Cover Girl Confidential

by Beverly Bartlett

  I thought it was quite nice, really. I mean, it wasn’t Tiffany. But the Tiffany cups averaged eighty dollars apiece and this, the producer told me, she got for twelve bucks. For that money, I was awfully impressed. I need to start shopping at Crate & Barrel, I thought.

  But Hughes laughed at it. “It’s so flimsy,” he said, thumping it with his finger.

  I cringed.

  He patted me on the back in a reassuring way. “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll be fine for TV. The viewers won’t have to touch it.”

  When the clock struck 6 AM, we were all back on television, only this time Hughes and I had more serious looks on our faces. (Baxter could not possibly look more serious than he already had.)

  Surprisingly, it went just as well.

  We talked about the history of kidnapping, the modern scourge of terrorism, and the persistent cloud cover in Paris. Hughes was wondering aloud how someone “holds it together” in a time like this, and I said, “Well, I’ve known tough times myself. You just have to have faith.”

  Hughes bit his lip, patted my knee, and nodded gravely. “Ah yes,” he said, “the camp in Turkey.”

  Even Baxter looked touched as he rubbed his chin somberly.

  I had actually been talking about the whole experience with the bum water heater, so I was a bit uncomfortable about the knee patting and lip biting—until I watched it later on television and saw how riveting it was. (From the first day, I made a habit of watching the tapes later. If I concentrated on viewing the tapes the way a detached, objective observer would, I could tell what worked and what didn’t. That is how I learned. And one of the first things I learned was that Hughes and I were great TV from the start.)

  When the president’s niece was eventually released, days later, at the Ritz-Carlton in Paris, I was able to talk in great detail about the layout of the lobby—I had stayed there during the filming of the Jim Carrey movie. I also suggested a nearby café where she could get a good cup of espresso.

  “There’s a handy tip,” Hughes said as Baxter rolled his eyes.

  And when it turned out that the kidnapping was not the work of international terrorists, as everyone suspected, but a desperately out-of-hand fraternity prank, Hughes leapt in with surprising gusto, having won awards while working on his college paper for his coverage of fraternity initiation rituals. (Who knew?)

  At one point, he threw out an especially interesting statistic or two and quoted from a “famous” research journal on the subject—all off the top of his head. It was the live journalism equivalent of a slam dunk. “What is this,” Cal shouted triumphantly (and a bit too loudly) into our earpieces, “freakin’ 60 Minutes?”

  Hughes’s long dissertation impressively filled what would have otherwise been an excruciatingly long stretch of live coverage of the accused being driven to the courthouse in a white van. (Brian Williams, we later learned, resorted to reading from a world atlas about typical weather patterns in springtime Paris—saying that it would appear from the blooms along the roadway that the season had arrived as scheduled. “See,” Cal said. “Brian should have had a weatherman. Where’s Roker when they need him?”)

  When Hughes began his impressive dissertation about fraternities, I had just reached for my teacup. I’d been able, by this point in the week, to upgrade to a simple Wedgwood White, which appeared to be more acceptable to Hughes—though still affordable. (I got the cup and saucer for less than fifty dollars.) I stopped the cup midair, not yet to my lips, and allowed myself to look somewhat awestruck when Hughes began his insightful run of frat-prank commentary.

  “Well,” I said, when Hughes had finished and Cal’s 60 Minutes comment had stopped ringing in my ear. “Aren’t you all that and a bag of chips?”

  That was the first time I winked on the GUP network, though it was to Hughes, not the viewer.

  So that’s how it happened. That cheap European map was not quite three weeks old when the executives at GUP realized they had something special in Hughes and me. Our show got its third name, It’s Morning Now with Addison and Hughes, and was added to the permanent schedule.

  I suppose if I am to be remembered for anything—well, aside from the arrest and the possible deportation—it would probably be for the way I always opened It’s Morning Now. When I die, they will drag out some grainy video of it, and people of a certain age will say, “Oh yes, I remember all the fuss about that.” Although if I get deported and if Cassie is right about how long I’ll last in my father’s homeland, the video won’t be all that grainy.

