Frank Beacham's Journal

The landmark smoking Camel sign blew its last oversize puff in Times Square 56 years ago this month

The landmark smoking Camel sign blew its last oversize puff in Times Square 56 years ago this month. The two-story sign had been blowing out smoke since a few days after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

During World War II, the model morphed from sailor to soldier to Marine to airman and back again every four months, The Times reported. In 1966, the tobacco company R.J. Reynolds decided that the iconic billboard had “done its work.”

The company’s advertising agency told The New York Times that the change had nothing to do with cancer warnings or the increase in popularity of filtered cigarettes. “We’re just always looking for ways to support other forms of advertising,” a spokesman said.

Eddie Hausner, a Times photographer, took this unpublished photo in 1964 as a Times reporter spoke with Kjell Lindell, a maître d’ who admitted to smoking about three cigarettes a day.

Thanks New York Times

What's your story?

It’s about the end of 2021 (thank God!) and most of us working in the creative arts are plotting away at plans and resolutions for the new year.

It doesn’t matter whether we are musicians, writers, photographers or other visual artists — the challenges are the same. Covid continues to devastate our careers. We have to re-think our futures.

In these tough times, none of us are making the amount of money we need or deserve. We all know that times have changed, but few of us who truly concentrate on our art take the time to consider how different the world has become today.

In order to reach a wider audience in this lockdown era, most of us know we must be internet and video savvy. Yes, I know it’s a nasty concept among most artists, but it means our names must become instantly recognizable to our audience (it’s why I do this Facebook page). If you don’t have your own name in an internet domain, you are missing out on a powerful tool.

Some basic advice: Try to get “your name” dot com, and use it with a service that allows you to mask the real e-mail and web/blog service. This costs surprisingly little and is the first step toward internet success.

Then — one of the most misunderstood things — is that each artist must be able to define their work and what makes it unique in 10 seconds or less. Try telling a total stranger exactly what you do in that amount of time. It’s damn hard. It takes a lot of work.

I took an eight-week course on this very subject in Los Angeles at the American Film Institute in the 1980s and it became THE most valuable class I’ve ever taken.

Being able to succinctly describe the uniqueness of what you do is essential to finding audiences for your work. You need short and long form written pitches defining your work for audiences. Every artist needs to tell a compelling story about his or her self.

In today’s world, people want to know your story before they open themselves to your music or other art. It’s simply a fact of life in our media-centric world.

The use of video in today’s marketing is more important than ever. Your work and your story are being told in videos — the key medium for the internet — whether you like it or not. Anyone with an iPhone who recorded a snippet of a musician’s public performance in the past and puts it on YouTube is defining you to the public — bad sound and all.

And, you guessed it, most are total amateurs who are clueless how to tell your story effectively. As unfair as it is, you can’t protect yourself against bad YouTube videos. That cat is out of the bag.

Today, it is essential to fight back by producing high-quality videos to counter them. In fact, if you don’t, your non-career as a musician will be swamped by bad video. I can’t tell you how many genuinely talented musicians have no usable videos on the internet. It is sad to watch.

It doesn’t have to cost a fortune to produce a great video. Some of the best are made now for free at radio stations who do simple live performances in studios during guest appearances. Audio companies like to show off their new gear with videos of bands.

Capitol Records even does a series of highly professional videos against bare studio walls called “1 mic, 1 take.” It asks what happens when you take one artist, one mic, one iconic recording studio and give them one chance to show their raw talent? It is bare bones in production, but fantastic in audio and video quality — where it counts.

With any video, remember that the sound is most important. There is no question that audio recorded at a distance on an iPhone sucks big time. One good microphone in mono served many artists well in the 1950s, and still works today if the artist can handle it.

Saying you can’t afford video means you are choosing not to play the game today. It’s that simple. It’s the same with live streaming. Do it often and do it right.

Keep your video very basic to keep costs down. Do close-ups with a couple of cameras if you can. It’s all you need, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. Billions of people watch videos online — both pre-recorded and live streamed.

Use low-cost free video distribution and social networking tools like podcasts, blogs, Facebook Live, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo. All that adds up to a superior, but low-cost new way for artists to reach global audiences.

Of course, there are no precise formulas for artistic success. There never has been. No textbook will tell you how. Each artist must design a specific narrative, and plan, for his or her own individual attributes. You must cut through the noise.

As the new year approaches, everyone should evaluate their creative life. If it’s not working, consider what to do and how to get started in taking control of the future.

