For the full week of April 23, GMA surpassed Today by 180,000 viewers, a far better performance than the week of April 9, when it had led by only thirty-one thousand. Elliott celebrated by leasing—though not buying—a black BMW X5 at a dealership in Connecticut. (His assistant had bullied him into trading up from the Volvo he’d been driving.) Sherwood celebrated by sending this e-mail:
Congratulations, team!
You won by 180K!
Smallest demo gap (105K) since 1995.
And…GMA Saturday won the entire month of April in the demo.
Great work.
Play your game.
Keep it going.
This was the key “second election” that Stephanopoulos had described earlier. What made the win especially significant was that Lauer had been mostly present that week, unlike during the week of the first win, when he had been—as NBC never got tired of pointing out—gone the whole time. GMA had proven it could beat the Today starting lineup. (Or you could read the results another way, and say they showed that if Lauer was beatable he wasn’t worth the truckloads of money that NBC had just agreed to caravan out to his estate in the Hamptons.) To any kind of doubter, however, Today show spokeswoman Megan Kopf offered the same response: “We’re still winning in the demo!” True, thought Sherwood, but you’re also living in denial.
May 2012 was a seesaw month in the a.m. ratings. Some mornings, Today showed some of its old spunk. On April 30, for instance, the NBC show teased three exclusive interviews: the mother of a missing Fort Bragg soldier; Whitney Houston’s ex-husband Bobby Brown, in his first interview since her death; and Ryan O’Neal, Farrah Fawcett’s longtime lover, who was promoting a memoir. GMA, that same day, pulled off the kind of stunt that used to be a hallmark of Today, opening at seven a.m. with Stephanopoulos standing atop 1 World Trade Center, the skyscraper under construction in downtown Manhattan, to mark the day it became the city’s tallest building, surpassing the Empire State Building’s 102 stories. To the viewer the slugfest may have looked like a draw, and it almost was, but ultimately Today won by an average of seventy-six thousand viewers for the week and retook the lead.
As far as ratings went, unpredictability was now the norm. Anything could have happened the next week—until Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, called ABC’s Washington bureau chief Robin Sproul on Tuesday, May 8, and offered Roberts an exclusive sit-down with President Obama the next day.
This wasn’t just any old presidential interview. Obama had been sidestepping questions about his views on same-sex marriage for several days, or ever since Vice President Joe Biden declared to NBC’s David Gregory that he himself was “absolutely comfortable” with the idea. Obama, who had said before that his views on gay marriage were “evolving,” had been planning on saying later in the year that he was in favor of such unions. But he and his aides had concluded that because Biden had been so blabby, he now had to speak out sooner.
The White House tends to rotate big interviews among the networks. In this case they wanted an interviewer who’d concentrate on the issue at hand, not horse-race politics. Rivals speculated that Roberts’s cordial relationship with the Obamas and factors like her spirituality and her race also came into play. (Religiously affiliated Americans and African Americans were more likely to oppose same-sex marriage, according to polls, and having Roberts as the vessel for the news might help politically, the theory went.) ABC naturally wanted to say yes to the offer right away and start making arrangements for Roberts’s travel to Washington. But when Pfeiffer called Sproul, Roberts was at her doctor’s office in Manhattan with a drill in her back. Another portion of her bone marrow was being extracted for testing. Cibrowski knew why Roberts wasn’t in her office that afternoon, but he couldn’t tell his colleagues, who spent three hours frantically trying to find her.
ABC executives feared that if the White House couldn’t get a confirmation soon, it would take the interview to another network. Indeed, Pfeiffer was going to offer it to NBC’s Savannah Guthrie if Roberts couldn’t commit to it. Roberts said, “I just remember coming out of the doctor’s office, and seeing all these e-mails and voice mails from all these people, from Ben Sherwood and others, almost like, ‘Where the hell have you been?’”
When she connected with Sherwood, he told her, “You’re going to be interviewing the president tomorrow.”
Roberts was surprised, but on the other hand she was in an emotional zone where really nothing was surprising. “Ben, you have to trust me right now,” she said. The interview “sounds great. I’m happy. But I need a few minutes; can I call you back?”
