Up All Night

by Lisa Napoli

  But this was all about bolstering PR. The court ruling would allow CNN to launch on time and, he added, “Barring satellite problems, we won’t be signing off until the world ends. We’ll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event. We’ll play the national anthem only one time, on the first of June, and when the end of the world comes, we’ll play ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ before we sign off.”

  If planning to stay on through the apocalypse didn’t show he was serious about news, what possibly could?

  A schedule was distributed to the curious pack of reporters. The programming day would feature a farm report at six a.m., a two-hour news and features show at noon, a two-hour nightly newscast at eight, a national call-in talk show at ten, and sports highlights at eleven p.m. Next, a slick promotional film was screened. It promised “news when it’s news, not history” and “the kind of news the world’s been waiting for.” The world had been changing, but television news hadn’t kept up. It continued:

  Recent national surveys show that 36% of all TV viewers want more TV news. They want better reporting, better coverage, more follow-up. National newsmen may tell you that’s the way it is. At the Cable News Network, we believe that’s the way it was, and that’s why you’ll be looking to CNN.

  That is, if you could find it. For it turned out that the seven and a half million homes Ted had been promising prospective advertisers would carry CNN at launch—half the available cable audience—hadn’t materialized. Though salesmen scrambled to sell the service, the projections kept being sliced in half.

  Now, after having survived seemingly insurmountable obstacles, it seemed only 1.7 million subscribers would be wired for this revolutionary new service at its debut—a tiny sliver of the network audience of seventy-six million people. Channel 17 had a wider audience.

  This was also a fraction of what Reese’s old pals at the ITNA would soon reach with the new nightly half-hour show, Independent Network News, about to debut on thirty indie stations around the country. This offering was a natural outgrowth of the ITNA news service Reese had launched years earlier, and another testament to the growing zest on the part of stations, and viewers, for news. If Reese had stayed put, he could have had his own show without leaving New York.

  Instead, he’d traded the city in order to build a network for Ted, and now, yet again, the network was on shaky ground.

  The paltry audience CNN would reach was not just a matter of vanity and relevance. It was practicality. Without eyeballs, the all-news network couldn’t sell ads, and without ads, CNN—already a loss leader before creating one frame of programming, and with no fat-cat parent corporation to support it—couldn’t possibly last a year.

  1 As for the new Progressive Club, it was ultimately dissolved, and the new facility converted into a branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association.

  2 The newscast at WRET launched on September 1, 1978, after the station had been awarded the NBC affiliation earlier in the year. In his bid, Ted had to promise to spend a million dollars to begin a local newscast. It’s not entirely clear why he wished to affiliate the station with a network, given his misgivings about the television establishment, except perhaps to bolster the value of the station in order, ultimately, to sell it.

  3 Ted had said of Brown, “I guess you could say it’s an Uncle Remus–type relationship.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Reese’s Pieces

  In the winter of 1979, Jane Maxwell’s life was, by most people’s measures, moving along at a perfect clip. She’d just married her longtime beau, Rick Brown, whom she’d met at her first job out of college—at TVN, the news service backed by Coors. There, she’d worked her way up from secretary to news assistant at a time when women were finally making inroads in the business. Reese thought highly enough of the couple that he’d hired them at his next venture, ITNA.

  Being Reese’s number two meant that Jane’s job was to wrangle the day’s news she’d gathered from member stations into a package of stories that got sent out late each afternoon, just in time for their evening newscasts. She was famous for sweet-talking non-members into selling her video when the news warranted. Everyone said she gave “good phone.”

  She and Rick had decorated their apartment on West Seventy-Fifth Street to their liking, installing the perfect curtains and parquet floors. A private garden out back served as their own personal oasis, complete with a hibachi and an umbrella to shield against the sun. It was perfect for the days they didn’t wish to venture to nearby Central Park, which they typically walked through on their way to work at the Daily News building.

