The News Sorority Read online

  Viewers may have assumed she was coequal to Brokaw, but, contractually, he was the host. “It was extremely obvious to me, and my employers, that Tom was number one among equals. He is such a big personality! He had gravitas when he was fourteen. He had just come off the White House. He’d covered Watergate. With my sense of proportion, it would have been absurd to try to persuade anyone that my four years in local television was comparable to his work. I knew where I stood.” Jane Pauley’s acceptance of “where she stood” would be the biggest difference between her and Katie—that and the change in gender politics from 1976 to 1991. When in January 1982 the by then popular, experienced Jane Pauley inherited a new partner, Bryant Gumbel, it was Gumbel who was anointed sole anchor; Jane, again, was his “cohost.”

  By today’s media-star measures, this would seem odd. Jane Pauley was a staple in People magazine by then; she was respected and adored. Her “bad hair” had settled into a thick and well-groomed blond pageboy, she was dignified but charming, she was married to the actor-handsome Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who manifested preppy wholesomeness as well as witty social criticism. She’d had a miscarriage (actually two; one was kept quiet) that had garnered public sympathy. Hadn’t she earned the starring role? In 1980, when sports anchor Gumbel was appearing on Today in a secondary capacity, “I felt it was incumbent on me as a woman not to accept second-class citizenship. I made this rather impassioned argument to the president of NBC News, Reuven Frank and [four other] guys, that to not elevate me to full anchor role—for them to pass over a woman—would not look good. A confab was convened in Reuven Frank’s office. They had to hear me out. My agent was not there. I was on my own.

  “They took me seriously. These were thoughtful men.” But: “I lost. I lost the fight.” Even though most viewers did not know it, “Bryant, by contract, was the sole anchor. I could only be called ‘cohost.’” Did he make more money than she did? Pauley laughs, ruefully. “I assume he got a lot more.” She adds, “I’m not shufflingly grateful, but I know how lucky I was.”

  When her time came—and it would come in less than ten years from the day she moved to Atlanta—Katie Couric would not make Jane Pauley’s mistake. As she has said, “I’m pretty convinced that the meek will not inherit the earth.” And as a UVA friend of Katie’s who went on to work in the thick of one of the most rarefied, most cutthroat hotbeds of media ambition told a friend, “Katie Couric is the most ambitious person, by far, that I have ever encountered.”

  • • •

  WHEN KATIE GOT to Atlanta in early 1981, she worked prodigiously, moving in the short span of two years to assistant producer and then to daily talk show producer.

  Take Two, the show she worked on—with her former ABC colleague Don Farmer and his wife, Chris Curle—mixed celebrity interviews with hard and soft news. Katie was twenty-four, but, as one of the network’s evening anchors, Lois Hart, recalled thinking, “‘Oh, my God, that girl looks like a teenager!’ She looked so young compared to everyone else—even to me, and I was only thirty.” Hart’s husband, Dave Walker, remembers that, from virtually the moment she got to CNN, “Katie was pleading with people to get a shot on the air.”

  Katie met architect Lane Duncan because they both had apartments in a cozy building in Ansley Park, a neighborhood that attracted youthful careerists during those years that the city was just beginning to gentrify. She dated Duncan—a native Atlantan over a decade older than she—when her more regular boyfriend, a CNN cameraman, was out of town on assignment. “Lane was her secret lover,” says a mutual friend from those days. “You know news business people; they had a lot of lovers, and so did Katie—well, she was a player.”

  Another Atlanta friend and young CNN colleague of Katie’s, Diana Greene—at the time a serious Vermont girl who “didn’t shave under my arms” and was culture-shocked by Atlanta—viewed Northern Virginia–bred Katie as, by contrast, having “the Southern girl’s early attachment to makeup.” Diana was also a bit taken aback that someone who wanted to be a serious journalist (and had “a more cush job”—daytime show producer—at CNN than did the more ostensibly serious Diana) would have Vogue magazines lying around her apartment living room. There was always that whipsaw in Katie: the contradiction between the slightly trivial or jivey or snarky—the makeup, the Vogues, the wisecracks, the “player” dating habits—and her sincerely hurt feelings at not being taken seriously. There was always the friction between that Leave It to Beaver–referencing, enthusiastically cheerleading, undisguised sorority girlishness—a part of herself she brandished half with I-gotta-be-me pride and half with cheeky self-deprecation—and her ferocious ambition and abiding feminism.

