My Remarkable Journey (10 page)

Now, the girl and I were in the middle of dessert. I was eating cherries jubilee. I had no idea Frank was going to introduce
me. In my haste to stand, I bumped the table, the cherries jubilee went flying and landed all over my white shirt and pants.
There was nowhere to hide. Cherries jubilee is
very
red. Sinatra started to laugh. The band was laughing. The audience was laughing. The girl was laughing.

It was really embarrassing. What could I do? I wiped myself off and we enjoyed the second half of the show.

The performance ended and it was time to drive the girl home. I knew it was going to be a good night.

After paying the bill, I had eighteen dollars left in my pocket. I knew I needed three dollars for the car. So I left fifteen
dollars as a tip for the waiter. When I gave the valet three dollars for the car, I had absolutely nothing left. But that
was OK. The girl had already invited me home.

On the way, she said, “Oh, I don’t have any coffee. Why don’t we stop and bring home a couple of containers?”

What was I going to do with this dilemma? I was a big shot who just took her to see Frank Sinatra, and I didn’t have a cent
in my pocket.

So I pulled in to Royal Castle. I told her to wait in the car, that I’d be right back. A few minutes later I came back to
the car without anything.

She said, “Where’s the coffee?”

I said, “They can’t change a hundred dollar bill.”

S
OMETIMES I USED TO WONDER:
Where the hell did all the money go?
I didn’t do drugs. I wasn’t a drinker. I wasn’t into nightclubs. I just lived beyond my means. I should have owned a Chevy.
I drove a Lincoln. A new Lincoln. Every year. There were women. Days at the racetrack. All I can tell you is, the bigger I
got, the more money I owed.

My real problem was that money just didn’t mean anything to me. If I owed a hundred thousand dollars and somebody called me
up in a pinch and asked for some cash, I’d give him what I had. I was never good at saying no even when it was the smartest
thing to do. Not only was I borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, I was lending to Pat at the same time. It was a flighty way
to live. But I was able to get away with it. Bank presidents signed off on loans without a credit check because they were
fans.

Talent got me out of one jam after the next. If I heard it once, I heard it a hundred times. The station manager would call
me in and say, “Larry, the furniture store phoned. You are so good at what you do. Why aren’t you paying what you owe to the
furniture store?”

“Oh, I’ll be better,” I’d say. “I’ll try.”

If I meant it, I didn’t do anything about it. I don’t think I ever looked at myself and said,
There are going to be some changes here
.

Some part of me must have liked living that way—on the edge. I should have known better. I’m not dumb. Why do smart people
do dumb things? Even worse, why does a smart person repeat a dumb mistake? That’s the definition of insanity—repeating the
same behavior and expecting a different result.

It’s like one of the great gambling jokes. This guy is leaving Las Vegas. He’s lost a lot of money, and he’s totally depressed,
whacked out. A voice comes to him, saying, “Go back to Las Vegas.”

He shakes his head, pulls in to a gas station, gets some gas. Again, the voice appears out of nowhere, “Go back to Las Vegas!”

The guy turns to the attendant and asks, “You hear anything?”

“No,” the attendant says.

So the guy’s certain that God is talking to him. He makes a U-turn. Drives back to Las Vegas. As he’s driving down the Strip,
the voice comes to him again. “Go to Caesars Palace.”

He pulls in to the parking lot and walks into Caesars Palace. The voice comes again. “Go to the roulette table. Play the red!”

The guy goes to the cashier, writes a check for everything he owns—thousands of dollars—and puts it all down on the red.

The roulette wheel spins.

Comes up black.

And the voice says, “Shit!”

I don’t think I was addicted to gambling. I stopped playing blackjack after I caught myself cursing at a dealer who gave me
bad cards. It wasn’t his fault. The dealer
wanted
me to win. That way, he could get a nice tip. I felt much better yelling at horses that couldn’t hear me. I can still remember
the pain of having the winning ticket at the racetrack only to learn my horse had fouled another and been disqualified.

