On this date, April 21, 1986, about 30 million viewers tuned in to see one of the biggest anti-climatic events in TV history. Geraldo Rivera had made a name for himself in the 1970s when he exposed the harsh conditions at the Willowbrook State Hospital in the Staten Island borough of New York City.
But by 1985, he had criticized ABC News president Roone Arledge for killing a news report that claimed that President John F. Kennedy had a romantic relationship with Marilyn Monroe. Arledge had been associated with famous people throughout his early career and was close to the Kennedy Clan. Rivera, himself, had even been the son-in-law of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., briefly as his second wife was the author’s daughter, Edith, who is known as a famous painter. He would later say the firing was really over a $200 donation he made to a non-partisan mayoral race candidate which was in violation of ABC policy.
Regardless, he had won a Peabody Award for the coverage on Willowbrook and was in his prime at the peak of the 24/7 news cycle. CNN and Headline News had just come out in the early 1980s and the news never sleeps. Unfortunately, you usually have to find the news. And being someone who’s worked in the media myself, it can be difficult to find news. Some people go to a barbershop or salon and you’ll get gossip. But I’m not a waiter I never worked on tips.
Part of the reason is you spend most of your time chasing a story that goes nowhere. And when you’re dealing with an editor, publisher or a deadline that dictates you have to get a story regardless, it can be frustrating. A scientist can spend a day, week, month working on something only to find it can’t work. But that will point them in a different direction. It’s not the same mainly because scientist publish their findings and even their non-findings are still their findings.
So, Rivera’s comeback would be The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vault. It was going to air live in syndication (which itself is a contradiction), but people tuned to the stations airing the special only to discover nothing. The special was styled like a documentary of Capone’s life and criminal career with talking head interviews from the people still alive in 1986.
However, when the underground room (which really wasn’t a vault) of the Lexington Hotel in Chicago was opened, the only thing found was debris that had been settling over decades and bottles. Rivera speculated the bottles had been used to bathtub booze. And this happened live to millions of people. Rivera had booze on the brain because he later said he walked across the street to a bar and downed tequila until he retired to his hotel room with a “Do Not Disturb” on the door and phone.
But as Homer Simpson sang, “There was nothing in Al Capone’s vault/ But it wasn’t Geraldo’s fault.” How could we believe that there might be something hidden in an underground room for more than half a century? And Capone himself had been deceased for almost 40 years. So, if there was any skeletons left in the closet after his death, I’m sure they had already been found. The best thing the production could’ve done was at least anticipate nothing.
Instead they had agents with the Internal Revenue Service and medical examiners just in case they found corpses or body parts as well as possible documents. When award shows make mistakes, they almost anticipate it. But live TV itself is a curious thing. We’ve seen Lee Harvey Oswald get fatally shot by Jack Ruby as well as watched the Challenger shuttle explosion just three months prior to this. And TV itself had been pulling gimmicks before to get people to tune in.
Yes, it was a bust. But Rivera would survive. This was the 1980s. If it was still the 1970s, he would’ve been reduced to anchoring a local news station somewhere in the southwest if he was lucky. But this was turning a negative into something more of a positive, but creating his own daytime talk show Geraldo that debuted a year later and ran until 1998. In 1988, Rivera would get in the middle of a studio brawl that started between an argument of black guests on the panel and white supremacy groups. Rivera would be hit in the face with a chair and had to appear bandaged on later shows.
This would later be parodied by Weird Al Yankovic in his cult classic UHF where the comic/singer would also parody the vault by opening the glove compartment to Capone’s car to find, “Road maps!” Rivera had been parodied by Yankovic which meant he had made it. And along with others such Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey and Montel Williams would be able to transform a medium that wasn’t necessarily the news but it wasn’t the “trash TV” of Morton Downey Jr. and Jerry Springer.
But it proved that there is news where there is no news. How many times, especially during the winter months, have we watched news programs freak out over the possibility of an outrageous snow storm/blizzard only for it to be nothing? News up until the 1980s all followed a format. But now, so-called journalists and broadcasters could do steer their shows into a format that was more opinionated and pointed.
It didn’t matter that there wasn’t much in the underground room. Just the idea they’re might have been has changed the medium. Now, people watch Sean Hannity and they’ve watched Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly and listen to Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and Joe Rogan. They’re going to believe like what they’re seeing and hearing is the real thing.
But Homer was right. It wasn’t Rivera’s fault. It was ours for buying that there might be something extraordinary. Look at the Balloon Boy case or the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase. Let’s say for the sake of argument, there was some body in the underground room. We would be criticizing the producers for exploiting a murder for entertainment. Yet, it shows how we as a society love bad things. We slow down to look at accidents on the road. We listen to true-crime podcasts without any consideration that someone’s murder is being exploited. True-crime shows actually buy information from cases and they will dramatize events that were very awful for people.
The program aired 10 years after Network showed our culture devolving. But maybe we’ve always loved violence and hardship as long as it doesn’t happen to us. We watch boxing and NASCAR racing to see blood and major accidents. Rivera was just giving us what we wanted.
And like many other journalists of the era, he made himself a celebrity because that’s what we’re interested in. We say we not. But we actually like talking about how “celebrity culture” is out of hand itself.
Thirty million people can’t be wrong, can they?
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 