The News Sorority Read online

  Also by Sheila Weller

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  Dancing at Ciro’s: A Family’s Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip

  Saint of Circumstance: The Alex Kelly Rape Case: Growing Up Rich and Out of Control

  Marrying the Hangman: A True Story of Privilege, Marriage, and Murder

  Raging Heart: The Intimate Story of the Tragic Marriage of O. J. and Nicole Simpson

  Hansel & Gretel in Beverly Hills

  PENGUIN PRESS

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  First published by Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Sheila Weller

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Photograph credits

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Weller, Sheila.

  The news sorority : Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour—and the (ongoing, imperfect, complicated) triumph of women in TV news / Sheila Weller.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-698-17003-2

  1. Women television journalists—United States—Biography. 2. Women television news anchors—United States—Biography. 3. Sawyer, Diane. Couric, Katie. Amanpour, Christiane. I. Title.

  PN4872.W42 2014

  070.1'950922—dc23

  [B] 2014009725

  Version_1

  TO

  Jack Dawson Kelly, Sofiya Kaur Lyall, and Arjun Kiernan Singh Lyall:

  Communicators of the future

  TWENTY-SECOND TEASERS

  An Arc of a Story in Eight Sound Bites

  “In the early 1950s, the possibility of a woman being a major TV news reporter was never discussed because it was never a possibility. A woman being a TV news anchor? Out of the question.”

  SANDY SOCOLOW, Walter Cronkite’s producer

  “In the late 1950s and early ’60s, I refused to send women reporters to Vietnam, even though they wanted to go. I thought I was protecting them.”

  AV WESTIN, CBS and NBC News producer

  “Audiences are less prepared to receive news from a woman’s voice.”

  REUVEN FRANK, NBC News president, 1970

  “The most successful women in this business are the ones who have no shame, who are pushy—and at the same time reserve a little ‘feminine.’ The guys are a lot easier to figure out—they’re what they appear, they’re aggressive, they’re snakes, whatever. But the women have to be all things to all people. Trot out the sexiness when they need it. Trot out the cattiness when they need that. They’re much more interesting. And you don’t have this career without being a little off-kilter. People who want to succeed in the public spotlight, night after night—‘Look at me! I’m significant! But I’m also fun and human!’ If there’s a spectrum from Asperger’s to normalcy, well, somewhere in the middle is network TV anchor.”

  NETWORK EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

  “These three are formidable, formidable women. They take no prisoners.”

  CONNIE CHUNG, highly successful network news reporter and former CBS News coanchor

  “Isn’t it fascinating? Everybody said women have a short shelf life, but these three are all outlasting the guys.”

  DON BROWNE, former executive vice president, NBC News

  “Don’t cry. They’re fuckers. And we can have a good time. Honest!”

  Note scribbled in 1973 by CBS News assistant (now longtime 60 Minutes star) Lesley Stahl to fellow assistant (now longtime CBS executive producer) Susan Zirinsky, during a difficult moment during Watergate. It’s still in Zirinsky’s wallet.

  “Martha Gellhorn, [the] great, great, great war correspondent, . . . said, ‘In all my reporting life I have thrown small pebbles into a very large pond, and I have no way of knowing whether any pebble caused the slightest ripple. I don’t need to worry about that. My responsibility was the effort.’”

  CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR

  CONTENTS

  Also By Sheila Weller

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Twenty-Second Teasers

  PART ONE | UP-FRONTS

  INTRODUCTION The News You Give Begins with the News You’ve Lived

  Diane, Christiane, Katie: 1969, 1997, 2000

  PART TWO | MORNING

  CHAPTER ONE Louisville Idealist Becomes Nixon Loyalist

  Diane: 1945 to 1978

  CHAPTER TWO The Secret Princess Becomes the Exile in Atlanta

  Christiane: 1958 to 1983

  CHAPTER THREE Little Sister Cheerleader to Pentagon Correspondent

  Katie: 1957 to 1989

  PART THREE | PRIME TIME

  CHAPTER FOUR Brainy, Blond, Glamorous

  Diane: 1978 to 1998

  CHAPTER FIVE America’s Sweetheart to Premature Widow

  Katie: 1989 to 1998

  CHAPTER SIX From Atlanta to Bosnia: A Crusader Is Born

  Christiane: 1983 to 1999

  PART FOUR | SWEEPS

  CHAPTER SEVEN The Cool Drink of Water Versus the Girl Next Door

  Diane and Katie: 1999 to 2005

  CHAPTER EIGHT Home from War, Still in Battle

  Christiane: 1997 to 2007

  CHAPTER NINE First Female Anchor

  Katie and Diane: 2006 to 2009

  CHAPTER TEN Two Out of Three and Then Three Out of Six

  Diane, Katie, and Christiane: 2008 to 2011

  PART FIVE | CANCELLATION

  CHAPTER ELEVEN “Any White Male in the Chair . . .”

