Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (14 page)

If
A.M. America
was an imitation of
Today
, the retooled and renamed
Good Morning America
was an alternative—more entertaining, more appealing, and maybe even, as the name implied, more American. When
GMA
had its premiere on November 3, 1975—and a cheerful Broadway actress named Nancy Dussault was brought in to be Hartman’s perky but unsexy cohost—it was ABC’s entertainment division that was in charge. Structurally this gave
GMA
more freedom to stray from news ethics and standards; practically, as TV critics were quick to point out, it allowed the show to go “softer” than the
Today
show, which was a product of NBC’s news division. Hartman described
GMA
this way: it “had a different look and feel from a traditional news program,” including a more conversational style (the writers would substitute
a lot
for the more formal
many
, for instance) and a set that was supposed to look like a dreamy suburban home (with a living room, a den, a kitchen, and what appeared to be a leafy backyard). Still, ABC News produced the newscasts that were shown within
GMA
every half hour, and the anchor of the newscasts, Steve Bell, joined Hartman for most of the show’s hard news interviews, as a sop to those who believed, in those pre–Ronald Reagan years, that an actor should not try to examine and explain affairs of state.

Given Hartman’s never having possessed a press badge, “the journalists among us were anguished,” said Merlis, who was the first producer hired at
GMA
. “And the first week looked like it would prove us right. David would ask questions that caused the news guys to groan and wince.” But what Merlis and others didn’t realize at the time was that Hartman was asking the questions the viewers would have asked, not the questions TV newsmen ask to show off how much they know. Before long it was generally acknowledged that whatever it was Hartman was doing was working, and then, in short order, Merlis said, “the news guys started asking those kinds of questions, too.”

It was fine with
GMA
’s producers if the journalists in the building imitated Hartman a bit, but they didn’t want their new show to similarly flatter
Today
.
A.M. America
had done that by booking its sloppy seconds, and it had lasted less than a year. So there was an ironclad rule that
GMA
could not book people who had appeared on
Today
the day before. Thus an era of frenzied, cutthroat, and, as we shall see, occasionally unethical competition for the most coveted guests was born.

ABC president Silverman—a pooh-bah of prime time who had already brought
All in the Family
and
The Waltons
to the airwaves, and at the time was working on
Charlie’s Angels
—felt in his golden gut that
GMA
should conform to the morning habits of the audience—assuming you define the audience as a sea of middle-class, middle-American, cereal-eating salary workers, and not a bunch of cab drivers or hookers, dragging their asses home just as Hartman was saying “Well, here we are again!” To Silverman, predictability was the plan and the point. So weather was at exactly the same times every day. And so were the headlines and so were the Hollywood gossip segments. The format was modeled on the “wheel” formula of radio newscasts, made for a mom at home. Its exactness sometimes frustrated the hosts, but the producers believed the unvarying formula attracted radio listeners and converted them to television in the morning—exactly what Sigourney’s NBC executive dad Pat Weaver had set out to do with
Today
in the 1950s.

Today
hardly flinched when
GMA
premiered. It had what it thought were bigger problems. The NBC News president at the time, Richard Wald, thought cohost Jim Hartz wasn’t up to the job; he told Hartz more than once to “sit up,” and Hartz knew it wasn’t just a reference to his posture. But Hartz also knew, as he told a reporter when he was forced out in 1976, that he could only be himself, “and if that wasn’t good enough, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. There’s enough artificiality in this medium without altering the way you are.” That sounds like something Ann Curry would say. Wald proposed—and Hartz reluctantly accepted—a roving correspondent role just like Curry’s, with a fancy “traveling co-anchor” title. The publicists for NBC dodged questions about Hartz’s new position, which vanished within a year.

Meanwhile
GMA
, strengthened by the addition of contributors like Joan Lunden and Geraldo Rivera, inched toward
Today
in the ratings. Was NBC, the network that had invented morning TV, worried? It certainly looked that way by the time Silverman, who changed channels more often than your sister’s preschooler, became president of NBC in June 1978. He immediately shook up the
Today
show, said Paul Friedman, then the executive producer of
Today
: “He insisted that we program more segments at shorter length, as
GMA
was doing, and that we do more ‘news you can use’—particularly medical and consumer news—and pop culture segments.” In four words: be more like
GMA
.

