Behind The Mask (Part One)

He lifts the cat off his lap, ignoring a plaintive meow, and silently stands, tottering unsteadily as his thin frame rises in the afternoon light. He threads his way toward the kitchen, where his mother bends over the sink, washing vegetables for supper. Most year-old boys whirl through a room, slapping door jambs and dodging around furniture like imaginary halfbacks. But this boy, a 5-foot, pound waif, has learned never to draw attention to himself.

He moves like smoke. He watches his mother, humming as she runs water over lettuce. His mother sighs with worry and turns, not bothering to turn off the water or to dry her hands. His left ear, purple and misshapen, bulges from the side of his head. His chin juts forward. The main body of tissue, laced with blue veins, swells in a dome that runs from sideburn level to chin. The mass draws his left eye into a slit, warps his mouth into a small, inverted half moon. It looks as though someone has slapped three pounds of wet clay onto his face, where it clings, burying the boy inside.

But Sam, the boy behind the mask, peers out from the right eye. It is clear, perfectly formed and a deep, penetrating brown. You find yourself instantly drawn into that eye, pulled past the deformity and into the world of a completely normal year-old. It is a window into the world where Sam lives. You can imagine yourself on the other side of it.

You can see yourself in that eye, the child you once were. His healthy, close-cropped hair is a luxuriant brown, shaped carefully in a style any serious young man might wear. His right cheek glows with the blushing good health that the rest of his face has obscured. The boy passes out of the kitchen, stepping into the staircase that leads to the second floor. A ragged burst of air escapes from the hole in his throat—a tracheotomy funnels air directly into his lungs, bypassing the swollen tissue that blocks the usual airways. He walks along the worn hallway and turns into his room, the one with the toy license plate on the door.

Real estate prices have soared, but the Lightners still need new carpets in every room and could use new appliances. The paycheck helps, but she really took the job for the health insurance. From upstairs, Sam hears year-old Emily and 9-year-old Nathan laughing. The kitchen, though, is silent.

The boy figures his mother and father are talking about him and this night. He grabs a small foam basketball and throws up an arcing shot that soars across the room and hits a poster tacked to the far wall. His mother made the poster by assembling family photographs and then laminating them. In the middle is a questionnaire Sam filled out when he was 8.

He had been asked to list his three wishes. Finally, his mother calls out. His teeth are brushed, his face washed. He runs his left hand through his brown hair, parting it to the right. Sam nods his head and replies with a garbled sound, wheezing and breathless, the sound of an old man who has smoked too long and too hard. His sister and brother watch from the window as Sam and his parents walk to a Honda Accord that has , hard miles on the odometer. The boy gets in the back seat, and the Honda backs down the driveway.

Just a few blocks from home, Sam senses someone looking at him. After a lifetime of stares, he can feel the glances. The Accord is stopped at a light, waiting to turn west onto Northeast Sandy Boulevard, when a woman walking a poodle catches sight of him. She makes no pretense of being polite, of averting her eyes.

When the light changes, the woman swivels her head as if watching a train leave a station. On school mornings, Sam rustles up his own breakfast, and his sweet tooth sometimes gets the better of him. His wholesome side might lead him to microwave a bowl of hot cereal. The family steps out onto the sidewalk and walks through the dark neighborhood. As Sam passes under a streetlight, a dark-green Range Rover full of teen-age boys turns onto the street.

A kid wearing a baseball cap points at the boy. The windows fill with faces, staring and pointing. Soon, the streets fill with teen-agers on their way to Grant. Sam recognizes a girl who goes to his school, Gregory Heights Middle School. Sam has a secret crush on her. She has brown hair, wavy, and a smile that makes his hands sweat and his heart race when he sees her in class. She does most of the talking. He uses his good eye and hand gestures to get his point across. Two blocks from Grant, kids jam the streets.

The wavy-haired girl subtly, discreetly, falls behind. When the boy slows to match her step, she hurries ahead. Sam lets her go and walks alone. Grant, a great rectangular block of brick, looms in the distance. Every light in the place is on. Tonight, there are no shadows. He arrives at the north door and stands on the steps, looking in through the windowpanes. Clusters of girls hug and laugh. Boys huddle under a sign announcing a basketball game. Sam grabs the door handle, hesitates for the briefest of moments and pulls the door open.

He walks into noise and laughter and chaos, into the urgency that is all about being 14 years old. On the Internet, Sam is just another screen name in a chat room, where his words speak for themselves, unfiltered by his distorted voice or his appearance. She struggled to sit up on the examination table. The baby, her doctor said, was larger than it should be. Debbie watched him wheel up a machine to measure the fetus. She felt his hands on her stomach.

He told Debbie he would call ahead to the hospital and schedule an ultrasound. Then, a few minutes into the test, the technician fell silent. He repeatedly pressed a button to take pictures of the images on the monitor. After 30 minutes, he turned off the machine, left the room and returned with his boss.

