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My decision to leave daytime TV was cemented by a 1997 incident during the taping of a show involving DNA testing. The easy, inexpensive test to identify a baby’s daddy was about to change the genre and breathe new life into the careers of long-running hosts Jerry Springer and Maury Povich. But I was the first to use the technology to create dramatic moments of raw revelation. There are few canned dramas as fundamental as solving the mystery of fatherhood on live television.
As we crafted the DNA segments, the show had a redeeming social value in that we provided a safe space for abused spouses to confront their abusers under the cover of getting them counseling. During one episode, after confronting an insanely jealous husband with his battered wife’s allegations of abuse, I took great satisfaction in telling the arrogant slug, “By the way, you’re not the baby’s father.”
The shocked young man looked at me with contempt. “Thanks, Geraldo,” he spat out as he punched a hole in the set and stormed off, as the audience gasped. I looked at my longtime stage manager, Mike Jacobs, and told him I had to get out of the business or go straight to hell.
My first instinct was to go back to Roger Ailes, who had made an informal pitch for my services in 1996, when he was creating Fox News. This time, he honored me with a formal multimillion-dollar offer. I initially accepted, but NBC had the right to match any outside offer, which it did. When I inked that pact, the New York Times ran an oversized picture of me on the first page of the business section with the caption “$30 Million Man.” Said the story: “NBC moved aggressively to keep Mr. Rivera after he accepted an offer from the Fox News Channel last week. NBC had a right to match the Fox offer and did so rather than lose his Rivera Live program, which has been the most successful show on CNBC, an increasingly important corporate asset to NBC.”
“This is something I need for my honor, for my family, for my own self-image,” I told Bill Carter, the new media writer for the Times. Referring to some of my most criticized moments in the years since leaving ABC, I continued, “A lot of the problems people have had with me have been of my own creation. But I want to go down as doing something to open up TV news to being more human, not as someone who opened up Al Capone’s vault or had his nose broken on TV by some skinhead.”
Being embraced by a major network news organization appealed to my ego. It signaled respect. “Andy Lack [once again the president of NBC News, and the man who negotiated Megyn Kelly’s big deal when she left Fox in January 2017 and survived the Lauer dismissal in November 2017] sat down with me and said, ‘I want you to be an NBC News correspondent,’” I told the Times. “That was the most important thing to me.” I was a rare media creature, a former news correspondent allowed back into the rarefied ranks of the network-news profession after leaving thirteen years earlier to go into show business.
Also included in the deal was a monthly appearance on the then-dominant Today show, at the time hosted by Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. Katie was an ebullient star and a rival to Barbara Walters for preeminence among women in broadcasting. She and I had an emotional bond because of my relationship with her husband, John Paul (Jay) Monahan III, a lawyer and NBC News legal analyst. Dashing and handsome, Jay at the time was battling the cancer that would kill him less than two months later at age forty-two. To show him my love and support, I insisted that my new contract contain a clause in writing naming Jay as my permanent substitute host on Rivera Live.
It was an important role because beginning earlier that year, in July 1997, I was taking big chunks of time away from the show to skipper my sailboat, Voyager, around the world, on an odyssey I will describe shortly. Jay hosted the show every Friday night during that important time when the O.J. Simpson civil trial still commanded enormous attention, also covering the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh trials.
With friends Marianne Bertuna and her future husband Arthur Aidala on board Voyager off Martha’s Vineyard. Summer 2014.
Jay was so touched by the gesture of being written into my contract that for a time he carried the letter around with him to show people how highly he was valued by CNBC and me. A couple of weeks after I signed the deal, he asked to see me about a personal matter, which I figured was bad news about his health. We dreaded the possibility that his heroic treatments at New York-Presbyterian Hospital had come too late to save him from the ravages of the disease. He and Katie had been very public about his battle with cancer and were already crusading for men to get colonoscopies as soon as they hit age forty. The couple had two little girls who later attended school in New York with my daughters Isabella and Simone.
After playing phone tag, Jay and I caught up outside a car dealership in the Chelsea neighborhood, where I had come to buy a Bentley to celebrate the signing of the NBC deal. “What’s up?” I asked, fearing the answer. “I almost died last week,” he told me. “Things don’t look good. I wanted you to know.”
Katie asked me to deliver one of the eulogies at his grand funeral service in January 1998 at a packed Park Avenue church, St. Ignatius Loyola. Everyone in the news business attended. He was beloved. A Civil War reenactor, Jay always assumed the role of a heroic Confederate cavalryman. In my corny and overwrought eulogy I put him in character from those long-ago days and spoke of how he and Katie were soul mates through the ages. Thanks to Katie’s generosity and fundraising there is now a Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
The last part of the NBC deal was for four prime-time, network-news specials a year, one of which, “Women in Prison,” won the 2000 Robert F. Kennedy Award for Journalism, my third. In those days before Orange Is the New Black, it was a stark and revealing exposé on the exploitation and abuse that was endemic to the privately owned women’s prisons throughout the South.
