Dating David Frost

R. McPhedran/Getty The real Caroline Cushing Graham—who’s played by actress Rebecca Hall in the movie—talks to The Daily Beast about her romance with Frost, drinks with Richard Nixon, and what the movie gets wrong.

More than thirty years ago, jet setting beauty Caroline Cushing Graham travelled with her boyfriend David Frost to Los Angeles where he conducted his famous interview with Richard Nixon. Graham, a budding journalist, remained largely in the background, making sandwiches for the two heavyweights and sharing a drink with Nixon. Before long she was a high powered journalist herself, serving as an editor for Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. Today, Graham runs a marketing and media relations firm—and remains best friends with Frost, who, she insists, isn’t as big of a playboy as the film would have you believe.

In the movie, you and David first meet on the plane over to L.A. Of course in real life, you and David had been together for five years.

Yes—in fact, my first travel with David was to go with him to the Muhammad Ali fight in Zaire. That was my first date with David. He said would you like to go to Zaire, I’m going to be the host of the Rumble in the Jungle.

Do you feel that your relationship with David is accurately portrayed in the movie, or is it over-dramatized?

Well we had been together for five years before this so we knew each other pretty well, so I felt very much part of the team. You know, I was there for David, and I was very involved in getting the funds for the movie. But I had dinner with David every night, and the birthday party was quite, quite accurate. There wasn’t a ton of detail in the movie you know, so it was fair enough. I don’t think I’d have gotten him the cheeseburger though. I said to him recently, I’ll get you one, one of these days!

David and I are still best friends. We’ve always been friends, I’m friends with his wife too. But after the interviews were over, David went back to London and I happened to stay and took a job at the Herald Examiner as a reporter in downtown LA.

You being there solely for David must have put a strain on your relationship.

Well as the English say, you rise to the occasion. It wasn’t like we’d gone for summer holidays, though we were staying in Beverly Hills and there was a beautiful pool at the Hilton. But I was also there as a journalist, to hear the expert researchers and find out what they found out. Clay Felker, who is not portrayed in the movie but was there was a great friend of David’s and a great friend of mine—he was the former editor of New York magazine and he really knew all the journalists at the time and had a tremendous amount of input and was very influential. So were James Reston and Bob Zelnick, although they were not initially friends of mine. We had a huge group of people at the Hilton. I mean you would arrive somewhere with David and people would immediately know who you were. He was better known as a personality than they portray him in the film. David Frost Presents The Guinness Book of World Records were the first reality television shows, and I went with him to do a lot of those.

Nixon certainly thought you were all having one giant party.

His idea of us all having this fantastic time was certainly in his imagination. David traveled, he worked; when David does an interview he gets his hands dirty, he’s not a fancy guy. In the movie they show David driving, but we were always chauffeured because he was always making those notes, he always had that way with the clipboard, he always had ink all over his fingers. David was always absolutely covered in ink.

The script built up that David doesn’t feel like he did a good job with the first two interviews. My memory is that he felt he did a pretty good job on every interview, that each was a step to getting to the gold they were working on. I don’t think there was such a dramatic buildup as screenwriter made it, he was going to get something all along. We all knew he would do it, and never doubted that he would do very well.

I also feel that maybe in the movie David is a little too kind of playboy-ish, when really he’s a guy when he’s working he gets right into it. All the stuff about David’s girls is perhaps a bit of a stretch.