The News Sorority Page 36
The wedding was “an incredible cross-cultural thing,” Diana says. “Christiane’s dad and some cousins from Iran were the Muslim contingent. There was the Catholic ceremony, and then the Jewish one, with Jamie’s friends holding the poles of the chuppah.” Christiane wore a round-necked white sleeveless silk dress with a short, tiered veil, her hair pulled back to show dangly earrings. Among the guests were John Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn, present just as Christiane had been at their small wedding two years before in a tiny church on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia.
• • •
MARRIAGE WAS STRANGE new terrain for an international correspondent. “Christiane was not used to being in a committed relationship,” says Lizzy Amanpour. “She’d had lots of relationships on the road.” But marriage to Jamie “changed her. It made her more patient.”
Just after their wedding at the end of 1998, Christiane was scheduled to go to Iran with Liza McGuirk and Pierre Bairin to begin reporting an intensely personal documentary called Revolutionary Journey. Liza was particularly excited to go. She had taken time off from work during this period and Christiane had talked her into getting back into action. “Only a friendship with Christiane would allow one to go from a PTA meeting to hopping a plane to Tehran,” Liza says. “Pierre and I got there first. We checked into the Homa Hotel and that day’s headline in the Tehran Times was ‘Zionist Rubin Condemns Iran.’ And I remember Pierre and I looking at each other: Is she gonna be able to come into the country now that she’s married to Jamie?”
Not only did the trip work out, but it was the first of several such trips, some filmed during her ensuing pregnancy, in which Christiane showed her native country most hopefully—marveling at the plethora of newspapers of many political persuasions on the street—and most personally, proudly showing off an Internet café owned by her cousin, where young Iranians were not opposed to America but, rather, hungry for news about it. The head-scarved Iranian girls smiled at the American cameras, and Christiane, herself in a green head scarf, looked straight at the lens and said, “I was their age when the Revolution began.” In the most heart-stopping portion of the three-part special, she returned to what was left of her childhood home and greeted her father, embracing him, and a cousin. The once lovely house was “a ruin,” as Christiane’s father aptly put it—“a shell” of its former self, she said. She walked from wrecked room to wrecked room. Only now, twenty years after the Revolution, had her family been able to reclaim it. It was a poignant stocktaking by an exile whose family had lost so much yet had survived intact, and whose expulsion had impacted Christiane’s ambition in ways that benefited the world.
• • •
CHRISTIANE AND JAMIE wanted a baby, and, considering her age, there was no time to wait. She determined that pregnancy would not slow her down. At just about the time she became pregnant, in June 1999, Christiane traveled to Bangladesh with Andrew Tkach to investigate how UNICEF had made a colossally fatal mistake. “They’d put in,” explains Andrew, “a million hand-pump wells so the people would not get waterborne diseases. But nobody had tested the water and there was arsenic in it,” resulting in “the largest mass poisoning in history.” Standing on the banks of a river, with footage of women and children near a well, Christiane reported that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions. . . . When UNICEF first started its safe water program twenty-five years ago, it helped to nearly halve the number of child deaths in Bangladesh. Before that, hundreds of thousands of children like these were dying every year from diseases like cholera and diarrhea, found in the dirty surface water. But no one suspected that the clear water in the new wells would simply replace one poison with another. . . . The poison was arsenic.”
Christiane then turned her microphone over to University of California researcher Allan Smith, who said, “This is the highest risk of cancer that we know of from environmental exposures. . . . [O]ne in ten may eventually die of cancer.” Christiane’s transition from a reporter in literal war zones, those of bombs and grenades and intentional genocide, to a reporter in humanitarian war zones—those of tragedy, oppression, cruelty, and hideously accidental killing—had begun.
