The News Sorority Page 25
Katie took a monthlong break to be with her daughters—Ellie was six and Carrie had just turned two. When she returned to Today in late February, she was wearing Jay’s wedding ring on a chain around her neck. She thanked the viewers for their thousands of cards and letters—they had heard about his death, and about the cancer that had preceded it, in the media. She spoke briefly and touchingly about Jay. “He was everything I ever wanted,” she said. Then she got back to work. It was a powerful, understated, and dignified reentry. Television critics and viewers were moved and admiring. Katie Couric was now viewed as heroic.
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KATIE HAD ALSO now entered a new phase in her life. Jeff Zucker explains, “How can you not change? She became a widow and a single mother to two young girls at a very young age. I think it made her life more difficult, more complicated. She had the means to deal with all that, so that was very fortunate, but it certainly affected her. It made her more of an advocate, more of a philanthropist, a fighter for those causes. Which was great.” Zucker pauses, then adds, “Jay and her father were the two most important men in her life, no question.”
“When Jay died, that left a tremendous void in her life,” agrees the NBC man who spoke of Katie’s reliance on Jay’s judgment and discipline, but he adds a darker emphasis: Jay’s death “changed Katie. Katie was no longer the person she had been. And look—I don’t know a lot of people who could function [as she did] when the husband gets sick and dies and leaves two children. But Katie has not recovered from that. She is nowhere near the person she was. I’m not saying that maybe Jay could have lost control, or that they didn’t have a lot of problems. But there are two lives of Katie Couric—with Jay, and without Jay. And all the bad stuff was without Jay, after Jay. Katie right now is a person who only cares about Katie Couric. She doesn’t care about anything else.” It is hard to reliably analyze this, but suffice it to say that, both in her and in those close to her, Jay’s death left a hole far deeper than can be readily seen in Katie’s public persona.
Certainly, now, Katie’s own visceral understanding of tragedy allowed her a deeper grasp on sensitive stories. In early October 1998, Matthew Shepard, a twenty-two-year-old gay student at the University of Wyoming, was brutally attacked in a rural area outside Laramie, tortured, pistol-whipped, and left hanging on a fence. Soon thereafter “all the networks were pursuing an interview—everyone had heard the story,” remembers a GMA producer. “It was a very competitive situation.” Matthew’s parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard, chose Katie, and Katie flew to Laramie and sat with them at the hospital, questioning them sensitively while Matthew fought, in vain, for his life. Katie’s recent time in critical care units and her loss of Jay gave her a natural understanding of what the Shepards were going through.
A few months after Jay’s death, Katie had lunch with Lilly Tartikoff. An elegant former ballerina, Lilly was the widow of NBC Entertainment wunderkind Brandon Tartikoff, who had overseen or reordered the development of the shows that made NBC: Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Law & Order, Cheers, Miami Vice, and Seinfeld. Brandon had died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma in August 1997. Several years earlier, Lilly’s young daughter Calla had been seriously brain-injured in a freak car accident in Lake Tahoe when Brandon was at the wheel. Calla had required intensive therapy to regain her speech and movement, and the young girl was still in rehabilitation when Lilly and Katie sat down to dine.
Lilly Tartikoff was now an activist and philanthropist for cancer and other health issues, and this inspired Katie. Katie said to Lilly, in effect: “I want to use my bully pulpit—my platform on the Today show—to help demystify all the treatments for colon cancer: colonoscopy, sigmoidoscopy, all of it.” Colorectal diagnostic tests were considered too embarrassing, and colonoscopy was wrongly presumed to be too painful, to consider or even discuss. Those tests might have saved Jay. Colon cancer, if caught early, is very often curable. Katie wanted some silver lining, for others, from Jay’s tragedy.
The need for action was especially acute now. Jeff Zucker’s colon cancer had returned. Still, Jeff was Jeff—positive and aggressive. He was not letting cancer get in the way of his life—he and Caryn were creating a family; they would ultimately have four children. He would triumph over the illness, in his professional and personal life.