“HE DOES WHAT HE DOES,” JUNE 1999
There was no love lost between me and anchor Tom Brokaw. He was a news snob and I was an outlier. Knowing that bad blood simmered, David Corvo, the excellent NBC News executive who supervised my work, arranged to make my office two feet wider than that of the network’s principal star. Of course, as befitting the anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, Brokaw’s office overlooked the skating rink and elegant Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, while mine in Fort Lee, New Jersey, looked out at the extensive King’s Plaza parking lot, a gas station, and a Korean market.
While I enjoyed regular appearances on the Today show and Dateline NBC, the only NBC News program I could not get on was Nightly News, helmed by Brokaw. In those days before humbled by father time, he was still the NBC News god and had strict say over which correspondents could appear on his broadcast. I was not one of them.
In spring 1999, I volunteered to cover the Balkan Wars for the Today show and CNBC’s Rivera Live. That conflict resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia in the post-Soviet era. Serbia, an Orthodox Christian country, was vying to become dominant, but had just lost Bosnia, a Muslim region, after a bitter war marked by Serbian genocide of Bosnians, who were buried by the thousands in mass graves.
In 1999, Christian Serbia was still fighting to hold onto another majority-Muslim region, Kosovo. Kosovo was supported in its independence bid by neighboring Albania and much of Europe and the United States. Ethnically, Muslim Kosovars and Muslim Albanians are virtually indistinguishable, a people divided by an invisible line on a map.
I had great contacts within the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in New York. Some worked at Elaine’s. Little-known fact of Big Apple life: Many of the suave Italian waiters at the best restaurants are actually Muslims from Albania who learned their Italian by listening to RAI, Radiotelevisione Italiana S.p.A., Italy’s national public broadcasting company. Italy is separated from Albania by just forty-five miles of water across the Strait of Otranto, which connects the Adriatic to the Ionian Sea.
This Italianization of Albania happened from 1945 to 1992, when the country was a repressed, cloistered communist dictatorship run by the Soviet Union. Now it is a free country and like Kosovo, its little brother republic, sends its children to America where they also control New York City’s roofing jobs, and make up most of Manhattan’s porters and doormen.
The KLA had a rough reputation for mobsterism in the United States, which I thought was not relevant to their countrymen’s struggle for nationhood and independence in Europe. I chose to trust them, and they trusted me. To this day, they are among my favorite folks, along with the Lebanese. In May 2012, Albanian president Bamir Topi awarded me the “Medal of Gratitude,” Albania’s highest honor accorded a foreigner, for my work during the war and since in support of Kosovo and Albania.
During the bloody conflict in the Balkans, in June 1999, like true friends, the Albanians rolled out the red carpet for me when I flew into Tirana, the Albanian capital. They also provided transportation and armed support to the front lines across the border into Kosovo. We got behind Serbian lines, had some close-up, on-camera encounters with Serbian artillery, snipers, and mortars, and gained exclusive access to a Serbian position that had been overrun by the KLA.
Aside from the drama of nearby explosions, our foray was newsworthy because we discovered Russian Army identification on the dead, which proved that Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, its pugnacious prime minister and once and future president, was assisting its Orthodox cousins the Serbs in the fight against Muslim Albania.
The problem was with NBC News. Though Jeff Zucker, the wunderkind executive producer of the Today show (and now president of CNN), made extensive use of my reporting from the front lines, Tom Brokaw’s Nightly News ignored the dramatic reports.
Syndicated television columnist David Bauder wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer on June 18, 1999, that “It’s not hard to find NBC’s $5 million man, Geraldo Rivera, on television. You just have to know where to look.
“Try the Today show, where Rivera’s action-packed reports on the Kosovo Liberation Army first aired this month. But don’t try the NBC Nightly News, where a Rivera report has never been shown. Better yet, try cable, where MSNBC repeatedly ran the Kosovo reports.
“A year and a half into his lucrative new contract with NBC, the former syndicated talk-show host still doesn’t feel completely accepted at the Peacock Network. He may get more camera time than anyone else in the company, but he yearns for the time he doesn’t get. It’s a strange dynamic.
“Since signing his NBC deal in November 1997, Rivera has been rankled at not having any reports aired on NBC Nightly News, the network’s flagship show anchored by Tom Brokaw. In December 1997, Brokaw said of Rivera: ‘He does what he does, and I do what I do. There’s very little common ground between us. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have the right to do what he does.’ Brokaw hasn’t talked much about his colleague since then.
