CHICAGO -- It has been four years since Max Robinson coanchored the ABC evening
news with Peter Jennings and the late Frank Reynolds. "I still get
questions from black Americans who say, 'What happened to Max Robinson?'
" says Jennings, now the sole anchor.
The answer to the question is both mystifying and obvious.
Somewhere along the way, Robinson's rise turned into a tumble, a
change of direction that gained speed as it went. His work habits were
erratic and he railed against ABC, the network that paid his six-figure
salary. He drank too much. Eventually, he left ABC and returned,
briefly, to local television. For nearly three years, he has not worked
regularly in television and, most recently, not at all.
The past tense comes up a lot when people talk about Max Robinson.
Those who know him theorize about inner demons -- as if whatever
Advertisement
whittled away his life and career must have come from within. Once, as a
Washington anchor paired with Gordon Peterson, he was a local hero. A
jump to a network seemed inevitable and, with ABC in 1978, he became the
nation's first black network anchor. He seemed destined to illustrate a
new concept in the American mindscape: Blacks can read the news, too.
"The camera was in love with the guy," says Andrew Porte, an ABC
producer who was Chicago bureau chief during Robinson's years at ABC.
Today, there are few interruptions in the 49-year-old Robinson's
life. The phone at his small Marina Towers apartment rang once or twice
during a recent afternoon. A nurse who answered the door left as quietly
as she had worked. Robinson's assistant and secretary stopped by briefly
with a pile of mail accumulated from his other apartment in Hyde Park.
Advertisement
He wore cotton slacks and a pullover top and white socks and propped
his feet up on a chair as he talked. Next to him a timer beeped when it
was time to take his medication. He walked with a cane, dark wood with a
brass knob, which he explained as a necessity after two months bedridden
in the hospital in December, a time when he nearly died.
By his own description, he is more spiritual and certainly more calm
than in the days when he was confronting network executives. His days
are spent working on his autobiography -- "when I'm up to it" -- and
seeing people he knows. He plans to stay in Chicago, though most of his
family is in the Washington area.
He is also selling his Afro-American art collection. A painter
himself, Robinson amassed the art with guidance from Washington artist
and gallery owner Adolphus Ealey, who estimates it to be worth half a
Advertisement
million dollars.
"The collection became a burden," Robinson says, "and if there's
anything I've learned recently it's that all too many of us have too
many things." He also could use the money.
His hospitalization brought him an enormous amount of sympathy. He
received hundreds of cards, was visited by the famous -- Jesse Jackson,
Oprah Winfrey (who visited often) -- and sought after by the curious.
But even out of the hospital, he continues to be a subject of attention
in Chicago and in media circles along the East Coast.
It is widely rumored that Robinson has AIDS, and he's aware of that.
"The curiosity has at times annoyed me," he says. But neither he nor
anyone close to him will discuss his illness with outsiders. "I'm just
not going to get into the subject of what I have," Robinson says.
He was released from the hospital in February, seemingly stunned
Advertisement
himself by his recovery. He continues to get stronger, under the care of
Chicago physician Robert Fliegelman, a specialist in infectious
diseases. His doctors, he says, jokingly refer to him as Lazarus
"I've had very difficult times," says Max Robinson. "I've been to
hell and back."
Friends and colleagues describe Robinson as gregarious, articulate,
impassioned, temperamental, moody -- by turns generous and
mean-spirited. He could be charming and entertaining, a wonderful mimic
of such colleagues as Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson.
But he was plagued by a prima-donna reputation and disparaged by
some of his colleagues. His absences from the air and criticism of the
network -- most notably, a stinging speech on racism in television
delivered at Smith College in 1981 -- were chronicled by the press.
Advertisement
Robinson wore a constant and heavy mantle: He could not escape being
a symbol of achievement for blacks. It stayed with him whether he was
fretting over being treated with enough respect or agonizing over how
much he was actually doing to advance the position of blacks in
television.
Always there for contrast was his brother Randall, a Harvard-trained
lawyer and antiapartheid activist -- the very embodiment, it seemed, of
service to black causes.
