Great editorial in this morning's paper written by a friend of Peters (it's a very funny read - well worth the few minutes it will take):
"A kid from Ottawa called Pete"
He was unpretentious, laughed easily and never was Peter Jennings to me, writes friend of 40 years, Gordon Farr
Pete died last night. This morning I stood in my apartment doorway, coffee in hand, and read the announcement on the front page of my newspaper, and the tears flowed. And the memories.
Back when the earth was still cooling — the mid-'60s — I was a boy producer/director for the CTV Television network. For some unfathomable reason, the programming executives gave the go-ahead to a daily early-morning show I created, called Bright & Early.
It ran from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m., and today — if I allowed my ego to take over — I could think of it as the precursor to the slick, professional and highly-regarded, Canada A.M. In reality it was a dog's breakfast.
It featured puppets, an out-of-work actor in period costume reading 100-year-old news, weather, sports, and interviews with anybody in town promoting anything. It was cheap and cheerful.
The classiest, and most professional member of the regular cast was my equally youthful newsreader, a kid from Ottawa called Peter Jennings.
He had it even then; the looks, the voice, the authority, not to mention great suits.
Of course, the pants sometimes didn't match. "Hey, Gordie, I'm sitting behind a desk. They'll never know."
We had a couple of things in common. There was our mutual lack of formal education — I had barely completed high school, he hadn't. But, mainly, laughter at the absurdities of life.
I had booked an alligator wrestler from some tourist association on the show. What the heck, he was free and filled 10 minutes of time. Because the studio was small, the only place to keep the alligator was five feet away from the news desk. Pete "casually" suggested, "Perhaps the handler could put a rope around its jaws, I don't know any one-legged newsmen." It was done.
The actual alligator-wrestling act turned out to be even less than anti-climactic.
Some guy in tights and a cape, flipped and flopped around the floor with the eight-foot "killer." It was so unresponsive, it might as well have been stuffed.
After the show I apologized to everybody for booking such an inept act. Pete started to laugh. "The guy told me, the alligator had a cold. When he roped its jaw shut, it suffocated. Congratulations, Gordie, we have the only show on the air featuring dead alligator-wrestling!" (Sorry, animal rights activists but it was 40 years ago and who knew.)
Of course the network rightly cancelled the show after a year, and Pete and I drifted on to the next stages of our careers. I ended up in Los Angeles hoping to be the next great television comedy writer. Pete took on Huntley and Brinkley and Walter Cronkite, hoping to be the next great network anchorman. Neither of us succeeded first time around.
I remember a phone conversation a couple of years later.
"My god, Pete, what's my life coming to? I just wrote something called Me and the Chimp. And his reply: `Your life? I just referred to somebody as a `leff-tenant' to 20 million viewers!'"
We didn't see each other until the mid-'70s. It was in Rome, and we arranged to have lunch at a restaurant in some piazza. Pete was now a foreign correspondent for ABC. And did he ever look the part; trench coat, fluent Italian, stories about presidents and kings he had interviewed. I was dazzled; this wasn't the kid from Ottawa.
And then, after lunch, he bought my wife a single rose and presented it to her, as gallantly as Fred Astaire in a '30s movie. She almost swooned, I almost retched, and then he burst into laughter. Yup, he was still the kid from Ottawa.
We moved on, struggling upwards, downwards or sideways with our respective careers.
"How much money do you make?" I told him. "Hell, I'm a major correspondent and I don't make that much." He had no idea he'd eventually be earning $6 million or more a year, nor do I think it was his foremost goal. I asked him, what did he want to do, what did he want to be? "Honestly? Right now I'd rather be canoeing in Algonquin Park." The kid from Ottawa.
Over the following years we'd meet occasionally, when I was in New York, or he was in L.A. By then he was, The Anchor.
He was good; respected by his peers, authoritative, his news program Number 1 in America.
I hung around his office, we had dinners together — I almost choked when he spoke fluent Arabic to a waitress at the Café des Artiste — he raced my Mini-Cooper through the Hollywood Hills late one night, we commiserated about broken marriages, boasted about our sons.
We laughed about wrestling dead alligators.
At ABC headquarters in New York, he was always Peter, never Pete — World News Tonight with Pete Jennings just didn't work.
We got on an elevator once and Pete introduced me to Roone Arledge, then the head of ABC News.
He said, "Roone I'd like you to meet an old friend, Gordie Farr."
I shook hands and said, "Nice to meet you, Pete's often spoken about you." Arledge raised an eyebrow at the "Pete," but Pete burst into laughter and gave me a "You win" grin. Pete and Gordie it was, and will ever be.
Damn. Forty years of friendship. I'm out of coffee. I'm not out of tears.
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Gordon Farr is a Canadian television writer, producer and director.