The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  But others in the know have a different recollection of how badly NBC wanted to keep—or reclaim—her. The man who said Katie had not “waited her turn” and that Jay had kept her in line says, “At no time did NBC come in to try to top Moonves’s offer. Once she got that offer, NBC made no attempt.” And a confidant of Katie’s and veteran producer puts it another way, saying, in 2009, when rumors started to swirl that Katie might leave CBS to return to NBC, “No one at NBC wants Katie to come back.” Whatever the case, Meredith Vieira was quickly tapped. “We didn’t go down a lot of roads,” says an NBC insider. “It would be Meredith or Ann [Curry].”

  Whether or not NBC animus existed against Katie at the time or later, Jeff, who knew Katie’s talents better than anyone, argued with her—benignly, he says (“There was never a contentious conversation”)—about whether or not her move would be successful. “She went in” to the CBS anchoring “with a lot of hope. She wanted to fit the evening newscast more to her personality, which was my point all along—I didn’t think it fit her personality,” Jeff says. “You can’t fundamentally reshape the programs. I thought it wasn’t the best fit for her talent. I told her that. Katie trusts me because I tell her the truth,” even though “she’s not gonna admit that I’m right. Even if she doesn’t like it, Katie knows I’m telling her the truth for her own good.” Katie herself characterized Jeff’s advice, and her response, this way: He “told me it was the worst idea he’d ever heard—he thought it was the wrong format, that I should have my own show, that it didn’t use my quote-unquote talents. I listened—and I had my doubts—but I’ve always trusted my own gut, and ultimately I did what was right for me. That’s the way I’ve lived my whole life.”

  All of these conversations were taking place while Jeff and Katie and Lisa Paulsen put together their plan for their first Stand Up to Cancer multichannel telethon, which turned out to be tremendously successful and would be repeated year after year. NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN observed the “blockade”—the first proactive rather than reactive (the latter meaning a response to a crisis such as 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina) one in television—whereby these networks turned over all their prime-time programming for one night to star-studded fund-raising. Only Fox refused. (But Fox participated in Stand Up to Cancer’s 2010 and 2012 blockade telethons, along with, respectively, eighteen and twenty-two cable stations.) “Let’s raise money for The Colons!” was Katie, Lisa, and Jeff’s battle cry, explains Lisa, “The Colons,” irreverent shorthand for colon cancer patients. “Let’s raise money for all the body parts!”

  On April 6, during the last minutes of Today, Katie announced that, in what would turn out to be less than two months, she’d be leaving the show. Matt then poked through her script and stage-asked, “Did it say anywhere [in the script] where you’re going? If you were a guest on the show, I wouldn’t let you get away with that.” Katie smilingly rejoined: “I know—it’s the worst-kept secret in America.” And it was: The business press had been dropping hints. “I’m going to be working on the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes,” she replied to Matt. As coyly as she may have put it, the news broke huge, eclipsing even the day’s political stories. Newsweek both limned the reason and unintentionally personified the dated absurdity of the newsiness with its question, “Will viewers accept their evening news from someone wearing mascara?” However, they importantly qualified that “Couric is cut from entirely different cloth than any of her predecessors, including the handful of women co-anchors. She’s the most up close and personal news broadcaster ever on television.” The article continued, “We’ve seen her inside and out—literally,” referring to her colonoscopy. “We know her kids and her deceased husband. When she’s dating a new man, she makes the gossip magazines.”

  Regarding the latter, Katie and Tom Werner had broken up. In a few months, just as she was starting as CBS anchor, Katie would begin a years-long, eventually live-in romance with entrepreneur Brooks Perlin, a Connecticut-raised Williams College graduate sixteen years younger than she. The good-looking, athletic Perlin, not infrequently photographed in sports attire, could fairly be called a “hunk.” As worthy as his trendy endeavors were—marketing “green” construction materials was one—he did not emanate either the dignified panache of amateur historian and classical pianist Jay Monahan or the estimable success and power of Tom Werner. Many accomplished women choose younger men, but sixteen years qualifies as much younger, and some of the pair’s vacations—for example, staying at the Sun Valley home of Las Vegas casino emperor Steve Wynn—fed into a meme that was not synonymous with Katie the Serious Newswoman. To her credit and her detriment, she did not seem to care. In fact, when, two and a half years later, she gave the commencement address at Princeton (whose sports teams were the Tigers), she opened with: “I’ve been called a cougar a lot lately, but now I’m proud to be a tiger.” Being in-your-face in owning the tackiest personal aspersions lobbed against her by the lowest tabloids in the first sentence of her address to the graduates and faculty of a premier Ivy League university: This was Katie, and you kind of had to love her for it. But you also had to fear for her, for that kind of wholesale thumbing of proper image could work for men, but a woman who rocked the “appropriateness” boat was leaving herself wide open.