  I don’t remember how it got started really, whose idea it was, whether I liked it initially; thought it was smart enough. But it is there on the tape of the first show, and it’s on every show after that. Every morning they would play the opening music and then the camera would zoom in on me as I sipped tea from a china cup. By the time the camera was close enough that my face filled the entire screen, I’d peer over the rim, wink mischievously, and say: “Wake up, honey. It’s morning now!”

  Cal said it was my “signature sentence,” and it was he who paid for the huge moving billboard, perched at the top of Times Square, which replayed it for the world, over and over again. My big brown eyes—two stories high—peered over a giant cup, cartoonish steam rising from it. In my left palm, a saucer was balanced. My right pinkie was extended in mock elegance. I was winking. Over and over, all day long. No matter where you stood on the streets below, it seemed that winking eye was winking right at you, and my mouth was moving and you could read my lips. “Wake up, honey. It’s morning now.”

  It was spoofed regularly on Saturday Night Live. At one point, David Letterman begged me—begged me—to repeat it on Late Show. And when I did, he mopped his brow as if he was feeling a little overheated and muttered “Wow.”

  The president even weighed in during a photo op at a Virginia military post, asking the reveille player (in a jokey way) whether he’d considered just playing a clip of “that TV woman with the sultry voice saying ‘Wake up, honey.’?”

  My mother kept begging me to stop. “Your father,” she would say, “your father does not approve at all.”

  But that’s what Cal wanted and that’s what Cal got. I constantly feared that my “signature” would become stale. But Cal said it was as fresh on the week I was arrested as it had been on day one. And I suppose the ratings bore him out.

  Not that It’s Morning Now was ever an unqualified hit. It never drew the audience that Today, Good Morning America, or even The Early Show attracted. But we had “special viewers,” the sort of hip, sophisticated, high-spending young people who loved to buy organic coffee blends, nondetergent cleansers, and overpriced and unreliable cars. Our viewers were an advertiser’s dream.

  Suddenly my old celebrity friends—and a few new ones—were in touch. Denzel sent me a couple of scripts, jotting notes in the margin about how much he would love to work with me. I ran into Paris while shopping for Fabergé teacups at Scully & Scully. She asked for my number and saved it to her cell phone right on the spot. Woody kept inviting me to Soon-Yi’s parties, during which he’d follow me around with an embarrassing puppy-dog air. (Uncomfortable!) Will and Jada kept leaving messages, saying I must fly over for dinner, but I put them off. I didn’t have time to go to LA. (Besides, Tommy Lee hinted to me that they tend to get carried away with the karaoke.) Keanu told Rosie that I was his “dream date.” Sarah Jessica and Matt wanted me to babysit.

  President Samson Briarwood himself gave our show an impromptu endorsement during an in-depth interview he and the first lady gave to Oprah a few months after his niece was rescued.

  “The senator and I were consumed with worry, of course—even after word came that my sister’s daughter had been released.” (This sentence, historians say, will be forever significant because it is the first time a US president publicly used a title for his wife other than first lady.)

  “But,” President Briarwood continued, as the first lady/senator nodded in agreement, “when I heard t
hat guy on the GUP network speak so elegantly about the history of the sort of violence my niece had endured, and then when I saw Addison speak so movingly about having faith in hard times, well, somehow I knew everything was going to be okay. Really, I couldn’t take my eyes off her . . .”

  Senator Margaret Clemons-Briarwood stopped nodding and gave a sharp glance toward her husband.

  “I mean it,” the president said. “I couldn’t take my eyes off the coverage, I’m saying.”

  He chuckled. “We’ve been watching that guy and Addison ever since,” he said.

  “Good grief,” Hughes said, when we heard about the president’s comment. “Oh please,” I added. But the network was delighted. Cal was incredulous. “The president watches us? Really?” he kept asking. (We had all assumed the reveille comment had been scripted to make him appear “hip.”) “CNN, Fox, all the networks reported on his niece’s kidnapping and the president watched a couple of Hollywood Squares rejects yammer on like they know something?”

