The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  She felt she got her main comeuppance when she arrived at Wellesley in the fall of 1963. She’d been voted Seneca High’s “Most Likely to Succeed”—“the dreariest possible thing to be,” she would later say. She had been a sophisticate at Seneca, and many of her friends there could, and did, travel with minimal bumps to higher-barred environs—several boys to Harvard, including Barry Cooper, who took her to the senior prom, and Lee Goldstein, who was her debate team partner.

  It was perhaps harder for a female to make the transition from Louisville to an elite Eastern college. There were more cultural and stylistic obstacles. Traveling from the South to a New England campus in September 1963 meant entering a world of Northeastern girls in Lord & Taylor A-line coats and Pappagallo flats who’d been going to world-class museums and Broadway plays since they were five; of devotees of the esoteric whose long, straight hair had never touched a brush roller and who unpacked Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and Joan Baez albums from their hatbox-round suitcases; of debutantes whose parents had grown up not scrambling for sustenance on small farms, as Diane’s had, but owning large ones.

  So, at first, Diane acutely felt her Southernness. “When the other girls were getting packages of Kron chocolates, I was sent turnips and tomatoes from home, beautifully wrapped,” she has said, with a mix of pride and self-deprecation. She came to perceive her America’s Junior Miss crown as an embarrassment—a provincial’s gauche trophy—and today her Wellesley classmates recall the mixed reactions to it. “It was one of those things—if you’re jealous, you mock it, but secretly everybody wanted to be her,” recalls Aviva Bobb, now a retired California Superior Court judge. “Yes, there were people who were disdainful of the beauty queen thing and the ‘graciousness’ aura and they were not impressed with her,” concedes Judi Lempert Green, who became a Michigan psychologist. But “those were the days before beauty contests were ripped apart as body shows like they are today,” says Beth Johnson, also a psychologist, based in New Mexico. “We knew America’s Junior Miss was about talent and intelligence. I think Diane was respected.”

  Although it was considered second only to Radcliffe in rigor (though Smithies might beg to differ), Wellesley in 1963 put a premium on decorum and tradition. Arriving first-year students were given a class called Fundamentals, a sort of charm school offering instruction on how to enter and exit a car so their derrieres wouldn’t protrude and how to erase an unseemly—New Jersey, for example—accent. The girls had mandatory “posture”-revealing photographs taken in the nude. Graduates of inclusive public schools found themselves going backward. At Wellesley, unlike Seneca, there was a quota for Jews (applicants were asked to state their religion), and minority girls were bunched together—“the Jewish girls rooming with the Jewish girls, the Asians with the Asians,” recalls Aviva Bobb.

  Formal tea was served in dorm living rooms. Grace was said before dinner, a meal at which slacks were banned. Bible class was mandatory. If you had a gentleman caller in your room during the two-hour visiting period on Sunday afternoon, three feet had to be touching the floor at all times. (Dorm mothers checked.) There was no TV, just radio; and if liquor was found in your room during weekly inspection, you were suspended. Most of these rules were tossed in 1968. “I wish I had stayed at Wellesley at least one more year, without those constraints,” pines Diane’s classmate Leesa Campbell, slightly more than tongue in cheek.

  The late Nora Ephron (Wellesley ’62), who would later become Diane’s friend by way of Mike Nichols, criticized the college’s early 1960s shoehorning of deeply intelligent girls into an anachronistic mold that would soon be jettisoned. As one of Ephron’s classmates expressed at a reunion, Wellesley “was a dress rehearsal for a life we never had.”

  Even more than Ephron’s 1959–1962 stretch, Diane’s 1963–1967 years at Wellesley were marked by a sharp cultural turnabout. The year Diane entered, only two Wellesley women—a student and a professor—attended Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, according to Judi Lempert Green. But by 1968, a year after Diane graduated, Green says the climate had changed so significantly that student body president Hillary Rodham “led busloads of women” to the 1969 Mobilization for Peace in the nation’s capital. Moreover, during Diane’s sophomore year, 1964, Betty Friedan’s freshly published The Feminine Mystique “was being read all over campus,” recalls Diane’s classmate Beth Johnson. The slow boil of the women’s movement—no turning back—had begun.

