IT'S MORGAN IN AMERICA

JAMES WOLCOTT

If you're going to go in, go in big. Mount your ego on monster-truck tires and plow ahead. This is how Piers Morgan, answering destiny's Tarzan call, geared himself up for the mission of filling the creaking throne of CNN's prime-time institution Larry King, who was retiring after a long, long reign as cable news's premier celebrity interviewer and kibitzer. King had seen all the giants come and go—from Marlon Brando to Anna Nicole Smith—and now it was time for him to go, too, up into the bat belfry. It was time for new blood, a change of attitude, a bold reset. Piers Morgan was made to measure. He had attitude in spades. Not for him an Eve Harrington show of faux humility, the glistening hope that America would accept him into its heart, adopt him as one of its own. As befits the Season Seven winner of Donald Trump's tragic charade party Celebrity Apprentice, Morgan adopted the master of major lip as his mentor-model, talking himself up as if ready to take his rightful place in the Manhattan skyline, a landmark head. Like Trump,

Morgan practiced pugnacity for maximum P.R. effect, announcing that Madonna would be banned from his show and baiting her as an old gray mare that ain't what she used to be: "Lady Gaga is half her age, twice as good-looking, twice as talented, and twice as hot." Morgan also reveled in Twitter slap-fights, boasting that he would mop the floor with doubters and detractors such as John Schiumo, the 24hour cable news channel NYl's prime-time news host, whom he warned,

"You're like Stephen Baldwin and Vinny Pastore—they thought they were big shots in NY too until I wiped them in Celeb Apprentice." Yes, those were quite a pair of titans he toppled.

Where did Piers Morgan come from? And is there any way to send him back? Reviewing the debut "gets"-Oprah! Rudy! Condoleezza!-of Larry King s blustery British heir, the author examines the failures behind Morgan s success

For the debut week as host of Piers Morgan Tonight, the host didn't let modesty tie his tongue in a bow. He made a wager with his gala opening guest, Oprah Winfrey, over which one of them would score quarterback and former dog mistreater Michael Vick as a guest first. "Rudy's a tough guy, but tonight I've got tough questions for him," he said in the intro to his hour with former New York mayor and presidential delusionist Rudy Giuliani. "Howard Stern may think he's the king of all media, but I'm the British king of all media," he boasted, and when Stern jokingly asked, "How big's your penis?," Morgan snapped, "Bigger than yours!" (Which Stern laughingly noted was no great triumph since he was hung like a raisin.) Morgan was on a smoother wavelength in the interview with the controversial man of the moment, comic actor and auteur Ricky Gervais, who had spoken truth to power as the M.C. of the Golden Globes by making fun of Robert Downey Jr.'s stints in rehab and helping an older man off the toilet. Andrew Anthony, the television reviewer for The Observer (U.K.), captured the oily mood of mutual admiration between host and guest nicely. "Morgan played the interview as two Brits made good in the States, and the air of self-satisfaction— which Morgan wears like aftershave— sometimes threatened to reach levels of suffocating smugness."

any questions torment America in its dark night of the soul, questions more urgently pressing, and yet it must be asked: How did we get stuck with Piers Morgan? Who is he, why is he here, is he returnable? His backstory is a blank for most Americans, but for all of his self-fluffing, he did make a notch for himself back in London. Born in East Sussex, Morgan may not be the British king of all media, but he has touched a lot of the bases. He

was the editor of the "red top" tabloid Daily Mirror, where he had cozy access to the prime minister with the bewitching teeth. "In his 11 years as editor, Morgan had at least 56 meetings with Tony Blair, many of them one-toone," wrote Lynn Barber in a Guardian profile of Morgan, going on to say that he seems to have had "almost a schoolboy crush" on the Tone. His tenure as editor was marred by scandal and inquiry—such as the furor over his buying shares in a company shortly before it was touted in the pages of the Mirror by its financial columnists—and he UNCLE SHAM was canned when photographs purportPiers Morgan, host ing to show abuse of Iraqis at the hands of CNN's °f British soldiers turned out to be bogus. PiersMorgan He turned disgrace to his advantage with Tonight the best-selling publication of The Insider (2005), his diaries documenting his days as a tabloid buccaneer, in which he gave us a backstage tour of political-journalistic incest and settled old scores. Morgan hosted several TV interview shows and a travel series too, but it was as a guest judge on Britain's Got Talent that he became a beloved household nuisance, teleported into the same role for Americas Got Talent. As the satirical Private Eye, in whose pages he's known as "Piers Moron," pointed out, Morgan practiced major revisionism in the run-up to his American launch to tidy up his past: "A fawning interview in the Guardian allowed Moron to trot out some of his favourite canards that he was 'cleared of insider trading' (he wasn't: the DTI [Department of Trade and Industry] merely announced that it was unable to prosecute him 'on the evidence currently available'); and that the provenance of the 'Iraqi abuse' photographs which got him sacked from the Mirror 'was never resolved one way or the other' when it was demonstrated that the vehicle which was featured in them had never been in the country and the paper itself admitted that they 'were not genuine.'" Dilating on this theme was Private Eye's former editor, the sainted Richard Ingrams, who wrote in his weekly Independent column that Morgan was one of those rebounders always bouncing back higher from whatever befalls them. "Nothing succeeds like failure," Ingrams wrote, and today Morgan is "riding high, publishing books and diaries... and appearing on TV on both sides of the Atlantic to the acclaim of all the critics."

