Myron's Story

What Makes Myron 'Mike' Wallace Tick? Morley Safer Tries To Find Out

(CBS) 
So what's next? Like so many others in this confessional age, he's already put out two books of memoirs. But what about retirement — or whatever you want to call it.

Asked if he is scared about what faces him ahead after this, Wallace told Safer, "Yeah, I am. You're 13 years younger than I."

"Fourteen," Safer corrected. "Well, yes."

"And I've always thought, you know, what the Dickens would I do? You paint. You write. You do all kinds of things I don't. I work," Wallace told Safer.

Perhaps it's time to dust off that fiddle. 60 Minutes took him to the violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman, whom Wallace once profiled, to see if there was a second career in the old war horse.

"Let me see you hold it. Let me see your bow grip," Perlman instructed. "Thumb a little bent, like this. Nah, nah, nah, nah. This is a real challenge."

"We're not going to play," Wallace said.

"What? You're going to play a note. That's it, that's it," Perlman said, as Wallace scratched a note. "Do you remember songs you played when you were a kid?"

"Mediation from Thais," Wallace responded, referring to a composition by Jules Massenet.

"You actually played that?" Perlman asked.

"Yes," Wallace said.

"Do you remember the note, the first note? There is a career here. There is a career …," Perlman joked, after Wallace hummed the first note.

"Come on," Wallace said. "I used to talk about my fiddle playing and so forth. And at Christmas celebration, the whole family was there and they got on the old man, the buzzard, to play 'Meditation from Thais.' And I started to play it, and everybody began to laugh."

"Cry?" Perlman asked.

"No, to laugh. I never have picked up the fiddle since. And you know what this morning has done, this? I am never going to pick up the fiddle again," Wallace said.