Getting Real

by Gretchen Carlson

  It took me a while to find my voice. Fox & Friends was different than anything I’d ever done—a carefully calibrated mix of entertainment and news. It was certainly not like the other morning shows. But I soon got into the rhythm. Doing the show every day, I not only built my knowledge base, but I got comfortable. I learned you can get used to anything—even getting up at 3:50 in the morning. I always had a lot of sympathy for guest hosts who filled in for me when I was away, because it’s hard to jump in and pick up the rhythm of a show that requires a deep knowledge base about news stories, chemistry among the hosts, and ad-libbing.

  Sitting in the middle, flanked by Steve Doocy on the right and Brian Kilmeade on the left, I had to speak not only as the lone woman, but also as the journalistic voice, with fifteen years of hard news experience. I teasingly called Steve and Brian my “work husbands” because I spent more time with them than I did with Casey. We each had our roles to play on the show. For example, Steve might be the one to outline the facts of a story we were about to discuss. Brian had a passion for military issues, and we had many discussions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. My role was often to say, “Now that we know all that, what does it mean?” I think it might surprise people that we didn’t work out what we would say in advance. I never saw Steve or Brian until I came flying out onto the set with three seconds to spare. After a time, we all had a pretty good idea of where each other stood, but I did enjoy throwing a curve, usually on cultural issues.

  We were distinct personalities, too. Steve has an uncanny ability to connect with the audience. He can be very serious, but he has a fun side, which he’d showcase on forays out to the plaza. He could talk to ordinary people and draw them in. Brian is one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met. He never sleeps! In addition to Fox & Friends he has a three-hour radio show every day. Then he goes home and virtually inhales the news, watching every program. Of course, as the viewers well know, Brian also has a funny side. He’s quick-witted and not afraid to throw himself into the fray. Throughout my time on Fox & Friends, Brian kept me in stitches.

  I used to tell people that the reason I sat in the middle on Fox & Friends was because I’m a registered independent. That label says it all: I think for myself. Sometimes people were surprised, as if the idea of being at Fox News and being an independent was an impossible stretch.

  Once, when I was a guest host on The View, we somehow got on the topic of political differences and air kissing. Joy Behar said that she had kissed a lot of Republicans, and I asked, “Do you kiss independents, since I’m an independent?” Joy seemed stunned. At the commercial break she turned to me and said, “You’re not a Republican? I thought you had to be a Republican to work at Fox.” One more misperception bites the dust.

  The other misperception was that I may not have a sense of humor about people making fun of the show, but honestly, I just loved the spoof that Saturday Night Live did of Fox & Friends. I laughed my head off when I saw the portrayal Vanessa Bayer did of me. One day my makeup artist, who also does makeup for SNL, told me that Vanessa was always asking, “Is Gretchen mad at me?” I said, “No, I’m not mad at her. Tell her I’m a fan.” And I was. I’ve always enjoyed laughing at myself, and I even felt a little bit flattered that I had “made it” enough to be spoofed on SNL.

  News and politics were a big part of Fox & Friends, but there were also a lot of lifestyle and entertainment segments. We went from serious to funny to working out on the air. I was able to say to my mother, “Look, Mom, now people can see all sides of my personality!”

  I was the one to jump rope and do push-ups with members of the military—except I was in a dress, although I took off my shoes. Jumping rope was my specialty, because when we first moved to New York, Casey and I went to a jump-roping gym and got into it. At that point I only knew how to do slow jumping, but I learned to do fast jumping, kind of like Rocky in training. I was so determined to learn that I practiced in our apartment, and Casey thought I was nuts, but I mastered it to the point where I could do thirty minutes straight. It was crazy good exercise.

