The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  When Christina, Chris, and Lynne graduated in the spring of 1982, John and Christiane, by prior agreement, switched bedrooms—now he had the biggest and she, the smallest—and he populated the house with near replicas of the previous occupants: Cordelia Richards, a budding actress, moved in, along with John Hare and Rob Littell, both preppy, Republican-leaning jocks. They all called Christiane Kissy, and she was still acknowledged as the boss. “Like a den mother, or maybe a general, she laid down the rules and we followed them. . . . The house ran like a Swiss watch,” Littell marveled in his memoir The Men We Became. Littell also called her “the smartest” of the housemates. “I usually ended up as a knuckleheaded ‘counter’ to Kissy’s fiercely informed ‘point,’” admitted Littell, who has otherwise described himself to others as so commandingly self-confident he could match John in looks and status. “I required constant assistance from John, who, while firmly on Kissy’s side in nine out of ten debates, acted as the de facto mediator between us.”

  Christiane’s forte was her air of command—her tough, natural leadership. She was the exotic, passionately political boss girl whose whip cracking could snap the most cocksure, privileged young men into shape. Which didn’t mean she was without her vulnerabilities. One night, for example, she borrowed John’s car to drive to the market for lemons needed for the fish she was making for dinner. She accidentally whacked her mouth with his key chain, chipping a front tooth. John teased her that a broken front tooth meant that her dream of being an on-camera reporter was over. She burst out crying.

  One day in her senior year, Christiane walked into WJAR, Providence’s NBC affiliate and leading TV station, and asked for a job. Jim Taricani, then and now the head of WJAR’s investigative team, was immediately impressed with her. “She said someday she wanted to be a foreign correspondent, which was unusual for a young woman,” he says. “She told me she spoke three or four languages. She was eager to work.” She herself felt “really lucky,” she has said, to be hired at all. Her first job was doing graphics for WJAR’s weather reports. She’s laughed about how “I was always putting up ‘cloudy’ when it was sunny, and the weather anchor would call me out on the air. It was a little humiliating.”

  After Christiane graduated, summa cum laude, from the University of Rhode Island, Taricani put her on real stories: investigations of the rampant drug trade in Providence, a major Mafia city, and in nearby glamorous Newport. “They miked me up with all these wires and sent me out to get a confession from some mobster; I didn’t get close,” is how she’s told it. Taricani somewhat begs to differ. “We took a look at the jet-setters’ use of cocaine in popular clubs. We did a story about cocaine use in Newport, called ‘City by the C’—C for cocaine. Christiane went into clubs with a hidden camera and a hidden microphone and got the cocaine dealer to talk. She had the savvy to pull that off at a young age. She was an amazing, amazing young woman with great journalistic instincts. She had a great head about her. And she was pleasant, with a good sense of humor.”

  She also made it casually clear to Taricani that she was in an elite circle. Taricani remembers her mentioning that “she was living in the same building as JFK Jr., somewhere near the Brown campus, or something to that effect.” Taricani was so impressed that his intern and the son of President Kennedy were friends that, even decades later, he recalls: “I went ‘Yikes!’” This revelation of hers was in keeping with her housemates’ knowing that her family was friends with the Pahlavis, and that she knew the Shah’s wife personally. She seemed to understand that it was useful for people to know that, despite being a vulnerable exile with a straightforward manner, she was not to be underestimated.

  It was at WJAR, toward the end of summer 1983, that Christiane heard about a fledgling TV network in Atlanta. As she has described, “All of a sudden [someone in the newsroom] said, ‘There’s this new thing, CNN—and we’ve heard some English accents [on it]. . . . And they basically said, ‘You know, this is a great opportunity for someone like yourself who’s foreign, who has a foreign accent.’” She seems to be ironically embellishing here, putting into her Providence colleagues’ mouths her own well-grounded sensitivities about her non-cookie-cutter looks and voice: “‘Who knows, maybe they’ll take you, because you certainly don’t fit in in the American spectrum of news’”—meaning blond, big haired, and unaccented. A friend for life she would soon make at CNN, writer-turned-producer David Bernknopf, vociferously agrees: “Christiane would never in a hundred million parallel universes have worked her way up the success ladder of a local TV route” and might not even have “ended up as an international correspondent of such renown had it not been for the weird timing” of the founding, in the earliest 1980s, of “this crazy, ridiculous, unique place” that was hungry for any and all talent, unconventional or not.

