The Mellowing of Mike Malice

During the 1950s, Mike, you were the host of several highly controversial TV shows. You acted on Broadway and got your second divorce. Why have you omitted all those details from your biography in Who's Who?

This is the sort of interview question that CBS Newsman Mike Wallace would put to Mike Wallace. The answer is that Wallace has mellowed since those old "Mike Malice" days, and would prefer to forget his show-biz past. He still pounds away with the same tenacious questioning, of course. The difference is that today, at 51, Wallace is more interested in getting the story than in stirring sensation. In fact, he has emerged as the toughest news interviewer on the air, and as one of the most capable reporters in broadcasting.

Wallace's current title and prime responsibility is "co-editor," with Harry Reasoner, of CBS's newsmagazine show 60 Minutes. But he also does seven weekly radio spots and appears on the Walter Cronkite nightly news or Face the Nation when the CBS assignment desk is looking for a heavy interview. It was Wallace who did CBS's skilled, chilling --and highly controversial--interrogations of Private Meadlo and Captain Medina about the My Lai massacre. And it was Wallace who put together last week's powerful report on Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers. Cleaver openly admitted that his "goal is to take Senator McClellan's head," and "that would mean shooting my way in and shooting my way out" of the Senate. "This is rhetoric?" asked Wallace. "This is not rhetoric." responded Cleaver.

Soft Openers. Wallace has become a star journalist so rapidly, says CBS Writer-Producer Andrew Rooney, because of his "old still photographer's ethic of Tm going to bring in the story and the hell with everybody else.' " Wallace works harder and longer than anyone else. He is on the road fully one-third of his working life, and spent the New Year's weekend, for instance, tracking down the fugitive Cleaver in Algeria. Preparing for an interview with Judge Clement Haynsworth last month, he immersed himself for eight hours in Senate hearings transcripts, court decisions and CBS morgue clips. Wallace usually opens his interviews with the soft questions. "You want to put a man at ease," he says. "You waste a few, like a baseball pitcher." He talked to Cleaver for half an hour to get the five minutes that were on the air. Once the interview is rolling, Wallace puts short, rapid questions and knows when to slip in a prodding "huh?" if he thinks the subject is about to open up.

As Reasoner points out, "There is one thing that Mike can do better than anybody else: with an angelic smile, he can ask a question that would get anyone else smashed in the face." Taking on Manhattan Restaurateur Toots Shor in the old days, Mike blurted, "Toots, why do people call you a slob?" Just last month, on 60 Minutes, Wallace reminded 32-year-old Millionaire Stewart Mott of his broken engagement to Girl Friend Christine Donovan and continued, "You still go together--aren't you going to get married?" The response: "We may some day, if we ever decide to have children."

Hyoersensational. Wallace started as a radio announcer and occasional newsman, and his credits include The Lone Ranger, Road of Life, Ma Perkins and Weekday (Margaret Truman was his co-host). On TV, he did PM East and Guess Again and was master of ceremonies on Big Surprise just before the quiz-show scandals broke. During that period he also played on Broadway in Harry Kurnitz's Reclining Figure (Critic Walter Kerr wrote that Mike performed with "ingratiating ease").

Mike is best remembered, though, as the demolition man of TV's explosive Night Beat interview show. It worked fine as a local New York program but became hypersensational when it went network on ABC. Wallace--in the one tape in his whole career that he would like to erase--egged Mobster Mickey Cohen into calling a police officer a "sadistic degenerate" and an "alcoholic." Libel suits for $3,000,000 followed; they were settled for much less, but within a year the series was dumped. Wallace became a sort of Sonny Listen of broadcasting: the mean, out-of-work ex-champ.

In 1963, Wallace landed a job with CBS News. Colleagues were leary of a man who had come over from the entertainment side, but he soon won his journalistic spurs. At age 49, Mike did a tour in Viet Nam. At the 1968 Democratic Convention, he took a sock on the jaw from a Chicago police inspector but kept his feet. In the shop, too, Wallace is a pile-driving competitor. He fills almost two-thirds of the air time on 60 Minutes but maintains a fond, prank-playing friendship with Co-Editor Reasoner. Mike gets along well with junior associates too. He is demanding--but always polite.

The owner of a Manhattan townhouse, he lives conservatively for a man who earns more than $100,000. In his spare time, he reads (lately Galbraith's Ambassador's Journal and Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich), watches news and sports on TV ("85% of the rest is junk"). Also, "I talk to my wife"--Lorraine Perigord, his third, an accomplished painter whom he married in 1955. Mike has a son by his first marriage, Chris, 22, who was a top reporter at the Harvard University radio station but went into newspapering and now covers city hall for the Boston Globe.

Hate Mail. Chris and Mike differ on the merits of the younger generation. "But oh Jesus," says Wallace, "don't get me started on that. I was impressed by the Eugene McCarthy kids and Sam Brown [the Moratorium organizer], but too many of the young want to recreate the world without having lived long enough or thought hard enough." As his evenhanded broadcasts might suggest, Wallace is not strongly partisan and is close to the center ideologically. He is registered as an independent and says: "I have voted for Democrats. Republicans, Liberals and one Conservative in the past ten years." One of the Republicans was Richard Nixon.

Wallace became a personal friend of Spiro Agnew's while covering his 1966 gubernatorial campaign and subsequent National Governors' Conferences. In general, Mike feels that the Vice President has been "underestimated" but is disturbed by his recent "fulminations." Wallace agrees that "a little scrutiny of the press can hardly hurt at a time when the credibility of Presidents and the infallibility of Popes are getting knocked around." And he is not concerned "that the Administration wants to play Big Brother or that the people would let them. But you've got to be scared by the virulent mail, the polarization that Agnew has stirred up."

In the spring of 1968, Wallace turned down an offer to become press secretary to Richard Nixon. "I couldn't take a job," he says, "that would try to put the best face on the news or obscure it." Besides, he is having too much fun on the other side of the fence.

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