Ray Martin's Favourites: The Stories Behind The Legends

By Ray Martin

Award-winning journalist Ray Martin is one Australia's most loved personalities. It seems he's been everywhere and met everybody, for 60 Minutes and a range of top-rating ABC and Channel 9 shows. So, who are his favourites? And what was Audrey Hepburn or Prince Charles or Madonna really like? That's what people always ask Ray and that's why he's written this book. Ray Martin's Favourites bring together the most remarkable of these interviews, offering an intriguing insight into some truly extraordinary celebrities—Dustin Hoffman talking about sex, Jane Fonda talking about God, some poetry from Ronnie Biggs the Great Train Robber and some wisdom from Patrick Dodson, the father of reconciliation. Here, too, are the last interviews with Sir Donald Bradman, Fred Hollows and Kerry Packer. The comedy brilliance of Billy Crystal, Robin Williams and Peter Cook. The studio body-language when Bob Hawke and Paul Keating came together for the first and only time. And much more. Revealing, perceptive and inspiring, Ray Martin's Favourites is compulsive reading. Enjoy the journey.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780522860894

Book preview

me.

An unnatural act

A television interview is an unnatural act between two consenting adults.

Michael Parkinson

It’s a funny quote. I know exactly what Parky’s saying. I’ve thought the same thing many times.

Here we are, just you and me sitting in a studio—with a camera, lights ’n’ action TV crew plus an audience of about two hundred—while around Australia another two million are watching in their lounge rooms. So, why do you treat me like your friendly shrink and pour out the most intimate details of your life—your successes and your failings? Even your sexploits?

It beats me. But people do it, again and again.

For some reason the television camera pares people back, like psychoanalysis—or a can opener. Only it doesn’t cost them a couple of hundred bucks for a session. Indeed, some people even get paid thousands to tell their story on TV.

Most times, of course, with the really confidential tales, it’s an interview in the privacy of the person’s home. But, in truth, there’s nothing private about it. It still happens in a kitchen or a living room that’s been radically rearranged with a battery of lights, a mega-camera on a tripod and microphones, while a producer and crew stand off to one side. Personal and private—for all the world to see.

The TV interview becomes a public confessional.

But, I have to say, it’s also happened to me many times in a big, open Channel 9 studio—on A Current Affair and especially on Midday.

In a way, I can understand the Midday phenomenon, because the show was always friendly and familiar. There was rarely confrontation and viewers felt immensely comfortable with the way that Midday brought the world with all its complexity and emotion into their lives for ninety minutes a day. In many ways, Midday was a more reliable, more constant visitor in lonely, sometimes isolated lives than many a son or daughter. The fact is I turned up in their homes every day.

Midday encouraged guests to speak freely, without being judgmental. Or inquisitorial. Again, it seemed that, unwittingly or not, I played the role of a priest or a counsellor. I’ve had so many guests reveal dark secrets about births, deaths and marriages that I never expected to hear. Not on TV, anyway. People have sat there and cried about miscarriages and abortions and domestic violence.

Often they just seemed to want to tell somebody, to get it off their chest, to purge their souls. Even though it was on camera and before millions of people.

I remember one elderly lady from the Atherton Tablelands who told me about being raped by her grandfather, seventy years before. She was barely a teenager at the time. She said it was her darkest secret, one she’d never revealed to her husband or any of her three daughters. But she told me. And she cried.

Another man—a bloke who was also in eighties—wrote me a letter, another cri de coeur, a cry from the heart. He revealed that he was on his deathbed, which is why he wanted to tell me about his acts of incest as a young man. He felt guilty about having had sex with his sisters. I suggested he should talk to a priest instead, but he said that he had no time for God. So I went out and interviewed him. I was shocked to hear his story, in such detail.

He died the next week but I felt uncomfortable about dragging his family through the sad, grubby past of a devastated childhood. So I never aired the story. But the point is that he felt the need to tell me and was happy to do it before the TV camera.

