The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  Caroline Couric Monahan, known as Carrie, was born on January 7, 1996. With the birth of her second child, Katie, who herself had two cherished sisters, saw her life move closer to an ideal sealed in childhood. More, everything Katie loved about her husband was thrust into emotional high relief, with the marriage’s gnawing complications relievedly and abruptly pushed aside. Katie has remembered the day she and Jay brought the baby home from the hospital, when New York was in the midst of a massive blizzard: “Settling into our warm apartment, [Carrie] was napping with me and Ellie, [who was] then four and a half, while Jay played a Brahms lullaby on the Steinway piano that we had bought each other for our birthdays, which were two days apart. This was deeper and more satisfying than any happiness I’d ever experienced. This was pure, soul-filling contentment.”

  Still, the marriage “had a lot of problems” at this point, says a then close NBC colleague. “She was becoming an international superstar. It was harder and harder for Jay to control her. All of a sudden everyone knows who you are. You’re one of the biggest stars of television, generating five, six, seven hundred million dollars of revenue a year. It is difficult to stay as you were—the perky, wonderful, caring person. Everyone’s telling you how great you are, how important you are. It turns your head. Jay tried to turn it back.”

  During the summer of 1996, not long after returning to the show from her two-month maternity leave, Katie conducted another substantive gotcha interview with a presidential contender. Senator Bob Dole was running against President Bill Clinton, and Dole and his wife, Elizabeth, had written a memoir about their marriage. At the time, their union involving two major careers and no children was unusual (and, in some eyes, laudable) for a late-middle-aged Republican politician. To promote the book, and to try to cut into Clinton’s large lead among women voters, they were appearing on Today.

  Katie’s friend Mandy Locke, Elizabeth Dole’s deputy press secretary, helped arrange the interview.

  Just as she had with George H. W. Bush and Barbara Bush, Katie cut to the chase, going beyond the expected female interviewer niceties to the red meat. Dole had accepted considerable campaign donations from the tobacco industry, and now, in various campaign appearances, he was claiming (in 1996!) that tobacco was not addictive. “I guess what I’m trying to say, Senator, is that some people think, from your comments that you’ve made of late, that you’re being an apologist for the tobacco industry,” Katie said. “That somehow they have you in their pocket.”

  Katie’s aggressiveness startled the couple. “Elizabeth Dole kept taking her microphone off and saying, ‘I thought we were here to talk about the book,’ but Katie kept her cool,” Mandy recalls. It was Senator Dole who lost his cool. He angrily accused Katie of being part of the “liberal media,” even suggesting that her questions were “violating FCC regulations.”

  The next day, when the piece aired, Mrs. Dole’s main press secretary, Kate Bush, heatedly informed Mandy that the interview most certainly did ‘not [go] well’ I was in an awkward position,” says Mandy. Then Mandy got a call from one of Katie’s assistants, who said, “Hi, I’m just calling because Katie wanted me to make sure you’re still talking to her.” Mandy laughed then—and she laughs now. “I said, ‘Of course I’m still talking to her! She was just doing her job.’ She’s a serious interviewer. But her gift is, when she gets into these really stressful, high-stakes situations, she injects calm and humor.” The next day, having gotten the preliminary “all clear” from Mandy’s staffer, Katie called Mandy and, to be doubly sure, asked, “‘Are you still talking to me?’ She had to put her job first, but she was still concerned about our friendship.”

  • • •

  ONE DAY IN OCTOBER, Jeff Zucker walked into Katie’s office without the confident élan that he usually projected. His mood surprised Katie—what was this about? Barely three months earlier, Katie had been at Jeff’s wedding to Caryn Nathanson, a Saturday Night Live executive. They were a happy couple. Jeff had a good life. But his face now projected something very dark. “I remember going to her office to tell her that I had colon cancer,” Jeff says. “I was just diagnosed and [had to make plans for] my surgery.” He was thirty-one years old.

  When he told Katie his news, “she immediately sprang into action and wanted to find the best people to treat this.” She made phone call after phone call, to every contact she had in the medical community. “I ended up finding the doctor who treated me on my own,” Jeff says, “but she was very eager to help—she jumped in instantly.”