"Max was as close to the top of the front line of power in the news
industry as we have come," says Randall, 46. But, he adds, "he
understood what more had to be done in the industry ... He could not be
satisfied simply being Max Robinson, anchorman." Broadcast News
He walked into his first Washington television job virtually off the
street. It was 1965.
"A great-looking guy, dressed beautifully, great voice," Jim Silman,
Advertisement
then the program director of Channel 9 (formerly WTOP television, now
WUSA), remembers thinking about Max Robinson when he showed up. "I think
I hired him on the spot."
Silman started Robinson as a "floor director," a jack-of-all-trades,
putting up sets, cuing talent, even sweeping the floors. But Silman, now
an independent producer, saw Robinson's potential and one day decided to
test him secretly.
Robinson was working on a set, and Silman and the late John S.
Hayes, president of Post-Newsweek Stations, which then owned WTOP, were
in the glassed-in control room. Over the loudspeaker, Silman said, "Max,
we want to test the microphone. Sit in the newsman's position and give
us a check."
Robinson did.
"We had him read from a newspaper," Silman recalled. "He looked
great and sounded great. Mr. Hayes and I looked at each other, and the
Advertisement
next week he was in our news department."
For someone growing up in segregated Richmond, there was little
inspiration to go into television. His mother Doris was a schoolteacher
before her marriage to Maxie Robinson, a former Virginia Union
University football star who taught history at Armstrong High School and
coached several sports.
The four children were raised in a cocoon of support. "I really had
a whole environment that said I could achieve, that my brothers could
achieve," says the oldest of the children, Jewell, now an actress in
Washington. Max was next in age, followed by Randall and Jean Robinson
Yancey, who is director of public relations at the Duke Ellington School
of the Arts here.
In a house full of books, Robinson remembers himself as something of
a Renaissance child, delving into philosophy, science, even medical
Advertisement
texts. He attended Oberlin on scholarship for a year in 1957, then
dropped out because of illness. He never returned to the school, where
his academic record was neither dazzling nor disastrous, and says he
always regretted not going back. He later entered the Air Force and he
studied Russian at its language school at Indiana University.
His initial encounter with television came at a low-power station in
Portsmouth, Va. Robinson recalls it as WTOV, a now-defunct independent
UHF station, which later became part of the Christian Broadcasting
Network-Continental and is known as WYAH.
Robinson did station breaks and read the news -- but always with a
graphic filling the screen that said simply "News."
One day before going on, he told the cameraman to remove the slide.
"I thought it would be good for all my folks and friends to see me
rather than this dumb news sign up there. Vanity got the better of me."
The next day, Robinson recalls, the owner called him and
apologetically fired him. "He'd gotten these calls from some irate
whites who'd found out that one of those people was working there."
Robinson says he found the incident predictable rather than
traumatizing. (One Norfolk area television station executive who
remembers that era says it was common for small stations to do newscasts
without any face on screen.) Robinson, however, was tantalized by the
fact that television news was essentially off limits to blacks. "That
was before any of us were on," he says, "because I was one of the
earliest."
As soon as Robinson joined the WTOP news department in 1965, he
proved himself covering fires, robberies, murders. He was, in the words
of Edward F. Ryan, a former news director, "a guy who went after stories
and got 'em."
He wasn't a reporter at WTOP very long before WRC "grabbed him,"
Silman recalls. He became WRC's first black reporter in 1966.
"His air presence, his voice, poise, his looks were such that we
gave him a good bit of air work," recalled Bill Monroe, now editor of
Washington Journalism Review and who in 1966 was Washington bureau chief
for NBC, which owns the station.
There he won six awards, including a national Emmy, for a series on
life in Anacostia; he made friends. "He always talked to everyone, he
always was very friendly. Max was always up," recalled Betty Endicott, a
WRC reporter at the time and now general manager of WTTG, Channel 5.
But there were problems. "He had a habit of not showing up
occasionally," said Irwin Margolis, then the station's news director.
"It gets real irritating when you're trying to put on a newscast."
And, increasingly, management was having doubts.
