Now I've Heard Everything

Julie Andrews made her debut as an actress and singer in London in 1948.

She first appeared on Broadway in 1954.

But to audiences of all ages around the world, she may be best known as Mary Poppins, or as Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music.

I met her in 2009, aftershe and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, had collaborated 

Tomorrow night, September 29th, is the first debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.

So today on Now I've Heard Everything, I wanted to revisit an interview I did over 30 years ago with a man who played a key role in the 1984 presidential debates between Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale.

Years before he became head of Fox News -- way before there even was a Fox News -- Roger Ailes was a media consultant.  Most prominent among his many clients, perhaps, was President Ronald Reagan. Ailes was an adviser to the President in his 1984 reelection bid, and was indrectly responsible for one of that campaign's most memorable, and decisive, moments.

Fifty years ago today, a TV show premiered on ABC, about a family that had formed a rock band. It was called "The Partridge Family,: and its star was a young actor-singer named David Cassidy.

In very short order, Cassidy became a full-fledged teen idol. Girls went crazy for him. He sold out concert Halls.

But as he revealed in a 1994 memoir, life was not exactly what it looked like on the outside.

In nearly thirty years of interviewing celebrities and big names, I didn't often get very Starstruck, but this day I did.

It's hard to overstate how big a star Mickey Rooney was.  For decades, he was one of the most recognizable names and faces in all of Hollywood. If you've ever watched one of his movies on one of the classic movie networks, you know his Andy Hardy series, and all those hey kids, let's put on a show movies with Judy Garland.

To the general public, Mickey was known primarily for two things: his height, he was only five foot three, and his marriages, of which there were many.

So when he published his Memoirs in 1994, I jumped at the chance to interview him.

Journalist and celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley first rose to prominence in 1978, with her biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a book called Jackie Oh!

But it was her 1986 biography of the legendary Frank Sinatra that make kitty Kelley a household name.

Kelley is a meticulous and very thorough biographer, and in researching Sinatra's life, she uncovered a lot of things he didn't want uncovered.

If you've ever eaten that Wendy's, and most of us have, you probably know that the chain was founded by a guy named Dave Thomas. He needed a first daughter. And you probably remember his TV commercials:

But here's what you may not know about Dave Thomas. He was born during the Great Depression. Later he was adopted, but his homelife was so unstable, he dropped out of high school and struck out on his own at age 15.

As a young man, he got into the restaurant business. And eventually, he started working with an older gentleman, who had just started his own business:  Colonel Harland Sanders, founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken. 

I first met Dave Thomas in 1991, when he wrote a book that was part Memoir, part How to Succeed in Business.

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In the US, we take labor unions for granted. To many, it seems like they have always been around.

But in 1980, labor unions in countries under the grip of the Soviet Union we're totally hostile to labor unions. That's why it made huge news 40 years ago this week, when workers in the Gdansk shipyards of Poland formed a labor union called solidarity.

With the implicit blessing of the communist government.

And Solidarity was not limited to shipyard workers. Teachers and other educators also wanted in on the movement, and that's where Kazimierz Wierzbicki comes in. He was one of the early organizers of those educators

Today's episode is for my baby boomers. Because we all remember June Lockhart, whether it's from Lassie, Lost in Space, or even Petticoat Junction.

June Lockhart, child of Hollywood parents, has been a fixture classic TV for decades.

She typically played a firm but loving mom, someone we can all relate to. 

I met her in 2001, after she'd written a memoir.

Do you remember where you were 19 years ago today?

Richard Picciotto will always remember that as the day he thought he would die. Indeed, he almost did.

PIcciotto was a New York City Fire Department battalion chief that day, and he was inside the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the South Tower collapsed. Half an hour later, he was still inside the North Tower when it, too, collapsed.

Whoopi Goldberg has been entertaining us for almost 40 years, in movies like "The Color Purple," "Ghost," and "Sister Act" as well as TV's "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and of course, on ABC's "The View."

I met her in 1997, after she wrote a book called "Book."  It was a kind of stream-of-consciousness effort, with chapters each having a single syllable word as their title.

And our interview was kind of stream-of-consciousness, too.