TWO YEARS AFTER Jay died, my agent, Alan Berger, set me up on a date with someone he thought I’d like: a big-time TV producer named Tom Werner.
I was vaguely familiar with Carsey-Werner, the powerhouse production company behind The Cosby Show （back before Bill Cosby was a convicted rapist）， Roseanne （back before she fired off racist tweets）， Grace Under Fire （back before Brett Butler had a meltdown on the set）。 But Hollywood wasn’t my sandbox; Tom Werner the person was unknown to me.
Alan sent me a Newsweek story about Tom and his empire. Blah-blah-blah—I zeroed in on his photo. Mmm, not really my type, but kind of cute? Apparently he was funny, smart （Harvard）， and unpretentious. He was born and raised in Manhattan, which I thought might be a plus; at least we’d have the city in common.
“Okay,” I told Alan. “When he’s in town, I’d be happy to have lunch.” （My usual rule was coffee, lunch, or a drink. Dinner was a potential death trap.） Along with managing the details of my career, now Alan was handling my love life, which I thought was sweet （as long as he wasn’t going to take another percentage）。
Tom called and invited me to the Rainbow Room atop 30 Rock. He was dressed just how I liked a man to be dressed: navy blazer, powder-blue button-down shirt, khakis, Hermès tie. He was charming and entertaining, telling stories about antics on the sets of his shows, his lackluster tenure as owner of the San Diego Padres, and growing up on the Upper East Side.
As for the nitty-gritty, he verified that he and his wife had just split up after 28 years. They had three kids—two in their twenties and a daughter in middle school; Tom had found a place nearby in Brentwood so he could easily spend time with her. Which spoke well of him, I thought, although I was pretty sure the bicoastal thing would rule him out as a steady beau.
The next day, a floral extravaganza arrived at my apartment with a note along the lines of I can’t wait to see you again. Nice.
That was just the beginning. I had never been pursued with such intensity. Producer that Tom was, he orchestrated everything. A few weeks later, he sent a printed invitation to the girls and me for a lobster lunch on the deck of his Del Mar beach house and a VIP tour of the San Diego Zoo. Included in the invite were Alan, Wendy （now living in Rancho Santa Fe and producing Larry King Live from her guesthouse turned control room）， and their families. We were given a behind-the-scenes tour, where we got up close and personal with some penguins （one of which projectile-pooped all over Wendy’s daughter’s white polo shirt）。
When I went to London to cover a story, there were silk Sulka pajamas in a fancy box on the bed in my hotel room and yet another gorgeous floral arrangement. When I arrived at our summer rental in the Hamptons, an envelope was waiting for me. Inside, a fancy notecard on which Tom had written the lyrics to “Night and Day”—Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom—signing it with “This Tom-Tom beats for you.”
Yikes. How can that Tom-Tom beat for me when he hardly knows me?
48
The Couric Effect
THE PROMISE OF a new relationship always brought me back to Jay. With every step I took toward building a new life, I became more committed to keeping his memory alive. I enlisted the help of Lilly Tartikoff. Her husband, the game-changing Brandon, the youngest-ever president of NBC Entertainment, had lost his battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma at just 48. As we talked about our dead husbands over lunch at Cipriani, Lilly, a transfixing former ballerina, suddenly said, “We have to save the colons! We have to save the colons!”
Maybe not our bumper sticker, but I knew if I joined forces with Lilly, who’d spearheaded the Revlon Run/Walk for women’s cancers, we could make a massive push to raise money for colon cancer research.
All I could think was Finally, this disease will get the attention it deserves. For the longest time, it was the ugly stepchild of cancers, colons being the literal butt of jokes, lacking the erotic appeal of breasts, the mystique of the brain, the easy-to-comprehend essentialness of the lungs. Instead, colons dwell in the netherworld of the rectum and the anus and, we’re told, have something to do with pooping. （They’re even as ugly as you might imagine, resembling an earthworm on steroids.）
But if something goes seriously wrong with your colon, God help you. At the time, things were going seriously wrong with the colons of over 100,000 Americans a year. Colon cancer was （and still is） the number-two cancer killer of men and women combined.
Lilly and I partnered with Lisa Paulsen, who ran the Entertainment Industry Foundation, and the three of us created the National Colorectal Cancer Research Alliance. I took the lead in establishing the Jay Monahan Center for Gastrointestinal Health （another mouthful） at New York Hospital, where Jay had been treated. Having to go to so many different locations for things like radiology, chemotherapy, and ocular oncology during Jay’s illness had only added to the sky-high stress. The Monahan Center, led by Jay’s doctor Mark Pochapin, would treat not only the disease but the whole patient—with kindness and compassion, from the person who answered the phone to the surgeon who removed the tumor.