Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (13 page)

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It was 6:33 a.m. when Lauer walked into Studio 1A on Wednesday the twenty-seventh. This was the last day he would have to pretend that nothing strange was happening at the
Today
show.

Curry was already at the anchor desk, preparing for teases for local stations—for the last time. Tomorrow she’d announce that she was stepping aside.

Lauer waited five minutes before sitting down. First he stood at the news desk while Curry read a tease; then he walked over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the plaza, where a few dozen people were standing already, waiting for their second of TV infamy. Protected by the tint of this window, Lauer was nearly invisible to the crowd.

What would this crowd think of him tomorrow?

Lauer and Curry didn’t acknowledge each other when he sat down next to her. She reached for the morning’s
The New York Times
and started reading the foreign section. A few minutes before airtime she said she felt self-conscious about her arms and tried on a black cardigan over her sleeveless pink dress. She asked the crew, but not Lauer, for their opinions; then she took off the cardigan and tugged at her dress to cover a bit more of her arms.

On the air, Lauer and Curry seemed to talk past each other. Some viewers, having read all about NBC’s negotiations, were amazed that Curry was still there at all. “The Ann Curry hostage crisis continues,” wrote one viewer on Twitter while watching Wednesday’s show. “Ann Curry couldn’t look sadder this morning,” wrote another. “Is it just me or does Ann Curry look like she’s going to cry?” asked a third. For NBC, the only good thing about the situation was that
Today
was still beating
GMA
in the overnight ratings, thanks in part to the public’s curiosity about what would happen next.

On the evening of the twenty-seventh, Curry called from home and asked the supervising producer, “How are we doing this tomorrow?” Word spread among the staff that Curry’s separation deal was done. Lauer called in, too, and asked how Curry’s sign-off would be choreographed. No one really knew the answer. A source remembers that Lauer referred to the anticipated moment as “taking my cyanide pill.”

The questions from the cohosts were passed along to Bell, who arrived at his third-floor office at about eight in the evening—uncharacteristic for a man who lived in the Connecticut suburbs and woke up at three most mornings. His lieutenants had slotted Curry’s announcement for 7:45 a.m., the traditional time for
Today
show transitions. That’s when Vieira had announced a year earlier that she was stepping down. Bell also considered 8:30 a.m., but later decided to shift the announcement to 8:50 a.m., apparently because Curry had said she was afraid she’d be too emotional to keep hosting afterward. “That was a huge warning sign that a bomb was going to explode,” one producer said later.

Another warning sign had come earlier in the day, when Curry spent forty minutes on the phone with Susan Page, a veteran Washington reporter for
USA Today
. Barnett had connected the two women because Curry wanted an exit interview of sorts, a chance to right wrongs and tell her side of the story after staying silent on
Today
for a week. Curry told Page that the leaks had “hurt deeply” and that the claims of a ten-million-dollar salary were made up. “I can say that I’d love to earn that much,” she said. She also singled out Hale’s column in
The Times
for criticism: “I have never felt like a stepsister at the
Today Show
family, as some have described me,” she said. “I’ve always felt close to the people here.”

When the interview hit the Web shortly after midnight, it became clear to all that Curry was not going to pretend that this new role was her idea, nor was she going to pretend she was pleased. She said in the piece that she was “deeply sad” about being forced out. She said of her audience, “I don’t want to leave them. I love them. And I will really miss them.” And she said she didn’t think she was given enough time to settle into the cohost chair. The Curry interview was the centerpiece of
USA Today
’s front page the next morning. The stark headline was a quote: “I know I am not to blame.” (What Curry had said in full was “I know I am not to blame for the ratings worries. And my bosses have said to me there are many factors involved.”)

She did accept some responsibility, though, for her less-than-satisfactory on-air interactions with Lauer. “You know, Matt and I have had great on-air chemistry for 14 years, been part of the No. 1 winning team for a history-making number of years. That said, I just finished my freshman year as co-host. In every single co-host’s first year, there have been kinks to be worked out, and perhaps I deserve as much blame for that as anyone,” she said.

Capus, in a separate interview with
USA Today
, called the correspondent job a better fit for Curry than the cohost job. But no one—not Curry, not Capus, not Bell, who wasn’t interviewed by anyone—said explicitly why she was being forced out. No one took responsibility.

