by Lisa Napoli
The affable producer was also legendary for discovering on-air talent, like Jerry Dunphy, who famously began his newscasts with the trademark introduction, “From the desert to the sea, to all of Southern California, a good evening.” Zelman knew that to cut it at CNN’s seat-of-the-pants environment, good looks and mellifluous pipes wouldn’t be enough.
He passionately believed news was “the lifeblood of citizenship” and that the more of it there was, the better. Now sixty-five, he’d traded retirement—mandatory at the network at his age—for this impossible-to-miss opportunity. Goodbye, Learjets and the extravagant silver tea service available at CBS. Hello, Winn-Dixie gift certificates and fruitcakes provided at down-market Turner Broadcasting.
The résumé of another network refugee, Jim Kitchell, read like a timeline of the mid-twentieth century. He’d directed NBC’s nightly newscast, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, including coverage of the Kennedy assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Nixon’s historic visit to China. He’d won an Emmy for his coverage of the Apollo space missions. At CNN, he’d arrived as vice president of operations at a start-up that was ordering used furniture and old videotape from the network he’d left behind. (NBC, flush with cash, recorded on tape only twice before chucking it.)
Both Zelman and Kitchell didn’t mind that they were window-dressing for Ted as he trundled around to potential investors, advertisers, and cable companies, hoping for their buy-in. Their A-list bona fides were prominently featured in a glossy promotional video to add legitimacy in the hopes of offsetting Ted’s questionable behavior. An unrelenting critic of their former employers Ted might be, but he wasn’t beyond using their clout when it served him.
Among the other hires were, as Reese uncharitably called them, the “rehab projects.” He lumped Kavanau and Schorr into that category. Another producer he’d hired despite his history of harassment issues at another broadcasting company. Then there was Ed Turner, an experienced news director who’d lost his television job in Washington, D.C., because of a drinking problem. Kavanau convinced Reese it would be a mitzvah to give the man a chance to get back on his feet. Turner learned quickly to point out he was “no relation” to Ted.
While Ted Turner was thrilled that someone who shared his father’s name was on the payroll, Jane was distressed to learn that this Ed fellow had been promised the same title offered to her: managing editor. It fell to Ed to explain that, in fact, she’d have to settle for deputy managing editor. Then, he deigned to ask the young woman to fetch his dry cleaning and make restaurant reservations. No, Reese’s assistant made clear: Deputy did not equal secretary.
Adding to the sting, “No Relation” explained that there would be no budget for acquiring news stories. Everything had to be pure trade. Even her finesse and her Rolodex didn’t offset the sheer lunacy of asking stations around the country to give their material to an untested news network.
“You’re being ridiculous,” they’d say when they heard her proposal. “Ted Turner can go to hell.” It was hard for most people, particularly those in smaller markets, to grok this newfangled system—and how it would be advantageous to be a part of it. Jane knew from her last two jobs how starved local stations were for video, the pressure they were under, and with limited budgets, too. The industry of television news had gone berserk, as local newscasts were continuing to expand and a wave of new technology like minicams and videotape and microwave trucks and news choppers were making it possible to transmit more often from farther away, and more quickly.
On Kavanau’s recommendation, Reese had also hired a well-regarded senior producer who’d worked in local news, most recently in the San Francisco television market. His name was Alexander Cooper Nagle III, a prep school graduate who’d attended Dartmouth (like Reese) and Syracuse University (like Kavanau, he’d earned his master’s there). “Any similarity between Alec and characters in movies depicting the fraternity life of the sixties is not coincidental,” his college alumni magazine said when describing this convivial spirit. At age thirty-five, Alec, as he was called, had already suffered a heart attack. The stress at an always-on news network would naturally be even more intense than in local television, but he couldn’t turn down the challenge to invent something new, nor the opportunity to work alongside the legendary Kavanau.
They made for an odd couple. Together, they became the heart and soul and conscience of CNN—Nagle, a blue-blazer, khaki-clad, Ivy League WASP of a gentleman who, a colleague described, “joyously lived in the news,” and, as Reese explained, “coddled people into shape,” alongside Kavanau, the intensely serious, pistol-wearing “Mad Dog” from the Bronx, who believed the best way to create a great newscast was to keep the staff tense and on edge.
“Kavanau would say tear down the wall with your fingernails,” Reese observed. “Alec would say, ‘No, let’s do it with our teeth, and smile,’ and then go knock it down himself and shrug as he was doing it.”
Each man possessed an obsessive, tireless commitment to his work that made him perfect for an all-news channel. Nagle followed his wife’s orders to keep to a rigid schedule, due to his precarious health. But when he was present at work, he was all in. Kavanau never wanted to step out of the frenzied haze of the news cycle. He asked if he could live at the new studio, as he had wished to in New York—and was told by Ted Turner himself that he couldn’t. CNN was no sweatshop! (Though once they went on the air, it wasn’t uncommon for a young employee to sleep off the fun of the hours before his or her shift by catching a snooze behind one of the hulking one-inch tape machines.)
