Ruth Ashton Taylor: Interview #3

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[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Biagi: We were at the end of the Maxwell House episode when we stopped before. What we want to do is move forward from your inability to meet Maxwell House's needs in time in Los Angeles and get started from there. What happened?

Taylor: I had been working on television at night on the ten o'clock news, which was the main news program on television, because television was so new.

Biagi: How long was it?

Taylor: Half hour, the whole program was. I did the women's angle. I think I probably explained that to me that meant whatever I wanted to do because I was a woman, was a woman's angle.

Biagi: You didn't see it as any kind of puffery or anything like that.

Taylor: No, I didn't see it as something in fashions and didn't do any cooking and fashions. Through the years I've done fashions of men more than I've done of women, things I could kind of make tongue-in-cheek fun with, you know. But, no, I did stories of all kinds and it was brand new. There was very loose management because it was such a new industry, television and television news, that the news head for television was the same fellow who was the head of news for radio for CBS in Los Angeles.

Biagi: That was who?

Taylor: His name was Jack Beck. He was the one who had called me up and had asked me if I wanted to be on this program. So I was on the program. In the last episode we did discuss the fact that the other managers in radio said, "Hey, they've got a woman doing news on television. Let's audition for a woman doing news on radio." So they held auditions and I participated and auditioned, and I won the audition, which meant that I was then going to be doing news on radio as well as news on television. There were two women's news shows now, or news spots, and I was doing both of them. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Actually you did television before you did radio on the air.

Taylor: Right.

Biagi: I didn't realize that.

Taylor: I was in radio as a producer and as a writer and all those things prior, but in terms of actually going on and performing, I did not do any on-the-air things on radio before, and I started my on-the-air appearances with television, which went very well. It was such a novel

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on us, which they did, on the umbrella, and then we come dripping in. That was visual. It showed you there was a storm outside. There was a storm inside. [Laughter.]

Biagi: How did your hair fare on that? [Laughter.]

Taylor: My hair was always a problem. I would go home after doing radio, because after a while it became that I was doing radio in the day and television at night, and also trying to raise a young daughter and I had a husband. I'd go home to get my daughter ready for bed and get dinner. I always put my hair up. One night we had to go to some kind of a function, so I did put my hair up, and I put it up wet. I don't remember if we had big dryers. I don't know what I did to get it dry, but it always dried. Most of the time it dried. But this particular night we had to go to this function, so it wasn't dry when I took it down, and I showed up on the set with my hair just limp and falling down. I don't know how it looked. Happily, we don't see ourselves. But I went onto the set and I'm sitting there, and finally here comes the director out and he looks at me real hard and says, "You do look like that." [Laughter.] He thought there was something wrong with the camera.

It was a funny time. It was fun to do, and we took our work very seriously. There were a lot of things happening in Los Angeles at the time.

Biagi: What were some of the most exciting things maybe in that first early era that you remember about Los Angeles?

Taylor: One of the things that was happening, we had a lot of corruption in the city hall and there was a new police chief who came in, who was William Parker, Bill Parker, who became a legend, actually, and was in for many, many years. He was a real change. There was that.

There were big things going on in technology. Shortly after we started, we were hooked up by microwave to the East Coast. In fact, I believe that the World Series that year, in '51, was the first coast-to-coast broadcast or was the first event broadcast coast to coast. Because I remember I did a great trick then, too. I tried to explain the microwave setups and the relays from coast to coast. I can kind of just remember I had a whole bunch of little pictures of little relays, and I guess I explained it. I don't remember. I surely couldn't explain it today.

But there were all these things, a lot of things happening, a lot of politics, and I'd done a lot of politics when I was with CBS in New York, so it was interesting to me. [Dwight D.] Eisenhower was going to be running in the fifties. In '48, for instance, there was this great big push for Eisenhower to get into the process. So now he was running. I don't remember what we did in politics until the conventions the following year, which became something else. For the conventions the following year, they brought me back because after this little scene where I had said I wasn't going to be working at night anymore, I stuck to radio.

Biagi: So you reverted to radio in about late '51?

Taylor: No, '52. But the conventions in '52 brought me back. Whenever there were special events, I came back.

Biagi: Back to TV.

Taylor: Back to TV. I did the Rose Parade in '52 for TV.

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Then I did go back for covering the conventions. They were in Chicago, but I was covering them from Los Angeles. The thing was that at that point we had the microwave hookups, and I don't remember exactly all of these things, but each network had to hire up cable or microwave or what, something in order to go transcontinental. There was a pool feed that took the conventions across the country, but for the networks themselves to have their own individual input, they would have to share the microwaves and the cables, whatever the hookups were at that point, and that meant that, say, CBS would be on for limited time. In between, NBC would be on, ABC would be on. So my job was to fill in all the holes while the other networks had the air time. It was unbelievable. It couldn't happen now. You stayed with all the wires and you listened to everything that was on the broadcasts of the conventions and so on.

I was scheduled to do a broadcast in the morning from like 6:45 to 7:00 our time, and then our network people would come up. The convention then would go on around nine o'clock or something like that. The trouble is, there would be something wrong with the cable or the microwave or whatever the hookup, or somebody else would have it or something, and I'd be on there and I'd get a little sign, "Hold the air until 7:15." Okay. So you're going to talk about some more of these people that you had talked to. You didn't have visuals.

Biagi: This was all studio?

Taylor: This was all in the studio. Then I remember the most distressing day of all. Now, maybe there would be another one of us in there and we'd bat it back and forth or something. I can't remember if we had still pictures or what we could show in between, but I remember one morning, "Hold it till 7:15, hold it till 7:30." Then I got a sign that said, "Hold till 9:00." [Laughter.]

Biagi: Oh, my goodness!

Taylor: I never forgot, because those were the early days of television.

Biagi: So that's an hour and a half of live shot with nothing to say. [Laughter.]

Taylor: Well, you're going over what they've done, you are talking, and you always would be talking to other people, getting sidebars. This would all have to be obviously ad lib, though. Of course, the idea was of holding the air for our place, that you were going to keep the people interested in the convention. I think they probably tuned out way before our network ever came on. But that was the idea. It was good exercise in broadcast journalism, because you had to just talk, talk, talk, talk. I guess maybe that's where I got started and never shut up. [Laughter.]

