There was a rising-star contender: Deborah Norville, a Georgia native who had made a mark for herself on TV news in Chicago. Jack Welch, the bombastic chairman of General Electric, which now owned NBC, “was a huge fan of Debbie Norville’s when she did her early news,” NBC’s News at Sunrise, Pauley says. At twenty-eight (Pauley, by contrast, was thirty-nine), Norville had a cool, blond, pageant-level beauty that was a slightly more upscale version of the local-anchor paradigm. She was also a solid journalist. Jane Pauley graciously (at least from this distance of years) concedes that “Debbie was fabulous. She was gorgeous, smart, ambitious—and a very good reporter.”
So Norville was tapped to replace Pauley. But how she was worked into the Today show mix was unnerving at best. She was “pushed in,” Pauley says. “Debbie did not push herself in—it was not her doing. But it was done”—by the network producers and executives—“in such a ham-handed, ham-fisted, awful way.” One day, September 5, 1989, Norville, hired as Today’s newsreader, suddenly appeared on the couch next to Pauley and Gumbel, as if she were a third anchor.
“I felt blindsided,” Jane says. “Nobody had warned me, and it struck many viewers as, ‘Oh, my God, does that look awkward or what?’” Worse, it seemed like a slow-motion dismissal notice. Jane says, “I recognized what was happening: My role was being diminished significantly, in a way that would absolve NBC from having to” be explicit about it. “I would just be allowed to sit further and further in the background—and then I’d be gone.”
Every Tuesday, from early September through mid-October, Jane Pauley fought with her bosses to let them “settle” her contract. She wanted to have an on-air celebration of Deborah’s new role as her replacement, and then she would leave the show while collecting the salary that NBC was contractually obligated to pay her. Pauley couldn’t stand the humiliation—or that the tabloids were turning the episode into a catfight. But NBC, she says, thought that paying her to leave would set a bad precedent, even though it had been done when Stone Phillips left Dateline. Then Pauley got an idea: She would host an evening newsmagazine, justifying her payment while being able to exit Today. NBC went for the plan. (The show would be called Real Life with Jane Pauley, and it would end up being short-lived.) So on October 27, 1989, the baton was passed: An emotional Jane Pauley handed Deborah Norville the alarm clock that Barbara Walters had given her fourteen years earlier.
On January 1990 Norville officially became Bryant Gumbel’s coanchor.
NBC tried to muster optimism about Norville. Dick Ebersol, the senior VP in charge of Today, called Norville’s arrival an “appeal to women” (he regretted that word choice after she was wrongly smeared in the media as being the young encroacher on a much-loved female veteran) and touted her “unique talents in being able to think on her feet and project cohesiveness”—vague and less than rousing praise. But network spin didn’t matter. What mattered was how Norville would be welcomed by the viewers—and by the notoriously challenging Bryant Gumbel.
Gumbel was a tough partner for a rookie female. “Bryant was the only person in television who said, ‘I don’t care if you like me; I care if you respect me,’” says someone who’s worked closely with him. “He didn’t pander to the audience. He would never have a Sally Field moment—‘You like me! You like me!’ He was a different type of guy.” Indeed, months earlier, a memo written by Gumbel in which he’d spoken ill of weatherman Willard Scott had been leaked to the press. Gumbel didn’t apologize for it.
As the winter of 1990 turned to spring, it was clear that the viewers weren’t warming to Norville—and neither was Gumbel. Panicked producers rushed in likable former baseball star Joe Garagiola as a third on the couch to try to build camaraderie. It didn’t work. “Implosion” was a word staffers now whispered in the 30 Rock halls.*
Meanwhile, Browne, with Dick Ebersol and recently hired NBC News president Michael Gartner (who had had a background in serious newspaper editing), had been considering Katie for Norville’s old job as Today show newsreader. During one of Katie’s visits to New York to meet with the executives about the newsreader job, she stopped in first to see Kathleen Lobb, who was working in an office in Rockefeller Plaza, right near NBC. The two women were practically jumping up and down. “For both of us, it was, ‘Is this really happening?’” Kathleen says. They remembered Katie’s hubristic words in Miami: I want Jane Pauley’s job. Then, after meeting with the executives, Katie ran into Jane herself. “Katie stopped me in the hall and asked some advice. I don’t know what I said, and I doubt she remembers it, either,” Pauley says. “But there was a certain inevitability; I just felt it. She was a go-getter, and she had all the ingredients.”
