The writer, Joe Hagan, threw me a few bones, giving our early broadcasts props for their “chatty, friendly vibe and a bright, casual atmosphere never before seen at 6:30 p.m.” And yes, viewership was down, he wrote, but we’d doubled the number of female viewers between the ages of 18 and 49 in a single year.
Then he went to town on the negatives: that some thought I wasn’t a true “newshound” like my predecessors, that my big salary required others to take pay cuts, that Bob Schieffer and Lesley Stahl had talked smack about me （anonymously） to the Philadelphia Inquirer, that I was so stressed out about the ratings, I beat up a news editor…
The assault-and-battery charge involving Jerry Cipriano was clearly a case of aggravated hyperbole, Your Honor. For the record: I was reading a story about tuberculosis that had been added during the broadcast when, much to my surprise, the creepy, hard-to-pronounce word sputum came up on the prompter. It’s just not a term I use （falling into the category of words that gross me out, like moist）， and Jerry hadn’t warned me about it.
After the broadcast, I went up to him and basically said, “I can’t believe you did that! You have to tell me when you’re going to use a word like that!” and slapped him on the back in a half-annoyed, half-playful way. （I wondered if he was screwing with me, the way they say Tom Brokaw’s writers sometimes screwed with him back in his local news days, writing L-1011 instead of DC jumbo jet because they knew Tom had trouble pronouncing his Ls.）
Jerry and I had a great working relationship. We traveled the world together; he saved my bacon on plenty of occasions and remains a good friend to this day. But at the time, everything I did or said could and was being used against me.
Ideally, the media sisterhood would have come to my defense. Instead, proud feminist Nora Ephron piled on, writing: “It’s impossible for me to make any sort of evaluation at all about her. Because I cannot believe how bad her makeup is.” Sigh.
After the New York Magazine hit job, I went on an epic crying jag. I remember looking at Lauren and blubbering, “I’m trying to cure cancer, I write children’s books—I’m a good person. Why does everyone hate me?”
We laugh about it now, but at the time, I was drowning.
67
Business Trip
SOMETHING I’LL NEVER understand: affluent parents who scrimp on childcare, paying rock-bottom wages, not offering ample benefits and time off. You’ve entrusted this person with the thing you care about most in the world—why wouldn’t you do everything in your power to make sure she （or he） feels respected and valued? With the women who took care of my kids, that was my highest priority.
During those incredibly stressful early months at CBS, I wondered what would have become of us if it weren’t for Lori Beth. Work was so hard, my schedule so unpredictable, my romantic life so volatile, my stress level so high…Lori Beth was the glue, our rock, our savior.
She was also the secret police. One day when Ellie was in seventh grade, she told Lori Beth she was going to visit her friend Elizabeth on another floor in our building. Lori Beth smelled a rat and went down to the street, eventually spotting Ellie and Elizabeth tottering out in stilettos and makeup, on their way to meet some boys. The riot act was read, and Ellie was dragged home.
Another time, when Lori Beth detected cigarette smoke coming through the vent in the wall between her and Ellie’s rooms, she told me about it, knowing I’d bring the hammer down: “Your father died of cancer—why would you invite that into your body?”
As you might imagine, tears. Lots. Of. Tears.
Lori Beth was getting a degree in English from Hunter College at the time and shared her learning with the girls. It wasn’t always age-appropriate. When Carrie was 8, Lori Beth taught her every word of Emily Dickinson’s “My Life Had Stood—a Loaded Gun,” which cherub-faced Carrie would dutifully recite at the dinner table:
For I have but the power to kill
Without—the power to die—
My Little Pony it wasn’t.
We were a family. In some ways funky and misshapen, but a family nonetheless, fiercely loving, happy more often than not. Of course we had our challenges—for example, when I had to inform the gang I was heading off to the most dangerous place on earth.
When I was still at TODAY, I’d told Access Hollywood that, as a single mom, I was reluctant to travel to Iraq to cover the war, saying that I didn’t want to make the girls orphans. I got some blowback, but TODAY was such a mom-friendly show, I knew the audience would ultimately understand.