The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  Yeltsin might have been surprised had he spotted his alluring interviewer at the Moscow airport, on her way home. As a witness tells it, Diane showed up “with her Coke-bottle glasses and her hair is not done and she’s not dressed up.” The airport officials “look at her passport, which has a glamour shot, and they don’t believe that it’s her.”

  Diane herself would make sly jokes about her charm offensives, giving tips to the younger women with whom she worked. Like a parody of Helen Gurley Brown, she once said, “Always wear clothes in fabrics that men like to touch.” She also cheekily admitted that she liked to wear high heels when interviewing shorter men because “men love it when you tower over them.”

  • • •

  LOVE CAME TO DIANE IN 1986, when she was just turning forty-one.

  Diane had taken her mother and her stepfather, Ray Hayes, on a trip to France, where her mother’s doctor called her to warn her that the heart monitor Mrs. Hayes wore had transmitted an alarmingly high reading. So they planned to fly right back to New York; the night before the hastily planned return trip, Diane sat outside her “mother’s door all night, listening to her breathe, in a blind panic.” The next morning, at the airport, Diane was in the Concorde lounge, “wearing a juice-stained turtleneck and ratty jeans,” she has said, when Mike Nichols, the esteemed director, “walked up behind a potted palm and said, ‘You’re my hero.’ ‘And you’re mine,’ I answered, in a dazzling riposte.”

  Diane was still living with Holbrooke, and Mike—one year divorced from novelist Annabel Davis-Goff—was in a serious romance with a woman who is described by a friend of hers as a “diligent, hardworking” media professional. Though this woman was in a committed relationship with another man, she was seeing Mike on the side and it was the relationship with Mike that mattered to her. “I think she thought she could become the next Mrs. Mike Nichols,” says her friend, who knew the situation well, adding, “I think she was really blindsided by the Diane thing.”

  At the time he met Diane, “I think Mike was very interested in changing his life—and I mean consciously,” says a friend of Nichols’s. His career was in flux. Seven years earlier, his movie adaptation of Catch-22 had been “his first failure. He had been the golden boy—he was untouchable” before that: Oscars, Emmys, Tonys. “Because he’d been such an early success, he wasn’t used to failing.” After that comeuppance, his track record had been uneven: some wins, some losses. “It wasn’t that people weren’t returning his phone calls,” the friend stresses, “but still, he said, ‘When you’re a failure, you begin to understand what people are there for’”—that is, how readily you could be abandoned by fair-weather friends.

  As for Diane, she was instantly taken with him. “In the first ninety seconds I knew. It’s like the tonic chord: When you get there, you know you’re there; there’s no explaining it. . . . I knew before he spoke. I knew before he was walking across the room. I knew something was happening.” She laughed at the ridiculous Hallmark card aspect of this, but reaffirmed: “I knew life was changing. . . . Not that anyone thought [a relationship] was going anywhere,” because of their significant others, her relationship with Holbrooke and his with the media woman. “But I knew he was at the center of the dance.”

  That man, age fifty-five, who suddenly became the center of Diane’s dance was enormously sophisticated. He had been married three times and had had a legendary, decades-long career in avant-garde comedy, theater, and film. He occupies an elite position at the intersection of quality popular culture, high culture, and high society. “When you speak to him, he says, ‘Oh, Noël Coward said thus and such to me,’ and ‘George Abbott said this,’ and ‘Samuel Beckett . . . ,’” says a relatively new addition to the inner circle of the man who was first blessed with fame in the 1950s. “And the stars who’ve been in love with Mike! Meryl, Emma Thompson, Julia Roberts—there’s an endless list. And Jackie [Kennedy Onassis]! She loved Mike—no question. She loved Mike. . . .” The sentence trails off knowingly.

  Nichols was born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, of wealthy Jewish parents in Berlin. In 1938, at age eight, along with his brother, he was hustled off to safety in America, reuniting with his parents after they, too, fled the Nazis, just as Richard Holbrooke’s parents had done before his birth. The Peschkowskys, who changed their name to Nichols, resumed a prosperous life in Manhattan, Mike’s father becoming a successful doctor. Unlike the Holbrookes, the Nicholses owned their Jewishness. Even today, Mike Nichols will ask an opinion of a Christian friend by prefacing it with “What would a goy do?”

