As I’m sure is clear by now, I was able to move ahead in show business by believing my version of what was happening and not someone else’s just because that someone happened to be in authority.
I’ve seen it everywhere. From the President of the United States to the man who unsuccessfully tried to fix our refrigerator, it’s not unusual for people to not know what they’re doing.
This, of course, is true in personal relationships as well. If a significant number of people see you a certain way, there’s probably truth in the perception, but if it’s one person who has an opinion of you that no one else seems to share, that person needs to look more at themselves. I know of so many relationships that have gone bad because people were unable to do that. That should be a goal for all of us. It’s easy to point fingers. It’s obviously much more difficult to take responsibility. “The truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth” may be the biggest challenge for all of us.
When I was a boy, I was told it was a good idea to put my savings into a savings account where my money would earn interest and someday turn into significantly more money than I started with, so I gave the same advice to my son when he was fifteen. He put the money he had accumulated from gifts from various relatives over the years into a savings account at our local bank, and we let it sit. When we went to withdraw the money from his savings account, we were looking forward to seeing how much interest he’d earned. We were surprised to see his account held less money than he had put in because the bank had charged him $15 a month for an inactive account, more than the interest the bank paid, which was less than 1 percent.
So my son paid the bank for taking his money and investing it for their own gain. They made money off my son and charged him for it.
That ought to be illegal.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been more skeptical of things than most people, but in the last thirteen years or so, working for NBC and CBS News, my skepticism has quadrupled—at least—beginning with stories about myself that I’ve read in the papers or seen on the news that have no truth to them at all.
Reports had me attending Robert Blake’s wife’s funeral in Los Angeles in 2001. I haven’t been to Los Angeles since the early nineties. Mrs. Blake was known to have put nude photos of herself on the Internet to attract male clients—not a group I’d want to be associated with.
Once, at a party, I was told by a journalist that I had written a very angry letter to someone complaining that I wasn’t recognized sufficiently at an event. I had no idea what he was talking about. I asked him to give me a source. He looked into it and then reported to me it wasn’t an angry letter, it was “a series of irate phone calls.” I don’t think anyone in the history of show business, including Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, has made “a series of irate phone calls” about not being recognized somewhere. The fact is, I prefer to not even go out. Yet that story was making the rounds. In fact, I’m widely known for my lack of irateness. Irate is just not one of my things. I’m not saying I don’t have things. I’m just saying, irate is not one of my things.
I was recently sent a biography of me to check before an event I was hosting. It said my mother’s last name was Moretsky. That’s not true. It said her father’s name was Emanuel Moretsky. That’s not true. It said I made my film debut in an uncredited role in Disney’s 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I not only was uncredited, I wasn’t in it. If the picture was released in 1954, it was probably made in 1953, when I was still in high school and then started college. It said I hosted Saturday Night Live, and before the show the writers and I decided to play it as if I had missed dress rehearsal and was clumsily ad-libbing my way through the sketches. It said the comic scenario was taken a bit too literally by the audience, and I was never asked to host again. That Saturday Night Live is one of the shows they put out on the Best of Saturday Night Live DVDs, and, of course, I have been asked to host the show again. It said that among other books I wrote is one titled Spilled Milk and Other Clichés. I’ve never even heard of the book.
Not that long ago I read an article in the New York Daily News about the second President Bush that stated he had wanted to marry another woman before he met his wife, Laura. The article said the woman didn’t want to marry him because she had wanted to marry Charles Grodin, and she hadn’t gotten over that that didn’t happen. This was a woman I had gone out with, but I had no idea she wanted to marry me, and I seriously doubt that she hadn’t gotten over me when she met the future president, because the last time I saw her was at a party at her apartment and she was sitting in a corner kissing another guy.