But we were all in the shadow of the OG, Barbara Walters. The first woman to co-host a morning show （TODAY）， the first woman to co-anchor a newscast （the ABC Evening News）， she’d been out there practically on her own since the 1960s, enduring a Handmaid’s Tale level of institutional sexism while paving the way for the rest of us. When she was on TODAY, it was stipulated in her co-host Frank McGee’s contract that Barbara had to wait until he’d asked three questions before she could jump in with one. When she was given the evening news, her co-anchor, Harry Reasoner, sat next to her wearing an expression that made it seem like he’d smelled something bad.
Of course, she’d go on to be the queen—we all owed her so much. Whenever I lost a highly competitive booking, I always thought, Let it be Barbara.
NEWS-MAKING INTERVIEWS WERE the name of the game. But the bar for what constituted news was getting lower by the second. After all, who wouldn’t be fascinated by Lorena Bobbitt cutting off her husband’s penis and throwing it out her car window? Who could resist the Tonya Harding / Nancy Kerrigan shitshow on ice? As a result, every organism in the media ecosystem—from network newscasts to tabloid shows like A Current Affair—went after the same stories, covering them like they were cultural watersheds as opposed to the straight-up ratings bait they were.
Getting the big get wasn’t for the faint of heart. The lengths we all went to were often absurd, hilarious, and flat-out shameless; I heard that Diane’s bookers would often cry on the phone to potential guests if an interview was starting to fall through. Here were these suddenly famous folks who’d often been through hell—the last thing they needed was a sobbing booker on the other end of the line.
Then there were the covert ops. We’d put up our guests in hotels in New York, and if GMA was able to figure out our undisclosed location, they’d call, posing as a TODAY show staffer, and tell the guest the interview had been canceled. Or they’d send a car to pick them up in the morning and whisk them to the GMA studios instead of ours. If a guest was booked on both shows and the GMA slot came first, the producer would corner the guest in the greenroom afterward, chatting, offering more coffee, basically holding the person hostage so he or she wouldn’t make it to the TODAY show in time. Over at 30 Rock, we’d be left scrambling and cursing.
GMA was notorious for these tactics, but we got our hands dirty too. Jeff Zucker could be ruthless （and downright obnoxious）： When Dionne Warwick performed for GMA at a live concert in Bryant Park, he redirected the local News 4 traffic chopper to buzz the crowd. His GMA counterpart, the formidable Shelley Ross, was apoplectic.
Bookers （most of them women） were typically responsible for developing friendly relationships with the lawyers （most of them men） representing the big gets, buttering them up with lunches, drinks, and schmoozy phone calls in between. The stakes were so high, anchors increasingly had to get involved in the booking process. Drop the well-known name and it was open sesame: The assistant’s clipped voice would instantly turn sweet as syrup and you’d be put right through. If that didn’t close the deal, we followed up with handwritten, hand-delivered notes on expensive stationery engraved with our names, sometimes accompanied by fruit baskets.
Often we’d book the lawyer himself for an interview, not only for his legal perspective but for ego-stroking purposes that might lead him to offer up his client. Ted Simon, a nerdy Philadelphia lawyer, was lapping up the unprecedented attention when everyone wanted a piece of his client Michael Fay, the so-called caning boy, sentenced to six lashes in Singapore for vandalizing cars. Suddenly, Simon had a passel of suitors. In a Vanity Fair piece called “Kiss of the Anchorwomen,” he described Diane’s telephone voice as “very languid and sexual, lingering, throaty…”
Of me he said, “Katie is very warm, very sympathetic.”
Hmm—I wonder who was making more headway with the good counselor. Despite all the unctuous phone flattery, the interview went to—wait for it—Larry King.
Then there was the silver-tongued Southerner （turned rabid Trump supporter） Lin Wood, who defended Richard Jewell, a security guard on the scene at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta when a bomb went off. At first hailed a hero, Jewell suddenly became the prime suspect. I’d interviewed him during the hero phase, and when Jewell was finally exonerated, he and his mom, Bobi, flew to New York for a TODAY show exclusive. Clearly, we’d found a friend in Lin—which proved monumentally useful when a 6-year-old beauty queen with candy-floss hair and the face of an angel was murdered in her Boulder, Colorado, home. The media was desperate for interviews with anyone connected to the JonBenét Ramsey case. Thanks to Lin, we got a long sit-down with her parents, John and Patsy.