  Hughes and I each cringed. First of all, Hughes wasn’t even on Hollywood Squares. And I was, I hasten to point out, not rejected by them. But we couldn’t help but laugh when Cal finished up his tirade by yelling: “We’re a phenomenon, baby!”

  Even Baxter grinned and pumped his fist in the air in a charmingly goofy manner.

  We were a phenomenon. And I believe we rose to the occasion. Hughes and I really “became” our roles, you know. We reinvented ourselves as journalists. We inhaled news. We lived on information. (Well, I did. Hughes also had salad dressing.)

  I took to reading three newspapers a day and two books a week, usually of the ponderous historical sort. With private coaching and careful study of past tapes, I eventually became a disciplined interviewer. Soon I fancied myself an expert on the European Union, the Middle East, and the Far Eastern financial markets.

  Hughes was like a mentor to me. He knew the right papers to read, the right books to purchase. Left to my own devices, I would have been getting my news from Salon.com and studying Middle East coverage through serial romances with sheiks on the cover. But my mind positively blossomed under Hughes’s tutelage.

  Baxter settled into his role as well. He stewed, but in a very affable way, according to all the magazines. They used words like curmudgeonly. They found his rumpled hair and wrinkled clothes inexplicably attractive. And mothers, in particular, loved the way he worried and fretted and fussed over the weather. “The only person who cares more than I do about my kids getting wet feet on the way to school,” wrote one fan, “is that curmudgeonly Baxter Bailey.”

  No hip young audience, however, would stand for a steady diet of disciplined interviews on foreign financial markets—much less public agonizing about the possibility of school-children in wet socks. So we interspersed the real news and weather reports with the latest antics of the Olsen twins or yet another “special studio performance” by Clay Aiken.

  “Boy howdy, you sure can sing,” I’d tell Clay, and I would really mean it. (Larry King had pulled me aside at a party once and told me the trick is to give the impression that you really mean it. Also, he said, “It never hurts to throw in a folksy colloquialism.”)

  We gave viewers the news of the day, but we also gave them tips on cooking crêpes or planting petunias or cutting clutter. And our “sources” for these stories were not experts in any normal sense of the word. Penélope Cruz would explain about petunias. Catherine Zeta-Jones would take us on a tour of her file cabinet. Jennifer Love Hewitt shared her crêpe recipe. (Has she ever actually eaten a crêpe? I certainly haven’t.)

  Real journalists, trained journalists, experienced journalists, were universally appalled. So was Julie Chen. “The final irrevocable blurring of news and entertainment”—that was the conclusion of a solemn Washington Post editorial. A lot of people, at least a lot of media critics, seemed to believe that you couldn’t care about the Olsen twins and also follow the news about Syria. They thought that if you cared about Clay, you couldn’t care about Chad. (The African nation, I mean.) They thought discussion of crêpes and clutter left no room for discussions of corporate ethics or judicial confirmation hearings.

  Scholarly journals were soon filled with long-winded articles about how dreadful the whole thing was. Commentators wrung their hands about me at their oh-so-serious broadcast seminars. They threw darts at Hughes and me, I am told, in postseminar cocktail hours.

  The only thing that reined in the criticism at all was the “real” journalists’ sensitivity toward being perceived as picking on me, a person of color. They did not mind at all suggesting they were too good for Hughes Sinclair, the effete child of a former Supreme Court justice and an accomplished ballerina. But they did not want to suggest they were too good for me, the Nebraska-raised offspring of a pig-blood mopper and his veiled Wal-Mart greeter wife. Picking on Hughes was sport. Picking on me would be mean.

  “Addison McGhee is an inspiration to all Americans,” wrote an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. “But, as much as it pains us to say this, she is not a reporter.”

  “Oh, la-di-da,” Hughes had said to that, leaping to my defense in a way that flattered me. “As if that should matter.”

