The News Sorority Read online

  Christiane “finally got away from Jeanee and became a writer, like I was,” says Bernknopf. At last some movement was possible. “We could do voice-overs on weekend stories. They would look around the room and say, ‘Who can voice this story about the Middle East today? Christiane, you busy? Can you write this up and go track it?’ So you wouldn’t get on camera, but it was close.” One time “she managed to convince whoever she had to convince to be allowed to do a backgrounder on Iran,” recalls Maria Fleet. She was so excited. “‘Marie! Marie!’—she called me Marie— ‘would you shoot a stand-up for me?’ So we went out into the CNN parking lot” and filmed Christiane’s CNN on-air debut against that “generic background of vague trees.” A few years later, when the two women and camerawoman Jane Evans—the three female musketeers—were in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia together, at the start of Christiane’s brilliant career, they laughed about the parking lot stand-up.

  • • •

  DURING ONE BRIEF PERIOD of weeks in 1984, a trio of almost operatic tragedies rocked Christiane’s life. First came the deaths of two female gay friends of Christiane’s, a CNN tape deck editor named Wendy, whom a mutual friend recalls as “brilliant, indefatigable, very funny,” and Wendy’s quiet, retiring girlfriend. Wendy had been telling Christiane and others that she was going to break up with her girlfriend but kept putting it off because her girlfriend was “fragile.” Wendy was killed in a traffic accident. Shortly afterward the girlfriend, feeling she couldn’t face life without her beloved (and having no idea that Wendy had been planning to break up with her), killed herself. It was shocking for everyone in their circle, not least for Christiane.

  These shocks had barely dissipated when, one night, a houseguest of Christiane’s showed up at Sparkle Hayter’s apartment door “distraught,” Sparkle recalls, to report that she had been alone in Christiane’s apartment when a phone call came in relating that Christiane’s adored uncle had been executed. “The friend wanted to give me a heads-up because Christiane was coming over to my place that day before work,” Sparkle recalls. “We were both on late shifts then. I went out and bought vodka and mix so we could have cocktails before work, which we never did any other time—in fact, that’s the only time I remember Christiane having a drink. She had one only. It was also the only time I saw her cry.” Many of Christiane’s relatives (and her beloved childhood nanny, to whom she remained close for decades) had been able to get out of Iran, a number of them painstakingly extricated through international rescue services. But this uncle hadn’t been so lucky, and now, a full five years after the revolution, he was murdered. “She was in a very grim mood, as you can imagine, but at work that night she just buckled down, did her job, wrote her stories, and said nothing about [the execution] to anyone at work, as far as I know. But she and I talked about it—and about Wendy, and about life—a lot that year. People who don’t know Christiane’s private side think she’s tough, even hard, but she’s not. She feels everything deeply. She’s not tough, she’s not hard, but she is very strong.” To Sparkle, Christiane personified the art of “keeping an open heart without having your heart broken fatally.”

  However, all was hardly somber during Christiane’s last two years in Atlanta, 1984 and early 1985. Diana Bellew, who had been at Cambridge while her best boarding school friend was in Rhode Island, moved to Atlanta to work in a Chinese porcelains gallery. She moved into Christiane’s tiny apartment. The girls were always broke—so much so they not only didn’t have an air conditioner, but, for a while, “we didn’t even have any fans—it felt like 150 degrees.” Of course, Christiane was carless “but, luckily, she had these nice friends at CNN who had cars. And she used to get our landlord to drive her to the farmers’ market to buy food.” Diana, meanwhile, “was the only white person on the MARTA,” the bus, “to my gallery job in Buckhead—white people didn’t go on buses in Atlanta in those days.” Diana recalls, “I used to cook every night—chicken and potatoes, because I’m Irish, or veal marsala, or pasta—because Christiane got home at eleven p.m. Then we would eat. But it wasn’t so bad because, after that, Christiane’s friends would take me dancing in Midtown.” Usually Christiane abstained—“she’d be at her desk working”—except for weekends, when they’d all go to the club where there was a Prince impersonator singing “Purple Rain” and then to “another where RuPaul was discovered.” CNN colleague Amy Walter would hang out with them. “We made no money, so we would hit the bars at happy hour and have the hors d’oeuvres as dinner,” Amy recalls. “Diana and I would go up to any guy and dance. Christiane was always much more reserved. Diana was the wacky, goofy one. I was in the middle, and Christiane was very solid, but when she did cut loose, she had a great, delightful sense of humor.”

