Transcript of PTFO - The News Anchor America Needed

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre. And today, we're going to find out what this sound is.

Do you really feel like a philanthropic person? I feel very philanthropic. I really do.

And I'm a young guy.

People don't believe that.

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You're listening to Giraffe King's Network.

To be on the internet with you, having truly grown up watching you. Really? Yes, of course. What do you mean really? No. Seriously. I am one of the millions upon millions of Americans who trusted Connie Cheung with telling us what the fuck is happening in our world.

Wow, sir.

You were the person inside my television.

Oh, my gosh. I can't believe it.

It's something that I'm meaning to talk to you about specifically, because what this book did was reveal things about you that I could not get by watching you on television. What you actually felt.

Well, you know what? That was a gigantic challenge. When I wrote what is commonly known as the Shitty First Draft, when I submitted it to my publisher, she said, You're just telling the facts. And I said, Well, that's what I do.

You're reporting? Yeah.

And she said, No, you can't. You've got to tell how you feel. And I thought, Oh, gosh, give me a break. If I had known that, I wouldn't have written the darn thing.

Connie Cheung was a television star in ways that young people today cannot possibly appreciate. Because when I was growing up in the early '90s, back in my day, there was no Internet, there were no cell phones, no social media, no YouTube, obviously. And so watching the news meant turning on your television by pressing a button after dinner. At which point, almost inevitably, this person would crackle into view.

This is the CBS Evening News with Dan Ratham and Connie Chum. Good evening. Dan is off tonight. The FBI put out a warning today that organized crime from Russia is now the greatest long term threat to the security of the United States.

Today, Connie Cheung is a tireless 78-year-old who insisted, by the way, on standing up for our entire in-person interview here because it had been a long book tour, understandably, and she had been sitting too much. And at this very moment in American political history, there are a few people I wanted to stand up and talk to me more than Connie Cheung, who wasn't only the first woman to co-an anchor of the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, the man who had succeeded Walter Cronkite, who had hired Connie as a correspondent. Connie was also the first ever Asian Network news anchor and the reporter responsible for the first federal prosecution of a civil rights era murder case. And also, as you'll see in a bit here, simply one of the toughest television interviewers of all time. And I've been thinking about Connie ever since her husband, Mori Povich, yes, daytime television icon Mori Povich, casually mentioned her memoir to us in studio a year ago. I'll call her, though, if you want me to. Well, we might need to- If she's not writing her memoir. I was going to say, if she's not writing her memoir.

You will not be surprised to learn that Connie Cheung and Maury Povich, this paragon of journalism and this paragon of the alleged opposite, are, in fact, opposites themselves. But it's not in the way that you'd expect.

He is the stable, able, stalwart traditionalist, and I am the crazy one. And he has to curb my enthusiasm all the time because you know what he says to me, You can't do that. I said, Why? You do a crazy program every day. You're determining the paternity of every child in America. Who's the daddy and who's not the daddy.

You are not the daddy.

Now, come on. I can do it. And he says, no, you have a reputation to uphold.

But it's clear now that, and you write this in the book, that this whole time, you write, I looked like a Lotus blossom, but I talked like a sailor with a raw sense of humor.

Yeah.

That is just not merely a personality trait, but a learned skill of sorts.

I was a trash talker. It was really because I wanted to be one of the guys. At that time, there were so many guys in the newsroom. I mean, in fact, everybody in the newsroom at CBS was a man. All my competitors were men. Everybody I covered were men. I Capitol Hill and the White House, and Pentagon, and the State Department, all men, and white for that matter. I had decided that the only way I could be one of the boys is to literally talk like them, act like them. It was not a conscious decision. It's just something I acquired through osmosis because they would make such sexual innuendos at me, so I would do it to them. It was really disconcerting learning, and they didn't know what to do about it, so they would just stand down.

You were preemptive at times.

Yes. I would love something at them before they could love it at me.

There's a part of your book, you write about a guy at channel 5 in DC, and it's page 73. Could you read this part? Would you mind? Is that possible? No, sure. It's the baracketed part from your misalette.

Okay. Bill gave me the look. I could see the sperm swimming in the YTS of his eyes. His long nose was pointing at me like a golden retrievers. His thin body shaking as dogs do when they're determined to chase a bird. You want me to go on?

I think the gist that I wanted to establish.

Is that I could see the sperm swimming in the YTS of their eyes?