An industry source who asked not to be identified says WRC
management was reluctant to push Robinson further until he "developed as
a reporter first." Robinson saw it differently: In an interview years
later, he told The Washington Post that he had asked for an anchor slot
but had been told, as he put it, "The time isn't right."
Robinson felt racial bias was behind the turndown, and in 1969 he
returned to WTOP -- first as a reporter, then as midday news anchor and
finally as coanchor with Gordon Peterson of "Eyewitness News" at 6 and
"The more I looked at him on the air and the more I got to know him,
the more I felt he was a very strong person," recalled former WTOP news
director James L. Snyder, describing Robinson's on-air persona. Snyder
teamed Robinson and Peterson in the spring of 1971. "There were no black
anchors in any major city. I felt he could do it."
It was a stellar pairing; within a few years the team had soared to
the top of the rating charts in both nightly time spots and essentially
stayed there during Robinson's tenure. Robinson even became part of the
news. When the Hanafi Muslims took over the headquarters of B'nai
B'rith, one of their leader's first phone calls was to Max Robinson. And
when Robinson left Washington for Chicago, Channel 9 ran a documentary
These WTOP anchor years may have been Robinson's happiest and most
productive. "Gordon was the best partner I ever had," Robinson says.
Their connection was genuine, warm and fused with the shorthand that
develops between people who work closely together.
"I remember once on the air Gordon made a segue -- it was a most
unfortunate segue," says Robinson, smiling as he tells the story. "He
said, 'Speaking of trouble, 5,000 black people are descending on Gary,
Indiana' -- and he caught himself. He had come from a story about
trouble and he catches himself and says, 'No, I didn't mean that! Max,
tell them.' He panics. On the air. Live," Robinson says, chuckling. He
switches to a low, calming voice. "I said, 'I know you didn't. I
understand what you're trying to do.' "
He had friends, charisma and dashing good looks. "Women swooned over
him," recalled Jean Freas, a New York free lance who was a Washington
television reporter at the time. "He was just astonishingly handsome and
He also had a reputation as a ladies' man and a history of
unsuccessful marriages. He is neither pleased by the characterization --
"Some of my best friends have been women," he counters -- nor expansive
on his matrimonial record.
His first marriage to a Richmond woman ended in 1968, after five
years and three children. His second marriage was annulled after a
month, and his third, in 1973 to social worker Beverly Hamilton, broke
up 10 years later. Their 11-year-old son lives with his mother in
Chicago; she still visits Robinson regularly. "I will always love
Beverly Hamilton Robinson," he says.
At WTOP, Robinson became a godfather to aspiring black reporters and
technicians -- intervening with management, doing personal favors. "One
day out of the blue he asked me, 'What size suit do you wear?' " recalls
Mike Murphy, a cameraman who was in a minority training program when
Robinson was starting as anchor. "He bought me a suit!"
Robinson became so prominent that he was becoming a role model for
many black Washingtonians. Snyder, now a vice president of Post-Newsweek
Stations, remembered talking to a woman from Prince George's County:
"When the news came on Channel 9 she would sit her children in front of
the TV and say, 'You see how he's dressed? You see how he sounds? That's
the way I want you to look and sound.' "
But his colleagues and friends were beginning to see a dark side.
There were periods of being "crazy and depressed" and times of heavy
drinking. "He was a very gifted guy," says Gordon Peterson, "but he felt
sometimes that the gifts would go away. He lacked confidence in
himself." He seemed nagged by doubts -- uneasy about rising so high so
fast, unsure of his talents.
"I think one of my basic flaws has been a lack of esteem, not really
feeling great about myself, always feeling like I had to do more,"
Robinson says now. "I never could do enough or be good enough. And that
was the real problem."
He pauses. "In fact, it probably was the essential problem I had
throughout my career, throughout my life."
The inner conflicts surfaced in public ways: "There were days when
he'd call at quarter of 6 and say he wasn't going to be in," recalls
former Channel 9 reporter Susan King, now with WJLA, Channel 7, who
often substituted for him. "He did this enough times to give me an
unusual opportunity ... It was blue moods; he just couldn't get himself
together."
