Up All Night

by Lisa Napoli

  * * *

  The road continued to be riddled with potholes. While a core group of inductees laid the groundwork for his baby, Reese dipped in and out of town in service of the Wizard’s creation. He was well aware that he could deputize others to perform tasks like finding the real estate to house the six planned CNN bureaus around the country (Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, in addition to New York and D.C.), or negotiating for a first-of-its-kind switch that would connect Atlanta with New York and D.C. to allow a continuous pipeline of news to flow. (It was so revolutionary an idea that when it began working, even cynical TV veterans gasped with wonder.) Reese didn’t intend to miss one single moment of what he deemed “the most exciting opportunity in journalism in this quarter of a century.” He had one shot to “do news better,” and this pressure propelled his already warp-speed personality into overdrive. In the hopes of tamping it down, his assistant slipped his wife, Pat, some Valium to put in his orange juice, but they all decided it didn’t work. A painful hernia that Reese was ignoring in the service of making it to launch day amped up his mania.

  Describing Ted’s investment in the network as both an “act of faith” as well as an “act of genius,” Reese sliced and diced his “pie,” the hours of the day, inventing shows and hiring more commentators to record those time-filling “columns.” For a morning business program, he wanted to negotiate with the New York Stock Exchange so his team of financial reporters could file from the trading floor for the very first time. In the evening, when the networks ran their obligatory newscasts, he imagined a sports round-up that “every bar in the country will have on,” which would please the bookies, too. Just like newspapers ran comics to entice readers to other parts of the paper, he planned on hiring music critics for daily reports “to attract the kids.”

  Top of mind was whom to hire for what he considered the plum assignment, a nightly, issue-oriented call-in talk show that would be CNN’s answer to Phil Donahue. On this ten p.m. program he’d tentatively titled Backtalk, newsmakers of the day would sit before a live studio audience for an in-depth interview that advanced the news into the next day. So in love was he with his idea that it never occurred to him that it would be next to impossible to corral Atlantans to sketchy midtown at that time of night, much less that he’d have to wrestle with the phone company for a toll-free number, which they refused to give this untested network. He fretted: Would anyone call if they had to pay?

  Maybe all the industry buzz would help him lure what he couldn’t before: a big flashy “name.” A string of well-known and up-and-coming television personalities turned him down. David Frost. Geraldo Rivera. NBC’s wry Linda Ellerbee. Maury Povich, then a sportscaster eager to cross over into regular news. Charlie Rose, who’d been making the rounds in local news. (Thumbs down from Sam Zelman, who declared him dull, dull, dull.) Some prospects parlayed CNN’s interest into better deals at their existing jobs. Reese dismissed a local Atlanta anchor named Forrest Sawyer for fear that hiring him would seem too homespun. Sam Zelman pushed an undiscovered gem named Oprah Winfrey, a young, rising star on Baltimore television. Reese nixed her without even watching her demo reel, claiming she was too inexperienced. He didn’t want critics to harp on the new network for having a rookie in such a prominent role.

  Soon, Winfrey would land a job in a major market because of the person Reese did hire.

  Sandi Freeman of WLS-TV’s AM Chicago had sent in a tape accompanied by an impressive endorsement—a column by Jules Witcover in the Washington Star that praised her for a recent interview she’d conducted on her morning news show with the presidential candidate Senator Ted Kennedy. After watching her reel, Reese was certain he could turn this woman into a star—the next Barbara Walters.

  A midwestern charmer, Freeman was possessed with good people skills, with the looks to match, but a career in journalism hadn’t been her goal. Her passion was singing. She’d appeared with the St. Louis Municipal Opera in her hometown and, after graduating from Webster College there in 1964, had set her sights on Broadway. With only $140 in her pocket, she found herself waylaid in Chicago, where she paid her college loans by working as a cocktail waitress at the Gaslight Club. (Unlike Bunnies at the nearby Playboy Club, fishnet-adorned Gaslight Girls were expected to have some sort of vocal talent to go along with their good looks.)