It was decided that, instead of becoming newsreader (Faith Daniels got that job), Katie would become Today’s national correspondent—“which meant they wanted to get her on the air a lot, and have her travel and do stories,” says the then young man who also bumped into her during one of her earliest NBC interviews. It’s hard to overestimate how important not merely the hallway meeting but everything after it would be. That young man was Jeff Zucker.
Jeff Zucker had been Pauley’s intern—the one intern she’d insisted Today hold on to. Then, at twenty-four, he was a Today junior producer. He was nicknamed “Doogie Howser” because he resembled the sitcom character. People thought him talented, bold, and brash—“hyperkinetic” is a word some used. He still vividly recalls that chance meeting in the hall with Katie. “I was wearing white Keds sneakers,” Zucker says, and she—this young stranger, striding along with her out-of-towner hair and in her corny dress-for-success suit—“completely made fun of me for wearing them! She totally teased me.” He was struck, as if by lightning, with her brazenness, her brio. If she had so much sassy, ad-libby confidence in an office hallway, imagine how that would translate on air.
“So what happened was, I raised my hand to be her producer,” Jeff continues. “I wanted to do something new. And she seemed like the fresh new thing.”
When Zucker raised his hand, Don Browne called on him at once. From the day Katie became NBC national correspondent, on June 11, 1990, in spot after spot—reports, promos, live tags—Jeff Zucker guided her from the control booth. “We began seeing a transformation taking place in Katie,” Browne says. “She was growing before our eyes.” Katie Couric and Jeff Zucker would, simply, be one of the most formidable news star/producer combinations of the last twenty-five years of television.
Zucker explains their magic synergy in an understated way: “We were both young and eager and ambitious—and we were in the right place at the right time. I had a sense of what she was really good at: being herself, being natural without trying to play the role of ‘anchorperson.’ She was the girl next door who wasn’t afraid to ask the questions that everybody wanted to ask. So I told her to do that. I saw she could be great. I think she saw in me someone who gave her confidence. She sensed I was there to help her look great, that I was completely looking out for her. She knew I had her back.”
In just weeks, Browne got a sense that “Katie and Jeff were the perfect complement to each other, the perfect couple. Jeff had great instincts. He recognized the hidden talent in Katie. Katie gave him what he didn’t have”: a chance to pull an underutilized personality out of a pat mold, to bring out the essence of “the off-camera Katie we all loved.” And “Jeff gave her what she didn’t have”: a total advocate—the energy and loyalty of a gifted, hungry, very young producer. “He saw the bigger picture of what she could be. He fought for great stories for her,” Browne says.
The synergy between the two was even greater—and, in a sense, perhaps less innocent—than people thought. Jeff was Katie’s producer when she went to Saudi Arabia during Desert Shield. Someone who worked closely with the two of them daily reported to a colleague that when Katie and Jeff were together, “it was like no one else was in the room—I was invisible. Katie and Jeff spent every minute—their entire stay in the Gulf
War—planning to take over the Today show. It was a very clear plan between Jeff and Katie.”
Not surprisingly, between her Pentagon stand-ups, her reports from exotic countries, and her increasing national correspondent spots, Katie was now getting such visibility that Jay’s best friend and Williams and Connolly colleague David Kiernan kiddingly suggested that he change his phone listing from Jay Monahan to Jay Couric. “My husband is traditional, but he’s proud of me, so he was amused by that,” Katie said. “Traditional,” “proud,” “amused”: Was there a hint of possible crisis looming in the marriage? Kiernan’s joke may not have been that funny to Jay or Katie.
In January, Katie was asked to sit in for Norville during Norville’s maternity leave. “It was exciting, but it was obviously complicated because Katie was pregnant herself”—at the end of her first trimester, Katie’s friend Kathleen Lobb recalls. “She was living in a rental apartment on Third Avenue in the Sixties. I remember going there and hanging out and reading baby books with her. It was definitely a lot to contend with. But she and Jay both were, ‘Let’s just do it!’ They were determined.” Katie accepted the offer to substitute. It was like a dress rehearsal.
