The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

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  IN THE NOW TIME-HONORED tradition of Pauley, Lunden, and Norville, Katie lumbered to the end of her pregnancy on the air. “It was slightly bizarre gaining thirty pounds in front of millions of people, but I guess it’s fine as long as you don’t pose on the cover of Vanity Fair,” she remarked, referring to Demi Moore’s notorious nude shot (and demonstrating, as she would in every introductory interview, a skill with one-liners that could match a late-night TV host). She gave birth to a daughter, Elinor Tully Monahan (Tully was a name on her mother’s side), on July 23, 1991. She and Jay were elated. After a two-month maternity leave, Tom Shales hosanna’d her September 9 return to the show as “brighten[ing] the program by several thousand watts,” going on to say that “Couric puts [Today] blissfully over the top,” and adding that “perhaps no one is quite so deliriously ecstatic about Couric’s return as NBC News, which is otherwise in terrible shape and which hopes the wildly likable co-anchor will help restore Today to its long-lost first place among morning programs.” Shales noted that, on Katie’s first day back, she interviewed Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and “cranky legend Katharine Hepburn,” the latter one of Katie’s favorite interviews of all time.

  A month after she returned from maternity leave, Anita Hill’s testimony at Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings thrust the coanchors onto opposite sides of that bruising national debate, which was blaring from TV sets in public places, stunning the country with surreally vulgar talk (pubic hairs on Coke bottles?) that was delivered with prissy matter-of-factness by staid business-suited witnesses, starchy congresspeople, and straight-faced anchors: a crazy eye-rubber of a televised circus.

  Bryant Gumbel was not merely a golf-playing man’s man who scoffed at “women’s lib”; he was also (though this was rarely remarked upon) a highly accomplished black man who, as such, had reason to be angered on behalf of another highly accomplished black man who was calling the testimony mounted against him a “high-tech lynching” of an “uppity Negro” who dared speak his mind. Almost any other brand-new white female coanchor might have paused at the edge of such sensitive territory and been reticent to support the feminists’ freshly minted heroine Anita Hill. But Katie pushed right in, and she and Bryant had on-air exchanges that provocatively strained the niceness quotient of Morning.

  During her first year, Katie rigorously interviewed conservative columnist turned token presidential candidate Pat Buchanan (accusing him of being on an “ego trip”) and serious third-party candidate Ross Perot (he bristled at her relentless questions). She had the first interview after the Gulf War with General Norman Schwarzkopf—conducting it in Saudi Arabia. It helped that she was perceived as cute and harmless by older gentlemen who wandered into her web with their expectations low. She even crowed about this convenient fact during one of her earliest, and boldest, triumphs: a gotcha interview with President George H. W. Bush. In a very real sense, this interview was the equivalent of Diane’s interview with her former boss Richard Nixon, and one that Christiane would soon conduct with Bill Clinton. In each case, the young newswoman came into a conversation with a president and was either underestimated (Katie with Bush), or unknown (Christiane with Clinton), or asked hard questions of a man who had expected, instead, loyalty and deference (Diane with Nixon). In each case, the great man was caught unawares and the reporter got the goods.

  The triumph unfolded this way: Katie was at the White House to be taken on a tour by First Lady Barbara Bush—a tiresome “women anchor’s” chestnut of an assignment. Today’s cameras captured a peppy Katie in red, a dowagerlike Mrs. Bush in deep blue—and, midtalk, the casually attired president, stopping by merely “to congratulate Barbara” on her fine disquisition about the antiques. Seeing an opening, Katie pounced on a surprised George Bush with substantive questions—which he answered—about the Iran-Contra scandal, about his Democratic opponent, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, and about much more. Katie was so unrelenting that Mrs. Bush resorted to pulling her husband away. “Aren’t I great?” Katie couldn’t resist zinging the president. “I’m one of these less contentious reporters who can convince you to stick around and talk with me because I’m so easy.” The joke was on him—and everyone who’d ever underestimated her. Katie later said of this interview, “I was trying to prove my manhood.”