  Many a woman who entered a top college in 1963 faced a forked road: Half of her friends married their college beaux (many divorcing them later) and planned to become teachers while supporting their husbands through law or med school; the other half veered off into heady new zones, from radical politics to psychedelic drugs and communes. The more indelible revolution—involving new ideas about women and serious careers, women and ambition, women and singleness—wouldn’t occur for a few more years, so it was the slightly younger women who most naturally caught that wave as it rolled in. Diane Sawyer, who’d come to Wellesley insecure about her provincialism, would actually prove to be ahead of her times, quickly making a “male” career her goal, not marrying until she was forty-two, forgoing motherhood without regret or apology.

  One of Diane’s best friends at Wellesley was Marie Fox, now an artist living in Los Angeles. The two met their first year because Linda Sawyer was assigned to be Marie’s Wellesley “big sister.” If Diane was circumspect about entering Wellesley, Linda was confident and jubilant enough to have snuck a bottle of scotch into her desk drawer—Linda’s opening the door and brandishing it was a giddily rebellious “Wa-hoo!” that Marie remembers. Marie and Diane had height in common—Marie is six feet tall. “Diane was very funny—very witty, very playful. And caring. She’d write you a poem to thank you for something. She was persistent, hardworking, and ladylike—a Southern thing—but not in a formal way.”

  One late November day during their first year, the campus was sharply disrupted, as were campuses all over the country. Aviva Bobb remembers “walking out of my dorm around noon and there were a swarm of people in the quadrangle and people walking out of their dorms and rushing out of classes, and they started to mix in a crowd.” As word spread, “there was this incredible grief and sadness.” Marie Fox was “in German class, when a school official somberly walked in and delivered the news, which stunned us all.” President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. Diane was one of the shocked mourners of this signal tragedy of her generation. The bringer of this news—Diane and her classmates watched the footage again and again—was CBS’s Walter Cronkite. The anchor’s dignified grief—the way he briefly took off his glasses and paused, tear in eye, as he announced the president’s death in a manner that perfectly combined personal pain and the necessity to do one’s job—seemed to represent the best of America. The gesture would make him the most beloved and respected TV newsman in the country, a prototype of avuncular authority (indeed, he would be called “America’s Uncle”) that would serve as a high bar for more than forty years, even after he’d been replaced by Dan Rather. Another aspect of him, his presumed modesty, was so legendary that Kurt Vonnegut called him “the reluctant bigshot.” But in truth Cronkite was not so avuncular or so humble. “He was a tough, tough guy. And demanding,” says Sandy Socolow, who produced Cronkite’s show from the beginning and who has been a venerable—and opinionated—witness to the history of women in TV news over all these decades. “You don’t get to be Walter Cronkite unless you have an ego as big as an elephant.” “He was called the eight-hundred-pound gorilla,” explains veteran producer Joe Peyronnin, for the way Cronkite immodestly threw his weight around but was not thought of any less for doing so. (“But if a woman throws her weight around,” Peyronnin says, “she’s a ‘diva.’”) As she sat in front of a Wellesley TV screen mourning the president’s assassination with her classmates, Diane Sawyer could probably never imagine that, in her mature career, the pervasive “avuncular” and �
�modest” conventional wisdom about Cronkite—the worship of the man—would complicate things in a then far-off future when women, including Diane herself, would fill national anchor roles.

  Marie and Diane roomed together during sophomore year in one of the new dorms, Freeman Hall. Diane was an English major and Marie was an art major. A small dose of activism was creeping its way into Wellesley, and Diane briefly caught the bug—or, at least, faked it in order to fit in—marching in a protest against compulsory Bible class. But later she would confess that she’d felt guilty about doing so because, in fact, and perhaps unsurprisingly, “I loved Bible class!”