  That radical idea—a twenty-four-hour cable news station—had been launched by Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner and TV news service executive Reese Schonfeld.

  A few years earlier—in spring 1980, in the most seat-of-the-pants way imaginable—CNN had started filling its temporary quarters in sleepy Atlanta, Georgia. “The kids in the newsroom were so young, they looked like they didn’t have driver’s licenses,” says Lynne Russell, one of the first anchors to sign on. There were no health benefits; they couldn’t afford to unionize. But Russell sees in retrospect, “If it had been unionized, it wouldn’t be uniquely CNN. Because you go in to Ted Turner off the street and say, ‘I have an idea.’ And the next thing you know, you’re carrying cardboard boxes in and you’ve got an office.”

  The network hired a number of African American anchors—Renalda Mews, Roz Abrams, Bernard Shaw, later Leon Harris—at a time when national ABC, CBS, and NBC remained fairly snow white. And it hired lots of women. With twenty-four hours to fill, CNN “didn’t have the luxury of being an old boys’ club,” says one of the early hires, anchor Marcia Ladendorff. “They needed young and hungry.” Female news professionals were hungry.

  It was an astonishingly unpropitious start-up, and hardy pioneers who were present at the creation often compete with each other to tell stories, one more zany and improbable than the next. When early-recruited weatherman Flip Spiceland’s taxi arrived at “this old condemned white house on Peachtree Street, I argued with the driver—this couldn’t be the right address!” Yet it was. He got out, disbelieving, and sat on the “old, dilapidated cracked concrete steps” of what had recently been a halfway house for drug addicts. The permanent building—a former Jewish country club—was being renovated, but so late off the mark that when “they moved us into its basement,” early anchor Don Farmer says, “they forgot two things: a men’s room and a ladies’ room.” Flip Spiceland: “You heard right: No bathrooms. And a mud floor.” Turner made arrangements for the staff to use the bathrooms a block and a half away at a low-rent motel; some chose the closer but less sanitary gas station.

  In addition to the initial lack of bathrooms—which prompted one female anchor to quit in disgust—the new studios were directly below a wrestling ring. Through the months of rehearsals there was constant booming and crashing, everyone recalls. Two weeks to launch, Turner lost a satellite in space—it just disappeared. Ten days to launch, there was a money crunch—the only bureau now was Atlanta, not the previously planned New York; Washington, D.C.; Dallas; LA; and Chicago. Ellen Spiceland (who met and married Flip there) remembers that, between the lack of bathrooms and the hours (“I’d work twenty hours a day, sleep four, and go back to work”) and the sudden defunding, “it was horrible—horrible. We were putting our careers on the line for this?” Says Dave Walker, who anchored the first night—June 1—with his wife Lois Hart: “Everybody told Ted not to [attempt CNN]. But he was a riverboat gambler.” “It deserved its nickname Chicken Noodle News,” says Don Farmer. “It was slapdash. It was also exciting, fun, and groundbreaking.”

  “We made it up as we went along,” says Marcia Ladendorff. The personalities were volatile. Ted Kav
anau, the founding senior producer, was “a kind of wild man,” Reese Schonfeld admits. “Ted was an incendiary device,” amplifies Ladendorff. “You never knew what was going to happen. One day, all of a sudden we hear this crazy shouting. Kavanau was on one side of the room, and the person he was fighting with on the other. They were screaming, and Kavanau reached over and grabbed the other guy, and there was a flurry of fists and hollering. That was the tension and energy at CNN. Oh, and the midnight show Kavanau produced! He would set little ‘bombs’ to create crises so he could run in and fix them—that was his adrenaline rush.” Kavanau says: “A lot of guys who worked late watched that show—it got a following.” Kavanau once cohosted his show with Frank Zappa. Yippie radical Abbie Hoffman called the show while in hiding from the feds to say he was a fan.

  “I anchored Ted’s show a couple of times and I thought I’d have a nervous breakdown,” says Marcia Ladendorff. “He would put the show together and then disassemble it while it was on the air. It was like a suicide mission every night. People were popping Valiums right and left. There was a rumor that a tech guy was peddling coke. I’d walk into the makeup room and—those little hand mirrors? I’d have to wipe them off. In the bathroom stall, you’d see marijuana in the tile grout. People would go out and spin around the block and get stoned and come back and do their newscasts. There were no rules! All we were interested in was making this ship float!”