“Yet Rivera’s feelings were hurt anew by the treatment of his Kosovo reports. He hoped they were good enough for Nightly to seek them out. ‘The writing is on the wall, the sky, and the ground,’ Rivera said. ‘It’s just not going to happen. I don’t think it will ever happen. If that piece didn’t get on, I don’t think they’d use anything. I know that Dateline and Nightly are like the country club in my neighborhood. I’m not allowed in.’ The network’s only comment was that ‘each NBC News program makes its own editorial decisions,’ said spokeswoman Alex Constantinople.”
SAIL TO THE CENTURY, 1997–2000
My marriage to C.C. was already on the rocks by the time of my NBC News disenchantment in 1999. We were estranged but not yet formally separated as the world approached the new millennium, anticipated around the globe with a mixture of superstitious awe and more-grounded fears of computer malfunctions and systemic technology breakdowns. We were commemorating that historic New Year in January 2000 with a monumental sailboat journey around the world. It was an awesome experience that checked a key item on my existential bucket list.
With the permission of NBC, through my personal company, Maravilla Productions, I sold the Travel Channel a four-hour series documenting the once-in-a-lifetime journey on board Voyager, my classic, vintage ketch. Designed by Sparkman & Stephens Naval Architects, she was built in 1972 in Lemwerder, Germany by famed shipbuilders Abeking & Rasmussen. Seventy feet long, with two soaring masts, Voyager is a graceful beauty. She is also rugged, with a hull made of half-inch-thick aluminum, and four watertight compartments. She was purpose-built for Tom Watson Jr., who was retiring as CEO of IBM. A world-class sailor, Watson wanted to take her farther north than any cruising sailboat had ever gone. He achieved that goal, taking the sturdy vessel through the ice-bound seas north of Greenland.
I bought her third- or fourth-hand in 1995, in bad shape, but her peerless lines and sailing soul remained intact. I rebuilt her in Howdy Bailey’s Boatyard in Norfolk, Virginia. Together, Voyager and I sailed tens of thousands of miles, around the world, and up the mighty Amazon River. When my age and lifestyle no longer favored grand sailing adventures, I still could not bear to sell her, so I gave her away. In 2014, nineteen years after setting foot on board, Erica and I donated the beautiful boat to the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, appropriately close to the Watson family compound in North Haven, Maine.
The grand journey around the world started at Rough Point, my home on the Navesink River in New Jersey, through New York Harbor to Marion, Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay, down east off New England, into the great circle route across the Atlantic Ocean to the mid-ocean Azores archipelago, and on to Lisbon, Portugal, on the European mainland. Then it was through the Strait of Gibraltar, gateway to the Mediterranean Sea. We stopped in Tangier, Morocco; Malaga and Palmas, Spain; the South of France; Corsica to Sardinia; Italy to Sicily; Malta to Santorini, Greece; Crete, Turkey, and Cyprus; and then across to Tel Aviv, Israel. From there, it was through the Suez Canal, up the Gulf of Aqaba, dreaming of Lawrence of Arabia, to Eilat, Israel, then after an unpleasant encounter with an Egyptian Navy frigate, it was down the Red Sea, around the pirate-infested Horn of Africa to the Seychelles Islands, and Kenya. From Africa, we headed to the island nation of the Maldives, across the Indian Ocean to Saba, Indonesia; Singapore, Bali, Australia, and New Zealand; and into the vast Pacific to the island nation of Tonga, which is located directly on the International Date Line.
At the helm of Voyager, which I sailed around the world and 1,400 miles up the Amazon River. January 2000.
There, after doing a live shot for NBC, which was broadcasting around the clock as the various time zones hit the historic Y2K marker, we held our collective breaths hoping that our computer-driven navigational systems would not crash along with every other computer in the world. When that did not happen, we celebrated the Once-in-a-Millennium New Year at a party at the rotund and gregarious Tongan Crown Prince’s lavish home. From those long-dreamed-of festivities, it was on to Tahiti, and the other islands of French Polynesia, including Bora Bora, across the broad Pacific to the miraculous Galapagos. We dry-docked Voyager in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to repair a broken propeller shaft, then headed up the northwest coast of South America, through the Panama Canal, passing the east coast of Central America and Mexico, through the Florida Straits, riding the swift, strong Gulf Stream current up the Atlantic coast of the US, past Cape Hatteras, and home to North Cove Marina in Lower Manhattan. There, in the shadow of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, which still had a year of life left, we jumped overboard to celebrate our circumnavigation.
