Former '60 Minutes' Commentator Andy Rooney Dies
Rooney had announced a few weeks ago in his 1097th essay for 60 MINUTES on Oct. 2 that he would no longer appear regularly on the broadcast.
"Words cannot adequately express Andy's contribution to the world of journalism and the impact he made--as a colleague and friend--upon everyone at CBS," said Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS Corporation. "His wry wit, his unique ability to capture the essence of any issue, and his larger-than-life personality made him an icon, not only within the industry but among readers and viewers around the globe. Andy was not just a member of the CBS family; he was a member of the world's family. We treasure the legacy he has left, and his presence will be sorely missed by those of us at CBS and by his fans around the world."
"It's a sad day at 60 MINUTES and for everybody here at CBS News. It's hard to imagine not having Andy around. He loved his life and he lived it on his own terms. We will miss him very much," said Jeff Fager, chairman of CBS News and the executive producer of 60 MINUTES.
Rooney wrote for television since its birth, spending nearly 60 years at CBS, 30 of them behind the camera as a writer and producer, first for entertainment and then news programming, before becoming a household name - a role he said he was never comfortable in. He preferred to be known as a writer and was the author of best-selling books and a national newspaper column, in addition to his 60 MINUTES essays.
But it is his television role as the inquisitive and cranky commentator on 60 MINUTES that made him a cultural icon. For 33 years, Rooney had the last word on the most watched television program in history. Ratings for the broadcast rose steadily over its time period, peaking at a few minutes before the end of the hour, precisely when he delivered his essays, which could generate thousands of response letters.
Each Sunday, Rooney delivered one of his 60 MINUTES essays from behind a desk that he, an expert woodworker, hewed himself. The topics ranged from the contents of that desk's drawer to whether God existed. He often weighed in on major news topics, sometimes seriously and often humorously. In an early 60 MINUTES essay that won him the third of his four Emmy Awards, he reacted to the grain embargo against the Soviet Union by suggesting the U.S. sell them cereal instead. "Are they going to take us seriously as an enemy if they think we eat Cap'n Crunch for breakfast?"
Mainly, his essays struck a cord in viewers by pointing out life's unspoken truths or more often complaining about its subtle lies, earning him the "curmudgeon" status he wore like a uniform. "I obviously have a knack for getting on paper what a lot of people have thought and didn't realize they thought," Rooney told the Associated Press in 1998. In typical themes, Rooney questioned labels on packages, products that didn't seem to work and curious human behavior, such as why people don't talk in elevators.
Rooney asked thousands of questions in his essays over the years, none, however, began with "Did you ever...?", a phrase often associated with him. Comedian Joe Piscopo used it in a 1981 impersonation of him on "Saturday Night Live" and, from then on, it was erroneously linked to Rooney.
Rooney was also mistakenly connected to racism when a politically charged essay highly insensitive to minorities was written in his style and passed off as his on the internet in 2003. Over the next few years, it found its way into the e-mail boxes of untold thousands, causing Rooney to refute it in a 2005 60 MINUTES essay, and again, as it continued to proliferate, in a Associated Press article a year later.
Many assumed he wrote the screed because Rooney's longtime habit of writing or speaking plainly on sensitive topics had often left him open to attacks by activist groups. The racist essay was one of the many false Rooney quotes and essays bouncing around the internet. The racism charge angered and hurt Rooney deeply. He hated racism: As a young soldier in the early 1940s, he had himself arrested in Florida by refusing to leave the seat he had chosen among blacks in the back of an Army bus.
At the height of the AIDS crisis, Rooney had his biggest run-in with a group and it had dire consequences. In February 1990, the gay magazine The Advocate interviewed him after he associated the human choices of drugs, tobacco and gay sex with death in a CBS News special, "A Year With Andy Rooney: 1989." The magazine printed racist remarks attributed to him from the interview, which he vehemently denied making. A torrent of negative publicity followed, after which then-CBS News President David Burke suspended him for three months. The outcry for his return was deafening. Burke reinstated him after only three weeks, saying Rooney was not a man "who holds prejudice in his heart and mind." The ratings for 60 MINUTES, CBS' only top-10 hit that season, dropped while Rooney was off the air.
But the negative publicity and suspension exacted a toll. Rooney said publicly he was "chilled" and admitted the new sensitivity led him to spike a later essay regarding the United Negro College Fund.
Rooney still spoke his mind, however. Thousands of angry letters arrived when he said Kurt Cobain, the young star of hit rock band "Nirvana," was essentially a waste of humanity for taking his own life. Native Americans demanded apologies when he belittled their efforts to stop sports teams from using names like "Braves" in 1995 and again in 1997, when he suggested Indian casino profits be used to support poor tribes. He reacted to the acquittal of O.J. Simpson in 1995 by offering a $1 million reward for information leading to the real killer - a reward he said he would never have to pay because Simpson committed the murders. His essay in 2004, in which he said God told him that the Rev. Pat Robertson and Mel Gibson were "whackos," resulted in 20,000 complaints - the most response any 60 MINUTES issue ever drew.