  Katie, Christiane, and Diane: 2011 to 2014

  Acknowledgments

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photograph Credits

  Photographs

  PART ONE

  UP-FRONTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The News You Give Begins with the News You’ve Lived

  Diane, Christiane, Katie: 1969, 1997, 2000

  I. PUSHING PAST GRIEF: DIANE, 1969

  Twenty-three-year-old Diane Sawyer (she used her real first name, Lila, ironically, only in affectionate letters) was working as the first ever full-time female news reporter in her hometown of Louisville, Kentucky—on WLKY, Channel 32—in mid-September 1969. She had been on the job for two years, and she—a Wellesley graduate and former beauty queen—was itching to leave for a bigger opportunity, in the nation’s capital. Still, Diane’s years at WLKY had not been uneventful.

  Louisville in the late 1960s had a roiling temper. Some of its residents were hell-bent on overturning the recent federally mandated civil rights advances. When black demonstrators peacefully marched through the streets to protest the stubbornly still segregated neighborhoods, angry whites rushed them, bearing swastikas, hurling bottles. On top of that, the country had just
passed through a nightmare of a year, and Diane Sawyer of WLKY had reported on all of it.

  Diane and her colleague Bob Winlock—who rejected being “the black reporter” as much as she disliked being “the female reporter”—witnessed painful backlash against advances they had both been a part of. Diane was kept off the riot-scene beat by her gallant bosses—at least one frontline reporter had gotten beaten—but the city’s racial anguish was on clear display everywhere, including during the emotionally fraught press conferences she covered for the station.

  Violence became commonplace. Early in her tenure at WLKY, Martin Luther King Jr. had been spat upon by a little white girl who couldn’t have been more than seven. During another visit, the civil rights leader’s skull had barely evaded a rock hurled through his car window (he later held the rock high and pronounced it a “foundation” of his struggle there). Then, of course, came Dr. King’s murder—close by, in Memphis—and that of Bobby Kennedy, in Los Angeles, during that surreally violent patch of spring to summer 1968. “Diane was disconsolate” at both assassinations, the station’s general manager, Ed Shadburne, says. Still, she dutifully went out to get person-on-the-street responses. That was being a reporter: Tuck in the pain and do your job. You were a witness.

  But that was the ironic thing. Diane had already been a witness—indeed, a participant—in some amazing ground-level integration gains almost a full decade earlier. Her junior high and high school, Seneca, had integrated startlingly early, in 1957, well before the city’s neighborhoods, restaurants, restrooms, and theaters had stopped barring blacks or roping them off in dingy “Coloreds” quarters. By a fluke of the school’s newness and geography, the 1957–1963 Seneca kids (“a third white, a third Jewish, a third black,” the alums today like to proudly exaggerate) and their teachers were on their own, improvising a racial amity.

  In 1958, when Diane was in the eighth grade (four years before James Meredith’s federally assisted singular integration of the University of Mississippi), white boys in ducktails and low-slung jeans had written GO HOME, NIGGER! on the walls when the first black students bravely but nervously entered, and some of the kids were beaten. But by the time her class reached eleventh grade, in 1961, the students were protesting restaurant segregation together. When the boys’ basketball team traveled to racist Kentucky towns for away games, the white players refused to go into the coffee shops that didn’t allow their black teammates; they all ate in their bus. Now, in 1969, the still resonating killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy seemed like a Molotov cocktail hurled against those fragile, cherished Seneca High advances.

  • • •

  DIANE’S FAMILY WAS her stable haven during a period of violence, regression, and sadness. Even as a working reporter four months shy of twenty-four, she was still living at home with her parents.

  The elder Sawyers had come to their security and respectability the hard way. Erbon Powers Sawyer and Jean Dunagan Sawyer had grown up during the Depression in dire poverty in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky, just north of the Tennessee border. Diane’s father was one of nine siblings. Diane’s mother, whose parents had the folksy names of Foxie and Norma Belle, was one of four daughters. The Dunagan children teetered on the brink of starvation. “There were sometimes only pennies and a few potatoes in winter—there were bruises, real bruises in that life” of theirs, Diane has said. Erbon and Jean had limited themselves to two children. Diane’s two-year-older sister, Linda, was the vivacious, prettier girl; Diane was the adoring little sister—circumspect, awkwardly tall, her poor eyesight requiring thick glasses.

  The Sawyer family was comfortable but not seriously prosperous. The bar was very high in Louisville, a city of century-old debutante balls and Kentucky Derby Winners’ Circle families of six generations of gentry who patronized the exclusive fox-hunting clubs in Lexington. Diane’s father had made it up from a tiny junior college all the way through law school, and by 1969 he had long been the Jefferson County judge—Judge “Tom” Sawyer his jaunty sobriquet. Jean Sawyer—“Mrs. Sawyer” to decades of students—officiated at the blackboard at Hite Elementary. She was known as the best third-grade teacher in the city.

  The Sawyer family was deeply Methodist. Diane had attended Methodist Youth Association camp, and, as busy as she now was as a reporter, she still made it to practice two evenings a week to blend her gifted soprano, on classic hymns, with a mélange of other voices in the St. David’s Church–based choir called the Motet Singers. When Diane was growing up, the Sawyers had hosted home Bible meetings on Sunday and sometimes Wednesday nights at their home, while their family church, St. Mark’s, was under construction. “Purpose” was a word heard in many sermons. The ideal—to live a life “of purpose”—was also fortified by Judge Sawyer.

