The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  She did this “with every story,” the person says, beleaguered even in remembering it. “The show would be over and she’d say, ‘Well, I guess we cut it pretty close.’” Did anyone stand up to her? “No. David Westin was notorious for not doing so. Westin accommodated her.”

  Diane’s relationship to David Westin, who came in as president of ABC News in March 1997 after Arledge retired, is much remarked upon. Westin was a lawyer by training, not a talent person—“Diane showed him the ropes,” a producer says. Notably, Westin, like Diane, came from a religious Protestant family in a noncoastal city—in his case, Ann Arbor, Michigan. But Westin’s upbringing was more devoutly Christian than Diane’s was; as a boy, he went to church three times a week (she went on Sunday and sometimes to one midweek meeting) and his denomination forbade card playing, drinking, smoking—even watching movies.

  Diane championed David Westin at the very awkward beginning of his tenure. He was having an extramarital affair with Sherrie Rollins, the wife of Republican political consultant Ed Rollins. Diane smoothed the way for Westin, talking him up when his personal scandal made many at the top tiers of ABC angry. “You would see the two of them whispering in the halls,” a producer says. Some believe she was essentially responsible for getting him the job. More, she personally supported him and Sherrie when they shed their respective spouses and decided to marry, and she initiated him into the social sphere he coveted. “David Westin was a climber,” says one producer. Says another staffer: “Their social circle widened through Diane. David and Sherrie were really beholden to Diane,” because of Diane’s and Mike’s top-drawer-elite milieu and connections.

  David and Sherrie decided to get married on the Vineyard, and Diane and Mike flew them there, to their wedding, in a private plane. Diane made many of the arrangements for the Rollins-Westin nuptials, and, according to one former anchor, “Diane personally took care of Lily, the Chinese daughter that Sherrie and Ed Rollins had adopted. Diane gave them her and Mike’s house for their honeymoon, and she took Lily somewhere else” so the newlyweds could have some privacy. Some people at ABC were surprised by these expansive gestures. A female eminence says, “He’s your boss! You don’t do that! It made me want to throw up, Diane being so unctuous.” As for Westin’s being charmed by the largesse and glamour, “Well, shame on him,” this person continues. “You’re president of News!” When Sherrie Westin became pregnant, Diane reportedly accompanied Sherrie for her ultrasound. Says a former staffer, “Everything about David and Sherrie was tied to Diane—tied to making Diane happy.”

  Still, the work was always paramount for Diane. Investigatives, interviews, human interest pieces: Diane brought “an intensity to every story,” recalls Betsy West. “She never phones it in. She doesn’t pick and choose. She always goes where she needs to go to crack the nut of the heart of the story. She’s a complex thinker, and that’s part of what made it challenging to work with her. She will push and pull to make sure a story has the nuance she thinks it deserves.”

  Somehow it all paid off. Ira Rosen: “She won a Peabody for her story on pap smears, and we won an award on the day care centers story and the deadbeat dads story, and the story about Russian orphanages won a DuPont Award.” Diane also spent two days and nights in a women’s maximum-security prison for a major special—one particularly strong story—and she investigated the mistreatment of mentally handicapped patients at a state-run home, along with an influential feature on the high incidence of pharmacy prescription mistakes. The era’s Nellie Bly she was, indeed, becoming.

  Ironically, one of Diane’s most powerful investigations—of grossly unsanitary conditions at Food Lion markets—proved that sometimes her attempts at charm could backfire. The show, which aired in November 1992 and won a journalism award, showed numerous Primetime reporters who, armed with tiny hidden cameras, acquired jobs in the meat and deli departments of various branches of the rising supermarket chain. Working undercover, they documented stunningly unethical and unhealthful practices: redating old meat on its plastic wrappers, washing meat in dirty water, and so forth. The sensational broadcast, vivid because of the surreptitious photography, caused Food Lion’s stock to plunge; the formerly fast-growing chain made plans to close more than eighty stores.