The two studied the photographs. They led the Lightners down the hall to a prenatal specialist. Their unborn child, he said, appeared to have a birth defect. No, Debbie remembers telling him. She and her husband were adamant that they would not kill this baby. David drove her to the hospital, and the staff rushed her to the delivery room for an emergency Caesarean. David handed his wife two Polaroids a nurse had taken. When the Lightners arrived at the neonatal ICU, they were led to an isolette, a covered crib, that regulates temperature and oxygen flow.

Seuss—and taped it to the contraption. The nurse lifted the cover of the isolette, and Debbie reached down with a finger. The mass was soft. Debbie thought it looked like Jell-O. Debbie and her husband returned to her room, and she climbed into bed. She picked up one of the pictures her husband had given her and covered the mass with her fingers to see what her son should have looked like.

He had brown hair and eyes. The temptation is to break ranks during a family portrait, and wave when a neighbor drives by. Still almost everyone stays in character, Nathan, 9, is a cutup who mugs for the camera. Emily 12, tries to stay dignified. Maggie, the vocal family dog, is uncharacteristically quiet, but David and Debbie are their naturally casual selves. Tim Campbell, a pediatric surgeon known for tackling tough cases, walked into the ICU and peered into the isolette. The boy had a vascular anomaly. They were rare enough, but what this tiny infant had was even rarer.

The anomaly was a living mass of blood vessels. The malformation extended from his ear to his chin. Doctors knew little about such anomalies except that they were made up of fluid-filled cysts and clots that varied in size from microscopic to as big as a fingertip. The mass swelled up from below and wormed its way into his tongue, threatening to block his air passage.

He could barely breathe, and only immediate action would save him. He asked a nurse to direct him to the Lightner room. He operated a second time to remove bulk above his left ear and to ease his breathing with a tracheotomy tube. Ah, crazy because This Day Tonight decided to break every rule in the book. This Day Tonight, was just magnificent for me, because the timing was right, it was a bold, brave new program, and I happened to be there at the right time, and in the right place, Canberra.

Behind the Mask - Part 1 - Australian Story

This Day Tonight gave me a flying start. He was a natural. He was serious, but he always had a twinkle in his eye. Um, he could just hold the audience and you knew that here was a guy who was really good at interviewing. Do you have fears about this appointment? He can cut through the bullshit, he has a wonderful detection meter. And I think his father gave him an appreciation of the practice of politics without necessarily an affection for the execution of it.

You know, I was still a kid, in terms of politics, and television, and the prime minister was asking me around for advice. The same time, I saw how he drank, and it was frightening. He was pouring very heavy scotches. And as it transpired, in his prime ministership there were several occasions when his drinking did get the better of him.

Taught me more about drinking than about prime ministership. And as a result of that I went across to Four Corners which was then a very poor rating program. Here is our report. Vietnam was the big story of my era. Suddenly, I was in journalism, I was in the press gallery, and all around me was the Vietnam War. The protest marches, the arguments in the pubs, and I wanted to get to Vietnam.

We were both pretty young when we first went, so it was all pretty new, and it was very, very frightening, and exciting, and the power. The Americans, the invasion of the Americans, the machinery, the helicopters. It was an amazing experience to cover this, as a young man. Between us and the hill is a small Cambodian village. The villagers are frightened; they have no way of knowing they are not the targets.

Vietnam was dangerous at times. I have asked myself, am I attracted by the danger? But I think I'm being honest to myself in saying that I'm attracted to the best stories. Vietnam was the best story of an era. The helicopters are the lions of this jungle — but at a price. The Americans have lost nearly 2, Then pick up the camera, slate, and away he would go. He just, not just the words, but the presence. He was very, very natural. There was none of this thing, that we can get carried away with in television, of ego or presentation, it was just the way he was. To cover it well, you had to go to dangerous situations.

A lot of journalists didn't and I would even question myself about, because it was usually my decision to go to a certain place, and I was taking a camera crew with me, was I being fair to them? Fortunately, nobody got hurt where I was, but quite a few of my friends were killed. The adrenalin would get going, and then, after we got it all done, he'd just sit, have a drink, maybe, or not, and maybe a cigar.

He did like his own company, and he'd be in his own thoughts. What they were, I don't know, but there was that side of Mike. And I don't think it was shyness, not in my opinion. Mike is the most confident man, consistently, that I've ever met in my life. I fibbed a little bit, and said yes. I'd never run a program.

So, Clyde gave me an opportunity to run my own program, and a flying start in commercial television. Serious crime in New South Wales was very much higher than figures published indicated. What Mike did was take This Day Tonight as a sort of a basis and then build on it and make it more commercial. Journos in those days were traditionally not businessmen, they were journalists. They asked questions, they wrote stories.

