Photograph by Whitney Curtis
Julius Hunter's new book, TV One on One, mixes his life story with gossipy, good-natured revelations about his encounters with more than 100 celebrities — including Jimmy Hoffa, Pearl Bailey, Pope John Paul II and seven presidents.
Hunter's fourth-grade teacher, Miss Johnetta Jackson, wrote, "Julius is generally a good student, but he talks entirely too much." Indeed, as a broadcast journalist, he was never at a loss for words. Not when he asked Chuck Berry about his records and Berry flashed back, "Prison or phonograph?" Not when Bette Midler told him her backup group was called the Harlettes because they were "whores, darling, whores!" And not when he interviewed Pat Buchanan via satellite and asked him, "Are you a racist?" and Buchanan said, "Well, white guys like you and I ..." That night, Hunter signed off with a remark about viewers having just seen presidential speechwriter Pat Buchanan, "who, obviously, couldn't see me."
THEN THERE WAS YOUR SPONTANEOUS INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER. Dennis Riggs snuck on board the Delta Queen and managed to borrow the Secret Service phone to report to the station. I was saying, "Great, thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, that was Dennis Riggs, the only reporter on board the Delta Queen on the president's trip down the river." The sound went off, and I said, "Dennis, that was fantastic," and he said, "Hold on. You want to talk to the president?" I said, "Dennis, I don't have time to mess around." Then I heard, "Hello, Jul-ius?"
I was getting ready to say, "Dennis, that's the worst impression of the president I ever heard" when Carter spoke again. I cupped the phone and yelled, "Kill everything in the next section. I've got the president of the United States on the phone!" We talked for 12 minutes. I signed off with, "And that was the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter. We'll be back with God knows what."
WHAT WAS YOUR MOST CHALLENGING INTERVIEW? Watergate had just broken, and Julie Nixon Eisenhower was here playing in a golf classic with Bob Hope. I make a few pleasantries, which always help, and say, "Julie, just a very quick word, could you tell me what you think is going on with this matter called Watergate?" Then I turn around, and the camera is belching out all this film, it's in curlicues and loops on the ground. She moves on, and I'm yelling, "Reload. Reload. ReLOAD!" We run across the golf course, and I start off my question again, and she starts to answer, and Bob Hope comes up and says, "Honey, you don't want to talk about this." We race ahead of her to the Republican women's luncheon, and I say, "Please, please," and she starts to answer, and the Ladue High School Marching Band strikes up behind us, and I cannot hear a word she's saying.
EVER INTERVIEW ANY OF THE BUSCH DYNASTY? At a picnic at Grant's Farm, I ended up seated next to the king of beers. Gussie said, "Hunter, you like beer?" What am I gonna say, "Oh no, I hate beer, Mr. Busch"? I asked him how much beer he'd ever consumed in a day, and he said, "Oh, I suppose two or three cases." I said, "What do you drink when you don't drink beer?" and he said, "Manhattans. Manhattan on the rocks, that's my drink."
Then he said, "You like Michelob?" "Oh yes, yes I do." He turned to his valet, Cletus, and said in that gravelly voice, "Cletus, get us a couple of Michelobs." Boom, the beers appeared. The old man takes the bottle and turns it up and says, "Goddammit, Cletus, I told you this beer is too cold. Beer should be — " whatever the optimum temperature was. Then he hands me his bottle that he's just taken a swig of. Now does one take one's hand and wipe the top of the bottle or does one consider it a kind of Eucharist? I thought, "What the hell?" and turned the bottle up, and he said, "Now isn't that too cold?"
HAS ANY CELEBRITY INTIMIDATED YOU? Well, Sophia Loren just knocked my socks off — and it showed on the air. By the time I got back to the station and did my intro, I was blithering like a fool. We'd missed an earlier interview option, so I talked to her before a private dinner on the Robert E. Lee. My buddy John McGuire at the Post-Dispatch had asked her if she was shilling perfume to pay her tax bill, but I asked her the softest of questions. Then I escorted her in to dinner on my arm — the whole room went silent — and kissed her hand. [Post reporter] Harry Levins was indelicate: He dove under her table to grab her lipstick-stained napkin. It's his Shroud of Turin.
WHO ELICITED YOUR HEAVIEST ARTILLERY? A superintendent of a large school district that was falling apart at the seams. She had distinguished herself by never even bothering to move to St. Louis, just flying in for the school week. I said, "What would you say is the most critical problem right now in your school system?" and she said, "Oh, I think it would be attendance." I came out of my chair. I said, "You have got to be kidding. You are telling me, after you have had shootings and all kinds of violence, that attendance is your biggest problem?"
