The News Sorority Read online

The difference was newsworthy. What Time magazine would later call Diane’s “rich, honeyed voice” was “free of the severe tone affected by” Pauley. And in contrast to Lunden’s and Pauley’s “red light reflex”—eyes aimed straight at the lens—Diane’s confrontation with the camera was beguilingly indirect. She was starting to “master”—and fine-tune as her own—what camerawoman Ginny Vicario describes as the “chin-down, eyes-up look of Lauren Bacall.” She was also learning to “know how to control an audience and make you think you’re her best friend,” says former CBS executive Joe Peyronnin. In addition, there was the blond pageboy so reminiscent of the Breck Girls advertisements from viewers’ awed childhood perusals of Life and Look magazines; the thick, sensual lips; the slightly Southern decorum; the lightly flirtatious laughter. Diane’s persona had an alluring gentility and mystery—the counterpoint to Pauley’s and Lunden’s genial transparency.

  And she appealed to men as much as to moms. As one man, considerably younger than she, who would later work with her at ABC, says, “There is something about Diane that is romantic.” And a now veteran male CBS correspondent, then just starting out, says, “I used to wake up early in the morning just to watch her. She’s the only person I would do that for. She was breathtakingly beautiful and incredibly smart, and the combination was really sexy.” Media guys enjoyed the fact that powerful men she interviewed seemed disarmed, stripped of the shrewdness that governed other parts of their lives. “I remember her interviewing [Vegas casino powerhouse] Steve Wynn, and he was flirting with her, and you could tell he had no idea that someone like Diane would see him as a joke,” says a male author.

  Diane wisely sought to maximize both her exposure and her on-air responsibility. Just three years earlier, Roger Mudd had called her “selfless,” a stance that had helped defuse the Washington bureau’s initial tremendous animus toward her. Now she was self-interested. According to someone who witnessed the goings-on at the show, she wanted a presence equal to her cohost, the far more experienced Bill Kurtis (not for her, Jane Pauley’s deference to Tom Brokaw), and she had in her corner a powerful proxy. “Richard Holbrooke did her dirty work for her,” this staffer says, “and he drove everybody crazy. He was an obnoxious guy, but he could be charming too. He would call the executive producer every day to say, ‘Why doesn’t Diane have more to do? Why does Bill Kurtis get to do that?’” Kurtis had two producers; Holbrooke pressed for Diane to have two producers as well. Once, when Diane was returning from an interview in South America, Holbrooke called the show’s female production assistant, yelling so much about her “letting” Diane ask certain questions (which had not shown her favorably) that the young woman was driven to tears, leading her friend, another news professional, to feel “shocked that the Diane I knew could have a control freak boyfriend like that.”

  But having a person to explicitly advocate for her while she retained a more modest demeanor was beginning to reflect a part of Diane’s M.O. A dazzling indirectness—soon manifest as the most canny sense of strategy of anyone in the industry—would become, in terms of business politics, the quality that Diane is today most known for. She seems to have begun polishing that adaptation during this interval. “Seductive” is a word frequently used—often admiringly, sometimes not—to describe Diane. “Manipulative” is another. (“You could never pinpoint” that particular part of her emotional intelligence; “you just knew it existed,” says a colleague.) But the chief term applied to her, which comes from her own playbook, is “leaves no fingerprints”—something that Diane’s having Richard Holbrooke be her “bad cop,” for example, might well have been meant to effect. “She thinks she doesn’t leave fingerprints,” says a person who was closely involved in the advancement of her career. “But she leaves cat paw prints on people’s foreheads.”

  People in the news industry—including female executives—are fond of saying that Diane plays “three-dimensional chess.” One takes the image further: “She’s playing three-dimensional chess while you’re sleeping. She’s way ahead of you, by leaps and bounds. She has moves that [others in the business] could never rival.” Such may have always been a talent of hers, though it seems to have taken off at this juncture, only to escalate. Diane’s self-regard has never translated into that of a diva. Her disarmingly self-deprecating personality may be part of what people mean when they call her “manipulative.” Diane’s frequent mentions of her flaws, and her negative self-comparisons with her sister, Linda, became shrewdly endearing tropes. One example: “My sister is elegant,” she said in a 1984 interview. “I was a kind of parody of elegance, always the one to fall down the stairs.” (Linda Sawyer got married, had two children to whom Diane became and remains a devoted aunt, divorced, and remarried, and became a highly successful Manhattan Realtor. With her second husband, David Frankel, she recently bought Rosie O’Donnell’s multimillion-dollar Connecticut estate.) Though her awe of Linda is no doubt genuine—she “idolizes, absolutely idolizes” her sister, says a former colleague—her highlighting that awe kept people from resenting Diane: her beauty, her success, her poise, her luck. And, colleagues believe, she couldn’t have been unaware that such disarmament was the effect of her leitmotif-like paeans to her sister.