  We had animal segments—Jack Hanna, the wildlife guy, made regular appearances—and I always volunteered to do those. One day we had a kinkajou on set. It’s a rain forest creature a little like a miniature kangaroo. It jumped into my hair and started licking my ear, swishing its furry tail into my eyes. Ugh! Another time Jack Hanna brought a dangerous cobra onto the set. It was in a basket with a lid on it, and there was a hook to handle the snake. Brian just decided to grab the hook and remove the lid. The snake started pouring out of the basket, and Jack Hanna jumped onto the sofa because this particular snake could kill you. Seeing its head and body weaving out of the basket was like watching a horror movie. I ran off the set and you could hear me screaming in the background, “Brian! Brian, put the snake back into the basket!” Meanwhile, Jack Hanna was up on the couch trying to call 911.

  Roger Ailes, the most accessible boss I’ve ever worked for, was behind the scenes. He saw Fox as a big family, and he cared about everything we did. Sometimes he’d show up in the control room or call during the show. He’d watch us at six before he left home and then listen in the car going to work. One day we had set up a batting cage outside the building and were doing a segment where we all tried to hit eighty-mile-an-hour pitches. Roger walked by on his way into the office and he stopped at the batting cage and took a crack at the ball. On live TV! Roger always has the capacity to surprise.

  The most challenging part of the show was the political interviews, but I loved doing them. I became known for my fiery interviews. Like the one I did with then Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. He did his best not to answer my questions. Par for the course, but it turned contentious. The interview was in advance of a big speech President Obama was giving that night talking about the end of the Iraq war. I asked Gibbs whether the president was planning to explain his flip-flop on the surge to the American public. Gibbs instantly went into attack mode: “I think what’s important, while you guys play political games, is [for] the president to laud our men and women, and to mark the end of our combat mission.” Believe me, I wasn’t the one playing political games. When I asked him whether Obama would credit Bush in his speech, Gibbs basically refused to answer—so I just kept asking. Frustrated, he said, “Gretchen, I don’t know whether this is you actually interviewing me or just a tape of you looping the same question over and over.” Well, that’s what I do when I don’t get answers.

  I interviewed all the presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012, along with other political luminaries, and I enjoyed those interviews. One morning I interviewed eight candidates all in one show. Sometimes political figures could be like rock stars and it took extra effort. I’d arranged an interview with Sarah Palin while she was doing her bus tour in Florida. It took six months to set up a seven-minute interview. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and it so happened that I was going to Disney World with my whole family, and I ended up not going to the park with my kids one day so I could do the interview. It was at the huge retirement community, The Villages, and I was on the stage with Palin, and the interview was piped out to thousands of people in the Barnes & Noble parking lot outside. The interview was simultaneously being fed back to New York.

  The next morning I was doing the show live from Orlando, and that night Kaia lost her first tooth. I told Casey, “I have to go to bed, so you need to make sure to put a dollar under Kaia’s pillow so it will be there when she wakes up in the morning.”

  When I got up at the crack of dawn, I just happened to peek under Kaia’s pillow and the tooth was still there. No money. Casey forgot. I ran and grabbed a dollar bill, retrieved the tooth, and shoved the money under her pillow before I went to take a shower. Literally three seconds later, Kaia woke up and reached under her pillow. Talk about split-second timing!

  Of course, Kaia being Kaia, she was quite concerned about losing her tooth. She asked me, “Mommy, are people going
to say, ‘Who’s the funny little girl without any teeth?’” Stifling a laugh, I patiently explained to her that all children lose their baby teeth before they get their adult teeth, and nobody would think she looked funny—just like a regular girl.

  For me, the biggest thrill of being on live TV is the adrenaline rush that comes from doing breaking news. It’s what every broadcaster lives for. I found that it was in the midst of a breaking news story that I actually felt the most calm. I responded to the challenge, as I had done all of my life. Almost no interview made me nervous—ironically, unless it was with a family member or someone I knew well. The most nervous I ever got on Fox & Friends was when my mom came on the show for a segment on preparing traditional Swedish Christmas foods.

  Now that I was doing so many interviews on Fox & Friends, it really struck me in a profound way how important my violin training was. I learned how to do interviews in the same way I would perform a violin piece—by listening and being tuned in. I always prepared, but being in the moment was crucial because an interview subject might say something in the first sentence to throw you off. If you watch people doing interviews you can tell which people listen and which don’t. Some cling to their set list of questions no matter what happens, which makes for a lousy interview.

