Now I've Heard Everything

Who knew that a little boy born to a lower middle-class family in England, who grew up with asthma and put up with teasing from his classmates, and like to smoke by the time he was aged 10, would grow up to become one of the world's greatest rock singers?  That's kind of the short version of the life of Eric Burdon, who in 1962 joined a quartet that soon became known as the animals. Burdon wa...

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder but in modern western society the beholders are usually men and the men make the rules of that social construct that we call beauty. That's the essence. Kind of boil down into my own words of Naomi Wolf's blockbuster breakthrough 1991 book The Beauty Myth. The Beauty Myth created some big waves when it was published. In fact, later the New York times e...

A third-rate burglary” at Washington’s Watergate hotel and office complex in the summer of 1972 launched a scandal that ultimately brought down the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. At the very center of that burglary, and ensuing Scandal, was G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent who headed the the infamous White House “Plumbers” unit. After serving prison time for his role in Watergate, Liddy wrote...

Fifty years ago this week, a botched burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, DC touched off a criminal conspiracy that eventually brought down the president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. It's the scandal that to this day is simply known by the name of the office complex where the burglary occurred: Watergate. All this week on Now I've Heard Everyt...

The Watergate burglary was 50 years ago this week. Iconic renowned Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee played a central role in covering Watergate.   He took over at the Post in 1965, in the thick of Vietnam, the civil Rights movement and a changing journalism landscape. And although Watergate may be the thing he is best remembered for now, it was not the only major story he was involved in. I...

Father's Day is coming up in about a week, and today. I wanted to share with you an interview I did a few years ago about a Hollywood father-son story. For the better part of four decades, one of America's favorite actors was Jack Lemmon. He made some 60 movies. He was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won the Oscar twice,for Mr. Roberts, and for Save The Tiger. Younger audiences may remembe...

She is one of the most visible faces in television news. For 15 years she has co-hosted MSNBC's Morning Joe program. But before that, Mika Brzezinski ;s future in television news was anything but certain. In fact, she wasn't sure she had a future. Through a little bit of luck, a lot of hard work, and a persistence that just wouldn't give up, Brzezinski earned her way back into TV news, and eventua...

It was an electrifying finish to the 2006, Kentucky Derby, as the undefeated 3-year-old Barbaro won the race by the largest margin of victory in over six decades. The jockey who guided Barbaro to victory that day was one of the world's best, the 38-year-old veteran Edgar Prado. But two weeks later tragedy struck. In the opening seconds of the Preakness, Barbaro went down with a catastrophic leg in...

Can the guy who just barely graduated from high school become one of the world's 100 most influential people? Well, it doesn't very often, to be sure. But that is the short version of the story of Dr. J. Craig Venter, who led the first draft sequence of the human genome some 20 years ago, Venter founded the company Celera Genomics, which found itself in a very publicized race with the internationa...

We're kicking off the start of LGBTQ Pride Month with a conversation with one of the leading literary figures in the gay rights movement of the late 20th century. Armistead Maupin started writing stories in 1974 that were published in a small newspaper in the San Francisco area. Those serialized stories were known as tales of the City. Finally, in 1978, Maupin published the first Tales of The City...

Memorial Day is the day America honors the men and women who have sacrificed their lives in military service. But not all of those lives were lost on the battlefield. U.S. Air Force fighter pilot Michael Donnelly flew 44 combat missions during the Persian Gulf war, Operation Desert Storm, in the early 1990s. But in 1996, Donnelly was medically discharged from the Air Force, after being diagnosed w...

One of the world's most iconic auto races, the Indianapolis 500, will be run this Sunday. In the 111-year history of the Indy 500 only a handful of drivers have won the race three times or more And only two drivers have won the race in three different decades. One of them Bobby, Unser, who's part of the storied Unser auto racing family.  He won the Indy 500 in 1968, 1975, and 1981. He and his...