  Diane’s at-the-time conservatism—as well as the fraught, absolutist bifurcations that marked student politics during the early 1960s—was highlighted during a disastrous blind date she had toward the end of her America’s Junior Miss reign, in Palm Springs, with a very incompatible young man named Martin Snapp. Martin’s brother was highly placed in the National Junior Chamber of Commerce, and it was his job to find escorts for Diane and her princesses for a Jaycees event, so he fixed Diane up with his brother, a very smart but not conventionally handsome Yale undergraduate and Beverly Hills native. Martin Snapp was enamored of student protestors, such as those who’d recently organized the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. “I thought those students were heroes; Diane thought they were traitors,” he remembers keenly. “Diane and I spent the whole night arguing about politics—her judgments on protestors were very harsh,” says Martin. “I thought she was a snob, a Junior League type, and she probably thought I was a dirty [beatnik]—she clearly didn’t like me. I found her rigid and uptight. Her princesses were a lot hipper than she was. I wish I’d had a date with one of them.”

  Still, Diane’s self-image—and Wellesley’s image of her—was hardly as rigid as that striking impression would suggest. At that still cloistered woman’s college with its hint of social conservatism, Diane and her roommate Marie fancied themselves quixotic—rather literally: They hung a poster of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on their wall. “One day, to soothe our sense of boredom—‘This room is so mundane!’ we said—we decided to turn the poster upside down,” Marie recalls. “Then we turned the furniture upside down. It was one of those ‘We have to rebel!’ moments.”

  Diane also joined the Wellesley jazz and blues singing group, the Blue Notes, which her sister Linda led. “We dressed in white blouses and ‘Wellesley blue’ knee-length skirts,” recalls Marie, who was also a member of the twenty-girl group. The Blue Notes’ repertoire was pegged to their name, covering blues standards like “Mood Indigo,” “Basin Street,” “Little Girl Blue,” “Blues in the Night,” and “When Sunny Gets Blue.” They performed at top-tier schools: MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, Yale, and Bowdoin. Diane was renowned for what Marie recalls as “her killer soprano.” They produced an LP, You Ain’t Been Blue, whose title and theme contrasted the album cover photos of fresh-faced white girls who could have stepped out of the pages of Mademoiselle magazine.

  In interviews, Diane has always portrayed her Wellesley self as dorky and wallflowerish. “I went to my first mixer my first year, and I heard some guy say to his date, ‘That can’t be her. She’s nothing special,’” she has said. “I slinked out of the room and never went to a mixer again. I became very self-conscious. I only dated four or five times in college.” Still, if this is true rather than a combination of diplomatic modesty, a then self-conscious state of mind, and some objective reality, at least two desirable young Ivy League men certainly were among this handful of dates. A very tall Missouri boy who’d been such a high school basketball sensation he’d been offered multiple college scholarships was one suitor. He drove all the way in from Princeton, where he was a senior when Diane was a sophomore, to take her out. “I went downstairs and there he was, waiting for her: standing there in all his wonderful height,” Marie recalls. He was Bill Bradley, later to be a Rhodes scholar, Hall of Fame basketball player, Democratic senator from New Jersey, and, briefly, in 2000, presidential candidate.

  Diane also dated Jamie Niven, the son of the British actor David Niven and “a big, hail-fellow, Swiss-boarding-school-educated Harvard hotshot,” as a classmate describes Niven, who is now a vice president of Sotheby’s. By this point, Diane’s reputation as an unapproachable Wellesley beauty had spread to Harvard, but when Jamie Niven returned to his room after the date, he arrogantly told his Harvard buddies he didn’t know what the “big deal” was about her.

  And she kept up with Greg Haynes, her counterpart at Seneca High—he’d also been voted Most Likely to Succeed. She wrote Greg funny letters; he wrote her back, opening with, “Dear Lila.” She visited him at the highly social Davidson College in North Carolina, with her minimal weekend wardrobe crammed into a bag “the size of a purse,” he remembers having marveled. He saw her indifference to clothes—a hint of her extreme indifference to domesticity in the years to come—as a sign of “confidence.”