  The Newsweek piece, which was written by two men, Marc Peyser and Johnnie L. Roberts, trotted out sexist clichés—“Couric cries regularly” (which contradicted what the Today man has said of her off-air toughness)—and asked if “the girl next door,” which Katie had stopped pretending to be for the last half of her Today tenure, to the partial disapproval of the public, could “succeed as a network news anchor.”

  “Welcome to a very special edition of Today,” Matt intoned, at seven a.m. one brink-of-summer morning. “Now, after more than fifteen thousand interviews, millions of laughs, and countless cups of coffee, Katie is saying good-bye to us on Wednesday, May 31, 2006.” The theme music boomed. Katie—in a low-V-necked white jacket, her voice hoarse—kidded Matt about how controlling she was. “You? Controlling?”: He was mock-aghast. Both the affection and the edginess in their long TV marriage resonated. The show would be, Matt promised, “like an episode of This Is Your Life.”

  And in terms of her professional life, it was. A reel was unspooled of snippets of Katie’s early intros from her positions at CNN D.C., CNN Atlanta, WTVJ Miami, and NBC D.C. and pre-Today New York. Her generic concerned-and-serious enunciation, expression, and cock of head in every one of those intros was stunning for what was lacking: the completely original woman America had come to know over fifteen years. Don Browne had been right: The brevity of her tenures in front of each of those other cameras—her “failure” in each of those markets—had kept that standard-issue anchor persona from taking root. She was able to come to Today as a total original.

  After a video clip of her driver calling from the NBC car at her apartment house curb, pleading with the half-asleep Katie to get her out of bed, Matt and Al joked about how late she arrived every morning, always inconceivably ready to go at five of seven. A very effective reel of sharply edited takes of her tough journalistic combat—punch! punch! punch!—as she pinned to the wall Yasir Arafat, Kofi Annan, Bob Dole, David Duke, George H. W. Bush, H. Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and Laura Bush pulled viewers up to their full height about who she really was as a power interviewer. Next came those moments—Katie as Tinkerbell, flying through Rockefeller Plaza on Halloween; Katie dancing with Al Gore, with Patrick Swayze, with John Travolta; Katie singing with Tony Bennett, with queen of the backup singers Darlene Love, and (along with Matt and Al) with Stevie Wonder—that had already risen like cream to the top of viewers’ memories.

  Barbara Walters watched the May 31 show—and the preceding shows, from April 6 on—with the rue of a pathbreaker who would never, understandably, quite stop licking her wounds. She mused in her 2008 memoir:

  I can’t help but contrast my experience with what happened to Katie Couric when she left NBC.
There was little uproar over the salary CBS was giving her, a reported $15 million a year. NBC gave her the most glorious send-off—a three-hour retrospective preceded by two weeks of tributes, messages from celebrities and high-profile politicians, special music written for her, and past clips of her work from her years on Today. There was a gala going-away party and an equally warm welcome awaiting her at CBS. . . .

  Perhaps my experience was the price of being first, and in a very different time. Back in 1976 you could freely attack a woman for wanting to do a so-called man’s job, especially in the holier-than-thou men-only news departments. Many people still believed that women were supposed to know their place—and stay in it. There were few women in front of the camera and fewer still in any kind of executive position. Today . . . that same attitude would not only be politically incorrect, but the backlash would be enormous.

  Walters’s misty-eyed hurt failed to take into account that many at NBC were thrilled and relieved to see Katie go, and that her “welcome” at CBS would turn out to be more complicated than “warm.”