  Televised screwups were par for the course, says writer Sparkle Hayter. “Klieg lights fell in the middle of broadcasts. Bad-tempered people were seen pitching fits in the blurry background. Another time, a big thunderstorm knocked out our signal—or so we thought. The producer of Prime News decided to take this time to tell a few raunchy stories to the anchors while they waited for the signal to return. The switchboard lit up with people wanting to know why the chubby man was telling dirty jokes.” On a different day, a news executive didn’t think he was on the air “and so he responded with a big, dramatic fake heart attack.” Again, the switchboard lit up. “CNN was patched together with chewing gum,” says producer Maria Fleet, who was a fresh-out-of-college newbie like most everyone else.

  But the craziness bred a fierce kinship among the staff. “It was such a weird start-up, such a freak show” that staffers were like resolute outcasts bonded together against the sane world, says David Bernknopf. “We were a small group of people filling those twenty-four hours, but we had a sense of mission and we were together all the time,” says Sparkle Hayter. “We worked together, lived together in sprawling antebellum houses, dated each other, partied together, and those of us on late shift would grocery shop together at Winn Dixie at three a.m. It was very incestuous.” “People throw around the word ‘family’ about certain organizations,” Lynne Russell says, “but we really were.”

  After hearing from her WJAR colleagues that CNN would be hospitable to someone who looked and sounded like her, Christiane picked up the phone and called CNN and got to someone willing to preinterview her in the most off-the-cuff way. “They asked me ten questions on the phone, and I answered them all, and then they asked me, ‘What’s the capital of Iran?’ I said, ‘It’s Tehran,’ so I passed that test with flying colors.”

  And so in September 1983, with what she’s colorfully insisted was little more than a hundred dollars and her bicycle, Christiane Amanpour arrived in Atlanta, a city of Confederate flags and Baptist churches. She would join the CNN family—becoming close to Bernknopf, Hayter, Fleet, and others. It would be her family for twenty-seven years.

  Another young woman had gotten there first: come, seen, not exactly conquered—and then resolutely pushed on. This young woman was every bit as aggressive and ambitious as Christiane—in ways, even more so—but she and Christiane were as different from each other as two aspiring TV newswomen could be.

  Her name was Katie Couric.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Little Sister Cheerleader to Pentagon Correspondent

  Katie: 1957 to 1989

  KATHERINE ANNE COURIC was born on January 7, 1957, in Arlington, Virginia, the fourth child of Elinor Hene Couric and John Martin Couric. Emily, Clara (called Kiki), and John Jr. were the three siblings who preceded her, each separated by roughly two years. Years later, Katie’s husband, Jay Monahan, would kid her that she must have been “born on a sunny day,” because the circumstances of her childhood were so normal and easy.

  Katie’s parents had different religious and ethnic backgrounds. The Omaha-raised Elinor was Jewish; her father was a successful architect whose parents had emigrated from Germany, and the family had spanned out in the Midwest and South, with one wing of it, the Frohsins, proprietors of a couture women’s clothing shop in Atlanta. Katie’s father was the great-grandson of an émigré from France who had been a cotton broker. John Couric grew up in Georgia and, after service in the navy, worked as a newspaper reporter and editor before eventually entering public relations.

  Katie and her family attended a Presbyterian church, her mother having converted to Christianity before marrying John. It is unclear whether Elinor’s conversion arose from personal conviction or marital compromise, but Katie has said that she herself had a “tough time” with some of the tenets of Christianity: “When our minister showed me a diagram of Jesus on a throne, surrounded by my family, I had a tough time with the idea that Jesus was more important than them. I didn’t become a [church] member.” Perhaps in this way she was mirroring her mother: Family was more important than fierce religious identity. Though Katie would abidingly continue to relate as a Christian, she grew to become fascinated with Judaism, especially after she went out into the professional world.

