The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  Morning—seven to nine a.m. on the three networks—is one of the most surprisingly hard to expertly master genres of television. The host is required to be an emotional quick-change artist, segueing from serious news to cooking segments to human interest pieces to celebrity interviews and back again in crisp, tiny, majority-live time parcels. The tone is intimate yet professional, funny but never tasteless; the image projected must be relatable to the diverse viewership that becomes possessive of the morning stars and sees them as presumed family members.

  Morning is also the networks’ cash cow; and while, right now, Katie was actually beginning to tire of the format, she was never more in her glory, never more in her prime. Her Today position had fed her love of attention, had gratified the tremendous ambition she’d had to be a TV news star—an ambition she’d nurtured since childhood. It had made her a famous, wealthy woman, and, perhaps most important now, it had served as her bully pulpit to launch an audacious public health campaign in honor of her late husband, Jay Monahan. She had recently done something that would have been unthinkable from anyone but her—she’d had a colonoscopy on live TV, to acquaint viewers with the little-understood, much-avoided procedure that might have saved her forty-two-year-old husband’s life and could so easily save others.

  Hanging out with Katie in the greenroom was her good friend and colleague Lisa Paulsen. Tall, blond, and, like Katie, high-spirited, Lisa was the president and CEO of the Entertainment Industry Foundation, a major philanthropy. Lisa and Katie were laughing and joking while Katie was getting her makeup done. As much as the two enjoyed gossiping and talking shoes-to-die-for (Katie was an almost in-your-face “girlfriend girl”; she had a posse of friends, many from college, with whom she regularly lunched), Katie and Lisa had become close through a serious mission a year ago: raising money for cancer awareness, prevention, treatment, and research.

  It was good that Katie was in an easy mood tonight, Lisa thought. All of Katie’s friends were protective of her; they knew that Jay’s death two years earlier had not stopped hurting. Katie and Jay had been having marital problems just before his out-of-the-blue diagnosis, and though the instant perspective that came with his direly advanced illness had swept those problems away, Katie was still almost certainly racked with the regret and guilt that had intensified her grief. Would we have fought if we’d known this was coming? the healthy survivor in such a situation often thinks.

  It was an inconceivable loss. Jay, despite their period of conflict, had been the love of her life and her steady complement and reality test (sometimes her disapproving, behavior-correcting reality test) when fame became disorienting. What’s more, she was now the single parent to two daughters, ages six and two at the time of his death. This was no small thing. Katie had had an uncommonly normal childhood. She was raised in surburan Virginia, the youngest of four children in a happy nuclear family—working dad, stay-at-home mom—that was rare even during the decade, the 1960s, that represented the last moment that template was the norm. She’d always had a smart aleck’s provoking wit, and over the years it could be ascribed to different sources: initially to youngest-kid-in-the-family indulgence and attention lust. Then as she came to understand challenge, first as the only sister not accepted into an elite university, her humor acquired an edge. This sharpened when she began her career in news and found herself in the role of the perennially underestimated striver at one television station after another. Fantastically ambitious—and wily—Katie alone believed in the depths of her seriousness and talent. Her drive and pluck became her way of proving herself, and it carried her to Today, where she would defy all expectations.

  When Jay died, everything changed. His death meant that “my first four decades of life”—those ridiculously lucky years!—“seemed to be getting some kind of psychic payback” from the redistributive hand of fate.

  Now Katie’s irony—the sting in her appraisals, the woundedness under those barbed jokes—had a deeper resonance. People could call her “perky” all they wanted—she knew she was substantial. She had gone through more tragedy than her sunny persona suggested. In a sense, Katie had a secret self: Let them think her breezy and trivial; the more she went through, the less the clueless stereotypers could touch her.

  Not that Katie had time—or cause—for bitterness in the spring of 2000. She was too busy being a single mother; an aggressive, consummate professional on her seven to nine a.m. show; and a passionate cancer activist. And she knew that her lot as a widow with children was enormously eased by the outsized resources she commanded.