  When Reese called before Christmas to invite them to join him at CNN in Atlanta, they found themselves at an impasse. Jane dismissed the offer right away. Rick, however, was intrigued. Since childhood, he’d been fascinated by the power of information and how new technologies could propel communications. At age twelve, he’d sleuthed out the names and addresses of all the kids in his neighborhood, then printed a directory using rubber type. Later, at the Associated Press, he found himself intrigued by a service called LaserPhoto, which could dispatch a picture at high-resolution in just seconds. Transmitting news in various forms, as far as he was concerned, was the highest calling.

  Just as Ted needed Reese, Reese needed Rick and Jane, not just because they were longtime allies he knew he could trust but also because, like him, they were guerilla fighters—comfortable with the “Bangladesh bazaar” style of news and not the spendy, Saks Fifth Avenue variety to which network veterans were accustomed. Though his would be the most modern, up-to-date newsroom on the planet—the first computerized, satellite-propelled newsroom on earth!—CNN would have to adhere to a slim budget, a quarter of what the networks had to spend to fill a fraction of the time. Reese needed someone who understood the ins and outs of buying satellite feed time, the politics and pricing of the phone company’s “long lines,” and negotiating the alphabet soup of call letters, network affiliations, and desk chiefs at the nation’s television stations. Jane would diligently scribble updates in her copy of the Television Factbook, the industry bible published annually that listed addresses, phone numbers, and market rankings. An explosion in Omaha? A bridge collapse in Dubuque? Jane, ever-composed and perpetually enveloped in a halo of cigarette smoke, knew exactly who to call, anywhere, for film from the scene of catastrophes, natural disasters, and crimes. Rick, for his part, understood how to get that material where it needed to be—like a cabdriver who instinctively knew which streets to cut through on the back roads to the airport. This adrenaline-fueled, air-traffic-control part of the business was hardly glamorous, but it would serve as the crucial backbone of the world’s first all-news channel.

  Anyone who’d worked in broadcast journalism had, at some point, wondered about whether or how news might one day flow continuously. But nobody was clear, exactly, on the mechanics of such a beast, nor what an all-news channel would or should look like. The very prospect of an endless stream of information was heady stuff, challenging the essence of what “news” was or could be. No longer would it be limited to what three networks could wedge into a half hour. Except in limited instances, a television newscast had never before lasted longer than that. The possibilities presented by a never-ending stream of news were mind-boggling—not to mention the implications. Mind-boggling, too, was the possibility that there might not always be something to report. Then what?

  Rick, a pensive fellow who liked to work through problems as puzzles, tried to imagine it.

  “You’re talking about this as if we’re going to accept the job,” Jane said.

  “Why wouldn’t we accept the job?” Rick said.

  “Look, I don’t want to do another ITNA or TVN,” she said. Those second-tier news services were synonymous with frustration. The budgetary limitations were just part of it. The deflating and constant reminder that they were David battling Goliath was wearying—the tedium of explaining to friends and family who could not see
the product she was helping to create. Yes, she worked in television, but it wasn’t a show on television anyone could actually see. It was, indeed, as Reese had described it, an “invisible newscast.”

  Jane’s resistance to joining Cable News Network was, lastly, geographically propelled. “I don’t want to leave New York,” she told her husband. “I don’t want to live down south, where Jews are not welcome.”

  And yet, Rick also knew that the man who’d replaced Reese at the ITNA unnerved his wife and had made life at the office more of a trial.

  “Essentially,” he asked her, “what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can just tell you what I don’t want to do.”

  “You want ABC or CBS to give you a call and make you an offer? You have more power doing what you do at ITNA. I think we should do it.”

  “Well, we’ll have to think about it.”

  In the spirit of compromise and adventure, the couple accepted Reese’s invitation to visit Atlanta, to talk with him and his wife, Pat, a skilled film editor who’d left CBS, where she’d worked for years, to join her husband in the film-free newsroom he was building at CNN. A fact-finding trip down south, to the land of Ted Turner, might help Jane and Rick make a more informed decision. Maybe, too, they’d get to meet this mythic man.