Called Sail to the Century, the 30,000-mile journey took several years, from 1997–2000. I managed to do it and my job by taking six weeks off every six months. As I mentioned earlier, Jay Monahan was my semi-permanent substitute host, and after he passed, Dan Abrams, now the skilled legal analyst for ABC News and a dapper internet entrepreneur, filled my chair.
Typically as we sailed east through the Mediterranean, I would leave New York after Rivera Live on a Thursday evening, catching an overnight flight to either London or Paris. Then I would fly from that European or Asian airport on Friday morning to wherever Voyager was waiting, arriving on board by Friday afternoon.
We would spend the weekend on the move, always sailing easterly. Then on Monday morning I would take an early-morning flight back to London or Paris from wherever we had docked, in time to catch the noon flight on the supersonic Concorde back to New York.
With a cruising speed of Mach 2 (1,354 mph), Concorde got me home in less than three hours. Since there was a five- or six-hour time difference, the ride outraced the sun, getting me back to New York two or three hours earlier than when I’d left Europe. Sadly, months later in July 2000, Concorde stopped flying after an awful Paris crash, which killed all one hundred passengers and nine crewmembers aboard.
In grand style, we achieved the Travel Channel series’ big idea to be astride the International Date Line at midnight, January 1, 2000, but along the way I lost my marriage. Chastened and abashed by decades of self-indulgence, I swear I am transformed, faithful during my entire marriage to Erica, and as proud of that as I am ashamed of the earlier philandering that diminishes me. But that is now. Back in 2000, I was getting that fourth and final divorce. I kept the boat and to escape dealing with my shortcomings, kept sailing.
FROM ROOTS TO RAIN FOREST, 2000–2002
Upon returning from Tonga and the Date Line, I was asked by the Travel Channel for another Voyager-based, four-part series. We called it From Roots to Rain Forest. It documented a second grand journey onboard the old sailboat, this time from Puerto Rico (my “roots”) across the Caribbean Sea and down the Atlantic Ocean off the bulge of South America, across the equator, entering the gigantic delta of the enormous Amazon River, then heading 1,400 miles up the big river, across the entire nation of Brazil (hence the “rain forest”), touching Amazonian Colombia, all the way to Peru, farther up the river than any ocean-faring foreign sailboat had yet gone.
This journey began in February 2001 when I brought Erica to a huge family reunion in San Juan Harbor attended by scores of local relatives, who despite the impressive number of guests, still represented a mere fraction of the Rivera clan. My dad, Cruz Rivera, was one of seventeen children. We partied with my cousins and uncles and aunties and reminisced for the cameras. Then we set sail on the tough upwind journey a couple of hundred miles to the Windward and Leeward Caribbean Islands en route to South America’s great river.
From the special: “Our short and easy first leg of our journey hasn’t turned out that way. We have been battered for the last hour by the wet and driving wind. And now this squall; when it hit, packing rain blown as if by fire hose at forty-plus knots, Voyager was soaked and pummeled. Nothing, certainly no synthetic amusement park thrill ride, can match the terror and the satisfaction of riding the wrath of elemental fury. We don’t sail the oceans looking for trouble. But we’re reasonably competent to deal with it, and relish the glow of flamboyant survival.”
A Travel Channel executive who wanted to be hands-on joined us, but he was puking so badly after the first few hours we had to drop him off on Vieques Island, a mere forty choppy miles from our starting point in San Juan Harbor.
As I did for the original 1997–2000 around-the-world voyage, I flew back and forth during this Amazon River odyssey, balancing my day job at CNBC with long weekends and scattered vacations in the jungle. From that February 2001 through the late summer, usually with Erica, I would join the big boat as her crew steamed and sailed her up the legendary river, reporting from the special: “Having sailed Voyager over six of the Seven Seas, in the spring of 2001, we began our exploration of one of the world’s most mighty rivers. So vast is the Amazon that its fresh water can be found two hundred miles out in the ocean.
“Home to three thousand species of fish, including the piranha, one of the world’s most terrifying; three hundred species of mammals, including these magnificent cats (jaguars, leopards, and mountain lions); and a billion acres of rain forest, there is peace here—and war. Harmony and conflict, and the lure of the jungle and its river, proved irresistible.
“Welcome to the Amazon. Of all the world’s exotic destinations, few rival the Amazon in mystery and allure. It is the world’s mightiest, largest, and at 4,200 miles, the longest river on the planet. It is a watery highway through an adventure land that stretches the distance from New York to Los Angeles and halfway back again. The journey up the incredible waterway will pass through the immense jungles of Brazil, touch the corner of Colombia, and travel up into the Andes Mountains of Peru.”