  A childhood disease left Nichols’s whole body permanently hairless; he has always worn a wig. His friend believes that “in some way he’s still suffering from that disease.” It’s made him “not afraid of luxury. He’s very funny about it. He appreciates every minute of the wildly luxurious life he’s always lived,” with his collection of horses and art and houses. “He doesn’t take any of it for granted. It’s fun for him—it’s almost like he knows he doesn’t belong in it.” He’s still in some way the boy “who deserved nothing—he had no hair, so how could he deserve anything?”

  With his comedy partner, Elaine May, Nichols helped to pioneer the intellectual “neurotic” sketch comedy of the late 1950s. The long span of films he subsequently directed include Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood, and Heartburn, and the stage plays include Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple.

  He is sophisticated personally as well as artistically. In the midsixties he was such a fixture at elite New York nightspots that morning planning meetings for The Graduate, his eventual directorial debut, often started at his apartment before he got home from his evening gallivanting. Yet people talk of his relationship to the very differently backgrounded Diane rapturously, none more so than the principals themselves. Nichols described an epiphany to Joan Juliet Buck: “I thought [at first that Diane and I] were brilliant but totally full of shit, so modest, so wise. It took me a long time to realize that, in the first place, [Diane] wasn’t bullshitting, she was real. And then—to my astonishment—that I was real, too. And it was because of her. The way she saw me let me finally see that I was real, too.”

  As for Diane, according to her friend Mark Robertson, “I heard her say this: ‘Everyone I’ve ever dated in my life, there was a piece of them that was right for me, that was intriguing and wonderful. But Mike was all the pieces of all of them.’ And she felt it immediately.” Diane has amplified this statement: When she met Mike, “I thought he was the most heart-stoppingly funny and limitless person I’d ever met. To be so funny and generous, it’s a rare combination. And the connections he makes to the world—it really is like flying with the Blue Angels. I love it so much when we get into a cab in New York and within two blocks he’ll have the cab driver, even if he only speaks Pashto, in stitches. You know what Napoleon said: ‘A woman laughing is a woman conquered.’ It’s just some gift that comes from a very original view of the universe. And he’s not judgmental about anybody.”

  After that first meeting of theirs in the airport, back in the city “we had lunch,” Diane has said, “at which point I sort of did my performing seal number: ‘You just have to let me interview you!’ And he postponed seeing me again, and then it just sort of trailed off.”

  There was a good reason for the trailing off. Nichols, like his friends Philip Roth and William Styron, had become addicted to the sleeping pill Halcion, a sedative hypnotic that would later be linked to a mesh of side effects, from amnesia to suicidal thoughts, termed “Halcion madness.” He’d gotten on the drug when he was in the hospital for a minor heart procedure, and had soon become dependent on it. “He had a nervous breakdown—he thought he was going to die,” says a longtime friend from the theater world. “I went totally crazy” as a result of the drug, Nichols said. He thought he was losing all his money. He began to sell his prize collection of horses. He didn’t call Diane right away after that first lunch
because “I didn’t want her to see me as I was. And as soon as I was okay again, I called her up. She had wondered what had happened to me and was sort of hurt. And then it went very, very fast.”

  Quickly, Diane broke up with Richard Holbrooke. “She just came home one day and told him. He was crushed; he was devastated,” says a friend of Holbrooke’s. She moved out of his apartment—and into her own makeshift one. Mike was shocked that, at the height of her glamour, Diane had no furniture. For such a successful woman, she had the most bare-bones life he’d ever seen. Diane admitted, “I have no taste. When I’ve had the option of going to a movie or looking at swatches, it wasn’t even close. I’d rather send out for pizza and sit on my floor pillows.” Mike broke up with the woman he was seeing as well, and Mike and Diane took a penthouse apartment in a Park Avenue hotel. Diane set to work to woo Mike’s children, Max and Jenny. Over a nervous lunch, Diane asked Jenny, “What do you think of my marrying your father?” When Jenny, after a stage pause, answered, “Have you seen his feet?” Diane understood, with relief, that Jenny thought Diane was the catch.

