(
)
Mike Wallace — the brazen broadcast legend who virtually invented the in-your-face TV interview — died Saturday night at the Connecticut nursing home where he had spent the last years of his life, CBS announced yesterday. He was 93.
Wallace’s pit-bull style — whether asking the Ayatollah Khomeini if he was “a lunatic” or bringing Barbra Streisand to tears — helped make “60 Minutes” a Top-10-rated show for decades and proved that TV journalism could be both news-breaking and profitable.
Before he appeared on the “60 Minutes” inaugural show, on Sept. 24, 1968, he had a varied career.
Born Myron Leon Wallace in Brookline, Mass., he was a radio announcer for action shows, soap operas and wrestling; a TV game-show host and panelist; a TV pitch man for Parliament cigarettes; and an actor. He was on Broadway in a 1954 comedy, and had several movie roles — even playing himself in 1957’s “A Face in the Crowd.”
But he established his broadcast identity in 1956 on “Night Beat,” a nightly Channel 5 interview show seen only in New York, in which Wallace grilled a wide range of personalities, including the head of the US Communist Party and the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, in a style no one had seen on TV before.
“Toots, why do people call you a slob?” he asked the restaurant owner Toots Shor. “Me? Jiminy crickets, they musta been talking about Jackie Gleason,” Shor replied.
“There is one thing that Mike can do better than anybody else,” his “60 Minutes” colleague Harry Reasoner said years later.
“With an angelic smile, he can ask a question that would get anyone else smashed in the face.”
Wallace carried his tough-guy persona to “60 Minutes,” where he pioneered the “ambush interview,” showing up unannounced at the office or home of one scoundrel or another.
His fame grew with his caustic sit-down interviews, such as when he lectured Streisand about her decades of psychoanalysis.
“What is it she is trying to find out that takes 20 years?” Wallace said he wondered.
“I’m a slow learner,” Streisand replied.
Wallace was also on the receiving end of the glaring spotlight. His work on a 1982 CBS documentary that charged the US military deliberately undercounted enemy strength during the Vietnam War prompted a $120 million libel suit by Gen. William Westmoreland. The suit was withdrawn, but Wallace was so depressed over it, he considered killing himself.
In the 1999 movie “The Insider,” Christopher Plummer portrayed Wallace as caving in to pressure to kill a “60 Minutes” interview with a cigarette-company whistle-blower.
But Wallace, the father of Fox TV’s Chris Wallace, rebounded and continued to win awards even after dropping his full-time role at “60 Minutes” in 2006. He earned his 21st Emmy that year, for an interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.