Way down the emotional scale—but still surprisingly personal—I recall adman extraordinaire John Singleton and his lovely ex-wife Belinda Green talk openly to me about their marriage collapse. (Singo had had a few of them and laughingly suggested he should just hand over a house when he signed the marriage certificate.) Comedy king Paul Hogan’s first spouse Noeline talked freely about her husband running off with his Crocodile Dundee lover, Linda Kozlowski. She told me much more than I really wanted to know. Kim Beazley also confessed to me that he prays nightly, on his knees by his bedside. Nothing wrong with that, but having interviewed so many Aussie politicians, I was surprised how little prodding it took to get this good man—who desperately wanted to be Prime Minister—to open up about God. Religion, I learnt a long time ago, is almost a no-go zone for our politicians, as Julia Gillard found when she revealed that she’s agnostic.

I remember Tony Abbott talking candidly to me about a teenage love affair that had resulted in an unplanned pregnancy, back when he was still contemplating a life of abstinence in the Catholic seminary. His ‘illegitimate son’ had been given up for adoption. But, decades later, the son tracked down his biological mother and came out of the woodwork—as it happened he had been working in the Canberra press gallery! Abbott came on camera and spoke openly.

Whatever you may feel about Mr Abbott’s politics, he’s an honest man. He serves it up on the battlefield but is also prepared to cop it. Still, I must confess that I was surprised when Abbott talked to me about his affair in such personal detail—right down to the fact they hadn’t used contraceptives.

The only trouble was that within a few days his old Manly girlfriend—who was now living with her family in outback Western Australia—came on camera to confirm to me that Tony wasn’t actually the father. It turns out that, at the time, she’d had another fling with an artist and he was really the dad.

‘How embarrassment!’ as a cameraman mate used to say.

As Michael Parkinson quipped, the TV interview can be a most ‘unnatural act’.

And yet my old friend and mentor, Bruce Gyngell, had an altogether different twist. He used to call ‘the interview’ the most compelling kind of communication. He always said it was even better than TV pretty pictures or action—two people just talking together, while everyone else watches in fascination.

The Gyng, the first to welcome viewers to TV with the words, ‘Hello. Welcome to television’ back in 1956, knew more about TV than anyone I ever met—along with Peter Faiman and Peter Wynne, the two grand doyens of television production. (I have to say that working with Wynney and Faiman was like, well … as Bob Dylan said about hanging out with Bono, ‘… like eating food on a fast train, feels like you’re moving, you’re going someplace!’)

Anyway, Bruce Gyngell would phone after a good interview was broadcast—hours before the ratings came in, unlike every other TV executive. And he’d critique it usually with a kind eye. He’d point out what he thought had been pertinent or poignant, what was a revelation. And, with a click of the tongue, he’d always say, ‘Son, you can’t beat a good interview, can you?’

I guess doing TV interviews is a bit like what Tim Winton once said about sitting down to write novels, ‘You’ve gotta be there and ready. Because you never know who might turn up’. Winton was talking about unexpected characters in his story; I’m talking about answers that you never quite expect, no matter how much research you do.

Gyngell’s pet hate was the stock-standard showbiz interview on current affairs programs, with, let’s say, Elton John or Nicole Kidman, where answers are buried under an avalanche of pictures of Elton on stage performing, or Nicole from her latest movie clip. It happens all the time.

‘If someone’s got something worth saying’, Gyng would scream, ‘then let ’em bloody say it. For Christ sake, how basic is it?’ I couldn’t agree more.

It’s a producer’s, or an editor’s, knee jerk reaction to want to slap pictures over someone’s face when they’re talking to you. They call it ‘colour and movement’. I call it a mindless distraction. (It’s not MTV after all.)

David Frost didn’t bother to overlay pictures in his compelling historic interview with former American President Richard Nixon in 1977. Why would anybody? Believing that this starched British television gadfly would be ‘a goddam pushover’ for someone as formidable as Tricky Dicky, the disgraced President agreed to talk to Frost, in a series of interviews. With forty-five million viewers tuned in the first night, it was the most watched political interview in history—long before it received five Academy Award nominations, as a movie.