  Food Lion sued ABC—not for libel, but for unfair methods of reporting—and in 1997 the case went to trial. Diane was flown down to Greensboro, North Carolina, to testify before a jury of exactly the kind of regular Southern folks she had grown up among. She was utterly charming and, of course, she seemed to be highly impressive on the stand. But the jury found ABC guilty on two counts: fraud and breach of duty of loyalty, manifested by the use of the hidden cameras and the ABC reporters’ misrepresentation of their identities. After the verdict was announced, the jury was interviewed on television. One of the jurors, a grandmotherly woman, smiled as she said that a key mistake for the defense was having “the great Diane Sawyer” take the witness stand. We’re not a bunch of starstruck simpletons, the juror seemed to be saying.

  Diane finally won her first Emmy at Primetime—at 60 Minutes, “she’d been the Susan Lucci of Emmys,” always nominated, never winning, says a colleague—for her piece on the Menendez brothers. The shocking saga of the siblings—two privileged, handsome young men who murdered their mother and father in cold blood in their Beverly Hills home in August 1989—was a kind of shot across the bow, signaling a phenomenon that no one explanation could account for: the emergence of sensational, media-begging crime stories, which would transform the decade’s television. The trend’s apotheosis was the O. J. Simpson story, which NBC “owned,” covering the story to the saturation point in 1994 and 1995.

  In June Diane embraced the “magazine”—as opposed to the “news”—aspect of the show with celebrity interviews that sparked criticism. The first was a heavily advance-promoted interview with Michael Jackson—who had just privately settled his notorious child molestation civil lawsuit, brought by a thirteen-year-old boy—and Jackson’s wife, Lisa Marie Presley. The interview was denounced by Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth, who accused Sawyer, and ABC, of bending journalistic standards. Jackson, Orth argued, was given free rein to proffer a one-sided version of events, without challenge, and ABC allowed Jackson to dictate many of the broadcast’s conditions, right down to the lighting. It was an undeniably gimmicky segment—the credibility of already-far-gone, whisper-voiced Michael Jackson, married to Elvis’s daughter in what none could imagine was a genuine marriage, was implicitly shaky—but Diane firmly insisted that she had done her journalistic due diligence.

  Fans of the “classy” Diane took this interview—and, earlier, her interview with Donald Trump and his bride Marla Maples, in which Diane prodded Maples to answer a question about their sex life—as warning that the elegant highbrow interviewer was not above going pop. Sensational celebrity interviews could actually be a smart career move, in fact. They’re “what make people talk about you,” says a CBS correspondent. “And then, in this perverse reversal, you start to become more a celebrity, and then the power allows you to get to other people,” many of whom are not pop figures. But such interviews could also exemplify what Ira Rosen meant by the no-win situation of female newsmagazine stars. From then on, Rosen says, “sometimes Diane was trapped between, ‘Am I more Peter Jennings, or am I more Barbara Walters?’ Sometimes she ended up splitting the difference.” Eventually, as the years of her nonstop multigenre career ensued, and as she could be more selective about the celebrities she chose, she could do both well.

  Diane was now doing double, even triple, duty at ABC. She appeared on Turning Point, a show launched by McGrady that gave over a whole hour to one strong narrative. She did special investigations. She substitute-anchored for Peter Jennings on World News Tonight and for Ted Koppel on Nightline. Her dedication was rewarded in early 1994, when her compensation rose to $4 million a year. Even at that price, Arledge considered himself lucky to have retained her—there w
as heavy competition from CBS, NBC, and Fox, with Rupert Murdoch reportedly offering her $10 million a year.

