The Entertainers Mike Has Met

When you think of Mike Wallace, you think of him barging in on bureaucrats and bad guys, loaded for bear. But over the years, some of his most memorable interviews have been with entertainers.

Lesley Stahl sat down with Wallace to screen some of his greatest show biz hits, beginning with an example of almost every interviewer's nightmare: a performer so quick and so funny that right from the start, you weren't sure who was interviewing whom. In this case, it was Mel Brooks.

"Is that a hundred-dollar watch? Let me see that watch," Brooks asked Wallace.

"It's about a $40 watch," Wallace replied.

"Really?" Brooks asked.

"Yeah. Lights up in the dark," Wallace explained.

"What a cheap son of a bitch you are," Brooks said.

"You got that right," Wallace responded. "You're a great judge of character."

Next, Brooks quizzed Wallace about the jacket he was wearing, which Wallace claimed was made out of hopsack.

"Am I right? It's like burlap shrunk down. Do you know that six months ago that, your jacket carried coffee beans? Do you realize that? I'm telling you. That came from Colombia full of coffee. Wait a minute," Brooks said, taking a whiff of Wallace's jacket, "It reeks of Colombian coffee, I gotta tell you."

While some would say Brooks had hijacked the interview and taken control, Wallace says that's not hijacking an interview. "I was grateful to him for what he was doing," he says.

Over the years he has matched wits with the best that Broadway, Hollywood and the music world have to offer. He has interviewed longhairs from Leonard Bernstein to Luciano Pavarotti and divas of all stripes, from Janis Joplin to Julie Andrews to Oprah.

Asking Oprah whether God was important to her, the talk show host replied, "Oh yeah. I love her. I do!"

Another memorable encounter was Wallace's 1992 interview with actor Kirk Douglas.

"You had a reputation as a real horse's behind in this town," Wallace remarked. "Even your own kids said that you were very difficult."

"They didn't say I was a horse's ass, did they?" Douglas asked.

"No, they did not," Wallace replied.

"Who besides Mike Wallace would start an interview by saying, 'People say you're a horse's behind?'" Stahl asked.

Wallace says his interview subjects know who he is and what kind of questions he might ask — and thinks that many of them think they can beat him.

Not many do. Wallace got to hang out with Johnny Carson in 1979 for the only in-depth profile the TV host ever did.

"Why are you doing this now? I'm not running a boiler room operation. I have no phony real estate scams. I'm not taking any kickbacks," Carson asked Wallace.

The interview was pleasant and innocuous enough, until Carson mentioned his rule about never joking on "The Tonight Show" about people's drinking problems.

"It takes one to know one," Wallace remarked.

"Ahhhh. You're cruel. You're cruel," Carson said.

Carson went on to admit that he didn't handle alcohol well. "And when I did drink, rather than a lot of people who become fun-loving and gregarious and loved everybody, I would go the opposite, and it would happen just like that," he told Wallace.

"I loved that man. I really did," says Wallace, adding that Carson wasn't upset with this interview.

"He loved it. And of course, the one thing that he did not like was that I beat him at tennis. You laugh. That was very important to him," Wallace explained to Stahl.

Carson was very competitive. "Whaddya waiting for, your pacemaker to start? I think it's gotta kick in just about when you serve," he joked with Wallace on the court.

The chemistry between Wallace and his interview subjects is sometimes complicated. Barbra Streisand was one of the people Wallace had run-ins with.

He first met Streisand in the 1960s, when she was a guest on a talk show he hosted. Three decades later, they crossed swords on 60 Minutes in one of Wallace's most controversial interviews.

"I really didn't like you back 30 years ago. And I don't think you liked me, either," Wallace told Streisand.

"I thought you were mean," she said. "I thought you were very mean."

"You know something? Twenty or 30 years of psychoanalysis. I say to myself, what is it she's trying to find out that takes 20 to 30 years?" Wallace said.

"I'm a slow learner," Streisand replied. "And why do you sound so accusatory, too?"

"I'm not accusing," Wallace said.

"Are you against psychotherapy?" the singer-actress asked.

"You know what your mother told me about her relationship with you," Wallace said.

"What?" she asked.

"She says you haven't got time to be close to anyone. Quote. And –" Wallace said.

"You like this, that 40 million people have to see me, like, do this," Streisand emotionally said.

"Barbra, what am I going to do? And then I wrote? And then my next song was?" Wallace asked.

In retrospective, Wallace admits it was rough. "Yes it was. But she was, she needed to have control."

"But you let Mel Brooks be in charge," Stahl pointed out.

"So that became a kind of challenge for me. And I wanted to get a real picture of her. And we got it," Wallace said.

But thinking about it, he decided that after 15 years, it was time for an apology. "Barbra, I do apologize to you. I have nothing in the world but respect and admiration for you."

Then there's Shirley MacLaine, who got the full Wallace treatment in 1984.

Asked if she really believed that she had lived lives before, the actress told Wallace, "Oh, yes, Mike. I don't, there's no doubt in my mind about it."

"And you really believe in extraterrestrial — how, do they come visit you on the porch?" Wallace asked. After a pause, he said, "'Now you're being unpleasant, Wallace.' Is what you're saying?"

"Yes. This is what I was a little afraid of," MacLaine replied. "But you don't have to be that unpleasant. It doesn't become you, you know?"

"I adored her. And she was interested in me, too," Wallace recalled.

"Wait. Interested in you? What do you mean, interested in you?" Stahl asked.

"And Mary, my wife, who you know, before we were married, and Shirley and I triple-dated from time to time," Wallace explained.

"You don't mean triple-dated. You mean a threesome," Stahl said.

"Yes, but only at dinner," Wallace said with a smile.

In his later years, a side of Wallace has emerged that's positively paternal. In 2005, he interviewed actress Hilary Swank, whose rise to the top in Hollywood is a story to soften the heart of even the toughest old crank.

"My mom said that I could do anything that I wanted in life as long as I worked hard enough. And to this day it still makes me really emotional," Swank told Wallace. "Because I just never questioned it, you know? I mean, she just always believed in me."
Wallace says Swank was a "genuine article."

"Do you think you've mellowed? I think you've mellowed. I do," Stahl remarked.

But Wallace's all-time favorite interview — not just among the performers, but of all of them — was with piano virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz in 1977.

"I was in awe of this guy," Wallace recalls. "He comes into the orchestra hall in Chicago. And I say, 'Oh, maestro.' 'Mike Wallace! I watch you every Sunday night!' Come on."

When Wallace asked the pianist to play what he had played in New York's Central Park in 1945, "The Stars and Stripes Forever," Horowitz claimed he had forgotten it.

"I have to remember, it's too difficult!" Horowitz said.

Finally, Horowitz' wife Wanda told her husband to play it.

"And he did," Wallace remembers.

Asked why Horowitz was his favorite interview, Wallace says, "Because you got the unvarnished — this was the first time he had ever done anything like this."

But the 60 Minutes team thought of another possible reason. Because in a lot of ways, Vladimir Horowitz was just like Mike Wallace — brilliant, temperamental, and a holy terror.

When Horowitz was growing up in Russia, people who heard his astonishing playing thought he was possessed by the devil.

"Just like Mike," Stahl remarked.
Produced By David Browning/Warren Lustig