The News Sorority

by Sheila Weller

  • • •

  IN MID-1999, while Diane was getting her Morning sea legs, Katie moved herself and her girls from the apartment she had rented with Jay to a twelve-room Park Avenue co-op. For a year and a half after Jay’s death, Katie didn’t want to uproot Carrie and Ellie from the home they’d shared with their father. But now, she had “lost the lease” on the Central Park place, as Katie told Good Housekeeping. She had to move.

  “It was time to buy an apartment,” she said at the time. “But it was a very scary thing for me to do all by myself, without Jay.” Bringing Jay’s essence into the new apartment and somehow keeping him in their lives was a big part of the move, just as it was a big part of Katie’s wider life. She became godmother to the son that her good friend and producer Lori Beecher had given birth to—whom Lori and her husband had named Jay. With her new friend Lisa Paulsen and her longtime friend Kathleen Lobb, she was beginning work on a memorial to her husband, the Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health.

  Describing the new apartment to Good Housekeeping, Katie said that she made the girls’ rooms especially “sweet” and cheerful. Like a typical seven-year-old, Ellie had been uncomfortable at camp the summer after her father died; that desire not to be “different” had masked her grief. But when Ellie took a framed photo of her father—looking particularly handsome, Katie noted—in his navy uniform into her new bedroom, “after a while she came into the kitchen and she had been crying.” With her girls, Katie noted, the emotion “just crops up at unexpected times. There are days when [Ellie] can talk about Jay and be upbeat and fine about it, and other times I think she’s really, really missing him so much.” Given all this fresh experience, Katie helped developed a curriculum, for her daughters’ school, for children who lost their parents.

  Katie dotted the apartment with Jay’s military memorabilia. The brass bugles and military helmets lined the shelves. A life-size mannequin of a Napoleonic-era soldier that Jay had bought just weeks before his death was given pride of place in the dining room. Carrie, who was now three, took one look at the dummy and said, “Jay!” Katie, who had found the mannequin “creepy” when Jay had purchased it, now saw it as a symbol that her late husband was “watching over us and protecting us.”

  In talking so openly about her widowhood and her children, Katie was viewed as being admirably honest and providing a service to other young widows. Alternately, to cynics in her cutthroat business, she was strongly thought to be exploiting her personal tragedy to reinforce her likability in the face of fresh competition from the glamorous, childless Diane. Although Katie has frequently mused that she always thought she would end up “like Florence Henderson on The Brady Bunch,” with a second husband and a blended family, and though she went on to have other boyfriends—some more serious, others called “boy toys” by the tabloids—she remained single for fifteen years.

  Soon, Diane took over her own booking. “She would be on the phone—with lawyers, with everyone for hours,” Phyllis McGrady says. Shelley Ross: “Booking, booking, strategizing, looking ahead.” Charlie continued to have Shelley and the staff do his booking, but Diane was hands-on and a perfectionist.

  At the dawn of the new millennium—the first anniversary of Diane’s arrival at GMA and, for Katie, the culmination of their first year of rivalry—the contrast in the two anchor teams’ images was clear: Diane and Charlie were the mature wise couple, Diane speaking slowly and earnestly and, while enjoying herself, emanating a comforting warmth. By contrast, Katie and Matt were the younger couple, people viewers with school-aged kids might want to take a vacation with, and maybe blow off steam with at a blackjack table while a babysitter watched the kids: he affable and not quite slick, she everybody’s sassy best girlfriend.

  The different images and delivery of the two women were important. Morning gets a heavily female audience, and it did matter which woman the viewers liked better—it made a significant ratings difference. Also, women are more variable when it comes to their style—clothes, hair, and so forth. How they look matters on Morning TV—a lot. The Morning men, on the other hand—always in a suit and generally with short hair—pass more or less unnoticed on this score. Competition between the female hosts existed in guest wrangling, too. Sometimes a guest chose between Katie or Diane because she or he liked one or the other so much. Such was the case with Darva Conger, who chose Diane over Katie because, according to a GMA senior staffer, “Darva just loved Diane!” Darva, a pretty blond nurse, had won Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?—one of the first of the reality shows—and had soon found out that her insta-husband was not only not a millionaire but had a shady past, having once had a restraining order filed against him by a former fiancée.