We met indigenous people, saw boundless rain forest and abundant critters, from monkeys to piranha to pink river dolphin. We wondered at the bizarrely ornate opera house in the jungle capital of Manaus and often ran into stern-faced police and local military forces on and around the river. During our jungle adventure, the vast expanse of the Amazon through Brazil, especially where it gets close to neighboring Colombia, was heavily patrolled to curtail rain-forest and wildlife poachers, battle the endemic ordinary crime, and most urgently, to deter or catch the dope smugglers who were running rampant.
Aside from the four-hour Travel Channel documentary, I also sold my real employer, NBC News, on an hour-long network Dateline special using the river journey to probe the huge extent of drug production and distribution surrounding the Amazon River basin. In those days before the Mexican drug lords took control, we were sailing right through the dark heart of the most important cocaine and heroin production and transport artery in the New World, and the adventure made for compelling television.
An oxygen-deprived nap on small plane flying over the Andes Mountains. July 2003.
PLAN COLOMBIA, MAY 2001
Voyager docked for the duration of the NBC News shoot in hot, humid, seedy, scary Leticia, Colombia’s southernmost city and principal Amazon River port. It was a scene torn from a Casablanca-style movie. The shady riverfront was filled with nefarious characters, the majority of whom were ne’er-do-wells engaged in aspects of the drug trade. From Leticia, I chartered small planes to various locations in the region to document the extensive coca and poppy fields and accompany authorities in their raids on production laboratories.
We taped an interview with US Marine General (and later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Peter Pace at the splendidly exotic, semi-secret US jungle base where hundreds of our GIs were deployed. They were there for the now largely forgotten military effort called Plan Colombia. The goal was to counter narcotics production and transport, as well as direct the fight against leftist guerrillas who were facilitating the drug trade and destabilizing regional governments.
As extraordinary as it sounds today, the terrorists had their own mini-country within a country, and in our own hemisphere. In one hairy sequence, we made contact with and gained access to FARC-landia, the quasi-official chunk of Colombian territory that had been ceded to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by their Spanish initials FARC. Frantic to get to our rendezvous before the nighttime curfew, the violation of which was death, we drove our borrowed vehicle hard into that rebel-held territory, past numerous checkpoints manned by edgy boy soldiers bearing big weapons.
With US-trained paramilitary, Plan Colombia. July 2003.
Covering Plan Colombia. July 2003.
FARC’s leadership was made up of vicious, extreme-leftist revolutionary drug barons responsible for decades of kidnapping and murders that presaged ISIS, only without the artifice of religion. We reached our predetermined jungle clearing just as night fell. The next morning, we were thoroughly searched before being introduced to the boss, Raúl Reyes. Wearing jungle camo, short, bespectacled, and bearded in the Che Guevara mode, he was known as El Comandante and was wanted around the world, including in the United States. I questioned him hard about FARC’s dope-dealing ways. He answered calmly. Denying the allegations of drug dealing, he claimed his group only collected taxes on those who were the actual cocaine producers. Seven years later, after peace talks with the government failed, Reyes was killed in a massive US-Colombian assault on his camp. When my brother, Craig, and Greg Hart told me the news, there were high fives all around.
Called “Drug Bust: The Longest War,” our NBC special aired in June 2001. I thought it would be a big award magnet, like “Women in Prison.” By awards season, though, I was gone from NBC News, and the world’s attention was focused on another menace, Osama bin Laden.
PICKING UP THE PIECES, FEBRUARY– SEPTEMBER 2001
The rest of that summer of 2001 was taken up sailing the old boat back down the Amazon toward home. The awesome power of the river flow is fascinating. While we struggled on the way in as if going up a steep hill, averaging just two knots against the mighty current, we virtually flew on the way out, sometimes hitting fifteen or even twenty knots (twenty-three mph) as we were swept downriver toward the Atlantic Ocean and the two hundred-mile-wide delta of this incredible stream.
Out of the river, our most notable stop on the way up north was Devil’s Island, France’s remote and notorious former prison colony off the northeast coast of South America. It once held Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish artillery officer whose trial and conviction came to define institutional anti-Semitism. The brutality and inhumanity of the penal colony are brilliantly described in Henri Charrière’s classic memoir Papillon, which became a great 1973 movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman.
By staying on the move, I was also postponing dealing with the upheavals in my personal life, especially the divorce from C.C. Our estate was large and complicated, so the process was drawn out, and Isabella and Simone were whipsawed as a result. Born during the flush times, they spent their early childhood helicoptering between our two homes. Rough Point, a 105-year-old Victorian home on eight acres on the Navesink River in leafy Monmouth County, New Jersey, was our principal residence. When we sold it to a newly minted hedge-fund millionaire, he knocked down the old but meticulously maintained landmark the same day in an act of civic vandalism, replacing it with a McMansion.
