The News Sorority Read online

  Still, the colleague felt Walters had a point about the subtle status differential. “There was a New York media elite, and Barbara always felt like an outsider, and that feeling is what drove her. Barbara felt Diane had tools she didn’t have.”

  The women’s styles were radically different. Diane could “go down to the edit room and chat with the producer and work on a script—she loved that people saw her as part of the team,” the colleague says. “Barbara would never, ever do that. Barbara saw herself as a Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard character. People would come to her office—the editor, the writer. She’d say, ‘I don’t know how to do this.’ One of them would push the button for the tape for her, and she would be more regal. She considered this her position, which she’d worked so hard to get. She didn’t see herself going to the cafeteria.”

  Yet for all that “regal” attitude, Barbara would turn into a pious, intimidated hopeful in the presence of Peter Jennings. Barbara would sit in Jennings’s office “with her hands folded on her lap, like a schoolgirl,” this colleague continues. Jennings had an “imperial” attitude. During the production of a piece on the Olympics diver Greg Louganis, who’d just come out as gay, Jennings dispensed his advice, “and I think Barbara even had a notepad in her lap.” After the Louganis piece aired, Jennings told Walters, “‘I’m glad you followed my directions, but there are certain things you still need to know about editing.’ He was very officious and arrogant. It deflated her—deflated her. I felt very bad for her.”

  Walters’s reaction to Jennings points to a bigger problem, one that women in the industry say hardly gets discussed: For all the competition between women doing similar work on the same or rival shows, the biggest competition—and the worst treatment and strongest barriers—came from their male colleagues. Peter Jennings is singled out for his arrogance and condescension. He was “the most rude, officious, thought-he-was-God’s-gift-to-women man, but also the smartest, most experienced international reporter,” says a female former news star. Cowed as Barbara might have been by Jennings in 1995, two years later, at Princess Diana’s funeral, “Peter and Barbara were at the desk together and he kept talking over her,” says an ABC witness. “And Barbara would say, ‘Let me talk!’” Down the line, in 2001 and 2003, Diane would also have issues with Peter’s imperiousness. Thus, whatever combat Diane and Barbara had with each other, “the men were worse,” says an ABC woman. “Ted Koppel, too. His attitude with women was, ‘I’m sorry, did you say something? Do you have a brain in your head?’ Peter and Ted were cold and condescending to women,” including their top peers.

  Diane and Barbara expressed aggression differently. “Diane was very evasive, elusive, demure,” says the ABC newsmagazine insider. “Barbara was the opposite.” An on-air personality puts it this way: “Diane was a stealth bomber. You never knew what was going on. Barbara was a tough cookie—beyond-the-pale tough! The toughest! The queen! She was straightforward. She’d say it to your face, not to management. I like straight shooters, even if they’re going to kill me. They’ll stab you in the front, not the back.” This person adds, “And Barbara and Diane were determined to kill each other—to wipe each other off the face of the earth.” (A junior producer demurs, saying, “It was in ways a healthy rivalry.”) They fought over Robin Williams, Al Gore, Henry Kissinger—so many “gets” in the hectic circus of time-sensitive weekly TV. When there was tension over who would interview Mary Kay Letourneau—the Washington State teacher and married mother of four imprisoned for having sex with the twelve-year-old student with whom she eventually had two babies—David Westin threw up his hands and said words to the effect of, “We are not doing it. We don’t want it. Everybody, stand down,” says someone involved in the fracas. So legendary was their competition that in 2002, at Roone Arledge’s funeral, when it came to the ordering of eulogies, an insider recalls Frank Gifford whispering, “ Is Barbara speaking first, or is Diane speaking first? And are they fighting over it? ”

  Yet for all the rabid competition and inner-office-whispered angry words, the two women respected each other’s work, and they showed a graciousness on camera. When Barbara did an enormously moving special on transgender children—several years before the issue became well known—Diane said of her, on air, with a musing smile, “Any time there’s a beating heart, there’s Barbara. . . .” It was an unmistakably admiring remark and it came from Diane’s own beating heart.

