The News Sorority Read online

  Outgoing Linda was shy Diane’s idol and protector. It’s not clear what Diane needed protection from as a secure little girl with doting parents, but she would later say that “Linda [was] a saint. I’m not kidding. I’ve never known anybody like her in my life. She only worries about me—this has been true since I’ve been little. She would take me with her, let me tag along, from the time I was tiny.”

  By the middle of elementary school, however, both Sawyer girls were constantly going to performance classes; their distinction and perfection was their mother’s mission. Still, for all her rabid ambition for her daughters, and abiding conservatism (Jean was a lifelong Republican), and “indomitable” affect (Diane has always used this adjective on her mother, noting that this steely role model of hers never came to the breakfast table less than perfectly groomed and dressed for the day), Jean Sawyer also modeled originality and open-mindedness for her daughters. She practiced yoga—hardly typical of a Kentucky mother in the 1950s. She was sure that there was Native American blood, as well as German and Scottish, in the Dunagan bloodlines; she had the family’s genealogy traced and she was gratified when her hunch was confirmed.

  Louisville’s racial landscape during the 1950s was as turbulent as anywhere in the South. In 1954, a white couple, the Bradens, activist progressives, were charged with sedition for helping a black family, the Wades, buy a home in a “non-Colored” area. The Bradens were convicted of that crime, and Carl Braden served jail time before the conviction was reversed. Housing integration would be Louisville’s bane, from Diane’s girlhood through her early work as a reporter, but that turmoil was unsurprising—it was sadly par for the course in the South during the McCarthy era of the Eisenhower years.

  All national news that was funneled into the Sawyer household’s black-and-white television set during Diane’s girlhood had a nonurban overlay.It came through the voices of Douglas Edwards on CBS or, on NBC, the popular duo of Huntley and Brinkley. Though they broadcast from New York, all three were men of rural American origin—Edwards an Oklahoman, Brinkley a North Carolinian, Huntley from Montana. Edwards was old-school formal; the widely popular Huntley and Brinkley played off each other, with Brinkley’s wit balancing Huntley’s solemnity. Still, as popular as Brinkley was, Huntley’s baritone trumped Brinkley’s higher voice; Huntley was the main anchor of the duo during a time that high-pitched voices were considered unacceptable.

  • • •

  FROM THE OUTSIDE, the new school that Diane entered in seventh grade in 1958, Seneca High, seemed normal for its time and place—the students had to stand and recite the Lord’s Prayer every morning; Frankie Avalon and Pat Boone were the radio favorites, while Elvis was deemed unappealingly “greaser,” even though he hailed from the state next door. Girls wore cinch-belted skirts and circle pins, and if a girl wore shorts on a hot day, she had to be separated from the boys on the school bus. But Seneca drew from an unusual geographic swath: from a largely Jewish neighborhood as well as a white Protestant one. In addition, a group of African American students also entered. This was an almost unheard-of mixture, but principal Kenneth Farmer resolutely insisted that everything be peaceful. The “GO HOME, NIGGER!” signs were scrubbed from the walls. The hate mail was kept from the students. “Seneca was a school that everyone was watching, all across the country, because integration was going on there,” says one of its black students, Diane’s classmate David Cosby, who became one of the high school’s basketball stars. Seneca would boast two all-American basketball players—Wes Unseld and Mike Redd—during Diane’s years there, both of them black, and that integrated, game-winning basketball team, the Seneca Redskins (later Redhawks), helped to make what could have been a very bumpy process of integration less so.

  The injustice was sharp at first, though many of the white kids were too naive or privileged to immediately notice: “‘Coloreds Not Served Here’ were signs at the Greyhound station and at the restaurants—I remember seeing them as a kid and as a teenager,” George Unseld, Wes’s younger brother and also a Seneca basketball star, recalled, before his 2010 death. And the irony was sharp: Here were the black kids winning the basketball games, yet they were legally unable to enter the after-game hangout—the coach brought their food back to the car. “It was really hard for me, scoring forty points in the basketball game, and then when we went to Frisch’s and the white kids went inside, I had to sit in the car. That’s hard for a sixteen-year-old,” says David Cosby. It didn’t take long for the white players to rise to the challenge: All for one and one for all—if they can’t eat in a restaurant, then we won’t, whether in Louisville or farther out in some of the more provincial counties, where the sight of a mixed team of basketball players eating together in a bus could be potentially dangerous. It was an improvised, ground-level, teenage protest against segregation that preceded its counterparts in the deeper South. (And it was helped along by some of the Jewish students’ own earlier protests—they didn’t want to read the New Testament in class, for example—which had made the school more open-minded than others.) By Diane’s senior year the basketball team was a third black, a third white Christian, a third Jewish.