  The girl who’d sung the My Fair Lady song at the Louisville TV show used that talent to make her mark at Wellesley. It was as cowriter, chairperson, and lead of the junior play, One Knight Stand, that Diane Sawyer gained distinction—so much so that her friends like Greg Haynes expected her to go into the performance arts. Diane spent part of the summer of 1966 on Cape Cod with other classmates creating the play. Diane starred as Tupelora, so named because Tupelo Point was the spot along the campus’s Lake Waban where Wellesley girls received marriage proposals from beaux on bended knee. And just like the unisex plays in Shakespeare’s London, a Wellesley girl portrayed the knight in shining armor, Veritas (Harvard’s motto). “It was a spoof on getting engaged and a spoof on the looming sexual revolution,” Beth Johnson says. “Everybody loved Diane in it—and they loved the girl who played the knight, who was about five inches shorter than Diane,” making for a very humorous “romance.”

  The next year, Time magazine pressed a nose to the Seven Sisters’ glass and did a schematic breakdown: Radcliffe was “breathless brilliance,” Barnard “corpuscular,” Mount Holyoke “country sweet,” Wellesley “wholesome and well-adjusted.” The grooming grounds of well-heeled women were being romanticized just as their relevance was collapsing.

  Diane spent her senior year in a single room next to Marie Fox’s in Severance Hall, one of the beautiful Gothic-style buildings on campus, completed her work for her English major, and made plans for what to do next. Many small-city Wellesley girls were going to big cities; others were staying in the hospitably heady climes of leafy Massachusetts. But for Diane, who was close both to her family and to her church, home beckoned.

  After graduation, she returned to Louisville and decided to cover her bases—possibly influenced by her father’s distinction, she would go to law school at night. But what she really wanted to be was a TV news reporter. That calling meant putting her performance skills into practice with her other skills. Alice Chumbley Lora says today, “Looking back, I can see how that career choice involved aggression, curiosity, performance, willingness to work—all traits she combined into her final career.”

  WLKY was the CBS affiliate in town, and she applied for a job in their news division shortly after returning home in early summer 1967. There were no openings in news. Indeed, there were only two women on the local TV stations in Louisville at the time, and both of them—Julie Shaw at WAVE and Phyllis Knight at WHAS—were women’s talk show hosts; neither was a newscaster. Not only that, Ken Rowland, WLKY’s anchor and news director, was “a little skeptical of beauty queens,” he says. Still, Ed Shadburne, the station’s general manager, had received Diane’s application and knew her name, both from her term as America’s Junior Miss and as Judge Sawyer’s daughter. He pressed the dubious Ken Rowland to meet her anyway—even though there wasn’t a job in news, there was an opening in weather.

  Rowland took Diane to lunch at the restaurant in Stouffer’s Hotel. “Just by the questions she asked, just by her curiosity about the world
in general,” he ended up thinking, “‘I’m in the company of a very, very smart young woman.’” Rowland asked her if she’d like the job of weather woman, and she said, “No. I’m not interested in that job. I want to be a member of your news staff.”

  But being on the news staff was impossible, so Diane agreed to the weather job to get her foot in the door.

  It was a wacky door to set one’s foot into. Before the days of modern, localized meteorology, a station’s weatherperson just called the National Weather Service a half hour before broadcast and then stood in front of a map and talked. Thus, novelty was called for. Diane’s gimmick: She snuck bits of poetry—Auden, Baudelaire—into her disquisitions about imminent thunderstorms and patches of sunshine and the movement of high- and low-pressure fronts. She was known as the Weather Maiden. Half of the time she had difficulty seeing the board because of her very poor eyesight—her Coke-bottle glasses were a no-no on TV—and sometimes she made mistakes. “But if she got a forecast wrong she was delightful about it the next day,” making fun of her error to the viewers, says Bob Taylor, WLKY’s operations manager, who was in charge of hiring her. “She had no background” in weather or TV broadcasting—“no experience. But she had a confidence, a delivery.” They loved Diane in the weather department at WLKY. A former weatherwoman had taken herself very seriously, and Diane, says one who worked with her, “was a one-hundred-eighty-degree turnabout” from that predecessor, as well as a hit with the viewers. Still, her fellow Seneca High high achievers, like Marc Fleischaker, who’d graduated from Penn, wondered what she was doing back in her hometown, in the house she grew up in, being a weather girl!