The Personal Side Of Ed Bradley

This segment originally aired on Nov. 12, 2006.

Over the course of his 65 years, Ed Bradley was tagged with a lot of nicknames. "Teddy" was the one that Ed and his best friends often used when he went home from work and took off his tie. "Teddy" was the mischievous, off-duty alter ego, who liked to get up on stage at Jazz Fest in New Orleans to perform with Jimmy Buffet and The Neville Brothers or hang out in Aspen with Hunter S. Thompson.

In many ways, he was the same Ed Bradley that loved great food, stylish clothes, good cigars, and collected fine wine, the latest electronic gadgets and a very eclectic group of friends.

He drank the wine, and discarded the gadgets as soon as something more exotic came along, but the friends – he always kept the friends, and their numbers grew every day. Correspondent Steve Kroft introduces us to a few of the people who knew Ed best.

"Well I was a teenager then when Ed first got on 60 Minutes," Marsalis remembers. "Like all the other younger Afro-Americans, we were impressed with him and in awe of him really. His sense of culture. His intelligence, his clarity and his soul."

Asked to talk about Ed's soul, Marsalis tells Kroft, "Oh, man. You know, they say that soul is when you have the ability to make other people feel better about being alive, regardless of their condition. And he possessed that in such abundance. And then, above those things, the sense of humor that makes you not be elitist or lofty. He was just as down home."

"He loved to have a good time, which we all like to have. But he loved to bring a good time," Marsalis says.

And it almost always involved music. Ed met one of his best friends, singer Jimmy Buffett more than 30 years ago, when Ed and Hunter Thompson dropped off the 1976 campaign trail for a few days and dropped in on Buffett in Key West.

"I think what we had in common was our nomadic sense of being. And we were travelers, and we were kind of gypsies out there. He and his journalistic endeavors, and me and music," Buffett recalls. "I kind of was the guy that introduced him to the music community in New Orleans where he, once he got the introduction, he not only loved New Orleans music, he loved New Orleans people to this day. They feel a deep loss in New Orleans. I know that."

It was in New Orleans that Ed found the perfect match for his sensibilities and his appetites: great food, great times, and the music he loved – from Gospel to Zydeco. And it was in New Orleans that another personality began to take shape: he would go up on stage to dance and perform on stage with "The Neville Brothers."

"I call him Teddy. Teddy's a little different than Ed," Bradley once said. "Ed would never do that."

Buffett says, "And, in the end, I probably made the mistake of allowing him on the stage one time to actually play with a band. And it was hard to get him off after that. But I got so much joy out of watching him attempt to be a shameless performer."

"Tell me about 'Teddy,'" Kroft asks.

"That happened when he got on stage the first time. Because it was somewhere in New Orleans and people in the crowd … they were saying, 'That looks like Ed Bradley up there from 60 Minutes.' And I go, 'No, no, that's Teddy Badly,'" Buffett remembers. "And so, it just was one of those things on the moment happened. And it kind of stuck."His repertoire was limited, pretty much to one song: a 1951 R&B classic by Billy Ward and The Dominoes called "60 Minute Man." The piece was written long before the show came on the air, and it has nothing to do with journalism, but that was all part of the joke.

"I can't sing. I can't dance. I can't play anything. And so it's always sort of a joke when Teddy gets up there to play because my ability is very limited. Music is my bliss," Bradley joked about his talents.

But for one week a year, during Jazz Fest, it was an emotional release that allowed Ed to be part of a scene and a city he loved, and the feeling was mutual. Over the years, Quint Davis, who runs Jazz Fest, became one of Ed's best friends.

"He could, you know, nail someone to the wall in an interview, and he can just let it all loose and get out there and boogie at Jimmy's Club in New Orleans," Davis recalls.

Jazz Fest was like Spring Break for Ed.

"Look, I'll tell you something interesting about Ed and music," Davis says. "In all the years that we were together, we never went to a show with an African-American musician – and we went to hundreds if not thousands – that they didn't stop the show, introduce him, ask the audience to give him applause, and sing him a song. In a club, at Jazz Fest, everywhere."

He enjoyed being Ed Bradley, not so much for the celebrity it brought him, but for the people he got to meet, the places he got to, and all the things it allowed him to do. It all fit together. When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, Ed went to cover the story and to help out help his friends.

"He met a praline maker in New Orleans who he thought made the best pralines in the world. And he loved her. And he would get tins from her," Davis remembers. "And when she got misplaced by the storm, you know, he found her, and he helped support her."

"How many people did he help?" Kroft asks Buffett.

"A long list of people," he replies.

By chance, 60 Minutes found one of the people helped last Friday at "Tipitinas," one of Ed's favorite haunts. Blues singer Marva Wright had lost everything in the storm. Ed heard that she was going to have to pack up and move to Maryland. So Quint Davis brought her a present.