It got worse. In 1973, wracked with grief over the death of his
father, he fired a .357 magnum pistol that had belonged to his father
from the patio of his Northwest apartment.
"Max was in heavy brooding," said Channel 9 reporter Bob Strickland,
who was there that night. "He was having more than a few drinks and the
pistol appeared and he just went out and fired ... He must have fired 18
or 20 rounds, talking about his dad ... racial discrimination kind of
talk, how tough life was."
He was arrested and fined $25, and the next night he apologized on
the air, drawing a sympathetic response from viewers.
But none of this stopped his rise in Washington.
His brother Randall encouraged him to go to the network. "At first I
wasn't gung-ho about it," Max recalls. He was comfortable with family,
home and career. "I'm not the most ambitious person in the world."
But ABC was very interested. "What we were really taken with were
the tapes of the {Hanafi} hostage crisis in Washington and how he
handled it," says ABC News Executive Vice President David Burke. They
made a spectacular offer: an anchor post in Chicago (with a salary
variously reported to be from $200,000 to $300,000 a year) as part of
the new three-anchor evening newscast.
"It seemed like a nice fit," Burke says. The ABC Battleground
"When Max came to Chicago, all of us looked up to him," says veteran
Chicago television reporter Russ Ewing, who is also black. "We thought
it was the best thing that had happened."
Robinson saw the job as a way to change things on-screen. "I tended
to take on the burdens of others much too readily," Robinson says now.
"So ABC became a challenge of not just Max and the network but a
challenge that affected black people in this country."
And if he found something he didn't like inside the business, he
planned to speak out on that too. He'd always done that.
"I can remember we were having a meeting at WTOP and I raised the
point that a story we were doing on home buyers did not have one person
of color," he says. "And I remember one of my colleagues saying, 'But,
Max, it has nothing to do with black people.' As if you had to have a
black story for black people. I was horrified."
ABC was a formidable battleground, and by his own admission, he was
zealous about taking on the battle against racism in all the "nooks and
crannies" of the network.
"It wasn't a personal thing with me," he says. "I felt it was very
much institutional ... I remember someone once saying to me that I
wasn't a team player, and I said, 'I'd be happy to play on the team if
the rules were not structured against me and my people.' "
But this was a game where he needed to be a team player. ABC's new
anchor format (in London, Washington and Chicago) was something of a
three-ring circus, fraught with frustrations for all the anchors but
especially for Robinson, who was relegated to the least important ring.
Furthermore, his leap to national anchor highlighted his weaknesses.
As Roone Arledge, group president of ABC News and Sports, who
conceived the format, envisioned Robinson's job, it would require
reportorial dexterity, not to mention stamina. Stationed in "the
heartland," Robinson would be a roving anchor-correspondent: "someone
who would show up everywhere," says Arledge. "That was probably not a
task that Max was used to doing, and he required a good bit of help."
And there was the city itself -- racially and ethnically polarized,
a place where outsiders who come to make their names are treated with
suspicion.
"He was never treated by ABC as a participant in the broadcast,"
says Carl Bernstein, ABC Washington bureau chief in 1980 and 1981, who
was present at many Washington and New York meetings involving the
planning of news coverage. "He was always treated as a mouth or a face."
Bernstein, a friend from the days when Robinson covered the District
Building here, also says, "There was a conscious policy almost of
excluding him from any decision-making that had to do with that
broadcast."
"There's no question that the first two years were very, very
difficult," Robinson says. "I really became paranoid at times feeling
that some {weak} producers were assigned to me deliberately."
"There's guilt all around," Arledge says. "I think that Max didn't
seize the moment and make it work as well as it might have. On the other
hand I think there was a tendency on the part of people early on to
Share this articleSharecategorize Max as 'This is what he does -- he's effective on camera,
he's a good reader but he's not the kind of fireman reporter you can put
on a plane and fly to Kansas City when the {Hyatt Regency} collapses.' "
Finally, Arledge says, "I just mandated that Max do stories."
He went to the 1980 political conventions; he went to Pennsylvania
to cover the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident and to Fort
Wayne, Ind., to cover the devastating floods of 1982.
