I was very content in my job at CBS Sports. In 1985, two years into my second three-year deal with the network, every assignment still brought new challenges and unique opportunities for creative writing and music composition. I also had the freedom, along with my producers—David Michaels in particular—to operate in a sort of clandestine Mission Impossible scenario. We would receive our event assignments by phone or fax, we’d research and plan our mission, and then we’d hop on a plane and fly first class to some exotic locale—Switzerland, France, Austria, Egypt, Nebraska—where we would work like maniacs for a month straight covering the event before being granted a month off to recover. We rarely spent time talking to network executives back in New York, and we completed our jobs without ever having to physically show up at the CBS Sports offices at Black Rock. It truly was my dream job.
The freedom we enjoyed was not without its limitations, however. Covering major sporting events in the 1980s, particularly in Europe, was a study in isolation. Total immersion, in the sensory-deprivation sense of the term. No cellphones yet. No internet, and more often than not, a foreign language to deal with. Constant travel and little sleep, hours upon hours in a dark production truck where day turned into night turned into day again, without one even noticing. With an event like the month-long Tour de France there was a new finish line in a new town every day, which meant we were never in the same hotel at night, which meant trying to stay in regular contact with anyone stateside was next to impossible. In fact, the only time we got messages from home was during the weekend when we’d be connected to the broadcast center in New York by satellite phone and we could check with the office or even our answering machines. Basically, we had to be at work for a chance to connect with home. However, home for me represented the early stages of a failing marriage. I was traveling too much. I was very committed to my career and I had made the decision to propose at a time when I was losing my father to cancer and I was not emotionally available to be a good partner.
During one of those weekend check-ins with New York, I picked up two messages that had been left three days apart by a man named Frank Kelly from Paramount Television in Hollywood. He wanted to know if, upon my return from France, I’d be interested in doing a screen test with the co-host of Entertainment Tonight, Mary Hart, in the show’s New York City studios. This was, on its face, something I was not at all interested in doing. I had heard of ET, but I had never seen the show, and the words “screen test” were more than a little bit foreboding. Plus, I had another year left on my CBS Sports contract, so a serious conversation—or audition, if that’s what this was—seemed moot. I could not and would not break my sports contract.
But when I returned to New York that August, there was another message from Frank Kelly waiting for me on my answering machine. Mary Hart was going to be in New York in two days, he said; would I meet her at the Gulf and Western Building (the ET East studios) and read some teleprompter with her and have a casual chat? He explained that he and his boss, Lucie Salhany, had seen a tape of me anchoring the news in Nashville, and that they were looking for a newsier approach to their half-hour, nationally syndicated program.
That night I watched Entertainment Tonight for the first time. Robb Weller and Mary Hart were hosting. It was a fast-paced half hour with incredible graphics and music. It was hypnotic. Could I see myself in one of those anchor seats? The most famous people I had met to that point rode bicycles and walked on balance beams. But actors and directors? Studio heads? Where would I even begin to know how to talk about them in a way that wasn’t immediately obvious to the viewing audience at home that I had no idea what I was doing?
I decided this was probably not for me, but I showed up for the meeting out of professional courtesy and curiosity. The words “Paramount Television” were intriguing. Paramount also made major motion pictures. Hmm. Movies need music. So do TV shows, now that I think of it. Maybe there was a side door into composing for film and television.
So a couple of days later, I step out onto the fifteenth floor of the Gulf and Western Building right on Columbus Circle without a care in the world, and it showed. I was wearing cutoff jean shorts and a tank top, my hair nearly reached my shoulders, and I had gained twenty-five pounds over the summer, courtesy of Breton buckwheat pancakes and baguettes at breakfast every morning while over in France. Needless to say, the person whom Mary and her producers met that day looked nothing like the newscaster on the decade-old Nashville news tape they’d watched.
Mary Hart was wonderfully cordial at our meeting. Producer Larry Fleece offered me a seat next to Mary on the set. She was dressed like people I’d seen walking on the red carpet during Oscars coverage. Larry politely suggested that I might like to put on a sport coat. We are close to the same size so he offered me the coat he was wearing. Larry then informed me that the “folks in LA” will be watching Mary and me on a closed-circuit satellite feed. This suddenly felt like one of those recurring nightmares where you are giving a speech but you forgot to put on your clothes. Perhaps I should have taken this more seriously? I apologized to Larry about my appearance, explaining in way too much detail how grueling it was to cover the world’s greatest bike race. He was nice. But he had a job to do.
“What we’d like to do, John, is have you and Mary read some copy from yesterday’s show and then have Mary ask you a few questions. This shouldn’t take long. This is Cynthia. She is our makeup and hair person. You should spend some time with her now.”
Very subtle, Larry. Very subtle.
I’ll never forget the look on Mary’s face when I sat down next to her on the news set. It was somewhere between shock and the look you get on your face when you see something weird that’s washed up on the beach. Things got much worse when the cameras rolled. I hadn’t read a prompter since my days at WCBS. It’s not at all like riding a bike. I was rusty. I stumbled. And I was perhaps a little loud. Mary read a couple of stories about new movie releases. Then she turned and threw to me.
“John?” (That was my cue to start talking.)
I could see my face pop up on the monitor in front of us. The prompter quickly cued up a story on Bruce Springsteen. I dug in. I mean hard. Unfortunately for Mary, and the sound engineer, I read what was up on the prompter like I was calling the last ten seconds of a World Cup downhill ski race.
“BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN IS BACK OUT ON THE ROAD AGAIN!”
Mary began waving her arms wildly. “Whoa, whoa, too loud. Ouch!”