  • • •

  ONE PERSON WHOSE BLESSING KATIE definitely wanted was Walter Cronkite. “Katie wooed and won Walter,” says his forever producer, Sandy Socolow. “He was a big fan from afar, and when it was announced she was becoming CBS Evening News anchor, she took him out for dinner a couple of times.” Cronkite, in his dotage, was highly susceptible to charm. “He fell in love with Katie,” Socolow says. He’d been impressed that “she covered the Pentagon and other hard news.” Now, during the dinners, “he fell in love with her even more than before. She paid attention to him. And he’s an egomaniac.”

  Katie embarked on a summer “listening tour” across America. Patterned after Hillary Clinton’s listening tour when she decided to run for the Senate from New York, the series involved Katie flying to a variety of cities and taking questions, in auditoriums, from a diverse pool of citizens (selected, by CBS affiliate staffers, from people who’d filled out applications) about what issues mattered to them. Several insiders believe that that pretentious gimmick of a “rollout,” which was the brainstorm of Moonves and CBS spokesman Gil Schwartz, was a mistake. One industry authority believes Katie would have been better served spending the summer honing her broadcasting skills. Bob Schieffer was an expertly conversational broadcaster, able to pack nuance into a folksy but serious sentence, while Katie read what her writers wrote for her. “Katie liked puns, and real people don’t talk in puns—it [ended up being] cutesy writing,” another CBS producer says. At the very least, as Andrew Tyndall puts it, Katie’s listening tour and CBS’s massive fanfare created inflated expectations.

  It also let Katie, prone to be stoked by attention, increase her brio about, and up the ante on, the Moonves-blessed incipient change of format. “This is not your grandfather’s newscast,” she told Good Housekeeping as she began to prepare for the show, for which she would also serve as managing editor. “I think people are ready for an anchor who’s multidimensional, who’s not so detached. I hope I do this job with humanity and heart. And intelligence.” By the time Kurt Andersen interviewed her, in a welcoming New York magazine piece—“Humor Is the New Gravitas”—just before her Evening News’s first broadcast, she was saying things that, while certainly A-for-effort in terms of thinking outside the box, were, in hindsight, flashing danger signs of what six-thirty news viewers didn’t want to watch. One key innovation in the broadcast was to be a ninety-second commentary by both ordinary citizens and well-known opinion purveyors, called “Free Speech.” Aside from the difficulty of reining in a verbal essay (especially by a non-media-trained speaker) to the tight time limit within the twenty-two-minute-long broadcast, there was Katie’s trendy wish list for guest speakers: director Nora Ephron, popular novelist Carl Hiaasen, and urban liberals’ favorite TV pundit-host, Jon Stewart. “I love Jon,” Katie said. “He and I have talked about” his appearing on her broadcast “down the line.”

  Says a woman who’d worked with Dan Rather, “Moonves misjudged the market. He thought if he brought the Today show to nighttime, they’d increase the audience.” Says a CBS News producer: “They wanted to reinvent the evening news.” “They” were Les Moonves, Sean McManus, Couric, and the producers. The venerable six-thirty news broadcast had been a classy fixture of the American conversation almost since the beginning of television, but it was also a relic of another era: before twenty-four-hour cable and the Internet, which gave the news in real time; before the complicated, constantly in-flux schedules of modern life. Especially at CBS, the audience for the six-thirty news was old and aging; Moonves’s and Couric’s planned “reinvention”—whether a creative move or a desperate one, whether admirably conceived or ill conceived—was a bold risk, a shoving of all poker chips to the middle of the table.

  Whatever would happen—and a lot would—one had to admire Katie’s insistence on retaining her own personality and her defiant eschewal of affectation of any kind. Just as she was taking the reins, she told Glamour, “I think most people equate humor with intelligence and comfort in one’s own skin. I’m proud I have these qualities. It’s funny, through all this discussion of gravitas, I realized I don’t really want to have gravitas. I want authenticity. I want good journalism—but gravitas is sort of a pretentious word.” Her goal, she went on to say, was “to make news compelling. So much of it feels like newzak, news that’s just there but doesn’t sink in or register.” That latter point was dangerous. It was one thing to stick to her guns as an authentic, pomposity-loathing broadcaster—that was her persona; that was Katie. It was another to think that the essential aspects of the packaging and broadcasting of the six-thirty news had to be changed—that was the content and form of the show, and it involved the expectations of viewers who had been watching the show for a long time.