  But the thing is, no one cares about Columbia or its review of journalism. Hughes himself told me so, and I supposed he knew. (Readership or not, I still added it to the pile of magazine cover shots I discreetly kept in my desk. They had me pose wearing nothing but newspapers—which only goes to show how intellectual they are.)

  Columbia’s journalism reviewers could say what they wanted, but I was soon named “woman of the year” by more than a few women’s groups, the newly formed American Academy of Cable Hosts, and, most famously, by the East Coast Association of Irish American Television Personalities—an honor that Hughes found delightfully ridiculous.

  He gave me a playful nudge the morning after the Irish American award was announced. “And here I thought those red highlights you were sporting last summer were hair coloring,” he said.

  I shrugged and played along, making the self-deprecating wave that I had perfected when brushing off rude questions from customers at SI. “Oh please,” I said, grinning at the camera. “Irish is a state of mind.”

  Hughes laughed and slapped his knee and Baxter frowned and shook his head in a bemused and world-weary way, as if this was just another of my wild antics, claiming to be Irish.

  (I did not “claim” to be Irish. I dutifully talked about my heritage whenever asked, and it was reported many times over the years in various publications, both serious and trivial. But what can I say? The East Coast Association of Irish American Television Personalities did not have a lot of candidates that year. They could not afford to be particular about their definition of Irish. Or, for that matter, American.)

  Of all the accolades piled on It’s Morning Now, the one I cherished most was from a reviewer in The New York Times who said our show was “sort of like Anderson Cooper 360, only with more flirting and recipes.”

  It was the flirting that got the most attention.

  Hughes and I were routinely linked on the gossip pages, and every winsome smile, every casual pat on the arm, every charming exchange, was analyzed and argued over by devoted fans on our Web site’s discussion boards. This amazed the show’s Web master, because we did nothing to promote the discussion boards, which were somewhat hidden on the site. “Who are these people and how did they even find the boards?” he would ask. But whoever they were, there were apparently quite a lot of them, and they enjoyed picking over every Hughes–Addison exchange. And there was, at the peak, a lot to pick over. I spent a little time pondering it all myself.

  “Did you notice the way she patted his arm this morning?” Addifan wrote in a typical post. “The way she said ‘now, now,’ when he was getting all worked up about the World Cup. Was it just me or did it seem a tad too familiar?”

  And FargoMama, a self-described feminist housewife and mother of three, admitted, with an appropriat
ely self-deprecating tone, that she was in something of a snit for a week after Hughes complimented me for a particularly insightful interview of the director of a movie that was deemed the “new” Animal House. FargoMama nursed a crush on Hughes and appeared insanely jealous of my relationship with him.

  (“You know, I know a little about fraternity initiation rituals,” Hughes had said after we ran the taped interview. And I had given him an admiring look, fanned myself as if I were feeling flush, and added in a mock Southern accent, “Now, Hughes, you know how impressed I get when you start talking about swallowing goldfish.”)

  “I never knew that the phrase ‘swallowing goldfish’ could sound so suggestive,” FargoMama wrote. (This from a woman who repeatedly shared a fantasy about “pushing Hughes down on the futon and biting off his buttons.”)

  At one point, Ladies’ Home Journal devoted an entire cover story to the question: HUGHES AND ADDISON: ARE THEY OR AREN’T THEY? They polled various body-language experts, fortune-tellers, and celebrity “commentators” about whether our chemistry was real. The nearly unanimous verdict? Absolutely.

  But there were two notable naysayers. President Briarwood said that Addison McGhee, like his own bride, was a real woman and thus would need more of a “real” man.

  Ahem.

  And Baxter Bailey surprised us by weighing in as well. “I sit as close to Ada and Hewey as anyone,” he told the magazine. “And they don’t have a thing in common.”

  Well, Baxter Bailey, I said to myself when I read that little tidbit. What business is it of yours?

  Chapter 8

  Baxter’s comment irritated Hughes, too, although his reasons for being upset were different from mine. I was offended by the suggestion that I had nothing in common with the man I was fawning over. Hughes was peeved about being called Hewey.