  Keeping conversation away from herself was another way to deflect resentment. “In the South, your mother teaches you that when you’re with a group of people, it’s not about you. Your job is to make other people feel comfortable,” says a former colleague. “Diane would never talk about herself. She would tell many stories and say funny things”—her Lily Tomlin imitation was a killer—“but she was never narcissistic in that ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ way. That’s not who she is at all.” And then there was her tone. “You never raise your voice. You always say it with a smile.”

  Finally, there was outright courtship. “If Diane thought you didn’t like her, she went above and beyond” in trying to please. “Diane wants everyone to love her,” says this colleague. “She’s ‘I’m going to make you all love me, and I’m going to make you all love each other. And it will be great!’”

  At the same time, her enormous and sincere work ethic made it impossible for people to get the impression that, despite her silky charms, she was ever coasting. The compulsive perfectionism—or indecisiveness, or both—that would be Diane’s forte was also coming into view. At CBS Morning News, a writer or producer would write a script for her, and then “she would rewrite it and record it,” someone who worked with her there says. The piece would then be edited, and once she saw it “she’d want to change it, and change it again.” People at the show knew that “she’d call you, honestly, at three in the morning, and she’d want to change it. Five times”—even for just “a three-minute piece.” Often, all that work would be for naught: The piece would be put on the air in its original form. “She drove us crazy, but not in a bad way,” the staffer says, adding, “Diane was very competitive and she knew exactly how to use her beauty and her smarts. While she and Kurtis were doing it, the show actually got to be number two in the ratings.”

  Diane’s detailed thoroughness startled coworkers. “The phone rings early one Saturday morning,” recalls another colleague from the show. “It’s Diane. She says, ‘Have you seen this fascinating profile in the Style section?’ Now, this is the Style section of the Washington Post. She lives in Manhattan. There’s no Internet yet. How the hell did she get her hands on the Style section of the Washington Post so early? But she did, and read it, and expected that I would have too. That’s the kind of round-the-clock obsessiveness she had.” She was also utilitarian. “Diane will only spend time with people who will be of service to her,” this person adds. A former executive agrees: “Diane uses people. Every relationship has a purpose.”

  Diane was thirty-six years old—living with Holbrooke but with no apparent interest in marrying him (much less in having babies)—when, as one of her CBS Morning News features, she interviewed Candice Bergen. To at least one person who vi
ewed the uncut interview, Diane seemed to use her conversation with this strikingly similar woman—they were the same age, they’d both attended top colleges (Bergen had gone to Penn); they were intelligent, discerning, beautiful blonds—to indirectly ratify an ambivalence she had. Bergen had been married to filmmaker Louis Malle for two years, and at that point had not yet had a child. “Diane spent half the interview asking her if she was going to have children. It seemed to me that she was looking for—that she really wanted—another well-known woman who was willing to say, ‘I don’t want kids.’” A male producer who knows Diane’s round-the-clock work habits says, “She likes taking care of other people’s kids. I feel a little sad when I see that because I think she could have been a really cool mom. But maybe she knows enough about herself to know it would be impossible for a child to get enough love from her, because she had too much to do.”

  In 1984 Don Hewitt, the creator of 60 Minutes, the jewel in CBS News’s crown, asked Diane to join the show as its first ever full-time female correspondent. Then, as now, 60 Minutes was revered, the most esteemed newsmagazine show—or news broadcast—on the air.* In 1984, there was only one other newsmagazine, ABC’s 20/20, and it was considered to be more a “variety” show, as one producer called it—not at all in 60’s journalistic league. Stunningly, for all its seriousness, credibility, and prestige, 60 Minutes was also a moneymaker.

