The News Sorority Page 13
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EVEN BEFORE GRADUATION, Katie had begun sending her résumé, such as it was, to D.C. network news directors. The place she had the best chance, she figured, was at ABC, where she had connections. (It helped to be local.) The D.C.-based executive producer of World News Tonight, David Newman, had two younger brothers who had been in Katie’s sister Kiki’s high school class. When Kevin Delaney, the deputy chief of ABC’s Washington, D.C., bureau, didn’t respond to her query, she called his office several times; his “officious” secretary, as Katie later called the woman, refused to schedule an appointment.
So Katie planned a guerrilla strike. She put on “my best dress-for-success outfit—you know, the blue blazer, the blouse, the completely geeky little bow tied around my collar that was almost obligatory wardrobe for any young, aspiring career woman at the time,” she has said. She asked her mother to drive her to ABC so she could tour the newsroom. “My mother looked at me as if I were on crack.”
Nevertheless, Elinor Couric obliged, driving Katie to the bureau in her cream-colored Buick station wagon. As Katie has described it, she approached the security guard and asked to see Kevin Delaney. The guard “chuckled” at the chutzpah of this girl with no appointment and turned her down. But she spied a phone in the waiting area, politely asked to use it, walked over, picked it up, and asked the operator to be connected “to Davey Newman”—of course, she was not on such casual terms with him, but the ruse worked. Newman answered the phone himself. Katie’s words spilled out: “Hi, Davey. You don’t know me, but your twin brothers, Steve and Eddie, went to high school with my sister Kiki, and I live down the street from your cousin Julie.” The guileless appeal to personal ties, the brazen charm, the young voice—it worked. She asked to “come up to the newsroom and poke my head into the deputy bureau chief’s office,” she has recalled. “I think he was completely flummoxed,” enough to say, “‘Sure, come up.’”
Katie has told various versions of that story, always with her plucky charm highlighted. Lane Duncan remembers her saying something along the lines of, “I went through the back door, and while someone was opening it, I walked in and said, ‘I think you need me to carry your reels.’” In all accounts she uses the same topic sentence: “I just kind of wormed my way in.”
Whatever the details, she got to Delaney’s office and begged him for a job. “I told him I really wanted to work at ABC News. I told him I had a considerable amount of work experience compared with many of my peers and I would be a real asset to the organization.” Within a few weeks, she was hired as an assistant.
It was a—male—star-studded newsroom. There was Sam Donaldson, then the ABC Sunday Evening News anchor, who serenaded her with a lusty chorus of “K-K-K-Katie, beautiful Katie . . .” There was the network’s former evening news coanchor Frank Reynolds, whose lunch order—usually a ham sandwich—she had to deliver. There was Brit Hume, then ABC’s congressional correspondent (much later Fox News anchor), and Nightline’s Ted Koppel. In contrast to CBS’s Washington newsroom, home to Watergate warriors Connie Chung, Lesley Stahl, Susan Zirinsky, Marcy McGinnis—and now, in a move that sparked staff fury, so-called Nixon apologist Diane Sawyer—the ABC bureau that Katie Couric entered was a den of testosterone, where the suited stars, she’s recalled, “sat around drinking Scotch after the newscast.” But there was an exception: the smart, elegant Cassie Mackin, ABC’s Capitol Hill correspondent, who was covering Senator Ted Kennedy’s campaign to unseat President Jimmy Carter. After having earned distinction as a hard questioner of Nixon during his run against McGovern, Mackin had been hired away from NBC by ABC News president Roone Arledge, who was on his way to becoming known as a money-brandishing poacher of female TV news stars, for the then unprecedented salary of $100,000 a year.
By now forty-one and still single, and a local girl like Katie (she’d grown up in Baltimore), Cassie Mackin defied every patronizing image of the never-married career woman the culture had presented. Katie seized upon Cassie as a role model. “I used to see her floating around the office—and she did float because she was this willowy blond. I used to think, ‘Gosh, she’s so neat! She’s so smart!’ As a young woman, I was proud of her, proud of her role.”