  The dynamic between the two onetime New Hall roommates had shifted radically in eight years. Diana now seemed frivolous next to the internationally concerned, hugely ambitious, and now notably un-looks-conscious Christiane. Christiane would lecture her old roommate, “You should put as much time into thinking about your career as you do about your hair!” Amy Walter says, “Christiane got more and more serious as time went on. She had found her calling. Diana and I were more social.”

  Diana and Christiane did have fun hanging out with their buddy Ray Nunn, the ABC local bureau chief. Ray was black, and he drove an expensive car—and their presence all together served to remind them that they were in the South. “We’d arrive at restaurants,” Diana says, “the black guy in the white Porsche getting out of the car with the very white Irish girl and the Middle Eastern—or maybe she was Hispanic?—girl.” People in that still provincial city did a double take at this “mixed” group. “Christiane did not like Atlanta,” Leila Amanpour says. “She would rather be in New York.”

  In July 1984, Christiane got a break—she was sent to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. Diana remembers that her friend was thrilled not just by the opportunity, and the excitement, but perhaps also by the fact that, for the first time ever, a woman—Geraldine Ferraro—was being nominated for vice president, sharing the ticket with Walter Mondale.* Christiane had always lobbied to get on the air, but now she really pushed hard against what she would call “Fortress No.” Her fellow countrywoman Parisa Khosravi, who was higher up and would eventually become a major CNN executive, knew “she wanted to go up to New York. She was writing down here [in Atlanta]; she kept on wanting to get on air and not all the bosses were supporting her, because of her funky name and accent—the whole bit. She was not your typical on-air person; she was told that. She was going to quit and go to New York anyway.” Parisa, both of whose parents were Iranian, and who grew up there (she would gently make fun of half-Iranian Christiane’s “adorable,” imprecise Farsi), immediately bonded with Christiane. Aside from their ethnicity and their status as exiles from the Revolution, they would have in common both ambition and an instinctual international perspective that others could attain but not quite so effortlessly feel. They would produce many stories together, they would marry at approximately the same time, and they would have their babies at close to the same time. Christiane would have closer CNN women friends—Liza McGuirk, for one—but Parisa was as close to a CNN sister as she would ever have.

  Liza McGuirk got herself in a position to break the stranglehold. In 1985—after much “angling, angling” on her own behalf—Liza was made the head of CNN’s small New York bureau’s assignment desk. Her friend Christiane immediately saw an opening, and she started “begging me to bring her up—to give her a shot—because I was assigning reporters,” McGuirk says. “I talked to Burt”—then vice president of CNN Burt Rheinhardt. For the plan to work out, someone had to overrule Ed Turner, who oversaw the day-to-day operations of the newsroom, and who “had said he didn’t want her on the air—Ed said the same thing about Katie Couric at the time.” David Bernknopf adds, “If you looked at the list of people who Ed Turner thought would be great stars and the people who he pushed aside . . . the people
pushed aside were generally much better.”

  But both women, McGuirk and Amanpour, kept pressing. “Christiane was pleading her case to Burt and I pled her case to Burt—just for her to be on air, just for her to learn on the air. Obviously, an Iranian young woman with an English accent is not the first person you cast as a reporter, but somehow we talked him into it. I was pretty close to Burt—he loved both of us. I think he just did it because he loved us.” (At the memorial service for Rheinhardt, who died in May 2011, Christiane expressed her gratitude to him.)

  • • •

  CHRISTIANE MOVED TO NEW YORK in 1985 and roomed with McGuirk in Liza’s cousin’s “fabulous” three-bedroom apartment in a doorman building on Tenth Street and University Place in Greenwich Village. Liza gave Christiane weekend assignments—cleverly, Bernknopf notes, “on the theory that the executives were probably not watching much on the weekends and they might not even see who was on the air. And even if they did, they wouldn’t care because it was only the weekend: ‘Okay, who else are you gonna get to work for free on a weekend?’”