  As an idealistic, thoughtful—and Christian—girl, Diane was sympathetic. In fact, David Cosby says, sometimes in 1961 he and Diane talked about how unfair it was that they couldn’t date. “Yes, Diane and I talked about doing it [dating].” (Diane has affirmed this publicly.) “We teased each other about it in school—in the hallway, in the cafeteria. We laughed about it—I was a handsome guy and she was an attractive girl. I was the basketball star and she was doing everything she was doing,” including cheerleading at his games. “But what could we have done and both be alive right now? We knew that, publicly, black and white kids couldn’t date. We were ahead of our times.”

  In fact, Diane Sawyer of Seneca High basically did not date—perhaps that is why she could so easily joke about it. She was always busy at voice or dance lessons, or at rehearsals. She sang My Fair Lady’s “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” on a local TV variety show. She traveled during the summer, on exchange programs, going to South America, living briefly on the German-Swiss border (and learning almost fluent German). These were programs her mother determinedly found for her. Besides, she was somewhat hard to categorize. At five foot nine, she was tall for her age—somewhat gawky—and with her late December birthday, she was young for her grade. Tall and young and smart and always otherwise occupied after school and on school breaks: It somehow put her off-limits. Diane “was harder to get to know for a lot of people,” say Marc Fleischaker. Her friends were older. “I think there weren’t but a handful of guys who would have had the confidence to ask her out,” says Greg Haynes. “She was too beautiful for us fragile-ego’d guys,” says another classmate, Tom Hampton. She appeared aloof, even though that wasn’t necessarily the case. “She wasn’t terribly confident in social situations,” explains one female classmate. Her rectitude and extracurricular activities gave her a seeming diffidence, an “apartness,” as some students noticed.

  When as a sophomore she first walked into the class of the young, brand-new English teacher, Miss Chumbley, the teacher felt almost sorry for Diane. “Diane did not have that apple-pie beauty queen look that her sister, Linda, had. She wore black horn-rimmed glasses with very thick lenses—looks were not paramount to her. I thought, ‘Oh, it must be very difficult to have a sister as beautiful as Linda!’” says Alice Chumbley Lora.

  If her mother gave her the message that she should hold out for more—more opportunity, more distinction—there seemed a part of her that felt that, too—in a subtle way, as in a kind of gentle, high-minded alienation from convention. “I think Diane felt like an outsider, and I felt like one, too, and that’s why we were friends,” recalls classmate Sallie Schulten Haynes, Greg Haynes’s wife. The two girls indulged in “deep conversation. We talked about our philosophy of life and what was meaningful,” Sallie says. “We had this little group,” Diane has s
aid. “We were Unitarian, Jewish, Methodist. We used to get together and read Thoreau and Emerson, and we’d sit by this squalid little creek every day at lunch and imagine ourselves as philosophers. We called ourselves the New Transcendentalists. Oh, I was earnest—so, so earnest!”

  But if she was self-important, it was in a harmless way, without snobbery. “I don’t think Diane cared about status,” says Sallie Haynes. “I did, but she didn’t.” In their “Old Louisville” of private schools with exclusive fraternities and sororities, their ethnically mixed, meritocratic public high school was “looked down on by some of the kids in the other schools. We were ‘less desirable,’” says Sallie. “Diane was not alienated, she was not insecure; she just knew there was more out there than what everybody was caught up with,” not only in terms of social class but also with gender expectations. “I consciously tried to appear ‘not smart.’ Diane didn’t.”