For Frost’s TV team, preparing and planning the interview was a bit like a military mission—not exactly the Navy SEALs, but still a well-choreographed strike against a seasoned enemy. The ex-President had spent a lifetime playing such war games with the press.

Nixon was paid six hundred thousand dollars upfront and twenty per cent of any profits the interview made. (He collected over a million dollars in the end, which was a massive payout at the time.)

Frost quizzed Nixon for two hours a day over a twelve-day period, recording almost twenty-nine hours of interview, of which only five went to air.

The former president hadn’t spoken to the press since he’d been unceremoniously kicked out of the White House two years earlier. He had written his memoirs, but his Los Angeles agent, Irving ‘Swifty’ Lazar, believed that a TV chat before a mass audience would help polish the President’s damaged reputation. And help promote the upcoming book.

It backfired badly.

In promoting the interview on American 60 Minutes, Frost said he was looking forward to the President’s ‘cascade of candor’. When it was over, he admitted that it had been ‘a drenchingly tense’ process, which saw him switch from prosecutor to father confessor.

I watched every minute of David Frost’s extraordinary interview go to air from our New York apartment, having reported the unravelling of Richard Nixon’s crooked presidency blow-by-blow for five years. As you do, I kept second-guessing Frost, thinking how I would have approached it—one of the most sought-after interviews in history. And it was a fine job of interviewing, I have to say.

The ‘moment’ surely came when Richard Nixon was asked, in the third episode, why he’d acted illegally, and he replied in that harsh, gnarled voice of his, ‘Well, when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal’.

Game, set and match!

In the interview genre, Oprah Winfrey’s chat with the mercurial music genius Michael Jackson in early 1993 had more than double the Frost/Nixon TV audience. And the OJ Simpson interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw, at a time when the American football legend was accused of having murdered his ex-wife, was another TV moment that certainly stopped America. The only other comparable interview was when Princess Diana talked to the BBC’s Michael Bashir. That TV spectacular stopped the world, when she famously revealed that there were ‘three people in this marriage’, fingering Camilla.

In the emotional wash-up, Diana accused Bashir of ‘tricking’ her into confessing her deepest secrets. But if Bashir lulled the princess into a false sense of security, well, that’s part of his interviewing skill.

If you’re in the news business, they are the kind of interviews you kill for.

Personally, I’d have to say my biggest coup was getting the last interview with Sir Donald Bradman—something Parky and everyone else had been after for decades.

The Don, a genuine sporting hero—undoubtedly the greatest cricketer of all time—had become something of a recluse and hadn’t spoken to the press in thirty years.

After Bradman, I would include as some of my coups—in no particular order—James Jesus Angleton, the former boss of Counterintelligence at the CIA; Walter Mikac, in the searingly painful first interview after his wife and little girls had been gunned down at Port Arthur; Christopher Boyce, the reclusive American spy, who spoke to me in the federal penitentiary in Kansas and paid for it with a beating later; Fred Hollows, on his death bed in his last interview; Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, in the only time they appeared together, and which remains a classic of giveaway body language; and, of course, Lindy Chamberlain, in her first interview.

I remember talking to Lindy and Michael Chamberlain a week or so after she was released from purgatory in her Darwin cell. They were strong and resolute in their complete innocence. Lindy’s pain was palpable, etched into the emptiness of her eyes. She’d actually been beyond purgatory—to hell and back—and it was more than any loving mother could bear. She’d been convicted of cutting her baby daughter’s throat and then somehow disposing of the tiny body.

‘A calculated, fanciful lie’, the prosecution had snarled at Lindy’s protestations of innocence, convincing half of Australia of her hard-faced guilt.

Even the most cursory glance at the events of that dark Northern Territory night in August 1980 when a wild dog carried off the 10-week-old Azaria shows how absurd the criminal charges were. The Chamberlains should have been in our hearts not the targets of a hate campaign.