Now, a gentle pitch. I help certain artists combine the best of the written word with video, audio and still photography to produce compelling stories that speak to their chosen audiences. I don’t choose to work with everyone, but will do it if our goals are compatible. If multimedia marketing is combined effectively, results can be achieved in a matter of months.

I can help artists create key messages and videos to be used as live streams and on web sites, blogs, Twitter and Facebook to help market their name. I can help create “stickiness” to keep fresh messages that keep fans coming back to your web sites for more. It has worked well for me and can work for you.

If you want to talk about any of these services, please call me — Frank Beacham — at 212-873-9349 in New York City.

In the meantime, Happy New Year!

In 1962 — 59 years ago this week — New York’s Playboy Club opened its doors on East 59th Street

In 1962 — 59 years ago this week — New York’s Playboy Club opened its doors on East 59th Street with a rollicking $100-a-plate benefit for the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation.

“Nothing Stays Those Bunnies,” read the headline in Billboard, accompanied by a photo of Bunny Wanda chiming the call for Playboy Breakfast.

Opening-night talent included a quartet doing vocal impressions of jazz and pop singers — Tony Bennett caught the act of a Tony Bennett impersonator.

The club, complete with mood lights on each floor and “technomated” murals in which lights on buildings actually flashed, was a beacon to a certain kind of “Mad Men”-era businessman or those who sought to live like one.

It also attracted the attention of Gloria Steinem, who went undercover as a Bunny for a 1963 exposé.

By the mid-’80s, the club had closed.

Thanks New York Times!

In the autumn of 1963, Beatlemania was a raging epidemic in Britain, and it was rapidly spreading across the European continent

In the autumn of 1963, Beatlemania was a raging epidemic in Britain, and it was rapidly spreading across the European continent.

But in the United States, where the likes of Bobby Vinton and Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs sat atop the pop charts, John, Paul, George and Ringo could have walked through Grand Central Terminal completely unnoticed.

It wasn't Grand Central that the Beatles were trying to walk through on this day in 1963 — 58 years ago today. It was Heathrow Airport, London, where they'd just returned from a hugely successful tour of Sweden.

Also at Heathrow that particular day, after a talent-scouting tour of Europe, was the American television impresario, Ed Sullivan. The pandemonium that Sullivan witnessed as he attempted to catch his flight to New York would play a pivotal role in making the British Invasion possible.

It wasn't for lack of trying that the Beatles were still unknown in the United States. Their manager, Brian Epstein, had tried and failed repeatedly to convince Capitol Records, the American arm of their British label EMI, to release the singles that had already taken Europe by storm.

Convinced that the Merseybeat sound wouldn't translate across the Atlantic, Capitol declined to release "Please Please Me," "From Me to You" and "She Loves You," allowing all three to be released on the minor American labels, Vee-Jay and Swan, and to languish on the pop charts without any promotion.

Desperate to crack the American market, John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote a song explicitly tailored to the American market and recorded it just two weeks before their fateful indirect encounter with Ed Sullivan. That song was "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

Ed Sullivan had his staff make inquiries about the Beatles following his return to the United States, and Brian Epstein arranged to travel to New York to open negotiations.

And in what surely must rank as one of the greatest one-two punches in the history of professional talent-management, Epstein convinced The Ed Sullivan Show to have the Beatles as headliners for three appearances rather than as a one-time, mid-show novelty act.

He then leveraged that contract into an agreement by Capitol Records to release "I Want To Hold Your Hand" in the United States and back it with a $40,000 promotional campaign.

As a result of the chance encounter at Heathrow, and of Brian Epstein's subsequent coup in New York, the Beatles would arrive in the United States on February 7, 1964, with a #1 record already to their credit.

The historic Ed Sullivan appearances that followed would lead to five more #1 hits in the next 12 months.

Thanks History.com

On what is real creativity...

These days I’m hearing more and more very young people refer to themselves as “artists.”

It doesn’t matter whether they are musicians, photographers, painters or whatever, they still invoke the word artist. Most, of course, are clueless as to what a real artist does, much less a genuine understanding of creativity.

One person, who recorded sound on a couple of video projects, actually — with dead seriousness — called himself an “artist.” His arrogance made me so angry I wanted to strangle him.

That lame comment reminded me of a lecture I heard in the 1970s by David Lyman, when he ran the Maine Photographic Workshop.