Biagi: You're the only woman in the market at that point, aren't you?

Taylor: Right.

Biagi: Until what year, say?

Taylor: I was the only woman around until the sixties in Los Angeles.

Biagi: In broadcasting.

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Taylor: Because they would want forty-seven stations. Hills Brothers coffee, that became my sponsor. They wanted forty-seven stations. In order to get to all forty-seven, they would have to be done at different times because they couldn't clear all those stations.

Biagi: That's right. We did talk about that.

Taylor: I did the same thing subsequently. Oh, I was so big with coffee, because then after Hills Brothers—that was a long run, three years—then Folger's picked up my show and it was a longer show. I only did five minutes a day for Hills Brothers, but on forty-seven stations, so I did it two or three times. That's when I was studying piano, remember? We did talk about that. Then I did Folger's for ten minutes, a ten-minute show. They were called alternately "The Ruth Ashton Show" and "The Women's News Desk." I don't know which was first.

Then when it became too difficult to get the network to clear, somebody would come along and want you in all these different stations, but the stations in the mid-fifties began to feel that they wanted to do their own broadcasting. That's when the networks started to get into trouble, radio networks, in terms of putting on network programs, at least for the West Coast, because the local stations could make more money with local sponsors for their own programs. So by '56, late, or '57, I went local. That became hard work because I'd have to do a half-hour show locally and make less money than for five or ten minutes. It was hard. It was a lot of work.

Biagi: You talked about your second daughter being born. After that happened, were you having second thoughts about whether you were going to continue working or you were going to stay home?

Taylor: No. I had some problems in my marriage and it was breaking up, very frankly. There was no question. In fact, there was no question when I was working all the time that I had to work, because things were not well and we were not going to be able to keep this going.

Biagi: What was your husband doing at this point?

Taylor: My husband was Edwin W. Conklin, and he was a news editor when I first met him. When we were first married, he was a news editor with radio in Los Angeles, the CBS station, KNX, and then he went to ABC as an assistant news director. Then he became news director in about 1954, I think it was.

Biagi: Radio?

Taylor: Radio. He did do some television over there, too. They were just starting some television, too, on Channel 7 at that point. It wasn't much; it was real primitive. We were pretty ahead in getting going at the CBS station on television news, so we had a good head start on people as far as audience is concerned. But he was with ABC.

Biagi: So you both had fairly demanding jobs.

Taylor: We had very demanding jobs and there were some basic major problems. My husband, actually, was an alcoholic and it was impossible. It was a very difficult marriage and it wasn't going to last, so there was no question that I had to keep working. That was it. In fact, if I'd only just had great times with my personal life, I wouldn't have probably done any of these things. Not so.

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Biagi: You started it all in '56, '57?

Taylor: Yes. So that was what was going on, but it was very difficult times financially, though my husband, again, tried to be—and he was—very responsible, in his mind, when he could be. He paid a certain amount of child support, not a lot. There was no alimony or anything like that. It wasn't enough, even beginning to be enough to live on. Also the fact that I had to have somebody take care of the kids, all those things you have to do when you're a working mother.

So I kept working and worked, doing the half-hour program, until '58, I guess it was. In '58 they changed the formats. Furthermore, I had a big blow-up. [Laughter.]

Biagi: Did you quit?

Taylor: Yes.

Biagi: When was the first time you quit, Ruth? I want to know. You say you quit all the time.

Taylor: I didn't quit all the time then. I guess I had quit once or twice. I don't remember. I quit when I quit on television. I did. After that, it was pretty serene because I was pretty much my own boss. Nobody ever told me what to do. I liked it that way. I had to work real hard.

Biagi: Was it a half-hour program?

Taylor: Half-hour program. I had a producer who helped me, to some extent, to get on and get off on time, but I went out and did the taping and the stories that I wanted to tape, and I planned the format. We did a lot of interesting things. It was a period of time when the space program—it wasn't the space program, it was the Soviets that went soaring up with Sputnik, you know, in 1957, and started a whole lot of stories. I became very involved with covering space stories and was at the JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a great deal, which was the high tech part of Cal Tech. It was an adjunct to Cal Tech, where they actually had the scientists work with NASA [National Aeronautics and Space Administration] and so on. I don't know that it was called NASA then. Anyway, JPL was highly involved in the space pioneering. Of course, JPL eventually put up the unmanned space probes to the moon and all of that.

Biagi: What was the format of your half hour?

Taylor: The format was simply that I would introduce it with some news, regular news, and then I would go on to feature stories or interviews on top news stories. I would do interviews. I did a lot of taping. I'd go out, for instance. I remember one night I went out because Rocketdyne, North American's Rocketdyne division used to test engines for spacecraft out in the Santa Susana Mountains. Of course, you could hear that all over the San Fernando Valley, the big thing, the Atlas machines going, these great big rocket engines that were used in our early pioneering efforts. They were being tested out there in Santa Susana, so I decided to go out, and they let me. At that point I was accompanied by an engineer. I'd go out with a tape recorder.

Biagi: Is it the reel to reel?

Taylor: It was pretty big. Yes, a pretty big little machine. We started with acetate, let's face it, way back. But we went out to Santa Susana and they were testing—I think it was an engine for a Redstone rocket, a big engine, anyway, one of the big ones. So you could hear it, as I say, all over the San Fernando Valley. You can imagine. Here you are, you're across the canyon,

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Taylor: Right. And smog was a problem, to some extent.

Biagi: When Disneyland opened, did that change anything down there?

Taylor: Disneyland opened in 1955, I guess it was. Sure, that was a big story. This was in the sixties when I did some things with Walt Disney. No, I did an interview with Walt Disney when my daughter was only three or four, and that had to be early because she wasn't very old. Maybe she was five. I don't know. I did an interview with Walt Disney, went out to his place at Disney Studios. I wanted to take my daughter because I thought this was a great opportunity for her to see Disney, too, and his aides were saying, "I don't know if he's going to like this little child in there when you're doing your interview." Well, Disney thought it was great. We went in there and he took her up on his lap and talked to her, took her around, showed her everything there was. He loved her! It was a fine interview. I remember it was a charming time when I talked with him.