She could tell that Sherwood was shocked by her response, and yet she needed time to get her bearings. She was in pain from the procedure, tired from the MDS, and now she had to prepare for this interview. “It should be the happiest time of my life, career-wise, and I’m just not fully engaged,” she said later, recalling how she’d felt that day.
“But I think it made me better,” she added. “Because you think it’s the be-all end-all to be number one, and to have a career-changing—life-changing, for many people—interview with the president of the United States, and for me to be like, ‘Appreciate it. It’s great. But you know what? In the scheme of things, hmmm, it just really…’ That trite thing that people say, ‘Oh, it puts it in perspective’? There is truth behind that.”
She paused for a moment. Since the diagnosis, “I don’t take myself as seriously anymore,” she said. “I know what we do is important and it’s a service that we provide. But it’s really centered me and made me—as you know my favorite word is freakin’—so freakin’ mellow. It really, really has.”
After leaving the doctor’s office, Roberts called Sherwood back and calmly started to strategize about the interview. The network expected that Obama would “make news” about same-sex marriage, but no one knew for sure. “Honestly, we didn’t know for sure until the words came out of his mouth,” said one producer.
Roberts was supposed to appear on The View and The 700 Club on Wednesday the ninth to help promote her mother Lucimarian’s new memoir. Both bookings were hastily rescheduled, and Roberts and Cibrowski left GMA a few minutes early on Wednesday for a ten a.m. Delta flight from LaGuardia to Reagan National Airport for the interview at the White House. When they arrived at LaGuardia at nine thirty, they found out the flight had been canceled. They scurried to get on a US Airways flight instead, and landed in DC at eleven thirty, two hours before the interview’s scheduled start time. While they were on their way to the Hay-Adams Hotel across from the White House, where Roberts was going to change outfits, a taxi bumped into their town car. While the drivers got out to take pictures of the damage, Roberts abandoned the hotel plan. Cibrowski got out of the car and she changed clothes in the backseat. Then they proceeded straight to the White House. “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama told Roberts, who hurried onto ABC with the news at three p.m. She made it home to New York in time to make dinner for her mom.
The next morning, GMA sought to make the most of her huge presidential scoop. Three minutes before airtime, Cibrowski reminded the hosts of what he wanted: “A lot of chitchat off the top about the interview.” That was no problem: the GMA hosts did chitchat the way Horowitz did Scarlatti. All the morning shows led with Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage. James Goldston, watching the NBC monitor above his head while straddling a stool behind Cibrowski, predicted that Today would “cut their way around us so they don’t have to use our interview.” In fact the show did use the ABC interview clips, complete with the graphic that read “EXCLUSIVE,” but Goldston pointed out, “There’s no Robin! It’s as if Obama is talking to himself!” GMA aired about five minutes of the half-hour interview, followed by a thirty-second video of Mitt Romney’s response. Cibrowski thought it was a good morning’s work.
So, apparently, did America. On May 15, GMA announced that it had scored its third weekly win over Today. And in the demo, it
s margin of defeat was getting smaller…just 139,000.
But if Today was demonstrating that it didn’t know how to gracefully inhabit the number two role, GMA was perhaps revealing itself as an inexperienced winner. Caught flat-footed by its own success, it passed up on a chance to promote itself on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live. Nor did GMA act fast when its longtime concert booker quit in the spring, leaving GMA without a summer concert series to rival Today’s. Although the booker had a reputation among the staff for being prickly, at least she had secured A-listers like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé the previous year; now GMA had B- and C-level acts like Robin Thicke and the Beach Boys and a lot of blank spaces on its schedule. While Usher was kicking off the summer concert series on Today, GMA unveiled a summer lineup with six Fridays listed as “TBA,” for “to be announced.” “They really must love this band ‘TBA,’” Jim Bell said in an e-mail. (Subsequently “all the great folks here worked their asses off to fill that schedule,” Cibrowski said.)