  Also, the competition between these two women was no sharper than that of competing newsmen. ABC people recall Koppel and Jennings—however close friends they may have been—nevertheless being “nasty and competitive with each other. Koppel would be wailing on Peter, putting him down,” says a female producer who witnessed those incidents, “but you just didn’t hear about that.” An even more closely held secret was the back-biting between the top male anchors at CBS: The likable, folksy Bob Schieffer was vocally “resentful of Dan [Rather], just as Dan had disliked Cronkite,” says a CBS star correspondent. Over the months of Rather’s travails during “Memogate,” when his report on George W. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard was being unmasked as deeply compromised and he was losing his anchorship, “Bob took opportunities on his own to trash Dan,” despite his reputation for great loyalty to him. But the male versus male competition—even the back-biting—was not as seized upon or gossiped about—everyone prefers a good catfight. As for Rather himself, he was “so competitive,” says a producer who worked with him, “he would kill Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, and vice versa.” Adds a CBS News reporter, “Dan would kill anybody who looked like he wanted his job. Dan felt threatened by people”—as he had, earlier, by Diane—“and if he did, he’d cut you off at the knees.”

  • • •

  AT SOME POINT in the middle of the 1990s, Richard Wald was installed as the official Barbara-Diane mediator; he would enforce the “head of state rule,” deciding which interviews went to Barbara and which to Diane. “Diane was always trying to get something Barbara didn’t have,” says a colleague, adding that when Wald ruled against Barbara, sometimes “a black cloud would come out of Barbara’s office.”

  But Diane emitted a black cloud, too. She once referred to Barbara as “that terrible person.” Another time she phoned an on-air personality at home and said, “Barbara is saying nasty things about you”—which took the person, a friend of Walters’s, aback. When Walters nabbed the Monica Lewinsky interview—one of her biggest gets (she scored it by being “very maternal,” says an insider—“‘Oh, you’re so young to go through this. . . .’”)—Diane snapped at an aide who was working with Walters: “What are you doing with that woman?” “Diane always insinuated that Barbara was like a street fighter, going after things in an inappropriate way,” says one who witnessed this behavior.

  Still, Diane herself was fragile and could sound as hurt and wounded as Barbara did. A musical performer once heard her complain to a Primetime producer, “You know, if I got Al Gore for 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace and Don Hewitt would hug me, but I didn’t get anything from you. What do I have to do—beg?” The plaintive, seemingly out-of-character remark was not an isolated instance. Might these producers, whom Diane had asked for reassurance, have been proxies, of a sort, for her harshest critics? Mike Nichols was one of them. “She wants desperately to please him and for him to be proud of the work she’s doing,” says one who has worked with her. But there was no sterner or more abiding critic who could get to Diane than her mother. Diane’s mother criticized her for being too hard on Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr—Jean Sawyer Hayes respected the evangelical conservative. Her mother’s criticism had seemed to startle and deflate her, since her interview was a hard-won scoop. Even more to the point, when Diane covered the Kentucky Derby and stayed at her mother’s house, another staffer met Diane there in the morning and saw Diane—as a close adviser heard the story—walking down Mrs. Hayes’s stairs looking almost despondent. “What happened?” the staffer wanted to k
now.

  Diane revealed the answer: Her mother hadn’t liked the way she’d made her bed that morning.

  • • •

  DIANE DROVE HERSELF HARD—unsparingly hard. And she pushed her staff to the limit. As the four, five, seven, finally nine years of Primetime—which in its last years merged with 20/20, making the competition between the women all the keener—wore on, “you’d hear these stories” from Diane’s loyal staff, said one in a position to hear them. “They’d say they were working too hard, they were burned out. And once in a while they’d say, ‘I’d like to be reassigned.’”