Everyone in the audience was about to embark on an intense week of learning a craft, such as lighting, editing, video production or writing. The work was incredibly difficult, from early morning until late at night. Lyman prepared each week’s attendees with his now famous lecture on creativity.

He told us that when one learns a craft — take photography, for example — it takes about ten years to master the basics of it. Then it takes another ten years to throw out all the rules and seek the higher ground through one’s own creativity. Only then, and not before then, is it known whether a person might ascend to be a real artist.

Whether one becomes an artist — a very rarefied position in society — is determined not by the person himself, but by the people who are moved by that person’s work. One never refers to him or herself as an artist.

“This activity is what we do . . . we are a photographer, a painter, a musician, a dancer, a playwright or novelist. It’s up to society to tell us if we are artists. If the work we do is deep enough, if it touches a well of shared humanity, that universal quality of human existence, if the work is inspired and touches others, then perhaps it is art, and the creator is an artist,” Lyman wrote in his book on creativity.

Otherwise, the self-appointed artist is just more hyperbole in a bankrupt culture that attempts to self appoint heroes when very few exist.

Real artists have always been in very short supply. When some kid refers to himself as one, run for the hills!

Ma Barker, mother of several members of the Barker gang from the "public enemy era," was born 148 years ago today

Ma Barker, mother of several members of the Barker gang from the "public enemy era," was born 148 years ago today.

The exploits of the Barker gang, built-up by corrupt FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, gripped the midwest.

Under various pseudonyms, she traveled with her sons during their outlaw careers. After she was killed during a shoot-out with the FBI, she acquired a reputation as a ruthless crime matriarch, who controlled and organized her sons' crimes.

J. Edgar Hoover described her as "the most vicious, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade." Because of this, Barker has been presented as a monstrous mother in films, songs and literature.

However, her personal acquaintances insisted she had no active role in criminal activity and "couldn't plan breakfast," as one gang associate said.

Writer Tim Mahoney argues that the real force behind the gang was the corrupt St. Paul law-enforcement system, especially under the police chief, Tom Brown.

Before they met him they were nothing more than a "bumbling band of hillbilly burglars" who would have been captured or killed long before becoming nationally notorious.

"Had the Barker gang never come under Brown's protection, Ma Barker might have died lonesome in the Ozarks, an impoverished obscure widow," he wrote.

On producing a radio drama on The Orangeburg Massacre

Blair Underwood taping a segment of the Orangeburg Massacre on the top of a Hollywood parking garage

Photo by Frank Beacham

In 1990, the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, advertised a program where individuals could apply for a $5,000 grant to do an art project.

I applied to produce a radio drama of the Orangeburg Massacre and won.

The massacre is the 1968 story of an act of racism in Orangeburg, South Carolina, a small Southern town where two black colleges — South Carolina State and Claflin — are located.

The saga began as a peaceful protest by frustrated black college students who were denied use of the Orangeburg community’s only bowling alley.

However, a conservative Southern governor, wanting to appear tough to his white constituents, overreacted to the civil rights protest, ordering a massive show of armed force. As emotions frayed and the situation veered out of control, nine white highway patrolmen opened gunfire on the S.C. state campus — killing three black students and wounding 27 others.

All the students were unarmed and in retreat from the highway patrolmen at the time of the shooting. Yet, without warning, they were shot in their backs with deadly buckshot.

The killings occurred in a southern state that proudly celebrated a record of nonviolence during the turbulent civil rights years. The state claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen at the predominately black South Carolina State College (now university) in Orangeburg.

To bolster that claim and deflect responsibility from its own actions, the state hastily devised a media campaign to blame the riot on Cleveland Sellers, a young black activist working to organize area college students.

At first, the people of South Carolina believed it. Time, however, would unravel the state’s story. By then, the cover-up had gone on 25 years. The story is as old as the South itself — one where stubborn whites will not face up to their own racism.

Mayor Bradley, who was African-American, apparently liked the pitch. I got the grant and went straight to work on the script, which I adapted from a 1971 book by Jack Nelson and Jack Bass. I had yet to write my own book on the subject. In additional to writing the script and I would also direct the show.

Peggy Webber would produce and helped put together a terrific group of major radio, television and film actors through her California Artists Radio Theatre.

We got James Whitmore, of Harry S. Truman’s “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” fame, to play S.C. Gov. Robert McNair. Parley Baer, who was “Chester” on the radio version of Gunsmoke and the mayor of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show, played S.C. SLED chief and the story’s major villain, Pete Strom.