Our second home was Sea Gate, which C.C. still owns in her sweet hometown, Marion, Massachusetts. It is another lovely landmark, which I try to visit by boat each summer. Built in 1926 on a bluff on Buzzards Bay, it is bordered on the landward side by the seventeenth hole of the world-famous Kittansett Club. Incidentally, neither the Navesink Country Club in New Jersey nor Kittansett in Massachusetts allowed me to become a member. A Jewish Puerto Rican (who is 10% Native American, according to Ancestry.com) was more than either club could abide. These rejections just fueled my drive to succeed.
In late summer 2001, C.C. and the girls moved to Manhattan, into a homey brownstone near their new school. They were there on 9/11 when the planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers downtown. It was a Tuesday and their first day of school. When the authorities sealed the island of Manhattan, even closing the bridges and tunnels, it was temporarily impossible for some of their fellow students from the outer boroughs to get home. Two girls stayed with Simone and Isabella in their brand-new home. Five miles from Ground Zero, the terror of the attacks still reached them. The brownstone has an elevator, but when Simone heard on the news that people were trapped in elevators in the Twin Towers when they collapsed, she refused from then on to use hers.
Reunited in Paris with daughter Simone after a close call in terror attacks, November 2015.
Fourteen years later, Simone had a closer, more personal encounter with terror. She was studying abroad in Paris in November 2015 and attending a high-profile soccer match, Germany vs. France, in the Stade de France, when three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside. French president Francoise Hollande was also at the game. Like all the spectators, he was unhurt by the blasts. Some of Simone’s school friends were trampled and injured in the stampede that followed the evacuation of the stadium. Other Parisian venues suffered far worse. There were scores of casualties in coordinated attacks that stunned the world.
It is ironic that Simone’s near miss from terrorist violence happened in Paris. There was a standing joke in our family. I traveled to and from desolate, violent Afghanistan so often that a flamboyant friend of ours, real estate broker to the stars Robby Brown, once told C.C., “Geraldo must like it there,” (in Afghanistan). “I prefer Paris,” was C.C.’s punch line, always getting a laugh when she repeated the story. “But Geraldo doesn’t because there’s no war there.”
Then Islamic extremism reached even the City of Light, twice in one year, 2015. In January, seventeen were killed in and around Paris during an attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the three-day murder spree that followed. Then, in November, it happened again, when our own daughter was nearly touched by the horror.
Despite various close calls over the years as a war correspondent, nothing rattled me as much as the uncertainty and helpless feeling of having a child in distress. Simone and three of her friends were marooned outside the stadium, located in a shady part of Paris, after the bomb blasts. The stadium doors were locked once the frantic crowds were emptied out. The Metro subway was shut down, and all the hotels and restaurants in the area locked their doors. The bodies of 132 innocent civilians lay in street cafés and in the landmark Bataclan Theater.
Paris was reeling and it took us an hour of frantic calling around before we got in touch with a savvy Parisian friend of friends who managed to extricate my darling girl and her companions. I was on the air live with my friend and colleague Shepard Smith during the ordeal, and millions watched as my terrified family dealt with the crisis of uncertainty in the midst of the panic and chaos of the massive attack. Few stories generated more statements of concern from viewers than Simone’s plight in Paris; total strangers taking time to email or otherwise let us know they were relieved she was safe and unharmed.
My three daughters on holiday in London after Simone’s close call in Paris, November 2015.
CHASING THE FOX, SEPTEMBER 2001
Roger Ailes created Fox News in 1996, asking me early on to come over to see what he was doing, which I did as a courtesy. It did not look like much. In a huge empty basement space that used to be a discount drug store, he used his arms to describe what would be where in his world news headquarters. There were disconnected wires, unassembled desks, and eager, bleary-eyed kids running around, and I told him maybe later. I was in the middle of reporting the O.J. Simpson murders, the crime story of the century, and ratings at CNBC were soaring.
Despite that success, by 2001, a broad range of issues from patriotism to nepotism, pride and hubris, and the periodic need for chaos in my life fueled the decision to leave NBC News and join Roger at Fox News. By then, his headquarters had been built, and he was in the process of making the conservative news channel a competitive force. CNN was clinging to its status as the number-one-rated cable news channel, but barely. Fox was in second place, coming on strong.
