Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 30, 1993 TAG: 9311250308
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT WILLIAMS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
``It's the youth of old age. Or the old age of youth,'' Geraldo Rivera said, smiling, leaning back in his office at his production company, overlooking the Hudson River and the Penn Central right-of-way.
``The only good thing about these signposts,'' he said, ``is that they give you an excuse to really assess yourself and where you stand: Am I successful? Am I happy with my place in life? Is this really what I wanted to do? Is this my dream of 20-30 years ago? Am I where I wanted to be? Where am I?''
``In some ways, I'm very proud of where I am,'' he said. ``I never expected for an instant that I would be this successful in free enterprise terms. In other, more profoundly important ways, I'm in a season of discontent.''
Can this be Geraldo Rivera? Is he really 50? Look closer and, yes, there are lines engraved around his dark brown shark's eyes. And, yes, the beard he's got coming in is shot through with silver.
Yup, it's him. You know the story: A half-Jewish, half-Puerto Rican storefront lawyer on the Lower East Side, hired by WABC News, hustles his way to the top of broadcast journalism with ABC's ``20/20'' - until he gets fired in 1985.
He rises from the ashes and reinvents himself in syndication, first with live specials like ``The Mystery of Al Capone's Vault'' (the most-watched special in TV history), and then with ``Geraldo,'' his one-hour talk show.
But let's not confuse Rivera's musings for senility. That's a real tennis racket on his desk. And that guy he introduced on the way in was his personal boxing coach. And that's real muscle on his whippet frame.
No way is Geraldo Rivera gearing up to go gently into that good night.
Rivera said he wants to get four more years out of the talk show - making it 10 years in that business. ``I don't want to be like Donahue - I don't want to stay forever,'' he said.
``What I want to start, maybe as early as the fall, is a kind of alternative Rush Limbaugh show - activist, on the other side of the political spectrum. I'm probably taking it to cable, CNBC more likely than CNN, and late at night or prime time, talking to a different kind of audience than I have access to in the daytime.''
Rivera said he doesn't necessarily want to own the new show. ``I don't need to make any more money,'' he said. He'll even work for ``bargain basement prices,'' he said.
``I would like to leave a legacy that has people thinking of something other than the kind of stereotyped talk show topics that the comedians talk about,'' he said. ``I'm not nearly as bad as that image, but I want to work on that.''
Rivera won three national Emmy Awards from 1975 to 1985, and was nominated 15 times. ``I haven't been nominated since '85 and it really rubs me,'' he said.
``I've battled a kind of perception gap,'' he said. ``For years, I've defied it and denied it. Then, when I hit my 50th birthday a couple of weeks ago, I said, `What the hell, it's true, why not confess it: That if you mention my name, you're going to get a certain response and more often than not it's not going to be the response that I dreamed of 20 years ago.'''
Rivera thinks of the arrogant things he could say in rebuttal. Take his 10 best documentaries, for example, and put them up against Edward R. Murrow's 10 best. His would be competitive with Murrow's, he said.
``Participatory journalism - I think I was one of the primary inventors of it, in terms of reporter involvment. And what is called tabloid - I think I was doing that before it became a dirty word, with `Good Night America' and my work on WABC and `Eyewitness News.' ''
Rivera says this with no trace of irony or self-consciousness. He knows his story is a quintessentially American tale of success, failure, and success.
And what would Geraldo say to those who call him a career in a suit who'll do anything to ride the wave of pop culture and stay in the public eye?
``I think that's a fair question, but I think what it overlooks is the fact that I've been an enormous risk-taker,'' he said. ``I don't think I've played it safe at all. ...
``I think in many ways I've been in front of that wave. I haven't ridden the wave, I've helped create the wave.''
Elsewhere in television ...
AMC SHIFTS FORMAT: The Movie Channel, a premium cable service, says it will change formats in August, giving viewers more movies back-to-back, with a maximum of five minutes between showings.
by CNB