We were right where we wanted to be. Jay and I had moved out of the “skyrockets in flight, afternoon delight” phase and into the steady rhythms and comfortable familiarity of marriage.
BACK AT NBC, things were decidedly less tranquil. Tom Brokaw’s newscast was stuck in third place, and the TODAY show, which had dominated the morning for years, was starting to shed its young female viewers—the demo most coveted by advertisers.
The trouble started in February of 1989, when The Memo, as it will always be known around the network, Bryant’s unsparing assessment of the show’s strengths and weaknesses, was leaked to the press. Among other things, it went after beloved Willard Scott, saying that he “holds the show hostage” with his centenarian birthday tributes （“What a beautiful lady, 104 years young!”） and corny jokes before getting to the weather.
Talk about a cold front. It seemed to rally viewers to Willard’s side and made Bryant look churlish and petty. It also made it seem like TODAY had become Family Feud. As NBC scrambled, the corporate gaze fell on Jane Pauley.
I couldn’t understand it. She had the winning combination of Midwestern approachability and East Coast sophistication. I even loved her assorted hairstyles, including the ponytail that draped over her shoulder like a squirrel’s tail. She’d been anchoring the show for 13 years, the first four with Tom and the last nine with Bryant. Now the network brain trust wondered if she was a little long in the tooth for the job （Jane was 39; Bryant, 41）。
Dick Ebersol, the newly minted president of NBC Sports who’d also been put in charge of TODAY, had an idea. Deborah Norville, the blond, pillowy-lipped former pageant winner from Dalton, Georgia （the carpet capital of the world）， eight years Jane’s junior, had bumped up the ratings as anchor at NBC News at Sunrise. Now she was the newsreader at TODAY, bringing an air of uber-confidence and glamour to the role.
I mean, Deborah was stunning. She was also whip-smart, Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Georgia, and incredibly hardworking. As if that weren’t enough, she made her own clothes. Curtains too.
It wasn’t surprising that all the male executives at the network saw Deborah as Jane’s inevitable successor. That included Jack Welch, chairman of GE （which owned NBC at the time）， who apparently watched her on Sunrise from his exercise bike. But the way they set the process in motion became an infamous object lesson in how not to handle beloved talent. One morning as the cameras rolled, Deborah showed up on the couch next to Bryant and Jane—much to Jane’s visible surprise （she would later describe it as a complete humiliation）。 The Washington Post’s feared media columnist Tom Shales put it this way: “Watching the three of them on screen together is like looking at a broken marriage with the homewrecker right there on the premises.”
After four months of awkwardness, Jane said her classy and moving on-air goodbyes and headed off to a newsmagazine show, Real Life （short-lived, unfortunately）。
The audience took it personally. They’d been through a lot with Jane, including her two pregnancies （one with twins）。 They cared about her and resented the way she had been treated. So instead of attracting the larger, younger audience of NBC’s dreams, the Bryant/Deborah team repelled them: After nearly five years at number one, the show fell to second place, behind Good Morning America. Soon, TODAY was bleeding viewers, down nearly 20 percent from the previous year.
The press blamed Bryant, along with NBC management. In a familiar PR move at the time for anyone in need of a little reputation repair, Bryant submitted to a Barbara Walters interview on ABC’s 20/20, during which he talked openly about how much he missed Jane. Viewers could see why—he and Deborah had zero rapport; Bryant’s brow crinkled uncomfortably whenever she spoke. And suddenly, NBC was in panic mode.
Elena Nachmanoff, who recruited journalists for NBC, reached out to gauge my interest in subbing as newsreader on TODAY. Shortly after I’d arrived at the Pentagon, she and Don Browne, whom I got to know in Miami when he was the NBC bureau chief, had become big boosters.
All I could think of was the day the San Francisco earthquake hit in the fall of 1989. I was a newbie at NBC and happened to be the only one still in the bureau when an assignment editor pointed at me and said, “You! We need you to do a special report!”
I froze, then looked around the empty newsroom for someone, anyone, more experienced. I sat at the desk and muddled my way through a news brief while terrifying shots of burning buildings flashed on the screen. I prayed no one was watching.