No group was off limits for Rooney, especially CBS management and his own colleagues. Rooney poked fun at the 60 MINUTES correspondents on a regular basis in his essays, while he questioned CBS management on issues, such as layoffs and strikes, sometimes in his 60 MINUTES essays, but more often in his syndicated newspaper column for Tribune Media Services or in media interviews. During a Writers Guild of America strike against CBS, Rooney, though not in the union, supported it by not writing any 60 MINUTES pieces until the strike was settled. He publicly blamed CBS's troubles of the early 1990s on Chairman Laurence Tisch's cutbacks, daring Tisch to fire him.
Rooney was very popular with the public but drew criticism from the media for his controversial views and for the seemingly effortless style and content of his 60 MINUTES essays. He once took advantage of his popularity to get back at a critic. When Associated Press television critic Frazier Moore wrote that Rooney should quit because his material was getting old, Rooney took Moore to task by broadcasting the newswire's New York phone number, exhorting his 60 MINUTES viewers to tell the writer what they thought of his opinion. The Associated Press logged over 7,000 calls in 48 hours, the vast majority in favor of Rooney.
He rarely attacked his critics publicly, in fact, he sometimes embraced them. On many occasions, he read on the air their most cutting letters, sometimes admitting he was wrong and apologizing. The Cobain and the O.J. Simpson incidents were both essays he regretted writing and he said so on air.
Andrew Aitken Rooney was born January 14, 1919 in Albany, N.Y. He was graduated from Albany Academy High School and attended Colgate University, writing for both of the schools' newspapers. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941, his junior year at Colgate. After brief service in an artillery unit in England, he became a correspondent for The Stars and Stripes for three years. Rooney was one of six correspondents to fly with the Army's Eighth Air Force on the second American bombing raid over Germany - a risky mission the enemy fully expected. He then covered the Allied invasion of Europe and, after the surrender of Germany, filed reports from the Far East.
He was awarded the Bronze Star for his reporting under fire at the battle of Saint Lo.
Rooney wrote about his war experiences in his first three books, the second of which, The Story of the Stars and Stripes, was bought by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for movie rights. Despite going to Hollywood and writing a film script, Rooney's script was never produced, but the sizable sum he earned enabled him to write as a freelancer for several years after the war.
He was hired by CBS in 1949 after a bold encounter in the elevator with Arthur Godfrey. Rooney told the biggest radio star of the day he could use some better writing. His nerve moved Godfrey to hire him for "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts," which moved to television and became a top-ten hit that was number one in 1952. He also wrote for Godfrey's other primetime program, "Arthur Godfrey and His Friends," and the star's daily morning show. He became Godfrey's only writer in 1953, before quitting the lucrative work in 1955, because he felt he could be doing something more important. But after a period of freelance writing, with a wife and four children to support, he returned to television writing on CBS' "The Morning News with Will Rogers, Jr." The best thing that happened to Rooney on the short-lived program was meeting and befriending CBS News Correspondent Harry Reasoner, with whom he collaborated later to great success.
He also wrote for "The Garry Moore Show" (1959-'65), helping it to achieve hit status as a top-20 program. Such regularly featured talents as Victor Borge, Bob and Ray and Perry Como spoke the words written by Rooney during this period. At the same time, he wrote for CBS News public affairs broadcasts, including "The Twentieth Century," "News of America" and "Adventure," and he wrote freelance articles for the biggest magazines of the day, including Life, Look, Esquire and Cosmopolitan.
By the mid-1960s, Rooney's name was a familiar credit at the end of CBS News programs. "The most felicitous nonfiction writer in television" is how Time magazine described Rooney in 1969, by then a winner of the Writers Guild Award for Best Script of the Year six times.
Rooney had convinced CBS News he could write for television on any subject when he wrote his first television essay in 1964, an original genre he is credited with developing. Proving his point, he picked doors as the subject and Reasoner as the voice for "An Essay on Doors." The team - Rooney writing and producing and Reasoner narrating -- went on to create such critically acclaimed specials as "An Essay on Bridges" (1965), "An Essay on Hotels" (1966), "An Essay on Women" (1967), "An Essay on Chairs" (1968) and "The Strange Case of the English Language" (1968).
Rooney also wrote and produced many news documentaries, including the most comprehensive television treatment of Frank Sinatra, "Frank Sinatra: Living With the Legend," with Walter Cronkite in 1965. Rooney had met Cronkite in World War II and they had remained close friends for the rest of their lives. He wrote two CBS News specials for the series "Of Black America" in 1968, one of which, "Black History: Lost, Stolen or Strayed," won him his first Emmy and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award's First Prize for Television.
Rooney also produced for Reasoner at 60 MINUTES during the broadcast's first few seasons and made his on-screen "debut." He and the broadcast's senior producer, Palmer Williams, appeared in silhouette as "Ipso and Facto" in a short-lived opinion segment called "Digressions." Then, after Reasoner left for ABC in 1970, Rooney also left the Network briefly. Having trouble getting his material on the air, he purchased his "An Essay on War" from CBS and took it to public television to be broadcast on "Great American Dream Machine." The 1971 program was Rooney's first appearance as himself on television and won him his third Writers Guild Award. He wrote and produced more essays for the program, appearing in those as well.