  At around the same time that Diane and her staff were high-fiving over countless small but important triumphs in Morning-world, Katie had bigger internal worries. In the terminology of the man who believed that morning shows have an “actor” and a “reactor” and who felt that Katie changed for the worse after Jay died, Matt Lauer had “paid Katie back” for not having “waited her turn” with Bryant. Matt wasn’t waiting “his turn” anymore, either. “The worm turned,” this person says. Matt’s attitude was, “‘Hey, she’s gonna be gone, I’m the future’—and he demanded more and more.” This might have felt especially more justified to Matt now that Katie was becoming so late for work that her driver often had to call her from the car in front of her apartment, at six fifteen, to get her going, while Matt had been in the studio for a full forty-five minutes. Did his superior punctuality—his professionalism—not justify more aggressive anchor prominence on his part?

  Katie’s life now was a tight jigsaw puzzle of demands. The good thing about a morning show was that her hours coordinated with her daughters’—she went to bed as early as they did. And she made time for their activities, even if it meant dashing back and forth from studio to school to studio. Her friend and Park Avenue neighbor-mom Pat Shifke says that Carrie and Ellie “would do their dance recitals in the morning assembly. Katie would go to Today; she’d find out the timing, she’d leave the show, rush in, and get to the assemblies—she made it there for all of them. You’d see her on the show in the morning when everyone else was taking their time to get to the assembly.” And then, once she was seated with the other mothers, heads would turn in surprise and “people would say, ‘I just saw you on TV.’”

  • • •

  THE MATT-OVER-KATIE momentum had actually started two years earlier, just after Jay died. On January 27, 1998, Matt had scored one of the most-watched Today interviews in years: his sit-down with First Lady Hillary Clinton in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It was there, seated across from Lauer, who handled the interview with just the right combination of solicitousness and authority, that Hillary had used the initially startling but eventually meaningful term “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Around that same time, Matt had lobbied for and landed a very expensive yearly weeklong feature, “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?” In it, Matt popped up—amid lots of aggressively advertised hints and fevered guessing—in exotic places all over the globe: Egypt, Greece, and Australia the first year; Mt. Everest in Nepal, Italy, and China the next. Now he was moving into year three of the star-making franchise, with trips planned to Hawaii, Spain, and Zimbabwe.

  That same year, Matt, who’d been divorced ten years earlier from a TV producer, married beautiful Dutch model Annette Roque in 1998; the pair were often mentioned in the New York social columns. Matt and the man he’d replaced, Bryant Gumbel, were golfing buddies, and over time they became best friends. Matt and Annette would have three children. In 2006 Annette Roque Lauer filed for divorce from Matt, then withdrew her petition, and the supermarket tabloids would periodically blare rumors of his infidelity and their marital woes on their front pages. (Matt and Annette denied the rumors of infidelity.) As for Bryant, he would weather a very acrimonious divorce from his wife, June Gumbel, in 2001 and marry h
is longtime girlfriend Hilary Quinlan a year later. But somehow the considerably more turbulent personal lives of Katie’s male coanchors didn’t hurt their careers in quite the same way that Katie’s normal, postwidowhood dating would turn her, over the years, in the Morning public’s judgmental eye, from All-American Mom to an edgy, vaguely unsympathetic, somewhat older single woman.

  Matt and Katie’s relationship was complicated. It’s not exactly that they were openly competitive, or even only competitive. One who worked very closely with them saw something more utilitarian and more subtle: “It was mutual respect/dependence. It was oddly codependent, because they needed each other, to protect each other from executives, from events, from schedules. They were two people in this bottle together, and they needed a certain relationship. But at the same time they could be at odds on who would get a certain interview, who was getting more time.” Furthermore, in a morning show ensemble, this insider continues, “everybody has a role. It takes on the feel of a family. So Katie happily played the role of the demanding female star. Matt was the steadying hand—the brother. Al [Roker] was sort of the clown figure, and Ann”—Ann Curry, the newsreader on the show from 1997—“was the studious cousin. Ann was a very nice person. She and Katie got along well,” this person, who witnessed them daily, says.

