The News Sorority Read online

  Both Houston and Sawyer were dressed in white for the interview. Both women had sung in church choirs. When Diane asked what the biggest “devil” in Whitney’s life was, the loaded noun seemed unforced—it seemed mutually understood. Houston’s eyes misted. She dropped her bravado, more in relief than defeat. Her tone of voice suggested she’d been waiting for someone to ask her that question, but it had to be the right someone. In a powerful, poignant confession, Whitney Houston answered that the “biggest devil” in her life “is me.”

  Katie, meanwhile, was inciting animus within Today. She was arriving so late now that “it became a joke,” says a senior staffer. “But she was so good that that was the problem. She was able to swing right in: Show up, be in the shot, do the tease, and then go into makeup during the news and get final touches on. But she was making everybody’s life miserable.” In November 2002 Jonathan Wald was fired—allegedly for making the show too serious and taking too long to get back to the cooking segments—and replaced by Tom Touchet, who had been an ABC documentary producer and a line producer for Shelley Ross at GMA.

  Steadily, GMA was closing the ratings gap. From 1999, when Diane came on board, to the end of 2003, Today flattened or decreased in both main viewer categories (adults twenty-five to fifty-four, and households) while GMA soared. This was a significant threat to Today, which was the biggest money earner of any show on any network, its ad revenue holding at $250 million annually, three times more than GMA’s.

  The competition between GMA and Today “was like a relay race, it was tremendous, it was moving like the wind,” says an ABC staffer. “There was definitely a fight to overtake Today,” Anna Robertson concurs. The executive who had attended the December 1998 play-our-queen meeting adds, “The challenge of that show is something that could have been a disaster. And the fact that Diane mastered it, that she figured out the skill set, the booking, the relationship to Charlie, which is very complicated,” was a tribute to her doggedness. It was also a tribute to Shelley Ross’s work as executive producer. And to the entire team.

  Still, as close as she got, “I think Diane was completely baffled by the fact that she could never make it over Katie in the morning,” says a senior staffer. “She knew deep down that there must be somebody out there who had all the answers, if we could just find them. She thought, ‘Why can’t we find our own Jeff Zucker? Who is the next Jeff Zucker?’ There was no next Jeff Zucker. Jeff Zucker is Jeff Zucker.” Allison Gollust thinks that “the times that GMA got closer to us was probably more a reflection of when the Today show got lazy than GMA doing better. Or it was a combination. Not to take anything away from GMA, but Katie and Matt, in those chairs, were just an unbeatable combination. I’ve studied them for fifteen years—they know what people want to see.”

  • • •

  COMPLICATING THE MORNING war was the actual war that was starting now—Operation Iraqi Freedom. When, in March 2003, President Bush announced the decision to invade Iraq, Katie flew to Saudi Arabia and did Today from there, while Diane, in her fashion, took a more in-the-fray approach in GMA’s coverage. “Diane and I literally just went to the airport, sat in the Virgin lounge, and said, ‘Okay, should we try to go to Jordan or should we try to go to Kuwait?’” says Anna Robertson. “‘How do we best get into Iraq?’ You didn’t know if you could get in. So we just called people from the airport and said, ‘We’re going; this is the plan.’ We ended up going to Kuwait.” There, they hired a car and driver to get them into Iraq—“Diane is putting on her drugstore makeup in the back of the car with her little compact and we’re driving into the desert. We really had no idea where we were going. We got to the American military base and all the sirens went off and everybody put on their masks and we interviewed soldiers. This was definitely dangerous—we didn’t have the right equipment and at the time no one knew if Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Diane was fine. She mostly worried about the crew. If she had been alone, she’d have done anything—she’s fearless.” Soon after, Diane and Anna returned to Iraq to interview the notorious female weapons scientist known as “Dr. Germ,” a scoop produced by Shelley Ross. Anna: “It was a crazy adventure.”

