The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  After Barbara Walters accepted her award and left the dais, Simpson stood up and said, “We think we have a problem here. We have a problem of institutional sex discrimination. We don’t think it’s any conspiracy to keep us off the air. You’re not bad people. . . . It just probably hasn’t crossed your mind.” The graph was then displayed. Arledge and the other executives gave over the floor to the women, who spoke for three hours. The executives’ “mouths fell open,” Simpson recalled. “We really blew them away. Roone Arledge—I have to give him credit. He listened. He said, ‘You know, I just really never had thought about it before. You’re absolutely right.’”

  Sanders, too, gives Arledge credit for accepting the evidence of Simpson’s group. But she does not let the late, widely adored TV legend off the hook. Before he became president of ABC News, Arledge had been the head of ABC Sports (functionally from 1964; officially from 1968), and during that time, Sanders says, “The women [in Sports] came over to tell him that [that department] was sexual harassment headquarters. He knew, but he never did anything.”

  Simpson’s group demanded a talent scout to find female correspondents and managers. Amy Entelis, a producer for Peter Jennings at World News Tonight, approached Richard Wald, who by then was a senior vice president at ABC. Wald challenged Entelis, “What makes you think you can do this well?” Entelis replied, “I don’t think you guys have done such a great job so far. I think I could do better.” With Entelis hired, ABC branded itself as a network that welcomed women. And more women were hired.

  “Roone had listened,” Richard Wald says, agreeing with Simpson and Sanders. And the fact that he listened seemed to ratify the sense he already had and had already seen pay off at the topmost levels—certainly with his hiring of Barbara Walters, who was now riding high at 20/20: that women as on-screen presences were television news’s future. Perhaps his listening also signaled recognition of a shift in what “news” actually meant. The now mature women’s movement, the gay rights movement, the continuing search for equality for African Americans, the acceptance of psychology (serious, pop, or in between) as a lens, the acknowledgment of social-roles revolutions and human behavior trends as legitimate news, the upgrading of human interest and celebrity stories to newsworthiness (gone were the days when, six years earlier, Walter Cronkite had refused to make Elvis Presley’s sudden death the lead story on his broadcast)—all these phenomena were in bloom. Stories that were “featurey,” sociological, empathy-requiring were stories that female reporters had more experience with, and perhaps more of a natural touch with.

  The ABC women, and Marlene Sanders, may have felt their complaints were twelve years unaddressed, but this year—1984—was a pivotal year. The previously unknown Oprah Winfrey beat Phil Donahue in the ratings and was galloping forth to a startling stardom, making women’s personal issues a news category in itself. Donahue himself—who had primed the pump for Winfrey, turning emotional issues into non-sneer-worthy news (as perhaps only a beefy, heterosexual, heartland Irish Catholic man could most effectively do)—moved his show from Chicago to the bigger stage of New York. And Time Inc.’s People magazine celebrated its prosperous ten-year anniversary. The “numbers”—of viewers, of readers—associated with this blooming of human interest news must have been as striking to an astute executive as the damning stats on the ABC women’s graph. The tantalizing numbers pointed to the same solution: more women’s faces. Roone was “celebrity mad,” scoffs Marlene Sanders. He wanted a female star. He knew who he wanted.

  • • •

  IN 1988 ROONE ARLEDGE decided that he had to have Diane Sawyer at ABC. Her contract was up for renewal at 60 Minutes—again. He had pursued her before, and she had listened to his offer, but the right terms had never been met. “She was generating star power, and he was very attuned to that,” says Av Westin, who was now producing Barbara Walters, with Hugh Downs, at 20/20. “Roone had an expression” about the rarest TV talent: “The person ‘comes through the screen.’” Diane Sawyer came through the screen, but, even more than that, “Roone was besotted with Diane,” says a confidant of Arledge’s. “One of his great regrets is that she never fell for him.” Yes, he knew she was with Mike Nichols, but it didn’t stem his crush on her. “He was a shy egomaniac.”

  “Roone went through hoops to hire Diane; it was a long courtship,” the Arledge confidant continues. During that courtship’s course, one day while Diane and Roone were exiting a limousine, Diane briefly took Roone’s hand to steady herself. “‘I thought I might have a shot at her,’ he told me.”