Linda had agreed to talk exclusively to me for 60 Minutes and The Australian Women’s Weekly for a substantial fee. Mind you, no amount of money could ever compensate the Chamberlains for the agony they’d suffered. Not even the 1.3 million dollars the Northern Territory government begrudgingly paid them for ‘wrongful imprisonment’.

Now, experienced interviewers know that you can be polite and respectful but still ask ‘Why did you steal the money?’ Or worse. With Lindy Chamberlain there was no way to tiptoe around it. I had to bluntly ask, ‘Did you kill Azaria?’

‘No!’ she said, with a blistering stare that could have stopped a Bushmaster truck, in a voice that was almost shrill. ‘I loved that little girl.’

You just had to believe her.

(When I asked Walter Mikac how he could face life without his ‘three beautiful girls’, the village chemist wept and replied, ‘Martin Bryant also put a bullet through my head that day’. The world knew exactly what Walter meant.)

Talking earlier, as I was, about the television camera opening people up, I vividly remember Michael and Lindy speaking to me in their kitchen, again a bit too honestly. Michael wondered aloud whether their marriage could really withstand the trauma and heartache they’d been through. Back together as a family again, after Lindy’s three years in jail, you prayed that their turbulent life would calm. It didn’t, and they soon divorced.

•

So, what makes a great interviewer?

I once read an article by George Clooney’s father, Nick, who was a Canadian CBC journalist for many years. He said that the craft of interviewing is ‘often overrated. It’s fairly easy work. You do your research and then have a conversation’.

Nick Clooney is right—but only partly right.

You must do your research. That’s non-negotiable if you want to get your subject to open up. I like to be buried in biographical details, file after file of it. I don’t care if I’m not surprised by their answers—despite Tim Winton’s comment that I mentioned earlier. I’m rarely surprised, to be honest. But I’ll act surprised!

And the other fact of life is that few music or Hollywood stars want to talk to journalists, unless they have something to plug.

I knew Paul Hogan pretty well, after about half a dozen TV interviews and from swapping beers and war stories up in the Channel 9 boardroom. But I remember doing an hour-long special on one occasion, about whatever his latest movie was at the time, when Hoges said with a laugh, ‘Now don’t take this the wrong way, Raymond, but I wouldn’t have anything to do with you if I didn’t have something to flog!’

He meant it and I totally understood. They give you an hour of their time—or sometimes a few days of it—and they move on. You try and grab their confidence, and occasionally their trust, and you get the best interview you can.

To do that you’ve got to see their movie, go to their play or concert and always read their book. (On Midday I used to read at least three or four books a week!)

Two quick stories. I remember Shirley MacLaine’s caustic reply to Steve Vizard when the Gold Logie winner was honest enough to admit that he didn’t know much about her new movie because he hadn’t had a chance to see it yet.

‘Steve, it’s clear you don’t know much about anything’, Shirley replied. There’s not a lot you can reclaim after someone shoots you down like that.

On another occasion in New York, I interviewed the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times author, David Halberstam. He’d just published The Best and the Brightest, the finest book I’ve read on the Vietnam War.

Now, I always scribble in the margins and underline books that I read, to help remind me. I went to quote a line from his book and Halberstam asked, ‘Do you mean to say you’ve actually read my book?’ I told him I always read the books. Halberstam then commented that my interview was the last of almost three hundred interviews he was doing around America promoting his book.

‘You’re the first person I’ve met, Mr Martin, who I know for sure has read it!’ He then gave me a fantastic interview. I’ve never forgotten that lesson.

To be a good interviewer it helps to be born insatiably curious—and to like talking to everybody. Even Hollywood actors who don’t have a lot to say.

My dear friend, Richard Carlton, just couldn’t pretend when he interviewed someone he didn’t care about. Like the infamous time many years ago when he was set to interview the hot young starlet, Cameron Diaz. Carlton asked his 60 Minutes producer just before the interview: ‘What other films has he done?’ Not a good start. Then he spent most of his interview focusing on Diaz’s alleged ‘alcohol problem’, which she for her part vehemently denied.

