The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  A day later, on Christmas Eve, while everyone else at ABC was dashing out for holiday festivities, Charlie walked into Diane’s office and they puzzled out a plan, like two kids making a double dare. “I said to Charlie, ‘I’ll do it if you’ll do it,’” Diane’s recalled. “And he said, ‘I’ll do it if you do it.’” They each took up the other on the dare.

  And that was that.

  Their agreement was kept strictly confidential over the two-week holiday period. Then, on January 4, 1999, the media got the announcement via a conference call. Phyllis, who was on the call, remembers, “You could actually hear reporters gasp. It’s the only time in the years that I’ve been involved in television where something really stayed a secret.”

  • • •

  THE NEW TAGLINE of the show was “Start Smarter,” making a virtue of the cohosts’ maturity and reporting heft. But what ABC viewers saw at seven a.m. on January 18 was warmer and folksier than “smart.” Charlie, a known quantity on the show for a decade, nevertheless reintroduced himself, essentially to set up Diane’s reintroduction to an audience that had never seen her as a morning coffee cup holder, doing light fare while viewers were packing lunches and helping their children dress for school. “I’m Charlie Gibson, from Evanston, Illinois,” he said. Whereupon the glamorous, classy blond at his side said, smiling, “And I’m Diane Sawyer, from Louisville, Kentucky.” Everyone who knew Diane—Diane of the sweatpants and Coke-bottle glasses, the okra and salty potato chips, the Norman Vincent Peale and Catherine Marshall mottoes, the Methodist hymns and the obeisance to her indomitable mother—knew how central that identification actually was. Now perhaps America would get a glimpse of this Diane, too.

  • • •

  KATIE AND DIANE would now be locked into one of the more fascinating rivalries in morning TV, imbued with two very different kinds of star power: “Diane was the glamour girl—the tall, cool drink of water—and Katie was the girl next door,” says a staffer. Both were almost killingly competitive. In fact, when Roone Arledge learned that Diane had accepted GMA, the retired ABC News chief, who still carried a torch for her, called Diane to tell her not to take the offer, which was announced as open-ended and temporary, because, as a confidant of Roone’s relates his words, “You’re so competitive, you won’t leave until you beat Today.” He was 90 percent correct in his prediction: Diane would stay for ten whole years, including a window of time, in 2004 and early 2005, when she was a hairsbreadth away from trumping Katie.

  Though she virtually glided with great success (aided by her massive work ethic) into supposedly harder forms of broadcast journalism, Diane had to push and pull to get Morning right. An immediate challenge was that morale at GMA, which had three million fewer viewers than Today, was at a nadir. McGrady says, “Basically, you go into battle every single day—and they [Today] are a worthy, worthy, worthy opponent! Shelley was the right person to go into battle on a show that was defeated because she is a warrior—‘Hel-lo, we are going to get on the phone! We are going to get that booking!’ She brought the staff back to feeling: We can win! And Diane was the right person, because she is very competitive.” Says the senior staffer, reflecting the starting-on-a-dime angst they all faced: “Diane and Charlie were up against Katie and Matt, America’s Sweethearts! Who’d been doing it so successfully for five years! And we were up against Jeff Zucker! Jeff Zucker, who’s so smart!”

  But recharging the staff was just a start. Diane had a “big learning curve” in front of her, three separate people—including Phyllis McGrady and Shelley Ross—say, all of them using that phrase. The learning curve roughly broke down into four components: tone and image, technical performing skills, accelerated “get” bookings—and a way to manage the competition with Katie.

  First, the tone and image: Says the ABC person who attended the secret meeting, “The warmth that you’ve seen recently in Diane’s specials with Rihanna and Jaycee Dugard—when she started at GMA, she didn’t have that.” (The speaker is referring to the very concerned-toned and insightful November 2009 exclusive interview Diane did with Rihanna, the first one the Barbadian pop star gave after her near strangulation, nine months earlier, by her then boyfriend Chris Brown; and the highly sensitive July 2011 interview Diane did with the Northern Californian young woman who was kidnapped, at eleven years old, in 1991 and held captive for eighteen years before returning home, with her two daughters, to her family in August 2009.) The senior staffer agrees: “At first Diane had trouble with that Morning emotional connection. It really took her time. It was a slow, gradual process. She didn’t want to do the girl stuff, the fashion and makeup. She’s a serious journalist.” It took a while “for the Ice Princess to melt.” Wardrobe changes helped her image: She took off her Primetime blazers and started wearing sweaters to appear softer and more accessible.

