E-mail a friendRobert Wagner
airdate November 4, 2009
With his It Takes a Thief, Switch and Hart to Hart TV shows, Emmy-nominated actor Robert Wagner has been a Hollywood mainstay for more than five decades. He can also boast an impressive list of film credits, including the Austin Powers series, Crazy in Alabama and Wild Things. The Detroit native intended to become a business exec, but changed course when he became fascinated with the film industry. Among the charities Wagner supports is St. John's Hospital. He writes about his life's ups and downs in Pieces of My Heart.
Wagner dismisses retirement as a ploy to get people to buy insurance and go on cruises. (:54)
Full Interview (13:25)
Robert Wagner
Tavis: Pleased to welcome Robert Wagner back to this program. The star of many notable television and movie projects is out now with the paperback release of his critically acclaimed memoir, "Pieces of My Heart: A Life." Robert Wagner, always an honor to have you on this program.
Robert Wagner: Thank you, Tavis, very much.
Tavis: You didn't get the memo. You never dress nicer than the host.
Wagner: They told me to dress up. They said -
Tavis: Yeah, but not this nice, though. (Laughter) Glad to have you back, though.
Wagner: Oh, I'm happy to be here. I had such a good time with you the last time.
Tavis: Well, no more fun than I had, no more fun than I had. Let me start with - we were just talking about your wife, Jill St. John, of course.
Wagner: Oh, Jill, yes.
Tavis: You're living in Colorado.
Wagner: We live in Colorado.
Tavis: I read this somewhere, you tell me if it's true or not, that we owe Ms. St. John a debt of gratitude because she is the one that kept you from doing "Dancing with the Stars" when the phone rang. Is that a true story?
Wagner: (Laughs) That is a true story.
Tavis: That they called you and your wife said, "Heck no."
Wagner: I was ready to go (laughter) and she said, "I've never gotten into your career and I've never advised you on anything," but she said, "I don't think you should do this." So when she said, that, I thought I'd better take that advice.
Tavis: I'm just curious, why were you thinking about it? That's a lot of work, man. That's a lot of hard work.
Wagner: Yeah, it's a lot of hard work, but I think it's difficult too to stand up there and then have them take you apart at the end. That gets a little (unintelligible).
Tavis: You're an actor; you've done that for years, though. Critics are always nipping at your heels.
Wagner: Oh, yeah, sure, but it is a lot of work. I enjoyed meeting all the people. That was early on, too. That was early on.
Tavis: Speaking of early on, you've lived such a rich and full life, I can't do justice to it in the time that we have. But speaking again of early on, you start out this memoir by telling us that for all the privilege you grew up with here in this town you spent the first 18 years of your life trying to get out of - I'm paraphrasing here - get out of your dad's shadow, getting out of your dad's world. Tell me about your early days.
Wagner: Well, Tavis, I was a junior, I was Robert J. Wagner Jr., and my father was a very successful man, and he wanted me to be in his industry, in his business, Robert Wagner and Son, and he was a very demanding personality, very strong, and I always wanted to be in the movies.
I think from the first time I saw my first picture in a theater I thought that's what I want to do. I was around young people who were the sons and daughters of movie people, and we had moved to California, my father moved to California. I start the book out with sitting under a tree around 12 years old and seeing four men coming down the fairway at the Bel Air Country Club and those four men, as they got closer to me, were Cary Grant, Randolph Scott, Fred Astaire, and Clark Gable.
I saw the four of them and I thought oh, boy, that's what I want to be. I want to be in their world somehow, to be a part of that. One of the reasons that I wrote this book is because look what happened. Randolph Scott was very, very generous to me and helpful in my career, Cary Grant became a lifelong friend, Clark Gable took me to MGM, and Fred Astaire played my father in a series I did called "It Takes a Thief."
How all of that happened, how that all touched upon me and all these people involved in my career, that's why I wrote the book, to acknowledge that.
Tavis: I don't mean to be syrupy about this, but what does that say to you, looking back on it, about dreams?
Wagner: Well, Tavis, my dream came true. I'd always wanted to do this, I had a great desire to do it, and nothing deterred me. I had great enthusiasm. One of the things that came out of this is that if you have a dream it can come true, and it has a lot of hope in it.
I had a lot of friends who were so encouraging to me and helped me so much, and I wanted to write all that, so I put it down. Took a while to do it. I had a wonderful collaborator in Scott Eyman, and he knew a great deal about Hollywood. He's written some wonderful books.
He wrote the book on L. B. Mayer and John Ford and Ernst Lubitsch and sight and sound. He just finished a book on Cecil B. DeMille. So he knew Hollywood and he was able to drop me into Hollywood at that time because I started just at the end of the time that the contract system was on and I was under contract to 20th Century Fox for 12 years; that was my education. Instead of going to college I was at Fox, and it was a good one.
Tavis: For every child watching now, every young person who has a dream that happens to be different than the dream that his or her parent or parents have for them, what's the lesson in going your own way?
Wagner: Well -
Tavis: How'd you and your dad reconcile this?
Wagner: Well, we never really sort of got it straightened out, but I think the most important thing is to be a dreamer. If you have a dream and you believe it, it can work for you. I think parents can sometimes be very - they want to have the best for you and want to kind of have you go in a direction that you may not want to go.
