Frost's Big Deal

When CBS News paid H.R. Haldeman a six-figure sum for a television interview, newsmen and others shuddered about such "checkbook journalism." Asked New York Times Columnist James Reston: "Won't other big shots or notorious characters demand their price?" Now the most notorious big shot of all has done just that. Last week David Frost, 36, the British talk-show host and entertainer, announced that he had bought the right to video-tape a series of exclusive television interviews with Richard Nixon, who has granted no audiences to the press since he left Washington a year ago. The price: reportedly somewhere between $650,000 and $750,000. Though Nixon's literary agent, Irving ("Swifty") Lazar, announced that "Mr. Nixon chose David Frost because of Mr. Frost's unique and wide-ranging experience," it was obvious that the interview rights had simply gone to the highest bidder.

Frost offered $500,000 several months ago, approaching Nixon through his former communications chief Herb Klein, now an executive at Metromedia in Los Angeles. When Lazar insisted on more, Frost raised his offer. The deal was assured when NBC, the one network in the running, failed to match Frost's bid. Then Frost, Nixon and their lawyers huddled at San Clemente for 51/2 hours and emerged with a signed, 13-page contract stipulating that Nixon be available for 20 hour-long taping sessions that will be edited into four TV shows, each probably 90 minutes long, with a fifth show optional. The interviews will begin next April, but they will not be aired before 1977 so as not to influence the 1976 elections. Frost stressed that Watergate would be the subject of at least one broadcast, and that Nixon would not know the questions in advance and would have no say in the editing of the tapes.

Doubtful Interest. Who was putting up the cash? For the time being, Frost would say only that he represented an "international consortium of broadcasting organizations." Spokesmen for all three U.S. networks expressed doubt that they would be interested in Frost's finished product; yet there were no Sherman-like statements that absolutely ruled out the possibility. One reason the networks are unlikely to buy is that they have responsibility for the programs they air. To keep control, they almost never run news shows not produced by their own staffers.

The Frost-Nixon deal carries Watergate checkbook journalism to its greatest extreme to date. After the tempest triggered by its deal with Convicted Felon Haldeman, CBS swore off buying news and thus declined to bid for Nixon. Frost argues that since Nixon is out of office, the interviews are not news but a memoir and therefore immune to the checkbook charge. "There is no reason," Frost told TIME Correspondent Lawrence Malkin in London last week, "why Nixon shouldn't make money from this memoir as other former Presidents have done."

No Experience. The networks may well wonder whether Frost, who is not really a newsman, is truly up to his task. Frost does not, of course, lack experience with public figures: he has held forth with the likes of Indira Gandhi and the Shah of Iran. The problem, however, lies in his interview style. Rather than chip away at his subject with a series of jolting questions, Frost prefers to rock along with him gently and let his character emerge. "My aim in any interview," says Frost, "is to make someone come over as he really is."

It seems likely that Nixon will come across as he really has been, spinning out the elaborate, self-serving defenses he erected throughout the Watergate period. Indeed, could any interviewer induce the ex-President to make a clean breast of things? Can David Frost succeed where John Sirica, Archibald Cox and Leon Jaworski failed?

The cool Briton seems to think so. "The Richard Nixon of today is a different man from the Richard Nixon of even a few weeks ago," says Frost. "As time passes and he has more and more recovered his health, he has begun to analyze the past, and is ready to be really reflective or retrospective." Frost is confident that if his tapes are meaty enough, all the networks' reservations will go by the boards. "In my experience, the networks are in the business of disseminating information rather than suppressing it," he says. But if, as expected, CBS, NBC and ABC all shun Frost, he could still sell his programs to independent and local broadcasters or public television. He could assemble a makeshift network and perhaps turn a fatter profit than he might by dealing with the big three. In the end, Frost may find foreign broadcasters most receptive.

The issue remains whether the Frost shows deserve to be aired anywhere. Even if Nixon is moved to more candor than before, many Americans will still find distasteful the spectacle of an ex-President demanding and receiving a fee to tell the truth that he should have told them long ago as a matter of duty. If there is money to be made in acquiring the Nixon-Frost programs, broadcasters may well conclude that this is not the time to make it.

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