  Unbeknownst to Diane, her own reassignment was being plotted. In December 1998, a secret meeting was convened at ABC to stanch the “hemorrhaging” of ratings of Good Morning America and to consider firing its lackluster hosts Lisa McRee and Kevin Newman. By now Diane’s brief stint at CBS This Morning was beyond the viewing public’s memory; she was associated not with Morning but with Evening, as representing sophisticated, sometimes pop-laced, seriousness. “But the whole point of the meeting was to challenge our assumptions and not do the same old, same old,” says one attending executive. At the meeting, David Westin was adamant about Diane: “ You don’t play your queen! ”

  Westin had taken that position in a separate conversation with Shelley Ross, who had just signed on as GMA’s new executive producer, tasked with wooing a highly resistant Charlie Gibson back to the show after a half year’s absence. Ross, a former National Enquirer writer and a hard-charging producer—fairly young, petite, highly voluble, very story smart and creative, always fashionably dressed—had grown close to Diane while working on the Menendez story. It was Ross who had hatched the startling idea that Diane could come over and revitalize GMA.

  Ross wasn’t present at the secret meeting when Westin made that proclamation. But someone else who was present said, “Okay, let’s dissect that.” Diane’s considerable negatives for the job were detailed, says an executive who was present: “She’s not a morning person. She doesn’t do ‘live’ well.” Rather, “she was a scripted performer”—all wrong for Morning. “Think about it: 60 Minutes, not live. Primetime Live—live for little bits. . . .”

  And then there was Diane’s persona. She wasn’t a Joan Lunden or a Katie. “She’s not perky. And she’s not a mother—being a mother is important for Morning. Once a woman goes through a pregnancy and has a baby in full view of the public”—as Lunden and Pauley had—“everybody feels she’s her best friend. Diane seemed unattainable. Was she too glamorous? Too sophisticated? Too ‘aspirational’? Viewers could be turned off by that.”

  But once the small claque in the meeting laid out every single downside—every last negative—a funny thing happened. “We went from, ‘Holy shit, no way! There’s no way you risk Diane Sawyer!’ to realizing that she fit most of the criteria better than anyone else.” After all, “Diane had unimpeachable journalist credentials. She had deep curiosity, experience, name recognition. She had interviewed the most important people in the world. And we had just come off of two people”—Newman and McRee—“where we couldn’t really brag about anything they’d covered.”

  By meeting’s end, Diane had emerged as the surprising choice—the risk-all-to-gain-all choice.

  Why? Because there was a war going on and ABC was the clear underdog. That war was Morning, and ABC was desperate to topple the undisputed Empress of Morning.

  And that was Katie Couric.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  America’s Sweetheart to Premature Widow

  Katie: 1989 to 1998

  THE YEARS 1989 TO 1991 were very busy and very lucky for Katie Couric—though luck, in her case, was often the meeting of serendipity (and others’ bad fortune) with an ingrained-but-struggled-with cluster of personal qualities that she managed to turn to her advantage.

  Katie’s marriage to Jay Monahan was fresh. The couple had bought a historic house in McLean, Virginia, where she was getting used to his neat freak ways, and he to her messiness. (Katie initially resisted her ex-roommate Wendy Walker’s advice and didn’t hire a maid. Husband and wife had a big blowout one night when Jay found one of Katie’s cereal bowls—full of hairs from their Persian cat, Frank—under his pillow.) And she was adjusting to Jay’s participation in Civil War battle reenactments, which had initially sounded “really weird” to her, she admitted to journalist Lisa DePaulo. “I used to tease him about it,” she said. “‘If you think I’m gonna be following you around in a hoop skirt and snood, you’ve got another think coming.’” Reassured that Jay wasn’t one of those fanatics who thought the war was still going on and who “urinate on their uniform buttons to make them look old,” Katie settled on thinking of him as a “Civil War scholar.”

  Jay was a rising criminal defense lawyer for Williams and Connolly. Katie was still covering the Pentagon, and in December 1989 she flew to Panama to report on the American invasion to depose dictator Manuel Noriega.

  The following summer and fall, her beat got even hotter: Saddam Hussein had invaded and annexed Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Five days later, Operation Desert Shield commenced, with American forces, heading a UN-authorized coalition of thirty-three other countries (many only symbolic participants), landing in Saudi Arabia to prepare to defend Kuwait. Operation Desert Shield turned into Operation Desert Storm in January 1991; in less than two months of aerial bombardments and ground attacks, the mostly U.S. forces beat back Iraq’s incursion. The United States was supported by Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Notwithstanding that the presence of U.S. troops in the country that housed the sacred shrines at Mecca and Medina became a purported final instigation for Osama bin Laden, never since has a war on Arab soil been so casualty- and hate-free for America.