Yeah, that's what I found out today. We did it in five minutes that you had this ability to diagnose from up close and from afar, it seems. The intent of of these people who were both colleagues, but predators, and also for you, in the end, a form of prey as well, as you were not some shrinking violet. Violet? Yeah.

But I think every woman has seen the sperm swimming through the YTS of their eyes. It's like you can see it.

That was a good dance. Khari Jung just did a sperm motility dance.

There you go.

This is hard for me to even say aloud because it's a madlib of a sentence. What was it like when Henry Kissinger flirted with you?

It was so gross. I mean, really gross. Because he had this belief that he was a sex symbol, frankly. So he thought that he was some a hot person just because of his brain. It was so creepy. I mean, I wouldn't even have helped him cross the street if he had asked me to. I don't know. And there were a lot of creepy old men.

Just to run through some of the list here, and this is before my time, but again, as an attempted student of history, when I learned that it's not just Henry Kissinger- Oh, no, you're a Harvard guy. In my history class, I didn't learn that at a dinner, Jimmy Carter pressed his leg up against yours and just was hoping some magic would happen.

I don't know what he was thinking, but he had just given that interview with Playboy magazine that said, he lusted in his heart. I saw this look on his face after he pressed his knee against mine. And I thought, really?

These are only a couple of examples among many. But in 1972, just to be very clear here, you're a reporter who is aggressive and principled and unrelenting, and you're covering the George McGovern presidential campaign. And so this is against Richard Nixon. The point being that you wind up as Connie Cheung, young hotshot, rising star reporter on St. Michael's Island off Maryland. And And it's just, again, this is a madlib, Connie, because it's who? Who is there at the island?

Oh, yeah. It's crazy. Warren Beatty and his girlfriend, Julie Christie, both major stars, movie stars at the time, certainly. And McGovern asked me if I wanted to join them for dinner. And he said his wife Eleanor was not going to be there. And I thought, Well, this is not cool. But I thought, Well, maybe I'll find out something. Maybe he'll tell me something that everybody else doesn't know. So we have dinner. I excuse myself to go to the ladies' room bathroom or whatever. On my way back, he tries to kiss me.

In the middle of a presidential campaign.

Yeah.

You're the reporter who every… I mean, again, it's just… Bizarre. Bizarre. Did you have a diagnosis as to what was that moment?

I was clueless. But you know what? When I was on this book tour, a woman told me that she had also encountered McGovern at one point and that he propositioned her. Basically, she said, Why don't you go to a prostitute? I thought she was pretty darn bossy.

Let's be solutions-oriented here.

I would get a dog.

What about a dog?

Yeah, exactly.

But the point here that I bring it up to make is also that this is across the political spectrum. Mcgovern is a lion of liberalism. Carter, too. It's not just Kissinger, it's men. It is men and Washington and And there you are being called at the same time, just to get the full scorecard here, alternately, Dragon Lady, Yellow Journalist, OSE. Could you explain OSE?

Oslanais, which was like Oh, Blue Eyes. Frank Sinatra was Oh, Blue Eyes. Someone said to me, You're OSE, Old Slate Eyes.

You did do it your way. I did. It turned out.

I did, but it was crazy. But it was rampant. I think every woman who was alive then experienced the same thing. I was not unusual, really. Not by any means unusual. It was just all over the place. It was constant. It was daily. I think all the women in my era just plain put up with it.

It's clear to me in this book, and even just our conversation now, that you were not collapsing onto fainting couches when this happened. No. You were in, again, the boys on the Bus. It was the Boys on the Bus and Connie.

You could hang.

You learned to to the bar.

Yes.

Because that's what it meant to report.

Apparently, I didn't know that. I was tucked in bed early until I realized that the guys were getting scoops. And the way they were getting scoops was drinking at the bar every night with the McGovern people, and they would get them to spill the beans. I thought, Oh, forget about going to bed early. I'm going down to the bar, too. I learned how to drink in college, so why not apply what I learned in college?

Absolutely. I do want to point out that while a lot of this was happening, you were living with your parents Can you imagine?

How embarrassing.

I mean, just paint the picture, though. You're in DC, your family's there. And as all this is happening, you go home.