  It was no small honor to be asked onto the show, which at the time was a latter-day Murrow’s Boys enclave—“the quintessential boys’ club,” as many put it. When producer Ellen Rossen interviewed for a position there, one of the first things she was asked was, “Do you play poker?” Much worse, when film editor Patricia O’Gorman worked there, she explains, Mike Wallace “grabbed me from behind. I turned around and hauled off and hit him. He looked shocked, like, ‘What did I do?’” (O’Gorman goes on to say, without specifically indicting that particular show, “I knew women who’d been pinned to the wall” by other bosses at CBS “and were afraid to lose their jobs.”) CBS veteran Jennifer Siebens recalls that one day in the 1970s, as a young hire on the show, she “was walking down the hall to Cronkite’s studio, and I suddenly heard somebody call out, ‘Siebens! Did anybody ever tell you you have ugly legs?’ It was this giant of the industry, a legendary producer whose work was amazing—a man of such seeming class, I was stunned. I was burning with humiliation and anger. I said nothing, but I wanted to say, ‘Did anyone ever tell you you have a small dick?’”

  Those sexist tales aside, “Diane charmed Don,” a top CBS female producer surmises. But how? A male CBS producer who was powerful in the sixties through the eighties gives this blunt reason, under the cover of anonymity: “I had a discussion with a fellow—one in my peer group, an important guy at 60 Minutes. And I said, ‘What the hell is Diane’s secret? She’s always hired, for a lot of money, but she has no impact on the ratings.’ And he laughed like hell, and he said, ‘You gotta understand—the guys who own and run the networks all have the shiksa disease.’”

  The fascinating paradox—the irony—about Diane is that, despite her lack of impact on the ratings, she was considered cost-effective because of her sheer labor, her workaholism. In 2008, twenty-four years after Hewitt pursued her, Disney president and chief executive Bob Iger, who is Diane’s current boss, reportedly told someone that people put up with her difficult qualities “because she’s an earner.” In other words: “She will always work hard enough to be worth her pay.” That same person vouches for her: “She gives her all, twenty-four/seven. In fact, she works too much. Especially on the road. She will work until three or four in the morning and sleep twenty minutes, and then go back out in the field.”

  Diane left the CBS morning show (Maria Shriver, Meredith Vieira, and Jane Wallace alternated in her spot alongside Kurtis) and accepted Don Hewitt’s offer, joining Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, and Ed Bradley—and the media discovered her. In a People magazine profile, illustrated with a photo of Diane seated on her bed jubilantly throwing papers in the air, writer Margo Howard described her as “a thinking man’s Angie Dickinson” who “got to the top with a formidable blend of smarts, drive, and earnestness” and “is extremely desirable for television because her manner is both authoritative and appealing.” Howard made a zeitgeist point: “There is another component to Sawyer’s rise, and that has to do with her aura of refinement. She is one of those highly visible women who communicate the old-fashioned ladylike values from which we have ‘progressed.’ Along with Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and Shelley Long, Diane Sawyer is one of the Ladies of the ’80s. They have all gained star status with a cultivated style that offers a connection to a gentler time.”

  • • •

  AT 60 MINUTES Diane continued to produce and report the kind of serious news that had, thus far, built her reputation. She did feature reporting on the AIDS epidemic in Uganda, where the air was buzzing with malaria mosquitoes; when not on camera, and with little else in the way of clean paper goods, she resorted to protecting her eyes from dangerous bites by covering them with sanitary napkins. She interviewed elderly legendary author James Michener and Corazon Aquino, the reformist female president of the Philippines.

  She brandished her evolving interviewing skills—the gentility masking the toughness, armed by massive preparation—in grilling Vice President George H. W. Bush on Iran-Contra just as he was launching his presidential bid against Michael Dukakis. In fact, it was at 60 Minutes that Diane began to think about the art of interviewing in all its amplitude, says Ira Rosen, who worked with her there, and later at Primetime. But she also learned the double standard by which women adept at hard news were somehow lessened by their foray into celebrity interviews in a way that their male peers were not. “Diane looked at Mike [Wallace], and he could go from interviewing a president to Barbra Streisand; he could do a comedian or Khomeini. She looked at that and said, ‘Why the hell can’t I be that way?’” In a few years she would spread her wings with Wallace-like breadth. But she didn’t realize, Rosen continues, “that it was always different when Mike did it. He could be confrontational with Streisand. He did a piece on Tina Turner without people thinking it was softball.” Doing a celebrity interview as a newsperson was “much harder for women,” Rosen believes. “You’re trying to avoid two traps—appearing soft and appearing unlikable, and the more you tried not to fall into one, the more you risked falling into the other.”

