The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  Despite the promotion, or perhaps emboldened by it, Katie vented frustration to Don and Chris. Don says, “She got ticked off and said, ‘What should I do? I’m told I don’t have a future on air and that’s what I want.’ And we said, ‘It’s amazing and stupid [you were told that] but if it’s true, you should get the best job you can find in the best market and get on the air.’” While some CNNers say the pair supported Katie and that she benefited from their support, others say they led her on. One major international producer’s take on it was: “They saw a threat in her, somebody coming up behind them, because Katie’s personality was so perfect for Morning. They were autocratic and unfriendly.” After Curle and Farmer left CNN, says a CNN writer, some of the staff threw a party to celebrate their departure.

  Ted Kavanau—CNN’s famous wild man, who got into fistfights just before airtime and who turned his late-night show into heart-attack central for the staff who had to abide by his adrenaline-rush-fomented need to simulate danger on air—put Katie on the air with him. The two did brief lead-ins to features. In the spots, Katie made snarky small talk (her idea); Kavanau responded in kind. “What I learned about Katie is, she’s very charming, but she’s tough,” Kavanau says. “She’s tough. She’s not some innocent person.”

  During the run-up to the 1984 elections, Katie got a brief on-air moment, and it so happened that Al Buch, the new news director at Miami’s WTVJ, was watching. This was not the same Miami station that had called her after the piece she had done in Havana, though perhaps that piece had lodged her in the consciousness of various nearby Miami news professionals. “She seemed like the quintessential hostess,” Buch says, using an odd word for a stand-up reporter on a political piece, but a word that would certainly predict the most successful part of her future. “I decided she’d make a pretty good reporter for the Miami market”—a sexy market at the time, home to the hit TV drama Miami Vice.

  “We were looking for a few reporters, and Al Buch came in with a tape Katie made,” says WTVJ’s president and general manager Alan Perris. Perris flew her to Miami and hired her. “I can’t use the p-word”—perky—“because she goes nuts, but she absolutely was—delightful, smart, funny.” Brian Gadinsky produced a WTVJ magazine show called Montage. He was twenty-seven, two years older than Katie, and while Buch was giving Katie a tour of the station that would be her new home, Gadinsky was struck “that an outsider was coming here, to this insular newsroom. It was very unusual for someone to come from the outside, and there was this thing of, ‘Who is this girl and who does she think she is?’” Katie had lost weight by now and cut her hair and changed her on-air name to Katherine Couric. “You could tell she wanted to get down to business. She was laser-focused, she wanted to get her chops here, she was here on a mission—she never saw Miami as where she was going to make her home,” Gadinsky intuited. “Some people have found that off-putting, but to me it was attractive.” In no time, she developed “charisma. It was palpable. You walked in, your eyes went over to her—her spark, her mojo.”

  At WTVJ Katie became an on-air beat reporter, eventually sometimes given early access to breaking stories by her new boyfriend, Bill Johnson, a director of public affairs for the Miami Police Department. (It was a mutually convenient relationship, in the same way her romance with Guy Pepper had helped her at CNN.) At work “she was serious, she didn’t gossip, she was nice to everybody but she wasn’t there to fool around,” Gadinsky says. But after hours, Katie “was the life of the party” when she, Gadinsky, and other young staffers gathered at the hip bars and restaurants like Taurus and Monty Trainor’s in Coconut Grove and the retro Biscayne Bay dance club in South Beach. A lot of her colleagues were, like Gadinsky, Jewish. She explained to Gadinsky that she was half Jewish but that her mother had converted to Presbyterianism when she’d married. Gadinsky teased her, “‘Are you having half-seder on Passover?’”

  To Alan Perris, Katie seemed irrepressible. She became (and remains) close friends with Lisa Gregorisch, who was in charge of the station’s Fort Lauderdale bureau, “and when Katie and Lisa would come falling into my office once or twice a week, the Keystone Cops had arrived.” In interviews she gave during her Today years, Katie has said she was frustrated at WTVJ. Perris acknowledges, a bit defensively: “I do remember Katie wanted to anchor the morning cut-ins and I didn’t want her to. I thought she was more valuable as a reporter than in the studio.” But Al Buch saw her frustration. “She was driven. She knew where she wanted to go, and some people she worked with—mainly one photographer—gave her a hard time about her aspirations. There were nights when I’d walk her from the newsroom to her car and she was almost in tears—in fact, she was in tears—that people couldn’t see what she could do. I’d put my arm around her and say, ‘Look, consider the source. You have a good sense of yourself. You’re going to be just fine.’”

