to get something I’d left behind. “Shh.” He answers the door, finger to his lips. “My cousin’s here for the weekend. He’s sleeping.” I tiptoe in, keep my head down, and mumble something clumsy about lunch when we get back. But then I’m assigned to a story in Louisiana and become quickly reintoxicated with my job. Everything else, for the moment, is forgotten.
It’s a documentary called
Abortion: The New Civil War,
and Buddy Roemer is the star. He is the governor of Louisiana, and the state legislature has passed a bill criminalizing abortion that he thinks is unconstitutional. A quietly pro-choice governor in a pro-life state, he is planning to veto the bill. Peter Jennings sends Ray Farkas and me to Baton Rouge to cover it.
Ray is an old-school producer. There is nothing that happens to him that he doesn’t line up, clip, and fit into a frame. He is obsessed with composition and camera angles, the way writers are with words. He shoots every shot just slightly off center; it’s his trademark. He’ll shoot an interview subject from a side angle, instead of straight on, and get part of the lamp on the table next to him. He is not interested in the story so much as the camera angles, the composition, the parceling of the story frame by frame. Life is one long clip reel to Ray, there for the editing. If Leslie Cockburn is Meriwether Lewis, stamping up trails and craggy mountains to find the last Shoshone Indian, then Ray is William Clark, meticulously mapping and recording and framing it all for an audience.
Governor Roemer’s secretary ushers me into his office toward the end of a staff meeting the first day. He’s expecting us. “You must be Carole, right?” He is just wrapping up his meeting, and he motions for me to take a seat. He is younger than I imagined, and wears cowboy boots with his navy suit, as only southern politicians or rich oilmen can. I tell him the crew will be arriving later in the day and that I need to go over his schedule. “I’m not sure I’m crazy about having a film crew around, Carole.” He laughs. Buddy is good-natured, but Guidry, his chief of staff, is all business. “You can ask us to leave at any time,” I tell him, “and we’ll be careful to stay out of your way.” I’m very professional, reciting my lines—convincing, I hope. Guidry, I can see, will be watching us closely.
In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court said that states could set limits on abortion, and by 1990 more than forty states had taken advantage of the decision. Louisiana passed the most restrictive legislation of all: doctors who performed abortions could be sentenced to prison for up to ten years. It wouldn’t be criminal to
have
an abortion, but it would be criminal to perform one. Buddy Roemer had promised in his campaign to sign tough antiabortion legislation, and he was now facing a political quagmire. How does he veto an antiabortion bill while still appearing to be pro-life? He will be up for reelection soon.
Ray and I follow Buddy to meetings with lawmakers, to radio talk shows, and to press conferences. We follow him to the Governors’ Conference in Mobile, Alabama, where another southern governor, Bill Clinton, is working the room. The conference is a thick haze of backslapping politicians—choreographed movements from group to group of handshakes and practiced anecdotes.
But in the haze Governor Clinton stands out. It is apparent in the way people respond to him that he is the type of man who is used to knowing everyone in a room by first name. Buddy calls, “Clinton, get over here.” They are friendly with each other, teammates in southern politics. “Hello,” he says to me and introduces himself. There is nothing stiff or rehearsed in his greeting. My ABC News badge is visible around my neck, so I tell him about the piece. Buddy asks him a couple of questions about the issue for our benefit, and he answers them. “This is a good man,” he says in a soothing drawl, his hand grabbing Buddy’s. “You’ve got a good story.” Then Governor Clinton leans in close to Buddy, who is miked, and says something in his ear that we can’t hear, but it’s crystal clear when we play the tape back.
Give them fucking hell about that bill, Buddy.
Ray and I get a good laugh out of this when Clinton announces his run for president a year later.