  Katie’s executive producer, hired by McManus, was Rome Hartman; Hartman’s second in command was Paul Friedman, brought over from ABC, where he had worked with Diane and, most significantly, with Peter Jennings, next to whom Friedman seemed to believe all other anchors, especially female ones, failed. The highly experienced Friedman was key—and temperamentally stronger than Hartman. “Sean hired him over because Sean didn’t know what he was doing; he only knew sports,” says one CBS senior staffer, a woman. That staffer and the Rather aide—both women—and a longtime CBS man outline how unfortunate the choice of Hartman and Friedman ultimately was in the show’s launch, which was rockier than it seemed to the outside world.

  Hartman, who had been at the network for years, came in from 60 Minutes. “Rome is about as straight-arrow as you get,” says the CBS man. “Traditional news guy, no nonsense. Not a good sense of humor. Not mean or anything, but kind of a military-like presence.” Yet there was something about Rome that Katie may have sensed she could control, believes the female Rather aide, who also, provocatively, says, from observation, “I don’t think Katie liked men. She surrounded herself with weak men.” Hartman “was weak,” declares veteran Richard Wald, who, like so many, watched with interest. Says an NBC producer, “Rome was a hand-holder. He had no power.” The CBS senior staffer: “Rome couldn’t control Katie, and [the innovations] were her ideas. Except ‘Free Speech,’ which was a horrible, ill-conceived idea, a Journalism 101 exercise. Paul Friedman was behind ‘Free Speech,’ and while he was very smart and very persuasive and could be charming, he was an angry man.”

  The CBS man remembers the Katie-and-Rome process: “The show would be structured one way at nine a.m., before Katie arrived. At one, when she arrived, the whole show would change. She’d say, ‘Oh, no, we’re not doing that. We’re doing this.’ Rome didn’t think the way she did. So he would then spin it back the other way. You’d end up with some kind of in-between, neither fish nor fowl. That’s why the show was a mess. Most of us were going, ‘What is it? What do you really want?’ I can’t tell you how hard the executive producers tried to figure out how to make this work around her. They all trie
d to figure out, ‘What is Katie’s greatest strength? How can we highlight that, and still make it a hard news broadcast?’ Which is what our audience wanted. They tried in many different ways.” In the end, it was thought that Rome couldn’t contain Katie.

  If there was confusion with the Katie-Hartman relationship, there was outright conflict in the Katie-Friedman relationship, and it augured minor disaster. The senior staffer is blunt: “Paul hated Katie, and she hated him. She hated him. She told me that, and she let Sean know.” In the end, because of Hartman’s weak helming and Katie’s and Friedman’s strong negative feelings for each other, “nobody ended up respecting Sean. He came across as very weak.”

  But far beyond hurting McManus, the retooled show would be Katie’s Waterloo. Animus she had skirted for decades at NBC would now be pelleted at her at CBS.

  • • •

  YET AT THE very beginning, all seemed shiny. On Tuesday, September 5, 2006—when, at six thirty p.m., none other than Walter Cronkite’s* stentorian voice announced “the CBS Evening News, with Katie Couric,” and the first female solo anchor, in white jacket over dark shell, said, “Hi, everyone,” in front of a sleek new set—there was a sense of utter jubilation from the CBS News brass. “A high-ranking executive was standing right next to me and he was, ‘This is it!’” says the CBS man. “The management completely drank the Kool-Aid. They were all convinced.”

  In that first broadcast, between delivering the news, Katie interviewed New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman about the war on terror, and she showed photographs of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s four-and-a-half-month-old daughter, Suri, a day in advance of their exclusive cover story in Vanity Fair. Says the senior staffer: “The tone was set that first day, with the Suri baby pictures. Too fluffy. Too Today show.” As she signed off, a long shot showed her standing, leaning casually against her desk. You could see her fashionably fairly short (but not very short) skirt and her appropriately high (but not too high) heels.