Back in 2011, during a break from taping a profile with Wynton Marsalis, 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer asked the jazz musician if he’d do him favor: when he died, Toronto-born Safer wanted a New Orleans-style sendoff.
This morning Safer got his wish. Marsalis and his 7-piece band played off Safer at the end of a memorial service attended by more than 700 people at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Safer died May 19, just a week after he announced his retirement after 52 years with CBS News, 46 of them with 60 Minutes.
A New Orleans send off for Morley Safer from Wynton Marsalis. “Go find Ed & get out your handkerchiefs & umbrellas” pic.twitter.com/OHqAnkEl1V
— Chris Ariens (@ChrisAriens) September 15, 2016
“Whatever Morley touched he elevated,” said 60 Minutes ep Jeff Fager in his opening remarks. “We will fill his job. We will never be able to replace him. His example is still the order of the day.”
Fager recalled that Safer was hesitant about joining 60 Minutes in 1970, which meant leaving a plum reporting job at the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, for a show that ranked No. 100 that TV season. “Why would he join a broadcast that only aired twice a month and against the biggest show on TV: Marcus Welby, MD?” Fager asked. Don Hewitt “knew Morley would help dignify his new broadcast.”
Fager recalled that in those early days Safer’s colleague and rival Mike Wallace would often steal his stories. “So he invented the Morley Safer piece. He had it all to himself.”
“On TV he was the master of hyperbole,” correspondent Steve Kroft remembered. “Everyone says it was all about his writing, but it was more than that: The voice. His mannerisms. The sensibility. His attitude. A personal style that was carefully curated,” Kroft said. “The wardrobe was a big part of it.”
Kroft did some investigating of his own. Trying to track down the rumor that Safer owned a cape, bought decades ago when he was a young foreign correspondent. He found it and revealed it today.
“We’re going to miss the stories. We’re going to miss the anecdotes,” said Safer’s friend, journalist and author Calvin Trillin.
Among those in attendance, CBS’s Scott Pelley, Lesley Stahl, Lara Logan, Norah O’Donnell, Charlie Rose, Jeff Glor, correspondents Armen Keteyian, Bill Plante, Steve Hartman, Anna Werner, Seth Doane and Ted Koppel, who is contributing to CBS Sunday Morning. Also NBC’s Tom Brokaw and wife Meredith, former CBS and CBS News president Sir Howard Stringer, 48 Hours ep Susan Zirinsky, author Gay Talese, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, and many producers, editors and photographers who worked with Safer over the decades.
(Photos: Michele Crowe for CBS News)