  Mostly, she appeared in big-budget theatrical productions the general public could not see. The lucrative “industrial musical” circuit staged trade-show gems like Whirlpool Is the One and American Standard’s The Bathtubs Are Coming. Along the way, she’d met her husband, John Ivicek, when she joined a singing group he ran called the Ivy Five. By day, he was an editor at the television station where Freeman got her big break.

  As second banana on the morning show, she’d sat beside a string of male co-hosts, so many that her colleagues joked she’d had more partners than Elizabeth Taylor.

  Consultants, a proliferating force in the local news industry, insisted she cover up her long blond hair with a wig that, to her, “looked like a hard hat with curls and felt worse.”

  “Her job was to look cheerful and pleasant. But not so beautiful as to make the women at home uncomfortable,” local TV writer Fred Rothenberg explained.

  When co-anchor Charlie Rose left the program, Freeman asked for solo billing. The answer was no. Her boss didn’t think she could hack it. A reporter asked why the mother of three just didn’t walk out after the snub.

  “What was I going to do?” she said. “Say ‘Fine, I’m going somewhere else’? Even in this age of supposed liberation, most married women with children don’t think the way a man does about this situation. I didn’t want to disrupt my husband’s career as a tape editor.” She dealt with her frustration by redecorating the house.

  Freshly reupholstered furniture hardly tamped down her ambition. The same week that Ted announced CNN in May 1979, NBC confirmed that Freeman was in the running to replace Jane Pauley on NBC’s Today. Passed over for that job, she contented herself with her local celebrity, expanding her role at the station by contributing movie, theater, and restaurant reviews. Occasionally, she’d sing at station-related public service appearances in the Chicago area, and she picked up extra money as spokeswoman for a chain of women’s exercise studios.

  Though television critics dismissed morning news as “empty-calorie television,” her mettle as an interviewer was on full display in March 1980, when Ted Kennedy appeared on AM Chicago in advance of the Illinois presidential primary. A poll had shown that the chief reason women wouldn’t cast their ballots for him was his treatment of his wife, Joan—he’d legendarily survived an auto accident in which a younger female companion had died.

  “What about the ‘Joan factor’?” Freeman had asked.

  When Kennedy said he didn’t understand what she meant by that, Freeman explained she was talking about his wife’s alcoholism and how it might have been brought on by “incidents that happened in your marriage.” Kennedy acknowledged that Joan was coping with substance abuse. Women were angry, Freeman told the senator, about the “alleged promiscuity that could have led to her drinking.”

  Columnist Witcover had been wowed by the doggedness of this “pleasant looking blonde woman with one subject on her mind, and the determination to get answers about it.”

  Reese found himself similarly enchanted. Tapped for this major career move and, at last, a show of her very own, Freeman felt “ecstatic,” like a “kid at Christmas,” especially after she learned that the program’s name had been updated to The Freeman Report. A cross between Newsweek and People magazines, she described it, with a goal to enlighten and inform.

  This shot at the big time helped her overcome her fear of disrupting her family. She moved to Atlanta without her husband and three kids.

  “It was very difficult to pick up and leave,” she told a reporter in Chicago, where her new job was big news, “but I know it was the right thing for me. And for my family. To be here now, doing what I l
ove to do, when this whole thing is so new and so exciting.”

  * * *

  It didn’t really matter who was on the air at Cable News Network if there was no crew to run the studio cameras, to spirit the tapes fresh out of edit to air in master control, and to cue the anchors—thankless jobs in the trenches essential to the smooth functioning of a television operation.

  Initial projections called for the hiring of eighty-six crew to cover the 168 hours in a given week, for which each employee would be paid $20,000 a year. In a union shop, like at the networks, camera operators, audio technicians, and tape editors were paid handsomely for their focused expertise. Talent or guests couldn’t clip on a microphone without the assistance of a trained technician. Georgia, however, was a nonunion, right-to-work state, which meant CNN faced no such restrictions.

  Which was a good thing for the nascent network, because Reese had made a major miscalculation. Twice as many crew members would be necessary to keep the place operating—and, of course, doubling the budget was out of the question.