You go home to mommy and daddy. It really is embarrassing. That's amazing. Yeah, but that's how incredibly Chinese I am. The whole Asian thing of filial piety. I was such a good daughter. I was the last of their five daughters. They expected me to hang in there. My excuse is that I was on such a rigorous schedule of hopping all over the country with the McGovern campaign and then covering Watergate day and night, covering Nelson Rockefeller when he vice president, that it made it easy for me to just live at home because I would plop home and just be able to sleep. I was embarrassed to write that in the book, but it was the truth, and I have to tell the truth.

One of the most relatable parts. Really? Oh, yeah. I lived at home for several years after college. You did? Both for filial piety reasons and also broke reasons. I was a fact checker. My cousins in the Philippines still So many of them live at home as so many people in Asia do. It's not weird over there, but in America, Connie, I want to point this out, too. We're both first-generation Americans. We're both the first members of our family born in these United States. Yes. The place in your book where I was thinking deeply about that is the part where your dad is this force of ancestral weight, and in this case, pressure, insofar Of course, he gave you a mission.

He did. He did indeed.

How would you explain the mission?

He was very proud of the fact that he was able to basically manipulate a way to get out of China during the sign of a Japanese they had lost three boys in China. They had a total of nine children. Five of them died as infants, and three of them were boys. In China, that's verboten. I mean, you don't want girls. All you want are boys because they carry on the family name. He wrote me a letter, and I was already in the news business, and he said, Maybe you can someday carry on the name Cheung the way a son would. I think I took that mission seriously and tried to be the son my parents never had.

You got more muscular. I have lost 10 pounds. Have you? Yeah, using my Peloton. I've had the Peloton in my house, so my daughter, she wanted me to get a Peloton. I did. She used it a couple of times. Great endorsement. But once she left to college and the Peloton was just sitting there in my office and it wasn't being used, I said, You know what? I got to use this. And I have lost 10 to 12 pounds, Billy. I started using Peloton as a bike. Obviously, that's what they're known for. But recently, I discovered all of the classes that they have. They have a series of weight lifting classes. They have programs, which for me, the programs is great because I don't have to think about what I'm doing. Because if not, I just go and I pick a class at random, and I don't know that I'm actually accomplishing anything. I would like some recommendations on classes because I keep going to the same class. It's the Grateful Dead class, by the way. You do a four-week core program with Emma Lovewell. I would recommend that one. Anyone can do that. Any level starts out easy, and then you work your way up.

Then there's a core program two that you can do after core program one, if you want to do that. Yeah, if you graduate. Wait a second. You have to graduate course one to get to course two, the harder course? Well, you can start a course two if you want, but I ease my way in. I did course one first. Then you can do some strength classes with Andy. I love a strength class with Andy. It really puts me through it. I get up and I'm like a sweaty mess, and I'm disgusting, and I love it. You know the thing about Peloton, Stugats? What? Peloton coaches? They walk the walk. Really? Yeah. Do they talk to talk? They have sub-three-hour marathon runner coaches. They have military-trained athlete coaches, former college basketball player coaches, and There's so many other well-rounded coaches on their team. All this experience really shows in their classes, which are never short of challenging. You can do some resistance band classes. I got some resistance bands lately. You're my teacher. Am I? Yeah. You know, no, I'm not. Well, I just go with the program, so then I don't have to think because I don't actually know what I'm doing.

Anyways, what's the Mr. Olympia? Is that what it's called? Yes. The one where you go and you're lifting- Tony Atlas.gain boulders. We should talk to Magnus again. That's Mr. Olympia. Yeah. Yes. What did I say? Olympus. Did I? I don't Anyways, find your push. Find your power with Peloton at onepeloton. Com. I want to convey to people who maybe weren't of conscious memory when you were doing some of your most, let's call them name-making interviews. We'll start, I think, with a voice that is, like you, quite relevant still today.

I shall Very great condominiums in New York. I have the best casinos in the world. They aren't that great. They're the best. They're not that great. They're the best. What? They're not that great? Maybe if you can try and answer this question without giving me the normal spiel. What is the normal spiel? I don't know. Well, the normal spiel The fact is that many rich and powerful people do try to remain anonymous. But you became very public, very clearly by your own design. I don't know if it was by my own design. You mean the publicity? I do developments which get a lot of publicity. I mean, if I didn't do Trump... Oh, come on.

I mean this.