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Michael combined the two and did it very well. I wanted to do serious stuff, but also, to balance it and I was always looking for a Paul Hogan and when I found him on a- a- a talent show on television, I just knew immediately, he was the guy. Paul Hogan was the irreverent voice of the street, uh, and he was brilliant at that. He could encapsulate the ordinary man's view on most topics. He frequently felt out of his depth, he frequently didn't know what he was doing, but he was very ambitious and very determined. He bit off more than he could chew and he chewed like crazy. That actually was an insult to me.

Mike was always popular with the ladies. He was a bit self-deprecating, he didn't like being called a sex symbol, by and large. All his wives were beautiful, but you know it's a downside that he's been married three times, but there's some great results. He bore some beautiful children. Some fantastic kids who've done so well in life.

We shouldn't have gotten married, and I think we both knew that fairly quickly, but we did our best because Katie and Michael came along fairly quickly, and I was very disappointed. I'd never considered that I could have more than one marriage. It was all a part of my upbringing and my mindset, and I was very disappointed and I was very disappointed in myself.

Transcript

I thought, I'm just going to stay away from long-term relationships. I think Dad was probably embracing single life after the end of his marriage to Joan when a beautiful blonde Scottish model moved in to the house behind him. Very quickly Dad started taking Mum out but he was determined that he wasn't going to fall for another beautiful woman, so he wanted to keep it casual, but I think Mum had very quickly fallen in love with him.

So, before long she had moved in with him and then their relationship was cemented when she fell pregnant with me in So, we got married, you know, and so I'd done it again. However, that was a very successful marriage for quite a long time, and there were very good times, three more children came along, and everything was very good. I've always felt that Mum and Dad were the loves of each other's lives, and Dad definitely says that a big part of the time he was married to Mum was like his golden years, it was the best years of his life, um, he lived in a beautiful house, he had a beautiful wife who took really good care of him, three little girls and also to the public they you know, they were the golden couple.

We had a picture-perfect life in those early years, I mean a beautiful Mum, famous successful Dad, big house, it looked from the outside like it was perfect, and I think for many years it was. And I mean, we were all very happy. I eventually sold A Current Affair to the Nine Network and around that time I started developing further business interests.

The Girl Behind the Mask Part 1

The single most profitable thing I did was FM radio — a station called 2DayFM in Sydney which I started out as a group and ultimately bought out the other shareholders. I did very well out of that. I was always happy to have it. Better to have it than not to have it, um, but the end goal for me was achievement. Dad worked a lot, and his priority was work and you know, from the first time first thing he got up in the morning till when he got home from work.

He'd either be reading the papers, taking phone calls, and he also needed a lot of time on his own, I think because he worked so hard in such long hours, but also that's his personality. As far as Dad's concerned, she emotionally separated from him at that point. It didn't help for me that it was normal for most of my friends and people I dealt with, worked with cross examined, we all drank a lot, not all of us, but you know, many, and so when something is normal, you don't get the red lights flashing.

I think from Mum's perspective it was his drinking. Dad claims that it was the disintegration of the marriage that really tipped his drinking into alcoholism.

After Carol and I broke up, I became aware for the first time that I had a problem with alcohol, and that was a shock to me, because it just hadn't been there, whether I drank heavily or not at all, 6 o'clock the next morning I was working and feeling good. The personal social lives in those days were fairly hectic and there was a lot of drinking. There was a lot of work. Sometimes one tripped up the other. I was off-air and I was drinking too much, but didn't know it. So when I was asked to come back and fill in, I thought, well I'll play safe and stop drinking.

I was so ignorant of the problems of drinking, that I didn't even know that you couldn't just stop. So, what really happened to me, with the wisdom of hindsight, was that I was adjusting to stopping, and they sent me to a doctor and he gave me some diazepam and when that wasn't working I had two scotches and two valium. I was sitting at home watching and realised something wasn't right. And er, we all saw what happened. The unfortunate part about that is that he's done so many great things in television, brilliant interviews, arguably the best interviewer on Australian television of his era.

And for that to happen, and it happened and it's what some people still remember so well, which is a bit of a shame. That was soon after him and mum split up. I didn't know I had a problem, I was defenceless against it. The fact that it had spread to another organ, his lungs, means that it is an advanced cancer. Did you think it was curable? I did not think it was curable.

The Boy Behind the Mask

And I still don't think it's curable. The good news is that radiotherapy treatment for head and neck cancer is very effective. When you face mortality this whole idea of faith takes on a new meaning, and a new Video Player failed to load. Play Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Updated Mon 6 Nov , 9: Sunday 7 November 9: Alright Mike, do you want the music on or off today? Um…yeah, leave the music on. What a life he's had. You could have been fighting with your Parliamentary colleagues. On an empty stomach?