  Three months into Zucker’s long medical ordeal, which included surgery and chemotherapy, a sea change came to Today: Bryant Gumbel decided to step down after fifteen years. That Katie hadn’t “waited her turn” had something to do with his decision. She had become the star, she had Jeff Zucker on her side in many ways, and there was tension between her and Bryant. Although Bryant has claimed that he and Katie never exchanged an uncivil word, Katie is more forthright. “There was a lot of creative tension,” she would later say, stagily amending, “Well, there was tension. I don’t know how creative it was.”

  The show’s newsreader, the smooth, urbane, good-looking yet unthreatening Matt Lauer, took Bryant’s place. Lauer, then thirty-nine, the son of a New York businessman, had spent his postcollege years following the standard television career path: stints in a series of small and medium markets—Richmond, Providence, Boston, Philadelphia—then landing at NBC in New York, where he eagerly plugged holes by substituting and weekend-anchoring for Morning, newsmagazine, and news, as well as newsreading on Today. “Now Katie was the actor and Matt was the reactor,” says the NBC veteran who’d first mentioned those terms of art. “Eventually, it would come full circle: Matt would not ‘wait his turn.’ What goes around comes around.”

  But at the outset, the big difference between Katie and Matt was in punctuality. Allison Gollust, then a Today publicist, says, “Matt left his house at the same exact time every day—four forty-five a.m. He got in the car. It took six minutes to drive to the studio. He’d be in the studio at three minutes to five. He liked having that time between five and seven to be in his dressing room and his office. Katie, on the other hand, liked to get there at the very last minute. She was more of a six-fifteen type of girl.” Some say that Jay made certain that six fifteen was the absolute latest she left.

  Shortly after Matt replaced Bryant, Katie scored another coup: an interview with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat. She and her producers flew to D.C. for the scheduled meeting, but when Arafat didn’t show, Katie rounded everyone up for a tension-relieving photo. Recalls one of the people in attendance, “So we all got into the picture—the producers, the crew, the cameramen, and Katie—and it was Katie’s idea to have us all pulling our hair out. It was very Katie: ‘Aahhh! What am I gonna do?’ Making the best of the situation.”

  The interview finally took place a few days later, back in New York. “Katie asked a lot of tough questions, which made [Arafat and his minders] uncomfortable,” says one witness, of the interview that was also being covered by Lisa DePaulo of George magazine. At one point Arafat screamed at Katie, “Lies! Big lies!” “Then tell us what the truth is, Chairman Arafat,” Katie said sweetly. “Ask your government to tell you the truth!” he retorted. Even the State Department observer could tell the chairman did not like, or expect, the question. When it was all over, Katie said, “Thank you, Chairman. I enjoyed talking to you. Now get some rest.”

  Arafat said, “Katie, I am sorry I got angry.”

  “Hey, that’s okay,” she informed the head of the PLO. “I can take it.”

  Katie and Jay had traded their Shenandoah Valley country house for a beautiful spread in the horse country of Millbrook, New York, a two-hour drive from Manhattan. They loved the house and were able to grab some peace there, away from the attention of the city. Mandy Locke, who would soon be engaged to David Kiernan, thought the weekends in Millbrook were
magical, more relaxing than those at the Shenandoah Valley house. Everyone would sing show tunes—“any show tunes; Katie loved them all,” Mandy says. (A number of years later, when asked what she would be if not a newscaster, Katie unhesitatingly answered, “lounge singer,” and during a “dream jobs” segment on Today, she sang with Tony Bennett.) One time, “we became the Trapp Family and we were singing from The Sound of Music all night.” During another weekend, Jay described every movement of the 1812 Overture, then played the piece—gloriously—on the piano. Mandy saw what so many did: Katie was fun and pop; Jay had a certain romantic majesty about him.

  But Kathleen Lobb has a less idyllic memory. Her first time in Millbrook, she recalls, “Katie and Jay were telling me about this completely bizarre, terrible thing that had happened to Jeff. ‘Can you believe it? Thirty-one-year-old Jeff Zucker has colon cancer?’”

