Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (18 page)

Roberts shared his disinterest. The former ESPN host and self-professed jock outwardly had little in common with the moms who made up
GMA
’s base. She “grudgingly participated” in the studious goofiness of the eight a.m. hour, one of her colleagues said, “but it’s not really what she does or who she is.”

But fluff-adverseness was about all Stephanopoulos and Roberts had in common. When the ABC News president looked at Elliott he saw the mortar that could make those bricks stick together. A chiseled six-foot-three-inch California boy with a smile that, to hear the besotted Sherwood tell it, is equally endearing to women, men, children, and small fur-bearing animals, he relates to the camera in an inoffensively swaggering way that makes you wonder if he has a tattoo that says, “Born to Throw It to the Weather Guy.” And yet as Elliott, who doesn’t mind talking about himself, will tell you, as a child he dreamed of being a writer, and he says he still thinks of himself as “an ink-stained wretch.” Elliott majored in English literature at the University of California at Santa Barbara and covered sports for its newspaper, the
Daily Nexus
. After earning a master’s in journalism at Columbia, he took a job at
Sports Illustrated
, where he struck one perhaps envious colleague as “the kind of print journalist who wants to get out of print and get into something that gets you more money and more women as quickly as possible.”

Around 2002, Elliott hired a TV agent, Sandy Montag, who introduced him to the ESPN empire by way of a panelist gig on the daily sports roundtable show
Around the Horn
. Montag thought he saw marketability, and asked, “If you ever wanted to do any more television, what would it be?”

“I don’t know, anchor
Good Morning America
?” Elliott said. He thought the idea not so absurd since he had seen Roberts make the crossover from sports to news anchor. But the
GMA
job was one of the most coveted in the industry by the people who had the kind of hair Elliott had, and Montag just laughed.

Elliott’s dreams seemed less humorous in mid-2008, when he became a coanchor of ESPN’s signature newscast,
SportsCenter
, between the hours of nine a.m. and noon—the closest thing the network had to a morning show. Thanks to the Disney connection he even got to fill in on
GMA
once, on a weekend in early 2010, and he enjoyed the experience, but months went by and he never heard from anyone at the show about filling in again.

*  *  *

Elliott and his
SportsCenter
cohost Hannah Storm rang in 2011 in Pasadena, California, where they were leading ABC’s coverage of the Rose Bowl. After the telecast they shared a ride to the airport and the pair, who had worked together two and a half years at that point, started talking about their futures in television.

“What would you want to do?” Storm asked him.

“I don’t know,” he responded. “Maybe I’d want to do
Good Morning America
.” What he hadn’t told Storm—or anyone really—was that he’d met with the head of talent recruitment for ABC News, Amy Entelis, a few weeks before.

“Do you know anything about this new guy, Ben Sherwood?” Elliott asked Storm. She said she had met Sherwood socially a couple of times and that he seemed quite smart. Elliott, who had done a little research on the new guy, seemed to think so, too: the man was “writing books and they’re making them into movies,” he said.

At the airport, Elliott, who sometimes describes himself as a foodie, grabbed a copy of
GQ
because the cover promoted the magazine’s list of the best new restaurants in America. Flipping through to the feature, he saw that the New York pick was Lincoln, a contemporary Italian spot that had opened near ABC a few months earlier. He made what he called a “note to self” to check out the restaurant soon.

Seated on the flight, Elliott saw that one of the movie choices was
Charlie St. Cloud
, which he remembered as the film made from Sherwood’s novel. He also recalled that at his lunch with Entelis she had said, “Ben might want to have a drink with you someday”—and thought he should get up to speed with Sherwood’s work. So he watched the movie and then, like any enterprising journalist, logged on to the in-flight Wi-Fi and dug up the Wikipedia page listing what was different about the book version. This, he figured, would allow him to bring up the subject of how Hollywood plays fast and loose with your work.

It was a good thing that he did this, because as soon as he got back to his home in Connecticut, at around midnight…well, it’s best explained in his own words.

“I log on my e-mail and the first e-mail, sent at 11:05 that night, is from Amy Entelis. ‘Can you meet Ben Sherwood for dinner?’ It was sort of mind-boggling. So I write back, ‘Hey, absolutely.’ And she’s like, ‘I’m copying Ben so you two can talk.’ So he sends me an e-mail, ‘Looking forward to it. My son’s not going to believe that I’m actually having dinner with you. How’s Lincoln?’ And I was like, ‘There’s no fucking way this is happening.’”

Sherwood and Elliott’s dinner at Lincoln was scheduled for seven thirty p.m. on January 4, 2011, a snowy night in New York City. Elliott was planning to meet up with some friends at eight thirty. “He must be so busy,” Elliott recalled thinking. “I took a straw poll of people who might know, and they said, ‘You’re lucky if you get forty-five minutes.’”