  By now, over at CBS, Connie Chung had broken the unofficial dictum against women anchoring the six-thirty news, which had been first poorly tested by Barbara Walters’s humiliating experience with Harry Reasoner. Connie had star power, and NBC had been ashamed to have recently lost her to her original network, CBS. CBS had her coanchoring the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. But Connie’s triumph didn’t exactly count as besting Diane, since Rather made no secret of his dislike for sharing the spotlight. He undermined Chung, openly complaining, for example, that she got to cover the Oklahoma City bombing. “People have told me that it would not have mattered if I were a man,” Connie says. “He would not have wanted to share that chair because he had owned it before. He wasn’t about to give half of it up voluntarily. I can understand that.” But Rather wasn’t the one—or the only one—who judged Chung as undeserving of coanchorship. Jeff Fager, the current head of CBS News, says, “Connie is one of the best people I’ve ever known. But she was junior to Dan in journalism. It should not have been perceived as a man-woman thing. I don’t think they were equals, journalistically.”

  Eventually, Fager says, “it blew up—and blew up badly,” when Connie made an embarrassing faux pas interviewing Newt Gingrich’s mother. Chung had asked Kathleen Gingrich how her Speaker of the House son perceived First Lady Hillary Clinton. Kathleen Gingrich declined to answer the question until Chung encouraged her to “whisper” her reply, “just between you and me.” Then Mrs. Gingrich said, “She’s a bitch.” Though Chung never promised confidentiality—and the cameras were rolling—Mrs. Gingrich insisted she thought she was speaking off the record. During the ensuing outcry, a CBS reporter says, “Dan knifed Connie.” So, by the middle to late 1990s, the only two women (Walters and Chung) who’d ever anchored the vaunted six-thirty news had been cochairs to men, to whom both were considered journalistically inferior. And both women had, essentially, been run off the newscasts.

  Diane’s Primetime was not immune from political infighting, and Diane could act as a healer. Ira Rosen says, “When our show was floundering around, she, through her force of will, would get everybody in the same room until we solved the problem.” Still, there was also the opposite of healing—the fate of Sam Donaldson, for example. Sam was very popular with the producers—“Everybody loved Sam,” one says. Affection for him increased when, shortly after he had cancer surgery, he did a particularly grueling story on a survivalist living in the wilderness. Yet as soon as it aired, a staffer recalls, “Diane called everybody and said, ‘That was a really terrible piece—let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again.’” Then “Diane started saying”—this staffer affects a concerned whisper of a voice—“‘Sam really should be in Washington. . . .’ So Sam was moved to Washington—in Diane’s mind, he was exiled there. She always has a three-dimensional chess game going on, and that chess piece went to Washington.” As for Sam himself, the crisply gruff newsman who was born in 1934 has admitted that he ate his humble pie—but that maybe it was good for him. “When I got into the business there weren’t any women at all,” he marveled, at some point after the incident. “And [though] I’ve never thought of myself as being sexist-in-the-extreme,” still, “being sixty-two,” some attitudes inevitably developed and remained. Being “teamed up with Diane” meant he was “competing with a woman who can and does beat me. I’ve had to read [in the media] for years how Diane is the main anchor and I’m the minor anchor.” He’s “had to accept that,” he said, adding that his being in D.C. while she was in New York made that acceptance—that bit of ego deflation—easier to bear.

  Finally, there was the matter of executive producer Rick Kaplan. “‘Rick is so mean to me!’” Diane moaned to a colleague. “But Rick wasn’t mean to her!” says the colleague. “‘Mean’ was Rick’s sending the editors home at four a.m.” (The video editors eventually staged an “intervention” with Diane, not because of their late hours but because of her seconds-before-airtime changes of the pieces.) Kaplan was dismissed (“Diane left no fingerprints,” an insider says, but she was behind the dismissal) and Phyllis McGrady, with whom Diane by now had a long relationship, returned as executive producer. (Some believe that Phyllis’s earlier leave-taking from the show had not been entirely voluntary.) “Diane just gets tired of people,” shrugs a producer whom she wanted as her own. Says another, “Here’s the key: Diane is always looking for the magic bullet, where somebody will push her creativity and she will be the most famous broadcaster in history. Once she works closely with you and she sees your strengths and weaknesses, she’s like a vulture on the weaknesses. So suddenly Rick Kaplan wasn’t good enough.” A writer who’s worked for her agrees: “She’s a roving searchlight always looking for the next brilliant person, and TV is littered with her rejects. And she has the unbelievable gift of killing you with silence,” in terms of getting people who work for her to work harder. “Diane uses silence better than anyone I know.”