Whatever their fundamental differences, Nagle and Kavanau united in plotting out their raison d’être of news, the philosophy of CNN. They fervently believed in populist appeal, creating newscasts that cabbies would talk about with their fares. Zelman concurred. Reese, on the other hand, aimed to be more high-minded. The miner approach, as he thought of it: “Go around with your Geiger counter or whatever and look for the radiation, and if you find it, ah, there’s the ore, there’s the ore.”
In his dreams, he imagined a free flow of news, endlessly unfolding from story to story. No rundown, no format, just anchors responding to news as it was punched up from the satellite feeds. The audience should hang on to their seats, afraid to change the channel, for fear of missing a frame of the action—like a football game. Like the crew of a sporting event, the CNN crew would have to pivot on a dime. A television audience was captive, and therefore restless, and this quick pace was essential to keep them from changing the channel. A newspaper reader might skip around from page to page, but a TV viewer unhappy with what they were watching would suddenly ditch you and hop to another station.
Though he’d been in the business for more than twenty years, Reese hadn’t produced one single hour of live television. Nagle and Kavanau knew from producing hundreds of hours of it that some sort of road map to the troops was necessary, even if, along the way, that road map got blown up. The veteran producers knew that Reese’s vision of digging for stories required far more people and time than there was, especially given the beast of a “news hole” they needed to fill. Besides, broadcast journalism was built not on what you said but on what you showed—not on stories themselves but on the people affected by the stories. People power, Nagle called it.
“A bank interest rate increase can be pretty dull stuff unless we show the audience people who can no longer afford something because the price of money just went up,” they explained in a manual that laid out their philosophy. “Show them the people. We all must resist the temptation to take the easy route and merely interview the company presidents, who seem to have all the answers. Actually, most stories are far removed from the corporate world, down there where the folks are living.”
Their wisdom extended to personal habits.
“The energy that goes into the program comes out the other side of the screen,” Kavanau advised in a note to the staff. “If you are a laidback producer . . . the show you produce will lay back—the ta
lent will lay back . . . the staff will lay back. Personal advice. If you are a low-energy person, that will be reflected into your work . . . lift weights . . . run . . . do pushups. Do what it takes to bring up your life energy so you can pump it into the program.”
Finding guerilla warriors propelled by the right “life energy” was the goal. Absent that, they’d settle, simply, for eager.
“It soon became clear that I possessed most of the qualifications for a young producer that they were looking for,” said John Hillis, who worked at an ABC affiliate in North Carolina, “namely that I had two arms and two legs and was breathing.” Some recruits had been plucked from among the thousands of résumés that arrived at the white house. Others knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone. Still others just finagled their way in the door. There was no rhyme or reason. Kavanau administered writing tests to prospects, aware that he’d need an endless flow of copy to keep the shows going. If a person could rewrite ten copy stories in an hour from wires and newspaper articles, the job was theirs.
To eager would-be producers, Nagle would pose a theoretical news situation.
“Let’s say a plane goes down off Tenerife . . .”
“I’d call the network,” a confident would-be employee answered.
“But you are the network,” Nagle explained.
Everyone was making it all up as they went along. The woman hired to start the foreign desk wondered, “How do you start a Foreign Desk?” With personnel elbow to elbow at the white house, she retreated to her car with a bunch of file folders and converted her back seat into her office.
* * *
Finding on-air talent was another matter. In a tiny room upstairs, Nagle, Kavanau, and Zelman inserted demo tape after demo tape into a three-quarter-inch video machine, in search of the perfect faces to deliver news round-the-clock to the nation’s living rooms. Reese had budgeted for one anchor per hour, with a decided preference for hiring male on-air talent. Zelman convinced him women newscasters deserved to be equal parts of the equation and that two-person teams were necessary to keep up the pace. The budget for on-air talent immediately doubled.
The résumé tapes, stacked six feet tall and covering every wall, served as a visual reminder they were the epicenter of something hot. How many of the candidates were any good was another matter. Too many in the avalanche of potential newsreaders appeared stricken by what the trio of producers deemed “prompter look,” meaning it was obvious that they were reading, or in possession of “helmet hair,” that shellacked-in-place coiffure that made them look “stamped out of an anchor production line.” If it wasn’t their voice or their hair, it might be their clothing that presented gaudy “fashion risks.”
Determining a thumbs-up or -down on a candidate took thirty seconds. Prospects were ranked on a scale from one to ten—anyone over a seven got sent to Reese for further consideration.
Zelman’s lament? “The good ones are under contract, and those who aren’t are reluctant to join in Ted’s crazy scheme.”
Sniffed Kavanau: “An anchor is an anchor is an anchor.”
Burt Reinhardt seconded that: “The news is what people watch. The news is the star!”
Few of the candidates wowed all of the men, but for one. Her name was Kathleen Sullivan, and she worked in Salt Lake City—where she was beloved by the Mormons.
With her “wonderful violet eyes,” Reese felt Sullivan looked like “pure sex,” as if she’d just climbed out of bed with someone, that she was “astoundingly beautiful in a non-conventionally beautiful way.”1 Exclaimed Nagle, “She’s magic. She makes love to the camera!” Hired! To establish her as a hard-nosed reporter, they sent her off with a crew to Nicaragua to stockpile reports for June.