Some of his stories were very good, some were not so good, according
to Arledge. Sometimes Robinson's own fear got in the way of improvement.
"If he had realized his talent," says his former producer, Ray Nunn,
"he might have relaxed, he might have taken risks -- what he considered
risks and what others considered development."
Once, annoyed over not being allowed to take Martin Luther King
Jr.'s birthday off, he arrived at the ABC studios very late, jeans-clad
and inebriated, according to a technical staffer on the set. Robinson
took his place at the anchor desk only minutes before the newscast. "You
could see him trying to light his cigarette," says the staffer,
mimicking Robinson struggling to prop his elbow up on the desk only to
have it slip off.
But when cameras zoomed in, "Max did it like he always does, just a
pace slower," says the staffer, awe in his voice. "Max is a pro."
Robinson denies the incident ever occurred.
Any gaffe he made was magnified by virtue of his status. The most
famous involved his arriving in a chauffeur-driven limousine at the
Tylenol homicide investigation headquarters, seeking an interview with
the Illinois attorney general. Gary Deeb, then a Chicago television
columnist and one of Robinson's biggest critics, excoriated the anchor.
Producer Milt Weiss, who had sent Robinson on the assignment, takes
responsibility. "Max was in transit from his house to the office and I
called him from his car and said, 'Max, I need you to get there, this is
a big break,' " Weiss says. "And so he went right there. He did not
normally cover stories from a limousine."
Obscured were the assignments he did well. His profile of an
industrial town in Pennsylvania throttled by a steel mill closing
allowed him to employ what Weiss believes was Robinson's forte: "He
could interview anyone and get them to open up to him, whether it was a
skid row bum or the president of International Harvester."
Once, Weiss and Robinson came across a story of a black child in
Chicago who needed a liver transplant. An earlier network story on a
white child in a similar situation had resulted in a public outpouring
But, Weiss recalls, in the case of the black child his welfare
mother "had no idea how to go about getting him what he needed. We did a
story ... and money came in to ABC but not at the rate that it did for
the white child. But before a trust fund could get rolling, the boy
died. And we never talked about it, but you could just see in
{Robinson's} face when he heard the boy died that it was very painful
for him. I think it just reminded him of the desperation and problems
some black people have." The Robinson Network
Robinson reveled in the trappings of being The Anchor. Friends say he
loved the attention and the fan mail and the prestige. He often sat in
his ABC office reading and playing symphonic music -- just a touch too
loud so people would hear, thought his friend and cameraman Kenneth
Bedford, who tweaked him.
He and his wife Beverly entertained friends at their art-filled
North Side apartment and later at their home in South Shore. From his
back door you could walk to the lake front, where friends would pull up
in their boats. After their marriage ended, he held parties at his art
studio loft and sometimes would preside dramatically swathed in African
garb, clutching a cane for effect.
He was commanding in public appearances. Speeches before youth and
community groups often ended with inspirational crescendos that left
even his colleagues stunned. At the end of one Robinson gave in Los
Angeles, producer Weiss says, "I remember thinking if this guy ever
wanted to be a TV preacher or a politician or anything that ever
involved captivating people, he could do it."
And, conflicts aside, he was something of a dean to other black
television journalists. When Royal Kennedy, now a reporter and producer
at Chicago's public television station, wanted to move from her ABC job
in Chicago to Los Angeles, it was Robinson, she says, who urged network
executives to give her a West Coast position.
When Bruce Rheins, then a 23-year-old writer at ABC in Chicago,
substituted as principal national news writer for five months, the New
York bureau mercilessly shuttled his copy back for changes. Robinson put
an end to the tinkering by saying that the copy was good. "He stuck up
for me," Rheins says.
Patricia Arnold Gamble, a producer, had just been hired when she met
Robinson, whose ABC office was across the hall.
"You know, you hop from one plantation to another," she says, "and I
was telling him my horror stories. There weren't many blacks {there} at
the time. We were just kind of a support group for each other. And he
was kind of a mentor and took this group under his wing."
