Word: frosts
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...following this needling, Frost set aside his favorite white wines (Montrachet and Pouilly Fuissé) and began closeting himself with his staff and reading far into the nights in his suite atop the Beverly Hilton Hotel. He was still in a mood for cramming, fortunately, as his rented blue Mercedes rolled toward the final Watergate taping. En route, he read the statute on obstruction of justice that was to prove so helpful...
When the tapings were over, Frost's people were confident, perhaps overconfident, that their boss had scored a journalistic as well as a financial triumph. But Nixon's inner circle was just as certain that its man, even with his battering on Watergate (or perhaps because of it), had done much to raise his standing with the public. The show's viewers, said one Nixon friend, "should be sympathetic. It gives a much better understanding of what he thought. Those who like to make judgments will be better informed on their judgments...
...series had by no means been an assured commercial success from the start. It represented a bold gamble by Frost. He had been in Australia when Nixon left the White House on Aug. 9, 1974?and he immediately decided to try to pin the fading ex-President down to a TV contract. To Frost, Nixon's "likely unavailability" was a challenge; it was "the appeal of the impossible" that lured him. He telephoned an offer from Australia. For nearly a year, Nixon showed no interest...
...July 1975, after Nixon had signed his $2 million memoirs contract, he sent his agent, Irving ("Swifty") Lazar, to talk to the TV networks in New York. When Frost found out about this he offered Nixon a flat $500,000 for four shows. NBC was also bidding, and Lazar coaxed Frost into raising the ante to $600,000, plus a reported 20% of any profits. Helping Frost land the contract was Herbert Klein, Nixon's longtime press confidant, who felt that Frost was not the kind of U.S. journalist who is "always trying to put in his own opinions." Klein...
With the contract in his pocket, Frost still had no one to air the shows he would produce. CBS was shy of "checkbook journalism" after having been widely criticized for buying an interview with Nixon's former chief of staff, Haldeman. News executives at some networks were willing to put Nixon on the air, but only if their own journalistic stars could do the grilling. Undaunted, Frost got Syndicast, a New York-based independent TV marketing agency, to sell broadcasting rights to individual stations. He contracted with Pacific Video in Los Angeles to do the taping. Both were...