During their lunch, Lilly told Katie that, before Brandon’s death, the two of them had begun working with the venerable Entertainment Industry Foundation (EIF)—a charity founded in 1942 by Cecil B. DeMille, Samuel Goldwyn, and Humphrey Bogart—on a promising cancer research project that had just started bearing fruit. With a lead grant from Aetna, they were funding the work of Dr. Dennis Slaman, the chief of hematology and oncology at UCLA, who had developed a drug, called Hercepten, that was found to effectively treat 30 percent of women with the most aggressive form of breast cancer. Under the direction of the EIF’s president and CEO Lisa Paulsen, and with the energy of the Tartikoffs and others, the organization had moved beyond medical philanthropy to sponsoring scientific research. “You should meet Lisa,” Lilly told Katie.
“And so,” Lisa Paulsen recounts, “Lilly called me and said, ‘Will you meet with Katie Couric? And let’s see if we can help her develop an initiative that will fund a colon cancer campaign around awareness and bring together some of the best and brightest scientists in the country to fast-track great colon cancer research.’”
When Paulsen met Katie, she says, “We just immediately fell in love with each other. She is absolutely hysterical. We knew we could do something really extraordinary to make colon cancer a first-tier issue for this country.” During their second or third lunch date, “Katie said, ‘I think I’m going to have a colonoscopy on the Today show.’ I said, ‘Yeah, right.’ Katie said, ‘No, really!’” After taking in Katie’s wild idea, “I said, ‘That is genius!’”
Then Katie and Lisa began mapping out their path. They would be joined by others—Katie would bring a great many of them in—but it would start at this lunch, with the belief that a very high-profile woman in television and an experienced female fund-raiser in Hollywood could change the way money for cancer was raised. Over the next fourteen years, Katie’s intense efforts with the EIF, including Lisa and eight other women with whom she founded Stand Up to Cancer, and through partnerships with universities and hospitals—would raise $320 million to date for cancer research and services. That figure breaks down as follows: the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance, which Katie established with EIF, has raised $36 million, with part of the funds used as seed money to open the Jay Monahan Center at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center; more than $261 million has been pledged to EIF’s Stand Up to Cancer initiative since it was cofounded in 2008; Katie personally donated $565,000 to the University of Virginia Cancer Center; and, later, in her role as honorary chair of the campaign to fund the Emily Couric Clinical Cancer Center there she helped raise $25 million in private donations. Katie Couric and Lisa Paulsen would be a formidable combination, with Paulsen herself having overseen the increase of EIF’s charitable giving from $1.8 million to over $100 million.
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DESCRIPTIONS OF KATIE would change, and the disparaging adjectives would change—from “perky” to “lazy” and “overpaid” and “unserious.” And, eventually, worse. She was thin-skinned, to be sure. But she could take it. Her eventual singular effect on Americans’ awareness of colon cancer would be a priceless public service. She knew what she had done, and what mattered, and who the best part of her was, criticism be damned.
CHAPTER SIX
From Atlanta to Bosnia: A Crusader Is Born
Christiane: 1983 to 1999
CHRISTIANE’S TIME AT CNN in Atlanta started inauspiciously. She was passed over for the first job at the network that she applied for—in the electronic graphics department, run by Nancy Diamond. Diamond, today a Fulton County councilwoman, laughs at the fact that, yes, back in September 1983, she rejected Chr
istiane Amanpour. (“It’s a running joke every time she wins some international award.”) At the time, Diamond explains, “we had a nice conversation, and I think she was older than I was and I felt uncomfortable grilling her, and all the languages on her résumé jumped out at me, but I ended up telling my supervisor, ‘I’m not going to take the time to train somebody who’s not going to be here for long.’”
Nixed for electronic graphics, Christiane started in a lowly position “on the foreign desk because—I kid you not—I had a foreign accent.” (Her friend and CNN-mate David Bernknopf says, however, that she “wanted to be” on that desk.) Like so many others, she found the network lovable not despite but because of its difficulties—she would later cite its “barely meeting payroll” with affection.