  Not only did Katie have money and public respect to help her through this period, she had family—close family. During the months of Jay’s deepening illness, a particular source of help was her ten-year-older sister, Emily. Katie had always felt about Emily the way any youngest, irrepressible, mischievous sister feels about her oldest, most sensible, and empathic one: She idolized Emily, measured herself against Emily (sometimes insecurely), and she relied on her.

  Emily’s and Katie’s paths had developed increasingly satisfying symmetries. While Emily became a journalist specializing in legal issues, Katie was a University of Virginia student in the midseventies, trying out that same profession by writing for the college newspaper. When Emily published her first book, The Trial Lawyers, in 1988, Katie was doing her own breakthrough investigative story at a Miami TV station: sleeping on the street as a homeless woman. Then, the same year—1991—that Katie started at Today, Emily was elected to the Virginia state senate. Oldest and youngest sister were mutually proud of each other, and the legislation Emily sponsored—she was a fierce advocate for heightened educational standards and for specialized medical research and treatment—addressed issues that Katie was passionate about in her coverage. Whenever Emily got up to New York, Katie and Emily could be seen strolling around Katie’s neighborhood, arm in arm, with “smiles on their faces, listening intently to each other,” as Katie’s NBC colleague Barbara Harrison observed.

  But it was when Jay got sick—so rapidly and suddenly—that Katie leaned on Emily the hardest. Not only did Katie call Emily and Emily’s second husband, cardiologist George Beller, frequently for medical advice, comfort, and support, but Emily wasted no time introducing and pushing through legislation making Virginia the first state in the nation to require insurance carriers to cover screening for colorectal cancer.

  The most exciting family news had come half a year ago: Emily called to tell Katie that the Virginia Democratic Party had tapped her to be their nominee for lieutenant governor. Katie was ecstatic. There was even talk that Emily Couric could, after her probable term of lieutenant governor was over, run to become the state’s first female governor.

  Just as the makeup artist was finishing Katie’s touch-up in The Tonight Show greenroom, Katie’s cell phone sounded.

  Lisa looked at the number displayed and saw that it was Katie’s sister Emily.

  Katie put the phone to her ear. It was clear pretty quickly that this was no ordinary call. “Katie stood up,” Lisa recalls. “She was silent, as if her breath was taken away. She started shaking her head.” She looked grave and incredulous.

  After Katie snapped closed her cell phone, Lisa asked, “What happened?”

  Katie took a breath and said, “Emily was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.”

  Pancreatic cancer is one of the most insidious forms of the disease. Two years after Jay, it was almost too much to believe this could be happening, again, to a person she loved.

  Katie said, “I can’t believe this.” She and Lisa were both stunned.

  Katie gathered what were surely her careening thoughts—shock, heartsickness, disbelief, anger—as the countdown to her appearance on The Tonight Show stage began. Then, about ten minutes after hearing the news from Emily, she walked onto the stage. That night and in the ensuing months and years—during which Emily died and Katie’s brother Johnny’s wife died and both o
f Lisa’s parents died, one by one by one by one—“Katie and I cried a lot. We cry a lot about all the cancers,” Lisa says.

  These traumas would not merely deepen her as an interviewer, especially of people in crisis; they would have the unbidden auxiliary effect of steeling her from the intense criticism that would come not long afterward when, in September 2006, she became the first solo female anchor of a six thirty p.m. network newscast. Her appointment had been an experiment on the part of CBS, part of a large-scale reimagining of the evening news and what it could be. Although marked by highs such as the presidential game-changing interview with Sarah Palin, the experience of anchoring the CBS Evening News, from 2006 to 2011, was an infelicitous whirlwind for Katie, and it ended in what has been called a “mutual decision” for her to leave CBS. Katie was sensitive to the criticism she elicited. “I feel like a human piñata, but . . . no candy is going to spill out,” she quipped, while the media had a field day over her plummeting, then recovering, then static approval index. “This may not be a lot of fun, but it goes with the territory, unfortunately, of being successful and female,” she said. Having lost the anchorship, she skipped gamely over to a new format—Daytime—and another highly compensated and anticipated new show. The result, in 2013: another failure.