Today
’s main obstacle in this regard was that it couldn’t clone Hartman. In 1979, as
GMA
closed the gap with
Today
, audience research commissioned by NBC showed that Hartman (then cohosting with Sandy Hill) was considered more relatable and approachable than Hartz’s successor Tom Brokaw, who was perceived, fairly or not, as being eager to show off his journalistic chops at every opportunity. “The audience rated the two shows equally in terms of content and style, but was in love with David Hartman,” Friedman said. “He was ‘everyman,’ and he was the difference.”

NBC execs were so flustered that at lunch they often pushed away their clams casino half eaten and flubbed their lips in their martinis. At a meeting convened by Silverman to discuss the morning show war, Friedman mused that perhaps the money expended on all the research should instead have been spent to hire a hit man to kill Hartman. Silverman didn’t laugh. But the joke exposed a question that haunted all the morning shows: what influenced viewers’ choices more, the content of the shows or the chemistry of the cohosts? Most people thought chemistry triumphed, a view backed up by NBC’s research and the ratings race. In January 1980 the once-unthinkable happened and
GMA
started to beat
Today
some mornings. A month later ABC televised the highly rated Lake Placid Winter Olympics (think Miracle on Ice), giving
GMA
another lift that lasted into the morning hours. As
GMA
pulled ahead decisively, reporters used words like
surrender
to describe NBC’s underwhelming response. Decades of dominance by NBC, dating back to the dawn of television, when chimpanzees strode the morning landscape—those were no more.

This is when the gentlemanly competition among network executives who sat next to each other on the commuter trains from Connecticut and Westchester each morning, and drank and played cards with each other in those same smoke-filled cars each night, boiled over into mortal combat. The three best fights of 1980 were two Roberto Durán/Sugar Ray Leonard battles, and
Today
versus
GMA
. In the control rooms and on the sets, staffers from one show talked about the other guys like boxers describing an adversary. They took the rivalry personally. Hartman and his cohost Joan Lunden might have made a handsome living from their plenteous pleasantness, but “I view them as trying to take my mortgage away, stop me from eating. I view them as the enemy,” Steve Friedman, the fast-talking, heavyset producer (no relation to Paul) who ran
Today
in the 1980s said in one of his buck-up-the-troops staff meetings. This wasn’t hyperbole, he said decades later: “I thought they were trying to kill me and I tried to kill them.”

Sometimes he did it with money. “Those were the days when you’d spend your way to win,” Friedman said, referring to a tactic much easier to employ at a time when there were only a few television networks divvying up all of Madison Avenue’s cash. Under Friedman,
Today
started traveling around the world—spending weeks in Russia, Italy, Argentina, Australia—and stopped recycling so much of the prior day’s
NBC Nightly News
. “It became really the
Today
show, and not the
What Happened Yesterday
show,” Friedman said.

An age-old law of morning TV states that you don’t only help yourself to better ratings, you are also boosted by the sloth and incompetence of your rivals. Good fortune runs one way, then the other, seemingly in cycles. By the late 1970s
Today
was stale;
GMA
surged ahead. But by the mid-eighties
GMA
was the stale one, a condition blamed, fairly or not, on Hartman. Friedman, who called Hartman “potato face,” assured his staff that their enemy’s star would soon fade, and he was right. By 1986
Today
had once again taken command in the ratings, and by 1987 Hartman had announced that he wanted to spend more time with his family.