  Receiving Katie’s transmission in real time, Zucker made a brazen decision: He withheld commercials to run her grilling of the cornered chief executive, uninterrupted, for a stunning nineteen minutes. At the end of the segment, “it was eight forty-five in the morning, so we weren’t going out for drinks” to celebrate, Zucker says, “but there was a sense in the White House driveway, where we met up afterward, that that had been an incredible moment. It was a very significant event in Katie’s career—it made people see that she was able to react to any situation on her feet. And it helped cement our relationship.” That interview “made” Katie, says an NBC colleague. “No question that she saw the opportunity and just went off script. That’s perfectly in character with her being curious, inquisitive, loud, and boisterous.”

  Morning is the hardest of all the TV formats because it necessitates dozens of polar swings, from silliness to seriousness, all crisply sequenced and authoritatively delivered within right-down-to-the-second-tight time spurts. It involves interviewing minimally prepped guests—most of them, TV naifs—economically, and live. Being a Morning anchor is like being an actor playing a half dozen different characters in a two-hour-long one-man stage show. Katie just had a knack for it, and its built-in ironies matched her wit. Of sharp-right-turning from saxophonist Branford Marsalis to a report on domestic violence, she alliterated: “From Branford to battered women, this is the life I have chosen. Or maybe it’s the life that’s chosen me.” In the rush of magazine interviews that the NBC publicist booked for her, America’s new darling, she played along, polishing her girl-next-door brand, with remarks that some regarded as contrived and calculated and others deemed authentic: “My friends call me the Energizer bunny—I keep going and going and going.” “I guess I’m wholesome.” “I think I’m attractive, but not too attractive.” She liked the attention. She liked being famous.

  But there was a price. Katie was a traditionally raised woman with a traditional husband, and as Ellie began crawling and walking, something felt not right about having a long-distance marriage—her nights in New York with baby and nanny, her piles of research for the next morning, her Lean Cuisine, and her eight-thirty bedtime. And the separation was rough on Jay. “It’s really hard,” she’d muse. “I miss him terribly during the week. And he misses me, too. It’s harder for him, because I have Ellie with me. He really misses her.” Guilt and unease bobbed beneath the surface of these peppy interviews.

  Mandy Locke and David Kiernan spent time with Jay during the week in D.C. “Fortunately for Katie, Jay had a very demanding job,” Mandy says. “He was very busy during the week, which helps when you’re missing someone. But on the weekend, when I’d see them together, it was mostly regroup time—let’s hang out in our sweatpants all weekend, we’ll go to the farmers’ market, get together as a family, ’cause it’s hard.” As Katie herself told an interviewer, “It was hard enough [managing the two careers] when we were together. But, now, being separated, and dealing with the whole head trip of this job, it’s really hard.” “Hard” became a theme. Their commuter marriage was “hard,” Katie’s childhood friend Betsy Howell says. “But Katie respected the fact that Jay had his job down here and needed to stay. She made sure she respected his choices and life.”

  “Sometimes Jay and I will sit back and kind of evaluate what’s been going on,” Katie said during this time, “and if it feels like my life is starting to lose its balance, he’ll call my attention to it.” He’ll call my attention: It was he who noticed the preoccupying whirlwind that Katie’s new role had become. It was he who had brought it to her attention.

  Katie, too, would
fret over her “instant fame thing.” She was careful to say, in 1992, “My husband is terrifically supportive and very secure in himself,” but then she added, with a candor rare for women in the public eye, “But sometimes he’d like to get more attention. I wish he could.” She and Jay would be walking down the street, or they’d enter a restaurant for a quiet meal, and people would look at her in that new, excited way, and “he’ll say, ‘Your RF’—recognition factor—‘is very high today.’” She summed it up: “We are dealing with a lot.”

