by Megyn Kelly
Doug and I laughed at the situation, and then he came in for the kiss. I was so damn distracted that it wasn’t one of my best.
Doug got in a taxi to his hotel, and I got in the backseat of my car, with the security driving. Damn! I thought. Blew it.
This was fixable, I knew. The next afternoon I had plans to see Doug again. I suggested we meet at his hotel. I was friendly with the security guys by that point. A girlfriend and I had given each of them nicknames. Outside Doug’s hotel, I said, “Cougar, Viper, stay here. I’m going in alone.”
I marched inside, took the elevator up to Doug’s floor, and knocked. He answered, dressed and ready to go.
“Wait,” I said. “Back inside the room for a minute.”
“What’s up?”
“I can do better.”
“What do you mean?”
“The kiss. I was feeling self-conscious. I can do better.”
Doug was instantly back in the room. “Great. Come in.”
That was our first real kiss.
When Doug and I first started dating, Dan and I were separated but not yet officially divorced. Doug had also recently broken up with a long-term girlfriend. We met fresh off the heels of our former relationships. My friends marveled about this at the time. “How do you end a marriage and immediately find a guy like that?” my friend Laura would later ask me.
The answer was that I had gone through a major transformation the past year and a half, and as I changed myself for the better, better things started coming to me. I was settling for more. And “more” meant more from myself.
Doug is great looking, but it wasn’t just his looks that drew me in. Doug is dignified but also fun. He went to a private boys’ school in Philadelphia, where he won an award from teachers and students for being the all-around most decent guy. I probably sound like I’m bragging about him. I totally am.
On our second date, we bumped into a guy from his high school named Dan Murphy, who told me that Doug was good to everyone as a teenager, that he never participated in cliques, even though he was a popular guy. I joked that Dan was a plant, but I would come to see for myself that Doug is fundamentally good.
Doug does the thing that every woman on earth wants: if there’s something wrong with me, he genuinely wants to know what it is. He never lets me get away with:
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
He presses for the truth. Just like my mom.
“Something is wrong,” he will say. “What’s going on?”
If we’ve both been busy with work for a while or tied up in our own responsibilities, he’ll sometimes sit me down and say, “We need to talk. It feels like there’s distance between us.” And just as soon as we do, the distance is gone.
Doug is interested in everything. He constantly has his nose in a book. He’s expanded my horizons. He is smarter than I am, though he denies it. In the beginning I thought he was too good to be true.
I remember, when we were first dating, saying to Major Garrett, my officemate, “He must be married . . . or gay . . . or a felon. Something has gotta be wrong with this guy.” One time Doug sent me flowers at the office—a sweet but rather underwhelming bouquet.
“Well, he’s not gay,” Major quipped.
The truth was, Doug was unlike anyone I’d ever known. He was so confident but not slick, aloof enough to set me off-kilter but engaged enough to make me want more. I remember M’Lady Amy encouraging me to stay open-minded.
“You asked for something different,” Amy said, “and the universe listened. Will you?”
Thank God I did.
About six months into our relationship, we celebrated New Year’s Eve in Washington, DC. It was a fun night with a small group of friends, but Doug and I got in a fight—raised voices back and forth, a good old-fashioned argument.
Because we’d been dating long-distance for about six months by then, Doug was staying at my place for that weekend. We went back there in the middle of the fight. Doug went to lie down, but I was too angry for sleep, so I took out my journal and went to the living room to write.
I wrote for about twenty minutes and then heard Doug coming down the stairs. He walked over and sat next to me.
“Put that away,” he said.
I was still upset, but his voice didn’t sound combative. “Why?” I asked.
“Because,” he said, “you’re writing the wrong things.”
I’ll never forget that moment. It sparked the single best, single most important conversation in our lives. We talked from 2:00 a.m. until the sun came up. The next morning, I knew this man would someday be my husband. I had officially gotten the message: more risk, more imperfection, more openness and honesty—in my work, my friendships, and my love life.
Within weeks, Roger Ailes promoted me to full-time anchor, making me the cohost of a new program called America’s Newsroom. It aired from 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and I would be partnered with the highly respected Bill Hemmer. In New York. Where Doug was.
Brit would have preferred I spend another year or two in Washington, but he knew he couldn’t stop it—he agreed it was time for me to go. Good-bye, DC, hello, Doug. We kept separate apartments, which we maintained until after (spoiler alert—we’re married) our wedding. Doug helped me find a place and lent me some money to cover the ridiculous sums required for the first-last-security-deposit of the New York City rental market. I was still nowhere near my law firm salary range.
I knew living in the same city would make or break us, and I had a feeling that it would make us. I was in the right place mentally. I’d done the work. I’d changed.
For so many years, I’d been approaching my relationships inauthentically. I think my father’s death made me determined not to be left again. That meant being “perfect,” in my mind. I had to do what it took to maintain a relationship; being abandoned was simply not an option. But spending your life pretending you are something other than what you are is unsustainable. Amy helped me see that I should be focused on what I wanted, not on what those around me desired. That helped me make my decision about Dan. It also later helped me see that I wanted Doug, who loved me with all of my imperfections and even, perhaps, because of them.