Also then when we went over, they used to have a lot of great press parties around that time, early in the Disneyland history, and I remember when they opened up the tiki room, which was when he began to have—I forget the term he used for it, but they were able to do this animation of all the little birds around and everything. He took my family and me down to the control area which was like a Polaris submarine, he said. He was a really regular guy, and I got along with him fine. When he saw us, he always was very gracious. He was always out at his place, too. He also told us about how he happened to do that. He talked about when he and his wife were raising their kids and they would go to one of these amusement parks. They were always kind of dirty and there was no place for the family. He wanted to have a place where everybody could have a good time and it was clean and you felt like you were part of the whole thing, even if you were a mother and dad. So that's part of what stimulated him with Disneyland. I did a lot of things with him.

Everything was pioneering at that time because you hadn't been out, for one thing. You now had tape recorders that you were going out with, that you hadn't been going out with in decades prior. We had television, obviously, that was doing many things, but on radio you had complete freedom. You could run around. You didn't have to have all the time it took to get cameras and so on.

Biagi: What was the process? Say you went out to do a story. Would it be a reel-to-reel, a small one, about a foot wide, would you say, in size?

Taylor: Yes. I guess so.

Biagi: What would be the process? Say you had to do a story based on tape. How would you go about doing it? How would you organize it to get it on the air?

Taylor: In the fifties we had, as I say, engineers in the way the contracts ran, and they were more complicated machines. We took an engineer with us. We had an editor back at the station, and I would just come back with my tape and we'd edit it like you edit any kind of tape.

Biagi: Would you listen to it and then write?

Taylor: Very often I would do pieces. You had to string them together. You'd have four or five different tapes in your broadcast and you wouldn't spend a lot of time. Most of the time on each individual piece I would do a lot of things in the field, narrate it or take a clip out of it,

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[End Tape 1, Side A; Begin Tape 1, Side B]

Biagi: Since you say that they had such an impression or such an influence, advertisers tried to have such an influence on the news, was there an example you can remember?

Taylor: The examples would be that I was doing stories within my half-hour program on tape. I was going out. They'd say, "Well, Ruth, Robinson's is opening a store in Pasadena. Why don't you go out and just do a little story about Pasadena and the Robinson's opening." Well, you're now talking about promotion. You are talking about sales. You're not talking about something I would naturally choose to do. But I'd do it a couple of times.

I remember Robinson's as an example because it was the one that I really had the blow-up on. Then they said, "Robinson's is opening a store in Palm Springs, Ruth. Why don't you go out there and do a little story about the opening in Palm Springs. Palm Springs is growing," and all this. So, "Okay," I say, "I'll go out there, but I want to do a story then about Palm Springs. I'll include Robinson's in it, but I'll do a story about how Palm Springs is growing, how land is selling, how people are building houses and moving out here, all this sort of stuff." So I did that, and I included the Robinson's opening.

Well, in one of these stories, either the Pasadena opening or the Palm Springs opening, I came back, and one of my colleagues in the newsroom said, "Well, that was an interesting half-hour ad," or something like that, that sent me through the roof. I knew it was. I knew I didn't want to do it. When I did it, I did it trying to make a story out of it so that it wouldn't be so blatantly promotion for somebody who was an advertiser.

But at that point, because my skin was pretty thin on that anyway, I went to a friend of mine who was head of sales, whom I had known for years, whom my family had known, and I sat down and talked to him about how, "I don't want to do this. I don't like this. I'm really unhappy about this being thrust at me so much." So I'm in this sales manager's office when the general manager goes by, and he said, "So what are you talking about, Ruth?"

I said, "I'm unhappy," and I told him what I was unhappy about.

He said, "You could have come to me and talked about it. You didn't have to go to the sales manager." I remember this, that he didn't like it that I had gone to the sales manager.

I said, "Well, it's gone too far. I don't want to do it anymore. I quit."

He said, "Okay." [Laughter.] That was the time I got caught. I had done it a lot of times.

Biagi: 1960, was this?

Taylor: No, this was '58 or '59. I forget which time it was. It was interesting because subsequently he hired me back for everything. He wanted me to come back and do the "Storyline" program, and eventually I did do, but he became a real good friend. When I had my star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, he was down there last year. His name is Bob Sutton. He was very important in the fifties and sixties at KNX in Los Angeles.

Biagi: So he accepted your resignation?

Taylor: He accepted my resignation. It wasn't that hard for him to do because they were planning, and did then, change the format a whole lot. I don't remember, because I got involved in many other things, all the things they did. I didn't choose to listen to them after that.

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and things like that. All the colleges worked together in starting the public broadcasting station KCET down there. We started it from a gleam in the eye of one of the PR people at Cal Tech, I think. So when I was back on radio doing talk shows, I did lots and lots of interviews with the KCET people as it was emerging and growing and becoming an important public television station. It started with being at Claremont.

It was an interesting time, but I must say that here I thought I was going to get into more depth and thinking, and I did in a lot of ways. There were things that were extremely important, but also I found so much provincialism in the colleges and many more closed minds than I cared to think about. I remember one time I had this one professor who was a professor of European history and taught German, I think, and he was a German. I had him on to talk about something that was going on in Berlin on a television and radio program I had him booked for. The day before he was to do that, something happened. Somebody in the State Department had done something that changed the picture, so I told him about it. He said, "Oh, don't disturb my theories with the facts," or something like that, which to me was eloquent because it was what I ran into all the time. It got so that when I would get back on the freeway to go home at night, I would be so happy to be back in the real world and realize that I'm not an academic person. [Laughter.] So I did have that experience, but it wasn't really for me.

Biagi: Your daughters were what ages at this point?

Taylor: One was born in '50 and one was born in '55.

Biagi: One was ten and one was five.

Taylor: Right. My mother was staying with me. My mother had lived in Long Beach and had always worked. She got to a point where she could come up, and I actually paid her to take care of my kids.

Biagi: She closed the restaurant?

Taylor: She closed that in the forties, her own little restaurant, but then she went to New York when I was in New York for a while. She came back out and she worked at a little bakery and she had another little restaurant. She always had some little thing going on in Long Beach. But at the end of the fifties and early sixties, she got to a point where she was happy to just come up and take care of my kids, and I would pay her so that she had something to live on. Mother, though, for a long time lived in a little apartment of her own not too far from where we were. She was a very independent lady. But she always had to go down on the weekends and get her hair fixed and her teeth fixed and everything had to get fixed in Long Beach. She couldn't fix it up at our place, so Mom stayed with us up to close to the time she died in '66.