“Cassie was enormously self-possessed and charismatic,” recalls Richard Wald, who knew Mackin from her NBC years. “She was blond, striking looking, with great self-assurance. Whenever she’d interview a politician, she’d ask tough questions. She knew, and you knew that she knew, and she wasn’t going to take any crap from you. But she wasn’t overly aggressive,” Wald says, puzzling out the subtle mix that, in 1980, kept appealing femininity importantly in the picture. “It was that self-possession” that most stood out, Wald emphasizes. Katie could tell, from Cassie’s late hours and her long time on the Kennedy campaign trail, that she “sacrificed a lot” of personal life for her work. Katie admired that. As Lane Duncan, her Atlanta boyfriend, notes, even slightly later, “You could tell that her career was more important than any entanglement. It was clear that her career was first. She wasn’t in the market for a husband.”
Other ambitious young single female D.C.-based TV news reporters also looked at Mackin and saw that same complex combination—mostly awe-inspiring, but with a hint of warning poignance—that Katie saw. “You’d look at her and think, ‘How can you be that beautiful and that smart, in one package?” recalls Susan Zirinsky. “But there was a little bit of the lonely-girl aspect to her, too. There was the beauty, and I had so much respect for her, but you didn’t know what else was in her life.”
The bureau’s other Capitol Hill correspondent was a veteran on-air reporter named Don Farmer, whose wife, Chris Curle, was a TV newscaster in Tampa. As with many married couples in the news business, their careers kept them geographically separated. It was considered a conflict of interest for married news anchors to work the same market; most had commuter marriages.
Katie didn’t let her junior position keep her from pitching story ideas—and she did so, again and again, to Farmer. “She was barely out of college—a desk assistant—and she was hanging out in the same area where I had my cubbyhole of an office, along with Ted Koppel and some other correspondents,” says Farmer. “She would come in there and pitch stories to me that related to Congress. She would say, ‘This would be a good story for you to do,’ and more often than not they were good ideas. I don’t remember any bad ones. She was young and smart and really eager. That bubbly personality: I got to thinking really highly of her.” So did a higher-placed man Katie pitched stories to: ABC’s Washington bureau chief George Watson, a Harvard alum and close friend of David Halberstam.
In June 1980, when Katie had been pitching ideas at ABC for less than a year, CNN had just opened its doors in Atlanta. Ted Turner’s nonunionized, rules-breaking, initially bathroomless twenty-four-hour cable network—which Christiane would later come to—was on the radar for ambitious young people like Katie. It just so happened that—aside from looking for young people (requiring little salary), and aside from accepting staffers the networks wouldn’t so easily accept, such as women, African Americans, and old-timers aging out in other markets—Ted and partner Reese Schonfeld had another hiring trick up their sleeves: They got expensive veterans cheaply by approaching married-couple TV pros—anchors, weather people—stressed out from constantly weekend-commuting between his city and hers. Lois Hart and Dave Walker were the first married couple who gratefully jumped to the Atlanta unknown in order to work together and quit their commuting lifestyle. Next, Schonfeld recruited Don Farmer, the ABC Capitol Hill correspondent who was so impressed with Katie, and his Tampa-based wife, Chris Curle. They would anchor CNN’s two-hour crown-jewel afternoon Today-style show, Take Two.
As soon as Reese and Ted secured a line of credit and they re-upped the affiliate bureaus they had lost during their temporary money crunch, Reese asked Don Farmer and George Watson (by now also recruited to CNN) to recommend hires for CNN’s D.C. b
ureau. “George and I suggested Katie,” Don says. “She became part of our staff, an associate producer.”
Katie has remembered this period as being overwhelming. It was, “‘We’re gonna give you a break, kid.’” They told her to “go to the White House and talk about what the president was doing. It was like saying to me, ‘Why don’t you go play Lady Macbeth?’ I was sooo bad! I had this sing-songy voice and I looked like I was in high school.”
One morning the D.C. anchor failed to show up for the new seven a.m. spot, and unbeknownst to Atlanta, Katie was rushed in as a replacement. “Ted Kavanau—who hated Washington and was always fighting with George Watson about who had more time on the air—called me and said, ‘Look who’s on the air! ’” Reese Schonfeld recalls, mimicking Kavanau’s outrage at seeing an unprofessional novice. The story—which has been repeated many times—goes that Schonfeld then screamed, referring to Katie, “I never want to see that girl on the air again!” “It was a real confidence builder,” Katie has said, with grim sarcasm. Schonfeld admits: “She looked eighteen. Her voice was quavering. I did call the producer and ask, ‘Who put her on the air?’ But I didn’t say, ‘Never put her on the air again.’” Reese says his actual words were “Never put anyone on the air again without calling me first,” and he claims that, in the retellings of the story amid Katie’s fame, his actual, more politic words morphed into the harsher ones.