Richard was no better with her Gangs of New York co-star, Leonardo DiCaprio, who was next. He walked out—no surprise—and 60 Minutes missed the story.

Mind you, it’s easy to get people to walk out of a television interview. The real skill is to relax them enough so that they talk candidly. If you interrupt, hector them and ride roughshod, they’ll often leave. And you can guarantee that the enraged exit will appear again and again on television, like when Ron Casey threw that punch at Normie Rowe. It’s boomerang TV; it keeps coming back.

(Mind you, prime ministers never walk out. They usually just obfuscate, then say, ‘Will you please let me answer your question?’, then talk without drawing breath for three minutes, avoiding the question anyway.)

In more than ten thousand interviews, I’m pleased to say that only two people have ever walked out on me. (It won’t surprise anyone to hear that neither person is a favourite of mine.) Both were superstars, and both walked out when I asked them about drug-taking.

The first was a bizarre interview with La Toya Jackson, Michael’s older sister, on A Current Affair. After talk about her new album, I asked about incessant news reports that she was abusing drugs. That sparked an instant walkout, except that she was dragged back on screen by the microphone that was still attached to her jacket. (It was like something out of a cartoon! Zooop!) When she reappeared she hurled abuse at me, ripped off the mike and exited. Gone.

My other walkout was just as colourful but threatened to be a bit more violent. At least that’s how I read it at the time.

In late 2000, after the Sydney Olympics, 60 Minutes asked me to do an interview with Michael Johnson, probably the greatest 400-metre runner of all time. He’d just won two gold medals, including a relay. (I’ve told the story in my autobiography, so I’ll be brief.)

Johnson was in Brisbane, being paid by the Queensland Government to promote the upcoming Goodwill Games. He certainly wasn’t showing any of that. Goodwill, I mean.

On FM morning radio, at Southbank, everywhere he went, he was angry and obnoxious. He was surly, sulky, wouldn’t talk to anybody and flatly refused to have his photo taken with fans in the street.

Later that day, when it came time for my interview with him, I asked Michael about performance-enhancing drugs in athletics. Drugs had been the ‘other story’ at the Sydney games, with several American athletes sent home in disgrace.

Johnson went berserk. He jumped up and hovered over me for a moment before walking out. I thought he was going to hit me, he was so angry. (I kept thinking, ‘Hit me, please’, because the cameras were rolling. ‘But, not too hard.’)

The tag to this story is that a few years later, Johnson’s three teammates in the relay were all random tested and found guilty of using drugs. All three lost their Sydney gold medals. Michael Johnson, who had by then retired from competition, handed his medal back, too. I felt vindicated in at least asking the questions.

•

A last word on interviews I’ve done with scientists.

Scientists, I’ve discovered, are very different to rock stars, actors and gold medal–winning athletes. They’ll talk to you even when they don’t have a song or a picture to flog.

I like them, even when I can’t always understand what they are on about. I certainly found Nobel Prize winners and rocket scientists a bit of a challenge. Anthropologists I can better understand. I think.

When I was based in New York in the 1970s, every year between Christmas and New Year I covered the AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science convention, for ABC radio. My wife Dianne and I would head off to Los Angeles or Boston or wherever the convention was being held and have a good time.

Now, for a schoolboy who’d gleefully ditched physics and chemistry as soon as he could, I must admit this was way out of my comfort zone. Here I was interviewing the alpha stars of the science galaxy.

I stood around in absolute awe of these legends, trying to soak up some of their collective intelligence by osmosis. Or whatever it’s called. I simply couldn’t believe the brainpower I was mixing with. It was enough to lure me back to the old science lab. Well, almost.

I mean, just think about it. I got to ask Wernher von Braun questions about how he put man on the moon. (Dr ‘VB’ had pioneered the V2 rockets for Hitler and then switched sides, leading the Apollo space program.) Without doubt, von Braun was the greatest rocket scientist in history. It may not have been my most memorable interview but at least the good doctor didn’t laugh at my questions.

I did alright.