It's not to their detriment in a way, but I think you've just got to keep that positiveness in you and that feeling that you can do it, and that will. I think you've got to be, in a sense, willful about it and be strong about it.
Tavis: You've talked so much about this or have been asked about it, and God knows it's been written about all over the place over the years - that is, of course, the death of your former wife, Natalie Wood.
I don't want to go into the details there, because I think that's pretty well known, but I do want to ask this particular question, which is how - looking back on it, how you now process having to write about that in details. Was it therapeutic, was it the exact opposite? What was the experience like?
Wagner: I didn't do it therapeutically. I couldn't write a book called "Pieces of My Heart" and not have Natalie in it, because I was with her from the time she was 18 years old and we were together, very much in love. We were married twice. We had everything in the world that you can imagine, and the only - the way that I was able to process that and get through it was because of my three children.
Jill was so helpful to me and all of my friends who came to me and supported me and were there for me. David Niven was very, very close to me and he had a similar experience because he had lost his wife when he was very young and he had two young boys, and he was so helpful to me, to help me get on top of it a bit. It wasn't - it was a devastating time and I couldn't write a book without dealing with it.
Tavis: You have been celebrated for so many years of your career, of course, as a leading man, and we all know that. I found I hadn't really processed this until I was going through the book, which is that you have had the good fortune, I think - I'll use that phrase; you tell me if I'm right or wrong about this - but the good fortune, to my mind, at least, of having been in love at one point in your life with a woman significantly older than you, Ms. Stanwyck, and Natalie Wood, somewhat younger than you. I'm not sure there's a question there. I just think that's interesting. What do you make of my observation?
Wagner: Well, I write about my romance with Barbara Stanwyck. I met her on a picture I was in called "Titanic," and she was 22, 23 years older than I was, and it was the most wonderful relationship.
She was so fabulous to me and I fell in love with her and she couldn't have been - she just couldn't have been greater.
Tavis: They call those ladies cougars those days, as you know, and there's all kinds of shows, cougar, yeah.
Wagner: Yeah. But that - yeah, she would have been a cougar today, yes.
Tavis: A cougar. (Laughter)
Wagner: But in those days, that kind of a relationship wasn't recognized at all. That's why it was kept so quiet, because it just wouldn't have been acceptable. Today it would have been great. (Laughter)
Tavis: Amazing what a difference a few years makes.
Wagner: It sure is, it sure is. But this book has been an amazing thing for me because I had no idea that it was going to have the kind of results that it had. It was on "The New York Times" best-seller list. I had no idea, Tavis, that that was going to happen.
Tavis: Is it interesting, fascinating, or amazing - you pick a word - to you that people are so interested in your life? We know you as an actor, but this is really about you, the person. Does that tickle you, that people want to know -
Wagner: Yes, it was a - I was really quite amazed at it. It took three and a half years to write this and I was very reluctant, in a sense, to let it go, and when I did let it go I got depressed. I had kind of a very big slump, because you have no audience when you write a book. You don't know what's going to happen.
Boy, it just -
Tavis: How does that differ from doing a movie, though? You don't know what the response is going to be when you do a movie, do you?
Wagner: Well yeah, but you've got a lot of people around you. You're all going for the same -
Tavis: I see your point.
Wagner: - the same thing. This is rather an individual effort.
Tavis: Jonathan, do me a favor. Put this book cover back on the screen just a second, I want to ask Robert Wagner why, of all the photos that have been taken of you over the years, I'm just curious, why did you sign off on this particular photo being on the cover?
Wagner: I'll tell you why. I gave that picture to my youngest daughter, Courtney, and when I was going to write the book, she said, "Daddy, this has got to be the cover of the book."
Tavis: But your hair is disheveled, you've got two or three day - two days of growth on your face, why did she like that so much?
Wagner: I think it's because it's - I was - it's got a feeling about it where I was quite lonely then and Natalie and I had left each other, I was in France making a movie called "The Longest Day," and George Segal's wife snapped that picture. I was just - I was alone and I didn't know where I was going, and my daughter, Courtney, always just loved that shot. She just felt that was a - so that's why I used it.
Tavis: It's a cool photo, I thought it was cool. I just wondered, I said, "What made them pick that particular photo, though? So now I know. You don't believe in retirement, do you?
Wagner: No, I don't. (Laughter)
Tavis: Why not?
Wagner: No, I don't, because - and I think it's kind of a ploy by a lot of people to get you to retire, to move in those retirement communities and go on cruises and buy insurance and all that. (Laughter) This is something, Tavis, that I wanted to do all my life, and it worked for me. I got lucky, I got into it, I love it, and I just want to be a part of it as long as I can.
It's been working out pretty well for me. I've had some very dry spots, but sometimes I've had some very good shots.
Tavis: You keep this up, you might make something of yourself one day. (Laughter)
Wagner: I'll be back on your show.
Tavis: Yeah. (Laughter) There may be a spot for you in this business after all. His name, of course, Robert J. Wagner. His memoir, now out in paperback, "Pieces of My Heart," a "New York Times" best seller the first time around and I suspect no different the second time around in paperback. Mr. Wagner, honored to have you on the program.
Wagner: Thank you, Tavis, very much.
Tavis: Always good to see you, my friend.
Wagner: Always good to be with you.
Tavis: Thank you, sir.
Back to November 4, 2009