  • • •

  EARLY 1997 STARTED WITH no alarm bells. Sure, Jay “had lost a lot of weight,” Katie said in a conversation with Larry King in 2000. “But, you know, in this weight-obsessed culture, we didn’t really think that much about that”—losing weight was good. “He was working nonstop, and he was very fatigued. He was traveling back and forth from Los Angeles”; jet lag seemed the obvious culprit. “We had two young children, a two-career family. We just thought we were both exhausted [and that] Jay was particularly exhausted.” It made perfect sense.

  One morning Katie was on the Today set when an urgent call came in from the babysitter: “Jay was doubled over in pain. I said, ‘Let’s get him to a doctor right away.’” Katie rushed to meet Jay at the office of her internist, since Jay didn’t have a regular New York doctor. (“He was, you know, a healthy, athletic, forty-one-year-old guy,” she has said, “so he didn’t really even have regular checkups.”) A diagnostic test was scheduled. Still, the two felt reassured; the doctor said the magic words, and Katie and Jay took them in with great relief: “Don’t worry. It’s not cancer.”

  Some days later, Kathleen Lobb was traveling through New York with an old mutual UVA friend named Julie—Kathleen, Julie, and Katie had been resident advisers together—who was briefly in town from Alaska. Kathleen and Julie called Katie’s apartment from a phone booth to suggest getting together. “We thought, ‘We’ll just catch her at home,’” Kathleen says. “When no one answered the phone, I thought, This is weird. It was a time of day when she would have been back from the studio, and Jay had something of a work-at-home schedule, and they had the babysitter for their young daughters.” Kathleen pauses. “I had a little sense of foreboding.”

  The next day Kathleen tried to reach Katie at work. “I couldn’t get her, so I called Lori Beecher, because they were very close friends. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ Lori was being cryptic, because Katie had asked her not to speak about it. But she said that Katie and Jay were both off the air”—Katie had someone substituting for her at Today; Jay wasn’t on Geraldo. Not good.

  “I called their apartment, and Katie’s dad answered the phone. He said, ‘Jay has colon cancer.’” Just like Jeff Zucker. Kathleen’s heart sank.

  Then came worse news: Jay’s cancer was advanced. Katie has said she can’t even remember how she learned the prognosis—through a phone call? In the doctor’s office? “It’s a blur. It’s a blur because it was a nightmare.”

  Katie shared her news with Jeff, and, Jeff says, both of them felt “it was unbelievably coincidental that Jay and I both suffered from the same cancer. She immediately swung into action, as I had seen her do with me, to try to do everything she could.” Katie herself said her attitude was, “You know, we’re going to fight this thing! We’re going to do everything we can! I sort of took the role of cheerleader, and the person providing all the hope and the positivity.”

  Mandy Locke and David Kiernan came up from D.C. for Jay’s surgery. The visit was painfully ironic: They had recently become engaged, and David had just asked Jay to be in their wedding. From then on, “because Jay and David were so close, we would all spend a lot of time at the hospital.”

  Katie continued doing her show. Her viewers had no idea that Jay was sick and “only her closest friends knew what she was going through. She did not wear her heart on her sleeve,” says Lori Beecher, who worked with her daily. “She was always professional.” The man who saw the tough and disorganized Katie—who says she’d needed Jay’s “hard fist” and had not waited her turn to go from “reactor” to “actor” on Today—says that Katie was emotionally girded at work during this time, and that this was her way. “Katie will never let you see her cry,” he stresses. Jeff Zucker emphatically disagrees: “I’ve seen Katie cry a lot. On screen and off screen.”

  The minute she left the set at nine a.m., Katie would switch into research mode. “She would spend hours calling experts, doctors—figuring out what drug was being tested where, what experimental treatment was happening where,” Lori Beecher explains. “She was doing research constantly. She so very desperately wanted to find something that would help him—anything! ” Mandy Locke adds: “She kind of had a team of friends, mostly people who she worked with, who helped her get in touch with every doctor, every clinical trial. Every waking moment that she could be spending on it, she was.” David Kiernan was by now a doctor as well as a lawyer, “and he said that, after a month, ‘Katie’s knowledge of colon cancer has already surpassed mine,’” Mandy recalls.