They would share daily battles and long-range dreams. "We would sit
there on the floor with him and his wife until 3 in the morning,
listening to him on the soapbox. He loved that," Gamble says. "He helped
me step back from it ... Sometimes you just have to do a job."
Gamble readily says it was advice that Robinson, himself, rarely
"He looked like he'd reached the top of the electronic media," says
Donn F. Bailey, director of the Center for Inner City Studies of
Northeastern Illinois University. "Most of us thought he'd be secure.
The more you got to know him on a social level, the more you got to see
how uncertain he was -- 'What am I going to do after this? What happens
when this bubble bursts?' "
Bailey was one of a number of blacks, loosely connected through
social and professional ties, who often chatted informally with Robinson
about social issues and how the media handled them.
Weiss sensed a melancholy man who did not quite belong anywhere. "He
was one of three anchors and the only one who didn't come up through the
network ranks," Weiss says. "He was the only black one. He was in a city
that wasn't his home town. He didn't know who his friends were."
When Robinson got depressed, he would simply go into seclusion. "He
would call sometimes at 3 or 4 in the morning," says Gamble. "I'm sure
anyone who's close to him has gotten early-morning or late-night calls.
You could tell from his tone or from how evasive he was ... that he was
depressed."
Weiss recalls one vulnerable moment -- the only time he ever saw
Robinson drunk. They had been working late and went out for drinks. "I
remember I began to feel very uncomfortable about things he was asking,"
Weiss says. "He said, 'How come you don't want to be my friend? You
never invite me over to your house.' It would never occur to me to
invite the anchorman over to my house. I mean, Peter Jennings has never
been to my house. Eventually he started to doze and I got him home. The
driver and I physically got him into the house."
"He'd call me and tell me, 'This is terrible,' and 'I don't like
this,' " says ABC's Burke. "I'd go out on an occasion or two and we'd
have dinner and talk about it ... I didn't think I knew what to do to
relieve his unhappiness. I didn't think I could reach it." The Smith
The "infamous Smith speech" -- as even Robinson refers to it -- was
delivered on a snowy Sunday in February 1981. Robinson says now that his
anger "was part of the motivation for the speech, even though I will
stand behind in my calmest moments everything I said."
Robinson already had made a stinging speech in November 1980 in Los
Angeles before a media forum in which he said that Ronald Reagan's
arrival in Washington "was not a good day" for black people.
But in the Smith speech, he took his own bosses to task. He
lambasted the television news industry's one-sided depiction of the
"orgy of patriotism" resulting from Reagan's inauguration and the
release of the Iranian hostages. And he criticized his own exclusion --
as well as that of two other black network correspondents -- from the
coverage of those two events. ("I was furious" at being left out,
Robinson says today. Arledge says there was no reason why Robinson
should have been assigned, since the former was a Washington political
event and the latter a foreign story.)
"Why, the networks even failed to recognize America's black
ambassador to Algiers, who played a key role in the hostage
negotiations," the Smith College newspaper, The Sophian, quoted Robinson
saying. "The ambassador and his wife were standing right next to Warren
Christopher kissing everything that moved through that receiving line in
West Germany."
The speech, predictably, caused a furor. "People were not happy,"
Jennings recalls, "but people in large corporations are never happy to
hear that racism exists." Jennings wouldn't comment on Robinson's
remarks, but noted, "Nobody should have been surprised to hear a black
person working for a company stand up and say that."
Robinson was called to New York, where Arledge met with him in his
office in Sports "so it wouldn't look like he was being called on the
carpet," Arledge recalls.
Their talk started with Arledge discussing Robinson's delicate
position and asking him to make a statement clarifying his feelings.
"You're a high-profile person," he says he told Robinson. "You can't
drop a phrase like 'Your company is racist' and not expect people to
But it ended up a discussion that lasted four hours. "He said it was
an unconscious kind of racism," Arledge remembers. "I said, 'Explain
that. I'm a white person. I don't understand.' "
According to Arledge, Robinson's speech and the subsequent meeting
between the two men set in motion a number of informal discussions among
ABC correspondents and other employees about the subtle nature of
racism. And ABC set up an advisory panel of some of its black employees.