THERE ARE ONLY SO MANY BIG GETS UNTIL YOU REACH THE BOTTOM OF THE CEREAL BOX.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. The acclaim Stateside was actually on the spotty side. Despite the extravagant ta-da for his opening broadcast with Oprah, critics dismissed the interview itself as ho-hum (though the ratings were stellar), with Oprah on old-pro autopilot, spinning platitudes and saving the revelation of the discovery of a long-lost half-sister for her own sob show. His interview with former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was like a Valentine's Day date gone bad as he tossed her a series of candy kisses, such as "Do you dream of a fairy-tale wedding?" and "How would I woo you?" (To which Rice should have replied, "Woo me? Don't you have a wife?") Morgan got into similar distress when he turned the love lamp on Kim and Kourtney Kardashian for an endless hour, his line of inquiry running afoul of former magazine editor Bonnie Fuller, who had a hissy over at the Huffington Post. "Listen, I know the Kardashian sisters are extremely open about their lives and they were gracious to Piers—it's why we love them ["we" do? who's "we"?]—but there was something incredibly creepy about a 45-year-old man staring at their breasts on a national talk show and demanding relentlessly to know whether they were real or fake. Did this creep you out too?" No, Bonnie, it didn't. First of all, the Kardashian breasts are among this country's most precious assets and far more compelling than any of the banal inanities that come out of their mouths, which make Paris Hilton sound like Madame de Stael by comparison. Second, the real object of Morgan's lustful attention wasn't the Kardashian breasts, but the Kardashian brand, which he seemed to covet with mystical awe. Their ability to merchandise themselves, to commodify their every whim—this was the Cleopatra secret he sought. It made for a lobotomy session of conversation, since few things are more boring than hucksters talking about their brand. Morgan's slavish deference to marketing success was likewise evident in his sit-down with televangelist Joel Osteen and his wife, Victoria, who nodded in sync with every point her husband made like a Republican candidate's spouse, a blonde bobblehead with a metronomic beat. Introduced by Morgan as "the A-Rod of religion" (for preaching to a full house in Yankee Stadium), Osteen is one of those sunshine purveyors who espouse a gospel of abundance, smiling so hard that his ostensible face-lift looks as if it had been performed with a forklift. As Morgan observed, Osteen definitely personified a gospel of abundance; he looked so money on-camera. His sharp threads, his smart grooming and rippling hair, the glossy, beauty-pageant wife doting beside him—they were the Ken and Barbie Bible edition of the America n Dream. This is the dream Morgan dreams, too, of becoming a name brand whose every move can be converted into a sales opportunity.

Who is to say he won't succeed? I, for one, have learned never to bet against naked unadulterated shameless relentless ambitious careerism that can eat through steel wool (so many examples come to mind!). Morgan's use of Twitter and other social-network platforms boosted CNN's youth demo in its initial weeks, manna to advertisers. And when he isn't preening and polishing his guests' brass knobs, he can be an effective interrogator: he pressed Osteen on homosexuality until the happy face of Fundamentalism coughed up a newsmaking sound bite ("Homosexuality is a sin") and then backpedaled into a lame, fluttery I-only-knowwhat-I-read-in-the-Scriptures cop-out. But the format of Piers Morgan Tonight needs shucking. The booking policy has hinged on the "big get" (Oprah, Stern, Giuliani), but there are only so many big gets until you reach the bottom of the cereal box.

And it's a one-shot proposition. Booking a big get for the full hour leaves no one warming up in the bullpen if the interview craps out and cavalry relief is needed. Look at Larry King. He had a trophy wall of big gets over the course of his career, but what kept his show going night after night, week after week, eon after eon, were the running soap operas (O. J. Simpson, Monica Lewinsky, the disappearance of Chandra Levy, the death of Michael Jackson) that became floating crapshoots—countless panels of pundits and former prosecutors gnawing on the same dog bone, frothing away. Then, as tonic antidote, he'd bring on Kathy Griffin or Bill Maher, casting asperities. Going live enabled him to take viewers' phone calls, which injected nutty spontaneity and occasional notes of sanity into the programsomething the pre-taping of Morgan's celebrity interviews precludes. Where Larry King Live served it up hot and crazy from the grill, Piers Morgan Tonight was handing out canned hams. CNN and/or P.M.T.'s producers quickly recognized the necessity of breaking out of this vacuum seal and landing square on the beat, bumping interviews with Colin Firth, Kid Rock, and similar deities to later dates in order to plug Morgan into the network's continuing coverage of the convulsive events in Egypt. And since the Kardashian ratings fiasco, they've scuttled the original game plan for the show and hired a new booker, with Morgan himself announcing that in the future the full-hour celebrity seances would be awarded only to true superstars. Lucky them. But famous names, usual deadbeats, live, taped, it's hard to care. Not when the host is a canned ham himself.

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