Then there was Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born physicist, who was called ‘the father of the hydrogen bomb’. Teller had the thickest eyebrows I’d ever seen on a man and walked with a pronounced limp because of a prosthetic foot. Unquestionably a brilliant scientist, he was sadly best known as the inspiration for the mad Dr Strangelove character in Stanley Kubrick’s classic antiwar film of the same name.

I just couldn’t bring myself to mention Dr Strangelove when I interviewed Dr Teller. It didn’t seem fair. Besides, his Mittel-European accent was so thick, he was harder to fathom than Henry Kissinger. And that’s saying something.

I also got to interview, among many other scientists, Carl Sagan, the brilliant astrophysicist who unsuccessfully searched for E.T., or certainly his extraterrestrial mates. And Jonas Salk, who found a cure for polio, but somehow never won a Nobel Prize for his vaccine. And Linus Pauling, who did win a Nobel for his work—on the molecular structure of DNA: triple helix and all that jazz.

How good is that? Being a journalist really does beat working, I’ve got to say! (Because how many times have I quietly thought it?)

Anyway, it was also at one of these AAAS shindigs that I became acquainted with the firebrand eccentric anthropologist, Dr Margaret Mead. I came to interview her several times in her attic aerie atop the American Museum of Natural History building in New York. Margaret Mead was absolutely marvellous.

She had two separate twirling staircases either side of her office, explaining that if her secretary sent up someone she really didn’t want to see, then she’d do a runner—down the other stairs. She never once did that to me.

Mead was most famous for her early writings about the so-called ‘sexual freedoms’ of teenage girls in Samoa. Her 1920s research had upset American morality, because she suggested ‘this early promiscuity’ lead to stable marriages in later life.

Because I was an Australian, she would waltz me around the Museum’s ‘People of the Pacific’ floor, chattering away, asking questions about my family roots, talking about her early days in New Guinea and saying ‘fiddlesticks’ a lot. (I don’t think I’d ever heard an adult use the word ‘fiddlesticks’ before, unless it was Katharine Hepburn in some black and white movie with Cary Grant.)

‘It is only to be expected’, Dr Mead said in one interview with me, ‘that an individual’s sexual orientation may evolve throughout life’. Hers certainly did.

Margaret Mead was married three times, and was in a lesbian relationship at the time I first met her, which endured to the end of her life. When she died, The New York Times dubbed her ‘Grandmother to the World’, which in a sense she had been.

I regret that none of these earth-shattering interviews have made my book. Thinking back, I really should have asked ABC archives to conduct a full-scale search for them.

•

So, a final word about favourite interviews (from the sublime to the ridiculous) that somehow never made this book.

In the late 1980s, I remember chatting with an old bushie for Midday. It remains a favourite interview, brief as it was. Let me set the scene. There had been one of those cyclical floods in Queensland, which had wiped out vast tracts of countryside. When I interviewed him, the old bloke was in a Brisbane hospital, recovering from a bout of hypothermia. He’d been recklessly close to death but he was now chirpy again. (One of the nurses had tipped us into his story, I think.) What made it so memorable to me was that when we crossed to him—live, sitting up, all perky, in his bed—he regaled us with a story of how in the middle of the night he’d climbed a big gum tree to escape the rising floodwater. He’d grabbed his favourite kelpie dog for company.

Everything was fine until the morning light revealed that also sitting up in the fork of the tree with them was … a possum and two large bush snakes! The kelpie growled and wanted to sort out all three. But the bloke felt ‘a bit like Noah’, he cackled. ‘I felt responsible for all of God’s creatures up there. Mind ya, I had to keep a firm grip on the bluddy dog. So, he stared at the bluddy snakes and the possum and they stared right back at him!’

That’s where they all stayed for thirty-six hours, until the floodwater receded and the old bushie let his ark animals all go free, still hanging onto his kelpie.

The way he described it was like something out of a Henry Lawson short story.

