A congratulatory note from General Schwarzkopf came in the mail. He suggested that Norman might be a good name for the baby. And if it’s a girl, he wrote, I could call her Stormy Norma.
20
Katherine or Katie
APRIL 5TH, 1991, my first day as co-anchor of the TODAY show. With most of my life still in Virginia, NBC had put me up in a furnished apartment at Bristol Plaza on East 65th Street. My alarm went off at 4:15 a.m. I got up, threw up, and jumped in the shower. There would be a number of challenges in this huge new role, although at the moment, the biggest one was how to cover my ever-growing belly.
Places like A Pea in the Pod and Mimi’s Maternity were newish resources for pregnant professionals, offering slightly more sophisticated styles than the flowy, boho frocks of the ’70s or the baby-doll smocks of the ’50s and ’60s, which I always saw as society’s infantilizing of mothers-to-be, a way to camouflage the sex act that had taken place. In terms of my wardrobe, I remember a lot of lime green, fuchsia, shoulder pads, and buttons the size of poker chips—I don’t know how I left the house thinking I looked presentable.
That first day, I opted for a tomato-red number with little gold buttons shaped like pretzels. Hearing my heels echo across the slick floor of the Bristol Plaza lobby before dawn, I imagined the cleaning crew thinking I was some sort of baby-faced woman of the night.
Looking out the car window, I took in the sight of New York City waking up from its slumber: Doormen hosing down the sidewalks. The café owner noisily rolling up the metal gate protecting his storefront. The sun peeking through the skyscrapers, casting a coral hue on the concrete below. A yellow cab picking up an early riser headed to the airport. An intrepid runner who’d hauled himself out of bed at dawn heading to Central Park. I paused to inhale the sights and sounds, marveling that I was part of it.
The raspy-voiced Bobbi, who’d seen it all, did my makeup. A hairstylist named Catherine blew out my short ’do; a wardrobe woman, stout and stern, steamed my dress. I reviewed my notes, walked into the studio, and sat in my chair. The audio engineer clipped on my mic. Bryant looked over and said, “You good?” I said yes, even though I wasn’t so sure. Jimmy Straka, the stage manager, boomed, “Thirty seconds to air!”
At the stroke of 7, against the theme music’s staccato trumpets and swelling strings, the announcer intoned for the first time ever, “From NBC News…this is TODAY with Bryant Gumbel, Katherine Couric, and Joe Garagiola.”
If there was any confusion among the audience about why I was sitting there, Bryant dispelled it, with perhaps a little less tact than the moment required: “In case you haven’t gotten the message, Katie Couric is now a permanent fixture up here, a member of our family, an especially welcome one. Deborah Norville is not.” YIKES.
As for that “Katherine” in the intro…I still used it to counteract my Campbell’s Soup Kid looks. In real life, though, nobody called me Katherine （except my dad when he was mad at me）。 I was conflicted.
When Bryant asks me how it sounds, hearing my name in the intro, I tell him, “It sounded good! But I still can’t decide whether I’m Katherine or Katie,” grabbing my head with both hands in a playful gesture of confusion.
Watching it now, I can hardly believe what a prescient comment it was: Katherine or Katie, the serious journalist or the smiley cutup…the tension between those two sides of my nature would run like a fault line through my career.
21
A Defiant Mop
I WAS QUEEN of the May, as my mother might say. Reporters wanted to talk to me; photographers wanted to take my picture. My old station WRC asked to interview me from New York while my parents were interviewed at their house. They sent a live truck and wired them up, and my friend Barbara Harrison started asking us questions. My parents looked so uncomfortable and confused, sitting on their living-room sofa. I later learned the audio was screwed up and the feedback they heard was throwing them off. I vowed never to do that to them again, telling them that if a reporter ever knocked on the door, slam it in their face.
A stringer with the National Enquirer reached out. “I don’t need to warn how aggressive the Enquirer can be,” he wrote, then assured me I could easily satisfy them with things like “baby pictures, personal recipes, an occasional frank-sounding disclosure of some minor personal problem, etc.” Then he offered to broker an introduction to the articles editor. The hint of a threat, wrapped in supposed advice and help…it was a chilling welcome to my new world. （I didn’t reply.）