Getting to the crisis site in Bangladesh was sluggish and challenging—“twenty trucks trying to get over one huge river, currents, huge traffic jams!” Andrew recalls. Finally, impatient Christiane took control. She leapt out of her and Andrew’s stalled vehicle, stormed to the front of the crush of inert convoys, and took over directing the flow of vehicles—imperious attitude, hand signals, and all. “She jumped up and literally became the cop. ‘You go first! You go second!’” She ordered them and they obeyed. “It was just natural to her. And it was funny!” Andrew laughs, in memory. Later, the crew gave her a present: a Bangladesh traffic policeman’s baton.
Almost right after finishing that story in Bangladesh, Christiane and Jamie flew to Martha’s Vineyard to spend a weekend in early July with her close friend John Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, John’s cousin and best friend Anthony Radziwill, and Anthony’s wife, Carole. Anthony was severely beset by cancer, and the celebration was thus bittersweet, but they all managed to have a good time—“It was a very happy, lovely, normal, friendly couples weekend,” as Christiane would recall it. They all went back to Manhattan, and Christiane hugged John good-bye as he and Carolyn boarded his small plane to fly to Toronto (with his flying coach on board) on a quick business trip—a “mission,” as Christiane called it, for George, the magazine he’d founded and was editing.
Days later Christiane would pick up her phone and hear the ominous news: John, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister Lauren Bessette had taken off on a subsequent trip in John’s plane—this time, without his flying teacher on board. They were headed for the Hyannis Port wedding of John’s cousin Rory Kennedy to Mark Bailey. While in flight they disappeared over the water; their plane could not be located. Christiane stifled her dread in order to go on Larry King’s broadcast to talk about her dear friend—trained in war zones, she said she was still holding out hope that the three would be safely found. Never before had she violated the privacy of their friendship to talk about John, she made clear. She described him as a “loyal and generous and faithful guy, and if you look at his friends, they are all the people who have been with him for the last nearly forty years of his life.” She spoke admiringly of his “big risk” in launching, and succeeding at, a magazine where “many people [would be] just delighted to see somebody like John fail.”
Her optimism was not justified, of course. The plane had crashed and no one had survived. Days later, she attended John’s funeral mass at Manhattan’s St. Thomas More Catholic Church, after the private burial at sea that the three received off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. She was now two months’ pregnant. If her baby was a boy, John would be his middle name.
Still, as with many accomplished working women who did pregnancy later and were seriously enmeshed in their work, she knew enough to let incipient motherhood sneak up on her in its own time. It wasn’t real until it was real—that’s what many modern working women feel. And she was one of them—maybe, given the machismo pervading her field and the cynicism of the men in it who were waiting for her to falter, she took that attitude to unrealistic extremes. “I was very cavalier when I was pregnant,” Christiane has admitted. “I was a little over-the-top. I was, ‘Nothing will change. I’ll take my child with me. All I need is some bulletproof diapers.’” She felt the way many professional women who are pregnant feel but do not always admit: the surprise of it all, the foreignness, the trust that some feeling will come over you that you don’t yet understand but you will welcome when it does. “Motherhood is a very strange concept,” she admitted. “It’ll take time to figure it out because I never intended to have children—that wasn’t one of my goals. Everybody is saying it changes you radically, so I’ll wait and see.” A strikingly honest statement.
When Christiane was five months’ pregnant, s
he traveled to Russia to exclusively interview Mikhail Gorbachev on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Soviet Union. When she was more than eight months’ pregnant, she traveled to Iran with Parisa Khosravi to do a story about the elections there. She was now CNN’s chief international correspondent, and that meant ceaseless travel. “It was hot,” even in February, “and there’s always an extra layer of hijab to wear, and that does help disguise a pregnancy,” Parisa says. “But Christiane was running around in Iran, covering the election, eight months’ pregnant!”
Christiane and Jamie’s son was born on March 24, 2000. They named him Darius John: Darius for the great Persian warrior who fought the Greeks in 490 BC; John, of course, for John Kennedy. Christiane wanted Darius christened a Catholic. Jamie did not object.
• • •
NOTHING TOOK Christiane Amanpour more by surprise than how she would feel once she had a baby. She hadn’t quite expected to fall in love with being a mother. She didn’t fully anticipate the wave of emotion.