Curry and Lauer got through the first hour and fifty minutes of Curry’s last show in a way that belied the fact that in the last ten minutes she was going to sign off
Today
forever. There was no highlight reel of her fifteen years on
Today
, no performance by one of her favorite artists, no dance party on the plaza—just a small blank space on the rundown for her to bid adieu. NBC executives later claimed that a proper send-off was unwarranted because Curry wasn’t completely leaving the show, she was simply leaving the cohost chair. She’d still be the “anchor at large.” But that excuse was laughable. Vieira, after all, stuck around NBC as a “special correspondent” and a contributor to
Today
—yet her jubilant farewell took up the better part of two hours. To Curry, the poor treatment was a message from her irresponsible bosses: “Get the fuck out.”

Curry chose scarlet for her last day. She sat to the right of Lauer on the show’s trademark couch. Morales sat to Lauer’s left. Al Roker, Curry’s closest friend among the cast members, sat in a chair opposite Lauer. When the show came back from a commercial break, she had to introduce herself. “Welcome back, everybody,” she said. “It’s 8:50. This is not easy to say, but today is going to be my last morning as a regular cohost of
Today
.”

And then it happened. Her voice caught. She paused, tried to compose herself, and pointed at the camera that was televising a four-shot of the cast. The teleprompters in the cameras had a set of talking points that Curry had written and Capus had approved, including this one: “I will still be a part of the
Today
show family, but I’m going to have a new title and a new role.” She read them, mentioned her “fancy new titles” and said “we’re being given the chance to do the work that most of us got into journalism to do.” But she also signaled to viewers that this was a demotion, not a promotion. “This is not as I expected to ever leave this couch after fifteen years,” she said. Then, attempting a moment of humor, she added, “After all of these years, I don’t even know if I can sleep in anymore. I’m not even sure I can, but I know that whatever time I wake up, I’ll be missing you and I’ll be believing in you.”

Curry felt she had both an obligation and a right to tell the viewers all of this. “I’m not going to lie,” she’d said to Capus a day earlier when they came up with the script. It sounded OK on paper, but man it sounded awful when read out loud. Morales sat, motionless, as Curry read her lines. Lauer, lips pursed, stared at something in the distance. Roker looked offstage sometimes, too, as if Curry’s speech was too painful to watch. It was: viewers at home winced and some cried as she choked back tears. As she wrapped up, she said, “For all of you who saw me as a groundbreaker, I’m sorry I couldn’t carry the ball over the finish line, but man,” she said, pointing at the camera again, “I did try.”

As Curry apologized for turning into a “sob sister,” she wiped away tears with her hands. No one had thought to put tissues nearby. In the control room, Steve Burke cringed. His network was beaming this disaster to the whole country, and there was nothing he could do about it.

For the remaining two minutes, Curry’s colleagues took turns praising her work over the years, further inviting viewers to wonder: why is she leaving, then? After she apologized again for crying, Lauer tried to ease the obvious tensions: “Can we just say, it’s not goodbye, not by a long shot?” She looked down, frowned, and said, “Nah.” She knew that this was goodbye, no matter the denials from NBC.

Curry squirmed when he tried to kiss her on the cheek, then practically jumped into Roker’s arms for a hug as the show cut to a commercial break. Seconds later, Curry stood up and walked out of Studio 1A, and left the building immediately. She was still crying as she stepped into the town car waiting for her outside.

In and out of the TV industry, people who had witnessed the scene were stunned—not just by Curry’s behavior, but by the clueless callousness that NBC had shown. One rival producer said the segment was “the equivalent of finishing up a pleasant, two-hour family dinner by saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention: Mom and I are getting a divorce. While you were sleeping last night she packed up all of her stuff. There’s a cab waiting outside to take her away right now. Say goodbye, kids…OK, now that we’ve done that, who wants dessert?!’”

“Ann’s awkwardness proved the point—it proved why she needed to go,” said a person close to NBC. But the way she’d proved it, Bell thought, was unforgivable. Lauer was furious, too. He felt that Curry had lobbed a hand grenade into Studio 1A on her way out, wounding him and others. Certainly the messages to @MLauer on Thursday were venomous, blaming him for making her cry. “You are a phony.” “A bully.” “You’re the problem, not Ann.” They were channeling the troublemakers over at
GMA
, who said Lauer looked as if he’d been caught sticking a knife in Curry’s back.

“I’m never looking at Twitter again,” Lauer told a colleague.