Other actors included Ford Rainey, Royal Dano, Bill Erwin, Robert Rockwell, Lou Krugman, Vance Colvig and Ellerine Harding.

As a passenger on a flight from New York City to LA, I found myself sitting next to Blair Underwood, a then 20-something African-American actor who had a role on LA Law, a primetime television show.

Today, Underwood is 57 years old and has had an excellent career since I met him. On the flight, Underwood was friendly and we talked. I told him about The Orangeburg Massacre and how I had gotten a grant for a radio production from the city of Los Angeles. I asked if he’d consider appearing in it.

He immediately said yes, and also readily agreed to work for scale. He would play John Stroman, the man who wanted to bowl and had started the demonstration that began the entire Orangeburg dispute.

Later, Underwood’s agent tried to torpedo the deal. The money was so low that he would make nothing. But Underwood himself overruled the agent and did the show against his wishes since he had made me a promise.

I appreciated that. Blair Underwood was a man of his word, and I've always admired him because of his position with that agent.

I needed one more actor. This one would play me — the story’s narrator.

I had a friend who knew and suggested David Carradine, who had acted in the TV series, King Fu. He gave me his phone number.

I called Carradine and he agreed for a price of $400, all the beer he could drink and a ride to and from his home to the recording studio. I agreed, and our project was fully cast.

We recorded The Orangeburg Massacre documentary-style at several real locations, with only the narration recorded in a studio. Instead of a camera, we used a Neumann stereo microphone and a digital audio recorder.

For the sounds of a bowling alley, we visited a real bowling alley to get its natural sound and ambience. For the outdoor demonstrations, we got the city’s sounds by using the top of a parking garage at Sunset-Gower studios after hours. We recorded certain scenes at James Whitmore’s home over the beach in Malibu.

The talent we brought together worked very quickly. We finished the entire show in several days. Everything went flawlessly. It usually does when you work with professionals. In about a week, we finished the editing. The show was quickly picked up by public radio and aired nationally.

The Orangeburg Massacre radio drama won the Gold Medal for Best History Program and Silver Medal for Best Social Issues Program in the international radio programming competition at the 1991 New York Festivals.

The winners — selected from nearly 1800 international entries from 28 countries — were chosen by juries assembled in the United States, England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

When the show had its run, we retired it rather than have to continue to pay residuals to the actors. Everyone in the cast agreed to donate the program to the Center for the Study of Southern Culture in Mississippi where it could be heard, but not sold at a profit. It resides there today.

My story, The Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre, is part of the fourth edition of my compilation of Southern stories in, Whitewash — A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder.

Robert Redford is 85 years old today

Robert Redford is 85 years old today.

An actor, film director, producer, businessman, environmentalist, philanthropist, and founder of the Sundance Film Festival, Redford has received two Oscars: one in 1981 for directing Ordinary People and one for Lifetime Achievement in 2002. In 2010, he was awarded French Knighthood in the Legion d'Honneur.

At the height of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s, he was often described as one of the world's most attractive men and remains one of the most popular movie stars. Redford's career — like that of almost all major stars who emerged in the 1950s — began in New York, where an actor could find work both in television and on stage.

Starting in 1959, he appeared as a guest star on numerous programs, including The Untouchables, Whispering Smith, Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, Playhouse 90, Tate and The Twilight Zone. He earned an Emmy nomination as Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Voice of Charlie Pont (ABC, 1962).

One of his last television appearances was on October 7, 1963, on Breaking Point, an ABC medical drama about psychiatry.

Redford's Broadway debut was in a small role in Tall Story (1959), followed by parts in The Highest Tree (1959) and Sunday in New York (1961). His biggest Broadway success was as the stuffy newlywed husband of Elizabeth Ashley in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (1963).

While still largely an unknown, Redford made his screen debut in War Hunt (1962), co-starring with John Saxon in a film set during the last days of the Korean War. This film also marked the debuts of director Sydney Pollack, with whom Redford would later collaborate, and actor Tom Skerritt.

After his Broadway success, he was cast in larger feature roles in movies. He was cast alongside screen legend Alec Guinness in the war comedy, Situation Hopeless ... But Not Serious, in which he played a soldier who has to spend years of his life hiding behind enemy lines.

In Inside Daisy Clover (1965), which won him a Golden Globe for best new star, he played a bisexual movie star who marries starlet Natalie Wood, and rejoined her along with Charles Bronson for Pollack's This Property Is Condemned (1966) — again as her lover, though this time in a film which achieved even greater success.

