GOD, I WISHED Jay were here—to listen to me vent, read the tea leaves, and help me manage the politics of CBS. Not only had he been a loving partner, he was really astute and a great lawyer, so attentive to the finer points of my recurring negotiations with NBC. After he died, I found a legal pad on which he’d scribbled, in black felt-tip pen, things like Insurance? Housing allowance? Five years?—the terms of my first contract. I wondered what he would think of all this.
I’d been on the job less than six months when Alan and I were summoned to Les Moonves’s office at Black Rock, the granite skyscraper on West 52nd Street. I couldn’t imagine what it was about, but I doubted it was something awesome.
Les had a gleaming corner office on the 35th floor with an “I’m king of the world” desk and the aroma of fine Corinthian leather. The place was so different from the news operation over at the dairy barn, and rightly so: CBS Entertainment was the profit center, thanks to money-minting hits like CSI and Survivor. Les himself was hauling in close to $40 million a year.
He was entertainment through and through; news, not so much. In retrospect, there was probably something kind of off about the way he wooed and anointed me for the anchor job without ever getting buy-in from some of the most important people in the news division. It’s as if he were hiring me to star in yet another CSI.
Don Hewitt, my most ardent suitor, had retired. As the head of 60 Minutes, the marquee show of the news division, Jeff Fager was probably the most powerful person in the organization. Obviously, I should have met with him before I accepted the job so he could feel like he was part of the process. But Les never brokered that meeting—and neither did Alan. I just assumed Fager was on board.
There was still a mountain of distrust between the hard-core newsies and the slick Moonves. So I’m sure it wasn’t helpful when, early in my tenure, at a party at Tavern on the Green to celebrate the new season of 60 Minutes, I hung close to Les. I saw newspeople eyeing us suspiciously. That chumminess probably reinforced the idea that I was Les’s person. But he was the only one there I really knew and one of the few who seemed glad to see me.
Now at Black Rock, I wasn’t sure Les was that glad to see me.
He and Sean greeted us with outsize bonhomie. He offered us a seat and got to the point.
“We’ve been thinking about you and what you’re good at. The evening news really doesn’t give you a place to showcase your talent.” Oh, boy, here it comes…
“Would you be interested in going to the morning show?” he said. “You’re so great at it, and they could really use your help.”
I was taken aback. “Absolutely not,” I said. “I didn’t leave the morning show I helped make number one so I could go to the third-place morning show.”
What I wanted to say was I cannot believe you’re giving up on me already. That and Why don’t you have the balls to tell all the people undermining me to get with the program?
Les was only thinking about Les. As I’d come to realize, he didn’t want his legacy sullied by a glaring failure at the CBS Evening News—he’d do just about anything to make the problem go away.
I told them both that I had come here to accomplish something, and if it didn’t work, it didn’t work. I’d rather leave the network than retreat to the morning show, which at the time was a cheap imitation of the other two.
Les and Sean looked disappointed that I hadn’t provided an easy solution to their problem, which was me.
“Okay,” Les said simply. “Let’s keep going.”
66
The Fall of Rome
CARRIE WAS ALWAYS terrified of lice. Unlike so many of her classmates, she’d managed to outrun the little buggers for years. But now they were having a field day in her chocolate-brown hair.
Who you gonna call? Licenders!—Orthodox Jewish women from Brooklyn who come to your home and cover your head in a tar-like substance that kills the lice and, more important, their eggs while instructing you to wash all your bedding and bag non-washable stuffed animals to suffocate the critters. When they found a few errant nits in my hair, it was decided I needed delousing as well.
Just as one of the women started slathering my scalp, the house phone rang. Rick Kaplan was downstairs.
“Oh God, seriously?” I said. Pause. “Okay, send him up.” The whole scene （and, for that matter, my life） was so absurd, I thought, Why not?
Sean had suggested we meet. “I think he might be a good person to bring over,” he told me—meaning a good person to replace Rome as executive producer.