  “Katie was always ambitious,” Diana Greene recalls. “Every day she arrived at work one hundred percent ready to go on camera—hair perfect, clothes, makeup—even though the impression at CNN was that they would never put her in front of a camera.” It was “endearing” to Diana, the dissonance between what Katie wanted and how people thought of her, and that while Katie looked so organized and camera-ready, “she was chaotic. If you looked in her purse, she had a lipstick with no top. She wanted to be taken seriously, but she was so funny. She was the funniest person I knew.”

  “When people didn’t think she belonged in front of a camera, it energized her,” her childhood friend Betsy Howell believes. Lane Duncan saw this, too. “Katie was aware that people perceived her as not serious. She was hell-bent on proving something. She was constantly on. Her ON switch was turned there and there was no alternative.” Lane would wonder, “Where’s the REST button, Katie?” He also saw her teasing wit turn occasionally discomfiting. She could “tweak anybody about any subject and that caught us older people off-guard. Sometimes the thing that makes us most aggressive is that we’re scared.”

  One evening Katie brought Lane to her CNN cubby and played for him a piece on the Amish, which she’d “finagled a chance to do, and went out and did,” he says—producing, reporting, narrating, and filming it, although it never aired. He was stunned by the “thoughtful, solid journalism.” He’d pegged her as a funny, sarcastic, bubbly girl; he hadn’t taken her seriously. Now, here was “this paradox—she wasn’t play-acting. I thought, ‘This girl’s good!’ My perception of her really deepened.”

  Duncan also noticed that Katie, unusual for a newbie, kept track of the competing networks in town. “We’d drive past a station, and she’d say, ‘Oh, they’re on top of that specialty.’ It was clear she knew who the good ones were and why.”

  Katie’s reputation at CNN Atlanta was mixed. Everyone saw her energy and determination. Some saw her star power in its bud; others, her unquenchable faith in herself. “Katie always knew she was going to be big,” says Gail Evans, who was vice president of talent at CNN during Katie’s (and Christiane’s) tenure and who was then the highest-ranking woman at CNN. But others weren’t convinced. One of CNN’s three news vice presidents was Sam Zelman, a 60 Minutes producer hired by Ted Turner to give the network credibility. Zelman could hardly be called a sexist; in fact, “he insisted there be a woman on every show,” says Reese Schonfeld. Which may be why it hurt Katie all the more that Zelman dismissed her. “Katie didn’t impress me as a journalist at all,” Zelman flatly says. “She was a television personality and that was her ambition. She was very personable and she talked quickly with a sharp mind, but she didn’t have enough journalism background and moxie.” Being written off like this hurt Katie, Diana Greene says. Despite “that unflappable quality” of hers, “she wasn’t steely at all. She was very human. She was very vulnerable.” Still, Katie at least gave the appearance of rising above the disdain. “She was always high energy, she did her own thing, and she tuned out the haters,” is how Sparkle Hayter recalls it.

  Even Katie’s mentor at CNN, Don Farmer, referred to her to others there as “terminally cute.” Some thought that Farmer and his wife, Chris—the mentors she trusted—were hard on Katie. “They were re
ally tough on her, always promising something would happen which never happened; she may have remembered things charitably later,” says one staffer.

  If Christiane, who briefly overlapped with Katie’s time at CNN, starting in 1983, was kept off the air because she was too foreign, too serious looking, too assertively knowledgeable—in other words, too big and strange for the niche—then Katie had the opposite problem. She seemed too eager, too cute, too funny—too small and ordinary for it.

  Still, as different as they ostensibly were, the two had much in common. “Katie and Christiane were both comfortable in their own skin,” Gail Evans says. “‘I know who I am and I know where I’m going’: You saw this in both of them. Everybody wants authenticity—that’s what Cronkite had. They both had it.” Also, “Katie and Christiane both know how to get inside a story and tell it properly. And they share irreverence. Christiane talks back to authority figures like no one else. Katie’s irreverence is humor, her willingness to say anything despite the consequences.”