Deborah Norville’s two-month maternity leave started in February 1991; Katie was in the “And sitting in for” slot. Weekday mornings she had to meet the NBC car downstairs at five a.m. Just as it had been for Pauley and Lunden and Norville, morning sickness was not an option. Being completely alert despite the expectant mother’s prohibition of coffee was a necessity. Her hair was the same short mop-top that had been practical for spur-of-the-moment trips to Panama and Saudi Arabia—she had no time to cultivate the more “feminine,” beauty queen mane of Pauley and Norville. Her pregnancy-pudgy face beneath the bob gave her the look of a jaunty tomboy. (One TV critic would speak of her “sandlot grit.”) Her clothes were not chic, and her awkward, end-of-first-trimester body lines—when you don’t “show”; you just look fat—made them less so. “Be yourself, ” Jeff Zucker exhorted. “Ask the questions everybody wants to ask.”
Each weekend either Jay commuted to New York or Katie went back to Virginia. On top of everything else, they had just bought an eighteenth-century farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley, as a country home, in addition to their McLean house. There Katie and Jay managed to entertain friends on weekends. While Katie pored over research for the upcoming week’s interviews and Jay practiced for his trials, they attempted to relax. He indulged his love of riding horses and playing the piano. Everyone played board games and the word-association game “salad bowl,” a kind of variation on charades (still a Katie favorite); they watched fireworks and went apple or strawberry picking, depending on the season. “Katie was more the cutup and Jay was more the straight guy, completely, but they had a lot of fun together,” says Mandy Locke, who had just begun dating David Kiernan.
Deborah Norville gave birth to a son on February 27. A month later she was photographed in People magazine, breast-feeding the infant. Breast-feeding was certainly respectable; still, one network executive huffed to People that Deborah’s breast-feeding photos were “self-serving and embarrassing” to NBC, driving home the priggishness of the brass—or else exaggerating what they might have thought would be acceptable-sounding outrage as a pretext to get rid of her. Soon after, Norville announced that she would be spending a year at home with her baby.
Katie had bested her.
“Katie was so good,” it was decided that “Deborah just wouldn’t come back,” Don Browne says. “When we saw Katie with Bryant, and Jeff in the control room, we knew we’d found the answer.” The realization came in rapid-fire stages. “First it was disbelief. Then it was excitement. And then it was, ‘Holy crap! ’”
• • •
AT EXACTLY SEVEN A.M. on Friday, April 5, 1991, Today’s rainbow/sun logo and familiar staccato theme music backdropped a new intro, one devoid of Norville’s name: “This is Today, with Bryant Gumbel, Katherine Couric, and Joe Garagiola.” (During her substituting for Norville, Katie had been announced as “Katherine” but called “Katie.” Soon it would be only “Katie.”)
When the music stopped, Gumbel was blunt: “In case you haven’t gotten the message, Katie is now a permanent fixture up here, a member of our family, an especially welcome one. Deborah Norville is not.” (The unfortunate ordering of some of the phrases may or may not have been a Freudian slip.) “We had some good times here, and we wish all the best to Deborah and Karl and their new baby. Katie, welcome aboard.”
“Thanks. I’m thrilled to be here,” Katie responded. “And I guess that means you’re stuck with me.” Pause. “Or maybe I’m stuck with you.”
Neither Deborah nor Jane would have sassed Gumbel in her second sentence as coanchor, but Katie was clearly able to handle him, right from the start. In fact, Katie delivered a lot of impact with that rejoinder: She proved she could handle Gumbel. She slyly indicated that Gumbel’s remark about Norville may not have been unintentional. And she showcased her improvisational skills.
But that was just her opening salvo in her fight against Morning’s sexism—more was to come. “Katie was the first woman to demand equal treatment in terms of what story she could do,” says TV news content critic Andrew Tyndall, whose Tyndall Report is considered essential reading within the industry. “She would still do the soft stories, but she demanded Gumbel do an equal number of the soft stories and that she would get an equal number of hard stories.” As Katie has explained: “Not to sound too Helen Reddy–ish, but I felt I had an obligation . . . for the women who were watching, to have an equal role on the show.” Tyndall continues: “This was a breakthrough—the first time on a morning program that there were no sex-role stereotypes in the assignments between a man and a woman.” The condition “was understood when she took the job.”