  Katie may have put on a damsel-in-distress routine to Buch, but she was blunt to her peers. When her UVA friend Kathleen Lobb and two other girls visited her little Miami apartment, one of the girls asked, “So what do you want to do next?” The girl meant the question in an airy, open-ended way, not expecting a surge of entitled ambition. But “without missing a beat, Katie said, ‘I want Jane Pauley’s job,’” Kathleen recalls.

  At WTVJ, the assignment she wanted the most, lobbied for, and finally landed was spending a night as a homeless woman on a street in Overtown, one of the worst neighborhoods in Miami. “She went in prosthetic makeup,” Gadinsky recalls. “She became a bag lady. Just her and a shopping cart and her cameraman, Kevin Raphael.” Granted, the move might be considered a stunt by an ambitious young woman. But “she was in danger,” sleeping on that street, Gadinsky makes clear. “It was very ballsy of her, and she came back with a great story.” She pushed for more. When on her day off two FBI agents were killed during a big shoot-out, she called the station and said, “Listen, I’m really close by. Can I go cover this? Please?” The station hewed to protocol: The story was given to a reporter who was on duty that day.

  • • •

  KATIE SOON TIRED of the limited markets of the South—even jazzy Miami—and wanted to go back to her home environs, in D.C. She heard about an opening for late-news general assignment reporter at WRC, the NBC local affiliate, which she applied for and got. WRC was more than a local station; it was deeply linked to the NBC Washington bureau. Her idol, Cassie Mackin, had been launched at WRC. (So too would be other, later female stars: Suzanne Malveaux, Campbell Brown, and most recently Savannah Guthrie.) When Katie arrived in early 1987, at age thirty, at her fourth TV station in seven years, she had her game down enough to not need a champion—a good thing, because, as Arch Campbell, then a producer at the station, recalls, “The news director who hired her, Jim Van Messel, and the general manager, Dave Newell, both left just as she came on board.” Van Messel had been particularly enthusiastic about her, calling her “one of the most natural and spontaneous people on television,” on the basis of clips of her work in Miami. “We were looking for somebody who could do live shots at eleven p.m. She exuded the personality we were looking for.” Campbell continues: “She came to work totally unknown, with no one to protect her, yet she managed to thrive.” She made the staff laugh by gossiping about her date with Larry King, “and how he’d tried to ‘Roto-Root’ her”—stick his tongue way down her throat, Campbell says. (Katie has told that story widely in the media.) She got an apartment in D.C. with young producer Wendy Walker, who in fact soon went on to produce Larry King, for years. Wendy remains one of her closest friends.

  Katie seems to have felt this was an assignment she had to hit out of the park. “She was down and dirty about her job,” Dana Rudman, a colleague of hers at WRC, told reporter Jennet Conant. “She looked young, but she could be very aggressive. When she wanted an interview, she pushed and pushed and pushed.” Her energy and determination could apparently reach near manic proportions—Wendy Walker has recalled that sometimes Katie would clos
e the door of her own hopelessly messy bedroom and Walker would “come home from work to find [Katie] sitting on my bed among papers and plates and cups. She’d have tried on all my clothes, and they’d be lying on the floor.”

  Bret Marcus was the news director of WRC, and he was a good friend of Don Browne, NBC’s Miami bureau chief. Browne had noticed Katie’s talent in Miami, knew of her tremendous tenacity, and wasn’t surprised that she’d pushed Marcus for an anchor job at WRC. Browne had heard that, “wherever she was” (Atlanta, Miami), Katie had pushed for an anchor slot, and Browne heard “story after story that management at stations in those other cities didn’t see it.” Now, when she lobbied Marcus, he suggested she try her wings in a smaller market—say, Ohio. This suggestion—smug and tin-eared in retrospect—would become a famous piece of Katie lore when she popped up in the “small market” of New York.

  Hearing of his friend Marcus’s unintentional insult, Don Browne offered himself as a kind of counselor to Katie. He’d gotten a glimmer of Katie’s talent. “Katie had an edge,” he says. “Katie had this inner self-confidence, this tenacity—people would knock her down but she never gave up. That smile, that determined set in her jaw—she never gave up. ‘By God, I’m gonna wear those guys down and one day they’re gonna see it.’” One of Browne’s friends, Fred Francis, NBC’s Pentagon correspondent, was impressed with Katie’s work on WRC. Francis brought her to the attention of Tim Russert, the chief of NBC’s national bureau.