  Interviews can also run the gamut emotionally, just like different violin pieces. You might have a grandiose beginning, a melodic, emotional middle, and a fiery finale. I’ve learned to get into the rhythm.

  When doing a particularly emotional interview with someone who has suffered a great loss or had a terrible crisis, I always say in some way at the beginning, “I can’t imagine how you feel.” Because I can’t. The worst question that interviewers ask people in those circumstances is, “How are you doing?” Well, how the hell do they think they’re doing? I never ask that question. I try to be in tune with the person—to get inside the moment and feel empathy.

  When I get done with an interview, the most important thing the person I’m interviewing can tell me is, “Thank you so much for making me feel comfortable. I didn’t even realize that we were on TV talking.” It’s similar to when I performed on the violin. I wanted to touch the heartstrings of the people listening so that they felt the emotion that I was feeling—to give them the same experience I was having on the stage.

  The hardest interview I did while at Fox & Friends was with the mother of Christina-Taylor Green, the nine-year-old victim of the shooting in Tucson that wounded Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in 2011. The day after the shootings, Roxanna agreed to give her first interview to me. I was filled with nerves and dread. What were the right questions to ask a grieving mom who had just lost her beautiful child? What could I possibly say?

  I was also fearful that I wouldn’t be able to hold it together on the air. Kaia was eight at the time, and my sense of emotional connection was so great it was hard to breathe. As I was writing out questions for the interview during commercial breaks, I kept breaking into tears. I actually had to pinch my leg to try to stop myself from becoming too emotional. I said a prayer before Roxanna joined me on the phone.

  In the interview I focused on who Christina-Taylor was and what she had accomplished in her short life.

  “I just can’t even put it into words,” Roxanna said, in a heartbreakingly sad voice. “I can’t express the devastation and hurt and how we were so robbed of our beautiful, beautiful princess. She was a beautiful girl, inside and out. She was so intelligent, and her light shines on all of us today and forever and I just have it in my heart that my angel is in the arms of my mom and my grandmother and our good friend Margaret up in heaven. I lost my mom a year ago, so I’m just trying to be positive and strong because that’s what Christina-Taylor would want.”

  Roxanna and I talked about how her faith gave her courage. She told me that her daughter was going to do great things in heaven. “Maybe that’s where she was needed. She’s my angel.”

  A year later Roxanna returned to talk about the book she wrote about her daughter and the tragedy, called As Good as She Imagined. To prepare for my interview with her, I was reading the book at my kids’ piano lessons, and I had to hide my tears. It is so painful to read but impossible to put down. There is one story that will stick with me forever. One month after Christina-Taylor died, Roxanna wrote that she received a message from her in a dream. She said Christina-Taylor told her that she was in heaven with her grandma and that she was okay.

  Parents who lose a child, especially violently, are never “okay” again, but I respect and admire Roxanna Green for giving others who have lost a loved one a reason to keep going.

  • • •

  It was while doing Fox & Friends that I got a reputation for being a culture warrior. Bill O’Reilly started inviting me to come on The O’Reilly Factor for a regular culture warrior segment. I really cared about this stuff. Fox was the first place I’d worked where it was okay to talk openly about your faith on the air. Of course, I understand that when you’re doing news reporting and anchoring, it’s not appropriate. But at Fox I had a different kind of forum, so I went for it.

  Where our culture is headed is an enduring topic of interest for many people, and I think they appreciate it that I take the topic on—even when they don’t agree with me. For example, I’ve received plenty of flak for talking about the war on Christmas, often being described as “freaking out” and “going ballistic,” as if I were some demented Christian warrior. One Web site published this pearl: “If Bill O’Reilly is the commander-in-chief of the War on Christmas, Gretchen Carlson is the head of the women’s auxiliary.” The thing is, it’s not a joke to me. I can’t think of a single other religion whose holy day is treated like a joke.