  Diane also wooed their mother, Annabel Davis-Goff, whom a friend describes as a “very charming, very cunning, extraordinarily quick Anglo-Irish woman—and a true intellectual—who does not suffer fools at all.” When Diane—“with knocking knees,” as she’s recalled—arrived for a meal at Annabel’s house, Annabel accidentally served her coffee with sour milk and then “began to recite all the people Mike could have married who were far worse than me.” This “dance of wives,” as Diane calls it, was a love match: Annabel took to “stocking Mike’s country house with food,” a friend says, “because otherwise Mike and Diane would starve over the weekend—they were both helpless.” Diane does not disagree; in fact she’s said that her relationship with Annabel was forged because “I’m so undomestic [and] there is no doubt in anybody’s mind how little I know about the things she knows about.” Diane stayed proudly undomestic for years into their marriage, leaving such niceties to Mike. “He,” Diane’s good friend Joan Ganz Cooney has said, “is the decorator—likes the paintings, the furniture.” Diane did, after a fashion, eventually learn how to cook. (“She cuts out thirty-five different versions of the recipe,” Mike has said, and then they cook together, the process being “very detailed and sometimes complex.”) Today, Annabel, Mike, Diane, and the adult children have Thanksgivings together.

  Holbrooke eventually married Kati Marton, an ex-wife of Peter Jennings and a stunning, self-possessed author and woman about Manhattan with a complicated background (parents who’d had to deny their Jewishness) that uncannily matched Holbrooke’s parents’ own. Marton and Holbrooke were a dashing, even intimidating, A-list couple, perfectly suited to each other. But on some level, for a man as used to winning as Holbrooke was, the early abrupt loss of Diane seems to have stuck in his craw. For example, years later, when Holbrooke was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, he and Kati hosted a dinner for a Kentucky official. Diane was present. “He began his remarks by saying, ‘Diane’—not ‘Kati’ but ‘Diane’—” ‘and I welcome you,’” a guest recalls. “Everyone gasped. Then he couldn’t stop doing it.” Obviously, it wasn’t as if Holbrooke went around actively pining for a long-dissolved romance (especially with a woman he remained friends with), but the sight of Diane that evening seems to have triggered one of those innocent yet revealing past-to-present time displacements. “He said ‘Diane’ instead of ‘Kati’ two more times,” the guest recalls. “The room was full of very well-known people who were looking over at Diane. When he finished, nobody knew what to say. Diane went into the other room,” defusing the awkwardness by “playing ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ on the piano.”

  Diane’s ingratiation of Mike’s friends seems to have been earnest and thorough. A celebrity friend of Mike’s at the time says that when Diane and Mike became a couple Diane “did everything she could, in a political way, to win me over,” including giving this person “lavish presents.” The hardest people to charm were Mike’s long-standing theater friends. “The arts circle thought that Diane was not up to Mike, and they still feel that way,” says the friend, who has known Mike for fifty years, adding Jackie Onassis to the list of disapproving intimates. “Jackie was very covetous of Mike. She didn’t like him dating Diane, just as [many years earlier] she hadn’t liked him dating Gloria Steinem.” Another Nichols friend agrees that, however long past their actual romance was, “Jackie didn’t like” Mike being in love with Diane. “She was possessive. Mike was a love of her life.”

  • • •

  DIANE SAWYER AND MIKE NICHOLS were married on April 29, 1988, in a private ceremony at a church on Martha’s Vineyard, near the estate there, at Stevens Landing, that would become their primary retreat. The reception was held at the home of Carly Simon and her then new husband, the poet Jim Hart. “Mike,” someone asked, after the ceremony, “is this your third marriage?” “My fourth,” he corrected. “And is this your first, Diane?” the person inquired.

  “This,” Diane firmly declared, “is my only marriage.”