14
All the Days of My Life
I’d been in TV for about four years when Roger offered me the position on America’s Newsroom. He began with an invitation to lunch at the Fox News offices in New York. He and his top executives had recently held an off-site meeting to discuss the future of Fox News. Apparently the one thing they all agreed on was moving me into an anchor role, and pairing me with Bill Hemmer, one of the most talented and likable men on TV. Over a plate of chicken, Roger asked me if I thought I was ready for a full-time anchor gig. I looked at the chicken and lied—“Yes, I am more than ready.” All I could do was hope he believed it more than I did.
Hemmer and I launched the show in January 2007. We were seated in a tiny studio on top of a tiny oval stage. Our producer was a newsman by the name of Tom Lowell—a rhetorical gunslinger who followed no rules other than Produce a Great Newscast. I was the envy of every woman at Fox, all of whom were hoping to marry Hemmer. Of course, I was madly in love with Doug, Hemmer had a long-time girlfriend, and from the very start we were more like brother and sister. The first day on the air, we popped a big number—unusually big for the 9:00 a.m. show. It was a precedent we’d live up to for three more years. The show was an instant hit.
Much like when I’d first started in TV, being in the anchor chair was moot court all over again—I knew from the first time I sat down that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. And just as I did in law school, I was about to gain an education in very hard work that required very thick skin.
Hemmer and I clicked immediately, and I loved going to work each day. At first I was pretty stiff—I hadn’t found my on-air groove yet as an anchor. Nine times out of ten I was happy to let Hemmer handle any breaking news, because it still scared me, and our on-air ban
ter was kept to a minimum. But as time went on, I handled more of the Fox News alerts (Hemmer would offer me pointers, hand me wire copy, or otherwise help me—the man’s a prince) and started to take more risks on the air—with conversation and sometimes topic selection.
Possibly my single favorite broadcast was an episode of America’s Newsroom when we took a hard look at a therapeutic program called Radical Honesty. I’d thought “radical honesty” was something the Kelly family had invented, but evidently no, it was an actual movement. A psychotherapist named Brad Blanton from the middle of Virginia advocated for a world without lies, and A. J. Jacobs had written a must-read, hilarious, impossible-to-tear-your-eyes-away-from article about him for Esquire.1 The rules of the Radical Honesty system were: You have to tell the truth all the time. You may not use a filter.
For the story, Jacobs lived the program for a few weeks. He had to tell a friend he’d forgotten his fiancée’s name and was annoyed he hadn’t been invited to their wedding. He had to tell his wife he wasn’t really listening to her when she was talking, and that he was wondering if his occasional mistake of calling his wife by his own sister’s name meant that he secretly wanted to sleep with his sister. At a business meeting, he had to tell an editor he’d looked down her shirt. He veered back and forth between alienating people and feeling elated by how much he was connecting with them. It was spectacular.
I loved everything about that article, and having Brad Blanton on the air made for what is still one of my all-time favorite days of work. Hemmer and I decided that for two whole hours, we would run the show on the Radical Honesty program.
“I thought that guest was fascinating,” Hemmer said at one point in the broadcast. “Didn’t you, Megyn?”
“I wasn’t listening,” I said. “I was preparing for my own segment.”
We then had a plastic surgeon on, who said of the advice he gives his patients, “I give my patients tits—tips,” and then completed the sentence. I burst out laughing.
Hemmer, who is a gentleman, would never ordinarily have commented, but he had to be radically honest, so he acknowledged the slip-up with a devilish grin: “He said tits—tips.” We both giggled live on the set. Offstage, the guests asked our bookers, “What is wrong with them?” The bookers tried to explain that this was a one-day thing.
When Blanton came on at the end of the show, I wondered how it would go, speaking live on the air with him, given his hard-core rules of human interaction. Would he insult my looks? Tell me he wanted to sleep with me? Tell me he thought I was stupid? But he was terrific. He later said he was flattered that I’d clearly done my homework on his program. The truth is, I felt like I’d been doing it for about forty years.
Another time I was sitting with Hemmer when Hillary Clinton had a famous exchange in the Congo. A student asked a question that, when translated, seemed to be asking Hillary what “Mr. Clinton” thought about a proposed trade deal with China.
“Wait, you want me to tell you what my husband thinks?” she said.2 “My husband is not the secretary of state, I am. You want my opinion? I will tell you my opinion. I am not going to be channeling my husband.”
For her, it was a pretty serious brushback. She’s no Chris Christie.
Hemmer uncharacteristically wanted to talk about our feelings on this. He didn’t usually talk opinions, but he wanted to on that one.
“I don’t know if that was appropriate,” he said.
“What was inappropriate about it?” I asked.
“Stay above it, you know?”
“She’s supposed to let people ask her about her husband’s opinions when she’s secretary of state?”
“I’m just saying,” he said, “take the high road.”
“Sometimes people get irritated,” I said, growing annoyed. “It’s happening right now!”