Biagi: She would live with you during the week and on the weekends—

Taylor: First of all, she had her little apartment to start with and she would go down to Long Beach. But then she got so she lived with us. I did some remodeling and got a place that was more comfortable for her, and then she lived with us and she'd go down on the weekends and have her time in Long Beach. She stayed there, and this was great.

I remember one time when she was there, there was a big fire in Laurel Canyon. We lived right by Laurel Canyon. Mother called up and I was broadcasting. Now we're skipping a little time and I'm back in broadcasting now. We were broadcasting all afternoon and I got a call about

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Taylor: I think it's because I've lived this long and a lot of things that I may have liked I no longer have. I've had some pieces of jewelry, for instance, that I liked that were stolen. I've gotten along very well without them. I like clothes, but there are a lot of clothes out there, you know. A lot of people would love it if my closets would burn, because so many of them I've worn for so long. [Laughter.] I've got the clothes I had—I keep them for years.

Biagi: They come back. [Laughter.]

Taylor: They come back, and if you don't change your size very much, you can usually wear them. That might not be too bad to get rid of the whole thing. You furnish a place the way you like it, but in terms of real down deep, what means anything, my kids, my grandson, my dog. I just don't understand people who hook on to things, because I think it would be a miserable life. Like a car. I talk to people.

I got stuck one time, I remember. This is quite memorable because all of a sudden I was down in South Central Los Angeles doing a story, and the camera crew got called someplace else, so they just dropped me on something like Olympic Boulevard or someplace like that, and there was a car store, I call it, a dealer, of Porches and some of these real exotic sports cars. So I went in to call the office and ask them if they could eventually pick me up. But I was there quite a while and I was talking to the folks around there and the salesmen about some of these fancy cars. They were very expensive. I don't remember. At that point they were probably a third of what they are now. But they were talking about how these were like jewelry to a lot of people, and they gave me some stories about how men would buy them, and then when they would go to a restaurant or something they would have to sit by the window where they could watch their car, and about how sometimes these cars almost interfered with marriages. If you got a scratch on the car, it was like having somebody cut your ear off. It just seemed so ridiculous! And you pay all this money, now you can't have anything else, and you're going to worry about this car.

Biagi: I asked you that because you've lived in a town for a long time where things are very important to people and trappings, an industry where it seems trappings are very important, so it's fairly surprising.

Taylor: I like to look well. I like to dress well, so clothes are important, but, again, you can always get another dress, you're going to figure, somewhere. There are always some earrings around. I like my pearls. I have a strand of pearls, but I usually wear them. If I leave the house, I wear them. I wear them to go to the store because I've had so many pieces of jewelry stolen. I've got this one strand of pearls because I always wear them, and I think that's worked so far, I'll keep on wearing them. If anybody steals them, as long as they're on me, they're going to have to knock me over. But they can't see them. I wear them under sweaters, you know. Sometimes I wonder why I wear them because I never wear them so anybody can see them.

Biagi: Maybe you're a little attached to the pearls.

Taylor: I like my pearls. I like them, and I've had some wonderful pearls. I've always liked pearls. My family, my great-grandmother, everybody always liked pearls. I had a million pearls. There was one burglary we had where they just got swept out. I had, I think, one strand that I still have, and then my husband bought me another strand. Those are the pearls I have now.

Biagi: What about the issue of appearances, if we can digress for just a second, the issue of appearances in your profession? Appearance is very important.

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women who are made into things, head and shoulders, who wouldn't be too good out there in the field because they may be pretty broad someplace or they don't have good figures or something like that. It's a game.

The biggest problem for me has been that I've been out there for a long time, so I am one of the first women to have the audacity to get older in front of the camera. It's hard. That's hard, because your competition—and it is competition, particularly the way they play it now—they're very attractive women, for the most part. They're not going to choose any who aren't, for reporters. You're pretty much as you are on the hoof, you know. They aren't doing what they do with anchors, which is to set you up there and create you. So as you get older, you're not going to have the same value to people in broadcasting. I haven't had.

Biagi: Do you think that's true?

Taylor: I think it's true. Let's face it. If I were a man, they wouldn't have suggested they could make a great deal with me in terms of a semi-retirement, which is what I did at the retirement age. We've got Mike Wallace, we've got Morley Safer. We've got a lot of people out there, men all over the place, Hugh Downs, a lot of people who are older men. You analyze the way they look. They have wrinkles and they're plainly out there. I looked at Dan Rather last night and I thought, for one thing, somebody is going to chew somebody out because the lighting was terrible. His circles showed. That wouldn't be tolerated in a woman, that the circles show. You're going to have to either back off, get out, do something. A woman is much more vulnerable to criticism on the basis of how she looks. We've got women coming now into their fifties. You've got only a scattering of women who are older as I am, such as Barbara Walters is, I think, in her sixties now. You can see and you know that Barbara is very carefully taken care of. You get all those things, the manicures, the rest treatments and the different things. You really take care of a woman who is considered a star in network television the way you take care of an athlete, a movie star, or anybody else. But now there are these women who are getting older. I think as more women get older, just like it came as a revelation when I went on the air and some of the other early women went on the air, it was found that a woman's voice could be tolerated, well, it can be tolerated that a woman gets older, if she knows what she's doing.

I still have good success. I don't have maybe as much in my mind as elsewhere. However, things would have been different if I were a man or a younger woman.

Biagi: What would have been different, do you think?

Taylor: There would have been a bigger effort on the part of people to keep me around longer on full time. I say that. On the other hand, there has been a great deal of effort to keep me around, which is nice and I appreciate it. So somehow I get by with being older, and I have been. I can't complain that much. I just know it's harder, and it's harder for women getting older no matter what they do. Let's face it. Men get older and they just get more mature and wiser. Women just get older. [Laughter.] It's true. I have heard congresswomen talk about it. A gal, I guess, used to be a congresswoman from New York, she'd say they can have these marathon sessions on the floor or something and they'll say, "Oh, George, he's looking a little tired. He's really working hard." Then, "Look at Katherine. She's falling apart." You know. It's a whole different way of looking at women and men, no matter where they are.

