Everybody cheered as I walked in and continued cheering as I headed straight to the bar and ordered my first cosmopolitan. Lauren grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the dance floor. Dancing was always our favorite way to blow off steam. We were having a great time doing some of our signature moves, like the Lotion, where we acted out dispensing some in our hands, rubbing them together, and slathering it all over our bodies. During yet another moment of post-show revelry, someone snapped a photo of me vogue-ing—hands on thighs, slightly hiking up my skirt—something I imagine neither Dan Rather nor Bob Schieffer ever did, at least not in public.
Ellie innocently posted several pictures from the night on Facebook. Someone grabbed one and sold it to Gawker. Lovely.
Meanwhile, most of the CBS folks were standing awkwardly on the periphery, watching us. It felt like the debate team looking down on the Breakfast Club.
Screw it, I thought. I’m going to have fun.
THE NEXT DAY at about 11:00 a.m., Sean McManus showed up in the fishbowl—the glassed-off work area where the people in charge sat. Typically reserved, bordering on diffident, he was now more animated than I’d ever seen him. Sean announced the ratings had just come out: We’d drawn 13.6 million viewers—up 86 percent from the previous year.
An elated Rome was standing next to Sean. “Doesn’t it feel good to be number one?” he said to the newsroom. Too soon, I thought.
As the ratings came in, so did the criticism. Some focused on the new elements: We had shown a clip of Douglas Edwards debuting a photo of baby Prince Charles before revealing our Suri Cruise picture, “as if there were a grand tradition of baby pictures at the Tiffany network,” my old friend Alessandra Stanley sniveled. Tom Shales, who’d been such a fan since I started at the TODAY show, declared that “Free Speech” was “the oldest idea in television: Have some well-known or obscure blowhard pop up and do a rant into the camera.” Some critics claimed I lacked “gravitas,” which I decided was Latin for testicles.
But the headline was what I wore. Shales opined that my blazer “buttoned in such a way as to make her look chubby, bursting at the button, which we know she isn’t. It was a poor choice.” Regarding my decision to wear white after Labor Day, that fashion arbiter, the New York Sun, admitted it “isn’t a fashion crime anymore. But if Katie Couric really wanted us to focus on her reporting rather than her wardrobe, she shouldn’t have flouted one of the oldest rules in the book.” Keith Olbermann said my face looked Botoxed.
In terms of the format, I thought we were doing what Les had brought me there to do. Looking back, just having an anchor wearing lipstick would have been jarring enough; the changes we made were too much too soon. Standing at the top of the broadcast, axing “Good evening,” leaning casually against the anchor desk and sharing a celebrity baby pic, doing video opinion pieces—it all amounted to sacrilege.
One bright spot was a downright chivalrous defense by the Columbia Journalism Review critiquing the critiques: “At least nine separate reporters noted the visibility of Couric’s ‘legendary’ or ‘famous’ or ‘celebrated’ legs—startled, apparently, by the reality that when professional women forgo pantsuits for blazers and skirts, their legs will be visible. （For comparison, we had to look long and hard to find any media mentions of Brian Williams’ physical appearance the morning after he inherited the NBC Nightly News）。”
Unfortunately, the CJR isn’t the megaphone the other media columns are. Still, I wanted to kiss the writer, Liz Cox Barrett, whoever she was, on the mouth.
61
…And I’m Katie Couric
I WENT BACK AGAIN and again to Radutzky’s comment about what a backstabbing place 60 Minutes was. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that was just part of the show’s fabled DNA. Don Hewitt was known to pit correspondents against one another, believing that fomenting intense competition yields the best work. I’d heard about the screaming fights and bare-knuckle politics. The standards were high; the margin for error wafer-thin. Membership in this exclusive club didn’t come easy. It’s hard to imagine now, but when veterans Lesley Stahl and Steve Kroft started out, executives held emergency meetings and complained bitterly that they weren’t making enough of a splash. The place was notorious for hazing.
Yes, I knew 60 Minutes was going to be a tough nut to crack. But I wasn’t a kid—I figured my 15 years at TODAY, with my proven track record of scoring big gets and doing tough interviews, put me in a pretty solid position to win them over.