The same year saw his first teaming with Jane Fonda, in Arthur Penn's The Chase. This film marked the only time Redford would star with Marlon Brando.

Fonda and Redford were paired again in the popular big screen version of Barefoot in the Park (1967) and were again co-stars much later in Pollack's The Electric Horseman (1979).

After this initial success, Redford became concerned about his blond male stereotype image and turned down roles in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Redford found the property he was looking for in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), scripted by William Goldman, in which he was paired for the first time with Paul Newman.

The film was a huge success and made him a major bankable star, cementing his screen image as an intelligent, reliable and sometimes sardonic good guy.

His overall career flourished with the critical and box office hit Jeremiah Johnson (1972); the political satire, The Candidate (1972); the hugely popular period drama The Way We Were (1973); and the biggest hit of his career; the blockbuster crime caper, The Sting (1973), which became one of the top 20 highest grossing movies of all time when adjusted for inflation. It was also nominated for an Oscar.

Between 1974 and 1976, exhibitors voted Redford Hollywood's top box-office name. His hits included The Great Gatsby (1974), The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), and Three Days of the Condor (1975). The popular and acclaimed All the President's Men (1976), directed by Alan J. Pakula and scripted once again by Goldman, was a landmark film for Redford.

Not only was he the executive producer and co-star, but the film's serious subject matter — the Watergate scandal — and its attempt to create a realistic portrayal of journalism also reflected the actor's offscreen concerns for political causes.

He also starred in a segment of the war film, A Bridge Too Far (1977), the prison drama, Brubaker (1980), playing a prison warden attempting to reform the system, and the fantasy baseball drama, The Natural (1984).

Redford continued his involvement in mainstream Hollywood movies, though with a newfound focus on directing. The first film he directed, Ordinary People, which followed the disintegration of an upper class American family after the death of a son, was one of the most critically and publicly acclaimed films of the decade, winning a number of Oscars, including the Academy Award for best director for Redford himself.

His follow-up directorial project, The Milagro Beanfield War (1987), failed to generate the same level of attention.

Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985), with Redford in the male lead role opposite Meryl Streep, became an enormous critical and box office success and won seven Oscars including Best Picture, proving to be Redford's biggest success of the decade and Redford and Pollack's most successful of their six movies together.

Redford continued as a major star throughout the 1990s and 2000s. With the financial proceeds of his acting success, starting with his salaries from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Downhill Racer, Redford bought an entire ski area on the east side of Mount Timpanogos northeast of Provo, Utah, called "Timp Haven,” which was renamed "Sundance.”

He founded the Sundance Film Festival, Sundance Institute, Sundance Cinemas, Sundance Catalog and the Sundance Channel, all in and around Park City, Utah, 30 miles north of the Sundance ski area.

The Sundance Film Festival caters to independent filmmakers in the United States and has received recognition from the industry as a place to open films.

Hipsters: Real vs. Fake

Hipsters: Real vs. Fake

It makes my skin crawl whenever I hear a young person refer to his or herself as a “hipster.”

Not only do most people today not even understand what the term means, but they live in a corporate-infused world where it is now almost impossible to be truly hip.

The New York Times recently wrote about the origins of the word hipster, which might help to explain to those who don’t understand the history of the word and how it has changed over time.

Though the word has been in use for a long time, the Times credits the jazz clubs of 1940s Harlem for making the term popular. In the 40s, a Bronx-born, Juilliard-trained musician, Harry Raab, helped popularize the word with his stage name: Harry “the Hipster” Gibson. His big hit was “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine.”

At the time, “hipster” was used to describe someone who saw him or herself as hip and ahead of the curve, Lewis Porter, a jazz historian at Rutgers University, told the Times.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word is also thought to be a modernized version of “hepcat,” which had the same meaning in jazz circles.

Porter added that the word might also have been used to describe white jazz musicians like Gibson, who played in traditionally black clubs. “That certainly was not its original meaning, but that could have become attached to it later on,” he said.

In his 1957 essay, “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer examined beatnik culture, posing the theory that to be a hipster was to be a white American who adopted black culture, world views and music as an act of rebellion against capitalist greed, wartime violence and the ever-present specter of nuclear war.

Hipster was used to refer to members of the Beat Generation, who virtually all defied and criticized the white, capitalist establishment culture of the 1950s. All lived cheaply and outside the scope of mainstream consumerism. Virtually all true hipsters observed the counter culture ethics of the 1960s.