  “Katie was the best bump-line writer we had,” says one of the senior producers, Judy Milestone, referring to the teasers used to promote a show’s coming segments. As an assistant producer, Katie “really worked it, morning, noon, and night.” She flew to Texas and did a piece on Gilley’s, the bar with the wooden bronco that John Travolta had made famous in Urban Cowboy. She produced the piece and narrated it. “The piece was good but she wasn’t. Her delivery wasn’t good,” Reese Schonfeld says.

  Ted Turner had connections with Fidel Castro, and one of CNN’s early “gets” was an invitation to film life in Cuba, essentially for the first time since 1959. This was Katie’s first big production. She and Guy Pepper flew down and produced the series together, through which their secret romance, which eventually fizzled out, was first revealed to the others. Cuba in the early 1980s was in many ways jelled in aspic from the end of the Batista regime. Don Farmer and Chris Curle remember that, by a fluke, Katie and Guy got one of the only rooms in the Hotel Nacional that had a toilet seat lid. Don: “That’s why she got so perky.” Chris: “We knew then that she was going to be a star.” (They tried to trade rooms with her, to no avail; Katie wouldn’t budge.) Katie produced a piece on the town Hemingway had stayed in while starting The Old Man and the Sea. And when Reese pronounced it “‘Brilliant! Wonderful!’” Curle recalls, “she couldn’t believe it. She was excited.” She also did a touching piece about quinceañeras, the coming-of-age festivities for fifteen-year-old Cuban girls, which showcased her ability to relate well to young women. After it aired, Gail Evans remembers “Katie running down the long hall of the hotel, shouting, ‘I just got a call from WJLA in Miami! They saw it and they want me to come for an interview! ’”

  Reese continually rejected Katie as an on-air presence. “She was not a good performer, but she had great news intelligence. She was so quick and fast. When the freed hostages were coming back from Iran, she got film of them coming in and going out” of the White House but missed the crucial meeting of them with President Reagan. “So I say to her, ‘Katie! You got foreplay! You got postcoitus! But you missed the climax!’ And Katie immediately says, ‘All I got was a quick feel, a cup of coffee, and wet sheets.’” Lois Hart: “Katie was serious about her work but she wasn’t serious about herself.” Reese: “She was so likable.”

  That she was. Back in 1981—as opposed to the more macho-woman present—raw ambition in a young woman was most effective when softened by some typically female quality. For Diane Sawyer, it was that half-tongue-in-cheek blushing-maiden, poetry-quoting seductive charm. With Katie, it was what Michael Vitez was getting at when he mused about the benefits of her secure upbringing—she had a freewheeling everyday humanity that enhanced her little world. It was only a few years past the end of the seven-year stretch of the immensely popular Mary Tyler Moore Show, and while Katie was younger, feistier, and far less self-effacingly perplexed than the hugely likable fictional newsroom pivot Mary Richards, she filled a similar workaday and after-work peppy-good-neighbor role.

  “Katie taught my daughters to speak Valley Girl,” recalls Gail Evans. Of her six-year-old, whom she brought to work on days when school was out, producer Judy Milestone says, “Katie turned my son into a ‘runner’ and she taught him to Xerox and file. He adored her because she treated him as someone who had value while everyone else thought he was disruptive. She had a human touch.” One neighbor of Katie’s in her small and highly collegial Ansley Park apartment building was an elderly woman; Flip Spiceland noticed that “Katie would make it a point to take her out to dinner once a week and introduce her to us. She was always doing that kind of thing.” Soon after encountering CNN colleague Diana Greene at the local laundromat, Katie, playing Cupid, arranged for Diana to meet an attorney friend of Lane Duncan’s at Lane’s gallery show. The man bought a painting, Diana was impressed, they dated—and they married. “Katie was good to everybody at CNN,” Diana says. “She really was. She would know people’s names. She would know the name of the person who fixed the vending machine.”