  But during one of these trips to Iraq, Diane, again, confronted—and sidestepped—the hauteur trap of Peter Jennings. Peter suggested that he, as anchor, ask Diane an on-air question, but Diane had learned her lesson from his treatment of her during 9/11 and his abiding treatment of Barbara Walters. According to an observer, “Diane said something like, ‘No! I’m not going to do that’”—converse with Jennings on air—“‘because he will say, “No, you’re wrong.” He will intentionally make me look foolish.’” In less confidential settings, Diane had a deft and witty way to get back at Jennings. “To make fun of him at events, she would say, ‘Oh, captain, my captain!’ That was a dig to Peter. It said: One, you’re not educated. And two, I’m the captain,” says one who’s worked with both of them.

  Ben Sherwood, Diane’s protégé at Primetime, had worked his way up the producer line to handle Tom Brokaw at NBC Nightly News. According to a GMA insider, he was up for executive producer of Nightline, and “when he didn’t get it, he left,” returning to LA to write a book, the bestselling novel Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud, which became a movie. (It didn’t hurt that Sherwood’s wife, Karen Kehela, was an executive with the powerful production company Imagine Entertainment.) During this time—2003, early 2004—“Ben, who was as cunning and seductive as Diane, really wooed Diane. He sat at home, he finished writing his book, and he wrote her e-mails” as an unofficial adviser. “‘Why did you do this?’ ‘Here is where I think you’re going wrong.’ That’s how he wormed his way in” to her favor.

  The beginning of the year 2004 was intense for Diane. On the heels of the release of Mel Gibson’s controversial The Passion of the Christ, Diane taped her interview with Gibson, which aired on February 16. “It was very, very complicated,” Anna Robertson says, editing “five hours of tape” of a “very intellectual” nature down to a piece that was fair. “Diane feels a great responsibility to people who entrust her with their stories.” Gibson narrowly denied charges that he was anti-Semitic—he said that “to be anti-Semitic is a sin.” But the fervor with which he threatened Diane when she asked him about his father Hutton Gibson, a proud Holocaust denier—“He’s my father. Gotta leave it alone, Diane. Gotta leave it alone”—and the subtly fearful snap back of the head of this genteel WASP wife of a Holocaust escapee when Gibson leveled that threat, spoke volumes. Diane played Mel Gibson the opposite of the way she’d played Whitney Houston—she used her Decorous Lady card instead of her Serious Dame card—and her shrewd choice would grant her another, stronger crack at Gibson a couple of years later.

  In February 2004, during GMA’s post–Academy Awards broadcast, Shelley Ross made a split-second decision to lead the coverage with Charlize Theron, who had won Best Actress for her depiction of a serial murderer, instead of Charlie Gibson’s interview with Best Director winner Peter Jackson. Theron had a dramatic personal backstory: In their native South Africa, her own mother had shot her abusive husband, Charlize’s father, dead. Charlize had been in the house at the time, protected by her mother’s action. She was infinitely more photogenic than the messy-haired, then hefty Lord of the Rings director, and the interview Diane had done with Theron was a rare one in which the actress had discussed her mother’s act of lethal self-defense. Still, Diane’s interview with Theron was an earlier-taped interview while Charlie’s with Jackson was Oscar-night current. Initially, Shelley relented and agreed that Charlie’s piece could lead, but it wasn’t yet sufficiently edited, so Shelley made the call to go with the Theron piece. Soon afterward, the New York Post’s Page Six planned to run an item stating that Charlie was angry at Shelley “for tricking him”; he did not believe his piece wasn’t ready (though Ross says she never heard uncivil words from Gibson about her decision). Ross had the opportunity, during ABC’s negotiation with Page Six, to “p
re-trade” that upcoming negative item about herself for a negative item about movie reviewer Joel Siegel having a tantrum at an Oscars event. But, feeling that Siegel, a cancer patient, had enough problems without an embarrassing gossip item, Shelley declined to trade her own Page Six slam for Siegel’s. Partially as a result of that Page Six slam against Shelley—and despite the fact that David Westin, over a recent lunch, had just signed Shelley to a hefty new $3 million GMA contract—Shelley was suddenly “reassigned” back to Primetime. For her part, Diane told Shelley that, for the sake of unity with Charlie, she regrettably couldn’t step in.