  It all came to a head over the Festivus controversy. Festivus is a fake holiday, invented by the hit show Seinfeld in 1997. It was a funny bit on the comedy, and I laughed along with the rest of the world. But then it got real. Some people subsequently began to celebrate the holiday as an alternative to the Christian celebration, and one of them wrote a book called Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us.

  In 2008, when I heard that a group was petitioning the governor of Washington State to erect a Festivus pole as part of the Christmas display, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. When I brought it up on Fox & Friends, Steve and Brian tried to laugh it off as silly, but I was dead serious. I thought it was mocking Christianity, and I said so. (And by the way, a lot of people think that on Fox we have producers talking to us through our earpieces telling us what to say. We don’t. That protest was all me.)

  “I can’t believe you guys are defending this,” I said to my laughing colleagues. “I’m all for humor, and I’m all for telling jokes, but this is an insult to Christianity.” I said I thought it was an outrage that my kids would have to grow up in a culture that forced them to grope their way past a Festivus pole to see a Nativity scene—on Christmas!

  Festivus just wouldn’t die. The worst episode came in 2013, when a group erected a Festivus pole that consisted of six feet of beer cans next to a religious display that included a Nativity scene, a menorah, and other religious symbols at the Florida state capitol. Again I spoke out, appealing very straightforwardly to American values and common sense. I was asking a question that needed to be asked: Do we think so little of our religious symbols and rituals that we would give equal weight to a beer can sculpture based on an old sitcom? I still think it’s a good question.

  I was gratified when the American Spectator published an article by Jeffrey Lord titled “Gretchen Carlson Is Right.” Lord wrote, “Ms. Carlson’s outrage was right on target. She is exactly right to look into the cameras and call for a stand-alone display of that crèche. She understands perfectly what it represents, and that without the reverence and respect of those values we are all in serious trouble.” Amen!

  My reputation as a culture warrior was one reason I got a role in the movie Persecuted, which was
released in 2014. The film is a thriller that focuses on two rights in America that are sometimes taken for granted—freedom of religion and freedom of speech. The main character is an evangelist who is framed for a crime he didn’t commit and persecuted for holding firm to his religious beliefs. In the movie I play Diana Lucas, a journalist who asks tough questions. It was fun doing the movie, but the topic also meant a lot to me. Every day in the news business, I report on stories just like this. Christians or people of other faiths are persecuted simply for standing up for something they believe. The intolerance seems crazy, but it’s happening a lot more than you might think. The question Persecuted makes you ask is: Could the fictional movie plot ever happen here?

  By the way, doing that movie was an example of how important it is to take on new challenges. I really stepped outside my comfort zone with Persecuted. Actors have often told me they had a hard time imagining doing live TV and ad-libbing on the fly. Well, I had the opposite struggle on the movie set. It was very hard to sit still for fifty takes.

  • • •

  After seven years on Fox & Friends, I got an incredible opportunity to host my own show. The Real Story with Gretchen Carlson premiered on September 30, 2013, at two o’clock in the afternoon. My kids were ecstatic because it meant I would be home in the mornings and could even drive them to school on some days. The simplest things in life have so much meaning. And Casey was very happy because I wasn’t always stressed about being in bed by nine at night. I could be a regular adult.

  On my first show I pointed to the “cozy chair” area on my set and asked my Twitter followers to send me their suggested names for the area. I was surprised and amused when one of the tweets came from Jon Stewart at The Daily Show. His suggestion: “Purgatory.” I thought it was funny, and when I read some of the tweets at the end of my show, I included his, and with a teasing smile said, “I wonder if we’ll add that to the mix.” I knew he was kidding with his suggestion, and I was kidding with my response. But immediately my comment was picked up on the Internet, with one Web site displaying a banner headline: “Fox’s Gretchen Carlson Confused by ‘Daily Show’ Punchline.” Really? They didn’t think I got the joke. This sort of thing is typical.