With Curry dispatched to France for the Cannes International Film Festival and Usher on the plaza, Today won the week of May 14 by sixty-four thousand viewers. But NBC couldn’t keep its mojo going. GMA moved back into first place the week of May 21, thanks in part to the season finale of Dancing with the Stars (and maybe Maddie the coonhound, who made it to New York by Friday). For the whole month of May, GMA and Today were effectively tied, with Today ahead by just fifteen thousand viewers. What a difference a year had made. “The lead in last May’s sweep was 780,000—we reduced it by 98.3%!” Schneider wrote in an e-mail, still amazed that GMA, after struggling for so long, was now ascending to first place so fast.
Chapter 15
“I Am Going to Beat This”
Ann Curry was not the only woman who would take leave of the morning scene in the summer of 2012. Robin Roberts, under strikingly different circumstances, would also be making an exit. Roberts’s doctors wanted her to start the chemotherapy that would precede a bone marrow transplant fairly soon, and so the GMA cohost would need to tell viewers about her illness, and say what she was going to say about her long-term prognosis and her no doubt prolonged absence in the midst of the wildly seesawing ratings race. But first she had to break the news of her illness to Ben Sherwood.
Roberts and Sherwood sat down in his gray-and-blue-hued office on the fifth floor of ABC on Friday, June 1, for what would turn out to be, as Sherwood told it, “an extremely emotional” conversation. He said later that his message to her was “I need to change your marching orders. ’Cause everybody’s marching orders here are to win the championship, to be great, great journalists, great storytellers, and win the championship. But for you the marching orders are different now. It’s to take care of yourself first and foremost.”
Remember: a little more than a year before, when Today seemed permanently affixed in first place, people at ABC had openly wondered whether Sherwood was going to replace Roberts with another female cohost. Maybe Lara Spencer would take her place, they speculated, or maybe ABC would hire Amy Robach away from NBC for the job. Over at NBC, meanwhile, people had whispered that Roberts was unhappy at ABC. (NBC had been intrigued enough by the prospect of poaching her to test her against its own female cohosts in focus groups. Roberts was off the charts: “Robin could do no wrong,” one person who saw the research said.) Sherwood’s research showed the same thing. Roberts’s Q Score was higher than anyone else’s on morning TV. She was, simply put, his star. And now she was facing the very real possibility of death. When Goldston heard the news from Sherwood later that morning, he sort of crumpled in his desk chair. “After all that she had achieved, after leading the team in that way, for her to get hit like that, it was unbelievable to me,” he said.
What would happen next? Both men were skilled enough in the ways of network television to know that the reality and the perception mattered equally. It was critical that ABC stand by Roberts through her serious illness, and also that it be seen standing by her. It was not that her colleagues all along the hierarchy didn’t truly care about her well-being, but the situation had to be carefully managed. She couldn’t just disappear from the show one day, then hole up in a hospital somewhere until TMZ got a tip from some disgruntled orderly and broke the news. She would have to tell viewers about her months-long medical leave in a proper way that sent out all the right messages. After that, Sherwood and Goldston knew, ABC couldn’t leave Roberts’s chair empty; they would need to come up with substitute hosts who were good enough to replace her but who did not appear to be auditioning for her job. If it was done right, Roberts’s diagnosis, self-care, and medical treatment could be transformed into a classic television teaching moment and a recruiting tool for bone marrow donors. Done poorly, the episode could turn off viewers and ruin the precious and oh-so-fragile chemistry of GMA.
ABC, unfortunately, had some experience in this area. In 2005, Peter Jennings, the anchor of World News Tonight for thirty-two years, was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. On April 5, shortly after finding out that he had the disease, the sixty-seven-year-old Jennings, who had spent half his life at ABC, shared the news with viewers in a videotaped message. He strained to get the words out. “I will continue to do the broadcast; on good days my voice will not always be like this,” Jennings said. But he never anchored World News again. He died on August 7 of that year. “So many ABC News viewers experienced the Peter Jennings situation” as a personal tragedy, said a GMA producer when Roberts’s diagnosis was announced. “We’re not doing that this time.”