Christiane made friends with Maria Fleet, Sparkle Hayter, and Amy Walter, as well as Bernknopf, all of them sharing what Bernknopf describes as an “almost communal life. You could call it a fraternity-sorority. There was dating, there was hanging out, there was going to movies.”
Still, the very confident, forthright, ambitious new addition to that “communal life” was slightly mysterious. “I always had the sense that Christiane wanted people to think she’d gone to Brown,” Bernknopf says of those early months. “It was kind of like pulling teeth to get her to say it was really the University of Rhode Island. Not that she ever lied—she said, ‘Oh, yeah, I lived with a bunch of people from Brown.’” Her conflicting status markers made her hard to place. It seemed “that Christiane was having money troubles—which was funny, given her family upbringing—but she used to ride her bike to work,” and was known to ask to borrow a car more than once. Maria Fleet says Christiane was “always borrowing cars.” One of their crew finally asked, “Christiane, do you even have a driver’s license?” When Christiane said no, Bernknopf said, “‘Much as I love you, Christiane, I’m thinking it’s not a good idea to let someone who doesn’t have a driver’s license borrow my car, especially when you can barely ride your own bicycle.’ It took a lot of guts to ask to borrow a car, not really knowing how to drive!” Despite her seeming money problems and her scrounging about for wheels, “Christiane once bought a Picasso, at an auction or a gallery,” recalls Fleet, whose small apartment in the Midtown neighborhood was near Christiane’s equally compact flat. “She was very proud and pleased. I distinctly remember her saying, ‘You’ve got to see this Picasso!’” Still, she didn’t dress like a Picasso owner. “Her clothing was very workmanlike, simple, cheap,” says David. “She wore jeans. Clothes just weren’t very important to her.”
Of the many new friends she made among the other CNN staffers, none would eventually be more significant than young producer Liza McGuirk, who remembers first coming upon “this young woman with the bottle of Fantastik and paper towels, polishing the foreign desk, literally. She was willing to do whatever she had to do. Early on, one of the foreign editors wasn’t particularly fond of her.” Christiane herself has spoken of this obstructionist editor, without using her name. “I am sorry to say my first boss was a woman,” she has said. “You’d think that would have helped me, but it didn’t. If I had thought I would get a sympathetic hearing from her—some female solidarity—I was sorely mistaken. She hated me and my ambition. She made fun of me. She said, ‘You’ll never make it at CNN. You’ve got to go somewhere else and start.’” A half dozen current and ex-CNNers unqualifiedly identify this foreign editor as Jeanee (pronounced Jen-Ay) von Essen, and four of them say she had a negative opinion of Christiane. Von Essen was Christiane’s bête noire all the way through, and battling the roadblocks “was character-building stuff,” Christiane has said. To be sure, Christiane had an even higher-placed nemesis at CNN: executive Ed Turner. Sparkle Hayter says he “was just dead set against her becoming a reporter. ‘Not as long as I’m here,’ he famously said.” Liza McGuirk says, “Ed Turner was incredibly uncomfortable around Christiane.”
But the immediate obstacle was von Essen. David Bernknopf says: “Christiane was given just the worst kind of grunt work by Jeanee”—to wit, the desk polishing—“and I think Jeanee had no interest in Christiane ever getting ahead or being anything more than a secretary.” Amy Walter perceived that von Essen’s and Ed Turner’s attitude was, “‘Forget it! You will never get on the air!’” and that, in response, “Christiane basically said, ‘Fuck this! I want to do what I want to do!’”