  The math startled. Who would work overnights for what amounted to $3.10 an hour? Easy. Recent college graduates! A new, entry-level job category was invented that Kavanau anointed with a vague and lofty title: the video journalist. Work as a CNN “veejay” would be like getting a master’s in television, without the degree, in exchange for a (barely) subsistence-level wage. The “most important journalistic innovation of all time” would, it seemed, be propelled by an army of newbies! The sink-or-swim school of TV news, Reese called it.

  Kavanau, along with Jim Kitchell, fanned out to broadcast journalism schools around the nation, in search of idealistic young recruits willing to join the wild, wild west of news.

  The very best graduates of the very best schools would undoubtedly get snapped up for the handful of entry-level jobs that existed at the networks, where, in exchange for the prestige, they’d be restricted by union rules from touching equipment and have to stick to rigid job descriptions. Then, there was everyone else—kids with dreams well aware of the catch-22: they couldn’t get a job without experience, but without experience, they couldn’t get a job. At CNN, there would be no limitations. If you showed up and performed, and you wanted to try your hand at something, you could. That would presumably make up for the lousy pay and crazy hours.

  All who enlisted arrived with different stories and aspirations, and yet, all the stories and aspirations were somehow the same. Take Fred Cowgill. Watching his father and his colleagues punch the clock at IBM as a kid had inspired him to find a profession that was so much fun he didn’t notice the time except for where he had to be next. He was about to graduate with his master’s in television from Boston University when Kavanau appeared on campus.

  Cowgill was sure he was destined to be, as he called it, the “next rock star of Earth.” Kavanau sold him on the adventure.

  “We’re offering an opportunity to take years off the climb you might have to make,” he told the young man. “There’ll be lots of opportunity. If you’re half of what you think you are, you’ll make it.”

  Caught up in the whirl of excitement at the prospect of something new, and wowed by Kavanau’s intensity, Cowgill ignored naysayers who said this move was a crazy gamble. What did he, as a newbie, have to lose? So he said yes to six days of work a week for $9,600 a year.

  The weather proved an auspicious start to the adventure. When he’d left Boston in early March, it had been snowing, and when he arrived in Atlanta, the trees were in bloom. The variety of states represented by the license plates on the cars in the parking lot made arriving at CNN feel like the first day of college. He didn’t know a soul, he didn’t know the city, and he had no idea, really, what he was doing. What he didn’t see, couldn’t see, because of his own insecurity, was that everyone else around him was just as afraid.2

  Like John Towriss. He’d been working for his uncle’s construction company in his hometown of Muncie, Indiana, and kept encountering closed doors as he attempted to break into television. Like everyone else, every week he scoured the trade magazine Broadcasting for opportunities. During his lunch break one day, he dialed Atlanta’s directory assistance (404-555-1212), asked the operator for the number of the Cable News Network, and, when he got through, asked to speak with someone whose name he’d read in some article: “John Baker in operations, please.”

  Baker himself answered the phone. Towriss launched into his polite, confident spiel, that he was a kid out of college, looking for a job.

  “Sure, we’re hiring lots of people,” was the response. “Send me a résumé, give me a call in a week.”

  Towriss did as instructed.

  “Well,” Baker said, a week later, “do you want to come down and talk to us?”

  Of course he did. Towriss loaded up his little Honda Civic and arrived after a day-long drive to find Baker’s desk piled with papers. When he couldn’t locate the young man’s résumé in the avalanche, Towriss pulled out another copy.

  “John,” said Baker, giving it a cursory look, “you have a little more experience than most people we’re hiring right now.”

  “Mr. Baker, I’ve never done anything,” the dumbfounded and unerringly polite twenty-one-year-old responded. “What kind of people are you hiring?”

  Baker spent the next twenty minutes trying to talk him out of the job.

  “If we hire you, you’ll be working overnights, six days a week. We’re only paying minimum wage,” he said. “We’re losing $2 million a month, and we’re not sure how long we’ll be on the air.”

  Towriss’s construction job back in Indiana paid nine bucks an hour and was a sure, steady gig.

  “Well, Mr. Baker, I’m just trying to get my foot in the door, I’m pretty footloose and fancy free. I’d accept all that.”