  Some at GMA thought Diane failed to protect her longtime producer by letting the bad press stand unchallenged and for not stopping the reassignment. (By contrast, “Diane’s friend Oprah would have gone to bat for a loyal producer,” one senior staffer says.) The sudden loss of the powerhouse producer came as a shock to Morning as a whole. But someone who later came to the show reasons, “The trouble was, Shelley and Diane were too much alike. When you have an executive producer and an anchor who are both very creative and who both want you twenty-four/seven, it’s really like working eighty-eight/seven. Diane and Shelley together were too much pressure on the staff and the show. Only one of them at a time could be in a place like that or it was going to break. And Diane wasn’t going to be the one to leave. So it had to be Shelley.”

  Now Ben Sherwood came in as GMA’s new executive producer. He was lucky. The momentum that Shelley Ross had built for the show got a boost through a stroke of ABC prime-time programming fortune: The debut of instantly popular Desperate Housewives in October made more evening viewers leave their dials on ABC when they went to bed. Now Today was in serious trouble—at one point the GMA-to-Today gap was closed down to forty-seven thousand households, a miracle from the standpoint of Diane’s January 1999 initiation.

  In a sense, GMA’s edge in the tightening horse race may have been compromised by Diane’s own perfectionism—her insistence on being a journalist, covering far-flung international stories, while also being a morning anchor. The catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami hit over the Christmas holidays. Diane made a trip to the devastated region, and, says Anna Robertson, who accompanied her, “she kept going and going and going. We would fly over decimated areas. We didn’t sleep for days.” And when she did catch shut-eye, “she was sleeping in the back of a Jeep. But that’s just how Diane is.” There was a problem with getting out of Malaysia and back to New York; Diane and Anna ended up hitching a ride on a seatless C-130 cargo plane. “This is a woman who really puts herself in the zone,” says Phyllis McGrady. When she would go off on intense assignments to dangerous locations, “Mike gets extremely worried. His own work is very different and he’s very protective of her—he loves her. He’s called and said, ‘I’m very worried. I haven’t heard from her, Phyllis. Have you?’” Once, before a trip, he called David Westin and worriedly asked, “Is she really going to be safe? Is she really going to be safe?”

  Perhaps in the wake of the exhausting tsunami coverage, “Diane got a little lax [on GMA] after Christmas,” an insider recalls. “The show was doing really well for six or eight months,” since Sherwood came on. “They were really firing on all cylinders. Diane, Charlie, and Robin [Roberts, the newsreader] were golden. Desperate Housewives was a huge hit and there was great cross-promotion on that.” But “after Christmas we came back and we lost our momentum. We all talked about it. We couldn’t quite figure out how to get back that fighting feeling.”

  Eventually—inevitably—“Diane started losing confidence in Ben. Then it got progressively worse. I don’t know that there was a point where she didn’t talk to him, but she had gone through that with other EPs,” the insider says. Ironically, it was only after GMA mysteriously started—at least privately and internally—feeling the 2004–2005 postholiday morale slump that the New York media jumped on its rival’s misfortune. The trigger point was Today’s firing of Tom Touchet and replacing him with sports producer Jim Bell, in April 2005.

  On April 25, an Alessandra Stanley story ran in the New York Times under the headline “Today Seeks Yesterday’s Glory.” It was as coolly venomous a piece as the Times ever published, and in those largely pre–social media days, it went viral by word of mouth. Stanley spared Diane just marginally less scorn than she heaped on Katie with her catty opening line:

  Something has to be very wrong with NBC’s Today if viewers are turning to ABC’s Diane Sawyer as a refreshingly wholesome, down-to-earth alternative. . . .

  Then she lit into Katie:

  [Katie’s] on-air persona has changed, along with her appearance and pay scale. But lately her image has grown downright scary: America’s girl next door has morphed into the mercurial diva down the hall. At the first sound of her peremptory voice and clickety stiletto heels, people dart behind doors and douse the lights.

  Stanley reprised her swipes at Diane near the end (“Her golden good looks never change” and her “poised, creamy insincerity . . . never varies or falters”), but taking down Katie was the main point. This included the crediting of a flamboyant fashion correspondent’s rather histrionic complaint that his recent firing from the show after a kidney transplant had been like being “shot at the crack of dawn” and “left in a gutter to bleed.”