If Trump Tower weren't a great building on Fifth Avenue in 57th Street by a young guy... Trump Tower is one building in New York City with billions of buildings. Trump Tower was built by a young guy in a very important location. Because you know how to... No, I don't think it was by design, though. I think that it happened. That is so innocent. Come on. I want to be innocent. I've always wanted to be innocent. My entire life has been devoted to being innocent. Is it a little not alone? But I don't know that it was by design.

Okay, so what do you feel What do you remember now watching that back now?

What happened was that the producer of the program that I was doing at the time said, We have an interview booked with Donald Trump. And I said, Why? He was a tabloid king. He would create publicity that would put him on the front pages of either the New York Daily News or the New York Post. And I said, I don't see any reason why does anybody care what he has to say? And the producer said, No, you We've got it booked. Go ahead and do it. So I went ahead and did it. Afterwards, Trump was not happy with it.

I was going to ask about the aftermath. Yes. How did that feel?

Do you really feel like a philanthropic person? I feel very philanthropic.

I really do. I'm a young guy.

You know people don't believe that. Oh, I think people believe it. See, it gets to a point where some people can never be satisfied, Connie. Perhaps you're one of those people. He said that I didn't know what I was talking about, that I was- Oh, a lightweight.

Sure. Yeah, lightweight.

You know how he likes to call women nasty? He doesn't have a very wide vocabulary, so he was using the same adjectives. Then in subsequent years, Pablo, Morrie would play in celebrity golf tournaments with Donald Trump. Trump would be there. He'd introduce Mori to his wife, Melania. He completely completely ignored my presence. Despite Mori trying to introduce me, it was just really quite extraordinary, if I may. It seemed like a childish way to respond.

Yeah. Which is to say that anything that's happened since, as much as it is on one level, utterly surreal, is also in this way exactly a version of what you had experienced. Yeah. There was a quote in your book that is attributed to Joe DiMagio.

Yes.

About how you were, athlet, as an interviewer. The quote is, I'd hate to be on the other end of one of her fastballs.

Do you know who told me that was our podiatrist who was best friends with Joe DiMaggio? He said he and DiMaggio were watching an interview that I was doing, and that's when he said it.

It's funny the way sports does come up in your book.

Oh.

Because it recurs. Yes. And it comes, if I may, if I may establish a bit of the frame here. It comes both as a matter of assignments that were foisteed upon you, someone who's perpetually trying to prove your credibility and your seriousness with journalism, but also clearly as a matter of these characters, like let's just go to Bobby Knight in this NBC documentary.

I'm going to do it, and I'm going to do it my way. There are times Bobby and I can't do it his way. And what does he do then?

I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it. I mean, that's just an old term that you're going to use here. You said very little in that clip, and he did not need you to say a lot to know that he had said something that he should not have said. Right. What was going through your mind as he said it? I can't believe this.

I couldn't believe the actually said what he said. This was after he threw a folding chair across the court and was accused of trying to strangle one of his players during practice. Everybody knew that Bobby Knight had an uncontrollable temper. He didn't suffer any consequences, really, at that time. It was much later that he blew up and was blown off the court. But one of the funniest things of Pablo was a sports journalist was interviewing Bobby Knight, and he asked Bobby Knight, What do you think of Connie chunk? And he said, If she were on fire I wouldn't even piss on her.

Which, you got to admit, a pretty good line.

Pretty good line. I thought it was great. I thought it was hysterical.

What's crazy about that interview is that that was the headline. But the subhead, arguably, should have been the fact that this happened. I've never hit anybody.

Haven't you gone up to a kid and gone, whack?

Oh, yeah. I went down the line of our kids one time.

What did you do?

And just hit him on his shoulder, whack them. Come on, let's go. Let's go.

Let's go. That was a nice soft touch you had there.

Well, this, for Christ's sake, didn't like interview. You and some politician that wants to be on television. I don't give a damn whether you ever put this on television or not. Just for the record here, Bobby Knight literally slaps you in the face.

Yeah, I got to whack.

You handle it as if you had, again, the litany of equivalent circumstances that you'd experienced in DC. You were like, Yeah, I know how this goes.

Give me an uppercut now. Go on. Go ahead. I mean, it's like, whew.

Jesus. That's wild.

It is wild.