  Russert was looking for a second Pentagon correspondent and had interviewed a great many candidates. Russert was impressed with Katie, too—and offered her the job. Having had her high hopes dashed for so long, it wasn’t instantly clear to Katie that, nine years after leaving UVA, this was the opening she needed. “So I’m driving down in Miami one day,” Don Browne recalls, “and I get a call from Katie and she says, ‘I need some advice. I have a job offer from NBC to be the number two at the Pentagon. It doesn’t pay that much—what do you think?’ And I said, ‘Do it! Do it!’ I said it twice, because she’d be working with Fred Francis—I loved Fred. I said, ‘This is a great entry point to the network. Do it now.’” Influenced by Browne’s advice, she accepted.

  “When Katie became a Pentagon correspondent for NBC, all the CNN people rolled their eyes—‘Yeah, right,’” recalls David Bernknopf, who was Christiane’s close friend. “That whole ‘perky’ thing.” Still, Bernknopf had run into Katie when she was in Miami, and he “realized, for the first time, that I might have underestimated her.”

  • • •

  ONE WEEKEND IN 1988, when she was still at WRC, Katie was in New York visiting Kathleen Lobb. Kathleen heard that a UVA friend was having a party in D.C.—did Katie want to hurry back home for it? Yes, she did. She wanted to meet people. She was thirty-one. When she’d recently run into her Tri-Delt sister Beth Kseniak at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, she’d yelled out not “Hello!” but “Hey, Beth, you married yet?” When Beth responded with a surprised no, Katie yelled back, “Oh, good! Neither am I.”

  The party was full of lawyers. David Kiernan, a lawyer at the prestigious firm Williams and Connolly, came with his best friend, Jay Monahan. Neither one was a typical corporate attorney. David, who was as interested in medicine as law, would go on to medical school. Jay—handsome and dark haired with a slender face—was a romantic, an original. Though he grew up in the town of Manhasset on Long Island, New York, in an Irish Catholic family (his given name was John Paul Monahan III), he had early on become fascinated by the South. He attended the College of William and Mary in Virginia and became a lay historian of the Civil War, collecting antiques and memorabilia—including an assemblage of brass bugles—and he participated in reenactments. “Jay was the smartest guy I ever met,” says Mandy Locke, the woman who later married his best friend, Kiernan. “He knew so much about the Civil War, about history.” He was also an accomplished equestrian, an avid dancer at everything from swing to ballroom, and so accomplished a pianist, especially on classical compositions, that he’d been nicknamed “Liberace” by his bunk mates in the navy. There was a Renaissance man quality about him, Kathleen Lobb thought when she eventually met him through Katie.

  At the party, David and Jay were both quite taken by Katie Couric, who was wearing a tight black dress. “But she gave her card to Jay, not me,” David would later say. The oft-repeated story goes that when Katie found out that almost the whole group of men were lawyers, she mimicked gagging. Shrewdly, Jay said that he was a painter, not a lawyer. Katie “was taken with him right away,” says Lobb. In fact, she described him to Kathleen in one telling adjective: “Heathcliffian.”

  Jay Monahan was disciplined and orderly—a “neat freak.” Katie was disorganized. (So messy was she that when her mother walked into her apartment bedroom one day, she burst into tears.) Jay was the oldest of seven siblings; Katie was the youngest of four. Lane Duncan, her boyfriend in Atlanta, had keenly felt that “Katie was always on.” This new man, Jay Monahan, perhaps provided, in his very character, a reality check—a brake—for Katie’s freneticism. And he was family-minded, so close to his father he would ask him to be best man at his wedding. The first time Kathleen Lobb met Jay, at Katie’s parents’ house, “I remember watching him playing catch with Katie’s brother John’s son, and I had such a vibe of, ‘This man is going to be a fantastic father.’ I said that to Katie.”

  Jay asked for Katie’s hand in marriage formally, by visiting John Couric, alone, man to man, while Katie and her childhood friends “gathered at our friend Tracy’s house, waiting. ‘It took so long!’” recalls Barbara Andrukonis. “We thought it was going to just take fifteen minutes, but it took two and a half hours. At some point Katie started to get nervous.” It turned out that “Katie’s dad took it very seriously. ‘How are you going to make my daughter happy?’ ‘How are you going to provide?’” Here was an older, naturally traditional Virginia gentleman assessing a young, more consciously traditional, adopted-Virginia gentleman: a navy man to a navy man. “I’ve always had a weakness for Southern men,” Katie recently said.

