The News Sorority Read online

  Katie seemed to know, from very early on, that she wanted to be a television reporter. In 1970, when she was thirteen years old, “at cheerleading practice and in the hallways, she would hold a fake microphone in front of her face, and she would say, ‘This is Katie Couric, reporting from Cairo,’” her friend Barbara Cherney Andrukonis recalls. “Katie always had a vision of being ‘somebody’ when she grew up.” Adds her friend Betsy Yowell Howell: “In college, when we’d come home summers” and everyone else was cheerfully clueless about their futures, “she knew what she wanted to do: ‘I want to go to New York and be on TV.’” The on-camera part fit her natural zesty exhibitionism, her mischief, her flair for the wry bon mot. The newswoman part suited her serious self—a self she aspired to, knew she possessed if did not always manifest, and spent her early career uphill-battling to be acknowledged for.

  At Yorktown High, Katie had grabbed one of the rare eighth-grade spots on the mostly ninth- and tenth-grade cheerleading squad. The cachet of being a cheerleader, with its visible bravura, presaged that other, further goal. She’d practiced her older sisters’ cheers over and over; she memorized the cheerleaders’ names, both for ingratiation and for inspiration—and finally her shrewd determination paid off. She made the team. But cheerleading was just the beginning.

  “She was in the limelight from a very early time in our schooling,” says Barbara Andrukonis, recalling her bubbly friend as a track and field whiz who sang Broadway show tunes while playing them by ear on the piano; who was a ham, cracking everyone up while lip-synching “My Boyfriend’s Back”; who was a gifted mimic, hitting it out of the park, if she did say so herself, with her Karen Carpenter imitation. Katie’s knack for performance was deep—and her talent was not insignificant. She played Debussy and Chopin—the only one of her four siblings to keep up piano lessons—and she pecked out the music by heart, “like Irving Berlin,” she would later say, “play[ing] everything in the key of C.”

  Katie excelled at school. She was elected senior class homeroom president and she earned placement in the honors society. With Emily and Kiki both graduates of Smith College (Kiki was now studying architecture at Harvard), Katie applied there as well in her senior year, feeling optimistic that she would be accepted for fall 1974 entrance: She was a double legacy, and her grades were good.

  It was not to be. Smith sent her a rejection letter.

  This wouldn’t normally seem like a grievous loss. She was accepted to the University of Virginia, where Johnny was a sophomore. With its stately, bucolic campus established by Thomas Jefferson and its high academic standards, UVA was one of the finest state universities in the country. But the arrival in the mailbox of the thin envelope from Smith, indicating that her application for admission had been declined, was devastating to Katie, perhaps revealing how much she secretly feared her boisterous peppiness was less than her sisters’ gravitas, and how high a bar she had set for herself. (So stinging was the rejection that she still talked about it almost ten years later. “Katie told me she had always wanted to go to Smith, and when she didn’t get in she was heartbroken,” says her Atlanta boyfriend Lane Duncan, who met her in 1982. “I said, ‘Come on, Katie! UVA—it’s a wonderful school!’” But she wasn’t having it. “Katie was envious of her older sisters—she wanted to measure up to them and she felt she didn’t.”)

  Katie reacted to the Smith rejection, and the inferiority and imperfection she inferred from it, in an extreme way: She became bulimic. She began a secret daily habit of bingeing and purging—eating large quantities of food and then repairing to a bathroom to vomit it all up. “I wrestled with bulimia all through college and for two years after that,” she admitted in 2012. “I was struggling with my body image and feeling like I wasn’t good enough or attractive enough or thin enough.” She was wholesomely pretty, chubby cheeked, and barely five foot three. She was certainly not fat, but she was “curvy,” as she puts it, and, like many other Vogue-reading girls who looked enviously at the three lissome Charlie’s Angels on TV, she was deeply aware that the cultural ideal seemed to be “five-foot-eight and 115 pounds. It can be so difficult to embrace the body that you have if it doesn’t fit with the ideal,” she has said. “Women get praised for being super thin, so you keep striving to be that way.” She began to experience “this rigidity, this feeling that if you eat one thing that’s wrong, you’re full of self-loathing and then you punish yourself, whether it’s one cookie or a stick of gum that isn’t sugarless. I would sometimes beat myself up for that.” In the midseventies, little was known of eating disorders to which young women were especially prone. It would take Karen Carpenter’s death from anorexia nervosa in 1983 to shine a spotlight on what came to be known as the “good girls’ illness.” But eating disorders were far from rare at the time.

  As Katie entered the UVA freshman class of three thousand—along with some forty others of Yorktown’s 540 graduating seniors—she was not alone in her secret habit. “Lots of us girls were bulimic or anorexic,” says a female classmate. “If everything else spirals out of control, you’ve got food whipped.” And what heavy food that Southern school had! There was almost a secret contest among girls “for barfing up ‘grillswiths’—two grilled donuts topped with vanilla ice cream—usually eaten after a one-eyed bacon cheeseburger—fried egg on top—and sometimes pipn’ hots [fries with gravy] at the ‘UD,’ the University Diner, consumed at two a.m. after fraternity parties.”