  A bigger challenge was learning Morning stagecraft, the executive says. “Diane also didn’t have the performing skills to do a two-hour, live, moving-parts program. She had to find the technical skill to do a job that, despite looking easy, is extremely, extremely difficult.” The senior staffer says: “Morning shows just have a different cadence.” One of those cadence-related technical skills was the mastering of the cut-to-the-chase live interview. In live Morning, you don’t have time for warm-up questions, there are no do-overs, and you have to cram a lot into a short interview while giving it a polished thoroughness. “You don’t start with question number one,” says Shelley Ross. “You start with question three.” In mid-March, two months after Diane started, boxing promoter Don King was on the show with fighters Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis, right after their Madison Square Garden bout that was, controversially, declared a draw; many believed that Lewis had really won. While Charlie interviewed Holyfield and Lewis, Diane delivered King a knockout punch by asking, “‘So, did you fix the fight?’ I almost fell out of my chair! And I know it blew Charlie away,” says Shelley Ross. “She started with question six! That was the moment I knew Diane’s learning curve was over.”

  Wrangling “gets” was more of a street fight in Morning. Someone associated with the show recalls, “Diane was used to very little competition, other than Barbara. If she wanted a guest, she got it. Also, with Primetime and 60, she could work for weeks and weeks on things; Morning was immediate. And Katie and Matt and Jeff were so entrenched.” Diane learned the “muffin basket lesson” early on, says the senior staffer. Up at four a.m. browsing the Wall Street Journal for stories, Diane came upon the tiny mention of a little boy who had accidentally stabbed himself in the heart with a pencil and whose mother had miraculously saved him. Diane “snapped her fingers” for the story. Though GMA instantly hustled a crew out to the remote Midwestern location, mere hours later the TV monitors in the Fishbowl (the broadcast’s den of activity) displayed . . . mother and son on Today! “We’re, ‘How is it possible they’re on the Today show? And—I’m not kidding—it was reported to us later that they’d said, ‘Well, the Today show sent us a muffin basket.’” A muffin basket then became de rigueur. Still, “every single one of those little stories was incredibly difficult” to steal from Today.

  In keeping with Diane’s dignity, her booking team was decorous. As a close observer says, “She never wanted to—and we never put her in the position—of” starting a woo with, “‘Oh, you don’t want to talk to Katie or Barbara; you want to talk to me.’ It was never, ‘Oh, they’re not the right person to talk to.’ She was always, ‘Let me tell you how I’m the best person to tell your story.’ We never sent flowers to anybody and signed her name if we didn’t first ask her or tell her, ‘Here’s how we need to do this.’ We didn’t put her on the phone without a plan or a strategy: ‘Here’s what this person needs from you.’ We didn’t ask her to write a note that was anything other than, ‘You’re in my thoughts.’ It was very clear to us, although maybe not blatantly expressed, that we really never did anything to dishonor her name.” Shelley Ross adds, “She never p
ut herself in a position where she was directly competing with Katie. Charlie took those stories. We never let it be an ‘Okay, guys, compare and contrast Katie and Diane.’”

  A prime example of this strategy was the show’s Columbine coverage. There had been two multiple-fatality school shootings before the one at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. One had taken place in West Paducah, Kentucky, and the other in Jonesboro, Arkansas, so a terrible “trend” was in the offing. But somehow this incomprehensive tragedy—in which twelve middle- to upper-middle-class students, in a non-Southern state, were killed and twenty-one were injured by two of their peers, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who then killed themselves—felt especially devastating, especially relatably suburban. It also seems, in retrospect, as if it were the ominous a starting bell for events that followed: at Virginia Tech and, later, in Aurora, Colorado, and Newtown, Connecticut—just as the Menendez brothers had been for O. J., and as Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill had been for Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky.