  By now, this kind of fruitless crush on Diane was pretty generally shared by a lot of men in media—editors, writers, producers, network executives. What Gloria Steinem had been a dozen years before—the impossibly smart, classy woman in their elite milieu who they respected the hell out of but who was nevertheless undeniably a babe—Diane had now become. The essence of the term used four years earlier in People—that Diane was the “thinking man’s Angie Dickinson”—was what we’d now call her personal “brand.” Novelist Frederick Exley—one of those colorful alcoholics still being glorified as Macho Writer in the late waning season of same—made that point clearly in a cover-lined story he would do in Esquire a year after Roone started his pitch. The article was billed “The Decade’s Last Piece About Diane Sawyer” (that blurb alone, in a December 1989 issue, said something about the buzz she’d been generating for years), and his interview with Diane was given a mock-pining headline: “If Nixon Could Possess the Soul of This Woman, Why the Hell Can’t I?” (Diane played along. A pull quote from the piece trumpeted: “‘You know, Diane, you have a flat ass,’ I said. ‘How can you say that?’ she said. ‘I’ve got a great ass.’”)

  Roone Arledge wanted to create something new: a live newsmagazine show—“telling news stories like movies, with swooping cranes and high production values, and a fabulous look created by [Arledge’s star director] Roger Goodman,” a producer says—and he had the swagger and experience to do it. Says one who was close to this ABC action: “Roone was an impresario. He’d invented instant replay and Monday Night Football and Wide World of Sports”—live broadcasts were what he’d done best. “And he’d been the first person willing to pay an evening news anchor a million dollars: Barbara.” He’d also nurtured Peter Jennings and Ted Koppel, Nightline and 20/20.

  “Roone stole Diane—and it was a gigantic coup,” the insider makes clear. “It was practically ‘I can make you a star’: an old-fashioned spiel. Roone was a seducer. It was the ultimate charm meets charm. In fact, two people with the charm of Roone and Diane probably haven’t been together in a long time.”

  To “steal” Diane, Roone enlisted the help of Phyllis McGrady, who’d been Good Morning America’s executive producer and was now running Barbara Walters’s Barwall Productions. “When he first said to me, ‘My wish list is Diane Sawyer,’ I said, ‘Are you serious? Why would she leave 60 Minutes to start a show that might not work?’” Phyllis says. But by February 1989, Diane had essentially said yes to a reported $1.6 million yearly contract—an increase of almost half a million dollars a year over what 60 Minutes had reportedly been paying her. (According to Time, in a cover story on Diane six months later, “The prospect of losing Sawyer so rattled CBS’s bigwigs that they virtually handed her a blank check in an effort to keep her.” For his part, Don Hewitt retorted that while Sawyer was “a monumental talent,” he claimed that “her coming to the broadcast didn’t do that much for us. And her leaving has not even remotely crippled 60 Minutes.”) An insider on the other side of ABC’s wooing and negotiating table puts it this way: CBS’s promises to Diane had not come to fruition and “she knew it was time to leave. One way or another she found a way to leave.”

  The new show would be called Primetime Live, and would pair Diane with Sam Donaldson. The peaked-eyebrowed newsman known for his audacious questioning at White House press conferences was the overcaffeinated yang to Diane’s wry, ladylike, me
llifluous yin. “A sonata for harp and jackhammer,” Diane aptly called their pairing.

  Phyllis McGrady had a series of lunches with Diane between February and April. The two women found that they had much in common: their Southernness (McGrady hailing from southwest Virginia), their dutiful daughterliness, and their insomnia, which paved the way for years of three and four a.m. work phone conversations. Diane had felt “confined” at 60 Minutes, Phyllis learned. This new show would be a risk, but “Diane’s not afraid of taking gambles. She said to me, ‘The thing that’s scarier than change is standing still.’” That seemingly Catherine Marshall–inspired sentiment impressed Phyllis. “When I’ve worked on a show and it’s bombed, I sometimes have a tendency to hide under the table. But Diane, immediately, is: ‘Okay, what are we going to learn from this? How are we gonna take what did work and put that into the mix?’”

  Betsy West, who’d been one of Nightline’s several female junior producers, was hired as number two. The young Nightline women had called themselves the News Nuns because “we would come in at ten thirty in the morning for a conference call at eleven, and very often be there till twelve thirty a.m., doing an update for the show, and then turn around and go home and come back again. There wasn’t much time in our lives for anything else but Nightline.” Betsy thought “Diane felt liberated to break out of the formula. She’d come in my office in the morning with an article ripped out of a magazine with her inimitable scrawl: ‘Can we advance this story?’ ‘What’s behind this?’ ‘Can we do this?’ She was always driving the story.”

