Now I've Heard Everything

She's been a top New York City real estate broker for many years, but you may know Barbara Corcoran best for her role that's one of the investors pitched by entrepreneurs each week on the TV series Shark Tank. What you may not know is that Barbara Corcoran is one of 10 children, and that her very strong mother inspired her to become a business success. I met Barbara Corcoran in 2003, when she wrot...

if you were in high school or college in the 1970's, as I was, you undoubtedly are familiar with the comedy of Cheech and Chong.  Cheech Marin went on to act in dozens and dozens of TV shows and movies, as well as doing voices for several animated films.  But what you may not know is that Marilyn is also an astute art collector. That's how I met him, in 2002, when he published a book of...

If you were in network TV news 50 or 60 years ago, the place to be was the CBS News Washington DC bureau. CBS was long considered the gold standard of television news - after all, Edward R, Murrow helped shape and define it. Among the roster of journalism heavyweights in the bureau was Roger Mudd. He had a front-row seat to that historic 20-year period from 1960 to 1980, which he wrote about in a...

Happy Saint Patrick's Day! As I was mulling over all of the Irish or Irish-Amerian people I've interviewed through the years, one name kept coming to the forefront: Frank McCourt. McCourt burst onto the literary scene in 1996, wth his memoir of his early childhood, a powerful book called Angela's Ashes. It also became an award-winning movie. He followed that up with volume two of his memoirs, a bo...

ia Farrow may have been born to be a star. Her parents were both major Hollywood figures, and she grew up amongst big stars. By the time she was a teenager Mia Farrow was a star on the ABC TV primetime soap opera Peyton Place. Then came movie roles, as well as a brief marriage to Frank Sinatra. In 1968, Farrow starred in "Rosemary's Baby," the movie which propelled her to major stardom. And anothe...

In January 1966 a new TV series premiered, unlike any we had seen before.  Even though it only ran on the ABC network for three seasons, it changed television history. And it made the show's star a folk hero. That show, of course, was Batman. Adam West played millionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, whoalong with his sidekick Dick Grayson, aka Robin, fought evil criminals in Gotham...

Larry Flynt is best known for Hustler magazine, which he founded in the mid-1970s, and for the videos and cable TV channels the grew out of the Hustler brand. But it turns out Larry Flynt was also an amateur student of history. Ten years ago, fFlynt and a professional historian co-authored a book called "One Nation Under Ssex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies, and Their Lovers Cha...

She was Donald Trump's first wife, from 1977 to 1992. Ivana Trump is the mother of Don Jr, Ivanka, and Eric Trump. Ivana Trump has also been a professional athlete, a designer,and a novelist. And that's how I met her in 1993, the year after she and The Donald divorced.  She had just published the second in what was to be a series of novels, about a beautiful Czech immigrant named Katrinka. Wh...

Economist and Texas Republican politician Dick Armey was first elected to Congress in 1984. By 1995, he has risen to the post of Majority Leader, as the Republican Revolution swept Washington.  He remained in that post until his election defeat in 2002. The following year, Armey wrote a little book of wit and wisdom called Armey's Axioms.

Long before she was a successful solo act, Cher was half of Sonny and Cher. Perhaps no married couple in music was popular in the mid-'60s as Sonny and Cher.  Sonny Bono wrote hit songs like I've Got You, Babe and The Beat Goes On,   Eventually, they even had their own television variety show. Sonny and Cher went their separate ways in the early '70s. Sonny became interested in politics,...

It can be fun, informative, and educational to go back and revisit the things that futurists said years  ago. Just, you know, to check and see if they were right. Kurzweil has been honored by three U.S. presidents, he has 21 honorary doctorates, and has been called the rightful heir to Thomas Edison.  In 1990, I met and interviewed legendary inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil. He had...

February is, of course, the shortest month of the year. So it occurred to me it might be an appropriate time to share some of my shortest interviews with you. Normally, I would get 15 to 20 minutes or more with a given celebrity or VIP. But occasionally, because of the constraints of their schedules, I might only get two minutes, or three, or four. So here now are some of those short takes: ...