"I don't want to make it A to B overnight," Arledge says, "but ... it
started in motion a sense that there might be an unconscious kind of --
not racism, but activities that could be perceived the wrong way." An
Embarrassing Absence
Robinson left his job on a memorable faux pas: In July 1983, he
missed Frank Reynolds' funeral.
It was a televised event, which the Reagans were attending. Robinson
was to be seated next to Nancy Reagan.
The day before, producer Milt Weiss was sitting in Robinson's
office. "He got into a rather sad discussion about funerals, about how
uncomfortable funerals made him feel ... He felt there was a lot of
hypocrisy in terms of what people said." The funeral was in Washington
and both Weiss and Robinson were flying out the next day. "He said since
we had to leave very early in the morning he'd send his car and driver
to pick me up first and then pick him up at his apartment."
In the morning, Weiss was driven to Robinson's apartment. But when
Weiss buzzed, there was no answer, nor was there an answer when he and
the building manager knocked on the door. Weiss left without Robinson.
"What happened to Max, which he later told me," Weiss says, "was he
went home, had several drinks, couldn't get to sleep, took some
prescription drugs that the doctor had given him -- and that in
combination with the liquor -- and just passed out."
The media portrayed this as Robinson's ultimate, most embarrassing
absence, although ABC executives, including Arledge, played down its
importance. "It was more significant in retrospect than it was that
particular day," Arledge says.
Shortly after Reynolds' death, Jennings was elevated to sole anchor
-- a decision with which Robinson does not quibble. Robinson was
transferred to Washington to do the weekday evening "News Briefs,"
sandwiched between prime-time shows. On Saturday nights, he anchored the
network's late-night news show.
The news briefs, Robinson says, "became a sort of joke. People
teasing you about being the highest paid per-minute television person in
the history of the business. They were correct." He lets out a deep
"There was no way to sugarcoat it entirely," Arledge says but adds,
"It wasn't a demotion." Arledge asserts that the network wanted to keep
him but that there was simply no place for Robinson at an anchor desk
except on weekends. "I said it's a cruel coincidence," Arledge says.
By early in 1984, he had an offer from Chicago's Channel 5 to be a
coanchor of its evening show.
"I remember David Burke calling and asking me not to do it. They
wanted me to stay," Robinson says.
"We didn't stand in his way," Burke says. "Given the alternatives we
could see at the moment, we saw no reason why we should knock that
{potential job} off the tracks if that's what he wanted." The Anchor
He was going to a station that was owned by NBC in the third largest
market in the country. Beleaguered for years by third-place ratings,
Channel 5 management saw Robinson as a shot in the arm for the station,
where he would coanchor its 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts.
"We had a good news program but we didn't have a personality and we
thought that would add some spin," says Monte Newman, the former general
manager at Channel 5, now an advertising executive, who pushed for the
Robinson hire. Robinson was paid $500,000 a year, according to one
industry source.
But the 10 p.m. newscast with Robinson and Ron Magers just didn't
work. Their relations on the air were cordial but hardly warm. "If
there's competition between anchors," says one television source, "it's
death for the newscast."
The ratings didn't budge from third place.
"Max was the most reserved, aloof, formal person I've ever worked
with," says Magers, who is still a coanchor. "We finally made it to
dinner one night, and I asked him if there was anything I could do to
help our relationship on the air and he said no, he thought it was
In the end, it wasn't. "I was very unhappy at Channel 5," Robinson
says, "and it doesn't compare to ABC, really. It was worse ... I had
gotten tired of fighting the same old battles."
He finally ended his relationship with Channel 5 by going to
Cleveland to attend a local Emmys ceremony -- and never returning to the
In Cleveland, he was treated by a doctor, then entered a medical
rehabilitation program in the West "to deal with the problems I was
going through at that time." Later he was also treated at the Hazelden
alcohol and drug rehabilitation program; he refuses to discuss details
but denies he had a drug problem.