  Elinor was more temperamentally and politically liberal than John. Elinor volunteered for Planned Parenthood. In another era, Katie has said, her mother “would probably be an ad executive or a stockbroker,” adding, of Elinor’s zeitgeist savvy, “She bought many shares of Trojan condoms in the safe-sex early eighties.” Katie has characterized her father as “cerebral, gentle . . . thoughtful and intelligent, hardworking, a voracious reader, and a bit of a taskmaster who expected excellence from his children.” Even the musing deliberateness and specificity of Katie’s description of him hints at a parent different from the out-there and hip-shooting person she would become. Katie seems to have shared the directness of her mother—“Let them know you’re there!” was one of Elinor Couric’s mottoes for her kids. John Couric, by contrast, was formal, in a Southern, somewhat military way. When Katie made goofy, sometimes precociously bawdy jokes at the dinner table, Elinor would laugh, but John would plead to his wife, “Please, Elinor, don’t encourage her.” And, Katie has said, if her father “called to us and we responded, ‘Yes,’ he would say, ‘Yes, what?’ We were required to say, ‘Yes, sir.’” Katie grew up being accustomed to a man modeling tradition and propriety, reining things in, tamping things down. This would resonate later, in her relationship with Jay Monahan.

  Indeed, Katie Couric was a normal girl in the most normal suburb at the tail end of the last normal moment in America. The Courics managed to do something fascinating: They raised four unrebellious teenagers during America’s most rebellious span of years. Katie frequently says, and her friends agree, that hers was “a Leave It to Beaver childhood.” As one of those friends, Janie McMullen Florea, recalls, “No parents on the street were divorced.” The wives in the Jamestown Elementary School and Williamsburg Middle School district of Arlington, including Elinor Couric, were predominantly stay-at-home moms who had dinner on the table when their kids tumbled in from after-school sports—Katie ran track and did gymnastics—and their business-suited husbands came rustling through the front door.

  How different this was from Diane’s parents, who had vaulted from Appalachian poverty to respectability, her mother brandishing fierce, aggressive perfectionism to show for it—and certainly different from Christiane’s poshly cosmopolitan Iranian-British heritage and her family’s sudden exile. Katie�
��s eventual conquest of Morning—the immediate rightness of her fit as the sister stand-in for middle-class middle American women getting in some TV time before car pool—had a lot to do with her casually bone-deep understanding of her audience.

  Katie idolized her older sisters, Emily and Clara, and she happily played the little sister card, courting their friends. “I used to memorize photos in the yearbook,” Katie has said, “and then approach various students at football games with salutations like, ‘Hi! You’re Barbara McLaughlin. I recognize you from the picture in my sister’s yearbook.’” Kiki’s friends nicknamed Katie “Smiley.” Katie also adored her cool, closer-in-age brother, Johnny, who was her confidant and partner in hijinks. As a major ABC producer later observed, “Katie has a ‘guy’-like sense of humor”—blunt, baiting. Perhaps it came from her closeness with her brother. Neither Diane nor Christiane had a male sibling.

  However implicitly formal, even stern, John Couric was, it was Elinor who was the family enforcer. Katie recounts that her mother once drove “her station wagon over to [classmate] Steve Elliot’s house [after school], knocking on the door, dragging me out and throwing my ten-speed in the trunk, when all we were doing was smooching in the basement.” The anecdote, in both substance and delivery, is very Katie: the flip, ostentatious candor; the portrayal of herself as a flirt and a scamp.

  But the innocence she describes was real. The girls in Katie’s posse—Sara Crossman, Betsy Yowell (now Howell), and Janie McMullen (now Florea), and, later, Barbara Cherney (now Andrukonis)—listened to the Monkees and the Cyrkle’s “Red Rubber Ball,” which was Katie’s favorite song. They had crushes on the cute boys in that crowd of—as one friend describes them—“good, clean, popular kids” who eschewed the psychedelic counterculture that was lurking on the fringes. By high school, some of their peers in other crowds smoked marijuana, but that was mainly considered the province of the misfits. The girls played flashlight tag during sleepovers. Katie, Sara, and Janie serenaded their parents “with our versions of ‘Lemon Tree’ and ‘Let Me Entertain You,’ and Katie kind of directed the whole thing,” says Janie Florea. They shopped at the mall at Tysons Corner, ice-skated at the Falls Church rink, swam at the Washington Golf and Country Club pool, hiked at Turkey Run, and set their hair very carefully for the Friday night dances at school. “For Christmas, we’d all have our lists of what we wanted, and one Christmas the four of us got the same banana-seat bicycle,” Florea adds. “We called ourselves the Mod Squad.” Another time, “We had a ‘carnival’ where we raised money—twelve whole dollars—for the United Givers Fund. The Northern Virginia Sun came out and took a picture of us on the steps of Katie’s house. There was always a game of softball or kickball going on in the street, and the doors were open and we’d go from one house to the other.”