It’s never too late

Audrey Hepburn

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

‘Unending Love’, R Tagore

This is a line from Audrey Hepburn’s favourite poem, by the legendary nineteenth-century Bengali writer, Rabindranath Tagore. Gregory Peck read the poem at Audrey’s funeral in Switzerland in 1993. Peck had been her co-star in Roman Holiday, the film that launched her Hollywood career and won her an Oscar.

It seems to perfectly encapsulate Audrey Hepburn’s life, too. She was a film and fashion icon who made Givenchy’s little black dress her personal trademark and was once voted ‘the most beautiful woman of all time’.

Audrey came on Midday just a year or so before she died of cancer. She was everything I had expected—elegant, graceful and classically … well, classy. She had laugh lines that fanned out from sparkling green eyes, as a 63-year-old woman should.

It was hard to believe when she repeated to me the line she’d used in interviews before—that she’d ‘felt like a misfit all her life’. The swan neck was still there, the refined voice, the gloriously high cheekbones and the smile that had melted men’s hearts from Gary Cooper to Bogart. She’d certainly melted mine, when as a teenager I fell in love with Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In later life, living in Manhattan, I could never pass the exclusive jewellers on Fifth Avenue without seeing Holly/Audrey sitting on the stairs with the long cigarette holder and the cat that she just called ‘Cat’. Wearing that little black dress.

After just a decade or so in the incandescent Hollywood spotlight and only twenty movies, Audrey headed for the hills of Switzerland to have babies and live a quieter life. She has two grown-up sons.

The year before she came onto Midday, Audrey had done a movie with Stephen Spielberg, but more importantly she’d been appointed as Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nation’s children’s fund. What had long been a love of hers now became her full-time passion. That’s why Audrey was in Australia—to raise funds and attention for UNICEF. And that’s why she came on Midday.

When she glided into the studio, the audience of mostly housewives and young mothers swooned. Audibly.

Ms Hepburn was actually taller in person than I had imagined, maybe five foot seven, and maybe even taller, with that smooth elfin dancer’s movement and gamine figure. (‘Elfin’ and ‘gamine’ are two adjectives that feature writers for years have reserved for Audrey Hepburn alone, it seems.) Watching her entrance, it was hard to imagine Audrey Hepburn walking into a room and knocking over a piece of furniture or a vase.

I normally try to be more blasé when I meet beautiful Hollywood actresses. But this time I blew it. After I’d given Audrey a huge wrap in my live introduction, with ‘the most beautiful’, ‘infectious smile’, ‘has stirred people’s hearts for forty years’ etc., etc., I brought her out to a standing ovation. Caught between a handshake and a kiss on the cheek, I opted for the latter—figuring that it’d probably be my first and last chance.

I’m not usually lost for words, but when it’s Audrey Hepburn well … here’s what happened.

Ray I didn’t think I’d get a chance to kiss you. That’s terrific. I’ve been waiting … only about forty-four years for that.

Audrey Oh well, it’s never too late.

Ray ‘It’s never too late.’ Mmm … I don’t know how to respond to that … Can I call you Audrey?

Audrey Please, yes. After all that you just said, my goodness.

Ray All right, I know you’re here to talk about children. Jane Fonda is campaigning for homeless kids, Sting has been campaigning to save the forests, and then there’s John Denver and Bob Geldof and Bono … It’s no longer the politicians. It’s people like you.

Audrey Well, we need politicians because they are involved in making laws and so forth. Politics. But, my job really for UNICEF is to go to these countries where the poverty is quite indescribable. In many cases because I’ve been allowed into areas where very often journalists have not been. Or have had great difficulty getting in. I’ve been into the rebel areas of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Tigre and into the rebel country in the Sudan, where we’ve just come back from. And, I mean, with people in the government in the north and with the rebels in the south and so forth but …

Ray Does being Audrey Hepburn help? Is it one of the benefits of being a famous person?

Audrey You mean is that why they let me in? No, it’s because I am with the UN. I think that flag is some degree of safety.

Ray Yes. I guess most people see the news and realise that poverty is terrible and conditions are woeful, but have you found it much worse than you expected?

