Now I've Heard Everything

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 course.

But less than a year and a half later, in summer of 1997, Apple was still struggling and Amelio was forced out.

The following spring he wrote a book about his 500 days at Apple, called On the Firing Line.  And that's when I met him.

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.  She was actually there for 18 months, after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder..

Years later Kaysen drew on her experience to write her memoir Girl, Interrupted. I met her the following year.

Newt Gingrich was first elected to Congress from George's sixth district in 1978. By the end of the 1980s, he had risen to a position of leadership in the House GOP.

In 19 for Gingrich was a leader in the Republican wave that took over the house, and Gingrich became the first Republican house speaker in 40 years.

But by 1997 infighting in the party put Gingrich on the defensive.  

Gingrich himself help fan the flames of discontent when, in late 1997, he almost single-handedly shut down the federal government. It was a squabble over a continuing resolution to keep the government funded. And Gingrich was upset because he had apparently been snubbed on a flight on Air Force One.

In 1998 Gingrich wrote a book he called  Lessons Learned The Hard Way.  

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, when she was promoting one of her books about weight loss and lifestyle management.

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 CNN, MSNBC, The Discovery Channel, and elsewhere .

I met her in 2010, when she wrote a book about her experience, called The Profiler. And what you're about to learn, about Pat Brown and about profiling, you will find fascinating .

As a young man, Jeffery Deaver was a journalist. Then he was a lawyer for a while. But then his first love, writing, took over, and Deaver became a mystery and suspense writer.

And he was very good at it, but his real smash-through success came in 1997, with his novel about a quadriplegic police detective named Lincoln Rhyme.

Since then, Deaver has written 15 Lincoln Rhyme books, and is one of the world's most acclaimed suspense authors.

I had known Jeffery Deaver years before the series began, and we talked about his first Lincoln Rhyme book, The Bone Collector, when it was published. 

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 album, and she was encouraging other sons and daughters to create family memories.

Now, you'll probably chuckle a bit when you hear us discussing such "cutting edge" technologies as the CD-ROM, but in 1997, they really were.

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 missiles to Iran, in hopes that the Iranian government would persuade Hezbollah to release the hostages.

In Nicaragua, meanwhile, the U.S. was funding, arming, and training the Contras. That is, until Congress abruptly cut off the entire funding.

That's when someone had the idea to take the money that Iran was paying secretly for those missiles and hand it secretly to the Contras. The plan became known later as the Iran-Contra affair.

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 in an auto accident.  He was the only occupant of the car, and it was never known precisely what happened to cause the accident.

I met Edie Adams in 1990, when she finally wrote the book that publishers had been after her to write ever since Ernie kovacs's death.