Biagi: Going back to 1960 now, here we are and you're thinking about going back to television again. Was it ever an issue in your early career that you were a woman and there are men out

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series of things projecting what the world would be like in the year 2000. I don't remember why I did that. I did it in 1960. That was okay.

Biagi: Did any of it come true?

Taylor: The thing that happened is that they took what the world would be like in the year 2000 and we made up a brochure. I went out and I did what travel would be like, what homes would be like, what communications would be like, what all these things would be like. I did interviews and so on, and I put this all into a publication. I did papers and then it got put into a publication which was terrible. Beautiful artwork. It was a beautifully done brochure. We had a guy in promotion who did the editing on my pieces, who only would let them run to the end of the page, no matter what. There were quotes cut off right in the middle. But it was all right because it was put into a time capsule. It was distributed, I guess, to a few people who didn't know who had done the writing. The pictures were beautiful. They were art, paintings along with all my projections. But this was put into a time capsule, this whole thing, which is down below KNX so many feet. Two-hundred feet? I don't know how many feet. It's in there. But you realize that the year 2000 is coming up and they're going to take that damn thing out of there some day?

Biagi: Yes! They'll have to bring you back.

Taylor: Sutton had me do that. Sutton had me do a lot of things after he'd accepted my resignation. We really had a distant respect for each other.

Biagi: Had KNX moved at this time?

Taylor: KNX still was where it was at Columbia Square. KNXT had moved over to Columbia Square as well.

Sutton called me up in 1962 and said he wanted me to come do a talk show, so I came back and jumped into talk shows. I jumped into a show where I was interviewing people in the morning, then I went on to the "Storyline" program they had talked about my doing something on in '60, and I began to do that all afternoon.

Biagi: What was the morning program called?

Taylor: That was called something A.M., I think. But it was a talk show. It was the kind of thing where you interview somebody and then people call in and ask questions.

Biagi: A half hour?

Taylor: I think it was a half hour.

Biagi: Live?

Taylor: Yes. While I was around, they decided I should also work in the afternoons.

Biagi: "Storyline" now?

Taylor: "Storyline" now.

Biagi: Which is Ralph Story's program?

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Taylor: Yes. That was in '64.

Biagi: You'd been doing it for two years.

Taylor: About a year with "The Ruth and Pat Show." "Storyline," we were full time. The big job was "Storyline." This Ruth and Pat thing didn't amount to a whole lot, except it was a lot of fun, it was easy to do, and it was just extremely successful. Anyway, it got killed off.

Biagi: Did you have any inkling that would happen when you left?

Taylor: No. I was devastated by it, but I particularly liked the fact I went up in the general manager's office the first day that I wasn't going to be on it anymore, after it was decided that this would be a permanent thing, and it's really true that the phones all through that place just rang off the hook, that it was a disaster, all this terrible stuff. I loved it. This woman was a really dippy lady. I can't tell you who she was married to because you'd know the name and everybody would know the name. Ultimately she even accused me of having an affair with her husband. It was interesting, because she accused me of having an affair with her husband just after I'd been married to Jack. She said, "And I'm afraid I'll probably have to tell Jack about it."

I said, "Well, why don't you? He's right here." And I put him on the phone.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Biagi: So we're at "Storyline."

Taylor: "Firing Line."

Biagi: "Firing Line" in "Storyline." Before you go on, I wanted to clarify something. You said that was 12:30 to five. Is that right?

Taylor: Right.

Biagi: And that's live. Is he on the air that whole time in the afternoon?

Taylor: This was a mix of all of us.

Biagi: The program went for four and a half hours?

Taylor: Yes. There would be network news at the top of the hour, which would give you a chance to go get a drink of water or whatever else. It was interesting. You'd also have to get ready for "Firing Line." Whoever did "Firing Line"—and I started out alternating, then ended up doing it most of the time myself—it would be on, but spelled the people who were on "Storyline" for that period of time. So if you did "Firing Line" and the rest of "Storyline," you were on. Ralph did "Firing Line" for a long time.

Biagi: It was an all-local program produced at KNXT.

Taylor: KNX.

Biagi: For four and a half hours.

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people were pretty wacky that would be on, running, just because they had certain interests that they wanted to promote.

I had Nelson Rockefeller, Barry Goldwater. Barry Goldwater had some serious disputes with the press, let's say. He was very crabby with a lot of reporters. The day I had him on "Firing Line," I got a call from the first floor from the receptionist saying, "Senator Goldwater is in the lobby."

"Okay, send him up with all of the entourage." I stood outside the elevator waiting for him to come. We were on the second floor. He had left the first floor, obviously, but never arrived. The elevator got stuck. Of course, he had not liked reporters in the first place, and I thought, "He's going to really be in great spirit when he comes out of the top of the elevator." Well, he came out of the top of the elevator and he was in great spirits. He was fine, he was gracious, he was very nice. He'd apparently had a good time in the elevator, and we had a good program.

It was interesting when I had Nelson Rockefeller on. We had a seven-second delay, so that if somebody called in and there were some words that shouldn't be on the air, they could be cut off. Walter Winchell was with him, the rat-a-tat guy, the columnist. Walter Winchell sat in the control room while we were on the air, and he spent the entire hour wondering why our lips didn't say what the words were saying. We had this seven-second delay. He went back, though, and he did a real nice column in which he mentioned that experience and suggested Mr. [Bill] Paley pay attention to me, which was nice. It's just an example of the kind of thing. We had very stimulating programs. We'd really bone up for these. I studied hard, because you were doing a cram job every day.

Biagi: How did you study? What was your method?

Taylor: Basically you'd have people who would have to get some information for you. Like with Dick Gregory, I would listen to some of his recordings. There would be people who would be kind of baffling to me as to how you'd tackle them. James Baldwin was very crabby, but very talented, a brilliant person, of course in the middle of the civil rights movement. I simply read a lot, that's all. I was cramming because I didn't have that much time. I was on the air a lot. It was very good to do. Goodness sakes, I had—who was the guy I hate, who was the LSD guru? I'm trying to think of some of the other people that you never hear of on the air anymore. A lot of authors. It was a stimulating program, and the audience reflected it because the questions were right. Doctors, all kinds of people on. We hit the top of the news all the time. Had a good producer, and he was getting people.

