Never Look Away

Say your name and what your relationship

is to Margaret Moth.

Oh, that's tough.

My name is Jeff Russi...

...and Margaret was my first girlfriend.

I was 17 and she was 30.

And I ran away from home, joined the circus.

Who was Margaret in the circus?

She was a lion tamer.

She was the queen of the night.

Okay, what character are you?

Mm...

Oh, I'm one of the clowns, for sure.

So, the first assignment

I had with Margaret

was in Baghdad.

I was a few years into being a correspondent,

and part of me wanted out.

I was sick of it.

I was kind of heartbroken with the cruelty,

and I got heartbroken with innocent people

going through...

awful, awful stuff.

But Margaret didn't seem to feel the same way.

For better or for worse,

war is an amazing feeling.

Mind blowing.

Where is everyone?

You've never experienced

anything like this.

It's an emotional, psychological,

sensory explosion.

Nothing compares.

Keep going.

Like this.

Margaret got a little bit excited by it.

Any such experiences or emotions,

Margaret drank up.

She just drank 'em up.

She was fearless.

She was always cool-headed.

She had a sense of not just a pretty pictures,

but of sort of the reality here,

the messy, human reality of war.

And she'd get that in the shot.

She was calm, collected,

but she was on.

She was recording history.

Across the Gulf Coast,

you can't sing the part company with the rain.

I was a straight 'A' student

and sold weed at Westbury High School,

the highest academic school in Houston.

I did work at the Pizza Restaurant.

That was like 25 feet away from her front door.

This guy named John, he came down and asked around.

He said, "Is anybody selling acid or weed or whatever."

And they pointed to me, you know.

So, ran upstairs...

Walk in, it's a tiny little space.

And there was peacock feathers and old paintings

and antique furniture, Danish oak.

And she's sitting at the table,

and she's smoking a pipe.

And that was the first time I met Margaret Moth.

She was so exotic.

I thought she was a gypsy fortune teller.

She said she was from New Zealand.

You know, if you'd asked me where New Zealand was,

and then spun the globe,

there was no way.

Like, I had no idea where New Zealand was.

I didn't even know it was off the coast of Australia.

She was the first camera woman for Television New Zealand.

I mean, she was just too cool for me.

That's for sure.

I was so geeky,

tripping over my shoe strings

and making straight 'A's.

And I had no idea that anybody would have thought

I was attractive or anything.

And then she started spinning this weird tale all that.

Now, I was this really cute guy.

We got together in the summer

between my 11th and 12th grade,

your last year of high school.

I never went to 12th grade.

I forgot that it was even happening.

As soon as I started hanging out with Margaret,

things changed.

Partied our asses off.

I mean, it turned my life upside down.

I mean, I was one of the coolest kids in town then.

It was weird.

I just started staying in her house.

I remember her giving me a drawer.

Such a big day, you know.

She was an alien to me.

And the alien said, "Hey, want to do some acid?"

We did acid every weekend.

We were always tripping.

Margaret was an experienced traveller.

She got out there. She went a long way out.

She was like,

"I don't know

how we're going to get back to Earth."

Skating was huge for us.

So there was a big group of skaters in Houston called

The Urban Animals.

They were into different drugs.

They were the heroin crowd.

And we were speed crowd.

Friday we would go to the punk club.

The one punk club in town in Houston, Texas,

called The Island.

And then on a Saturday morning,

we'd get up and go skydiving.

My father had photographs

of paratroopers during the war.

But I never realized then that civilians could jump.

And it was my big ambition

when I was a kid, to be a paratrooper.

If somebody got boring, they're gone, for sure.

So it doesn't matter

how close it comes to this and jumping.

It just never seems bad when you're actually doing it.

Today, I'm just going to be having a lot of fun.

To Margaret, you know, that's right.

If they were with the Ten Commandments,

"Don't be boring."

She had a good time

and she took everybody along with her.

You know, nothing was out of bounds.

I mean, we had an open relationship

from the very beginning.

She just had a network of guys that she dealt with.

She played the field.

But I never doubted for a minute

that she wasn't in love with me

or that I wasn't in love with her.

K-H-O-U-T-V, Houston.

Back in 1984,

I was interned by K-H-O-U in Houston, Texas.

And, one afternoon, I was sitting at the desk

and I looked across the newsroom,

and this woman with spiky jet black hair walked in,

and it just totally caught my attention.

She became my good friend,

and we started going' out and partying quite a bit.

She looked so rock and roll 24-7.

She was always,

you know, Joan Jett's big sister.

Pilots for Eastern Airlines

write up a new contract, but they aren't looking...

She was working in what they call

the Southwest Bureau.

So it was a lot of politics.

She wasn't interested in politics.

She wasn't interested in shooting politician

holding a news conference.

Margaret preferred to go out on a hurricane

and chase a hurricane.

That was the kind of assignment Margaret wanted.

That's the kind of assignment that she volunteered for.

She wanted to be where the shit was happening.

And in her mind, that place was behind a news camera.

You know, she's got a bazooka on her shoulder.

You better watch out.

Now, Dan's going to have complete report

on that, a little later in the program...

I mean, this is Houston, Texas.

I mean, they were like, you know,

right-wing, Republican conservatives, you know,

a female cameraman in a male-dominated world.

That definitely gave her a charge.

She did what she wanted.

She dressed the way she wanted.

She said whatever she wanted,

and it was something that people were in awe of.

I was fascinated.

How could this person be so different?

I'd ask her things about her past

and she said, "I don't remember."

You know, "What about your family?

What about your dad?"

"I don't remember."

And that just added to her mystique to me.

The only thing she ever told me about herself

was that she had had to go to court

to get her tubes tied...

to get herself sterilized.

She said, "I'm not a breeder.

I want nothing to do with that."

Her only motto was, "No regrets."

She didn't look back.

In 1980, CNN revolutionized

the way the world watches news.

7 This news service will be called

The Cable News Network

and will program 24 hours a day.