  Part of “a lot” might have been the disorientation of a woman in a situation for which her Leave It to Beaver childhood, to use her expression, left her unprepared. Elinor Couric had been a stay-at-home mom in a community of stay-at-home moms. All the cheerleader exhortations of these now entrenched new times—the “You’ve come a long way, baby!” of the sixties, the “I am woman, hear me roar” of the early seventies, and those that followed—could not make up for the fact that she had never, in her childhood, seen this brave new way of being a wife and mother modeled. “It’s a constant struggle,” she said, “to make sure I’m not becoming too immersed in this show to spend enough time with my family.”

  The early nineties was a beat before the two-career “commuter marriage” was widespread enough, and sufficiently lauded as a “trend,” for its inconvenienced practitioners to feel at least a safety-in-numbers consolation. It was a decade before the phenomenon of upper-middle-class women outearning their husbands was too common to make men feel ashamed.* And it was two decades before many women did outearn their husbands and before graduate school enrollments by gender suggested that this might be a persistent fact of American life. Katie was a hugely ambitious, aggressive young woman in terms of her work, but in terms of her personal life she was poised on the front line of a vanguard she hadn’t sought or wanted. When she’d looked at Cassie Mackin ten years earlier, she had always seen a split, a quid pro quo, a warning: Ambition and success could stanch or jeopardize a woman’s personal life. Not every ambitious young newswoman would have been so alert to that, but Katie was.

  At some point in 1993, Jay, almost inevitably, gave up his position with Williams and Connolly and moved to New York so the family could be together. This was not a small sacrifice. But in New York, in the Central Park West apartment he and Katie and Ellie now shared, he kept his life stubbornly Virginian: He started with a new law firm, Hunton and Williams, that was based in Richmond; he began writing a history of a place—the Shenandoah Valley—that he adored; and he kept up his love of horseback riding by going to the Claremont Stables, just off Central Park, early every morning. Clearly, he was almost touchingly holding fast to the distinctive identity he had crafted for himself, as if to proclaim that he would not be subsumed in his wife’s persona.

  Magazine articles appeared mentioning that “Katie was the main breadwinner.” None of this could have been easy. Still, Jay continued to play the role of the somewhat courtly man of taste. “He was great; he would teach me about antiques,” says Lori Beecher, who had just started as Katie’s associate producer and would become one of her confidantes. “I was interested in learning about antiques, and Jay would help me. And if I was moving, I would show him an apartment” under consideration. Lori relied on Jay’s educated opinion and advice. “He was very supportive and kind and easy to get along with.”

  But toward Katie, not so much. As Katie whirled into greater and greater celebrity, Jay was judgmental—sternly vigilant about her character and providing, as ever, an important corrective to her disorganization, says a man connected to her work at NBC. “Jay was in charge,” this man says. “She respected him. He knew her before she was a star. And he ran it”—their life, her schedule—“with a hard fist. He didn’t take any bullshit. Made sure she showed up. Made sure she was disciplined. Made sure she was honest.” This man adds, bluntly, “Katie is not organized enough to do a show like the Today show. Professionally, Katie did a lot for Jay,” imminently getting him into lucrative TV-commentating arrangements. “But he made it so she could function.” Another man, a soon-to-be network head, muses, “It’s always struck me: These women who are so strong, they still need a guy. They tend to have one guy who’s key to anything they do.” Clearly, some would dispute this statement, but for Katie, Jay Monahan clearly did fulfill real needs.

  Katie consolidated her style and her power throughout the early nineties, partnering with Jeff and personally going after competitive stories. “There have always been bookers, so it’s not like the ‘get’ thing was invented by us,” Jeff says. “But Katie was incredibly willing to get on the phone, to get on a plane, to put herself out there—to convince these people to talk to her.” (Later, when she went to GMA, Diane would be stunned that her famously unfailing charm was one-upped by Katie’s and Today’s practiced ability to woo talent for Morning.) She also produced her own taped pieces—turning her interview with Woody Allen into a walk through Central Park and her inquisition of Paul Newman into a game of pool. These were a toe dip into the full-scale theatrical capers that would later seal her brand: flying across Rockefeller Center as Tinkerbell on Halloween, trading places with Jay Leno and hosting The Tonight Show for a week, arriving as Nurse Ratched at weatherman Al Roker’s house as he was preparing for a medical test.