  Diane was now developing her unique way of putting a piece together, which she would elaborate upon for the next decades: amassing the transcripts, cutting them up into small passages, taping or stapling the strips into one long document to produce the narrative she envisioned, ordering the segments by marking them A and B and C and D, circling passages, and then having the whole piece reformatted, taping key words to her wall or, later, to her computer screen—a process that was “like an art form; nobody does that anymore,” says her eventual protégée Anna Robertson.

  Still, at 60 Minutes, “I think it was a difficult time for her—with so many men. She had a hard time, to prove that, as the first woman, she could do the work,” Anna Robertson says. But Jeff Fager, the current first chairman of CBS Evening News and a longtime former producer and still executive producer of 60 Minutes, strongly disputes this. “Everybody respected Diane. They valued her on 60 Minutes,” he insists. “It’s easy to fall back on the ‘old boys’ club,’ and 60 was an old boys’ club—I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. But I don’t think [sexism] is what happened to her,” he says, citing as evidence the fact that Lesley Stahl, who arrived at 60 Minutes in 1991, “loved it from the get-go.”

  So why wasn’t Diane destined to stay? Fager explains, “I think she might have been too big for it. We”—60 Minutes—“are an ensemble. Every correspondent has to accept that there are moments they don’t get their way. Whether you fit in at 60 Minutes or not [hinges on] whether you can tolerate an ensemble rather than a star system. It’s a zero-sum game. If one
is happy, two or three are going to be unhappy. I think Diane bristled at that a little bit. I don’t think it was the right fit for her. Some people work well in an ensemble and some people need their own show.”

  Whatever the reason, Diane was responsive when in 1986, two years into her 60 Minutes tenure, NBC made a lunge for her. Someone close to the situation puts it this way: “Her contract was up and CBS had promised to get her things that didn’t happen. NBC and ABC chased her at the end of her deal.” In order to keep her, CBS raised her salary to $1.2 million and also arranged for her to substitute-anchor the CBS Evening News for Dan Rather. The plan greatly threatened Rather. An executive who worked closely with him asserts that Rather was so fearful that Diane could permanently replace him, he dismantled long-planned family vacations at zero hour just to keep her from going on air in his stead. “I saw Dan do that a lot, because Diane could anchor better than he did,” the executive says.

  In 1987 Diane traveled to the Soviet Union to participate in a CBS documentary, Seven Days in May, about the advent of glasnost. She was working again with Susan Zirinsky, with whom she’d energetically partnered on stories during her post–San Clemente days at the D.C. bureau. “We weren’t going to get Gorbachev, but the centerpiece was a [hoped-for] interview with Boris Yeltsin, who had not yet been elected president but was really powerful,” Zirinsky says. “So I’m sitting in this gorgeous office with two translators, trying to talk Yeltsin into doing the first Western television interview, where you’re talking about breaking up the Soviet Union. I’m getting nowhere. Finally, I walk across the room and get to my backpack and pull out an eight-by-ten glossy of Diane Sawyer. I walk back across the room, I put it on the desk, and I tell Yeltsin, ‘This is who will be doing your interview!’ He’s a lush. He’s lazy. But his face flushes, his ears flush. He goes, ‘Da!’ and then the Russian word for ‘certainly.’ Diane flew in and we did an amazing interview.” Zirinsky pauses. “But I must have rewritten that Yeltsin piece with Diane fifty times! She is a taskmaster!” (A few years later, when Diane had gone over to ABC, she called Zirinsky, who was, and is, still at CBS. “I had Yeltsin’s home phone number,” Susan says, and Diane knew this. So now “Diane said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna ask you a question. Would you give me Yeltsin’s number?’ And I said, ‘Fuck, no!’” The women were now competitors.)