As hurtful as Schonfeld’s outburst may have been, Katie steeled herself against it. She wanted to leave D.C. for the network’s wild and crazy action central. She also was having a flirtation with Guy Pepper, a good-looking young CNN producer engaged to a beautiful blond CNN anchor named Denise LeClair.
Looking at it from the perspective of 1980 and today, CNN producer Marcia Ladendorff says: “Katie flirted up a storm with Guy Pepper”—the two would indeed become involved—and once she got to Atlanta, she would also, more innocently, “flirt up a storm with Ted Kavanau.” (Kavanau says, with some pride, that when he put Katie on the air—he takes credit for being the first to do so, in a series of spots in which she sparred with him in “cutting, sarcastic repartee”—she “told me that her parents thought she should marry me.”)
Ladendorff continues: “Katie was pixielike. And she was very, very clever about who to get near and who to get to know. You can be the smartest person on the earth, you can be drop-dead gorgeous, but if you can’t do the people-politicking, you’re not going anywhere. This is not to put Katie down, but there are plenty of women out there who are probably smarter than she is and certainly more beautiful than she is, but when it comes to working the crowd,” Katie beats them. “This is the age of shameless self-promotion. I do believe she does have substance. But all the substance in the world is not going to trump someone who is smart and savvy.”
And Katie was savvy—and nervy. One day toward the end of 1980 Reese Schonfeld got a call from a D.C.-based CNN reporter named Jean Carper. “So Carper calls me and says, ‘Katie’s in my office in tears. [Producer] Stuart Loory just fired her. Can you get her a job?’” Reese respected Jean Carper—“She was one of the best reporters we had. I get Katie on the phone and she’s crying and I say, ‘I’m not going to override Loory, but I’ll see if I can find you something here on Take Two.” It turned out Farmer and Curle were thrilled to have Katie as a production assistant.
Only, Katie hadn’t been fired by Loory. Katie had made up the story and faked the tears to get Schonfeld to offer her a spot on Take Two, which would get her to Atlanta, a better launching pad (and where Guy Pepper also happened to be located). “The whole thing was a setup! Katie played me!” Reese Schonfeld says today. “She played me!” Apparently she’d also played Jean Carper. Schonfeld learned the truth much later: “I called Carper and said, ‘Did you get the story from Loory?’ And she said, ‘No! Katie just came in—her eyes were red and she was crying.’” Schonfeld pauses. He calls what Katie did “nefarious,” and adds, “No one likes to be played for a sucker.” Still, despite his words of anger and judgment, he involuntarily breaks into a small, admiring smile at Katie’s chutzpah.
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THE WAY KATIE operated wasn’t the way women in TV news—especially “soft,” featurey TV news—had ever acted before. Looking back, from the perspective of knowing that Katie would, starting in 1991, enjoy the longest and most successful run of any female Today host, it’s as if she represents a 3.0 attitude: bald aggressiveness and caginess, as seen in the defiant refusal, even as a young, inexperienced rookie, to be cowed or thwarted by a dismissive D.C. bureau chief or his “officious” secretary, by a condescending security guard, or by a network head who’d just screamed that her career dreams were futile.
Katie’s two predecessors as the female Today anchor had advanced their careers by very different means. Barbara Walters was beleaguered, battle-tested, battle-weary: the pioneer who cleared the path for others, but at personal emotional cost. Jane Pauley was, as she puts it, “reality-based,” sensible, so inherently deferential that she lost a promotion she’d clearly earned.
Barbara Walters emerged from her Today show struggle with Frank McGee only to become embattled with Harry Reasoner, an even worse television partner. From 1976 to 1978, as famously the most expensive Roone Arledge hire, Walters became the first woman to coanchor an evening news show. Her cohost Reasoner hated this.