No matter how bad my finances got, once my show started, all my problems and pressures vanished. When I was on the air, I
didn’t have to make a payment. I was in control. I was live and in the moment. And you couldn’t help but lose yourself to
the moment during the ’60s—especially when the moments started to come faster and faster. My life has always been go, go,
go. But I could never seem to catch up during the ’60s.

Sometimes you don’t know you’re living in a crazy time until after it’s over. During the ’60s, we knew we were in a whirl.
Every day I’d wake up and think,
What now?
And every day something else would happen. The ’60s was the most amazing decade in American history. It all started with
John Kennedy becoming president. I can remember tanks rumbling down the street outside my window when our intelligence discovered
nuclear weapons in Cuba and we had the showdown with Khrushchev and the Soviet Union. Then came Kennedy’s assassination. The
Vietnam War. “I Have a Dream.” The Beatles. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali. The Cold War. The Civil Rights Act. Women’s lib. Israel’s
Six Days’ War. Hippies. Drugs. Burning bras. Vietnam War protests. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. Bobby Kennedy’s
assassination. Police brutality at the ’68 Democratic convention. Black-gloved fists raised on the Olympic victory stand.
Race riots. Cities burning. The
Eagle
landing on the moon.

There were no twenty-four-hour news networks to cover all this. We had CBS, NBC, and ABC. News from Vietnam came a day late.
All these events needed to be placed into context and understood. The best places to hear them talked out in Miami were my
radio and television shows. I was at the center of the swirl. Once you’ve had Sinatra on your show, you can get anybody. A
friend of Richard Nixon’s, Bebe Rebozo, was a big fan of my show. So Nixon came on when he visited. All the major players
of the ’60s would pass through Miami on vacation, and every one of them came on my show.

Not only did I have clout, but my life seemed to be personally intertwined with everyone else’s. When I saw the footage of
John Kennedy’s assassination, saw the force of the bullet strike and his head lurch forward, I recalled the moment in Palm
Beach when my car hit the back of his convertible.

I was driving to lunch when the news came over the radio that the president had been shot. I had an instant of denial.
That can’t be, I just saw him a few days ago
. In fact, Kennedy had given a speech the week before at a conference in Miami. When he recognized me in the third row, he
winked. But my instant of denial was just that. I made a U-turn to get back to the radio station over a cobblestone bridge-walk
and nearly wrecked my car.

America was never the same after that. Kennedy was the first president born in the twentieth century. He brought us youth
and possibilities. He told us we would land a spacecraft on the moon by the end of the decade. His assassination was such
a terrible awakening. I’ll never forget how Nixon found out. Nixon had lost the presidential election to Kennedy in 1960.
By coincidence, Nixon flew out of Dallas on November 22, 1963, just as the city was preparing for the arrival of the president.
He was traveling commercial. Back then, even vice-presidents didn’t receive Secret Service protection. That came after Kennedy’s
assassination. As Nixon’s plane took off, the guy sitting next to him said, “A couple of thousand votes and it could have
been you arriving today.”

“I don’t even think about it,” Nixon told the guy.

When he landed in New York, the car that was supposed to meet him was at the wrong terminal. So he got in a cab. The cab left
the airport but made a wrong turn and ended up on a street in Queens. A woman came running out of her home screaming. Nixon
rolled down the window and asked, “What’s the matter?” The woman saw him and fainted. Nixon got out of the cab to help her.
People came running over, and that’s how he found out that Kennedy had been killed.

The aftershocks kept coming, and they often hit in ways that couldn’t be immediately understood. I got back to the radio station
and began phoning people who knew Kennedy. I reached the former ambassador to Ireland, Edward Grant Stockdale. His wife was
a prominent poet, and they lived in Miami. The ambassador was disconsolate to the point where he couldn’t get a word out.
He was moaning and groaning over the phone. I didn’t even know if he heard me. Later on, he jumped out of the window of a
downtown office building and killed himself. The only thing on his desk was an issue of
Life
magazine with Kennedy pictured on the cover.