Smoldering from the refusal of NBC News in that pre-9/11 era to count me among its top correspondents, I felt that the big money the network was paying me did not seem enough. The stage set, the immediate catalyst to leave came on the day al Qaeda attacked the United States, crashing hijacked airliners into the Twin Towers in New York, the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The events of that day were shocking and traumatic for every American in different ways for different reasons. My trauma was nothing compared to so many others’. Still, it left a scar. Erica and I were in Malibu. Longtime sidekick Greg Hart called shortly after 6 AM Pacific Time and told me to put on the Today show. As soon as I saw the horrifying sight of the towers burning, I tried frantically to arrange travel back to New York to the girls, but nearby airports were all closed and would remain so for days.
Commentators were speculating on the probability of further attacks, and the world was coming to grips with the fact that everything had just changed. Usually paradise, Malibu was hell on this wrenching day. Initially unable to reach my daughters on the phone or to get back, I felt as if God was punishing me for every sin I’d ever committed, including leaving our family behind. Frustrated, I was desperate to hear from Isabella, then age eight, and Simone, almost seven, both stuck in stricken Manhattan. I tried repeatedly to get through, but the phones were either disabled or overloaded.
I called the NBC News desk, suggesting that since I was stuck on the West Coast I should go to LAX to report on the situation there. The airport was the intended destination of the four doomed planes, and it made sense to report on the grieving families of passengers and crews. They noted my volunteering (“Thanks, Geraldo, we’ll keep it in mind”), but told me lead anchor Tom Brokaw was personally managing all NBC coverage.
Riddled with guilt, I was fuming and about to blow. It got horrifyingly worse when I heard from my sister Sharon, who told me what had befallen our New Jersey neighbors. She was head of ad sales for the local weekly newspaper I published there, the Two River Times, based in Red Bank. Sharon told me that when the towers went down, the calamity took many of our friends with them. Our Middletown, New Jersey, area was devastated. Many of the dead were executives from Cantor Fitzgerald, the big financial firm headquartered on the top floors of the North Tower of the Trade Center. Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 of its 960 New York employees. Some had kids in Rumson Country Day School, the New Jersey school the girls had left before their move to Manhattan. At least six school dads were missing and presumed dead.
When the smoke and rubble cleared and the bodies at the Trade Center were counted, the area had the highest per capita toll of any community outside Lower Manhattan; 135 of our friends and neighbors lost their lives in the attacks. Later I was proud to join two other dads from the school, Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, in helping host a benefit concert at Red Bank’s Count Basie Theatre.
Aside from their boundless talent, these two men were stalwarts of the community, often performing for surprised fans and worthy causes, usually unannounced. That night at Count Basie and in many subsequent events, they helped steady the community and build its resolve to help one another. Bruce’s song “The Rising” became America’s anthem of recovery and resolve to right this terrible wrong.
“DADDY, I KNOW KIDS WHOSE DADDIES ARE DEAD!” SEPTEMBER 2001
I wrote in the next week in the Two River Times about how the attacks destroyed everyone’s peace of mind, including little Simone’s:
“‘Daddy, I know kids whose daddies are dead!’ she told me when I finally got through on the phone. How do you respond when a statement so fraught with anxiety and alarm bursts from the lips of your kid? What do you say to comfort your child under these circumstances?” Feeling that I had deserted my children in their time of need, I felt guilt wash over me.
I do not mention my two sons in this context because they were spectators to this particular chapter of our tumultuous family life. Cruz, who was born in Dallas and educated at St. Mark’s School of Texas there until tenth grade, was with his mom and stepdad living in Portland, Oregon, when 9/11 happened. Gabriel, then twenty-two years old, was commuting between his mom’s home in Los Angeles and mine in New Jersey, trying to decide on a career path involving computers. He was with his friends in Brooklyn when the world changed, watching the tortured Lower Manhattan skyline from across the East River in Williamsburg, as shocked and disoriented as the rest of us.
As I wrote at the time: “Now the Two River community and Americans everywhere will have to deal with the awful reality that people we knew and loved and laughed with and attended parents’ day with and went to cocktail parties with and stood on the sidelines watching soccer games with are gone.
“They are gone before their time. They are gone despite all the sit-ups and jogging and annual check-ups and careful estate planning and the kids’ college funds and the clear career paths and the retirement dreams. Our hearts cannot bear the thought of the pain and loss of those children. Their fathers or mothers are gone with the wind of terror and dismay.”
My anger, anxiety, and frustration got worse because there was to be no Rivera Live from L.A. or anywhere else on September 11. Shortly after my conversation with the assignment desk offering to go to LAX, I got a call from my Fort Lee staff telling me Tom Brokaw’s newscast would be airing simultaneously on all three NBC channels, preempting all programming on both MSNBC and CNBC, including mine.
It was clear the network’s coverage of the war on these terrorists was not going to include me in any significant way. I was cut out of the biggest story of our time. Over the next few weeks, as other enterprising war correspondents were already making their way to the battle zones, I paced, filling with impatient rage.