One of the challenges of being an anchor is understanding how and when to bring emotional honesty into the discussion. I used to err on the side of formality, being new to journalism and coming out of the DC reporting ranks. But I soon realized that in some instances—in particular on cable—it’s okay to take a risk here or there. If I saw someone speeding down a neighborhood road at eighty miles per hour in some police chase, for example, I never hesitated to call him an idiot. We’d watch these scenarios play out with stupid criminals a fair amount on morning TV, and it wasn’t unusual for me to end a segment with “Enjoy prison!”
I’d never be out there calling for the troops to come home from Iraq, or taking positions on policy or politics, but when it was an obvious situation and the audience and anchor were pretty clearly having a moment together, I learned it was okay to share a little of myself.
I think too many anchors fail to realize you can express exasperation or empathy or connect with your audience, without inappropriately oversharing. Charlie Gibson talked about this realization in regard to his coverage of September 11.3 He was co-anchoring Good Morning America that day with Diane Sawyer. When the second plane hit, her response was “Oh my God.” He continued reporting the news and said, matter-of-factly, “Now we know what’s going on. We’re under attack.”
Gibson later said he regretted forgetting his humanity in that moment, and that he admired Diane for reacting in a human way, thinking of all the lives being lost. He wished he had taken a moment for that too before immediately charging ahead in journalist mode, going on about the whys and hows and whos. To be too professional in such a situation can be just as inappropriate as displaying emotions full-bore. I try to maintain this balance on the air. If a moment calls for seriousness, I respect that. If it calls for humor, well, I’m your gal.
A very well known female anchor once told me it was “very risky” to use humor on the air. She discouraged me from doing it. Thank God I didn’t listen to her. I’m no Tina Fey, and I don’t need to have people rolling in the aisles while they’re watching the broadcast, but I think a flash of mild amusement is gift enough to people trying to get the news. Sometimes my attempts at humor land; often they do not. Either way, I amuse myself, and that is half the battle.
Not long after I was offered America’s Newsroom, I received another proposal—one that would change the rest of my life. One evening in September 2007, at the shore in New Jersey, Doug asked me to marry him. We walked to the end of a dock where Doug’s dad kept a sailboat and watched the sunset with my dogs at our feet (later our dogs, by adoption).
As we watched the sun go down, Doug got down in front of me. My mind raced but was slow to process.
He’s going down on one knee. There’s only one reason men do that. He’s taking off his sunglasses. I’m taking off my sunglasses. Why are we taking off our sunglasses? It’s still bright out. He’s saying something now. What? It sounds like a proposal. Yes, a proposal. A proposal?
Doug and I had talked about love and kids. Everything was happy and naturally headed this way, but we’d never discussed a thing about a wedding.
I was busy anchoring two hours each day. Doug’s work running his company had gotten intense. He was gone every other week to San Francisco, London, or the company headquarters in Palm Beach Gardens. And so I was caught completely by surprise.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
What? I thought. Images began flashing through my head: marrying this man, having children with this man, growing old with him . . . The answer was and remains obvious.
“Yes,” I said.
Apparently it took me a few beats. Doug later told me that in awaiting my response, he had a moment of worry that he’d asked too soon. A few days earlier, he had met my mother and stepfather in secret to ask for their blessing. (It was a miracle my mother kept his secret long enough for Doug to propose.) My mom’s first response had been, “Does Megyn know? Is it a little fast?” While I was standing there stunned, Doug was thinking, Uh-oh. Her divorce is too recent. She’s not ready. Maybe it is too soon. But it’s never too soon to start the life you want.
My wedding to Doug, on March 1, 200
8, was easily one of my happiest days.4 We were married at Oheka Castle in Huntington, a gorgeous 1919 mansion on the highest point of Long Island. It was a wintry day. Out the window there were beautiful flurries with fat white flakes slowly drifting in the air. Inside, we had cherry blossoms everywhere. There were fireplaces at either end of the huge white ballroom, which had an elegant crystal chandelier. I wore a long white sheath dress with a deep V in front by an amazing designer named Joanna Mastroianni. All of our closest friends came. Even our dogs, Bailey and Basha, were there.
Every part of that day was magical. My mom and Peter were in the bridal suite of the castle with me, along with my closest friends. Getting ready was joyful—I felt no stress, only excitement for the day and life to come. My mother-in-law Jackie and sister-in-law Diane were also there—two women who would become hugely important figures to me.
Jackie has Doug’s quiet dignity. She is gentle, smart, loving, and humble. I have since gone through a lot with Jackie at my side—from childbirth to sleepless nights with newborns. She has never once passed judgment, never offered a harsh or interfering word. More often than not, she was telling me to take a nap, or rubbing my back and telling me I am a good mother. She is my model for how to be a mother-in-law someday to my own children’s spouses. I have only ever felt one way about her—I love her and want to be more like her.
If my own mother has given me the gift of a quick wit, Jackie has taught me when to use it. Jackie has shown me that you can communicate more sometimes with the arch of an eyebrow than an entire speech, and that sometimes silence really is golden. On that second lesson, of course, I could probably use some reinforcement. One time Doug and I were interviewing at a school for our son Yates. I started prattling on about this and that. I may have even dropped a harmless swear word. When it ended, and we left, Doug looked at me, eyebrows up.
“What?” I said. “I gotta be me!”