  For Katie, life was now divided between the normal world and her own world—a realm of unique and unbidden pain and a medical language she had never expected to be speaking. As she put it: “It’s these parallel universes when someone you love is sick.” Your world becomes “this completely foreign place involving radiation and tumor markers. Outside, people are buying sweaters.” The irony was painful—and angering. She would watch “people walking down the street and talking and pushing baby carriages and having lunch with friends, and you would think, How can their worlds go on? Mine has been completely turned upside down. Don’t they know what you’re going through?”

  Then came the ultimate heartbreak: Jay’s illness was terminal.

  The reaction, Mandy says grimly, “was wordless.”

  Jeff Zucker: “There were a lot of tears.”

  Still, Katie would not give up. Having taken the role of the “cheerleader,” it was so “hard,” she has said, “because I don’t think I was ever able to express how devastated and concerned and upset I really was in this very dire situation. I wanted to take the role of, ‘We can beat this thing!’” When she talked to old friends, she let her guard down. “She was just very somber, in an almost preoccupied way,” says Betsy Howell.

  As for Jay, “he never wanted to admit” things were as bad as they were, says Mandy. “Jay wanted to keep trying. He wanted to keep fighting.” Kathleen Lobb: “It was just terrible. But he was the type of person who needed to continue to live his life and be hopeful about his prognosis, even though it was very dire. I think it was important to Jay and to Katie to maintain a semblance of the normality of their lives.”

  To maintain that “semblance of normality”—to resist surrendering to hopelessness—Katie kept working. “I think, in a way, it was a refuge for me, to come to work every day, to keep kind of a normal schedule,” she said later. “I thought that was so important for Jay and for Ellie and Carrie.” But it was challenging. “I would be reading copy off the teleprompter and thinking about Jay, or somebody would be answering a question and [I would] think about Jay.” “I think without that job, she would have gone crazy,” says a person at the show who was close to her at the time. “That job was her salvation.”

  Mandy and David frequently traveled to New York to spot Katie at Jay’s bedside. “We were able to say, ‘Katie, go home and take a nap! You’ve been here for twenty-four hours!’” Mandy says. “Especially when I was with David, she’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll go home.’ She had this huge job and had two kids”—Carrie was not yet two—“and
she was caring for a terminally ill person.” As the weeks wore on, David would often go up to New York to spend a day or a weekend with Jay “so Katie could sleep.”

  Then “Jay’s cancer spread to his brain,” Kathleen Lobb says, “and it was creating problems with his vision.” Katie was impelled into a mind-set of “Get all the records! Go see this person!”—this specialist, that specialist. Having to find myriad specialists on her own as her husband’s cancer was spreading rapidly was, she felt, “insult added to injury when you’ve already had your world turned on its head.” Katie concluded that “there has to be a better way to deliver patient care,” Kathleen says. Later, when she became as much a cancer patient advocate as a news star, Katie helped devise a solution to the maze of specialist research she’d been through: an integrated approach by which all the specialists a colon cancer patient may eventually need are worked seamlessly into a program and brought to the family by a “patient navigator.” Katie devised this approach, along with Jay’s gastroenterologist Mark Pochapin, when she founded the Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

  At some point Katie was talking to Jay about how meaningful the Millbrook house was to her. He said that he hoped she would hold on to “happy memories” of their time there. That was a way of telling her he knew that he was dying.

  “He suffered so,” says Kathleen Lobb.

  “He did not go gently into the good night,” Katie herself said. “He fought until the bitter end.”

  Jay entered Lenox Hill Hospital in early January 1998 and held on for weeks. He died there on January 24, 1998.

  “When Jay died,” Janie Florea says, “Katie was so stricken by grief, she was numb.” One of the last things he said was, “Nothing really matters but your family and friends.” Katie never forgot that.

  Jay’s funeral was held at St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church in Manhattan. Judy Collins sang “Amazing Grace” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Katie was too emotional to deliver the euology she had somehow managed to write. Her oldest sister, Emily, stood up at his funeral service and read it on Katie’s behalf to the packed pews of mourners, in a clear, feeling-full voice. After the funeral, Emily didn’t want to leave Katie and Ellie and Carrie all alone, so she had her teenage son Jeff move in with them for a while, to help with errands and housekeeping and babysitting—and to provide family connection and warmth.