There was no need to. For one thing, five years earlier Roberts had publicly battled cancer and survived it; she’d demonstrated what was possible. This time she faced a very different disease with a very different course of treatment. She had hope in the form of a near-perfect bone marrow match: her older sister Sally-Ann, fifty-nine, a morning news anchor in New Orleans. And she had a deep desire to continue cohosting in the months preceding the transplant. Her daily presence would provide a measure of comfort to her as well as to regular GMA viewers.
Roberts knew she would soon have to share her news with her colleagues (except for Champion, who had known since April) and viewers, because pretreatment for the transplant was to begin in mid-June, and the catheter that doctors would be inserting into her arm, to deliver chemotherapy through something called a PICC line, would be visible on television, even when she wore outfits with sleeves. She spoke first with her cohosts, telling Stephanopoulos individually and then Elliott and Spencer jointly.
“It was one of those ‘Hey guys, I want to talk to you about something after the show’” moments, Elliott recalled. “But when she went to tell us, she…she couldn’t start,” he said. “Like, everything caught. So your mind’s doing that instant math. Recalculating, recalculating, recalculating. ‘What could this be?’ In the span of two or three seconds, you’re like, ‘Fuck, she’s sick.’ And at first you think, you don’t want to hear her say, ‘I have breast cancer again.’ But then she starts telling us…”
What Roberts said, sitting in her dressing room, was “I have something really scary.”
She took a deep breath.
“It’s this disease…”
Pause.
As soon as she said “MDS” and described it briefly, Roberts told her work friends that Googling the disease could be misleading. Since most people diagnosed with it were much older than she was, the public statistics on mortality rates were skewed toward depressing. Her doctor, in fact, had told her, “I don’t want you to look it up,” Roberts told Elliott and Spencer, adding, “Any questions you have, you must ask me.”
Spencer called the moment “classic Robin”—more worried about her castmates than about herself. “She was like, ‘I don’t want you to get upset.’ She was so worried about burdening us. I just remember her total confidence, which, consequently, made us totally confident that she’s going to beat it.”
Cibrowski and Roberts scheduled the on-air announcement for Monday, June 11, one day before she
was to begin pretreatment. The top producers and Schneider, the news division spokesman, spent the preceding weekend in meetings and on conference calls hashing out what to say and what not to say. (They were careful, for instance, never to put a timetable on Roberts’s treatment and return.) While they discussed issues of tone and timing, the network’s medical correspondent, Dr. Richard Besser, wrote an explanation of the disease for ABC’s Web site. That same weekend, Stephanopoulos e-mailed Roberts a long, thoughtful note that staffers later said brought the two of them—the odd couple of GMA—closer together. “This—in a tragic way—has helped to strengthen the team,” said one producer.
To preserve security—most of the staff still didn’t know—Roberts’s announcement appeared as a blank spot on the GMA rundown at 8:50 a.m. Cibrowski put it there, at the tail end of the broadcast, because he thought it would be difficult for both the on-air talent and the viewers to return to regular morning show business afterward. One of the GMA stage managers, Eddie Luisi, had the forethought to Velcro a box of tissues onto the couch where the five hosts would sit for the conversation.
“I am going to beat this,” said Roberts, sitting between Stephanopoulos and Elliott, as she gripped both their hands. Then, perhaps trying to preempt criticism of ABC for keeping her on the job, she assured viewers, “I want to be here. I don’t have to be here. I want to be here while I can.” Everyone around her confirmed that was indeed the case.
Roberts, while making the announcement, didn’t say how long she would stay on the show before leaving for her bone marrow transplant. She wanted to make it clear, though, that she would be back. She was a fighter, she said, and she’d fight off MDS the same way she’d fought off breast cancer in 2007. Tens of thousands of supportive comments soon piled up on Facebook and Twitter, the vast majority from the women who comprised about 70 percent of the regular GMA audience. Some shared their own personal experiences with MDS, and others changed their profile pictures to pictures of Roberts. One person wrote, “God will be inundated with prayers.” In the coming days and weeks Roberts would scroll through the comments and, buoyed by the support, occasionally reply to them. The contrast between this use of social media and the tarring and feathering of Matt Lauer on social media could not have been more striking.
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