  GMA had sent Charlie and a team to Columbine, but they had reported back: “None of the families are talking.” Yet two families did talk to Katie—in an extraordinarily moving interview, which was followed up by an interview about the catastrophe, for Today, with President Clinton. So Shelley flew to Washington and, insisting to President Clinton’s spokesman Joe Lockhart that “the White House can’t have a favorite network,” Shelley pushed for—and got—“GMA Live from the White House,” a two-hour town hall meeting on the subject of school violence, with the president and first lady and survivors of school shootings across the country. Diane and Charlie co-moderated that, but first there was a one on one with the president, and it was a shrewd accommodation to hand Charlie a plum assignment—one that would wind up on the front page of the New York Times. Diane, with her wise strategizing (actually, she and the producers less elegantly called it her “law of the jungle” reasoning), thus acknowledged that the audience identified GMA as Charlie’s show—one that he had cohosted for a decade, and one on which she didn’t want to appear to be encroaching. It was never clear whether “crusty” Charlie appreciated Diane’s deference; he would soon, according to the ABC executive, have tensions with Diane about her taking the show “down-market” and would feel that “here was another blond” overshadowing him after Joan Lunden had done so. For her part, Diane reacted to the White House town hall’s success with typical rumination, brooding over glitches, real or imagined. “The bigger the success, the more tortured she becomes that we won’t maintain the momentum,” Shelley Ross says. “The morning our GMA reporting got on the front page of the Times, Diane called and said, ‘Why did we pass on the Donny Osmond autobiography?’”

  But it was Katie’s Today piece in Columbine that stands out as one of the most affecting stories ever to run on morning TV. Just as he had done with Katie’s impromptu interview with George H. W. Bush, Jeff Zucker canceled the commercial breaks and let Katie’s conversation run overtime. Michael Shoels, the African American father of one shooting victim, Isaiah Shoels, and Craig Scott, the white brother of another, Rachel Scott, had never met. At first that worried Katie: “I just didn’t feel” the surprise value for each of them “was appropriate under the circumstances,” she said. But she would later describe the interview as “just bearing witness to something: these two people talking about what happened and holding hands and comforting one another.” She told producer Yael Federbush that the Columbine interview was “one of the most profound and spiritual moments she’d ever had.”

  Watching the poignant fifteen minutes unfold on the studio monitors, with the snowy Colorado background, Federbush recalls, “Matt said that everybody on the set had to remember the last time they swallowed—you just stopped breathing.” At GMA, a staffer remembers watching Katie pull it off, “and what she was able to get wasn’t just a great story but all the human emotion that she was so good at and Diane didn’t have yet.”

  In the new Diane versus Katie war: point, Katie.

  • • •

  MANY HAVE NOTED how the two women’s styles crisscrossed over the ensuing years: When they would later resume their rivalry in 2009, this time as evening news coanchors, “Katie was more all-business and Diane was the more emotive,” a former GMA-er notes. Meanwhile, Diane’s effect on Katie started subtly in the crushingly competitive forum of Morning. “I think when you’re number one you’re just there to be knocked off,” says Shelley Ross, whose helming of GMA eventually made that a near reality. Soon Katie started dressing more like Diane. “The sweaters . . . ,” Shelley says. “One day, after Diane started wearing pencil skirts and twinsets, Katie came out wearing the same outfit—we all noticed.” Over the next few years of their intensifying competition, many people would credit the change in Katie’s style—from reassuringly, mildly dowdy young suburban mom to cosmopolite in leather jackets and short skirts—to the presence of silky Diane a dial switch away. But that “cool drink of water”—that woman of the soigné evenings amid playwrights and literary eminences with her icon husband—was learning from Katie, too: how to be cheerfully facile with kitchen segments, how to smile broadly when a chimp climbed on her back (that segment provided inspiration for a scene in the movie Morning Glory, with Diane Keaton playing the Sawyer-like role), and how to gasp in incredulity that the average wedding now cost a whole gosh-darn $15,000. (“I thought, ‘Oh, yuck,’” at the insincerity, recalls one major CBS reporter who saw the segment while he was Exercycling at his gym.)