Biagi: What was his name?

Taylor: I can't remember. There were a couple of different ones. Anyway, I always felt that was extremely rewarding because it was not trivial. It was not trying just to be sensational. We had movie stars from time to time. I remember Phyllis Diller. I had her on. She had a lot of interesting things to say. She had been a very shy person when she was growing up. You got the inside story of some of these people. I had Bette Davis on. Who's the guy who does AT&T [American Telephone and Telegraph] who I thought was a real doll? [Laughter.] I'm getting ahead of myself in some of the people I had on, because I had some people later when I was doing the night program. That's another part of this saga.

Biagi: We're on "Storyline" now. That goes on for how long?

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Biagi: What did they tell him when you were on?

Taylor: They told him Friday night. It was his last show. They told him it was his last show after he finished his last show. Then I went on Monday.

It so happened there was a great big battle around town because the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had just opened up, and they had an artist being shown over there in the opening show that was very controversial. Keinholz, I guess it was. Anyway, there was a big fight because the county museum received substantial money from the L.A. County supervisors and from the county of Los Angeles. The L.A. County supervisors were objecting to this one artist, and it became a great big thing. They didn't want the show to go on, they didn't want the museum to open. The museum director was a very well-known director of museums around, and he was having this big fight with the supervisors. It was dandy. So I had them for my first show.

Biagi: Dandy for you. [Laughter.]

Taylor: Yes. I had the museum director and one of the supervisors on, and it was such a dynamic hour the first hour, that I kept them on for the second hour, with people calling in. So it was really a pretty good one to pick up when you had to take somebody's place. But I did that show and I felt like I was chained to a microphone, at night particularly. You'd work in the day and get ready for whatever challenges you had, and then I'd have to get ready for this big long haul at night. There was no way out. I'd go home and I'd have my dinner really fast and turn around and come back, now put the chain on around your neck, hook you on to that microphone, and you're not leaving here until after 11:30. It was grueling. At nighttime you get a lot of different dynamics going in terms of the people who come in and whether they've had dinner or not had dinner or whether they've had too much to drink or not. I had a really smashed prosecutor on one night. I couldn't get him out of the studio.

Biagi: It was a call-in show?

Taylor: Call-in show, but I had really good people. I had a wonderful show one night with Ray Bradbury and the Smothers brothers, all three of them together. They were just hilarious. It was fantastic.

Then once they got me on the show, they weren't letting me off. I couldn't get off that show till I went over to television and said, "Hey, I want to come back to television. I've got to get out of there!"

Biagi: How long was this that you were on that until I 1:30?

Taylor: I was on for six, eight weeks, something like that, and there was no sign they were going to let me off. Even though they'd said it was a temporary job, I was hooked. I would go over, and a friend of mine, Grant Holcomb, had become news director.

Biagi: In television?

Taylor: In television.

Biagi: KNXT?

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Biagi: Let me go over those names. Ronald Reagan and Bob Finch. You've going to have to tell me.

Taylor: Bob Finch was lieutenant governor, then he was secretary of Health, Education and Welfare with the Nixon administration. He was in the White House with [Richard] Nixon as well as one of his chief aides. Bob Finch, in fact, tried to get me an appointment to the FCC Commission. He almost succeeded. [Robert] Haldeman got his guy instead of Finch. Finch was very, very big.

Biagi: Edith Head, we all see her name a lot.

Taylor: She was a big designer.

Biagi: And Jack Kent Cooke?

Taylor: Jack Kent Cooke was the owner of the Lakers for a long time. He built the Forum in Los Angeles. What are all the teams that he owned and operated? He was a big, big sports promoter, a cocky guy, and he had a home that was a duplicate of a Venetian manor. These places that I would see, I'd go out and talk to baseball players. I went out to Don Drysdale's, the pitcher. He had horses. Just a variety of people, but it was fascinating to see where they lived, what kind of hobbies they had, what their families were like. It was like the old person-to-person thing that Ed Murrow used to do.

Biagi: What do you remember about Ronald Reagan's house?

Taylor: This was when he was running for governor. They lived in the Palisades and you could see out to the Santa Monica Bay. I interviewed him and talked to him by the pool at that point, very casually dressed, and then I walked around with Nancy. They had a bunch of photographs on the piano. I saw them many times. I interviewed them many times and was up in Sacramento a lot with them. Then Pat Brown, because Pat used to have a Los Angeles residence down on Muirfield in Hancock Park, and he had wonderful press parties every year before the press got so big that everybody stopped having press parties because it was too big. I did Pat.

Biagi: Edith Head's home would have been interesting.

Taylor: Fascinating!

Biagi: What was it like?

Taylor: She was on Coldwater Canyon. She had a sort of hacienda-type house. It was a big lot. Of course, this is a very high-rent district, but fruit trees and a lot of foliage around. Then it was a Mexican style, not Spanish style. It could be called early California, I suppose. You had a particular way you had to go in. There were chimes and you had to ring the bell a certain way. Then she'd take you in through certain ceremonial places. For every room she had inside, she had a room outside. Like for the kitchen, she'd have a kitchen inside, but then she'd have like the barbecue and outside cooking area. Bedrooms she'd have inside and then she'd have outside hammocks and things for the outside sleeping areas. It was a fascinating place. It was adobe, as I recall, and it was so fascinating that I couldn't get the cameraman to ever quit shooting it, because he even had to go back that evening and shoot some more because she was very gracious about beverages and refreshments, and I had a cameraman who liked beverages of all kinds. But she was great. That was a very memorable one.

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years, and I like to just do as much taking apart of somebody as I can. I can go in there with Zev Yaroslavski down in Los Angeles or the person who did Prop 140. Some of them I had great battles with. My job is to do battle with them, but some of these people are some of my good friends in a lot of ways. I don't socialize a great deal with people that I do stories with, but politically it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's a whole conditioning, I think.

Biagi: Do you see your role that way, as antagonist? How do you see your role?