At lunchtime that day Bell took the
Today
show’s top producers to Brasserie Ruhlmann, a Rockefeller Center restaurant that on some days seemed like a high-end NBC cafeteria. Bell, Nash, Noah Kotch, eight a.m. producer Debbie Kosofsky, and supervising producer Matt Carluccio sat outside—it was a beautiful June day. While Curry’s sole defender among the senior producers, Melissa Lonner, watched from a nearby table, the group clinked wineglasses to celebrate Curry’s departure. The
Today
show was wounded but alive. With the ascension of Savannah Guthrie, Operation Bambi would be complete, and the show’s preeminence would surely be preserved.

Act 2

Good Morning

Chapter 6

Try Harder

Let us rewind time and travel now about five midtown Manhattan blocks southwest, from the often tense and, figuratively speaking, bloodstained environs of Studio 1A to the cheerier corridors of
Good Morning America
. How different it feels to stroll through the Forest of Happy Hosts—
Look, there’s George Stephanopoulos!
—and imbibe the atmosphere in a place that, like the New York Mets, Garfunkel, and Avis, was born to finish second. Consider that when
GMA
’s forerunner first struggled out of the womb on January 6, 1975, with hard-living, four-times-married ABC lifer Bill Beutel and Stephanie Edwards (whose claim to fame was a recurring role on the NBC series
The Girl with Something Extra
) as cohosts, and Peter Jennings relegated to the job of newsreader, no one really believed that it would topple the mighty
Today
, which was then, twenty-three years into its history, in the estimable hands of Barbara Walters and Jim Hartz. Indeed, for a while the ABC entry, which was called
A.M. America
, was getting the crap beat out of it in the ratings by CBS’s
Captain Kangaroo
.

A.M. America
was not, shall we say, the most ambitious endeavor ever attempted by ABC News. The unimaginative producers “booked the show by watching
Today
and then bringing all of
Today
’s guests in the next day,” said the ABC producer George Merlis, exaggerating only slightly. The network suits had run the numbers and found that you could survive quite nicely, thank you, on the Nielsen leader’s leavings. But its affiliates scattered across the country agitated for something more than mere survival. Some threatened to switch affiliation to NBC or CBS if ABC didn’t—pardon a second Avis reference here—“try harder.”

Six months after
A.M. America
premiered, by which time Beutel had expressed a strong desire to return to local news, or for that matter go anywhere that was not the dinky
A.M. America
set, and Edwards had stormed off, still angry about a producer whispering in her ear, thirty seconds before the initial broadcast was to begin, that she should have worn something orange or pistachio green instead of the demure gray suit she had on, the legendary TV executive Fred Silverman, who had just arrived at ABC, went to work on fixing the show, going over a list of potential hosts that was longer even than this sentence. There must have been 150 or two hundred of them, according to ABC vice president Ed Vane, who had a Rolodex bulging with fully posable life-size Ken dolls he’d known in his capacity as the overseer of
The Dating Game
,
The Newlywed Game
, and the network’s other afternoon game shows. Which one to install in their dreary little dream house?

Wisely—not a word you will see all that often in a book about television—they settled on possibly the most un–Wink Martindale–ish name on their list: David Hartman, a forty-year-old Air Force–officer-turned-folksy-actor who had played a ranch hand on the Western series
The Virginian
, then a doctor on
The Bold Ones: The New Doctors
and an English teacher on
Lucas Tanner
, all on NBC. Hartman, an ardent believer in the teaching power of television, saw those prime-time series as informational as well as entertaining; he pushed for
The New Doctors
to be as medically accurate as possible. In the early 1970s an executive at NBC “asked if I’d be interested in switching over to working at NBC News,” Hartman said. “There were logistical challenges we could not solve, but the seeds were being sown.” Hartman was, despite his earnest streak, a brilliant and historically significant choice to helm a morning TV broadcast, given his blue eyes, boyish face, and paternal demeanor. What he lacked in melanin and other evidence of ethnicity, he more than made up for in the levelheaded-liberal vibe he emitted whenever he furrowed his brow or gawked his crooked smile. Indeed, NBC had noticed that he possessed the elusive, slightly puffy-eyed quality of wake-up-with-ness and had booked Hartman to cohost one episode of the
Today
show the following year. In a celebration of the United States bicentennial,
Today
was planning to relocate to a different state every Friday in 1976, and Hartman, that proud son of Pawtucket, was going to cohost from Rhode Island. And then came the phone call from ABC’s Bob Shanks, who if you read histories of
The Tonight Show
,
20/20
, and the other enterprises he was involved in, seems always to have been the vice president in charge of significant phone calls. Hartman had to cancel on
Today
, but he had a good excuse: he’d be hosting the competition.