  Others, however, have contested the view that Katie and Ann got along well. As a person at ABC always heard it from friends at NBC, “Katie was a bully and Ann was the victim.” Katie often threw Ann off balance by criticizing Ann’s clothing choices just before they went on air. According to several people at NBC, Katie was changing—she was now developing a reputation for twisting her snarkiness into meanness. Later, when Katie went to CBS, staffers coined a term for a tactic that, one says, “was Katie’s forte. We called it the ‘compli-insult.’ She would look at someone and say, ‘I really think you’re clever, but why is your script so horrible?’ She was mean. And nobody was safe from her zinging.”

  • • •

  IT WAS WHEN MATT was planning his third “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?” segment that Katie determined to make the “crazy” idea she had shared with Lisa Paulsen come true: She would have a colonoscopy on live TV.

  The idea of foisting the viewing of a rectum-penetrating exam on viewers while they were eating breakfast (not to mention risking America’s Sweetheart’s image by having the procedure performed on her) would have been beyond unthinkable had it not been for Katie’s personal ownership of the colon cancer issue—and her sheer insistence and force of will. “Katie’s the type of person who, when she’s very passionate about something, doesn’t rest until it’s done,” says Allison Gollust, the Today publicist on the project. “She decides she wants to make a difference in something and she relentlessly pursues. Jeff was on board from the start. I’m sure he would have been supportive of it even if he hadn’t been through colon cancer himself, but the fact that he had been made it particularly significant.”

  First, with the help of Jay’s physicians and the gathering team working on the Jay Monahan Center, Katie convinced the U.S. Senate to make March 2000 the first annual National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. In concert with that, she and Jeff designed two weeks of coverage about colorectal health—a completely new term for the viewers. This, Katie made clear, was the second leading cause of cancer death in the country and would lead to over fifty-seven thousand deaths the coming year. But those deaths were preventable, she stressed. When found in its early stages, colorectal cancer was 90 percent curable, yet almost half of those Americans who should be screened for it (those over age fifty) were not.

  To show how easy and painless that screening was, Katie—though under the recommended age for screening (she was forty-three, and Jay had been forty-two when he died)—underwent the entire process live for the audience, step-by-step: the preparation the night before, arriving at the doctor’s office, getting anesthesia, and then the procedure itself. Lying on her side on the gurney, with her still pixie-short hair grazing the top of her open-backed gown, Katie lapsed into mild unconsciousness and the inside of her rectum became the star of her show to nine million morning viewers.

  The segment had a huge impact. A team of researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Iowa compared the number of colonoscopies performed by four hundred gastroenterologists in twenty-two states during twenty months before Katie’s colonoscopy with those performed in the nine months after she had the procedure. The number of colonoscopies, they found, had increased by 20 percent—and more women and more younger adults were having the procedure than in prior years. In their article in a July 2003 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, the researchers called these salutary changes “The Katie Couric Effect.”

  Just after Katie’s on-air colonoscopy segment, Jeff Zucker was promoted from Today’s executive producer to president of NBC Entertainment. In May 2000 Jonathan Wald (who is the son of Richard Wald, the veteran producer at NBC and ABC who had dealt with the change in attitudes toward women in the business from the fifties through the seventies) came over from NBC Nightly News to produce Today. Wald saw that Katie was actively searching for substance now. “She wanted to be taken more seriously. She would often say, ‘I feel that the show has gotten too frivolous.’ There was a frustration, a chafing” against the mold she’d been set in for so long. “She’s the prototypical kid sister who always has something smart to say, speaks her mind—and wants attention. But you can’t be the kid sister for that long—at some point, you grow up.”