Bernknopf parses the office politics: “A lot of these folks who came in had their little groups of people that they brought in. Jeanee was not really a superstar of international coverage. At CNN, jobs were given out—including to me—[on the basis of] ‘Can you breathe? Can you be here at really bad hours? Want to work for very low money?’ So Jeanee brought in her little group—people who would kiss up to her, defer to her. And one thing about Christiane: Even as a secretary, she was never gonna kiss up to anybody, and she won’t defer to anybody.” In fact, Bernknopf was taken by his new female friend’s brazenness. “She’s gonna tell you exactly what she thinks. She will just get right up in somebody’s face if she thinks they’re not being honest. I’m trying to think if I ever worked with anybody else who used their physicality that way. Not that she would ever strike someone, but squaring her shoulders and leaning in and maybe even using her finger once or twice. Letting people know very quickly, ‘Maybe you can bullshit other people, but you are not going to bullshit me.’”
Christiane was impatient. She knew she understood more about Iranian and Middle Eastern affairs than many of her superiors in that shallow-benched department. “We had a guy named Mark Leff, who had been a foreign editor at CBS,” Bernknopf continues. “Every time there was an international story it was, ‘Let Mark do it. He knows what he’s doing.’ Christiane saw that, and she knew she could do better. She knew where she was going and she intended to do it, and she wanted to be on the air right away. And that might have caused some friction.”
Von Essen resented Christiane’s forthrightness, and she was threatened by it, several people say. “Jeanee really held her back,” says another coworker. “Christiane was a hard worker, always coming up with ideas—obviously she had ambition. She started writing on the side, and she spoke all these languages and had this personal history—her family being run out of Iran—but Jeanee was very picky about who did what. She would not give Christiane the opportunity to try reporting. She would not let Christiane go anywhere.”
As von Essen blocked her advance, Christiane tried to go around her. “She knew exactly what she wanted to do, to the point of making a nuisance of herself,” Eason Jordan, who later became CNN’s senior vice president for international news, recalled. “She badgered people.” She even tugged the sleeve of Flip Spiceland—“and there I was, a weatherman!” Spiceland says. “She picked everybody’s brain all the time—all the time. She would go into the break room, into the lunch room, and go from table to table and talk to every single person she could. She just wanted it bad, as if she knew: This was where she belonged in life.”
Gail Evans, the highest-ranking woman at the network at the time, who had seen the star potential in Katie, was greatly impressed by Christiane. “There was something a little bit breathtaking about her. She had an aura of authority, of determination, of intellectual competence.” Two senior members—anchor Marcia Ladendorff and senior producer Sam Zelman—who had dismissed Katie—were struck by Christiane as well. “Christiane took a totally different approach than Katie. She was very much interested in establishing credibility and was very professional, and she was not much running around trying to find the spotlight, which is how I would characterize Katie,” Ladendorff says. (Katie and Christiane overlapped at CNN for less than a year, and the two striving young women were not friends there.) Another anchor, Bob Cain, became friends with Christiane because they had “our alma mater, WJAR, in common.” He recalls that “she stood out for her somewhat British accent and Iranian Farsi heritage—that and her obvious intelligence. She was ne
ither self-effacing nor arrogant—she was a straight shooter.” But Diana Greene—who was Katie’s friend, and who had seen both Katie’s ambition and her social generosity—believed that Christiane had keen power sensitivity. “I was the same level as Christiane, so I wasn’t important to her,” Greene says. “Christiane knew where the power base was. She was interested in the people who could bring her to the next level.”
For her part, Christiane has downplayed her ambition in favor of a narrative that has her combating prejudicial obstacles. “I had to lose the ability to hear the word ‘no,’” she has said. “No, as in, ‘Your name is too unpronounceable to be on television.’ ‘No, you’ve got a foreign accent.’ ‘No, your hair is black, for heaven’s sake, and very unruly. Don’t you know you have to be a blond to be on television here?’”
According to Bernknopf, Christiane stuck it to von Essen. “Oh, yeah, especially at the end” of Christiane’s time as von Essen’s employee, “it was open warfare. She would have a fight with Jeanee or a producer, and she’d be very up in their faces and ‘I know what I want to do here!’ And as soon as that producer was out of sight, she would turn to us [as if to say], ‘Well, that really worked well!’ She knew she’d gone over the line. She would laugh—and she does have a great laugh, full, deep, and mischievous—about how crazy it was that she’d been so aggressive.”