  Christiane went out on corny, local-newsy stories, Liza says—“stuff like Coney Island hot dog–eating contests.” Christiane sometimes did her stand-ups, as one who saw the clips recalls, “wearing a crazy flowered jacket with big, huge shoulder pads.” Liza definitely had her friend’s back while Christiane was working out the considerable kinks in her on-air persona. “Ed Turner was incredibly uncomfortable with Christiane, and with another guy I was using, a neophyte, too—he didn’t like either of them. I would say, ‘Ed, just who do you want me to send out?’” She was challenging her boss while buying time. “Anyway, Christiane got better.” She mastered the storytelling part of her new job “pretty quickly [but] it takes a couple of years to get any kind of comfort level on air. She started developing her comfort on camera, and with the voice and the edit processes—slowly. Gradually, the protests [from Ed Turner] died down.”

  Meanwhile, Christiane never stopped pushing for better assignments. Finally “somebody said, ‘Okay, Christiane, let’s talk about making you a full-time reporter,’” Bernknopf recalls. “Now she was not just covering stupid features but real news.” “A huge door had opened for her,” says Parisa Khosravi. “General reporting or fill-in reporting, just to kind of break through—that was sort of the start of her reporting career. And when we used to chat, she always said, ‘Send me out there! I want to do some international reporting.’”

  Christiane, meanwhile, remained close to her family members, who were all still living in London. One day her mother, who was in constant touch, had to deliver heartbreaking news. Her youngest sister, Leila, then eighteen, had been riding her bike down a country road in East Anglia when a car slammed into her. In a lifesaving measure, her right leg had just been amputated above the knee.

  Christiane quickly went into a mode that few had seen her in before. Obtaining an extended “compassionate leave” from CNN as soon as she could, Christiane flew over “to be by my side for quite a long time—a couple of months,” recalls Leila. “She was a massive help—a great source of strength.” Before leaving New York, Christiane had rounded up encouraging letters to Leila from other young amputees, explaining how they had overcome their disabilities. “She brought over great letters that people had written,” including one from Teddy Kennedy Jr., who’d lost his leg as a boy to bone cancer, as well as a “great” one from then Paralympics track-and-field star Dennis Oehler, who had become an amputee at twenty-four following an automobile accident, just as he was about to start playing professional soccer. “I still have those letters,” Leila says.

  Christiane’s decision to take such a break from work seemed touchingly out of character to her family members. Lizzy Amanpour says, “It surprised me—and I’m her sister—that Christiane took all that time off to be with our younger sister after that accident. People’s impression of her is as very ambitious and driven and nothing would stand in her way. So it was really a shock that she would take that much time off.”

  Christiane’s nurturance of Leila was not gushy. “Christiane did not break down into tears,” Leila says. “She was very strong and really encouraging” as Leila moved from hospital to home and made the challenging transition from treatment to rehabilitation. “She said, ‘You’re going to walk. There’s amazing new technology. You’re going to be fine.’ I especially remember her saying, ‘You can either look at this as an obstacle or as a challenge.’ It was brilliant—it was just what I needed to hear—and I obviously went for the latter.”

  When she got back to New York, “Christiane was so determined to get out of America and go international,” says Liza. “She was an operator and an excellent spokeswoman on her behalf. She was constantly, constantly lobbying to go overseas.” Even her staunchest champion, Liza, thought that goal was wildly out of reach. So she was blindsided when, in 1989, Christiane’s dream came true: “She was assigned to our Frankfurt bureau as a producer, and soon after that as producer-reporter,” says Parisa Khosravi. Liza says, “I don’t remember who made that decision to send her to Frankfurt, but I remember I was, ‘Whoa, how’d she pull that off?’” Lizzy Amanpour believes, “I think it was a question of timing. She was the only person at CNN who said yes to Frankfurt. It was for her an opportunity to go abroad but it was not considered a particularly great posting.”

  Yet from the distance of decades, Bernknopf believes Frankfurt meant, “‘You’re qualified—go out in the world and do stuff.’ But even then nobody expected that they were going to get this brave, bold, dogged reporter who seemed to be fearless, not afraid of power.”

  Except maybe Christiane herself. “I don’t think she predicted she was going to become the most famous correspondent in the world,” says an executive who met her then. “But I also don’t think she was surprised.”

