“Stop!” I said, in my blue-gray cap-sleeve dress and steep heels. “I’m not wearing waterproof mascara!”
It was all a bit disorienting, especially the nearness of the audience. “I feel so close to you guys,” I said, “literally! I’m going to have to remember to shave my legs more often.”
I launched in. “In many ways this is a new beginning for me, which is both incredibly exciting and terrifying. But I think for all of us, life is often about new chapters and new adventures and learning how to handle and even embrace change.”
A photo of Jay, the girls, and me appeared on the big screen behind me.
I mentioned losing Jay. On a happier note, I said that Carrie and Ellie—now 16 and 21—were here, on either side of my mom. The crowd cheered as the camera cut to the girls, seated in row three （Carrie, who apparently had missed the memo about bright colors, was literally the only person in the audience in black）。 “And I feel very lucky to have my mom here today as well. Mom, thank you.” More cheers. It was an early, odd glimpse of how much the show would be based on me rather than the stories we were doing, which I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. I’d always seen myself as a journalist with a personality—not a TV personality.
So, are you ready for this day?
Looking back, I guess the answer would be Maybe not.
OUR FIRST GUEST was Jessica Simpson. In retrospect, that might have signaled a fluffier show than I was intending; after all, she was the one who famously asked if Chicken of the Sea was tuna or chicken. But as a Weight Watchers spokesperson who’d been relentlessly ridiculed for not losing the baby weight fast enough, she might, I thought, appeal to Everywoman. She was also an entrepreneur, having built a shoe empire. At the end of the segment she gave me some black flats from her line, and I gave her a onesie for the baby.
But for anyone who thought pop starlets were going to be the norm on Katie…my guest the second day was a complete 180: Aimee Copeland, the 24-year-old graduate student who’d lost both hands, a foot, and her entire left leg to a flesh-eating bacterial infection. I guess you could say I was figuring it out.
THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN the newspeople we’d hired and the talk-show people Abra had hired were growing more apparent by the day. It wasn’t the Sharks and the Jets, exactly; more like oil （Jeff） and water （Abra）。
Jeff had gone from barely tolerating Abra to pretty much loathing her. She was our conduit to ABC, the bridge between us and the network brass as well as the stations, and Jeff abhorred the idea of having to listen to her. So he banished her to another floor of the building.
A big challenge was creating a show from scratch every day as opposed to reacting to a constant influx of news. And we were getting mixed messages: make the episodes topical so they’re a good lead-in to local newscasts, but make them evergreen enough to work as reruns. My neck was getting stiff from the whiplash.
And then there was TiVo, DVR, cable, and Facebook, all fighting for the same eyeballs. Getting them to look at us was tougher than we thought.
A couple of months in, I met with Anne Sweeney. Perfectly groomed in her tailored suit and pumps, she was the picture of the successful female executive, the sort of person who looked like she smelled really good. We exchanged niceties about our families before getting down to it. A little sheepishly, I said, “I think the show’s looking pretty good, don’t you? I think there’s a lot of potential for it to grow.”
Anne put it bluntly: “I didn’t want you to have the number-one new talk show; I wanted you to have the number-one talk show, period.”
Oh, shit.
And it hit me that we’d broken an important rule of business: underpromise and overdeliver. With all the hype surrounding the debut, surrounding me, with all the money ABC was throwing at us, it was clear: We’d overpromised and underdelivered.
The real issue for me: There was very little overlap between the kind of shows I wanted to do and the shows people typically watch in daytime. I was determined to hang on to my news chops—I’d worked too hard to establish myself as a journalist to suddenly play the Gidget Goes to Daytime role. So I broke another rule of business: I didn’t give the people what they wanted.
Aggressively so, sometimes. One of my favorite producers, Molly McGinnis, reminded me of the time I called her into my office after hours to tell her I wasn’t happy with the direction the shows were taking, saying they lacked substance. International Women’s Day was coming up, and I said I wanted to scrap whatever we had planned to do an hour on empowering women instead.