  “It was all true!” says someone who was at Today shortly before this epic takedown was printed. “And that is what made it so painful to Katie. Had it been wrong, you would have laughed it off. ‘Disgruntled ex-employee?’ Are there any gruntled ex-employees who don’t have an ax to grind? And is anyone ever grinding anything other than an ax? But it was so close to home that I think it really hurt her. And you should have seen the dragnet of ‘Who could have been the source? How did this happen?’” that ensued, with Katie fruitlessly demanding to know who had spoken to Stanley.

  A female former CBS producer says, cynically, “We producers have a term for something anchors get. We call it ‘the disease that comes out of the front of the lens’—and the longer the time you spend looking into the lens,” the more you are susceptible to that malady. It may best be described as a public-attention-stimulated exaggeration of one’s personality in the service of self-interest and as a result of the necessary rapacious competition that comes with the territory.

  People in the business note that the difference between Diane and Katie is reflected in how they’ve fought over gets. When a friend of Diane’s, a public figure, was being pursued by Katie’s people, the wooed eminence got a call from Mike Nichols, who said—in a very nice way, to be sure—that he and Diane would essentially cut off all social contact if their friend appeared on Today. That threat of permanent silence from Diane “hurt,” its famous recipient reports, adding, “Diane has hurt me many times” and “Diane’s very sharp sword, which is hard to see because she’s so lovely, can cut you to the quick.” It was pure Diane—no fingerprints, yet all fingerprints—and it was stunningly effective: Diane’s worried friend turned Today down cold.

  Here, by contrast, is recklessly blunt, snarky Katie: When, in May 2005, a woman named Aleta St. James gave birth to twins at fifty-seven, a get war broke out between Katie and Diane for the mature new mother’s exclusive. Diane won; St. James chose GMA. Soon after, Katie minced no words. Within earshot of people in the control booth, Katie loudly mused: “I wonder who she blew this time to get it.” Converting Diane Sawyer’s famous penchant for figurative seduction into such graphic and improbable sexual terms may be common office banter, but it was startling for someone of Katie’s stature to be so unmindful of her image. Says one shocked witness: “You can think those things, but to say them? And where everyone can hear them?”

  • • •

  BY NOW, KATIE WAS BEING aggressively, secretly courted away from Today, to far more prestigious pastures than morning TV. Andrew Heyward was the president of CBS News in 2004 when he first approached Katie to discuss replacing Dan Rather—thus becoming the first ever female s
olo anchor of a six-thirty news show. It was “probably Leslie’s” idea, Heyward says gingerly—others make that statement more forcefully—referring to Leslie Moonves. Moonves was president of CBS and—as many people, especially those at CBS News, make a point to stress—a product of Hollywood, not of the news business. Says a longtime CBS News producer: “The Katie decision was taken outside of the news division. The news division had no voice in it—you really need to understand that.”

  Heyward: “Katie was one of the few superstars in the business, and it was known that at a certain point her Today show deal was going to be up. Leslie was very eager to reinvent the news.” Heyward agreed, believing, as he puts it, that “this tradition of the evening news anchor who hands down wisdom like tablets from Sinai” needed to give way to “a relationship between a journalist and her viewers” that was “more peer-to-peer and more authentically based,” less dependent on “the trappings of authority.” One way to do so would be “to name somebody of her stature—and there was almost nobody else of her stature.” To say you want “‘somebody like Katie Couric,’” as Moonves seems to have said, “means Katie—there’s nobody like Katie but Katie.”

  By some accounts, the first confidential overtures were made in early 2004. One of the “preliminary discussions” took place at Katie’s apartment, as is customary in these cases since, as Heyward explains, “we were not allowed to negotiate with her—she was still under contract [to NBC]. But you’re permitted to get acquainted, to have exploratory conversations about things that might be interesting in the future.” At this meeting, which Heyward and Moonves attended, Katie’s agent Alan Berger was also present. There was another meeting “at Leslie’s apartment,” Heyward says. “And I met once with Katie at her apartment. There might have been more [meetings] than that.”