One night over dinner, I just came out with it: Did we have a future? I needed to know.
He seemed uncomfortable. After fumbling around, he finally said, “I have a chip missing.”
I couldn’t quite figure out what he meant. Was it the intimacy chip, the commitment chip, the piece missing from Chip, the teacup in Beauty and the Beast? I was tempted to suggest he find one at RadioShack but resisted—he seemed so morose and confused. I had assumed Tom was emotionally healthy, but if I had shaken a Magic 8 Ball, it would have come up Don’t count on it.
The more distant he got, the needier I became. I started spending a lot of time in the self-help section of Barnes and Noble, reading books with titles like Men Who Can’t Love and Just Walk Away.
As we did every year, the girls and I were going out to dinner the night before they headed off for seven weeks of summer camp. We were walking to a neighborhood restaurant when I checked in with my assistant, Lauren. “Hey, woman! Just saying hi. Any emails I should know about?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “Oh, here’s one from Tom…uh…you may want to read it when you get home.”
I assured Lauren, who was like a sister to me, she could tell me what it said.
“Maybe you should read this later, Couric,” she said again, sounding weird.
“Laur, don’t be silly. Go ahead.”
She proceeded to read a “Dear Katie” email that basically said Tom was breaking up with me.
“Wow. Okay.”
I felt a little sick. When we got to the restaurant, I forced a smile for the girls and pushed the food around on my plate.
The next day, a FedEx envelope arrived containing a handwritten card, expressing the exact same sentiments, word for word. In case the email had gone to spam, I guess.
Don’t worry, Tom! Message received. I burned the note in my bathroom sink.
IT WOULD TAKE me a long time to fully realize what a textbook narcissist I’d been dealing with. Beware of men bearing gifts: What began as a lavish courtship （they now call it “love-bombing”） ended with me in a puddle. It’s a familiar cycle—idealizing, devaluing, and ultimately discarding. You’re left wondering what you did to alienate someone who’d been so dizzyingly in love, when it was never really about you all along. If we had lived in the same city, had I been less vulnerable following Jay’s death, I suspect I would have caught on much earlier.
At the time, the post-breakup miasma sent me reeling into a therapist’s office. I drenched several tissues, fixating on the fact that Tom had rejected me—it felt so unjust. And I will never forget that nice woman sitting across from me in her leather chair, fixing me with her wise eyes, and saying, “Have you ever considered that maybe not everyone is going to like you?”
Honestly, I sort of hadn’t. Since I was a toddler, I’d been such a pleaser, a master at recruiting people to Team Katie; I always knew the precise moment when I had them on the hook. On TODAY, getting people to like me was a job requirement, and pretty soon I was recruiting them by the millions. With that kind of positive reinforcement, it simply did not compute when somebody wasn’t buying what I was selling. Especially somebody I’d invested in emotionally and had even considered marrying.
The therapist’s words brought me back down to earth. I found it strangely liberating, this radical idea that not everyone was going to like me.
It was an epiphany that would come in handy.
55
Probing Colins
JEFF ZUCKER’S FEET may only have been size 9, but he left huge shoes to fill when he became president of NBC Entertainment. He’d handpicked his friend Michael Bass, a fellow Harvard guy and longtime loyalist, to step in as acting EP at TODAY. Michael was incredibly nice and a solid producer but lacked Jeff’s shrewdness and pizzazz （yeoman-like was a word that got used）， which showed in the broadcast. Suddenly it felt slow, boring, blah.
Jonathan Wald—son of Dick, who’d run two networks—had been a producer at NBC Nightly News and seemed like a great guy. He was smart and quick-witted, albeit part of a TV boys’ club that greeted each other with “Heyyy, buddddddyyyyy” and always landed on their feet professionally, often failing up. （One guy embezzled six figures and kept getting hired—even by people who knew about it.） Still, I was hopeful that Jonathan would be a little closer to the Jeff model than Michael Bass had been.
He wasn’t. For starters, Jeff made everyone, from pages to VPs, feel like they were part of the most exciting enterprise ever （which, arguably, they were）; Jonathan, on the other hand, could be hierarchical and inaccessible—people had to make an appointment to see him. He had guided us capably through 9/11 but didn’t seem to have the fire in his belly to keep the show on top.