  Popular culture at the time was rooted in disco. The swirly, strings-heavy music in seamless rotation introduced a new kind of joyous but disciplined dancing and made strange bedfellows of disparate elements of urban culture: preening outer borough New York tough boys like John Travolta’s character, Tony Romero, in Saturday Night Fever; dandyish African Americans in John Shaft suits; and denizens of the openly gay bathhouse scene.

  But the culture of UVA in fall 1974 was not only not in tune with the current disco era but “it was as if even the sixties had never happened,” says a woman with a background similar to Katie’s. “You didn’t wear jeans on campus, really.” Coming from a middle-class public high school, “I couldn’t believe all the boys in Lacoste shirts and khakis and the girls in these awful wraparound quilted skirts and headbands, dancing to ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup,’” by the Foundations—the song that was all the rage. “For those of us”—Katie included—“who did not come from the Virginia boarding school culture, with boys named Schuyler and Tripp with III after their names, those of us who wore halter dresses and platform shoes on our first day of class, UVA seemed like time-traveling to another era.” As classmate Michael Vitez, who also grew up in a middle-class neighborhood near D.C., puts it, “The longest distance in America seemed to be the ninety minutes it took to get from Washington to Richmond—it was a different world.”

  UVA had only started admitting women in 1970—four and a half years before Katie’s class entered. It was still catching up from its time warp, this school with its tradition of wealthy but provincial Southernness. Unmarked graves of Confederate soldiers peppered the fields adjoining the campus; the school was still majority male, and there were even a couple of professors who refused to teach women. One was the esteemed regional history professor Virginius Dabney, named for the state his ancestors helped found, a tall and courtly direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson and of sundry Stars and Bars eminences. Professor Dabney was an (initially reluctant) opponent of segregation, but he’d been ambivalent about the civil rights movement; he defended the South when it was criticized, and he wrote a book contesting the notion that Jefferson had had a love affair with his slave Sally Hemings. According to a student at UVA during Katie’s early years there, Professor Dabney firmly believed that Mr. Jefferson’s university should have remained all male, and he intended it to stay precisely that way. Other professors would teach women only if they came to class in skirts.

  Katie’s immersion into a school culture that was so conservative may well have c
arried a lesson for her about maneuvering in the “real,” postcollege world she would soon enter: America will change, but not that much. Her future ability to fit so perfectly into the expectations and approval of middle America during the first half of her fourteen years as Today’s star anchor may well have come from this understanding about the limits of change—the obdurate nature of tradition. Later, she would be punished by her loyal viewers for deviating from the image of her they had embraced so energetically early on.

  The college’s president, Frank Loucks Hereford, was a staunch traditionalist, and, says one then-student, “You got the idea that anyone who wasn’t Southern, male, and straight was there under sufferance.” UVA’s sororities were racially segregated and many did not accept Jewish girls, and competition for the top houses was intense. Katie pledged one of the two most exclusive sororities, Delta Delta Delta—Tri-Delt—in which, a Kappa Delta says, “the joke was that their version of diversity was letting in brunettes. Katie was probably about as far out on a limb as they went: brown hair and from a public school in Northern Virginia and she declared one of the new, nontraditional majors, American studies. Imagine!”

  On weekends, UVA became majority female. The students from the nearby “suitcase schools”—the all-women’s colleges Mary Baldwin, Mary Washington, Hollins, and Sweetbriar—thronged in for parties. These girls were considered prettier and both more mysterious and more accommodating by the UVA frat boys who now had a surfeit of women to choose from; they scorned their weekday female classmates as “U-bags” and bragged they’d never date them.

  The sexual politics of the mid-1970s were perplexing. There was a heady scent of mainstream-ascendant feminism in the air—Title IX existed; women were enrolling in law and med school in newly record numbers; the culture was energized by activists, like Gloria Steinem, whom teenage girls actually wanted to emulate; movies like The Stepford Wives showed, by way of horror movie hyperbole, what everyone finally understood that gender relations shouldn’t be.

  At UVA, even girls outside of the “I’m-going-to-be-a-teacher-but-mainly-get-married” inner circle wanted to fit in. As one explains it: “Here you had this über-traditional place that was filled with very, very smart women who wanted change, but not wholesale change. We didn’t want to be Michigan or Antioch. We wanted to keep the cool traditions. We wanted to drink with the boys at the frats but not worry about date rape. We wanted to get into a good sorority but not because the Richmond debutantes approved of us. We wanted intellectual respect and equality—we wanted to be smart and outspoken—but we still waited on pins and needles to be asked out for the weekend on Wednesday night. Needless to say, we didn’t always succeed with this confused agenda.”