Catherine Crier had a remarkable legal career. By age 30, she had become the youngest elected judge ever in the state of Texas. But the number of years and Crier became a journalist and television personality, eventually hosting her own show on Court TV. And along the way, she developed some strong opinions about the profession that she began her career in, the law. Her 2002 book The Case Against...

Given Apple's dominance in the high-tech world, it's hard to imagine that it was once a company that had cash flow problems, poor quality products, a bloated workforce, and a total lack of strategy. But that's essentially the kind of company that Gill Amelio said he took over as CEO in early 1996. By his own telling, Amelio cut costs, slashed staff, and tried to put the company back on a strategic...

She began singing professionally in the 1970s, as a solo artist and together with her older sister Barbara Mandrell and younger sibling Irlene Mandrell. She's proven to be an enduring and popular country musician. I met her in the summer of 1993, when she was promoting a series of books she had written for children, commemorating a dozen or so major holidays.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Tomorrow, May 19, is Mental Health Action Day. So today on Now I've Heard Everything, a 1994 conversation with a woman whose own mental health crisis became a bestselling book, then a major potion picture. In 1967, at the age of 18, Susanna Kaysen's family had her hospitalized for treatment of depression.  She was told she would be there for two weeks. &n...

You know the name Jenny Craig. It's a popular weight loss, weight management and nutrition company with hundreds of locations all over the world. It's named, of course, for its founder Jenny Craig. At the age of 51 she and her husband Sid co-founded what is today known as Jenny Craig Inc. They started with locations in Australia, and established a U.S. presence in 1985. I met Jenny Craig in 1992,...

Have you ever had an incident in your life that suddenly propelled you in a whole new direction? That happened to Pat Brown. After a close personal run-in with a suspected criminal Brown embarkrf on a whole new career path, even though many people said she was too old, and would never fit into a man's world . Brown became a criminal profiler. And a very good one -- you may have seen her on TV, on...

It's mother's Day weekend. So today on Now I've Heard Everything a conversation with a woman whose mother was, and is, one of the world's most famous women, the great Lucille Ball. I met Lucie Arnaz in 1997 when she was on tour promoting a CD-ROM project she had created called "Lucy and Desi: The Scrapbook. She was also promoting a companion project, a kind of do-it-yourself family, scrapbook and...

In the 1980s, the presidency of Ronald Reagan was facing two distinct foreign policy challenges. Members of Hezbollah had taken several Americans hostage in Beirut, Lebanon. And in Central America, a rebel group known as the Contras was trying to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. To free the hostages, the Reagan administration underook a secret plan to sell military missi...

Edie Adams was a very popular movie and television star in the 1950s, known widely for her comic impersonations of sexy singers, and her own wonderful singing voice. But eventually she became even more widely known for being the wife of legendary television comic Ernie Kovacs.  The two of them were a hugely popular comic duo. But their story had a tragic end. In early 1962, Kovacs was killed...

Many people think we're on the verge of another Cold war, a cyber war, in which skilled hackers will break into systems abroad and wreak havoc with them. But back in the 1980s, such a concept was still such a noveltythat intelligence agencies and police didn't pay much attention to it. That is, until 1986, when an astronomer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory made a startling discovery....

At the very height of the Cold War, in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, one of the most vilified man in the world – at least in the U.S. – was Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, For 11 years the USSR was led by this brash, arrogant, often angry man. You may have heard that he wants. Famously said the Soviet Union would “bury” the United States. That, however, was a mistranslation, and it was not somet...

Gloria Gaynor began her professional music career in the early 1960s, when she was barely out of her teens. She was recording by the time she was 22, and had a couple of albums by the time she was 30. But her songs and albums didn't really have great success- until 1978, when she went into the studio and recorded a song that became a defining moment in pop music. "I Will Survive" became a smash Hi...

Let me take you back four and a half decades, and tell you about one of the most popular books of the late 1970s, a family saga said in Australia, called The Thorn Birds. But if you happened to miss the book, The Thorn Birds was also a hugely popular TV miniseries in the early 1980s . The author of The Thorn Birds was Australian-n-born Colleen McCullough. Just 4 years after the TV miniseries, I fi...