  Katie is nothing if not resilient, and her weatheredness shows in her interview style: probing and compassionate, but also vigilant, dukes up, ever wry. She has warned people, “Before you gag at the absolute adorableness of it all”—her happy family-of-origin story—they should know: There was payback. She has said: “To paraphrase that L’Oreal commercial, ‘Don’t hate me because I’m happy.’ Trust me. I’ve been to the other side.”

  She has transformed her heartbreak into activism. Katie Couric’s work on the front lines of the colon cancer war is virtually unmatched by any other public figure. Just as there was an Amanpour Factor, there was a Couric Effect, a scientifically quantified rise in lifesaving colonoscopies because of her campaign to acquaint viewers with and demystify the procedure. And through her intensive work through five organizations and fund-raising and research projects that she established or joined and energized and remains closely involved in, she has made a $320 million impact. “This”—cancer fighting—“is the most important thing she does,” says Kathleen Lobb, her old UVA friend and now the senior vice president of Stand Up to Cancer, which Katie and Lisa Paulsen launched as an Entertainment Industry Foundation initiative. “Even if you’re not thick-skinned, when you’ve been through experiences like she has, you have a pretty good ability to see through to what’s really important.” On a recent anniversary of Jay’s death, at a fund-raiser, Katie said words to the effect of, “When my obituary is written—and I hope it won’t be for a very long time—I would want it to be said that I helped in the fight against cancer.” Kathleen remembers, “She always says that, outside of raising her daughters, fighting cancer is her most important accomplishment.”

  Katie Couric is the ultimate trooper. You don’t become the master of live, upbeat TV and not know how to deliver, even under duress, even under shock, even under sadness. Toward the end of her tenure at Today, the crew used to marvel, half admiringly, half with annoyance, at how late—how dangerously near seven a.m.—she would stride into the studio and still make it onto the couch with none of the viewers having any idea how close she’d cut it. She was that good at the form of live and upbeat, enough so that she could be cheeky and take shortcuts.

  But as well as being that good at the form of it, she was also that good at the responsibility of it, and this involved discipline. No matter what personal news was thrown in your face moments before a slotted, unchangeable appearance on a major live broadcast, you could not not show up and you could not be off-tone. After Katie got that call from Emily that night in the Tonight Show greenroom, she pulled herself together, and none of Jay Leno’s viewers had any idea of the profoundly worrisome news she’d just heard from her sister.

  It was after she left the stage that she broke down. And after she broke down, she got to work to help Emily, just as she had helped Jay. Her energy—her need to prove herself, her desire to get ahead—had seemed disconcerting, and even excessive, to some who had watched Katie’s climb to the top. But now those traits were useful and helpful and a marker of resilience: the same kind of resilience that had made Katie Couric, against dismissive predictions, a major TV news star.

  • • •

  DIANE SAWYER, Christiane Amanpour, and Katie Couric have succeeded as television news broadcasters as no other women have. They have each brought a unique persona to their broadcasts—Sawyer: circumspection, elegance, and personal restraint; Amanpour: an outsider’s muckraking zeal, a fearlessness, and a passionate commitment to help America understand international pain; Couric: an everywoman’s touch, a sly wit, an appealing relish for besting those who would dismiss her, and a willingness to experiment and throw out old models. They have each wielded a fierce—and necessary—ambition and a faith in herself that was able to conquer adversity and defy expectations. In the wake of tragedy, Diane would transform herself from a mannered daughter of the South into a hard-nosed, singularly driven newswoman, her forty-five-year-long career spanning every form of TV news, from beat reporting, to groundbreaking TV newsmagazine work at Primetime and 60 Minutes, to high-stakes Morning, to her current position as the sole female anchor in the prized six-thirty evening news chair. As for Christiane, she felled the conventional wisdom that her appearance, accent, affect, and national origin would keep her from getting on American television, and she persevered to bravely bring heart and soul to the world’s most devastating crises, becoming her era’s best-known and most respected TV foreign correspondent. Katie used her disarming girl-next-door relatability and her ferocious single-mindedness to reach unequalled success (and achieve new gender parity) in Morning, only to exit her cushiony position to become the seemingly odd choice as the first major-network solo female news anchor—and the one who also dared to try to change that format’s ossified paradigm.