It's unbelievable that that was on television. So at this point, I just need to observe that for all of the ways that Connie Cheung had been mistreated, obviously, by American presidents in private and Hall of Fame coaches in public, she loved her job. She found it thrilling, actually. She became obsessed with the craft of it, the taking of chances, the competition to score the big get. She was, in her own way, doing her father and her family name proud, as he had requested in writing to her. And America, in response, loved watching Connie Cheung work. Her interview with Gary Condit, for instance, the embattled congressman from California, was watched by more than 23 million people. Roughly the same number also watched her interview in Battle of Figure Skater, Tanya Harding. And the list, which extends deep into sports now, goes on. I just don't know if I've ever seen somebody grill the greatest athlete of all time, for instance, like you did with Michael Jordan.

Gambling has cut short or even ruined a lot of professional sports careers. Can you give it up? Can I give up what? Gambling.

Oh, sure. If it affects my life or the way I play the game or jeopardize my family or my financial status or whatever or the security of my family, sure. I give up in a minute. To solidify my argument is whatever I've lost, I've always given it back to my wife. So whatever check I make, Hey, honey, I'm sorry for the embarrassment. I'm sorry for what I've caused, for losing this amount of money.

Here, take it. Do what you have to do with it.

I wasted it.

So this is yours. This is the kids.

This is whatever. I didn't have to tell you that, but that tells me, and I'm sure that I'm not a gamaholic. I know where I am. I know what I'm doing. But if I feel I've done something that has embarrassed the family, I want to correct it, but yet I want to move on from it, too, as well.

All right, I'm going to play shrink here, see. All right?

Okay. I'm supposed to play patient or what?

When you said that you give your wife the 57,000 or the 108,000 that you lost, that said to me, you feel guilty about it.

I feel guilty that I did it, and I actually didn't tell her I lost it. That's where the guilt comes from.

Oh, you didn't tell her? No. But then when you do give her that money, you do tell her. Right. But when you lost it, at the time you lost it.

I was really embarrassed to tell anybody because I lost.

That's the most embarrassing thing is that I lost. Do you think you have a gambling problem at all?

No, because I can stop gambling. I have a competition problem.

I just want to observe that Michael Jordan, while being grilled, looks very comfortable with you.

Yes. That is also part of what made you a special interviewer.

Wow. That's so interesting because I had met him many times because he would have these Michael Jordan tournaments, and Mori and I would go.

Yeah, golf tournaments. Yes.

Mori would say, I played with Michael Jordan, and he meant golf, not on the court. One of the craziest things I used to say with Mori, what celebrity are you playing with And he says, I'm the celebrity.

You, in a sense, were another big star talking to a big star. And I wonder if that how you wielded that? Were you aware that, I'm Connie Chung coming in to do this interview? No, we're both... To quote your husband, I'm the celebrity.

Pablo, it's very strange, but I was just putting one foot in front of the other, trying to get what I thought was what we in television news, called The Get. At that time, Michael had so much going on with his father's death, with gambling, with Juanita, his wife. I don't know. I was just thrilled when you said, Okay, I couldn't believe it.

I do want to get to another part of your ouvra to just paint with all the colors on this because it's you, it's the richest man in the world, and it's a chair.

Is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position? It depends on the size of the chair.

I'll cheat a little bit. Yeah. The fact that you got Bill Gates. Again, to his credit, completely clear.

Completely clear. A chair. Wasn't that amazing?

You could get these people to do quite a bit, Connie, is what I learned.

Yeah, but you know what? After we sat down and started talking, I started peppering him with questions about the smaller companies that Microsoft was gobbling up. He walked out.

He walked out of the interview. Yeah.

I was thinking, Wait, whoa. Hey, dude, where did you go?

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He's so right. He is so... He's spot on.

And he says, Lord knows not that way with me. That's what he says for the record. But I do want to introduce this dichotomy to people, which is that you are the person going after the powerful, holding them to account, and also someone who is tortured at work because you're not saying no to these things that you don't want to do.

Yes. It's that patriarch thing. Someone who has power in many ways over me that I couldn't quite buck it, buck the system, buck the person, because I saw them as this patriarchal leader who I had to be obedient to. It was that way with both my parents. Mori is absolutely right. It was that way with these men who were in management. I thought they had my back and they had my best interests in mind. But as you well know, management, they're CYA in many ways. Always. Yeah. And that's why I think I couldn't quite figure out how to deal with management.