The steely blue eyes of Mary Alice Williams didn’t hit the same home run. Zelman found them cold, Reese said, but he himself was impressed by the reporter’s journalistic chops. So he hired her for a plum assignment, as anchor and chief of the New York City bureau. She had dreamed in college that there might someday be an all-news channel. The newsroom she’d lead would be situated in an unusual spot, behind a forty-foot pane of glass in the lobby across from the elevators at One World Trade Center. A fishbowl newsroom, on display for thousands of passersby each day.
Installing miles of cable to the top of the towering building proved a particular challenge, given the unions Williams had to wrangle to get the work done.
A woman placed into such a prominent managerial position was a rarity, made possible by this fringy, emerging part of television. “Women are attracted to cable,” Williams explained, “because it’s new and risky. We weren’t raised to think we would have to support a family, so we don’t carry that burden.”
In Atlanta, Ted was told one day between sailing competitions that the New York bureau chief had arrived to meet him. When the statuesque blonde Williams entered his office, he leapt up from his desk, she observed, as “if red fire ants had bit him.”
Promotional materials for the first all-news channel included this piece touting the first official hire, veteran broadcaster Daniel Schorr, whose journalistic pedigree offset Ted Turner’s reputation as a rogue. It wasn’t clear to Schorr that Ted even knew who he was.
“A woman! A woman?” he screeched.
Williams planted herself in the doorjamb, the place she’d been taught you’re supposed to stand in an earthquake.
“Do you want to work with me?” she asked, almost as a dare, and then explained that they’d do best if Ted stayed out of her way.
As difficult as it was for a woman to make her way in broadcast journalism, it was doubly hard for people of color, especially on-air talent. Aware that he could hire excellent anchors at a good price, Reese snapped up three African American women: Reynelda Muse, Roz Abrams, and Beverly Williams. Luring Bernie Shaw away from his job as ABC’s Capitol Hill reporter to anchor CNN’s eight-to-ten prime-time newscast was a coup. It would elevate Shaw to a position as one of the most prominent black on-air anchors in television news. His wife convinced him to take the job; she said he’d be impossible to live with if this grand, oddball journalistic experiment took off and he hadn’t.
Trading the prestige of the network he’d worked so hard to reach for the low-rent CNN D.C. bureau situated across from a graveyard on Wisconsin Avenue, miles from the center of media activity in the nation’s capital, didn’t faze him one bit. “I don’t view it as a step down,” he said. “Someone told me, ‘More people will see you on World News Tonight,’ than anchoring on CNN. That’s not the purpose. [CNN] is pure news—not just once or twice a day. The least of my problems is that it has a small audience.”
At television stations around the nation, a pink “while you were out” phone message slip bearing a message from “Diane Durham” became code for “CNN calling.” Anchorman Dave Walker in Sacramento got one. The rumor of shabby facilities and the rap about Ted Turner and his messianic vision to inspire world peace and brotherly love among all peoples didn’t stop the anchorman from responding. In fact, Walker said, the chaos was kind of appealing—as long as he could bring along his wife, Lois Hart, who worked at another station across town.
Reese and Pat and Rick and Jane had already set the stage for the Noah’s Ark of television news. Newsrooms typically refused to hire married couples and would force half of couples that formed at work to leave when they got hitched. For CNN, twofer hiring became a mainstay. So many couples and family members were subsequently brought on board that Ted joked CNN actually stood for “Cable Nepotism Network.” (One early employee petulantly referred to them as “nepits.”)
Some were lucky enough to receive a personal welcome.
“Dee,” Ted shouted to his dutiful secretary when two newcomers were ushered down the block to his office, “get me the basketball team on the telephone! I want the basketball team to welcome these guys aboard.”
“The whole basketball team, Ted?” It was just after nine in the morning.
“Awww, well, you pick
a couple of players and wake up just a couple of them. I want everybody in our organization to know you’re here,” he explained to the newbies sitting in his office. “I want everybody in the media and everybody at those big, bad network dinosaurs to know you’re here. That way, they’ll know we’re serious! They’ll know we’re coming after them beginning June first!”
When Dee shouted, “I got a sleepy Hawk on the line,” Ted punched up the speakerphone on his desk that his employees called his “squawk box.” The device exaggerated his nasal drawl into a sound like, as a reporter described it, “a mynah bird with an adenoid problem.”
“Now we have these good people from the Cable News Network in here this morning. Say hello to them.”
“Hello, Cable News Network,” the sleepy Hawk said unenthusiastically.
“I just wanted you guys to know they’re working with us now and we’re going ahead full speed with CNN. I want you to pass on the good news. CNN is now in business! I want to do more than get rich. I want to do something for mankind! CNN will shine a light on the world! That’s my real motivation! I want to shine a light on the world.”
Ted might have thought himself a modern Christopher Columbus, but others saw in him shades of the strange and arrogant industrialist Howard Hughes, who almost succeeded in buying ABC in 1968.
Alec Nagle offered a better comparison: “Do you realize that Ted Turner is the Wizard of Oz, and all of us are marching down the yellow brick road?”