  That plucky generosity, that wholesomeness: There was a character-is-destiny side to Katie’s nascent rise, Don Farmer began to see. Don evaluated her in the light of NBC’s star anchor in Houston, Jessica Savitch. Though the two women—Jessica and Katie—never worked together or met, Don couldn’t help contrasting them with each other. “I knew Jessica very well,” he says. “She wanted to be the woman anchor.” Ten years older than Katie, Jessica, a Philadelphia-raised blond as close to smolderingly attractive as a serious news anchor could be, was called the Golden Girl. She was undeniably talented, hardworking, and appealing. She rose swiftly in the ranks. She used the same tight, all-business anchor voice as Jane Pauley did to detract attention from her looks. (In fact, Pauley thinks that had Savitch not been under contract in Philadelphia in the midseventies, she would have been one of the strongest contenders as Barbara Walters’s Today replacement.)

  Jessica ultimately became a Washington correspondent for NBC. But she was a troubled woman, addicted to mood-stabilizing drugs (which once made her slur unintelligibly on the air), and her life took a number of very sad turns at the very time Katie’s career was taking off. She endured a turbulent marriage, then, right on its heels, a second marriage that ended in five months when her new husband hanged himself, with their dog’s leash, in the basement of their town house. Working daily with Katie while getting alarming bulletins about Jessica, whom he liked, Don Farmer found himself thinking about how the two women differed. Yes, Katie was fiercely ambitious, just as Jessica was. But, Don realized, “Jessica’s was a hollow ambition,” fed by a crippling lack of self-esteem. By contrast, Katie was emotionally healthy. “She took all the steps.”

  Savitch’s story ended tragically. One early evening in the fall of 1983, Savitch, then thirty-six, was in a car driven by a news director with whom she was having yet another stormy romance. They’d just dined at a popular restaurant in New Hope, Pennsylvania, when they accidentally drove off a pier jutting into a canal that abutted the parking lot. Stuck in their car, they drowned in the shallow canal.

  • • •

  OF COURSE, Katie had demons of her own—bulimia, for one. As 1981 turned to 1982, Katie was combating—and eventually conquering—that condition with the help of a therapist. She was also seeing a voice coach to neutralize her “git”-for-“get” accent. She may have been frustrated that neither Reese nor his deputy Ed Turner (“a bad hire, a drunk,” Schonfeld admits) would put her on the air and that Sam Zelman, the network’s champion of women, appeared to disdain her. But, at twenty-five, she was pushing forward.

  Then she received dismaying news. Her role model—the woman she’d been fascinated by at ABC in D.C., Cassie Mackin—had terminal cancer. She had left the network and was living with her sister in Baltimore. This woman, who had been so “enormously self-possessed, became tentative as she became ill,” Richard Wald recalls. “She stayed at home for a long t
ime, and she wasn’t that forceful person [she had been]. It was a very sad time.”

  Cassie Mackin died in November 1982 at age forty-three. “It happened so fast—it was like a Shakespearean tragedy. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to be!” says Susan Zirinsky. The death rocked Katie—and challenged her career-first priority. “I remember being so saddened by the fact that she wasn’t married and had no children,” Katie said years later. “While her pallbearers were famous people like Teddy Kennedy, I just wondered how truly happy she was and if she died basically a lonely person. I hope not, but I remember thinking: Ten years from now, people are going to say, ‘Cassie who?’ She sacrificed an awful lot, and for what? If you ask people today, they wouldn’t know who Cassie Mackin was. The idea of chasing after this sort of illusionary fame made me realize that it was not the most important thing in life.” Katie was a traditionally raised girl and a fantastically ambitious young woman. Cassie Mackin’s sudden, sad, distinguished but lonely death made her feel that there were no clear answers, old or new. She would have to cobble together a life plan for herself.

  Katie was promoted from Take Two’s assistant producer to full producer, replacing Louise Nobis, who many thought had been excellent. It was surprising to some at the network that Katie got the job, and it was a tribute to her political skills—being an operator counted as much as talent, and sometimes the two were too jumbled to separate. “I came to work one day,” says Nancy Battaglia, a senior staffer and Nobis’s good friend, “and suddenly Louise was gone—she didn’t have a job! I was shocked. Louise was in a real state of shock. But it wasn’t my fight. The show did very well under Katie.”