  Diane came to Miss Chumbley and said she wanted to start a debate team. Once the team was started, she was one of only two girls in the field of nine debaters. Diane liked to debate both sides of a topic—her desire for evenhandedness, for logical argument, was something that struck Miss Chumbley. Over the last two of Diane’s high school years, Diane began to confide in Miss Chumbley—there was a similarity, both women sensed. They were highly attractive, ladylike, questing young Southern women. Alice, who was then in her early twenties, had been Miss Kentucky in the Miss America pageant just before coming to Seneca, but she was pushing past cultural expectations; she would soon go to Duke for a PhD in English. Diane’s sister, Linda, had been Miss Kentucky in the Miss America pageant and now she was at Wellesley. Both of these women were models for Diane, combining beauty and charm with intellectual ambition.

  One day toward the end of her junior year, Diane came into Miss Chumbley’s homeroom in tears. She had not been invited to the junior prom! Everyone else had been. Actually, she had been worse than not invited; she’d been disinvited. Her classmate Jim Crunkelton had invited her, but she was his second choice. “I asked a girl to go; she said yes but then she changed her mind, so I asked Diane,” Crunkelton explains. “Then the mothers got involved and they thought it was wrong for that first girl to break her date with me.” So that first girl reaccepted Jim’s invitation and Diane was disinvited.

  Miss Chumbley told Diane, “‘Why don’t you ask your dad? Everybody loves your dad! And he’s such a good dancer!’ Of course, that brought more tears—no girl wants to bring her father to the prom.” The Monday after prom weekend Diane walked into Miss Chumbley’s homeroom with a look of quiet triumph: When all the other girls were getting dressed, she had gone by herself with a book to the creek—the “squalid little creek”—and read the poems of Wallace Stevens. She was proud of this thumbing of convention, this use of literature to best the world of wrist corsages and spaghetti-strapped taffeta gowns. Miss Chumbley was proud of her, too.

  But that whole thing was kind of a fluke—in fact, Diane had won the crown of homecoming queen in her junior year. George Unseld, the new Seneca Redskins basketball team captain, presented her with a bouquet of roses at the homecoming game, and Diane moved her cheek toward him—Queen getting a kiss from Captain had always been a tradition, at least in the old days of segregated schools. But George didn’t kiss her. “A lot of guys asked me about it. ‘She’s the best-looking woman in the school and you didn’t kiss her!’ I got this from both black and white guys,” Unseld said, before his death. “Diane asked me why I didn’t do it—she’d expected me to.” Unseld told her about his mother’s lingering worries because of the murder, seven years earlier, of Emmett Till, and she understood. In a separate situation, not more than a year earlier, Miss Chumbley, as a faculty chaperone, had accompanied two black star Seneca players to a game at a college to which they were applying for admission; her own friends—educated white women—called her afterward and exclaimed, “Alice! You’re going to ruin your reputation!” Alice was angry, and surprised. Years later, Alice Chumbley Lora and Diane agreed that these lines from the Sara Teasdale poem “The Long Hill” captured their, and their Seneca peers’, naive, improvised groping toward integration before they could fully comprehend the obstacles they were facing down:

  I must have passed the crest a while ago

  And now I’m going down

  Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know.

  Indeed, they didn’t “know” that they had passed a “crest” ahead of the time for their region. “I think the white kids at Seneca got educated from” it all, George Unseld said. “When we got there as freshmen we had problems. Some of the kids even fought us.” But by Unseld’s senior year, the Seneca kids protested Louisville’s theater segregation together: When the black kids couldn’t sit with the white kids, they all turned around and walked out. By the time of Unseld’s senior prom, in 1962, the Jewish kids and the black kids even “banded together,” Unseld said, in choosing the music: “It wasn’t so much that we had to have doo-wop. We just didn’t want country western.”

  • • •

  AT THE BEGINNING of her senior year (1962–1963), Diane had been recruited to be a possible contestant as Miss Kentucky in the America’s Junior Miss contest. Linda had been the runner-up two years earlier (aside from her run as Miss Kentucky in the far more prestigious Miss America competition). The scholarship money had helped pay for Linda’s tuition at Wellesley, where Diane would soon be accepted. Conflicted about whether or not to enter America’s Junior Miss, Diane consulted Miss Chumbley, as she often did. Miss Chumbley counseled Diane against entering. Still, if she won, the scholarship money would be crucial to her being able to accept Wellesley.