  Roone brought his new star anchor to his star director’s next-door office almost immediately—and Diane’s glamour wasn’t lost on Roger Goodman, who, in general, has the kind of effusively romantic way of talking more associated with Hollywood or the arts than the news business. “I’ll never forget the day as long as I live,” Goodman swoons. “Oh, my God! I’ve always been just in awe of her!” Days later, Goodman’s four-year-old son broke his arm and Diane had a dozen balloons delivered to the boy’s hospital room before Roger even got there. This would seal the ardor of the soothing, talented director who made anchors feel safe during live segments whenever they could say, “Roger’s in my ear.” Goodman worked mostly with Peter Jennings, who gave him secret on-air finger signs—Jennings straightening his tie meant “cut to tape”; Jennings scratching his nose with his middle finger meant he was really damn annoyed at something.

  “I wanted to make sure that everything was perfect for Diane,” Goodman says, and his own, charmingly over-the-top appreciation for her was rewarded by her diligence on the job. At the end of a trip to Russia soon after Primetime Live launched—during which Diane called Betsy West at four a.m., prodding her for research for her interview with a KGB chief—“Diane collapsed, in the most beautiful way, on a luggage cart, and I pushed her, sound asleep, through the airport.”

  Some at ABC found Diane’s overtures off-putting. One major producer was surprised when, at their first lunch, she brought a gift “for my wife.” Among the skeptics was Mimi Gurbst, the head of news coverage and a powerful figure but so controversial that when she left ABC in May 2010 to become a high school guidance counselor, the comments section of the New York Observer’s Web site, which reported her retirement, literally erupted with staffers’ complaints about how she’d played favorites at the network and had cultivated a clique. “If Mimi liked you, you were golden,” a colleague says. “I think Mimi was never a big fan of Diane’s. Mimi was very up front, and she was smart enough to see Diane’s manipulation (though she was also fascinated by it). I think Diane knew that, and she really went into overdrive to woo Mimi. ‘Let’s go to lunch!’ ‘I want to hear your thoughts!’ ‘I want to know what you’re thinking!’ Desperate! Sometimes that pays off—Diane has found out that it worked. But with other people it doesn’t.”

  The most powerful person who remained impervious to Diane’s charm was another woman at the network—the most powerful woman at the network: Anne Sweeney, who became president of ABC in 1996 and then went on to become cochair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney–ABC Television Group. News is a small part of Sweeney’s domain. “I’ve heard her refer to her high-priced anchors as ‘whiney anchors,’” says someone who worked there. “I don’t think Anne ever felt she had to kiss Diane’s ring in order to keep her own job and in order to succeed.”

  There was a familiar face among Diane’s new colleagues at ABC. During part of her time at CBS, she had as an intern a former Harvard Crimson editor named Ben Sherwood. Very tall, handsome, palpably ambitious, from a wealthy Beverly Hills family, Sherwood was fascinated by his boss. When, soon after his internship with Diane at CBS, he left for Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he kept a photograph of Diane on his desk. When Diane landed at Primetime, Ben arrived as a producer there—serendipity!—and his fascination escalated. Sherwood saw his boss—now Diane the Star—strolling around the offices, slurping Diet Coke “in her sweatpants and her thick glasses, amazingly normal,” remembers another colleague. Sherwood and that colleague would wonder together, “Was this an affect, a pretense? Or just her being relaxed? She was so charming. Is she playing the role of ‘charming Diane’? ‘Diane-of-the-people’? You didn’t know if she was self-absorbed—or totally the opposite. She was a very interesting psychological character. Ben asked me about it. He asked me, in general, ‘What is she?’”

  The fascinating truth is, people weren’t sure. At this point, Diane’s serene mysteriousness had become a thing of wonder. “You feel like there’s not a sincere bone in her body,” one colleague says. A colleague who worked with her at this time says: “People who’ve known Diane for twenty years don’t know who she is; her core is impossible to touch. But it doesn’t take away from her talent—in a way, it helps it.” At a memorial service for a colleague who’d passed away, this person adds, industry insiders were “rolling their eyes” because Diane’s eulogy was “insincere but beautiful.” Another colleague agrees: “I can’t say that I really know who ‘Diane Sawyer’ is. I don’t think she remembers. But the real Diane—Lila—comes out when she has a few drinks and sings.”