A television executive familiar with the situation says that when
NBC and Channel 5 managers flew first to Cleveland to see Robinson's
doctor and later to New York to confer with Robinson's agent, they were
told only that Robinson was in a treatment program somewhere outside
Chicago. Weeks passed, according to the source, without direct word from
Robinson and without any indication of when he would return. Meanwhile,
Robinson's hiatus was stretching through the summer.
"Then it gets really scary and the meter's running on all this
time," says the source. "Then finally we had to stop the meter because
he wasn't there."
Robinson denies that his bosses were kept in the dark about his
rehabilitation program. "No one was more shocked than I ... when I got
back from the West Coast and got this letter informing me that I had
been terminated," he says.
In the last two years, the people who worked with Robinson in
Washington and Chicago have seen him rarely. They recount snapshots of a
man trying to cope with a life and career in disarray.
"I think he missed being on the air and missed the power he had to
influence," says Dianne Hudson, a producer on "The Oprah Winfrey Show"
who worked with Robinson more than two years ago on a pilot she was
preparing for Detroit public television. "But I don't think he missed
being involved in the system. He never really could accept the way the
system was -- and is."
Producer Patricia Gamble occasionally heard from him. "He was in a
different spiritual frame of mind," she says. "He was getting into
meditation. He would call me and ask me to pray for him."
In April 1987, a despondent Robinson called Milt Weiss. "He had run
out of money and wasn't working and didn't know what to do with his
life," Weiss recalls.
Robinson, himself, describes the past three years as being filled
with "a little writing, a little speaking, and the 'Essence' shows," the
latter being the magazine-format programs spun off from the magazine of
that name. The show is based in New York and Robinson cohosted several
episodes and did reporting as well.
For part of 1987, he was living outside Richmond to be near one of
his sons, who had been ill, and did not return to Chicago until last
Two months later, Robinson entered St. Francis Hospital in suburban
Chicago after complaining about weight loss, according to a friend.
While in intensive care, he lay in an isolated room, and when he was
moved to another ward, a warning was posted outside his room to medical
personnel to gown and glove before performing certain tasks in caring
for him. He suffered from a serious bout with pneumonia.
When these points of information are noted and he is asked again
about his illness, he says, "I take the position that my health is a
private matter. I understand that you have a right to write." He pauses.
"And I don't challenge that."
When he does describe his health, he says, "I feel pretty good." Ask
if he is terminally ill and he replies, "We all are." And then he adds,
"And, lady, you are going to die. I guarantee you."
The salt-and-pepper hair is thinner and closely cut, and he looks
older than his 49 years. For contrast, you only have to look at the oval
table-top portrait by the famous photographer James Van Der Zee that
Robinson sat for in 1981. It depicts him in white tie and tails, against
a lush backdrop of curtains and flowers, resting an elbow gently on a
table, relaxed, confident, in control and pleased. Now, he reflects only
briefly on how things might have been.
"There are some things in my life that I would change if I had to do
it over again," he says. "I would never look at another bottle of
alcohol if I could change things. But for the most part I've been
extremely fortunate and I've had a very good life. I don't have a lot of
regrets and I'm certainly not sitting around thinking about them." A
Conversation
Recently Milt Weiss was at a party given by some of his Los Angeles
neighbors when he struck up a conversation with someone from the film
industry. "It was one of those guys with a development title," says
Weiss, who mentioned Max Robinson. "I said, 'You know, if you're ever
looking for a great idea, I think his life story would make a heck of a
TV movie.' "
Intrigued, the movie executive asked questions and Weiss told him
what he knew about the first black national anchor.
"What's he doing now?" the man asked.
"Nothing," Weiss explained.
"Well, that's a sad ending. It'll never sell," the man said, and
walked away.
Staff writers Phil McCombs and Jacqueline Trescott made substantial
contributions to this report.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zr8eirZ5nnJ6zpr%2FTsqOeZ2FuhXl7j25ma25fqbWmedGiqp5lkaOxbrDIs7GyoZ6ceqety6VkqJ5doq65edGomaKmo6S7cIKQnm1wbZaXeqJ9lJtkbW1nZ3p5fsVyZGyeaW2Con%2BSnJmaml8%3D