SO YOU HAVE A TEMPER? Oh, yes. But I have learned in fairly recent years that there's no need for it. In a television newsroom, it is a well-known fact that in order to survive one has to bark occasionally, or Darwin's theory will come to fruition. But I screamed and dressed down this guy out in the newsroom, and he came into my office a few minutes later and broke into tears and said, "You know, you did not have to do me that way. You could have called me in here." And tears welled up in my eyes.
AND THEN YOU TOOK A NEW APPROACH? Yep. I'd whisper. When a young writer would write something absolutely crazy — like "A man wielding a pistol and a woman" — I would say, "Pssst. Come in here for a minute. Did you write this?" [Pause.] "What hand was the woman in?" [He chuckles.] They began to hate the whisper.
WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE IT WAS TIME TO LEAVE TV NEWS? [Smiles and lowers his voice.] Boy, could you get some incendiary stuff here. [He draws a breath, chooses his words carefully.] In every job there is the inevitability that your bosses in the administrative offices are going to become younger and younger and younger. While you want to have respect for them, you realize that since they have not been in the trenches as long as you have, they could lead you over the cliff.
IS THERE ANY INTERVIEW YOU'D DO DIFFERENTLY IF YOU HAD THE CHANCE? Yes, with Gregory Hines. Tap had just come out, and we talked about the joy of tap and how it's so liberating. I could have left it at that — it was just a three-minute interview. Instead I said, "Let me ask you this, Gregory. Do you ever have any difficulty performing tap when you realize that was one of the classic stereotypes that were leveled by racists to say, 'Look how happy black people are'?" His face fell, and there was the longest pause. He looked at me like, "Brother, how could you ask me that?"
YOUR BOOK INCLUDES PHOTOS OF YOU FROM AGE 4 THROUGH THE DECADES TO TODAY. You look achingly serious in the early shots; progressively more amused as you age. I was not a very happy kid. I was born with some depressions I've been able to handle just by not having time to be depressed. The day they broke ground on my ill-fated restaurant, I was beginning my book on Westmoreland and Portland places and doing three news shows, and I had a wife and two kids.
YOU CALL YOURSELF A "MINISCULE VERSION OF BEN FRANKLIN, DABBLING IN A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING." SUCH AS? I was pronounced Scrabble King of the Nile on a cruise. I've conducted orchestras, including the Saint Louis Symphony Pops. I cook — I will never say "gourmet," that's pretentious. I whomp up food that tastes good. [He opens cabinets with a flourish: three shelves of hot sauces and a pantry closet of industrial-sized spices, alphabetically arranged.] And I'm a poor man's philanthropist — school uniforms, kids' shoes, a carnival.
YOU ESTABLISHED A CENTER FOR AFRICAN-AMERICAN GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH AT THE ST. LOUIS COUNTY LIBRARY HEADQUARTERS. I'd done my own research, because I was curious why no one in my family ever talked about slavery. I came from a very proud family. My great-grandfather always carried a rolled-up newspaper so people knew he could read.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT TODAY'S CELEBRITY CULTURE? That was another reason I thought it was time to move out. I'd been in the business 33 years, and one day I looked out at the camera to read the promo copy, and I read, "Is your dog psychic? We'll tell you at 10." The second one came up: "Is your child reaching puberty too early? We'll have a report at 5." I went straight to [KMOV general manager] Allan Cohen's office and said, "Allan, I have to get out of here."
ANY SECOND THOUGHTS? I was thinking of telling him, "If you don't let me off the air, I'm gonna have a big crackup on air." But I could just see what kind of promo they'd do for that.
I SEE YOU'VE HUNG THE PHOTO OF YOU WITH BARACK OBAMA ABOVE PHOTOS OF YOU WITH EACH OF SEVEN PRESIDENTS. My man. I was giving him advice, of course. I told him, "You keep saying you are not a Muslim, you have been worshipping Jesus every Sunday since you were a child. I want you to take the 'Sunday' out. It sounds like you only worship once a week." I haven't heard him say "Sunday" since. One does not come by this gate without some advice.
THERE'S A PICTURE OF YOU SCOLDING PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH, TOO. With my finger pointed at his face! Dubya shows up with his entourage at Laclede Elementary School, where I headed a program with 13 guys from my fraternity, and calls it a No Child Left Behind school. I said, "Mr. President, No Child Left Behind didn't have a damned thing to do with this school. We have been laboring here for 13 years."
YOU'VE BECOME A CELEBRITY YOURSELF — YOUR PLAQUES AND PROCLAMATIONS COVER ALL FOUR WALLS OF YOUR STUDY. HOW WOULD YOU ADVISE SOMEONE TO INTERVIEW YOU? I would advise them to narrow down their questions to no more than two areas. Don't try to cover the universe in the time you have on air. And I'd warn them that I would probably be wily and in some cases evasive. When they were gone, I would try to tally up how many things I'd slipped over on them or that they didn't ask.