  Katie, this sorority friend says, was as afflicted with this “confused agenda” as any other UVA freshman girl. She certainly partook of fraternity parties, which were frequent and raucous. Easter weekend was the school’s big blowout—one year Jackson Browne performed and Life magazine took pictures. “Katie may have wanted to get into Smith, but she wouldn’t have wanted to go to Smith,” the sorority friend opines. “The Seven Sisters’ time had passed. They weren’t fun.” This friend adds, “In order to do well at UVA, you had to be able to work hard and play hard, twenty-four/seven. UVA was very good at rewarding people who could handle that. Contemplation was not encouraged. Katie’s a high-energy person. That’s why she thrived there. Lots of other people burned out.”

  Kathleen Lobb met Katie when they were resident advisers in the same dorm. Kathleen was a junior, Katie a sophomore. Their shared background departed from UVA’s more elite norm—“I went to a Catholic high school in Northern Virginia, which was very near the public high school that Katie attended,” Kathleen says, “and one of my closest friends had known Katie since we were all little kids.” They would become friends for life, and at UVA they shared the sense that they were at a school that “still had very much the aura of a Southern conservative institution, and yet the women’s movement was exploding all around us. I don’t think we had that much of a sense of being part of feminism in terms of our day-to-day life at school,” but they wanted some of what was out there: careers as well as boyfriends, independence as well as security. Adventure, even.

  Resident advisers counseled younger girls in the dorms, and Katie was a natural for the job. “She would stay up all night talking to a freshman girl who was depressed over breaking up with her boyfriend,” a friend recalled. “Being an RA was a challenging experience and we just bonded,” says Kathleen, who is now the senior vice president of Katie’s Stand Up to Cancer. “She’s a lot funnier than I am, but our senses of humor were similar. We had the same value system; we were both very close to our families.” Kathleen was struck by Katie’s determination to become a TV reporter. “In my circle of friends, it was pretty rare to have such a definitive sense of what you wanted to do from the beginning of time, like Katie did.”

  The way Kathleen heard it, Katie had told her father she wanted to be a reporter and he’d replied, “Go into TV; you’ll make more money.” But Katie’s oldest sister Emily’s journalism career also inspired her. Katie’s talent for writing impressed Kathleen. “Katie was taking a graduate-level cultural and intellectual history course as a sophomore, and we were sitting together while she was writing a paper on witchcraft on her typewriter, and it was riveting. She got an A-plus in that course, so her talent as a storyteller was very apparent to me from the beginning.”

  In her freshman year, Katie joined UVA’s paper, the Cavalier Daily. “She started as a reporter, her second year became an associate editor, then the faculty was her beat for a year,” during which she did a series of profiles of professors. “She was a rock-solid legitimate staff member,” says Michael Vitez, who became the Cav’s editor in chief in his senior year and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize at the Philadelphia Inquirer. The paper took its mission very seriously—its staffers considered the campus’s weekly paper, The Declaration, “to be more conservative, more party line.”

  “I want to say this carefully,” Vitez says, “but if you lined up everyone in the newsroom at the time and asked, ‘Who will be the most successful?’ you wouldn’t necessarily have picked Katie. Because you would have thought, ‘Who’s the smartest?’ and there were a lot of intellectuals”—many went on to estimable, serious newspaper careers. But, in retrospect, Katie’s eventual outsized success makes sense to Vitez because “she was not just very attractive and hardworking, but she had a fabulous personality and was very quick on her feet, and she was forward-thinking to go into TV—CNN!—right away.” He pauses to make a point more important than it may initially sound: “And that classic suburban background and that solid, nurturing home she came from made her really in tune with America and gave her the confidence to deal with lots of people.”

  During Katie’s senior year at UVA, she was on the senior resident staff and was awarded the most coveted housing on campus, a rare “lawn room,” one of about a hundred small suites—cramped, but with a fireplace—in the most historic part of the university. “She was a mover and shaker on campus,” says Barbara Andrukonis, who attended UVA as well but was returning home after graduation and was engaged to her boyfriend.

  By now, the tenor of the campus had changed. No longer was UVA purely the anachronistic rich Southern preppie haven it had been in 1974. Katie related as a feminist now—“I was one of those young women right smack in the middle of the women’s movement who thought, ‘I don’t ever need to get married. I don’t need a man.’” And the gay rights movement had arrived on campus. On the other side of the country, Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay political official, had just been assassinated in San Francisco. UVA boys who had trembled in their closets during freshman year were coming out now, and gay bashing—once an unremarkable staple of fraternity life—was drawing outrage. Katie became close friends with a gay student who was an editor of The Declaration. Both papers—The Dec and the
Cav—came out for gay rights. UVA’s new Gay Student Union demanded a meeting with President Hereford to discuss protection for gays on campus. When Hereford declined, saying he had a prior commitment to go to the theater, students howled at his tone deafness: Going to the theater as a way of ducking gays? In defending his refusal of the meeting, Hereford explained that UVA was predominantly heterosexual. Students then reworded the earnest school song from “We come from Old Virginia, where all is bright and gay” to “We come from Old Virginia, where all is bright and the majority are heterosexual.”