  The three women are united by their strength of character, which they honed during these respective episodes: a father’s shocking death, a threat to one’s own life, a second loved one’s serious cancer. Their resilience—and their practiced comprehension of the limits of safety—resonated when they became the News Sorority: the rare women, in a field that is overwhelmingly male, who would tell the world’s stories.

  Collectively, these women have been our guides and our proxy witnesses to just about every tragedy, scandal, war, controversial personality of good or ill, election, crisis, major social or cultural trend, titillating celebrity dustup, headline-generating act of everyday heroism, or egregious practice of inequity and oppression that has transpired over the last three or more decades. Because they have entered our lives so consistently, for so many years and so intimately—looking us in the eye through screens in our living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms, sometimes during times of national pain and terror, when we are most vulnerably in need of information—we feel that we know them. But do we? Do we know what it took for them to climb, against a pushback that prevails to this day, to that peculiarly thin perch as a narrator of our world who also happens to be female?

  Diane, Katie, and Christiane have shed great light on many other people’s stories.

  Here are their own stories, from the beginning.

  PART TWO

  MORNING

  CHAPTER ONE

  Louisville Idealist Becomes Nixon Loyalist

  Diane: 1945 to 1978

  LILA DIANE SAWYER was born on December 22, 1945, in Glasgow, Kentucky, deep in the south of the state, where both of her parents had grown up. Her sister, Linda, preceded her by two years, born during World War II, when Erbon Powers Sawyer was away with the navy, so Jean Dunagan Sawyer’s already substantial strength, toughened by her Depression childhood of poverty, was tested all the more by the experience of being alone wit
h her infant. Still, Jean was surrounded by her bevy of sisters—Anna Jo, Wanda, and Maxine—who were all so close that they talked to one another on the phone every day of their lives. The feistiness of the ever present Dunagan women would come to impress young Diane immeasurably. Jean and her sisters were “amazing,” she has said. “Every place you would look there would be these women—taking chances, not for a minute thinking there was anything they couldn’t do.”

  Diane, born after the war ended, was a little girl when her father, a graduate of Lindsey Wilson Junior College, attended the Jefferson School of Law (now the University of Louisville’s law school); the family moved to the cosmopolitan capital Louisville, in the far north of the state, bordering Ohio. Diane dropped the “Lila,” perhaps thinking it was too homespun; indeed, Linda and Diane (along with Susan and Carol) were favored girls’ names in the early to mid-1940s.

  Lawyer Tom Sawyer became Judge Tom Sawyer; the family bought a two-story brick house on Lowe Road and Jean began teaching at Hite Elementary. Diane was in her mother’s third-grade class, and, despite Mrs. Sawyer’s commanding style, the kids were typical rapscallions. Diane was gamey enough to perennially tease the boy, Stewart Robensen, who by virtue of alphabetical seating always sat in front of her. “She’d torment me by unbuttoning the little buttons on my back collar and sometimes she’d scribble things on my neck,” Robensen recalls. She played Cinderella’s evil stepsister in the class play. Marc Fleischaker, one of a pair of twins from one of the affluent Jewish families in the school district, fashioned himself Diane’s third-grade “boyfriend.” Years later, in their high school senior yearbooks, Diane would write in Marc’s: “Goodness! After all these passionate expostulations by all your friends (female gender!), fond memories of the boy who used to chase me and try to kiss me on the playground in 3rd grade.” This quality—blushing maiden flirtation with a self-parodying edge—would eventually come to figure in her TV persona.