  Within a year, Diane got it. “She would always be saying to me, ‘Where’s the heart? Where’s the heart?’” says her protégée, junior producer Anna Robertson. Actually, Diane was not only attracted to stories with heart, but she made deep and meaningful friendships having nothing to do with their television utility. For example, Diane met teenage cystic fibrosis patient and poet Laura Rothenberg “one day when she was visiting someone in a hospital” and Laura was in an adjoining ward, Anna recalls. “Laura was very ill; she needed a lung transplant. Diane became friends with her off the air—it had nothing to do with on-camera. They kept this friendship going for years,” right up until Laura’s tragically untimely death, at twenty-two, in 2003. Diane’s viewers didn’t know about her mentorlike friendship with Laura, which perhaps was Diane’s way of giving to a poetry-minded young girl the affirmation that she, at that age, had received from her Seneca English teacher Alice Chumbley. The viewers didn’t know the many acts of philanthropy Diane performed—the hospitalizations she paid for, the flowers and food she sent to producers’ mothers who were having operations in far-off states. Or that she tutored a high school girl several mornings a week.

  Similarly, Katie’s viewers didn’t know that she mentored Harlem girls by way of the Big Sisters program for years, and that, as Katie’s daughters Ellie and Carrie got older, they did as well. Or that she was godmother to the severely autistic son of a junior colleague, once spending a weekend with him when he was in crisis, another time dashing from the studio to his eighth-grade graduation ceremony. They did know that she’d flown her girlhood posse—Betsy, Sara, Janie, Barbara—to New York to be on Today, get makeovers, and attend a Broadway play. But they didn’t know that when they were all relaxing at Katie’s Park Avenue apartment, a knock came at the door, in accordance with a special treat she’d cooked up: There, to borrow a cup of sugar, stood the generation-earlier football hero star alumnus of their rival Arlington, Virginia, high school: Warren Beatty.

  Diane and Katie may have sharply competed for gets and may have eagle-eyed the tiniest fluctuations of the overnights in the horse race for viewers for their rival shows—which provided the lion’s share of advertising dollars to their respective networks—but they also had private lives that cut against both the triviality and the avarice that their work could all too easily, and inaccurately, be reduced to.

  In terms of content differences, there was a counterintuitive switch between the shows during this period. Says TV
analyst Andrew Tyndall: “There came to be a huge difference in the first half hours. On Today’s, there would always be a longer, harder, more political news bloc than on GMA. Today would use Tim Russert much more than GMA used George Stephanopoulos. The type of news GMA would put in their first half hour was much more tabloid—true crime or celebrity trials or human interest, rather than politics or foreign policy.”

  The senior staffer at GMA says that Charlie Gibson found certain stories that the others wanted to do “tabloidy” and he disapproved of them. But “Diane was incredibly smart, and she was a very keen observer of popular culture, and she knew that she was willing to get her hands dirty with us versus his ‘I don’t want to touch this with a ten foot pole’ attitude. She knew that ‘tabloid’ stories were changing the direction of our country. She wasn’t the first to raise her hand to do them, but she was quick to say, ‘We have to do this.’”

  Still, there was one “asset” (though painfully unwanted) that Katie had in 1999 and 2000 and Diane lacked, and that was her fresh young widowhood. It had helped to get her Matthew Shepard’s parents and it had helped her get the Columbine story. Whether intentionally or not, Katie’s career benefited from the narrative of her widowhood, some people in the industry noted. Yet a widow’s grief is real, as is all that comes with it. “Shortly after Jay died, Katie said, ‘We should all just love each other more and better—life is short and uncertain. We should just spend more time loving each other,’” says her friend Barbara Andrukonis. The repetitive and pious nature of those remarks are not typical of pithy, snarky Katie. Perhaps the sentiment felt too real—and fatigued, and tinged with remorse for the fights they’d had before he received his diagnosis—to be wished away with wit. But Katie brought that life-worn solemnity to whatever interviews her personal circumstances had earned her.