Talk of the assassination must have filled my radio and television shows for two weeks straight. I did one show with Dick
Gerstein—the state attorney who in happier times had been a target for Captain Wainright’s humor on my morning radio show.
Gerstein talked about how Kennedy had been protected in Dade County when he’d come to give the speech I’d seen a week before
the assassination.

The more time passed, the more implausible the shooting began to seem. Here was this young, vibrant, sexy, dynamic, rich guy—and
some little punk shoots him? It had to be bigger than Lee Harvey Oswald. I later became involved in the whole mystery because
I knew the district attorney of New Orleans, who was convinced that JFK was assassinated in a gigantic conspiracy. My involvement
with that district attorney would turn my life upside down in the early ’70s. But that’s for another chapter.

Kennedy’s assassination seemed to set in motion everything that followed. As I look back, I don’t know how I kept up with
it all. Just staying on top of the civil rights movement was a full-time occupation in the ’60s. There was an incident with
Martin Luther King Jr. that remains etched in my mind. King was attempting to integrate a privately owned motel in Tallahassee.
He’d made a reservation. I knew the lawyer who was going to represent him in Florida. It was understood that if Dr. King walked
into the motel and insisted on a room, he would be put in jail. The lawyer asked if I wanted to come along.

I was right next to King when he walked into the motel. It had maybe twenty rooms. He walked up to the desk and said, “I have
a reservation here. Dr. King.”

The clerk said, “We don’t accept Negroes.”

Dr. King walked out and sat on the stoop. The squad cars came up. The owner of the hotel came out. The owner said to Dr. King,
“What do you want?
What-do-you-want?”

Dr. King looked up and said, “My dignity.”

I froze.

Nothing bothers me more than bigotry. What should skin color have to do with anything? A job? An election? A game? A house?
What do you care? I never could understand it. I wrote about my feelings in the
Miami Herald
, and a guy responded with a letter to the editor. In this letter, he wrote, “What if your daughter married a black?” I printed
his letter in my next column and responded, “I’d have to warn her about guys like you.” Even with Barack Obama winning the
presidency more than forty years later, we’re still dealing with it. We’ve come a long way, and yet we haven’t.

But back then, tensions that had been boiling for four hundred years were suddenly on the surface. Stokely Carmichael told
me he’d been at a school that was getting integrated. A cop made a black student get down on the ground, then he put a boot
to the kid’s neck, pulled out a gun, and said, “You go into that school and I’m going to shoot you.” From that day forward,
he told me, he never was calm again.

I had to contain myself when the Alabama governor George Wallace came on my television show. Wallace had stood in front of
doors at the University of Alabama to block black students from entering. As he walked in to the television station, Wallace
looked around, smiled, and said with a smirk, “I don’t see any black people.”

“They own the station,” I said. “They’re out to lunch.”

Whenever I’ve had to interview people I’ve strongly disagreed with, I’ve always pushed myself to go beyond my feelings and
seek the best answers. But with Wallace, I became argumentative. I told him a story that the leader of a civil rights group
called the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had told me. The CORE leader had been stationed in Galveston, Texas, with an
all-black detail in the Army during World War II. When a German submarine had problems and surfaced, the black soldiers took
the German crew prisoner. They stopped at a restaurant to get food on the way to Beaumont. The German prisoners were allowed
to eat inside. The black soldiers were forced to eat outside. “Tell me why I shouldn’t be angry,” the head of CORE said.

“What would you have said to that man, Governor?” I asked Wallace.

“I don’t have time to talk to everybody,” Wallace responded. It would be many years before he had the capacity to confront
that question, and when he did, he changed his ways.

I can remember interviewing John Howard Griffin—a white guy who had his skin artificially darkened so that he could see what
it was like to be black in the South. He wrote about the experience in
Black Like Me
. I had him on with the writer James Baldwin.

Griffin commiserated with Baldwin, saying that after three months he couldn’t wait for the color to disappear. He knew it
would take a year, and he could barely endure living in his artificial skin for the remaining nine months.

“You knew you were going to change,” Baldwin said. “My color is not going to change. I’m going to live with it every day of
my life.”

What do you say to that?