  Nichols’s friend says, “Mike always says the same thing about Diane: ‘She is the perfect wife.’” The friend enunciates that sentence, per Nichols, with each syllable given equal weight, as if to suggest intentional self- satisfaction—ironic because he is not being ironic. Mike himself has spoken movingly about his sincerity in almost a pious way. “My happiness in life really started with seeing my children become astonishing people,” he has said. “But my ultimate happiness began in 1988 when I married Diane.” Six years after that marriage, he was still analyzing its thrall: “Falling in love really does have a sort of going-over-to-the-other-side feeling to it. Giving something up. Dying. Giving up balance, equilibrium, some kind of safety, and just sliding through this unknown and slightly terrifying country, where you become unnervingly like the enemy.” That latter touch is pure Nichols in its dark originality and come-to-think-of-it sense making. “The other side. Just belonging to somebody: the end of all games,” he has said.

  “I’m trying to think if I’ve ever seen them fight,” says Nichols’s friend, squinting, and coming up empty. The friend mulls it over. “If I did, it would be about such a minor thing, like, ‘Why didn’t you make those reservations?’ They just don’t. When they’re irritable, they each accept blame for what’s gone wrong. And I suspect it has more to do with Diane than Mike, because Diane isn’t like us”—grandstanding males from hyperverbal cultures. “Her ego is not involved. She doesn’t need to take attention away from him.” Nichols told Mark Robertson: “Diane is the only person I’ve ever known in my very broad life who is without vanity.” (Diane has said they so rarely fight that “once when we were arguing, he stopped in the middle of it and said, ‘Well, this is sort of fun, too.’ And it was!”)

  Yet colleagues have noted how similar their styles can be. Someone who worked with Diane recalls, “Harrison Ford was on Inside the Actors Studio, and he said he loved Mike Nichols because Nichols had the uncanny ability to point you in the direction where you need to go and get out of you what he needs to get out of you, and that you never feel his hand on your back the whole time he’s doing it—the whole time he’s pushing you in that direction. And that’s Diane.” Again: “No fingerprints.” A writer who knows them: “Mike pushes actors as perfectionistically as Diane does producers.”

  Interviewers sometimes ask Diane why she never had children and if she regretted that she hadn’t. Her friend Mark Robertson once overheard her say, “I would have had children earlier,” under other circumstances, “but I chose Mike, and Mike already had three children with two other women, and he was fifty-eight when we married. And”—she stressed—“I chose him.”

  • • •

  DURING THE YEARS that Diane Sawyer was rising at CBS, women at another network were organizing. In late 1984, when Diane was making her mark at 60 Minutes, a group of women at ABC’s Washington bureau—led by Carole Simpson, a
n African American correspondent who would break numerous barriers—was getting together for what Simpson called “bitch sessions.” Fortune, and Don Hewitt, may have smiled on the deserving Diane, but for other women in the field—many, far more experienced than she—it felt like Groundhog Day: Twelve years after Title IX and the effective early CBS protests (and hires), what progress had been made had hit snags or had been dialed back.

  Over a dinner that stretched to seven hours, Simpson and eleven female colleagues pooled their war stories and realized that, at ABC, “there were no women correspondents, no women in top management, no women vice presidents, no women bureau chiefs, no women senior producers on any of our broadcasts,” Simpson said, describing the session to communications professor Judith Marlane. “And this was 1984!”

  ABC News president Roone Arledge had indeed spent lavishly on certain female stars, including the by then deceased Cassie Mackin and, of course, Barbara Walters. Still, the across-the-board representation was paltry. Marlene Sanders recalls sharing her frustration with Simpson. “I said to Carole, ‘You had to do the same damn thing all over again as we did!’ We’re reinventing the wheel and fighting the same fight!” Except this time it was different. “Carole’s group had an advantage,” Sanders says. “They had more women, they had more information. And they had numbers.”

  Numbers, meaning: statistics. Carole Simpson’s husband was a vice president of a computer company, and he helped the women conduct a content analysis of every news broadcast on ABC. A graph was constructed, documenting the lack of women on the broadcasts. On May 9, 1985, Simpson and the others appeared at a banquet that Arledge was throwing, at New York’s Westbury Hotel, to honor Barbara Walters. Their plan? To spring the graph on Arledge and the other self-satisfied executives during the festivities.