He returned to CBS in 1973 after a short stint with Reasoner at ABC News and then wrote, produced and narrated a series of broadcasts for CBS News on various aspects of American life between 1975 and 1989. These included "Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington," for which he won a Peabody Award, "Andy Rooney Takes Off," "Mr. Rooney Goes to Work" and "Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner." He also appeared several times in 1977 and 1978 on 60 MINUTES doing segments that included "Super Salesman," a look at the relationship between the Colonial Penn Life Insurance Company, the National Retired Teachers Association and the American Association of Retired Persons, in which he suggested the AARP was created as a vehicle to sell insurance to the elderly.
Rooney then was given the job as summer replacement for the Shana Alexander and James J. Kilpatrick "Point/Counterpoint" 60 MINUTES segment. In this first essay, "Three Minutes or so with Andy Rooney," on July 2, 1978, he attacked the dark tradition of tallying the highway deaths during the holiday weekend. In the fall, "A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney" became a regular segment, alternating with Alexander and Kilpatrick. The following season (1979-'80), Rooney had the end of the broadcast to himself, holding forth in front of an audience approaching 40 million - the number-one television program in America.
The National Society of Newspaper Columnists recognized Rooney's rich body of work with its Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award in June 2003. Rooney was a friend of Pyle, the famous World War II correspondent felled by a sniper, whom he met while covering the war for The Stars and Stripes. The Overseas Press Club honored Rooney with its President's Award in April 2010 for his war reporting.
Rooney was a rabid New York Giants football fan whose 50-plus years of season tickets began in a seat behind a pole at the Polo Grounds. Attending such public events was often problematic for the recognizable Rooney, who didn't sign autographs because he thought it a silly endeavor linked to his television fame. Always proud of his writing, he would gladly sign one of his 16 books - provided it was sent to him with a stamped and addressed return envelope. In addition to The Story of the Stars and Stripes, Rooney wrote: Air Gunner; Conquerors' Peace; The Fortunes of War; A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney; And More by Andy Rooney; Pieces of My Mind; Word for Word; Not That You Asked...; Sweet and Sour; My War; Sincerely, Andy Rooney; Common Nonsense; Years of Minutes; Out of My Mind and Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit.
Rooney resided in Manhattan; he also kept a family vacation home in Rensselaerville, N.Y and the first home he ever purchased, in Rowayton, Conn.. He was pre-deceased by his wife of 62 years, Marguerite (nee Howard), in 2004. He is survived by his four children Ellen, a photographer, Brian, the longtime ABC News correspondent, Emily, the original host of "Greater Boston," a local public affairs television program on PBS, and Martha Fishel, chief of the Public Services division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine; five grandchildren and two great grandchildren. He was pre-deceased by his sister, Nancy.
Funeral services will be private; a memorial service will be announced at a future date.
Following are statements from Andy's colleagues at 60 MINUTES:
Morley Safer:
Underneath that gruff exterior, was a prickly interior...and deeper down was a sweet and gentle man, a patriot with a love of all things American, like good bourbon and a delicious hatred for prejudice and hypocrisy.
Scott Pelley:
"The Romans had Cicero. The English had Dickens. America had Andy. He hid a philosopher's genius behind the honest prose of Everyman. Apparently, God needed a writer."
Steve Kroft:
Andy always said he wanted to work until the day he died and he managed to do it, save the past few weeks in the hospital. What a life: ninety- two years of doing what you love to do while engaging and entertaining millions and millions of people.
He played an invaluable role in the success of 60 MINUTES over the years, providing a much anticipated final course at the end of what was usually a good meal. Sometimes Andy offered up a confection, sometimes it was a shot of Irish whiskey, but was it was always delivered with a twinkle in the eye. I think its' fair to say that he was the most popular person ever to appear on 60 MINUTES, and I'm sure Andy would agree with that assessment.
Lesley Stahl:
Andy Rooney was our poet laureate. He was the Oracle of West 57th St., an everyman if everyman wrote like a dream. He was the most popular member of our team, loved by the audience, and far more loved by all of us than he knew. On his 80th birthday, when some of us spoke of him with affection, his eyes watered up with surprise. He will be missed and mourned.
Bob Simon:
Wherever I went in America, whenever anyone suspected I worked for 60 MINUTES, their first question would be: "How's Andy?" I'd reply: "He's fine. How would you expect him to be?" Or something curmudgeonly like that: something which wouldn't make Andy wince too much.
It is not difficult to tell stories which make viewers angry or sad. But to make them laugh? That's an art form. Andy did it better than anyone on television without ever telling a joke.
For me, his finest moment was his last appearance on 60 MINUTES. He said: "I`m not retiring. Writers don't retire and I'll always be a writer."
Susan Bieber:
A few words could not adequately express my sadness on Andy's passing. I had the honor to be his producer for 16 great years. Andy always said that he was just an average guy, however we knew better.
http://www.ktvn.com/story/15966899/former-60-minutes-commentator-andy-rooney-dies
Nov. 5, 2011