A LITTLE WHITE LIE..OR TWO..OR THREE.

“Do you have a nice suit with you here in England, Mr. O’Keefe?”  Yes. (I didn’t)    “Have you a nice pair of dress shoes?”  “Of course,” I said. (and, of course, I did not).  I was a junior in College studying overseas…in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales, halfway between London and Scotland.    My wardrobe was denim, T shirts and Reeboks or pre-Reeboks perhaps and whatever was comfortable for sleeping on trains.  It was many years ago…19 Eighty Something. And I was a liar, but it was OK.

So what..I lied.  As a child of an alcoholic (diagnosed, professed or admitted or not) and a potential alcoholic addict myself,   I lied about all sorts of things. You do, to survive, to hide shame, to please people, to make things better, to live, — but, as I said: to survive.

I was 20 years old. In my carefully thought out plan I was studying in this offshoot suburban sheepfarm college because I was awarded a full $5,000 dollar scholarship…but my secret reason: they had an incredible media internship program with big, big city (London) internships.   Its why I turned down Mansfield College in Oxford.  Yes, I was accepted to a year at Oxford, but my head  was not where my heart was: TV news.  All Mansfield would get me was the Oxford name and many a night in their really old library. Although, I would’ve been much closer to London.

The woman at Trinity and All Saints College at Leeds University (Oddly, she’s the one name in this story I cannot for the life of me, recall) stood before me.  It was the Friday before Easter break which is the month you go off to do your “attachment” (the fancy British word for internship.)  I was depressed if not devastated. Why?  My internship was at the Bradford Telegraph and Argus.  A boring, sleepy rural newspaper. Vacant. Empty sheepfields.  Awful, just as it sounds.  I wanted Saatchi and Saatchi or ITV or BBC or Radio One in LONDON, the capital…the big city where all the important people are.  London was where it was at.  Puhl–ease …I grew up a stones throw from New York City. Six houses down the street from our home the New York City Line went through my friend Carolann Dragos bathroom)  Yes, I recall her father saying the toilet was in the city ( naturally ) and the shower was in Floral Park in  Long Islands Nassau County.

She, the woman whos name I forget, had left me an urgent message in the “O” pigeonhole box to come see her immediately.  This is before email (!!) before cell phones (!!!) before beepers (!!!!)   All the other British kids had left …to the big city for their fancy British “attachments” as I wept about my upcoming 15 minute bus ride to Bradford.

But, she was smiling. Like a lot of British women of a certain weight…and height…and age, they didn’t smile much.

“You’ll be happy to know that Miranda won’t be able to commence her attachment in London.”  “She would rather spend her Easter break in Malaga with her family.”  (The British are obsessed with Spain..I think because their accent turns the names of Spanish islands and cities into even better sounding places, more elegant, more exclusive..clearly like Miranda and her family thought. But also it had a big bright thing called the SUN, which rarely visited olde pale white, pasty England.)  My heart raced.  Was I being swapped out of Bradford Sheepville for something bigger and better??  In advertising, I hoped. In television, I prayed.  I’d even take an ad agency in Birmingham or Leicester.  But nothing, nothing..no dream, no fantasy no imagination whatsoever prepared me for the dopamine rush that would claim me when I read the piece of paper she handed me.  On it in neat old lady British cursive:

BBC News London.

Shepards Bush.

9 AM.

See:  Bernard Doe.

I almost fainted. In fact, I think I may have. Its what I had hoped for. It was the good luck I craved to make.  All because Miranda wanted to get tan in the South of Spain. It wasn’t just the BBC News. It was their flagship, main, IMPORTANT, COOL  EXCLUSIVE  “The BBC Six O’Clock News”…their national evening newscast. The only one that counted back then.  Think Cronkite Jennings Brokaw of a British ilk. Oh my God I have to go buy a suit, you know the suit I already had. Wink, wink.  And fancy shoes.  And find a place to live cheaply.

That weekend I made it all happen although the shoes were too big and looked ridiculous and were so loose they plopped like flip flops. I didn’t care.  I told them it was a new fashion craze in America. (again, a lie)  I slept on the couch of a fellow student’s sister in London in the coolest building: Cromwell Tower, in the Barbican Center. One of Duran Duran lived in the building…as did a James Bond. And there was me: sleeping on a couch “washing up” … doing the dishes in exchange for the couch squat.  They were the coolest group of twenty somethings. There was a millionaire banker, a perpetual University student, a nurse, an ad exec, and one was just rich as his father was the personal pilot for the President of Malawi.  It was a Malawi and Southern African centric group. Cool, eclectic. Think: “Friends” meets The Real World meets The Economist.

The BBC British people loved me. I was the only “Yank”…..from New Yawk, no less.  I learned so much in that one month. Like how to write anchor copy. I remember writing an intro for Nick Witchell and the copy editor Bob Dunnitt telling me it had to be 30 seconds long. Terrified, I asked: “How do I know if its 30 seconds”?  They don’t teach you that in college. I still, mall these years later, can’t remember if its 3 or 6 words a second.  By now, I should know!

My London excursion and attachment was also my very first exposure to the celebrity of television, particularly newscasters. Whenever I mentioned that I worked with the co-anchors Sue Lawley and Nick Witchell..( even to this day …when I meet British people!)..I get a “wow-you’re-smart-and impressive-and-important-and-cool-and- rich” look. Back when I was working more often with Diane Sawyer I got the same look.  But with her they got it backwards. SHE, not me, most certainly is smart, impressive, important and cool. In fact, she may very well be the smartest, most well read human being I have ever met.

Believe it or not: The moral of this story is that sometimes its OK to tell a little white lie. To fib, if you have to. You might get that great internship in London..or….that incredible entry level job at CBS News.

When Andrew Heyward (who eventually led CBS News),  in my first real job interview, asked me if I was proficient with Lexis/Nexis, I lied.  I had watched someone use it..O N C E.  But I knew I’d figure it out, or learn real fast.  On my first day at work I asked CBS veteran researcher Olga Heinkel to give me a quick tutorial on Nexis. “Im a little rusty”, I said.. After the tutorial, she winked. She knew the secret: I had never used it before, myself. In days, weeks, months I learned real fast, and excelled at searching in Nexis, in fact. A few years later I even made it onto the cover of the computer magazine ONLINE USER because of my Dan Rather stories and all the research work I did finding facts, finding characters, finding experts,etc for “48 Hours” before it turned to Mysteries.

I tell the kids today..NEVER say “I don’t know”. If you don’t want to lie..thats OK too.  You don’t have the info….? ”its in my office..ill go get it..”  or just say..”Ill get that for you quickly.”…then you call someone who does know.  You make it happen. You get it done.
—————-

I was out of the gate. A national TV show was born, and I was a newly minted television journalist who eventually would attend both Princess Diana’s and Michael Jackson’s funeral, produce the incredibly famous Charlie “winning” Sheen interview, cover Prince William’s wedding and have a front row seat to the very biggest stories of our time.

And it all started with a little white lie. It may feel like an odd twist or turn, I know, but we always have discovery when we peel back the layers of an onion:  The true moral to this  story is that sometimes the pain that causes you to lie or fib in life …just might bring forth gifts. After all, good can come out of bad.  Survival and success, for example. As the great poet and peacemaker Mattie Stepanek said so beautifully, “Remember to play after every life storm.”

More on that later…later in our “48 Hours”  .