  When Katie arrived in Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield, it was shockingly novel to be a female American reporter in the world’s most sternly fundamentalist Muslim country. CNN had sent an all-female team, with whom Katie and her NBC crew shared quarters and swapped tales. The three-woman CNN posse included a young reporter with whom Katie had briefly overlapped in Atlanta—Christiane Amanpour—as well as Maria Fleet, a sound editor who had personally liked Katie at CNN, had found her eminently talented, and had been “irked that they called her a lightweight and not a serious journalist” there. Katie was wittily “self-deprecating” during her time in Saudi Arabia, Fleet recalls, quipping that merely enduring the assignment raised a female reporter’s status. “As a woman, you come here as a six and you leave as a ten,” Katie said. Katie was actually in the early stages of pregnancy, but she hadn’t revealed it to anyone—she hadn’t wanted this assignment scotched.

  The Gulf War was an unexpected star-making occasion: CNN went from ridiculed Atlanta second-rater to the leader of international television news broadcasting. It would also catapult the career of Katie’s onetime CNN-mate, Christiane Amanpour. As for Katie, coming back to D.C. for Christmas as a “ten” instead of a “six” advanced her lifelong effort to be taken seriously. The generosity of her senior NBC reporting partner at the Pentagon, Fred Francis, helped as well. “Fred didn’t look at her as competition,” Katie’s career mentor Don Browne says. “He looked at her as, ‘This is great.’ He was very supportive. We were in the middle of attacking Iraq. She was really coming on strong. The Pentagon was a hot story.” Accident though it was, “Katie’s timing was spectacular, and she was spectacular.”

  By now, Katie actually had a dual role—Pentagon correspondent and Today’s national correspondent. Her duties expanded when Don Browne, who had a particular interest in diversity, became executive news director at NBC in New York. Among his hires were soon-to-be-stars Deborah Roberts, Elizabeth Vargas, and Ann Curry. He’d kept an eye on Katie, remaining a sounding board as Katie took over the Pentagon position. “Katie and I were now in regular touch—we were like old home week,” he says.

  Tim Russert believed in Katie’s potential, too. “She was articulate, direct, and there was a real w
holesome appeal,” Russert said. But Browne was especially sensitive to the way Katie, like many outside-the-box strivers, tended to imitate some imagined mainstream newscaster “ideal.” At the Pentagon, and before that, “Katie was trying to replicate the traditional white male journalist role, and for her to be credible at it, she had to shut down the very thing that eventually made her great,” he says. “The on-camera part of Katie was not Katie. Katie as a person was incredibly infectious, funny, charismatic. But it all shut down” when the microphone was in hand and the network camera was running. The striking difference between the real Katie and the performing Katie made Browne believe that her long ordeal of being rejected could potentially work to her benefit—she still had that off-duty raggedy realness; it hadn’t been ironed out. “The fact that she didn’t anchor is the greatest blessing!” he stresses, looking back now. “When you anchor, you become manufactured—you’re told how to dress, how to turn, how to speak.” Anchors from midsized markets looking for better jobs often didn’t get them, Browne says (he’d nixed more than a few himself) because they were too smooth, too undistinctive. “Katie never got manufactured. She had a naturalness, a rough-around-the-edges charm that was authentic and not polished.”

  If only he could find someone who could bring out her true self on the air.

  • • •

  A SHIFTING TIDE at NBC News would help. In midsummer 1989, the division was in woeful shape. Nightly News seemed permanently stuck in third place, with Tom Brokaw limping behind Peter Jennings at ABC and Dan Rather at CBS. The network hadn’t managed to launch a truly successful newsmagazine, despite many efforts. And perhaps most direly, in terms of advertising dollars, the Today show had fallen to number three in the ratings. “It’s a little counterintuitive, but we had weak ratings in a key demographic: young women,” admits Jane Pauley, who’d epitomized that very cohort throughout her long tenure. “I’d been on the show twelve years.” It was logical that they’d want someone new.