Finally, we were going to be together as a family. Jay started working on a book about his abiding passion, the Civil War. He was even a reenactor, meaning that he and some equally obsessed buddies in Virginia would dramatize important battles on weekends, having researched every detail, from the type of muskets that were used to the patina of the buttons on the uniforms. I thought it was a little strange; I used to tell him, “I hope you don’t expect me to follow you around in a hoop skirt and snood,” which made him laugh.
“It’s better than gambling, drinking, and chasing women,” he’d say.
I was excited for this new phase. Doris, not so much. She didn’t enjoy having Jay around, intruding on our relationship, and the atmosphere in the apartment grew tense. “You won’t believe what he said about you,” she’d murmur to me, attributing some bogusly hurtful remark to Jay. What pushed her over the edge was Jay thinking aloud that he might take a break from practicing law to focus full-time on his book.
“If you think I’m going to keep working here while he sits around the house doing nothing, you’ve got another thing coming,” Doris said.
The scales fell from my eyes. She was delusional, and she was trying to destroy my marriage. I’d never been more sure of anything.
“Get out,” I said, as angry as I’d ever been. “Pack your things and leave.”
Hastily, she did.
That’s when things got really crazy.
Doris was like a wounded animal, thrashing about, hoping to hurt us in any way she could—which meant trying to embarrass me and going after my reputation. Imagine the spit-take I did when I saw the headline on the front page of a tabloid: “Exposed! Katie Couric’s Wacky Hubby: He Walks Around the House Half Naked Blowing a Bugle, Says Nanny.” The article goes on to poke fun at Jay for his （admittedly large） bugle collection, vintage military uniforms, and how much he supposedly spent on it all. Another one shares the fact that I’d happily go the whole weekend without showering （guilty as charged）。 It is so not fun when someone who’s had an all-access pass to your private life decides to hurt you.
Then Doris got creative. One day, my parents received a call from someone who introduced himself as a salesman from the McCormick spice company. “I was just at a rest stop in New Jersey and all the pay phones there have stickers on them that say ‘Why does Katie Couric care more about her job than her child?’ And ‘Why is her husband a pedophile?’ ‘For more information call…’ and then it shows your phone number. I watch your daughter on the TODAY show and she seems like a very nice girl. I wanted you to know I took the stickers off.”
As for the pedophile claim: One night during our trip to Lost Creek, after we’d all pigged out at a family-style dinner, I took a photo of Jay lying on the bed with a smiling Ellie sitting nearby. He’d undone the top button of his khakis to give himself room to breathe. Doris xeroxed the photo, made flyers, and delivered them to the lobby of the apartment building we were about to move into, warning residents that a pedophile would soon be in their midst.
We hired a retired policeman to keep an eye on things outside Ellie’s preschool for a few weeks, worried what Doris might do. We thought about getting a restraining order, but that legal step would make it part of the public record and accessible to the tabloids; “Couric’s Nanny Accuses Husband of Pedophilia” was a headline we could live without. Everyone—lawyers, psychiatrists, security experts, the PR people at NBC—agreed that I should ignore her. Starve the beast and it’ll slink away. Which, eventually, it did.
As for the photo shoot at Billy Joel’s house…One night my friend Pam was behind him in line at an ice cream place on the Upper East Side; they started chatting and she mentioned she was on her way to see me.
“Oh,” Billy Joel said, “please tell Katie I got the photos from her vacation.” Doris had mailed them to him. Oy. （Sorry, Mom.）
In the darkest days of the Doris debacle, I’d frequently think, This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. I had no idea.
29
Martha, Dear Martha
BEING A FRENZIED working mother in the mid-’90s meant being a soldier in the so-called mommy wars. Career women were on the rise in unprecedented numbers, while an equally defiant contingent stayed home to take care of their kids. The whole thing got so politicized, with the two camps eyeing each other warily across the divide—questioning each other’s choices and sometimes secretly questioning their own.