We worked on the story for five months, and Buddy and I became close friends. He introduced me to politics and country music—Machiavelli, Lyle Lovett, and Jesse Winchester. He was divorcing that summer after a long marriage, and was struggling with it. We had long late-night phone calls about wars and men and women and the business of politics. We skipped over small talk completely. And maybe there was a sort of love affair, platonic, but I didn’t see it then. I was too young—or maybe just old enough. Idealistic and caught up in all of this—the intrigue of state politics, a man and a principle, the rise and fall of ideals, a new story.
During the summer I fly back and forth to Washington, D.C., where Ray is doing final editing on the piece. Washington during the week, back to New York on the weekend, and Anthony and I don’t meet up again until September, when he calls my office. “Do you want to catch a movie tonight?” He’s working late and the theater is across the street from my apartment, so I buy the tickets and meet him there. Afterward we go to dinner at a trendy Mexican restaurant, and the bill comes to $104. I am relieved when he grabs it and then insists, “You paid for the movie.”
There are a handful of dinners, and then these dates become regular. It is an odd pattern, arranged without discussion—we don’t call from the road but take up again when we get back. Ours isn’t a whirlwind romance. It is slow and consistent, and it suits us both for more than a year. There is a unique ebb and flow to the news business, and we are wedded for the moment to our careers. Everything else is second. We both understand: an assignment trumps personal plans, no hard feelings.
We never talk about our families. There is no moment when the relationships are laid out. No moment when he says to me,
The president was my uncle, John is my cousin, Jackie Onassis is my aunt.
He is private, compartmentalized about his famous family and I am relieved. I like the world we are creating, just the two of us. Occasionally he mentions a vacation with his aunt and cousins, a weekend in the Vineyard. There’s an odd netherworld, really, where our invisible aunts and uncles and siblings and cousins carry on wordlessly in a back room. In the beginning it is just Anthony, a producer I met at work, and me. Two news junkies who like travel and the chase of a story. By the time we get to our families, almost two years after we met, my anxiety has dissipated. His mother is simply his mother—a woman with a beautiful house, a breathy voice, a cover story in
Life.
The first winter we’re dating we steal out to his mother’s house in East Hampton for weekends. It is impossibly clean, with white-cashmere couches in the living room standing on finely made Cogolin straw carpets, handwoven, I imagined, by stooped old women in France. Just off the living room is the small library, which becomes my favorite refuge. The walls and the two sofas and chair are all covered in white and red fabric. The walls, white with thin red strips, are soft and pillowy to touch. The couch in front of the fireplace is white, too, and covered in sketched red Chinese print. The room is cozy and warm and full of family photos: Anthony as a little boy in England in green Wellington rain boots; with his younger sister, Tina; playing on the lawn with his dogs at Henley; the four cousins: John and Caroline and Anthony and Tina, dressed up as angels for a Christmas play.
Our first weekend at the house, Anthony suggests I take his mother’s golden retriever, Zack, for a walk while he goes to the gym. I am new here and trying to impress him, so I call Zack from the kitchen and walk toward the beach. Emilia, the housekeeper, watches me quietly. Her English and my Spanish are about the same. I can say “Hola, qué tal?” and she knows how to say “Good morning.”
We leave through the side door, and after a few feet Zack just stops and sits. “Come on, Zack,” I call to him. He has a blue-leather collar with his name engraved, and I tug on it to get him moving. “Come on, Zack, we’re going to the beach.” He digs his hind legs into the ground, and it starts to annoy me.
What kind of dog won’t go to the beach?
I pull harder on the collar, and he digs in deeper and starts to bark, so I pick him up and carry him halfway down to the beach before I hear Emilia. She’s running toward me, yelling in Spanish. “Para! Póngalo hacia abajo!”
Put him down!
There is an electric fence around the property for the dogs that I’m unaware of. Emilia makes motions around her neck and then points to Zack’s collar, and I realize I have electrocuted him. I wait for him to go stiff, but after he stops yelping he seems fine, so we keep going and when we get back Anthony is waiting for us, unsuspecting. “Thanks for taking him,” he says, smiling.