"It was a check," Wright recalls. "I'm not gonna tell you how much the check was, but he said, 'This is from Ed.' And God knows, God knows it helped. It really did. I was so happy. I just love Mr. Ed Bradley."

Wynton Marsalis is familiar with Ed's generosity. He is the artistic director of "Jazz at Lincoln Center," a New York cultural institution Ed helped found and fund. And just to keep his hand in radio, Ed hosted a syndicated show for "Jazz at Lincoln Center" that was broadcast on public radio

"Are there any stories you can tell?" Kroft asks Marsalis.

"Na. I mean, I can tell a lot of stories about Ed. But the funniest stories to me are the ones where he would get mad," Marsalis explains, laughing. "We did a concert one time that he didn't like. He calls me up later. He says, 'Hey, man, this is Ed.' I said, 'Yes, Sir.' He said, 'Are y'all all right up there?' I said, 'What you mean?' He said, 'I went to that concert. What are y'all doing?' I said, 'Man, we trying to play the music.' He said, 'Well, I'm not paying my money for y'all to try to play the music.'"

"'Next time you go out there, play the music,'" Marsalis recalls Bradley saying.

If the various aspects of Ed's personality came together in one place, it was his uncompromising sense of style and especially the earring he got back in the 1980's but didn't wear on the air for a long time. It's the one thing everyone always asks 60 Minutes about. So Kroft went to the expert.

"He came to me and said, 'Should I wear it on television?'" Buffett recalls. "And I said, 'Well, you know, yeah, I mean, if you're a musician you'd wear him. But you're Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes. Let's start with your office. There's going to be some comment here.' And he said, 'That doesn't bother me.'"

"What did it represent to him? Why did he do it?" Kroft asks.

"That he should be able to do and be what he wanted to be and it wouldn't have an effect on his professionalism," Buffett replies. "It was the style of the time. So, why couldn't a top rate journalist for 60 Minutes dress and act like he wanted to? Who was going to put that rule in place that you couldn't wear an earring and a suit at the same time? That's just Ed and that non-compromising thing that, you know, 'Why shouldn't I be able to do this?'"Eventually Ed was able to do pretty much anything he wanted at 60 Minutes. When he needed peace and quiet, he disappeared to his home in Woody Creek, Colo., for some skiing, hiking or talking basketball and politics with friends like Hunter Thompson and Loren Jenkins, a reporter and good friend of Ed's since their days together in Vietnam.

Asked what his favorite Ed story his, Jenkins says, "I think my favorite story was when Ed all of a sudden decided he wanted to be bald. We sat there all laughing and watching television. And Hunter got out his straight razor and shaved Ed's hair. And made him as bald as could be. And they both laughed and loved it. And I thought, 'My God, you know, he trust – he trust — trusting.' You know, to have a straight razor on anyone's head was dangerous."

Asked what kind of shape Hunter was in at the time of the shave, Jenkins says, "Well, Hunter was Hunter, I mean Hunter was never stone sober."

But that haircut wasn't the only thing in Ed's life that was about to change. He had met an attractive young woman in New York, an artist by the name of Patricia Blanchet, who he discovered conducting a museum tour. And according to Ron and Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who had known Ed since the 1960's, he was immediately smitten.

"She had her hair up, very dignified outfit on. And he says, he says to me, 'Man, oh, man.' And he says, 'Look at that.' I say, 'what?' He says, 'Look man.' And I said, 'Come here.' He says, 'No, no, no … let's go get the tour,'" Ron Gault remembers. "And they became acquaintances and dated and that went on and on and on. And then they became Mr. and Mrs."

"He made it a project," Gault says.

"He's very focused," Charlayne Hunter-Gault. "But also, Ed had been alone a long time. And he had established his world around himself. His furniture, his art, his clothes, his closets, his soap, his kitchen, and he had his own, that was Edward's world. And suddenly he had to share that world with somebody who had her own ideas about what that world should be like. So that took a lot of negotiating."

The courtship lasted almost ten years before Ed finally convinced Patricia to marry him, in a lavish but very private ceremony in Woody Creek. She had nursed him through a difficult heart bypass surgery, but there were other health issues almost no one knew about. Ed had been diagnosed years earlier with a leukemia that for the most part had remained dormant. But it eventually came back with a vengeance.

Buffett thinks Ed knew how sick he was. "I'm just glad I got here, my wife called me and said – I was in Hawaii – and said, 'You need to get back here and see Ed.' And I'm glad I made it," he says.

After a year of ups and downs he made what would be his last appearance at Jazz Fest in May and the "60 Minute Man" ended with a flourish.

"But I think, you know, with Ed, he wouldn't be too much as far as crying over him, you know?" Marsalis says. "Me and him actually have talked about that. He loved that funeral. They play a little something sad. Give me a tambourine."