“Cut!” yelled Larry as he dashed out of the control room. “John, let’s take it down a notch and try again.”
Larry was right. This was Entertainment Tonight, not Entertainment LIVE FROM KITZBÜHEL, AUSTRIA!
The on-set interview with Mary following my epic teleprompter fail was pleasant and uneventful. Mary was a pro. Every now and then there’d be a pause and I could tell Larry, or someone, was speaking to Mary in her ear. She would pause and then ask more questions. The whole process lasted an hour and a half. When we were done, Larry and Mary bid me farewell; I returned Larry’s sport coat, wiped off the half pound of makeup, and mercifully resumed my life as not a host of an entertainment news show. I was determined to erase this experience from my memory.
Three months went by. No call from anyone at Paramount. This did not come as a surprise. And it mattered not in the scope of things because I still had plenty of time left on my sports contract before it was time to renegotiate. I had, however, begun hearing through the grapevine that the upper management team at CBS was changing, and CBS Sports’ programming priorities with it. I decided it was a good idea to be proactive and to ask for a meeting with the new president of CBS Sports, Peter Lund. I could just introduce myself, if nothing else. It couldn’t hurt.
Peter represented a new guard at the sports network. During our meeting he gently informed me that in the “foreseeable future” the network would not be broadcasting the anthology-style sports that I was known for hosting. Yikes. He insisted that the viewers had grown tired of those events and wanted more live programming. Therefore, Lund continued, CBS would not be renewing my contract. He said they would honor the last few months of the contract but that if anything else came along, I should probably take it. All I could think was, Perhaps I shouldn’t have scheduled this meeting! Not long after that Lund fired my godfather at the network, the man who hired me, Terry O’Neil.
The handwriting wasn’t just on the wall regarding my future. There was a horse head in my bed just to make sure I understood the score. I got the message. I was done. With Lund’s words—“If anything else comes along, you should take it”—I was transported back into my version of purgatory. The pup tent. Where would I go? Back to WCBS-TV news? Would they have me? What about radio? I could still do that . . . right? It was 1986. I was thirty-four years old and feeling like I was being forced into retirement.
I walked out of the CBS Black Rock offices on Sixth Avenue, into a pay phone booth, and dialed the number I had for Frank Kelly. I hated playing defense (I mean begging), but it was the only play I had. Oddly, Frank Kelly seemed excited that I had called. He told me they had auditioned a few select people for the hosting job at ET and they were narrowing their choices. He suggested Paramount fly me out to Los Angeles the following week for a second round of camera testing. They’d put me up at the Sunset Marquis on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. I would do the audition on the ET set and later meet with Paramount TV president Lucie Salhany.
Had Peter Lund just done me a huge favor? Perhaps. But first thing’s first. Haircut. A week in the gym. I set my Betamax to record every episode of ET being broadcast between now and the day I left for Los Angeles. I had to get this job. My ships were on fire once again, except this time someone else had struck the match.
For a garage-band kid from Long Island, checking in to the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood was a supernatural experience. This was where music royalty had stayed since the 1960s. Aerosmith, Keith Richards, Cyndi Lauper, U2, Ozzy Osbourne, Liza Minnelli, Neil Diamond, and more. I dropped my bags in the room at noon and decided I needed to get some color on my face before the next day’s camera test at Paramount. I headed for the pool and spent an hour in the California sunshine. I soon found out the hard way that the West Coast sunshine produces more intense UV rays than what I remembered at Long Island’s Jones Beach. The next day I showed up on Paramount’s Stage 28 beet red. The ET makeup team was hilarious. “Wow, what have you done to yourself, young man? Let’s see if we can fix your face.” Let me tell you, blond hair and sunburns do not go well together. It took them an hour, but eventually they got me looking almost human.
Maybe looking like a beefsteak tomato coated in vanilla frosting was my lucky charm, because my second audition with Mary Hart went a whole lot better than the one I had punted pitifully in New York. I was very familiar with the pacing of the show this time, having watched hours of recent episodes. I was also wearing a tailored suit I had purchased at Barneys New York. Sunburn aside, I looked the part. Even Mary seemed more at ease with our banter on the set.
Following the audition, I was escorted across the Paramount lot to a conference room that adjoined the office of Paramount Television’s president, Lucie Salhany. As I walked in I could see a camera shot of the empty ET news desk on her TV monitor. Obviously she had been watching my audition.
Lucy got right to the point. A TV-news headhunter had sent her a bunch of air checks of news readers and she had come upon the one of me anchoring the news in Nashville. She echoed Frank Kelly’s line: “We are looking for a newsier approach to the show.”
Then she said, “So, we are talking about a thirteen-week contract to co-host the show with Mary, Monday through Friday. You never know how these things will work out so that’s as much time as we can commit to at the moment. Now, John, it looks like you’ve gained quite a bit of weight since your Nashville days. We would need you to lose twenty pounds or so. Can you make that happen in two weeks?”
“Uh, sure thing.” I made a mental note to buy a new pair of running shoes.
And that was that. The good news? The first thirteen-week contract was quickly renewed and then eventually turned into a one-year contract—which then grew to a three-year deal as Paramount and I got used to each other and my “newsier approach” to entertainment news.
I co-hosted Entertainment Tonight for ten years. I told Lucie on the phone recently that her decision to hire me set an incredible course for my life. All of it. Without Entertainment Tonight I never would have met Connie; I wouldn’t know her first child, Gib, now my son, and we never would have had our daughter, Prima. There would not have been a Red Rocks concert to catapult my music career. And I never would have interviewed Eric Clapton, Bette Davis, Gregory Peck, or Pee-wee Herman, twice.