Taylor: Basically I like to be tough. I like to be hard hitting. But a four-letter word that's a terribly important one is "fair," and I like the fact that in that room over there where I've got those plaques and resolutions, that "fair" and "honest" are the things that I get praised for and have kept me in the business for a long time. You won't be in it a long time if you get too many enemies. You're not going to get them back to be on your show, and if you've had a show for thirty years or you think you want one for thirty years, you're darn well going to have to be able to be respected enough that people will come back and talk to you after they've done it once or twice. It's not going to be such a terrible experience. We have people who have said about certain experiences they've had, "I'll never go near that place again. I'll never talk to that person again." We've heard those situations. You can't do it that way. Furthermore, I don't think you like your job if you're trying to promote your own personal views.

To me the job of a journalist is to inform everybody, not just the Democrats or not just the Republicans or not just the Green party or whoever. You're supposed to be able to communicate with all the folks out there. You want to be tough because these folks ask for it if they're up there in the public eye. But you've got to be fair because they're going to see through it if you're trying to promote yourself and you're not fair. And promote yourself is what you're doing when you start to slant the way you do your questions. That's important. That's so important. I also enjoy it that way, where you have a relationship with the people you're talking to. You like to hit them as hard as you can, because that's why they're there, you know.

Biagi: Do you remember an incident when it was particularly difficult to do that, when you ever felt that you just couldn't hit this person as hard as you'd like to, or where your personal relationship focused you on the problem that the two of you had just being on the air together, that made it hard to ask the questions you knew you should as a journalist?

Taylor: It doesn't have so much to do with any preconception you might have, where you would be hesitant because you were afraid of hurting their feelings or something, because you'll adapt to that. You won't be as tough on somebody if you've got somebody who is terribly sensitive. You're not going to be appreciated by an audience if you take advantage of somebody who has got a weakness of some kind, so you've got to know that. You've got to be very sensitive to that. I would say that when you can't do it the way you want to, when you can't be as tough as you want to, or in some way can't perform the way you want to, it has more to do with the chemistry or the dynamics of that relationship at that moment and you don't know how that's going to be.

There are times when somebody doesn't feel well, you don't feel well, or there's just a chemistry, just like your chemistry with people in general. Sometimes you open up, you've got a good rapport. There are some people who are timid that you meet, and I can't think of specific examples, that you can't get to, you just can't get to. It's not that you can't hit them as hard. A lot of people you're just getting information from, too, and you're not trying to really challenge them like you are politicians a lot. But some people go inside, they're not comfortable, and you can have some pretty miserable times where you can't get to them, not because you don't want to,

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think of where you get somebody who is not with us, who's been drinking or something, on a live show, which I think I mentioned I had had that experience. That's terrible. We used to be in combinations of two or three always, in panels, and I've had experiences that the hardest part was not with the guests, but with your colleagues. That can be difficult. Sometimes your producers will want to put somebody up there because they want them to be seen or have the illusion or image of being knowledgeable and able to do these talk things, and they may not have nearly enough background.

I know there was one particular person who is extremely well known in Los Angeles, and this makes for a difficult moment. You could be going along. This would be when we'd have panels of three. You're going along, you think you've got some kind of a direction with the questions and answers, although with three it's difficult going in, but all of a sudden this colleague who's sitting there will come out from left field with some kind of a question that completely leaves you awestruck as to where the heck it came from and throw the whole conversation into another direction. Now you try to bring it back. That's hard. That happens a lot. You can have more trouble with the people you're working with than the people you're working against. [Laughter.]

I have also been on a program where the person who was anchoring the talk show had overindulged, and you just do a lot of talking because you're going to have to fill in for that person. Those are difficult times.

Biagi: We talked about broadcast journalism and print journalism, and the skills are so different. Do you think that's true?

Taylor: Yes. I don't think they still should be different. I don't think they are different in a lot of cases. Certainly with print journalism, the print people, a lot of them, have had more experience now in questioning for something live or on the air, because they have been around. They used to hate, of course, being in the same news conference with the idiot broadcasters, because they didn't think they had any brains. But I think that maybe in some ways they have learned that you can ask questions without being too long, too involved, and there are ways of asking questions that will get more out of the person who is up there. I think print folks ask shorter, better questions in a lot of cases than they used to, because you could go on forever on these little tiny things. What you used to find a lot, much more than you do now, is that some of the people in a news conference really wanted to show what they know.

Biagi: Reporters, you mean?

Taylor: Reporters. So that they would keep on asking questions or they'd ask them in ways that sort of showed them off; or they'd ask a question that might be oblique or obscure, to show that they really were original thinkers. On the other hand, you do have many, too many broadcast reporters—I'm not going to call them journalists in all cases—who are inadequately trained, much more than you should have. That's because in many cases we are talking about how you look. This can happen a lot with men and women, where you have these tapes that are circulated around the country to all the different stations by the agents, and a person is hired on the basis of how he or she looks on a tape and what kind of great releases somebody can turn out. Maybe they have pretty good writing. In an awful lot of these puff pieces about people, they snow somebody who's a general manager or news director. Somebody is hired who just hasn't the foggiest notion what stories are or what journalism is, because they look good and they have production skills. That's the term.

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and a half, three minutes. If you're ad libbing a special event or something, you can do it. Now in the sixties you had the tools. You were able to tell the story.

Biagi: By tools, what do you mean?

Taylor: I mean the tape or the film. We had visuals, we had good people basically. I guess I'm talking about the visuals and the equipment in your studios to be able to edit and do a good little production. We had bureaus, for one thing. We had a bureau in Sacramento. I remember when Warren Olney used to be at this bureau. He would tell what was going on at the capital and he would do that with some visuals and time. Then he'd go off into the Sierra and do maybe some environmental stories, and we did a lot on the environment.

I remember when they did infrared photography around the Lake Arrowhead area in Southern California. My husband and I went up and we took our own infrared camera, film, and we flew over the forests because it was going to take the forestry folks a long time to come out with their report. When you get into the bureaucracy, it's going to be months. So we flew over where they went and looked at what they looked at, and the next day we had our infrared stuff on and it was fascinating stuff. It was a story about how smog is killing the forests in Lake Arrowhead. Consumer stories that you can tell, and some of the violations and fraud that goes on. We've had a good series that has been on about worker's comp, for instance. It takes some time to tell stories like that. But we were doing the political stories.