At first she tried to deny it in mixed company. David Bernknopf recalls: “Right after Darius was born, I talked to Christiane about whether she wanted to go back out into the field and do the kinds of dangerous stories that she was doing,” he says. “Initially she downplayed the danger completely. ‘No, no, it’s important! I want to go back out.’” Christiane, as a female journalist who’d witnessed sabotage attempts by jealous male counterparts, needed to be on her guard. “I think she denied it to me and I think she denied it to herself at first, because she wanted so much to not have that vulnerability. Christiane did not want people to say, ‘Oh, now she’s had a baby, now she’s a mommy—now she’s weaker.’” Bernknopf’s assessment of his friend matched what Christiane herself has said: “I was conscious of being a woman and not letting them say, ‘Now you’re a mother and you can’t do this anymore. Let the guys do it.’”
Still, however she talked to others, something was different. “The minute my child was born, everything changed,” she later admitted. “There’s a love inside you that you never knew existed. There’s a protectiveness that you never knew you were capable of.” Christiane made these uncharacteristically sentimental and personal remarks to Oprah Winfrey, who, of course, has been known to coax emotion from anyone. But then Christiane continued, more defiantly: “And there’s no way in hell I would take my child to the places I go! That would be completely irresponsible. I’m also much more concerned about my [own] safety, and surviving.”
The risks of her field were underscored for her two months after Darius was born, on May 24, 2000, when Emma Daly called Christiane with the terrible news that Kurt Schork, their adored Bosnia buddy, and Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora—a gangly, charming, devoutly Catholic Spanish lawyer turned cameraman they were so fond of—had been killed on assignment in Sierra Leone. Christiane’s affection for Kurt is strikingly evident in a photo of the two of them that appears on his memorial page—she’s smiling in a giddy, hammy high-school-best-friends-in-a-yearbook way. “We were all sort of in collective shock,” Emma says. Christiane felt “devastated—I was really angry, she said. “They were killed telling a very important story, but does anyone know where Sierra Leone is? How many stations—how many networks—aired their footage?”
Christiane sent her condolences to Miguel’s family in Spain and journeyed to D.C. for Kurt’s ceremony, which took place after his cremation. Half of Kurt’s ashes were buried at the Sarajevo grave of the Romeo and Juliet lovers whose moving story he had shared with the world.
Losing these two colleagues together fortified Christiane’s motherhood-borne incentive to somehow stay safe while still doing powerful stories. And there would be more to come, less than a year later. “In 2001 another very close friend of ours was killed, along with two Reuters people and an Italian journalist, driving from Jalalabad to Kabul,” Emma says. The three “were pulled out of the car and shot and tortured.” On top of this tragedy was the indignity of some people’s judgments. “People said, ‘What were they thinking, driving down that road without an escort? Why didn’t they have soldiers with them?’” To have friends risk their lives for stories, get killed—and then get blamed for “irresponsibility”: This was a cruel irony.
• • •
CHRISTIANE AND JAMIE had had a commuter marriage the first fourteen months—she based in London, he in D.C. But when George W. Bush became president in January 2001 and Jamie was thus freed of his job, Jamie moved to join Christiane in London. “London was Christiane’s spiritual home,” says Bella Pollen, who would become her best friend there. Now Jamie entered that spiritual home.
Christiane and Jamie became part of a social circle of accomplished young Londoners of aristocratic heritage—Bella and her husband prime among them. Though she continued to travel to dangerous places, intent on her journalistic mission, Christiane’s life was now fuller, more bifurcated—and also, perhaps, more conflicted. In London, the grungy war dog receded (only to be trotted back out when on assignment) and an adult version of the elite boarding school girl reemerged. As with her time in Providence—among friends who were nobility, real or metaphorical—this was a kind of homecoming.