  But the biggest clash at ABC during the Primetime years was the abiding competition—some would call it warfare—between Diane and Barbara Walters. In her memoir, Walters writes:

  Diane and I struggled to figure out what to do, especially when we were competing for the same newsmaker or celebrity for our respective newsmagazines. We each had a booker to help pave the way with a potential guest’s lawyers, press agents and other handlers. Then we would come in for the last round of phone calls or meetings. Our bookers were notoriously competitive. Diane and I were more polite.

  Walters may have been exaggerating the politesse—at least in terms of how the women expressed things in private.

  Their rivalry had begun as soon as it was announced that Diane was coming to ABC with her own newsmagazine, Primetime, which competed with Barbara’s 20/20. “Barbara felt betrayed by Roone—betrayed,” says one who was close to Walters during those years. “Barbara was the queen of ABC News. Roone Arledge was her mentor—well, not exactly her mentor, but the big chief and very dominant. Barbara always assumed she had worked so hard for this position—and now she was usurped by Diane.”

  Indeed, part of it was a sheer—and understandable—generational clash. Barbara had been the pathbreaker, and she had fought for everything she had attained. Richard Wald remembers, of her leap from tea pourer to anchor at Today, “She figured out ways to get things on the air. She figured out how to get high-profile show business people on. She produced herself. She built the show.” The women who came after her, in Morning and in celebrity interview prime-time newsmagazines, “didn’t have to create it. Barbara had done that hard work. Barbara invented the formula.” So of course this charming, beautiful new star—Diane—might seem, to super-competitive Barbara, like someone who’d glided through a door that she’d knocked herself out pushing open at an earlier time when women in TV news weren’t getting any breaks.

  Then there was what colleagues could see as Barbara’s “wounded” quality; her surprising personal shyness, so intriguingly the opposite of the “old-time Hollywood type, Louis B. Mayer” élan she appeared to project. In her day-to-day work years earlier, she had been “very shy, terribly shy—head-down shy!” says a woman who worked closely with her during her battlefield years against Harry Reasoner. “Very insecure, very driven, very loyal—and she worked harder than anyone else.”

  Now Barbara was facing another unbelievably hardworking female, and one who seemed—to this older woman with the outsider’s complex—intimidatingly blessed. “Barbara referred to Diane as ‘That Girl,’” says someone who worked closely with Barbara when Diane came on board. “She would become very agitated” during booking wars, “and there would be terrible conflicts. President Clinton or whoever the person was, Diane had already put in a request and Barbara would be livid.

  “Roone would not resolve it. His number two would pull her hair out and roll her eyes. And we’d all have to sit in a room.
We’d have to negotiate. It would never be ‘fair.’ And Barbara would talk about Mike Nichols. And it was so interesting, because Barbara would say, ‘I don’t have a husband who’s a Hollywood director!’ And I’d say, ‘But you’re Barbara Walters!’ And she would say, ‘But I don’t have what she has! That Girl can book everybody! I don’t have these dinner parties. I don’t go to Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t even have a house. I rent Felix Rohatyn’s in Southampton.’” And yet by Barbara’s own standards, this wasn’t quite true. Walters had her own axis of connections. For much of this time, and certainly when Diane arrived at ABC, she was married to Merv Adelson, owner and CEO of Lorimar Productions. Adelson was one of Hollywood’s most successful producers of network television series—The Waltons, Dallas, Knots Landing, Eight Is Enough—and an emerging billionaire. Theirs was a commuter marriage, which lasted from 1986 to 1992.