Biagi: The big news went how long?

Taylor: An hour.

Biagi: Local news and then expanded.

Taylor: Local news, an hour long, and when I was on that show, the size of my normal piece was three and a half minutes. In recent times, not that long ago, a normal political story that I would do would be two and a half or two thirty-five, and that's just about the right time to get all the back-and-forth dynamics of the debate and so forth. It worked. It holds a lot better to do a well-told story than to just do it so quickly that you don't put any of the beginning, middle, and end, and conflict and the things that make good storytelling. But in the big news, three and a half minutes would be a regular piece, and maybe we wouldn't have a piece on every day.

I remember one time my husband and I did a piece. We went out and there was this crowd we had heard about in the San Gabriel Valley. A teacher who was teaching in her spare time musically inclined kids, getting them together for an orchestra in the San Gabriel Valley. She had done wonderful things. This orchestra was going to play at the Music Center, and we went out just to see. She was so dedicated and she devoted so much of her time, when she got these kids, she worked them hard and they turned out just great stuff. We did that story. You had music, you had dedication of a teacher, you had kids working for excellence, you had all these great things. It took some time, but it was pretty—

I remember even a story like an entertainment story. I think about it. I forget the guy's name, but he had won an Oscar as a supporting actor. He was going to be on a "Gunsmoke" episode and they were taping it the next day after the Oscars. They were going to have a big celebration for him, and it was all secret. We went out. Jack and I did this one. He didn't know. We saw him doing some other stuff. This is entertainment when they would maybe let you run, but we ran four and a half minutes. We sort of let our audience in on what was going to happen,

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they got rid of Gil Stratton, who was the sports guy, they fired a guy named Saul Halpert. Saul had been doing politics. I was slated to be fired.

In '72 I remember Jim Brown, who has been very successful at NBC doing entertainment things. On the anniversary of the 1971 earthquake, which was February ninth, I think it is, they hadn't planned in advance, and they called Jim in to do an anniversary thing on the earthquake. He did this really very good thing. I remember the piece, a year after it happened, what it's like, and so on. As soon as the story was off the air, they called him in and fired him. It was one of the original blood baths. We've had a whole bunch of them since then. I was slated to also be let go.

Biagi: How did you know this?

Taylor: Because Bill Ames told me. In fact, I'll get to that, because it so happened I was to be let go. The day I was to be let go, I'm thinking this must be '73, because that was a municipal election year. They had never discovered that everything in a municipal election happens at city hall. That's where the votes are counted by the city clerk. That's where the results come out and they go around and put them in all these baskets that are around. That's where everything comes in first. That's where all the candidates come to see what's going on and all the rest of it. So when they set up their coverage for the primary, which is in April, they sent me down with a runner. I took Laurie with me, my daughter. Then they had all their hot shots in the studio back in Hollywood. Well, it was a heavy-duty thing. It was the [Mayor Tom] Bradley night. He won the final election. I can't remember how he came out on the primary.

Anyway, here we've got all of this going on and, of course, a million people running the primaries. The primaries are always so much harder to cover than are the finals because you've got so darn many people and so darn many issues, all these things. But the people back there making plans never recognize that. Anyway, I'm down there by myself, but I've got my daughter with me and I've got a runner with me. I kept them busy and they were having to come to me about every two seconds. In fact, I did the show that night, to a large extent, because that's where everything was happening, and it was a big night. I was slated to be fired the next day. As Ames told me, when he saw the people, he said, "I can't fire her. She just saved our ass." [Laughter.] And Bill, when he told me that, he said, "And I want you to know, Ruth, that as long as I'm news director, you have a job here." And I've often said, "And I'm glad it was longer," because he was fired a few months later. [Laughter.]

Biagi: [Laughter.] So much for stability.

Taylor: Right! So he was fired, and then we've had this whole parade of people. But I always loved it. I remember that. "I want you to know, as long as I'm news director, you've got a job here." "Thanks, Bill. I'm glad it's longer than that." [Laughter.]

Biagi: Did anybody ever come to you, consultants, and say you should do your stories differently or you should do these kinds of stories or you should present them differently?

Taylor: Oh, I've been ground up pretty good. Not consultants. I've had different periods when I have had people grind me.

Biagi: Meaning what?

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saying, "What are you doing, Ruth? This is ridiculous! This is no story." It was a two-liner on city news the day before. I said, "I know it isn't. There's no story here." "Go find the people whose child was close to where the pellets landed." Well, I went to find the people and they all speak Spanish, they were all in the housing project. They didn't think anything about it. I tell the guy, "There's no live shot. I can't do a live shot. It would be stupid to do a live shot. Everybody would say, 'What are you doing a live shot for?'" For one thing, you've got violence down there all the time of a major sort.

When I got back, he was so furious that I refused to do a live shot. There was no story to do a live shot. He took me into the news director's room, closed the door, locked the door, and said, "You will understand that a news program is a dictatorship." And ever after he did treat me with complete—well, whatever I did was wrong. As a matter of fact, I remember him saying about one story I did, "Who knows those people?" He was just tearing me down again. The general manager called up and said, "Hey, Ruth, that was a really great story."

Well, the interesting thing was the night this guy was leaving, I was working late on one of the programs, "Newsmakers" or a religious show I did. I was in the bureau in my office about eight o'clock and this executive producer was leaving. I can't remember if he was transferred, fired, whatever. But they were having a little party for him out there, but there were no reporters at this party. The executive producer—I guess that's what she was at that point, one of the top management people, came back and said, "Ruth, there are no reporters out there and Dick's leaving." I said, "Okay." I just walked out and I stood in the back as people made little speeches and so forth. Then I walked back into my office.

In a little while, here comes this guy, Dick Goldberg, his name was, crying, and he came in and begged my forgiveness for the way he had treated me and he'd come to learn this and this and so forth about me and so on, and would I forgive him, that he had respect for me and he wanted me to know, and all this sort of stuff. I'm pinching myself. "Ruth, you're not alive. You're not here. This isn't happening. It can't happen. This guy has been killing you for all these months." But, no, he cried and begged my forgiveness, and I am not sure. I just managed to forget him. [Laughter.]

Biagi: With that, we can stop. [Laughter.]