Indeed, one of Katie’s most pugnacious interviews—and the one that she still calls her most unpleasant—was among her first: David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan leader who was trying to tone down his image and run for public office in Louisiana. “It was very contentious,” she’d later say. “I read his quotes back and he denied them.” Still, Katie pushed back at the prevaricating racist: “You said, ‘I think the Jewish people have been a “blight” and they deserve to go into the “ash bin of history.” ’” When Duke tried to dissemble, Katie leaned in and firmly said: “Well, that was only six years ago.” She took Duke on, quote by quote, pressing him as he grew angry. Some media critics actually thought she came down too hard on him.
Katie’s refusal to be ghettoized in fluff threw Gumbel just slightly off his game. He was “fascinated” with Katie, Tom Brokaw surmised. An unnamed “industry source” expounded to the American Journalism Review: “[Katie] comes in a package that’s a little deceiving at first. I think Bryant [now] understands that he is going to have a female there who is competition for him. Jane had to sit there and take a lot of grief, take a back seat and not do a lot of solid interviews. This isn’t the case with Katie.” “Zucker helped, too,” Don Browne says. “Jeff could manage Bryant. Bryant is very strong, but he needed a strong hand, and Jeff and Bryant got along well.” Zucker was made executive producer of Today at age twenty-five. Thus, the show now had a perky woman (and virtually every article written about Katie in those first few years included the p-word, often using the protestation “Don’t call her perky!”),* who, from the start, held her own with a partner known to seize impatiently, even contemptuously, on any perceived weakness in a woman. That strikingly “tough” quality that CNN’s tough guy Ted Kavanau had found in Katie was now serving her with another tough man.
• • •
KATIE’S RELATIONSHIP with Bryant would grow thornier as the years wore on. But at the very beginning of their time together, “Katie did a lot for Bryant—softening him up, making fun of him,” says one who worked closely with them at a high level. “He became a lot better hosting with Katie.” Did Bryant acknowledge her positive effect on hi
s screen persona? “No,” the colleague says, but then adds, on the basis of long experience in the format, “When you have two people on a show, you have an actor and you have a reactor. Bryant was the actor—he drove the show. Katie was the reactor.” That’s how they started out. As the show’s reactor, “you wait your turn,” this television veteran says, emphatically.
As her methodological talks with Zucker in Saudi Arabia indicated, Katie Couric was not one to wait her “turn.” She hadn’t waited when she was an inexperienced beginner pushing hard against closed doors, so she certainly wouldn’t wait now, with a prestigious perch and with the wind at her back.
And what wind it was! It is hard to overtout the splash that Katie made—how naturally she took to the role of Today female anchor, how well she updated it, how quickly the public seized on her as an intimate. Fans sent her christening gowns for her baby, fretted over her hair (“You have it puffed up on the left side, then combed at a straight forty-five-degree angle,” one fan wrote) and her clothes (“That multicolored outfit you wore on March 12—it was gawd-awful,” another complained) like busybody aunts who only want the best. Media critics gushed (“She hit Today like a meteor; suddenly she’s the savior, just by punching Bryant Gumbel’s arm”: the Washington Post) and gushed (“a Cinderella ascent!”: American Journalism Review) and gushed some more (“She skyrocketed right to the top”: Redbook). And really gushed: “The hard part is finding a flaw. She’s the everything gal. She’s an apple a day. She’s real, she’s natural, she’s totally at home on the air. She’s a godsend, that’s what she is. Thank you, God”: the Washington Post’s Tom Shales again. More soberly, astutely—and archly—Bruce Weber limned her in the New York Times as:
petite and tomboyish, pretty but not glamorous, cheerfully collegiate . . . conversationally deft, ever vigilant for the opportunity to quip and gibe. On the air this translates into a precocious competence, a crossbreed of authority and chatty hip: the video offspring of, say, Walter Cronkite and Martha Quinn on MTV. She carries on impressively in the important world of adults, somehow without appearing to be important, or, for that matter, adult.
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