  Since he’d arrived in Atlanta full-time that August, Reese had been going out of his way to ensure that recruits who paid a visit did not intersect with Captain Outrageous. An encounter with Ted would inevitably lead to an inappropriate remark or action, causing the prospective employee to flee. He was quite sure that Rick and Jane, in particular, would not find CNN’s drawling, hyperactive, motor-mouthed patron to be their kind of guy.

  While Ted Turner was nowhere in sight during the couple’s brief foray south, they did encounter another Ted on the scene—Ted Kavanau. Unable to get a TV pilot off the ground, he had asked if Reese’s previous offer stood. Figuring he could use all the street fighters he could get, Reese made room for him as a senior producer. To Jane and Rick, there was something comforting about having another dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, and one they knew, in their midst.

  The tour of the musty old Progressive Club Reese conducted hardly persuaded Jane to switch her answer to yes. Maybe the place would look fabulous, some day, when it was done—but from the looks of it, a miracle would be necessary for that to occur by June 1. The pungent aroma of vagrancy perfumed every corner of Reese’s palace of news-to-be. In the run-down locker rooms that would one day serve as CNN’s studios, the proud papa could only see a thing of beauty. His guests, on the other hand, kept alert for scurrying rats.

  The condition of the surrounding neighborhood was no more convincing. What redeeming features there might be in metro Atlanta were hardly evident in midtown. A pall seemed cast over this vacant, sad, desolate area. A once-vibrant hot spot of nightclubs called Underground Atlanta had been torn apart by the construction of a new subway system. Where were the pedestrians? There appeared to be no authentic deli, not to mention decent bagels or pizza, to be had here. No newsstands from which to fetch the Sunday New York Times on Saturday night. Hailing a cab? Forget about it.

  Right before Rick and Jane were to head home, almost as an afterthought, Reese brought up the elephant in the room: jobs. He offered them each an annual salary of $22,500, a tiny increase over what they were currently earning. Jane fumed to herself. What an insult! Reese expected her to leave her family and home and the place she loved to parachute into the unknown in a half-baked city where they were sure to be working round-the-clock? For pennies more than she was currently earning?

  But, Reese said, the salary was the same one most behind-the-scenes recruits arriving with television experience would command.

  “The other thing is,” he added—Big Mo, with the hard-sell—“we have to have a yes or no when you leave today.”

  “Reese, can I talk to you in the hall?” Rick asked, confiding man to man rather than prospective employee to future boss. “She doesn’t want to come to Atlanta. If she’s going to come to Atlanta, she’s not going to come for that. If we get home and I can talk to her about it for a day or so, maybe, but I can tell you right now she’s not going to take it.”

  “We’re not doing that with anybody,” Reese said. “We’re not giving anyone a chance to think about it.” Reese had been waiting practically every minute of his forty-seven years on earth for this chance to have at the networks. He was living his dream! That everyone didn’t see it as theirs, and wouldn’t drop everything to be a part of it, didn’t compute.

  But Reese was well aware that he needed Rick and Jane among his troops, so he relented and extended his deadline to the next day at five o’clock. Burt Reinhardt ferried the couple to the airport in his boat of a car.

  “I don’t even know what you guys do, but Reese speaks very highly of you, and I guess I have to go along with it,” he said. “This is the place to be. This is the thing people will be talking about everywhere. It’s the new thing in news. If you’re at all thinking of not coming here, you really ought to.”

  “Wasn’t that our exit?” Rick said, as they sped past the airport turnoff.

  “Yes, yes,” Reinhardt said absentmindedly. “I always miss that exit.”

  Marooned in an antiseptic bar in Atlanta’s dumpy, under-construction airport after missing their flight because of the bad driving, Rick thoughtfully considered the pros and cons. Jane was speechless, glum. The distance between them was magnified by the seating arrangement on the plane: Jane assigned to the back, Rick up front. The silence in the taxi on the way home roared.

  Almost the minute they got into their apartment and switched on the lights, as Rick was thinking, “I have until tomorrow,” the phone rang.

  It was Reese—manic and insistent.

  “I was giving you time, but if I can’t get an answer right now . . .”

  “Give me an hour,” Rick said.

  “Tell Jane if she doesn’t want to work here, that’s okay. We can get her a job at one of the stations here,” Reese said. “But we want you.”