  Toward the end of 1994, Bryant Gumbel renewed his contract for two more years, and when he did, Katie made a tactical error, according to the TV veteran who had dubbed Katie the “reactor” to Bryant’s “actor.” In this man’s view, in a morning show pairing, you, as the reactor, “wait your turn” to try to turn the tables. But, he says, “after Bryant signed that deal, Katie was unable, or unwilling, to wait. So she began to push—for more stories, for bigger stories, more airtime.” Broadly hinting at a conflict upon which he declines to elaborate, the man says, “It was very unwelcome. It was a very, very sad thing, that she couldn’t wait—that she couldn’t wait her turn.”

  But all this talk of “turn” taking sounds so retro and antifeminist. Besides, wasn’t Bryant Gumbel the ultimate male chauvinist? This man instantly answers: “She’s the one who put it [that image of Bryant as the male chauvinist] on the street,” fixing his face in the kind of grave stare that wordlessly suggests what Ted Kavanau had said: She is tough. Katie is not some innocent. Other women, indeed, have termed Gumbel a male chauvinist. (One who temporarily worked on the show confided that Bryant was very hard for her, as a woman, to work with, and that friendly Willard Scott took the edge off Bryant’s condescending coldness.) Katie might have been the one to secure the impression of Gumbel’s being a chauvinist, because her spin machine with the press was so good.

  Katie had a trusted and experienced live-in nanny named Nancy Poznek, a woman several years older than she, who had previously worked for Mick Jagger and Diana Ross. It is standard practice for members of the household staffs (and often the professional staffs) of celebrities to be required to sign confidentiality agreements, but apparently Katie did not ask Poznek to sign one. She was enormously dependent on the nanny, who did many tasks for Katie, aside from caring for Ellie; thus Poznek observed the Couric-Monahan household at close range, including Katie and Jay’s fights, and the incredibly busy life Katie had, sometimes manifest in sloppiness at home. Poznek initially came to Katie’s defense when a reader of People magazine wrote a letter criticizing Katie for being a partially absent parent—an accusation that is very painful to any working mother and that, of course, is never made about working fathers. Poznek’s rebuttal ran in People’s October 4, 1993, issue. The letter briefly mentioned the “dilemma of all working mothers,” which Katie shared, but declared that—“without hestitation”—Katie “is there for her daughter at the important and not-so-important times in her daily life,” giving vivid examples.

  But after Nancy did that good deed, the relationship soured. Apparently, Nancy told Katie the negative things Jay had said about her, including his mocking of her fame-inflated ego. For th
is or other reasons, Katie fired Nancy—“for cause.” Nancy retaliated by selling a story about life with Katie to the supermarket tabloid Star. It included this unattractive, though hardly damning (in fact, oddly endearing), description of the exhausted morning star for whom neatness was never remotely a habit: “She drinks milk straight from the carton with the refrigerator door hanging open. She eats ice cream and has to be told to wipe the chocolate mustache off her face. She peels her clothes off in one motion and leaves them wherever they land. She’s so tired on weekends that sometimes she doesn’t bother to bathe.”*

  Whatever disputes Jay and Katie had—and no one, including Katie, denies that their marriage was fractious during these years—they were committed to each other and wanted one or two more children. In early summer 1995, they were thrilled to learn that Katie was pregnant again. By now Jay was segueing into a new field, and one that directly competed with Katie: He was becoming a legal commentator on television. Criminal defense lawyers were suddenly celebrities. The unprecedented phenomenon of the O. J. Simpson case had created a market for lawyer-pundits, who analyzed daily and opined nightly—their patter and makeup, exhortations and arguments as theatrical as those of any TV star. Jay Monahan, handsomer than most, became a commentator on NBC News, MSNBC, and CNBC; that all these networks were divisions of his wife’s network must have led to complicated feelings on both of their parts. He became a guest on the show that was the prime minter of criminal-defense-lawyers-as-stars and was the evening watercooler for the O. J.–obsessed: Geraldo.