Now I've Heard Everything

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...

We got sad news last week but comedian Gilbert Gottfried had succumbed after a long battle with muscular dystrophy. Funny and controversial, by turns relatable and outrageous, Gilbert Gottfried built a fan base of millions. In 2012 while he was on a whirlwind book tour, I had a few minutes with Gilbert. And I found him to be exactly the kind of guy you would hope that he would be- the kind you'd l...

A few days ago Ketanji Brown Jackson made history as she was confirmed as the first black female supreme Court Justice. But 75 years ago today another African American made history, in a way that may have been nearly as significant. On April 15th. 1947 Jackie Robinson took the field as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, the first black man to play in the Major leagues. And Jackie Robinson was no to...

For 11 seasons on the TV series 7th Heaven,  Stephen Collins played The Rev. Eric Camden, a Protestant minister who headed a family of seven. But Collins had a long and impressive acting resume before that, including TV shows and movies.  He was in the first Star Trek movie in 1979. But when I met him in 1994, it was to talk about a novel he had written, a thriller called Eye Contact.&nb...

Male comedians have been dressing as women for comic effect for decades. Think Milton Berle. Think Flip Wilson.  Or Saturday Night Live sketches with Will Farrell or John Goodman.  But perhaps no one has taken it to the level that Tyler Perry did, with his character. Madea. And that is just one reason. Among many, the Tyler Perry is one of the most successful and influential filmmakers o...

For 21 years, from the mid-1950s to the mid '70s, mayor Richard j. Daly ran the city of Chicago. And I mean he ran the city. One member of Daley’s cabinet was a woman named Jane Byrne, who was Chicago’s Commissioner of Consumer Sales. Not long after Mayor Daley’s death in 1976 Byrne left her city job, and ran for mayor herself in 1979. And against the odds, Byrne won.   She became not on...

Back around 1988 or '89, you could hardly go anywhere without seeing a little book written by a former Unitarian minister called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Readers all over the world were struck by the simplicity and elegance and wisdom of that little book. That man was Robert Fulghum, and his book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. Here's how he...

Where has everybody's manners gone? Doesn't anybody have good manners anymore ? For over 40 years, syndicated columnist Judith Martin -- better known as Miss Manners -- has been helping people navigate the often confusing Waters of good manners . In her polite but firm way, Martin answers readers questions about what constitutes good manners and good etiquette in today's world. In 1990, Martin wro...

Today is March 30th, and it was 41 years ago today that a young man tried to kill President Ronald Reagan. And one of the most controversial things that happened that day happened to a man with a long and distinguished military and public service career, general. Alexander Haig. Haig was a graduate of West point m. He served in Korea, served in Vietnam, earned the silver Star and the purple heart....

I'm not sure Frank Warren understood what he was unleashing in January, 2005, when he initiated his PostSecret project . What started as something of a social experiment, encouraging people to send him their innermost secrets on a postcard, turned into something way beyond that. It wasn't long before Frank, a mild-mannered man from suburban Washington, DC started receiving thousands of postcards,...