  Of course no one could foresee the events that would thrust Christiane onto the world stage. Within a half year of her Frankfurt posting, Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq, long the archenemy of her native Iran, would invade Kuwait, instigating what would ultimately escalate into the Gulf War. Along with two female colleagues, Maria Fleet and Jane Evans, Christiane would head off into that war zone—the first of many. “And the rest,” Parisa Khosravi says, “is history.”

  Two dinners seem to bracket that posting to Frankfurt, that moment when Christiane’s life changed, placing her on the threshold of renown. The first took place in New York, Diana Bellew recalls. Christa D’Souza, Christiane’s friend from London and Brown, by now a correspondent for Tatler, was in town, and the three young women went to the opening of Lucky Strike, the new venture of a hot restaurateur of the era, Keith McNally. Madonna sat a few tables away. Losing her cool, Diana “let my mouth hang open” at being so close to the Material Girl. “Christiane and Christa both said, ‘Stop doing that—you’re so embarrassing!’ But then Christa looked over at me and said, ‘What kind of dressing is she putting on her salad?’ And I said, ‘You just told me I’m not allowed to look! And now you want information?’” Christiane—the former starstruck teenager, her celebrity scrapbooks long gone—stayed unimpressed and above it all.

  At the second dinner, in London, Diana joined Patricia Amanpour and Christiane, visiting from Frankfurt, at a Covent Garden restaurant. “And this time it was Christiane, not me, who was sitting with her mouth open,” Diana says. “She was gawking. She didn’t say anything—she just stared.” The object of her awe was a woman seated nearby whose rapid ascent in TV news she may have longed to emulate. The woman seemed golden, having just been “stolen” away from one major network to be a star at another.

  The woman in Christiane’s gaze was Diane Sawyer. And Christiane was, fittingly, fastening on her just as her own star was beginning to glimmer.

  • • •

  KATIE COURIC CALLED the Gulf War a proving ground that made a female journalist a “ten,” giving her the credibility to open better doors. But f
or Christiane, it was a novitiate, an induction into her true vocation as an international correspondent. In a double Cinderella moment, the war would thrust CNN, once called the Chicken Noodle News, and Christiane herself, the network’s in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time reporter, into the public eye.

  Christiane’s sense of vocation would soon be truly tested in a far more thankless conflict in Bosnia. “Nobody else wanted to go to Bosnia, so we ended up going there,” CNN cameraman David Rust recounts—the “we” being he, Christiane, and several close colleagues. Rust would become a stalwart in Bosnia and one of Christiane’s closest teammates there, documenting the dangerous, frenetic conflict at close range. Rust and Christiane would survive many near misses together.

  The two of them and the CNN team—as well as a coterie of committed others from different networks, photo agencies, and newspapers—covered the conflict so intensely, starting in early 1992, that, Rust says, “I spent more time with Christiane in Bosnia for two and a half years than I did with my wife and kids.”

  It was in Bosnia—in reporting on the explicit targeting of the Bosniak Muslims by the Serbs (and, at some points, to a lesser extent, by the Croats), and in revealing the atrocities committed upon civilians, including the raping of women—that Christiane was affirmed in her mission. She has flatly said: “I consider Bosnia the most important thing I’ve ever done.”

  First, though, Saudi Arabia.

  In August 1990, three CNN women met up in Egypt to form a team. Maria Fleet would be the sound woman and editor. Jane Evans would be the camerawoman. They’d both flown in from Rome and were in Egypt to film the Arab League’s meeting there. Christiane Amanpour winged in from Frankfurt. She would be the reporter.

  They’d all been told that Saudi Arabia was “unrepresentative of the Middle East—it’s more conservative than any other country,” says Maria Fleet. “So, in preparation, we bought all these big, long swatches of fabric, so we could wrap our head and cover our hair.” It turned out the women only needed to be seriously covered up when they wandered into “the most conservative areas or when we went into a mosque. Mostly, we wore Western clothes. Because Saudi Arabia was asking for the U.S.’s help, and we were doing them a huge favor by giving it to them, they relaxed some of the rules—we did not have to wear abaya,” the head-to-toe black garb with eyeholes. “We wore pants and loose blouses—not jeans and tight T-shirts,” but it was close enough to what they’d be wearing at home.