  “Diane’s father was the one who really put the idea of ‘purpose’ in her life; he was her moral compass,” says her close friend ABC producer Mark Robertson, on the basis of what she has told him. “She always says, ‘Those are real lives at stake!’” of her responsibility to the people whose stories she is telling on television. “That came from her father.”

  Judge Sawyer was a serious man—a thoughtful intellectual. Diane’s love of D. H. Lawrence and e. e. cummings seems to have derived from his respect for literature. Diane was very close to him, a closeness amplified by the serendipitous fact that she was the spitting image of his sister Lila, after whom she’d been named. She’d even tried law school for one semester, mainly, friends say, because law was what he did.

  Judge Sawyer was paternal in an old-fashioned way. Just after Diane had been hired at WLKY, he had pointedly dropped in one day, unannounced, on the station’s general manager to make good and sure that this man who’d hired his daughter did not have any designs on her. He was a fierce Republican—Diane’s eventual, abiding loyalty to Richard Nixon, incomprehensible to so many, owes much to his strong party affiliation. Yet the judge was not stern; he had a palpable sense of compassion. The judge’s “love for his family, intellectual curiosity, and evenhandedness were as perfect as a person’s could be,” says Diane’s high school English teacher and confidante, Alice Chumbley Lora. Finally, Judge Sawyer had given Diane the yardstick by which she chose her profession. “Answer three questions,” he said one day. “One: What are you passionate about? Two: What can you have adventure doing? Three: What can you do to make a difference?” Four decades later she would recount those unforgettably impactful words to a young ABC News female protégée.

  Diane’s mother was perhaps an even greater influence. Jean Sawyer was not an intellectual (“I never saw Mrs. Sawyer reading a book,” one friend says), but she was a seizer of life, an ambitious perfectionist—and Diane was awed by this. “Growing up, I didn’t have distant idols, I had proximate ones,” Diane once made clear.

  Jean Sawyer had a tremendous hold on her daughters. “Diane’s mother was a very, very aggressive woman. She was a force of nature,” says Greg Haynes, a Louisville friend whom Diane dated in college. “She pushed her daughters into all these beauty contests.” And lessons: Diane took piano, ballet, tap, voice, classical guitar, and fencing, sacrificing her social life for the palette of activities her mother lined up. “Mrs. Sawyer was a 1950s version of the Tiger Mom,” says one who knew the family: pushing her daughters, using criticism to make sure they did their best. Every opportunity Jean Sawyer hadn’t had, she made sure her daughters did have. “Mrs. Sawyer was very ambitious for her daughters,” Haynes says. “She was extremely devoted to their achievement.” Sometimes it seemed that was all she cared about. It was as if so much insecurity had suffused Jean’s and Erbon’s youths, the opposite would now be fiercely willed. A pristine security, unmarred by lack of opportunity—and certainly unmarred by tragedy—would be obtained for the Sawyer girls, come hell or high water.

  And then, on September 23, 1969, that plan—that dream—fell apart in an instant.

  Diane’s father had risen early t
hat morning and gotten into his car to drive to work. The route was familiar enough to be rote; he had driven it innumerable times. Somehow, this morning, something went very wrong very fast. Minutes from his home, while ascending an overpass above the interstate highway, his car suddenly veered and shot off the unshielded bridge abutment, over the overpass. Did the judge fall asleep at the wheel? Did a tire blow out? Whatever the cause, rumors would circulate, all unconfirmed, that the fatal plunge was a suicide.

  Louisville in 1969 was a small town when tragedies happened, so it was not surprising that the first newsperson who heard of the accident happened to be a member of Diane’s Motet Singers: Bob McDonald, a reporter at radio station WKLO. He was announcing the morning news when the bulletin came in that the judge’s car had plummeted and he’d been taken to General Hospital, where Diane and Jean were now rushing. Judge Sawyer’s death was announced on WKLO; then Jim Smith, Diane’s WLKY assignment editor, assumed the grim task of filming the removal of his junior colleague’s father’s destroyed vehicle for airing on the very newscast, that evening, to which Diane normally would have contributed.

  WLKY’s news director, Ken Rowland, rushed to the Sawyer house to pay a condolence call. The women were “in shock more than anything,” he recalls, like “any other family who’s just lost someone in a tragic accident that there’s no real explanation for.” Diane’s friend Greg Haynes hurried to the funeral home. “Diane was very distraught,” he says. “She was devastated.”

  At Judge Sawyer’s funeral service the Motet Singers performed one of his favorite songs, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The judge had been a navy officer in World War II and he was a border-Southern postwar Republican—which meant: anti-Dixiecrat. He’d stood up for some ideals that were regionally unpopular. Choir member Celia McDonald remembers, “The family”—Jean, Linda, Diane—“was just crushed” as they sat in their pews through the service.