Margaret Cho rose to prominence in the mid 1990s, with her TV sitcom All-American Girl.  Since then, she's established herself as not only a talented actress but as a standup comic,  fashion designer, and social activist.  I've met her and interviewed her twice, about her first two books. Thi interview was the second one we did, and as you'll hear, her views seem as current today as...

Most of what the scientific world knows about chimpanzees comes from the work of anthropologist Jane Goodall. She first went to Tanzania in 1965.   And in 1990 she wrote a memoir of her work.  That's when I met her. So here now, from 1990, Jane Goodall.

Warning: What you're abiyt ti gear is a true story, told by the suvivor of a violent and horrisying  attack. You need to know that some of the descriptions are graphic, some of the words used are offensive.  James Cameron was born in 1914 in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.  When he was a child, his family moved to Marion, Indiana. It was there, in the summer of 1930, that James Camero survived...

For nearly 20 years Joan Lunden was the co-host of ABC's Good Morning America.  Millions woke up every morning to her cheerful, reassuring, and professional presence. As a journalist, Lunden interviewed presidents and royalyu. She covered the Olympics. She bungee-jumped. In 1997. she left the show -- and was a bit taken aback by what other people assumed she must have been feeling. I met her...

Happy Presidents Day.  Now, if you're old enough, as I am, you may remember that this day was traditionally celebrated as Lincoln's birthday.  It was transformed into President's Day in 1971, as part of the move toward more Monday holidays. In 2005, noted presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose best selling books included volumes about Lyndon Johnson and John F Kennedy, took o...

Happy Valentine's Day weekend! I thought this would be an appropriate time to bring back an interview with the author of one of the great love stories of our time -- Love Story, by Erich Segal. His book became a huge bestseller in 1970, and even bigger box office movie smash in 1971, starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal as the star-crossed lovers. I met him in 1988, when he published his latest no...

Was the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s a social or political movement? It was, but it was also a religious or spiritual movement, says former Congressman and UN Ambassador Andrew Young. In a 1994 book called A Way Out of No Way, Young, a confidant of Martin Luther King jr., a former preacher, former Atlanta mayor, told his own story against the backdrop of the movement that he was a ke...

For three weeks in October 2002, the Washington DC area was terrorized by a series of sniper attacks. Someone was randomly shooting and killing people throughout the district, and the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. Piecing together scant eyewitness Clues, police began searching for the gunman, and ultimately found, and arrested, 41 year old John Allen Muhammad and 17 year old Lee Boyd Malvo. Both...

The Kansas City Chiefs are meeting the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Super Bowl LV. The Chiefs were also in the very first Super Bowl, in 1967. But it was their misfortune that year to be playing the Green Bay Packer, who are led by future Hall of Fame quarterback Bart Starr. He was named the game's Most Valuable Player, as well as MVP of Super Bowl II Ithe following year. I met Bart Starr in 1987, when...

A few days ago on Now I've Heard Everything, I featured an interview that I had done many years ago with one of my broadcasting Heroes, the late Larry King. Today, another one: longtime CBS radio and TV news personality Charles Osgood. Osgood grew up in Depression-era, World War ii-era Baltimore. And in 2004, he wrote a memoir recalling those years, called Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack.

They may have called her "the original 'bad girl of rock and roll'," but Ronnie Spector was nothing but nice to me, when I met her in 1990. Spectre was the lead singer in the '60s girl-group The Ronettes. Their big hit, of couse, was "Be My Baby." but of course there were others, too. But Ronnie Spector was also Mrs. Phil Spector. And we get into that a little bit, in this interview.

I listened to Larry King on the radio long before I first met him, in 1988.  That was actually the first of several interviews I did with King, who passed away the other day at age 87.  Larry King was a legend in radio and television. Whether you like them or not, you had to acknowledge he had Broad and deep influence in broadcasting.  Larry did tens of thousands of interviews over...

Tomorrow is January 28, and if you are old enough, you undoubtedly have a clear memory of exactly where you were 35 years agp, on January 28, 1986. That was the day of that horrible tragedy, the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger. Among the crew members was teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe, who had won a nationwide competition to become the first teacher in space. Watching the liftoff in per...