  Ben Sherwood was fascinated. He was fascinated by power well wielded, anyway. He would soon be termed “aggressively aspirational” by the New York Observer. He is called “very cunning and manipulative” by a friend. Was he struck by his affinity to Diane, or was he learning from her charm and skills? Were both things happening? The two would have many do-si-dos in their future.

  • • •

  EARLY ON, Phyllis McGrady left Primetime—because of a family emergency, she said—and was replaced by Rick Kaplan for the show’s August 1989 launch. Toweringly tall, known as an incredible producer with a huge ego, Kaplan stayed at the helm for years, steering the show from its wobbly beginnings to its galloping success, which Diane doggedly drove. (The “live” aspect, proving unworkable, was ditched and the name shortened to Primetime; L.A. Law was its formidable contender.) As for Donaldson, “Diane got along well with Sam and she thought he was amusing, but she was competitive with him, too,” says a staffer. “Sam had an evening news mentality—if you gave him ten minutes for a story, he’d fight you for an extra thirty seconds.” Still, “it wasn’t a fair fight; the balance of power was in Diane’s favor.”

  Phyllis McGrady had brought in Ira Rosen from 60 Minutes. Diane wanted to do big investigative stories, and Ira encouraged—and helped shape—her desire. (Many of the pieces were also produced by Robby Gordon.) Picking up on the issues he knew she cared about, “I simply said to her, ‘Why don’t you focus on investigatives meaningful to women: day care, mammograms, pap smears, deadbeat dads,’” Rosen says. “‘You can be the Nellie Bly of our time.’ She said, ‘I get it!’” She’d likely had a version of that same idea on her own. “A couple of days after this talk with Rosen, Diane came in with her hair chopped off. The managing editor said, ‘Oh, my God! What did Diane do?’” But by hacking off the B
reck Girl pageboy to the no-nonsense chin-length bob, “she consciously decided, ‘If I’m gonna go down this road, I don’t want people to focus on my beauty or my glamour.’” That wasn’t her only savvy image-conscious move. She also had her set’s look toned down. A staffer: “She said, ‘It’s got to be a raw set, because if it’s polished, I’m too slick.’” She instinctively knew how to maximize her desired self-presentation.

  Diane juggled her two worlds seamlessly—the sweatpants and Nellie Bly stories in the office, the sophisticated evenings with Mike and his friends, sometimes with campy repartee. One friend recalls a dinner party “with Mike and Slim Keith and John Guare—and the very raffinée, high-gay repartee. Diane was in her element. ‘Oh, John!’” she crooned, in parody, to playwright Guare. “‘Come and lick the whiskey off my lips.’” On the night of Mike Nichols’s sixtieth birthday, “I said, ‘Wait a second, Diane, it’s eleven thirty and you’re throwing him a party and you’re here with me in the editing room?’” Ira Rosen recalls—during which, as ever, she was nibbling plastic-bagged okra, collard greens, and salty potato chips: Southern snacks as comfort food. “And she looked at her watch and said, ‘Oh, my God—I gotta go!’ And she runs to the bathroom and comes back looking drop-dead gorgeous in makeup and heels and is out the door.”

  Even more than she had at 60 Minutes, Diane intensely micromanaged stories, honing them to their essentials. Being questioned by Diane about a piece was like “going through a PhD review,” says Rosen, noting that the need to rigorously justify minute aspects of a piece improved its quality. Gratuitous lines, filler, sloppy inferences—these were cut. However, the last-minute aspect of some of Diane’s revisions could yield mistakes. As she reworked a story dangerously right up to airtime, her attitude would be “naughty, devilish—but I would be a nervous wreck,” a coworker recalls. “She’s, ‘I wonder if this could move . . .’ And she’d walk back to the edit room. And somebody was hovering around, saying”—desperate voiced—‘ “Why move that? It reads great, and we’re on the air in five minutes!’ She’d say”—airy voice—“‘Oh, no, I think we can make one change. . . .’” Inevitably, sometimes passages would be in the wrong order. “She’d say, at zero hour, “‘We haven’t been introduced to this character, have we?’” The change would be hectically made, “and then, after the show aired, we were, ‘Did you notice we introduced a character twice?’ Or somebody’s talking and you have no idea who because the introduction was afterward.”