Well, they're trying to cover their ass. They're trying to CYA, cover your ass as a principal in life. And you're encountering that when you get to the anchor chair, right again, just the job of network anchor is this hallowed. It's the ultimate, as you say, a dream job. It was. And you begin to realize, even as a as a fill in, Who gets to say good morning is contractually negotiated and always the right of the man.

Well, when it came to the Today show, it was. I substituted for Jane Pauli during her pregnancies, and Brian Gumbel had it contractually in writing that he could say, Good morning.

This is today, Monday, January fourth, 1982.

And he could say, Have a good day at the end of the two-hour program, but she could not. She fought it, but she didn't win that battle. When I substituted, I also tried to fight it, but I couldn't win that battle either.

You know, I don't think we could give full consideration, as you do in the book, to the chapter that is you sitting next to Dan, rather. You becoming the first Asian to be a network news anchor, the second woman of all time, the first at CBS Evening News. This is Walter Cronkite's program. This is the man that you worked as a correspondent for, the ultimate journalist.

Yes, my idol.

Still today, I hope that you are not alone in revering Walter Cronkite. The best day of your life, you write, of your professional life is when you get that job. How do you summarize what that was like compared to your expectations?

I could not have been happier. I thought, Boy, I've reached the pinnacle. It's a place where all of our worlds come together. Somalia, Bosnia. Health care, the economy. Stories such as flood or the hurricane. And sometimes, even a moment.

It lets us all sit back and smile.

But then it was all a struggle from then on because I'd cover stories, and Dan Reilly would when I cover those same stories and get pissed off that I was covering them instead of him. I think he would have disliked having not only... Sharing this seat with anybody because he had been doing it by himself and didn't want to move a few inches over for not a man, not a woman, not an animal or a plant. I mean, he did not want to share Walter Cronkite's chair with anybody, especially me, because I wasn't compliant. I was trying to establish a precedent in which the co-anchor would be able to share everything.

You were trying to get an A. You were like, wait a minute, hold on. I can also report. I can eat what I catch. Why can't I do all of these things the way that, again, just for people who don't know, right? It's Peter Jennings at ABC. I'm Peter Jennings in New York.

Just a short while ago, astonishing news from East Germany.

It's Tom Brokaw at NBC. There has been so much budget part this year. It's enough to make your eyes It's over. Right. And now it's Dan Rather plus Connie Chung. Connie Chung.

The CBS Evening News team to cover your world. So there I was.

The first episode Connie Chung ever hosted next to Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News was June first, 1993. It was historic. Two years later, CBS fired her from that dream job. And Dan Rather, according to one news executive, had come to see Connie Cheung as his rival, not his co-anchor. And in Connie's book, she goes on describe Rather, telling her, Just read the news on the teleprompter. Because, according to Connie, Dan Rather very explicitly wanted her to stay in studio and therefore, leave all that reporting, all the anchoring from the field that she loved to do to him. Connie, of course, in response, was outwardly professional. You'd have no idea if you watched these telecasts, as I did, that any of this was happening behind the scenes. But internally, she was despondent, furious even. Because what you should also know is that while all of this was happening, Connie had been spending years trying to conceive a child with Mori. It never worked, despite multiple medical interventions. And so around when Connie had started her job with the Evening News, they decided to file the paperwork for adoption. Except that didn't come through either.

Which is why work, Connie's job, remained pretty much her entire life.

I found that when I was writing about it, someone, my nephew, asked me, Was it cathartic? And I said, I better look up catharsis because I'm not really sure what it means. And I discovered that the original meaning was actually medical, that one expunges one's body of unwanted waste. I thought to myself, Yeah. When I wrote about CBS and the whole experience with Dan Rather, that's exactly what I was doing. I was expunging myself of this piece of dung, and it actually It felt pretty good afterwards.

Again, this is the funny thing about television, which is that people at home don't always know how the people on camera, true to the theme of this episode, are actually feeling. And so both of you were quite professional, always polished. That's what I think of still. But the tension and the way in which Dan Rather ultimately ousts you from the chair and from CBS, despite being who you are, as now we clearly understand, that's the thing that can break a lot of people.

I thought I had lost face. It was a profound feeling when I got dumped from the program. I really felt, because it was so public, I lost face. I always wanted to crawl into a hole and dig my way to China again.

Humiliation is the feeling.