A message I wrote during that week to my dear friend Kevin Overmeyer, then captain of Voyager, sums up my emotions. The boat was in dry dock being refitted in Trinidad, West Indies, for its journey back to her Hudson River mooring off my new home in Edgewater, New Jersey.
I wrote Captain Kevin: “The losses are wicked bad for NYC. 343 firemen alone! It’s fucking awful. So many funerals and memorials, it’s like the Blitz during WWII. I hate the mother fuckers who did this and so does the whole country. Everybody’s also scared things will never be the same again. The view from the dock here in Edgewater feels amputated now. Remember, the towers used to be framed by the kitchen window. Now it feels like a gravestone.”
MS. ELLE’S, NOVEMBER 2001
To its credit, the Peacock Network agreed reluctantly to let me leave. I told NBC I was leaving one way or the other, but the network was reasonably gracious. Because the show was so important to CNBC’s prime-time lineup, they asked for more time to produce a substitute. I resisted, but Roger insisted that I leave NBC on good terms and with a signed release, so I stayed two more months, deep into November. It was a long goodbye that ended on the day of my farewell party at Ms. Elle’s.
The city was shaken and smoldering in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The mass grave of nearly three thousand friends and neighbors was still being exhumed a couple of miles downtown. And I was heading off to Afghanistan to cover the just and popular war to punish the perpetrators and impose restorative justice.
On the social scale of hipster New York, my November 2001 going-away party at Ms. Elle’s Restaurant on West Seventy-Ninth Street was a career high point. In a life that was no stranger to parties, this was a milestone. It had a seriousness of purpose that made it more important than other rowdier but less-focused celebrations.
The ambience at the party was somewhere between kamikaze fatalism and Irish wake. I vowed to bathe in glory or die trying. I conflated various clichés, invented others, and came up with my own epitaph:
Evil Heart’s Bane
Wild Song Sustained
No Pain, No Gain
No Guts, No Glory.
I told Erica, brother Craig, and all my confidants that I wanted it inscribed on my tombstone. Still do, although at this last stage of an increasingly enfeebled life it seems silly and pretentious. Erica joked that it sounds like a stoner’s epitaph, more Stan Lee than Joseph Conrad. Back then, a grim, dramatic time, the whole country was in my corner. It felt like everyone I had ever known from ABC, NBC, and the talk-show days packed my favorite joint that night, that dim, usually gloomy dive on West Seventy-Ninth Street off Broadway.
The place has since closed, but at the time, three lesbians, who took turns cooking and tending bar, owned it. What their joint lacked in flash or décor, it made up for in vibe that night. It was exactly the place, and exactly the emotion-laden moment, I craved and envisioned when giving up the CNBC job. Professional respectability beckoned, and even the possibility of a martyr’s death covering righteous combat was a small price to pay for immortality.
As in the Willowbrook days of my youth, everyone was cheering. In this normally cynical, skeptical town, for ten minutes New Yorkers suspended disbelief. Mocking chatter about my tabloid excesses was replaced by reluctant acceptance that I was leaving a safe, lucrative job to risk life and limb for God and country. The New Yorker magazine ran a cartoon showing two mujahideen fighters ducking bullets in an Afghan foxhole, one saying to the other, “I hear Geraldo Rivera is coming.”
Not everyone was applauding. Speaking for the snots on SNL, Tina Fey said, “I hope nothing bad happens to Geraldo in Afghanistan or I’ll have to pretend to be sad.” I hated it, but it was a funny line, and she is in the business of making fun of people. Her impression of Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign is among the best ever of anybody. Still, in 2016, when her Afghan-set war movie Whiskey Tango Foxtrot bombed, laying a rotten egg at the box office, I experienced a few seconds of gloating, thinking that what goes around comes around.
Roger hired me as a war correspondent for $2 million a year, plus the nice Fort Lee office. I also got to take my two long-time, skeptical, eyebrows raised, take-no-prisoner secretary/assistants: JoAnn Torres Conte, a loyal, street-smart Bronx Puerto Rican who was married to a Bronx Italian cop, and Sharon Campbell, a competent, confident, don’t-mess-with-me-either African American. Plus, I got first-class travel. I know that’s a sweet deal in real life, but it was just 40 percent of the money I was making at NBC and a fraction of the fat talk-show years. I told Roger that the opportunity to go to war against the 9/11 terrorists was worth the sacrifice, but asked if he couldn’t sweeten the pot a bit to ease the pain. He said he could not give me any more cash because in the time since he had first offered me a job several years before, he had “given all the money to O’Reilly.”
