Who

The lanky southerner, serial womanizer, and perennial heart patient is the host of The Charlie Rose Show on PBS.

Backstory

A native of North Carolina, Rose grew up working in his family's general store before heading off to Duke. After earning a degree from Duke Law School in 1968, he moved to New York and took a finance job at Banker's Trust, moonlighting on the weekends as a reporter for WPIX-TV. He soon quit finance altogether and went to work full-time with Bill Moyers, eventually becoming executive producer for Moyers' news shows and, in 1978, landing his own talk show in Dallas. By the early 1980s, Rose had gone national: He was the anchor of the CBS news program Nightwatch, the network's first late night news broadcast. In 1990, he left CBS; the interview-focused Charlie Rose Show debuted on Thirteen/WNET in 1991 and went into national syndication two years later. As of 2008, he has a side gig as a contributor on 60 Minutes.

Of note

Rose's show isn't much to look at—it's just him and his interviewee sitting at a table with two glasses of ice water in front of them. And while he generally plays nice with the people who sit down for a chat, he remains one of the last TV hosts in the infotainment age who's still game for a serious interview, a rarity today when the average television sit-down is cut into six-second soundbites. It's earned him plenty of big name guests over the years. Just a few of the people who have graced Rose's stark, black stage: Tina Brown, Tommy Hilfiger, Al Pacino, Helen Gurley Brown, David Childs, Gwyneth Paltrow, Itzhak Perlman, Tom Freston, Andre Leon Talley, Gay Talese, Uma Thurman, Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Tisch, Moby, Larry Silverstein, Will Shortz, Barry Scheck, Jacob Weisberg, Jerry Seinfeld, Ken Auletta, E.L. Doctorow, Steve Martin, Paul Krugman, Julian Schnabel, Tina Fey, Jay-Z, Harrison Ford, Peter Gelb, Louis Gerstner, Richard Gere, Nicolai Ouroussoff, Ted Forstmann, Queen Latifah, Spike Lee, Jeffrey Sachs, Oliver Sacks, Marcus Samuelsson, Gerald Lefcourt, Liz Smith, Jeff Immelt, Todd Solondz, George Soros, Stephen Sondheim, Conan O'Brien, Peter Neufeld, Jerry Nadler, Glenn Close, and Bill Clinton.

Health report

Rose experienced shortness of breath and chest pain while traveling in Syria in 2006 (he was there to interview Syrian president Bashar al-Assad), and on the advice of his heart surgeon, Dr. Wayne Isom, he was rushed to Paris, where he had emergency open-heart surgery to repair his mitral valve. (It was replaced with that of a pig.) It was his second heart surgery: In 2002, Isom operated on another one of Rose's faulty heart valves. The longtime oenephile has since been forced to cut back on his alcohol intake.

Personal

Rose has long had a rep as a lady's man; a close friend of his once called him a "straight up horndog." Past conquests included Wall Street Journal publisher Karen Elliott House, media entrepreneur/art collector Louise MacBain, and media exec Marybel Batjer. For the past dozen or so years he's had an on-again, off-again relationship with socialite and city planning czaress Amanda Burden.

Habitat

Until recently, Rose occupied an 8,000-square-foot townhouse on the Upper East Side with 18 rooms, including four bedrooms, maid's quarters, backyard, and fifth floor terrace. (The home is now on the market for $15 million.) He also has a home in Bellport—where he can often be found playing tennis—which he bought for $1.5 million in 1998.