  Rick steeled himself for a firm round of husbandly persuasion. The curtains she loved laid on the windows just so. He knew from experience as a younger man, when he’d briefly served as a page on NBC’s Today, that the networks were hulking beasts—vaunted, self-serious institutions that demanded reverence and gave little love in return. Sure, it made for impressive cocktail-party chatter. (“You work there?”) Rising up the ranks, even for the most talented person, required a combination of timing, luck, and magnificent political maneuvering. Anyone who hadn’t themselves worked at the “nets” romanticized them, and just one foot in the door would cure you of that. Even Reese’s wife, Pat, had concurred.

  “The networks aren’t going to knock on the door,” Rick told his beloved bride. “You and I have something in common when it comes to this sort of thing. We don’t have a lot of energy to go do this. We’re not going to go looking for another job.” Here, jobs—good jobs, jobs on the ground floor of something new and potentially revolutionary—were being handed to them on a silver platter by a man they knew, who respected what they had to offer. Yes, it was a risky venture. Yes, it required uprooting their lives. But New York wasn’t going anywhere. They could always go back.

  Jane sighed a long sigh of deep resolve. She knew this was a great opportunity. Interesting, even. Maybe, possibly, exciting. It was the logistics that were awful.

  “You want to do it, I’ll go along. If you insist we go down there, then I’ll go along.”

  She held up one finger. “One year,” she said. “We will work there for one year.” They’d need to find someone to sublease their beloved apartment, so it would be waiting for them when they came back. “If they’re going to screw up my life like this, then give them a month notice,” she said.

  Besides, they’d forked over $150 for a pair of pricey tickets to Evita, the hottest show on Broadway—a delayed wedding gift to themse
lves. No reason to ditch that pleasure.

  On Sunday, February 10, the couple arrived in Atlanta and headed straight to their temporary home, a motel nicknamed Sleazy Jim’s, just blocks from the station, the same place Kavanau had landed. It wasn’t the proprietor, Jim, who was sleazy, but the establishment. The kitchenettes were tired, and a perpetual hairball drifted across the floor that no amount of sweeping could make disappear. With any luck, the two tissue-paper-thin blankets assigned to their room had been sanitized. Ladies of the evening milled around the block, hoping for customers. It was impossible to imagine a bright future emerging from this bleakness.

  Off they went to grab dinner at Mellow Mushroom, a pizza and sub and beer joint that catered to the nearby Georgia Tech crowd. Even before they took a bite, the couple knew that it could not possibly be a fraction as good as pizza back in New York. So repelled were they by this new city, they decided even the graffiti was subpar when they spotted some neatly written on the back of the stall in the restroom (“The Ayatolla is an Assaholla!”). Clearly the work of some lowlife ignoramus who’d never make it defacing the walls back on the Upper West Side. Their exile to a foreign land had begun. New York City was 863 miles away—so close, and so very far. In just 364 days, they could go home.

  The next day, the couple trudged out on foot—New Yorkers that they were, they had no car and would need to buy one—to their temporary work quarters at the white house. The run-down channel 17 headquarters at the end of the block seemed palatial by comparison, though that building’s inhabitants were more worried than ever that CNN was going to drag down Ted’s empire and jeopardize their jobs. A bus rumbled outside, shaking the tiny desks jammed side by side in the warren of rooms. Rick and Jane had been so distracted by the wretched condition of the country club that the state of this place hadn’t quite registered. Now, with launch day under four months away, it was beginning to fill up.

  It was of some comfort to learn they were in the company of network television news veterans, like executive producer Sam Zelman, perhaps most famous for defying critics in 1961 who said no one would watch more than fifteen minutes of news on television. After creating the first-ever hour-long daily local newscast in Los Angeles, mimicked by news executives in other markets, the networks had been inspired to expand their own newscasts from fifteen minutes to a half hour. By then, Zelman was working at CBS in New York. He recalled the “pandemonium” that resulted. That, of course, would pale in comparison to the “zero to twenty-four hours” ramp-up of CNN.