  Katie Couric and Jay Monahan were married on June 10, 1989, at the Navy Chapel in Washington, D.C. After the ceremony, the newlyweds rode to their reception standing up and waving through the sunroof of a car. “There was a big UVA contingent,” Kathleen says. “It was joyous and fun.”

  • • •

  WHAT MIGHT IN RETROSPECT be considered Katie’s biggest wedding gift was provided, accidentally, by Jane Pauley.

  In September 1988, not long after Katie’s engagement, Pauley went to the Seoul Olympics for Today. She was assisted by a recent Harvard graduate who was a temporary intern at NBC. “He was just awesome. He was simply amazing,” Jane recalls of the young helper. “When the Olympics were over, his assignment was off.” But after she returned to New York in early October, “I went to NBC and said, ‘It’s funny, this guy—I can’t let him go.’” NBC kept him on at Today because of their star anchor’s insistence. The deliberate, modest, moderate Jane Pauley is not one to take credit unduly. So when she says, as she does of this intern, “He owes his career to me,” you know she is not throwing those words around lightly.

  The young man’s name was Jeff Zucker. He had grown up in Miami and had been the president of the Harvard Crimson. And when, three years later, he would almost literally bump into Katie even before she was hired at Today, some potential professional electricity would crackle between them. From then on, as Pauley says, “Katie and Jeff Zucker [would be] a partnership that cannot be underestimated.”

  PART THREE

  PRIME TIME

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Brainy, Blond, Glamorous

  Diane: 1978 to 1998

  DIANE REMAINED at San Clemente helping Nixon with his memoirs for three and a half years, from August 1974 to mid-1978. (Her official ABC biography has been revised to show 1975 as the cutoff date for her time there, but earlier, real-time-re
ported accounts indicate that she was really there three years longer.) In fact, she and her beau Frank Gannon were the last staffers to leave. They had stayed there all the way through the revisions of Nixon’s memoirs. The night Diane departed—it was July; she was thirty-two and a half years old—Nixon took out a special bottle of brandy and toasted her efforts on the book, and spoke emotionally and gratefully of all she, and Gannon, had done for him.

  All that time that she was at San Clemente, CBS News vice president Bill Small had kept tabs on her. “Bill had already created the best Washington bureau ever,” says Connie Chung. His on-air reporters included Dan Rather, Roger Mudd, Daniel Schorr, Marvin Kalb, and Bob Schieffer, as well as the worthy fruits of his and Dick Salant’s crash-feminism: Lesley Stahl, Rita Braver, Susan Zirinsky, Marcy McGinnis, and Chung herself, who would imminently depart for NBC in LA. “Bill made us so aggressive, we were ready to kill each other,” Connie says. “We were all competing with each other because we were the only people we wanted to compete with.”

  Small could not have expected that a Nixon loyalist like Diane would fit well into his elite crew of hubristic, triumphant Watergate sleuths—who’d proudly called themselves “the Enemy of the President,” and who were suffering what Connie Chung calls “post-Watergate letdown,” because no story would ever be as important—but he didn’t care. He went after Sawyer anyway, for all those four years. “I had a correspondent, Bob Pierpoint, who lived near San Clemente, and when Nixon abdicated,” Small says, he put Pierpoint on the case. Periodically “Pierpoint would contact Diane, and she would say, ‘We’ve got to finish the book.’” Small waited. And waited. “And finally Bob said, ‘If you call her now, her part of the book is done.’ I called her, and she agreed to come in to audition.”

  En route to the audition, Diane stopped in Louisville to see her mother and looked in on her ex-colleagues from WLKY. Bob Taylor, who’d supervised her as a weather girl, was now the manager at a stronger local station, WHAS. “Diane and I had a wonderful visit, and I said to her, ‘We’re ready for you in any capacity you want to be in.’ And she said, ‘You know, after having gone to D.C. and San Clemente, I would love to be home, and I would love to consider an offer. But I have one commitment to make. I have to visit Bill Small. I promised Bill when I left Washington that when I returned from San Clemente I would come back for one final visit.’” Taylor, sitting in his minor-market station, was nevertheless left gratifyingly “convinced, when she walked out the door, that she was coming back to Louisville.” Such was Diane’s ego-stroking charm.