Audrey I expected the worst. Really, when I was asked to join UNICEF on a more full-time basis, we had all been made aware of the great drought in Ethiopia. We’ve all seen those babies dying on the television, which so overwhelmed me. It was so frustrating not knowing what to do, which I feel a lot of people suffer under. And I had this great privilege of being asked to do something about it—however little.

So that’s been a great relief. I’ve seen a great deal of tragedy, but also it’s been very rewarding and stimulating because I’ve seen that something can be done about it and is being done about it.

Ray It’s that statistic you’ve used, Audrey, that forty thousand children a day are dying. That’s about fifteen million a year.

Audrey Yes, and because of the terrible debt that these countries are staggering under what goes first is health care. Any kind of care for children.

Ray How do you walk away from it? How do you go and see the Sudan, or Eritrea …? Is that difficult to walk away from, back to your world in Switzerland?

Audrey You never walk away from it ever again. It’s an image you carry with you for the rest of your life. I mean, you don’t have to go to Ethiopia to know that many people suffer. That there is a terrible injustice, if you like, an ill distribution of benefits in this world. That there are those that have and those that have not.

Ray Audrey, in your quiet moments after seeing such suffering do you ever ask yourself how come I was born somewhere else and these people were born there?

Audrey Yes. Yes. Of course, yes, absolutely. I think that gives you all the more responsibility—because we were born where we were and we have this privilege—your responsibility is to do whatever you can to share it. It is so simple. UNICEF does this extraordinary job. They’re in 120 countries and they’ve provided so much water, for example, which is essential to life …

Ray Pretty basic, isn’t it?

Audrey Yes, I mean they’ve dug so many wells and so many pumps. They train the people to maintain the pumps after they leave, which is terribly important. Health care, vaccination, I mean all our UNICEF children are protected against all the children’s diseases. I mean in 1980 only 5 per cent of the third world children were vaccinated. Today it’s 60 per cent. You see these are extraordinary facts. UNICEF has an enormous education program. We have emergency help to feed starving children, of course. But what we really concentrate on is development so that one day these countries will stand on their own feet.

Ray Yes. I reported from the United Nations for a long time. With respect, much of it is waffle and posturing. What you’re doing—and what the UNICEF does—makes a real difference. Do you think just by raising money as you’re doing here in Australia that you’re saving lives? Basic as that?

Audrey Oh yes, absolutely. Not because I am here, but anybody who has contributed has saved several lives. I mean, if I could just quote you some very, very simple statistics. Five dollars will vaccinate a child for life. Think about that. Five dollars not only saves its life but that child won’t be mutilated by polio and all those things that still affect hundreds of thousands of kids. I mean, every year half a million children go blind, simply because they don’t have vitamin A. It’s a deficiency. Our children get it all the time, because they occasionally get a carrot or a green leaf. Because of droughts or floods they have no access to vegetables of any kind. To combat this blindness we provide two vitamin A capsules, which cost four cents. Which means that four cents can stop a child from going blind. What more can I say?

Ray Audrey, it’s obscenely easy, isn’t it?

Audrey Yes. And that’s what I hope, if I do nothing else. That I can convince people that they don’t have to drop their heads and say, ‘Oh my God, the problem is so big I can’t do anything anyway’. This is not true. We just do need the funds.

Ray Audrey, we can feel your passion. We hear your message about UNICEF.

I know you’re very busy. Can we move briefly to movies?

Audrey Well, why not? With pleasure.

Ray What was the big break for you? Was it Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck?

Audrey I guess I had several big breaks. That was certainly the first big movie and it’s what brought me all my good fortune and a lot of happiness. But I had breaks perhaps even earlier than that. First of all, I had a mother who allowed me to go on the stage, even though her family took a very dim view of having her daughter become a dancer.

Ray You wanted to be a ballerina?

Audrey Yes. And I studied dancing and earned my living at it. I won’t say I was ever any good at it, but I did earn my living at it. And there’d been people along the way, like when I wanted to move from Holland to England to study