  “Okay. Go to that guy over there, see him, tell him to put you on the schedule.”

  “Wait, does that mean I’m hired?”

  There was no human relations department, Baker explained. But that guy over there, he would get him into the system. In other words, yes.

  “Hi, Mr. Knott, Mr. Baker told me to come over and have you put me on the schedule for next week,” said the young man, not quite believing his good fortune or how easy it all seemed.

  “What can you do?” the man responded.

  “Not really anything,” Towriss replied, ashamed, humble, but honest.

  “Great,” he said. “I can put you anywhere I need you.”

  Towriss was afraid to ask the next question: Which day did he start? He had to go home, get his stuff, and find a place to live.

  His worry that everyone else who’d been hired had rafts more experience was allayed shortly after he arrived when he’d met a guy whose last job had been playing Goofy at Disneyland. He himself felt like he’d landed in his own idea of an amusement park, a utopia of television news.3

  Summer camp, with no curfew! Animal House meets Network! Kavanau had suggested they build a dorm to house the veejays, but they themselves created their own group homes to cut costs, in some cases “hot-bunking,” where one person would sleep in a bed while another inhabitant went to work on a different shift. Absent a formal coordinator, Reese’s wife, Pat, stepped into the role of den mother, helping young arrivals connect with roommate-seekers and all else a den mother might do, like fielding calls from a bunch of drunken veejays who’d been arrested and then bailing them out of jail. If she detected addictive substance abuse, she’d track down the parents of the afflicted. If a kid had rent problems, she and Reese would advance them money. If a girl got into trouble, Reese said, Pat would help her do what had to be done. They loved and relied on her.

  Toga parties. Skinny-dipping. Sizzling love affairs that lasted as long as a commercial for Zamfir and his pan flute. For the ninety days from March up through launch, life was like an endless convention: Intense focus during the day giving way to wild parties at night. Everyone, all together, from the anchors to the veejays, rushed to the local bar f
or happy-hour appetizers to balance their otherwise liquid meals.

  On the weekends, the invitation stood to Reese and Pat’s backyard for a pool party. (Kavanau refused rides and trekked miles to the party on foot, but Pat insisted his pistol must not come inside.) Locals arranged trips for newcomers to raft the Chattahoochee River, or take in southern-fried spots like Aunt Fanny’s Cabin or Bobby and June’s Kountry Kitchen, to remind them, if they forgot, that they were inhabiting the glorious south. But not everyone wished to be so closely allied with “Reese’s pieces.”

  “I just hope we can avoid network politics. We want to keep it like a family,” one of the anchors, Lou Waters, told a reporter, hopefully, of these halcyon days.

  A happy little work bubble it was—for now.

  * * *

  Before they could launch the first all-news channel, they needed to get Ted Turner’s Graduate School up and running. To the grizzled “yeah, yeah, yeah, seen-it-all” types, the ones who wondered if their careers might be shot for having taken a job at a risky new venture, fell the task of educating the veejays at CNN College, which opened its doors on March 31 for a limited run. Writing, editing, shooting, Vidifont. “WELCOME TO THE CABLE NEWS NETWORK,” read one memo, issued by CNN College “deans” Jim Schoonmaker and Guy Pepper. “If you have questions, please ask. You should understand, however, that as this is a brand new operation, and as this is an undertaking that has never been done before, there will be questions that will not get an immediate answer, or might even get several answers. This is not an indication of confusion, but rather of continuous creativity. We will be making many, many changes right up to, and even after, June 1. So please understand and go with us. We are writing our own futures.”

  In six weeks, Reese confidently explained to a reporter, they could train an ambitious young college kid to do the same exact work as someone who’d been in the business for six to ten years.

  Since tarps and exposed windows and mud on the floors kept Techwood off-limits, and with the white house brimming to capacity, “class” was set up over in the Dogwood Room at the Admiral Benbow Inn at the corner of Fourteenth and Spring, a place up the street from Sleazy Jim’s affectionately known as the “Bimbo,” and at a field shop of channel 17 a few miles up the road.