“Harry Reasoner was a male chauvinist. He once said to me, ‘You’re a great executive producer, but you have one failing: You hire too many women,’” says Av Westin, who was SOS’d to the show in 1978 to first defuse and then phase out the toxic pairing. At the time, Reasoner may not have been the only man affronted when Walters got the anchor job. Walter Cronkite, upon hearing about Walters’s ascent, had the “sickening sensation that we were all going under, that all of our efforts to hold network television news aloof from show business had failed.” David Brinkley harrumphed that “being an anchor is not just a matter of sitting in front of a camera, looking pretty,” while Brinkley’s NBC partner John Chancellor said he was glad Walters wasn’t partnering with him. Yes, Walters was coming from the entertainment rather than the news division, but Today was a hybrid, focused on news as much as features, and TV news had been so inhospitable to experienced women that there wasn’t much of a pool of candidates with durable credentials. That Barbara Walters would be the first female coanchor made sense.
By the time Av Westin entered the fray, Walters had been cohosting with Reasoner for about a year and a half, but the coanchors weren’t talking to each other. “You’re coming into a room where a bickering couple has just had a hell of a fight and the walls are still reverberating,” was how Roone Arledge described the situation to Westin. Reasoner had been angry that Arledge had not only paired him with a woman, but, Westin says, “with Barbara, the quintessential woman who had made it, with extraordinary difficulty.” As if to underscore the gender war, Walters had turned her office into an all-pink lair; even her typewriter was pink. “It was very feminine—strange in an old boys’ newsroom,” says Westin. And during one of their first newscasts, not only did Barbara—not Harry—interview Anwar Sadat, but Sadat (whose salary as Egypt’s prime minister was about $12,000 a year) absolutely marveled on air—at peculiar, improvised length—at the million dollars that ABC was paying her.
When Av Westin arrived, Reasoner and Walters “had their own little coteries” that buffered them, to keep the broadcast from descending into “internecine warfare.” The first words Westin heard, from one of Reasoner’s allies, was, “‘She owes him five minutes and twenty-five seconds!’” Reasoner had been keeping “a running clock of the amount of time each of them had on the air, and if Barbara had more airtime he wanted it back. That’s how ludicrous it was.” Barbara was soon “pleading, though not in words, ‘Get me out of here! ’” She left the show “gun-shy,” for 20/20.
For all her battles, Walters, at that time and place, had little appetite for warfare. Says
one who knew her well then, “She was the most insecure person! I was once at a dinner party to which she came, and she stood in the corner with her hands against the wall, touching the wall.”
Jane Pauley, who took over Barbara Walters’s job on Today in 1976, says that she coined the phrase to describe her female cohort, “The Class of ’72” (as well as the term for her own too-long-for-TV tresses: “Bad Hair Day”). She is the first to say she benefited from Barbara Walters’s struggles, and from Title IX, which sprang a door open exactly as she was walking toward it.
“Lucky” is a word Jane Pauley often uses. She was lucky to go to a top public high school in Indiana, to be a speech and debate champion and a political science major working for a political candidate, George McGovern, in a battleground state, at the very time, “the spring of ’72, that the FCC added two words to the affirmative action clause to the qualifications for hiring: ‘and women.’” One day a TV recruiter saw her addressing envelopes for McGovern and said, “‘There’s an opening for a reporter, and they’re looking for’—and I quote—‘a female-type person.’”
Pauley was hired as an evening anchor on the local Indianapolis station, which provided another stroke of luck: On Memorial Day weekend, the Indianapolis 500 draws a half million extra people to the city—including many media types—and she was noticed by channel-flipping media execs in their hotel rooms. Result? An invitation to join CBS’s Chicago affiliate. A year later, in 1976, at twenty-five, she beat out two very different opponents—sixty-year-old Betty Furness and thirty-year-old Candice Bergen—to take over Barbara Walters’s coanchorship of Today.
Jane joined Tom Brokaw on the show and was immediately popular. Pretty, young, blond, and personable, she had what TV critic Tom Shales called “red light reflex”: The instant the cameras were on, she was, too. She tightened her Midwestern drawl into a formal, crisp voice with concertedly authoritative cadence and timbre, which seemed to say, “I am a professional,” and which became the template for young female anchors.