Friends were calling, people were writing, flowers were arriving, and men I didn’t know were claiming to have dated me.
Everyone had an opinion, including a self-described “83-year-old Scotsman,” who wrote:
Dear Katie:
Your hair-do is for the birds. You have it puffed up on the left-side, then combed at a straight 45 degree angle. It could readily be the ski-slope for an adventurous sparrow. It is totally lacking in symmetry.
Word came down that Dick Ebersol also had some hair advice; he wanted me to grow mine out and wear small earrings and fuzzy sweaters for a “softer” appearance. I sent word back that I liked the way I looked and was sticking with it, but thanks for the suggestion. （A Washington Post reporter astutely described my do as “a defiant mop.”）
My world was changing fast. A blazered airline representative whisking me away on a cart, tearing through the terminal, beeping at pedestrians who were in our path. At Disneyland, a solicitous VIP guide offering to kick a family out of a live Cinderella show so we could have their front-row seats （I said absolutely not）。 Walking down Broadway with a friend, glancing at a newsstand and seeing a beaming face on a magazine cover, and realizing it was me.
Then there was the time I was flipping through the latest copy of The New Yorker and saw a cartoon with the perpetually gloomy donkey, Eeyore, watching TV with a smile on his face. Next to him, Winnie-the-Pooh. The caption reads, Katie Couric will do that to you.
One morning when I was lying next to Jay in bed, I said the kind of thing you’d confess only to your closest friend: “I used to want to be the most popular girl in school. Now I’m the most popular girl in the country!”
He turned to me. “You’re gross,” he said, then hit me with a pillow.
SOMETHING I KNEW instinctively—if I was going to be successful at this, I had to be myself. The pioneering John Chancellor confirmed it in a note he sent when I got the job: “The only way it can work is for you to throw yourself on the mercy of the audience and hope they like you for what you really, truly, honestly are. The camera is the world’s most sophisticated lie detector.”
For me, that included a willingness to be clueless about sports. Rather than earnestly try to keep up with Bryant’s keen analysis the morning after a big game, I decided to have a little fun. With Jeff in my earpiece telling me what to say, I started offering my two cents on things like “calling an audible at the line” or “throwing a bomb as the pocket was collapsing.” Bryant would look at me, stunned. The third time it happened, he was onto me—and leaned over and pulled out my earpiece.
We had reached cruising altitude. Not that there wouldn’t be occasional turbulence.
The day before I went on maternity leave, Bryant commemorated the occasion by giving me a hard time—on camera.
He’s in country-club khakis and a blazer; I’m in shoulder-padded Crayola-blue shapelessness. He starts by asking how long I’d be gone. Nine weeks, I say.
Bryant: Why so long?
Me: It’s a major shock to your body, I hope you realize, when you have a baby…
Bryant: Your ancestors didn’t worry about that “shock to your body”; they came right back and worked.
Me: Yeah, and they died when they were, like, 32 years old.
Bryant （incredulous）： You’re 34; you’ve already beat that! What are you worried about?…How many men get nine weeks off?
I noted that he did—every summer.
Classic Bryant. He loved to needle me, and I had no choice but to smile gamely and play along. The guys in the control room sometimes encouraged him by piping a whip-cracking sound effect into the studio.
Bryant was a macho, macho man. But I deeply respected his talent and work ethic. He came in every morning with his interview notes highlighted and color-coded. And in the TV universe, he was a historic figure—the first Black person to anchor a morning show.
NBC executives had hesitated about moving Bryant from sports to news. But once he got the anchor job on TODAY in 1982, he settled into his hyper-professional, hard-ass persona—a preening, stogie-smoking, alpha male （David Letterman, with whom he had a long-running feud, once described Bryant as the kind of guy who spends the weekend “alphabetizing his colognes”）。 In his horn-rims and gorgeously tailored Joseph Abboud suits, he was the cock of the walk. And while he sometimes bristled at my assertiveness, we developed a mutual respect and affection that came out at surprising moments.
After Bryant’s great friend Arthur Ashe died, he was narrating a montage when his voice started to shake so much, he couldn’t continue. Instinctively, I jumped in and picked up where he’d left off. He returned the favor when Audrey Hepburn died. I’d found her so gracious when I interviewed her on TODAY—before she sat down, she walked around the studio and shook every person’s hand. During our taped tribute, I began to sob.