But when you’re talking morning television, there is always another twist to the tale. In this case it’s a Gibson with a twist. Charles Gibson, the anchor who replaced Hartman, was a child of privilege (Sidwell Friends, Princeton) whom average Americans nevertheless liked, the way you might actually if grudgingly like a guy who pays you to blow the snow out of his long, winding, tree-lined driveway, or tune his Jaguar. As soon as he arrived at the show, the audience research and the ratings started changing in ways that got the
Today
folks worried, and with good reason, because even those who “watched”
Today
through a closed bathroom door could tell that, despite its top spot in the ratings, it was at that time more than a bit of a mess. That’s why, in the summer of 1988,
Today
producer Marty Ryan asked Gumbel, then in his sixth year as host, to write a memo detailing what was wrong with their show and what they might do to keep
GMA
at bay. Gumbel responded with a scathing novella that criticized Ryan and almost everyone connected with the show (except Pauley, whom he was already known to dislike). Gene Shalit was always late with his movie reviews and did bad interviews, Gumbel opined. The talent department was hampered by “a lazy broad who uses bad judgment.” Of weather-weeble Willard Scott the cohost said, “He holds the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste.” We know all this because someone leaked Gumbel’s put-downs to
Newsday
reporter Kevin Goldman, who published the highlights. Said
The New York Times
’ Walter Goodman: “The commotion over the Gumbel memo offers the watchers of early-morning television a fresh perspective on the form.…Mr. Gumbel’s criticism of one co-worker for dumb carryings on and of others for unoriginality gave him the appearance of a vaudeville piano player clucking his tongue over how the jugglers are distracting the customers from his Liszt concertos.” NBC News president Michael Gartner condemned the leak but expressed little sympathy for Gumbel, who said he didn’t feel there was “a proper expression of support from the executive side.” To paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy family is unhappy in a way that repels morning TV viewers. The internal discord at
Today
drove many thousands over to
GMA
.

But the best was still to come for the ABC show, for now NBC took dead aim at the foot it had not yet shot itself in. In the summer of 1989, Dick Ebersol, who had been brought over from the sports division to solve the problems at
Today
, in part because he was a friend of Gumbel’s, thought it would be a peachy idea to bring in Deborah Norville, the anchor of the early-morning newscast
NBC News at Sunrise
, to become the
Today
show’s news anchor. He was wrong about that the way Liza Minnelli was wrong about David Gest, the way AOL was wrong about Time Warner. Norville was an obviously ambitious, obviously stunning and sexy young blonde whose very presence at the news anchor desk, near the traditional fake husband-and-wife combo of Gumbel and Pauley, was just as likely to annoy the mostly female viewers of
Today
as to enchant them.

But Ebersol, with his Minnelli-like wisdom, didn’t put her at the news desk; he put her right next to Gumbel and Pauley in an arrangement that took on the air of a sheepish threesome the morning after. To
Today
show loyalists it screamed, “Man, wife, and mistress”; by the thousands they called and wrote to the network about the odd bigwig-fantasy-made-flesh, with most defending the lovely but soccer-mom-ish Pauley and eviscerating Norville as a home-wrecker. About seven weeks later Pauley, who was as unhappy with the arrangement as anyone else, announced that she was leaving the show. Making a nod to the bad press, she calmly told viewers, “It has hurt to see two of my friends, Bryant and Deborah, assigned roles in this that they did not play.” But the obvious follow-up question—what roles
did
they play, Pauley?—was never answered sufficiently by anyone in a position to know. (NBC would make this mistake again in 2012.)

Norville’s debut as cohost, in January 1990, tipped the already weak show into second place for the first time since 1986. Within a few months Ebersol had issued a rare mea culpa for the furor—“I wanted to send a very clear signal that there was someone who would stand up and take responsibility,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
—and returned to NBC Sports full-time. In short, it was a heartwarming moment for the once-again-first-place
GMA
, and no one could have faulted its staffers for celebrating—and yet their joy in retrospect seems sadly misplaced, their champagne popped under false pretenses. Yes, the departure of Norville thirteen months later—she left to have a baby and never came back—caused even more bad press.
Today’s
ratings sank so low that NBC’s own stations tried to wrestle the eight a.m. hour away from the network so they could air their own programming! “There is nobody in America who wants to see this show for two hours anymore, nobody,” the stations chief bellowed. But he was wrong, just as
GMA
was wrong to chug champagne and let its guard down. For the departure of Norville also led to the ascension of Katie Couric, a misleadingly cheery-looking former cheerleader from Arlington, Virginia, who would kick their asses for many years to come.