Jack Kerouac described 1940s hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality.” Near the beginning of his poem, Howl, Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”

The New York Times said it has used the word “hipster” more than 3,000 times since 1851. Yet, the newspaper said, the bulk of those references came after the year 2000, when most of the people who used the term were only wannabes.

The Times said it typically used the word to describe a class of people who moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The problem with that, of course, is that if one could afford to live in Brooklyn after the boom, they were not genuine hipsters.

Today, the hipster subculture is composed of affluent or middle class youth who reside primarily in gentrifying neighborhoods. It is broadly associated with indie and alternative music, a varied non-mainstream fashion sensibility, vintage and thrift store-bought clothing, generally progressive political views, organic and artisanal foods and alternative lifestyles.

The subculture typically consists of white millennials living in urban areas. Often the world hipster is now used as a pejorative term to describe someone who is pretentious, overly trendy or effete.

In Rob Horning's April, 2009 article, The Death of the Hipster, he wrote that the hipster might be the "embodiment of postmodernism as a spent force, revealing what happens when pastiche and irony exhaust themselves as aesthetics."

Of all places, Time magazine, described the modern hipster phenomenon in a July, 2009 article:

“Hipsters are the friends who sneer when you cop to liking Coldplay. They're the people who wear T-shirts silk-screened with quotes from movies you've never heard of and the only ones in America who still think Pabst Blue Ribbon is a good beer. They sport cowboy hats and berets and think Kanye West stole their sunglasses. Everything about them is exactingly constructed to give off the vibe that they just don't care.”

One of the benefits of getting older is being able to easily see through the pretensions of youth. Whenever someone living in a major city like New York tells you today he or she is a “hipster,” run for the hills. Fraud is written all over them.

Thanks New York Times!

Above, is Harry “the Hipster” Gibson

Photo by William P. Gottlieb

On being arrested by Panamanian strongman, Manuel Noriega

Manuel Noriega: A Personal Remembrance

Manuel Noriega died four years ago today in Panama City at the age of 83. He had been in intensive care after complications developed from surgery to remove a benign brain tumor. At the time, he was still in prison, but had been granted house arrest to prepare for the operation.

A remembrance of Noriega is permanently seared into my mind. I will never forget him.

On Panama’s Contadora Island in 1979, while covering the late Shah of Iran for NBC News, I was arrested by Noriega, then Panama’s chief of military intelligence. It was early morning, and I exited the shower to find Noriega in the bathroom pointing an Uzi submachine gun at me. He ordered me to get dressed and then drove me in a jeep to a government-owned house on the island.

He said I was using a walkie-talkie that interfered with his private frequency. The walkie-talkie, which I bought in a gift shop on the island, was being used to communicate with the rest of my crew.

I apologized, but Noriega was having none of it. He made me and the other crew members he had also arrested sit on a couch and look at his porno magazines, while hysterically laughing at us. It became clear quickly that Noriega was a real sicko.

Time dragged by as we quietly waited, having no idea of our fate with this madman. Later that day, he took us in his jeep to the island’s airstrip. Our bags, removed from our rooms and hastily packed by his forces, were waiting there for us. We were told to board the plane and were flown back to Miami.

After returning to NBC’s offices in Miami, the phone rang and it was the president of Panama, General Omar Torrijos calling. Torrijos profusely apologized for Noriega’s actions to Don Browne, NBC’s bureau chief, and invited us back to Contadora Island to complete coverage of the Shah’s vacation stay there.

He absolutely promised no more trouble. Anxious to make the money on this lucrative job, I agreed to return with my crew. (Yes, I was VERY stupid back in those days!)

But first, when we arrived back in Panama, we visited Gen. Torrijos, who warmly welcomed us back to his country. He asked if I could deliver a box of Cuban cigars to his friend, Sen. Edward Kennedy, who liked them.

Each cigar had a band that had the words General Torrijos printed on it — a personal gift from Fidel Castro. I promised to send the cigars — illegal in the United States — to Kennedy when we returned. (That was not without skimming off the top row for myself!)

The rest of our trip on Contadora Island was without incident and we returned home a week and a half later.

A footnote to this story: Gen. Torrijos died in a plane accident on July 31, 1981. Colonel Roberto Díaz Herrera, a former associate of Noriega, claimed that the actual cause for the accident was a bomb and that Noriega was behind the incident.

Somehow, I was never surprised by this. Noriega became the defacto leader of the country before his arrest.