  Diane entered the pageant.

  Actually, despite its cutesy name, America’s Junior Miss was a competition that focused more on spiritual qualities than did many other pageants. Its charismatic den mother and mistress of ceremonies, Catherine Marshall, was the daughter, widow, and mother of Presbyterian ministers, and, after her first husband’s death, she married Leonard LeSourd, Pastor Norman Vincent Peale’s publishing partner. Peale’s pulpit was Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church; there he preached the enormously popular “Power of Positive Thinking”—in sermons, and also through books, national radio broadcasts, and his and LeSourd’s magazine, Guideposts.

  The Christian self-help/help-others doctrine that undergirded the pageant was precisely the one that Diane had grown up with, and in Catherine Marshall there were uncanny echoes of Diane’s mother. Like Jean Dunagan Sawyer, Catherine Marshall was an Appalachia-bred woman, a schoolteacher, a survivor of adversity—she’d had tuberculosis as a child—a successful, self-made woman who was a best-selling author of inspirational books. She was a woman who forcefully preached to her contestants the secular gospel that Jean Sawyer drummed into her daughters: No excuses! Be the best you can be! Push yourself! Diane was blown away by Catherine’s backstage pep talks at the Mobile, Alabama, pageant theater. Meeting her “was a seismic wake-up call,” Diane would later recall. Catherine “seemed almost disappointed at how we, the contestants, expressed our ambitions. She challenged us to take whatever each of us had to start thinking beyond our limited horizons. She dared us to dream big. She hated . . . waste of human capacity. She wanted to shake us up. ‘There’s so much more you can do!’ She could see the way the world could be and the way your life could be. I had never met a person who lived and worked her faith like that.” Catherine Marshall’s impassioned mentoring of the contestants was like Diane’s thoughtful father’s “three questions,” and it was like her aggressive, perfectionistic mother’s impelling her to take all those performance lessons—and her insistence, after Judge Sawyer died, that she not rely on a man. Diane’s homily-like exhortations to her friends today—“When it’s the hardest, do something for somebody else; it will make you feel better,” she has told at least one friend—seem to have come from an amalgam of her mother, her father, and Catherine Marshall, who left
a deep impression on her.

  For her talent presentation at Junior Miss, Diane, representing Kentucky, read a poem she had written about the Civil War, and, having honed her self-avowed interest in evenhandedness through work with Miss Chumbley, she sang songs from both sides of that conflict. Catherine Marshall was very taken with Diane. “Mom said Diane was the one who seemed to strike the deepest chord, who had a deeper vision” than the other contestants, recalls the late Marshall’s stepson Chet LeSourd. The judges must have agreed; they selected her.

  When Diane was crowned America’s Junior Miss—flanked by the runners-up (now her “princesses”)—she threw her head back in a thrilled laugh. She was handed a bouquet of long-stemmed roses, and in her white bouffant-skirted dress—her chin-length blond hair framing her face in the tight, neat curls of the time—she seemed the very picture of ladylike WASP graciousness that had dominated the country’s imagery since the Eisenhower years.

  But that female meme was now on its last legs.

  The night she was crowned was also the night the Seneca Redskins won the state basketball championship. Her pageant win—untelevised, in another state—was dwarfed by the school’s excitement at its triumph. Here was its racially integrated team hoisting the state banner! As much as Diane had contributed to the quiet gains that were now Seneca’s legacy, being the blond beauty queen in an all-white-girls contest in 1963 was being on the wrong side of history.

  • • •

  THE PERSPECTIVE WAS AUGURING. Shortly after parading down the runway, bouquet in arms, Diane found the elation of her win dissipating. It was embarrassing to wear her crown and sash to official America’s Junior Miss events. (She even had to wear them on airplanes to the events.) The inspiration of Marshall’s persona and words and the significance of the event didn’t translate beyond the South, beyond the world she was leaving—the sensibility that the country was leaving.