  And at this very point, a painful impetus to grow up arrived: her sister Emily’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis. This was quietly shattering to Katie. A second possible imminent loss of a loved one to cancer? How could it be? It was. By now Katie had somehow come to terms with what sometimes felt like a bargain fate had dealt her: uncanny success in her professional life; horribly unfair loss in her personal life. Emily was bravely dogged in fighting her disease. Katie prayed that her sister’s determination would be enough. At the same time, the anguish made her years-long repetitive work on Today seem trivial. Her real life was too big for her television life. She was open to anything that would put the two in alignment.

  It was also at this time—perhaps not coincidentally—that she started her first serious post-Jay relationship, with a man many thought she should have married and with whom she should have established that “Florence Henderson” life. He was Tom Werner, a Harvard graduate, an enormously successful television producer, and the co-owner of the Boston Red Sox. Seven years older than Katie, Werner, reared in a prosperous New York family, had been a programming executive at ABC in New York in the seventies. But his success—and his influence on the culture—came in the eighties, when he and his producing partner Marcy Carsey opened Carsey-Werner Productions and created the era-defining and stereotype-shattering sitcom The Cosby Show and later the equally high-quality Roseanne, which humanized blue-collar life. Through other shows, Werner and Carsey also helped launch the careers of Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, and Billy Crystal. The year before he met Katie (on a blind date arranged by her agent, Alan Berger), Werner had been honored by the Museum of Television and Radio.

  Tom was perfect for Katie in many ways—a “catch,” as it were—and she could be considered his mediagenic and accomplishment equal. Unfortunately, however, though Werner was separated from his longtime wife, he didn’t file for divorce until shortly after he met Katie, and with this relationship, and that particular gossip-vulnerable aspect of it, the National Enquirer entered Katie’s life, plastering her on its cover in a gotcha! way. The earlier Star story depicting her as a fatigued working mother, drinking milk from the carton with the refrigerator door left open, may not have been flattering, but it was certainly identifiable to exhausted women. This, now, was a different kind of tabloid glare. It would be the first step in turning Katie’s image away from her ossified Girl Next Door and Plucky Widow roles. Now she was a complex woman who was liv
ing an altogether appropriate life, but who, in the mind of a public who could turn from magnanimous to judgmental quickly, was romancing a still technically married man. In this regard she was crossing a bright red line.

  • • •

  THE STORY THAT MORNING would claim as its historical epitome of peerless reporting of history in real time—and the story that everyone on Morning would dearly wish wasn’t there for them to claim—would come on a beautiful late-summer day.

  It was the second Tuesday after Labor Day. Katie emerged from her car at 30 Rock at 6:45 a.m.; Diane had been working at the ABC office since before dawn. By 8:00 a.m. it was looking to be that rare meteorological meeting of cloudless sky, crystalline visibility, and no humidity. “Katie had even remarked on what an impossibly beautiful day it was—I think her expression was ‘heartbreakingly beautiful’ day, without any knowledge of what was to come,” says Jonathan Wald.

  Good Morning America had cold-opened its broadcast with Charlie trumpeting the fact that jury selection was starting in the murder trial of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who’d drowned her five children in a bathtub. Next to him on the couch in a bright red dress, Diane mused in awe about Michael Jordan’s fresh declaration that he was, once again, returning to basketball. Over at Today, Matt cold-opened with the Jordan news, and Katie—next to him in a chic black dress, the bangs of her newly blond-highlighted hair flipped over her forehead—cracked wise about it: “What’s that Dolly Parton song? ‘[she paraphrases]—Here You Go Again.’”

  Both sets of anchors were just wrapping up their two-hour shows when urgent, surreal images appeared on the monitors. Matt was chatting with an author about a book on Howard Hughes when Jonathan Wald said into his earpiece, “A plane’s hit the World Trade Center—we need to get out of this interview.” Over at ABC, just after 8:48 a.m., Diane announced, in a slow, assiduously calm-keeping voice, “We want to tell you: We just got a report that there’s been some kind of explosion at the World Trade Center. We can’t confirm any of this. But you’re seeing the live footage. We just got a report that a plane may have hit.” This was the North Tower. They relayed a phone call from a person who had escaped one of the buildings.