Celebrities Take to the Stage, Phones in Global Telethon

In a singularly American response to crisis, a group of pop culture superstars took over the airwaves Friday night for an unprecedented telethon to raise money for victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Even in this information age, the communal moment of charity, grief and celebrity beamed to televisions, radios and computers across the globe was historic in reach.

Called “America: A Tribute to Heroes,” the two-hour event was carried by all the major television networks, dozens of cable channels, 8,000 U.S. radio stations and broadcasters of all sizes and types in 156 countries, according to event organizers.

While they declined to release even tentative donation totals until the phone banks close at 7 p.m. today, even conservative estimates ran into the tens of millions of dollars. The funds are to be distributed by the United Way.

“We’re going to try to do something,” actor Tom Hanks began when he appeared as the show’s first speaker. It was more than a mission statement: Hanks was quoting the desperate words of a passenger aboard United Airlines Flight 93 making a cell phone call. That hijacked plane did not reach its intended target, presumably because the passengers intervened. It crashed instead in rural Pennsylvania. Hanks explained that the assembled stars sought to “raise spirits and, we hope, a great deal of money.” And, he noted, “we are not healers nor are we heroes.”

The show traded the flash of award shows for candle-lit austerity and the intimacy of a small-town public television pledge drive. But the citizenry on camera were among the nation’s most famous celebrity brand names, among them actors Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts and Robert De Niro, and singers Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder and Celine Dion.

The staging itself was by turns raw, somber and uplifting. With no studio audience, applause was absent and there was no sense of an elite industry audience sitting between the artists and the TV viewers. Performers onstage, never introduced or even identified, largely were subdued. Video montages of photographs of victims and memorials brought the focus back, again and again, to the cause at hand. Still, the scope of the project and its famous faces added heartfelt pages to the nation’s scrapbook of shared images linked to the terrorist attacks in New York and Arlington, Va.

The show opened with Springsteen and his band performing “My City of Ruins,” an unrecorded song he first performed in public last year. While the title is not about New York--the song was inspired by Asbury Park, N.J., where he began his career--its imagery and chorus of “Come on, rise up, come on, rise up” took on new meaning in the aftermath of the Manhattan attacks.

Among the haunting moments were an emotional Neil Young, at a piano accompanied by an orchestra, performing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and Muhammad Ali, trembling from his ongoing battle with Parkinson’s disease, imploring Americans to remember that hate crimes against Muslims--a community to which he belongs--will only add bitter new chapters to the unfolding horrors.

“I wouldn’t be here representing Islam if it were terrorist,” Ali said. “I think all people should know the truth, come to recognize the truth. Islam is peace.”

There were moments too when followers of pop culture witnessed moments laced with subtext.

Dennis Franz and Jimmy Smits, so familiar to TV viewers as onetime detective partners on “NYPD Blue,” offered a subdued tribute to the police officers who died in the Manhattan attacks. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam performed “The Long Road,” a song he recorded in 1996 with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the late Pakistani singer who helped lead a surge of U.S. interest in Middle Eastern music. And Mariah Carey, the pop singer who has recently been under medical care for exhaustion and emotional distress, emerged from seclusion to perform the song “Hero” in the most public setting imaginable.

The stars who did not appear on the show’s crowded roster of performers and speakers worked the telephones, with Jack Nicholson, Brad Pitt, Whoopi Goldberg, Adam Sandler, Al Pacino and Andy Garcia among the famous voices answering the calls of citizens making pledges during the broadcast.

Billy Joel, a native of Long Island, sang “New York State of Mind,” and afterward, climbed into a New York Police Department squad car to visit the World Trade Center site to see the aftermath firsthand. Speaking by cellular phone during the drive, he said the telethon was a unique moment for him as an industry veteran.

“A lot of the people backstage were the same ones that are backstage at the awards shows and industry functions, but it was completely different tonight--the mood,” Joel said. “This was not about competition or business. This was about unanimity as Americans.”

The breadth of the audience was unclear Friday night, but the event’s hammer hold on the airwaves was unprecedented, suggesting a historic potential.

Reflecting the anxiety of the nation’s mood, the sound stages hosting the event in Los Angeles and New York were tightly controlled.

No studio audience was brought in, the media were turned away and organizers tried desperately to keep the sites of the event secret. Bomb scares made during the day and the global stage of the event only added to the apprehension at CBS’ Television City here and, in New York, at the Sony stages.

In the end, though, the event proceeded smoothly, especially in light of its hasty genesis. In just four days, Joel Gallen, the veteran producer of MTV’s all-star award shows, spearheaded the effort to arrange talent and production necessities for the ambitious project.

“It’s all hands on deck,” said Simon Renshaw, manager for the Dixie Chicks, one of the acts that eagerly volunteered to help.

Other than news events, the only other example of TV networks banding together in such a fashion occurred in 1990 (interestingly, during the administration of the elder President Bush), when every broadcast network and multiple cable channels televised “Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue,” an animated anti-drug abuse special aimed at children.

That effort was orchestrated by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and then-President Bush and his wife, Barbara, taped public service endorsements urging every child in the country to watch the program.

Ratings estimates for “America: A Tribute to Heroes” are expected to be released today. The most widely seen entertainment program in television history is the final episode of “MASH” in 1983, which was viewed by 106 million people in the U.S. and in more than 60% of the country’s homes.

Willie Nelson, who closed the show in Los Angeles by leading the cast in “America the Beautiful,” said that, while the gravity of the event kept performers somber on camera, the atmosphere backstage was lighter and encouraging.

“The fact that everybody is here is a miracle itself,” Nelson said. “There is a lot of smiling and laughing backstage, and I think we all need that as much as anything these days. The whole country.”

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Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn and staff writer Brian Lowry contributed to this report.