“Oh, it wasn’t a problem at all,” I say, giving Zack a big pat.
We’re still in the campaign phase of the relationship, all promise and no accountability.
Love’s one thing, war’s another.
In January, Saddam Hussein fires Scud missiles aimed at Israel, and I go to the war in the Gulf, with Leslie Cockburn again. She wants to do an hour-long news special and sends me ahead to set up the interviews. I pick up my chemical suit and gas mask in London on my way to Tel Aviv.
The Israeli military has its public affairs office set up in the lobby of the InterContinental Hotel. This is where we spend most of our days, in the lobby crowded with bored and restless journalists waiting for the daily briefing and press release. The rest of my time is spent on the phone, confirming interviews, or at our bureau office screening tape with the military censor and then feeding it via satellite to New York. Nights we lie in our rooms on unmade beds, waiting for the alarms to go off. The loud, high-pitched wail blasts like a fire drill, and people stream out with gas masks, no pushing or running, to a makeshift bomb shelter in the basement. Everyone except the news crews. We assemble in the lobby and head out in the direction of the smoke billowing up against a starlit sky.
War, at least this one, from my vantage point in Tel Aviv, is mostly long, uneventful days interrupted by sharp bursts of horror. Two intolerable extremes. Reporters aren’t afraid of war zones, or air strikes, the way people should be. They consider it a perk. Some nights I sit out on the hotel balcony watching the CNN reporter file live telecasts across the rooftop. I watch for a few minutes, and then go back inside to watch him on television, and then go back to the terrace again to watch him live. It’s odd—the story I see on the television is much more frightening than the one actually happening outside, much more frightening
reported
than witnessed live.
I learn a little about the power of the medium, about moments strung together for television and condensed. Days of war are cut into a two-minute report and then shrunk to fit the average TV screen. To do this to the experience is to distort it. It’s inevitable.
When I get back in February, Buddy calls and asks me if I want to go to the White House with him. “The Governors’ Ball,” he says. “How ’bout it?”
I wear what I think a young woman should, a Nicole Miller cocktail dress, black. It’s the only short dress in the room, but I’m winging it again. There is someone to prepare you for such things only if you are the kind of girl
expected
to attend dinners at the White House. If I were the sort of girl people
expected
to grace the halls of ABC, to marry European royalty, I’m sure there would be someone here steering me along. But all of this is so unpredictable, nothing my father or Millie or Grandma Binder could have prepared me for. If my mother has this sort of advice, she has withheld it.
We drive right up to the front door. A guard holds a list, asks our names, then whisks us through to the main lobby. There is a flock of photographers behind a rope, snapping away while someone announces our names for the AP wire and the White House photographers. There is a reception in the East Room, then a receiving line to meet President Bush. A sharp-creased marine stands directly behind him, whispering the names of people as they come through the line. I don’t remember what I say as I shake his hand, or if I say anything, but I have a photograph of the moment, and in the photo I’m standing between Buddy and the president, my back to the camera, and they are laughing together about something.
This is actually my second time at the White House, but the circumstances are very different. A few months earlier, when war was just a gleam, I went with my boss to pitch an idea to John Sununu, White House chief of staff. We wanted cameras to follow President Bush as he prepared for war. Reality war. The White House wasn’t ready for it. We suggest to John Sununu the relevance of television as an instrument for “recording history,” and he looks back at us, unblinking. Unsmiling. Unmoved. “What does television have to do with history?” he asks. Then politely dismisses us.
When I go with Buddy, it’s all pomp and glitz.
We eat dinner in the Blue Room, and I sit between the country singer Gary Morris and Marilyn Quayle. Buddy is at another table.
After dinner we file into another room before the entertainment starts, and I see Bill Clinton through the crowd. “Hello, nice to see you again,” he says, gripping my hand. “How’d your story turn out?” He is warm, and I am flattered that he remembers me.