Now I've Heard Everything

One night, 40 years ago this week, a young man approached musician John Lennon outside Lennon's Manhattan apartment building. The young man appeared to be asking for an autograph, but instead, shot and killed Lennon, who was just 40. A few years later, Lennon's half-sister, Julia Baird, wrote a book about her, her brother, and their mother, called John Lennon, My Brother.

Today we're wrapping up Celebrity Cookbook Week on Now I've Heard Everything. On Monday, we heard from actress Dawn Wells (Mary Ann from Gilligan's Island), then on Wednesday, musician-actor IsaacHayes. Today, one of my favorite comic actors from the '60s amd '70s,  Dom DeLuise may be best known for the many movies he made with Burt Reynolds, and Mel Brooks. I met him on a snowy Friday aftern...

It's Celebrity Cookbook Week here on Now I've Heard Everything. We continue today with a man who my younge listeners may kknow best for his work on South Park. But for decades, Isaac Hayes was a major figure in the Southern soul music label Stax Records, where he was a songwriter, a session musician and record a producer I met him 20 years ago, when he published a cookbook that brought together so...

It's Celebrity Cookbook Week on Now I've Heard Everything.  And we start with not only one of my favorite sitcom stars, but also one of my favorite cookbooks. Dawn Wells portrayed Kansas farm girl Mary Ann Summers on Gilligan's Island. Turns out, she was pretty handy with coconuts, bananas, and whatever else the castaways were able to find -- plus a few food items probably not normally found...

Berkeley Breathed is perhaps best known for his comic strips "Bloom County," "Outland," and "Opus."   But he's also a gifted children's book creator.  I first met him in 2003, upon publication of his book "Flawed Dogs." We tal;;kerd again in 2007 after he published "Mars Needs Moms," which later became a Disney animated film.  It's about a 9-year-old boy named Milo who comes to appr...

In the music business, backup singers often fade into the background.  Few achieve much fame on their own.  One who did was Cissy Houston. After a successful career backing up the likes of Elvis Preslet, Dionne Warick, and Aretha Franklin, Houston struck out on her own -- and won two Grammies. I met Cissy Houston in the spring of 1998, after she'd written her memoir. 

Alexa stopNot since Carl Sagan, perhaps, has there been a professional stargazer as engaging and as popular as Neil de Grasse Tyson. A witty, Charming personality who seems to know everything about astrophysics, Tyson has become a very popular TV host, public speaker, and podcaster. I met him in 2000, when he wrote a book for the light person, not the professional scientist. Science literacy is Ty...

If you're of a certain age, you remember where you were when something big and historical happened. For my parents, it was Pearl Harbor. For my children, it was the Challenger explosion. For me, it was the John F Kennedy assassination, on Nomb 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. But in the intervening decades, members of the president's Secret Service detail rarely spoke about that day, even among themselv...

Very few professional athletes are best remembered for the game, or the play, that ended their career. But Joe Theismann maybe one of them. It was on this date, November 18th, 1985 -- 35 years ago --  that Joe Theismann sustained a gruesome, career-ending injury before a national TV audience. I met him two years later, after he had written a book about his football career an d the play that e...

Tomorrow, November 17th, is National Entrepreneurs Day. And perhaps no one better embodies what the day is about that Paul Orfalea. Back in 1970, the young man with e kinky red hair started a small business, making photocopies for students at UC Santa Barbara. The business took off, and before long Orfalea -- known to his friends as Kinko -- was a successful entrepreneur.

Not all funny people on TV are comedians. Some are weathermen, like NBC's Al Roker. For years, Roker has been a fixture on The Today Show. And in 2000, he wrote a funny book about fatherhood, and especially the challenges of raising children years apart in age.  But as you're about to hear, it wasn't all jokes and humor. Al Roker had some serious and poignant things to say about fatherhood.

Like many of my fellow Baby Boomers, I grew up watching Phyllis Diller on TV and in movies. She was one of America's first female stand-up comedians, inspiring the likes of Joan Rivers, Roseanne Barr, and Ellen DeGeneres, among others. Diller was known for her wild outfits, her even wilder hair, her self-deprecating humor, a cigarette always in a long holder, and her jokes about her long-suffering...