Arabella “Bella” Pollen was an attractive new friend to Christiane. The daughter of British aristocrats, Bella had spent her childhood shuttling between a family estate in Scotland and a town house in Manhattan. She was an accomplished fashion designer—she’d had her own line (Princess Diana was a client)—who then turned to writing novels, including two, Hunting Unicorns and The Summer of the Bear, that were greeted with critical praise. With her second husband, the publisher David Macmillan, a grandson of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, Bella presided over a lively blended family in several homes, including an English country mansion that was featured in Vogue. This was the world that Christiane and Jamie slipped into, with their move to London.
Before she met Christiane, Bella had researched her, as preparation for writing her protagonist—a tough-minded female war correspondent—in Hunting Unicorns. “I came across an interview Christiane had given on the death of the news—how entertainment was taking over real news. I was struck by how passionately she felt. Then, quite by chance, she was friends with friends of mine in London, and I met her at a small dinner. She read my book and loved it and gave me a quote. Then we started to bump into each other at our local farmers’ market and began chatting over vegetables,” and “because she was close friends with people who were also my close friends, we became a gang for five or six years. We’d meet a couple of times a week for movies and family Sunday lunches, and slowly we made the jump to close friends.”
Bella and the other Londoners were taken by how down to earth Christiane was. In a crowd of Brits of casual privilege, Bella saw that “Christiane’s not remotely rarefied. She’s the furthest thing I know from being a snob. She has no time for kiss-ass or fakery.” She was earnest and happy in her new London life. Christiane, says Bella, fell in love not only with her baby but also “with being a member of the community”: the young-prime-aged English gentry. And this life was “pretty much the polar opposite of what she’d been doing most of her adult life—being a passionately independent roving reporter.”
Christiane tried to puzzle out the dual—the dichotomous—nature of her life with Bella. “We talked fairly extensively about” the change in her circumstances from single reporter to social wife and mother. “She was passionate about her work in the field, but it brought loneliness at times—and worry about Darius.” Christiane displayed her feminine side with Bella. She was “incredibly giggly—game for anything. In Colorado,” where Pollen and Macmillan have a house, “we’re cooking up a storm,” and even though Christiane “can’t boil an egg, she’s in the kitchen wearing a funky vintage apron and a pair of weird Walmart slippers we’ve given her for Christmas, with her hands stuck up the back a raw turkey, trying to stuff the damn thing—laughing her head off. She has a deeply silly
sense of humor. She is much the opposite of Jamie, who has a much more cynical, less hopeful take on the world than she does. In fact, of all the people I know, especially in London, Christiane is the least cynical by a very long way.”
Was it motherhood, and a new relish of stylish domesticity, that softened this once impatient and confrontational warrior? Did flattery at being included in a tony circle make her more ingratiating? Or was the fact that she really had effected change for desperate people as few other journalists had what made for the optimism that Bella found in Christiane? Whatever the reason, over the ensuing years Christiane seemed to want—to need—the contrast of genteel hospitality she shared with Bella to soften—or to glamorize, or to reward—her breakneck investigative work. Bella says: “One minute we’re at the local Chinese mani and pedi; the next minute she’s in camouflage and embedded with soldiers in Afghanistan. My toenails are still looking pink and neat while hers are encased in hobnailed boots in a war-torn country.”
For the first six years of her son’s life, Christiane—simultaneously doing work for 60 Minutes and as CNN’s chief international correspondent—traveled to more international trouble sites than ever before in her career. Never had she worked so hard. She flew off from London to do stories in Sudan, Chad, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Kenya, Darfur, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iran, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Kosovo, Italy, France, Spain, Russia, Ukraine—and Washington, D.C., and New York—rushing back to London between each crisis report in each hot spot and each hard-fought-for interview with a controversial leader in a private room. Her sister Lizzy says, “I’ve noticed this with people: If your personality is driven with work, it’s also driven with being a mom. That’s just your personality—you are a driven person. She is like that with Darius. Her responsibility to Darius is the number one thing in her life. You can tell he means everything to her. She doesn’t like going away; it worries her. But at the same time, it fires her up. She feels incredibly passionate about doing a mission,” an investigative justice story. “When she’s engaged on that level, she just goes for it.”