Yes. Huge. Yeah. So humiliated. It didn't matter why or what. It's just I had a very public firing. Although I was offered a different job, I didn't take it because I had a big turnaround in my life. Only two days after I was fired, Maury and I discovered that our adoption that we had been working on for two years was going to come through. It was shortly thereafter that our son was in our arms, and he was less than a day old, so it was pretty darn wonderful. It was serendipity.

After decades of relentless grinding through the '70s and '80s and '90s, Connie Cheung finally stepped away from the job she loved. She stepped away for about 20 years, give or take. It wasn't easy, but she wanted the time to raise her son, Matthew. After hosting a few other programs on TV here and there, yeah, Connie more or less retired. Think back to what her father had asked of her in that letter she pulled us about before. Many years ago. Connie had already done all that. She had carried the family name to every living room in America, millions upon millions upon millions of them, as far as any woman could plausibly take it. And that was a legacy that couldn't possibly be topped. Or so it seemed. I don't even know what category this accomplishment goes into, but you now have a service area in New Jersey named after you. Yeah, I do.

And It's pretty incredible. I actually have to go there sometime. When I go there, I want to go into the men's room stall and write on the inside. For a good time, How's that?

You think it's not a good idea? Milepost 153 should be honored to have you graffiti the men's room at the Connie Junk Service area. By the way, you're a weed I do have a strain of weed named after me.

I don't know how it came about, and I think I should get a cut. I'm described as easy to grow. I created a nice flower and a scent. I don't cause the crazies too much.

No.

I'm good under stress. If you have a deadline, smoke a little connexia and weed. I'm low maintenance. I like that.

You're a good strain to wind down with at the end of the night. You bet.

I just saw online that you can get a five-pack pre-roll for only $22.

That sounds pretty dark. That's turning into a live read. For a thing that does have some dry mouth.

Yeah.

But again, whom's among us. But the last tribute that I want to acknowledge here is the one that, and I say this as somebody who's tear ducts, her my genetic makeup, are generally constipated. But the Connie's.

Yes.

Can you explain for people who don't know the story that was in the New York Times?

It's pretty remarkable. A woman named Connie Wong cold emailed me. She said her parents came from communist China. She was only three years old. Her parents say, We got to give you an American name. What name would you like? And at only three, she knew what she saw on television. She said, Connie or Elmo. And she said, I'm named after you. I'm named Connie after you. So she goes off to UC, Berkeley, Fiersmore. She's in the cafeteria and somebody says, Connie, Wong. And she turns around, but a lot of women turn around, Asian women. She finds there are all kinds of Connie's. So she knows something's up. She decided to look into it. Connie Wong discovers that there are untold numbers of Connie's who are named after me in the 1970s, in the 1980s, and the 1990s. I am blown away. She tells this story to the Sunday New York Times Opinion section. The photo editor brings together as many Connys as she can find in the New York area, asks me to come to a New York Times studio. Oh, my God. It's It's confusing why her name, Connie. I have a one, at least when I was born.

I know. But I realized what it means is your parents want you to work hard and be brave and take chances. Yeah. I did do that. Yeah. So thank you. Thank you.

Oh, my God.

We take an amazing picture, three tiers of Connie's, about a dozen, and me in the middle. I tell you, it has blown me away. And on this book tour, Pablo, I have met six new Connies, and I've also met a Connie Cheung in Drag. Oh. Yeah. He told me that it takes him four hours to put on his makeup. I said, Dude, you got to get faster than I. I can do mine in 15. It's crazy.

When you think back to the way in which your dad, your parents, who you supported through all of this, when you think about how your father saddled you with this mission of continuing the good family name, when you look back at the impact you've had upon the Connie generation, just the symmetry of this, what comes to mind?

Back when I was working, I was used to this big pace and occasional adulation. But now I'm getting it. I think Pablo was much happier when I was depressed. I mean, I rose from the dead, frankly. I had been off the treadmill for about 20 years and didn't know what to make of my career, but once, Maury encouraged me to sit down and write about it. When I got this beautiful ending of this Connie legacy, I thought, This is a perfect denumang for the book. It's a perfect ending.

Now people understand all the reasons why you've inspired, literally, generations of people. I can't believe it. It's true.

I know. It's true.

It's crazy. I dare say that as somebody who grew up fantasizing in a strange way about co-hosting a show with Connie Cheung.

Oh, we've done it.

I thank you for making a dream come true.

Oh, come on. We've It's done it.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metal Art Media production. I'll talk to you next time.