By now you've heard the sad news that Jeopardy host Alex Trebek passed away early Sunday. So today, we'll be revisiting my interview with him from some 30 years ago. He was promoting a book called, appropriately enough, The Jeopardy Book. And get ready for some real Insider information about the show he hosted since 1984.

For nearly two decades, Chris Jericho was a fixture of the WWE. In fact, he was widely considered one of pro wrestling's best. But since the end of the 1990s, he has also been a rock star. I met him in 2011, when he wrote the second volume of a memoir.

It was an iconic White House photo. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, shaking hands on a peace deal at the White House, with a smiling President Bill Clinton looking on. Just a couple of years later, in 1995 - on this day in 1995, November 4th - Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Less than a year-and-a-half later, his widow, Leah Rabin, wrote a memoir. Not jus...

Tomorrow is the presidential election. It's been a tough campaign, with not a lot of humor. But politicians, and their constituents, need a good sense of humor. In 1998, Bob Dole, the unsuccessful GOP nominee in 1996, compiled a book of presidential and political humor. Now, Dole himself was hardly known for his comic genius. But when I interviewed him in 1998, I found out how funny even conservat...

It's Halloween weekend, so, I have to give you a little bit of a scare, don't I? If you've ever seen the 2009 movie The Haunting in Connecticut, you know the story that you're about to hear. That scary movie was koosely based on real events, in which a family moved into what used to be a funeral home in Connecticut.  Turned out, it was a haunted funeral home. And that's where Lorraine Warren...

Some of you, if you're old enough, grew up listening to Cousin Brucie on New York City radio from 1961 to 1974. Others remember him from the movie Dirty Dancing. And still others know him from his show on Sirius XM in the last 15 years. Bruce Morrow, known on the air as Cousin Brucie, is one of America's most famous, and most popular, disc jockeys. I first met him in 1987, when he wrote A Memoir o...

Next week is our presidential election, so I thought it appropriate today to hear from one of our former presidents. I first met Jimmy Carter in 1987, and interviewed him several times over the years, including this conversation, from 1993. Mr. Carter had just written a book for young people, about peace, and war. I brought both of my daughters, ages 11 and 13, with me that day to meet our 39th pr...

As the U.S. Senate moved closer to confirming Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, we're reminded that not all nominees have such an easy ride. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated appeals court judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. But after a contentious hearing, the Senate rejected Bork's nomination. And now, in fact, his name has become virtually synonymous with ignominious defeat,...

I first saw Rita Rudner perform her comedy on an HBO special in the mid-1980s. And I immediately fell in love with her, and her comedy. Her routine is so low-key, so dignified, yet so hilarious.  So I was delighted to have the chance to interview her, in 1992, when she had written a book of essays called "Naked Beneath My Clothes."

What comes to mind when I say the name Marvin Hamlisch? You may think of The Sting. Or Tthe Way We Were. Or A Chorus Line. Certainly Hamlisch is known for all of that, but much more. I met him some 28 years ago, when he wrote A memoir of his decades in show business, starting with his early years at Juilliard.

For a few days in mid-October 1962, the world teetered on tghe brink of all-out nuclear war between the United States, led by PresidentJohn F. Kennedy, and the Soviet Union, commanded by Premier Nikita Khrushchev. It began when U.S. spy planes detected Soviet missiles being shipped to, and installed in, Cuba. President Kennedy weas determined not to allow what was seen as an act of Soviet aggressi...

Every day millions of American TV viewers tune in to the syndicated Wendy WIlliams Show.  She's been a fixture on daytime TV since 2008.  But her media career began long before that.  Some have even called her a "shock jockette".  When I met her in 2003, Williams was a major radio personality but had not yet broken out onto the national stage in a major way.  She had just...

Tomorrow, October 13th. is the anniversary of one of history's most famous plane crashes. It was on October 13th, 1972 that a Uruguayan Air Force flight, chartered by a rugby team, crashed high up in the Andes mountains.  Authorities tried for days to find the wreckage, but ultimately they gave up, unaware that there were survivors. For 72 days, they did what they had to do to survive -- incl...