Sherwood was right on time. When a hostess sat them at a table at the center of the restaurant, Sherwood asked for a booth instead, so they could have a little privacy. Maybe, thought Elliott, this was going to last more than forty-five minutes after all.

“You’re probably wondering why, on the third day of my tenure at ABC News, I want to have dinner with an anchor from ESPN,” Sherwood said.

“Actually, yes I was,” Elliott said, laughing.

Sherwood responded with a story about his then-six-year-old son.

Will Sherwood had started to show an interest in professional sports when he was four years old, the news chief said. So his parents turned on
SportsCenter
for him at six in the morning, before nursery school. This happened to be the time when Elliott and Storm were cohosting live on the East Coast. Sherwood wasn’t watching—he was spending his early mornings writing
The Survivors Club
in another corner of the house. But he noticed that Will started periodically spouting off random facts about baseball players like Melky Cabrera and CC Sabathia and Manny Ramirez.

“How’d you know that Manny Ramirez grew up in Washington Heights in the shadows of Yankee Stadium?” his father asked.

“Josh told me,” Will answered.

“Who’s Josh?”

“He’s the guy on ESPN.”

After a while Sherwood began to watch
SportsCenter
, too. Will, he noticed, “was completely captivated by Josh.” So was Sherwood’s wife Karen.

As Sherwood told this story at dinner, Elliott thought to himself, “Just take a snapshot.” Through the snow-speckled windows of the restaurant he could see Juilliard, the school for musicians, actors, and dancers, some of whom went on to be world-renowned, and others to be forgotten. “Just take a snapshot,” he thought, “because this is not going to happen. Nothing will come of this, so just enjoy this moment.” But as dinner proceeded far past the forty-five-minute mark, and the two men talked in detail about the chemistry and the connective tissue that make great television shows, it was harder and harder for Elliott not to get his hopes up.

When dinner finally ended at ten thirty, Sherwood asked, “I know this sounds odd, but can we take a picture and send it to Will? He’d think it’s great.”

Of course, said Elliott, who adored kids and had a two-year-old daughter, Sarina, at home. The restaurant maître d’ took a cell phone photo of the two of them and Sherwood sent it to his wife, then called her. It was seven thirty in LA, where Will was about to go to sleep.

“Did he get it?… Oh, that’s great, that’s good.”

Then Karen wondered: would Elliott say hello to Will?

“Sure, I totally will,” Elliott said, reaching for the phone. “Hey, buddy!” Elliott and Will dove right into talk about the Dodgers and the Lakers. Knowing the Sherwood family was probably moving to New York soon, Elliott joked, “Do not let them turn you into a Yankees fan, OK? Do not let them turn you into a Knicks fan.”

Then, as Elliott recalled it later, he turned serious for a second.

“You know what, Will? I just want to tell you this. And I know you’re not going to understand it. It’s not going to make any sense at all. But, you know, I just want to thank you for maybe changing my life.”

There was a pause on the other end of the phone. And then Will responded, “You’re welcome.” Elliott started laughing.

Sherwood said of the phone conversation, “It took my breath away.”

No job was discussed that night. But in short order Elliott had dinner with James Goldston, the
Nightline
producer who was about to replace Jim Murphy as the executive producer of
GMA
. Then Elliott, Goldston, and Sherwood all had dinner together—back at Lincoln—and talked in detail about where they saw
GMA
going.

When Sherwood first talked to him about taking over
GMA
in January 2010, Goldston, who had been the producer of
Nightline
for five years, was not interested; he had his sights set higher, on a VP job with oversight of all the news division’s shows—essentially second in command to Sherwood. Sherwood had the same thought, but first he needed Goldston in the trenches, so to speak, to retool
GMA
with an eye toward putting it back in first place. “James had to be convinced,” Sherwood said, chuckling.

Goldston’s heavy British accent was a kind of warning to anyone at ABC who might bring up “the way we’ve always done it.” He wasn’t very interested in that, especially if what ABC had always done wasn’t winning the time slot. Goldston, a former BBC and ITV producer, had many credits to his name, including Iraq war coverage, but the one mentioned most often was
Living with Michael Jackson
, an unsettling documentary that detailed the pop star’s habit of sharing his bed with children. Originally produced for ITV, it drew twenty-seven million viewers when shown on ABC in 2003. Two years later Goldston was tapped to remake
Nightline
as Ted Koppel was retiring. Goldston, depending on your vantage point, either guided
Nightline
into the new century or presided over its decline. One thing was for sure: it had a bigger share of network television eyeballs when he was done.

As Goldston hashed out what changes might need to be made to
GMA
, he did not see the goal as the cloning of
Today
, which had been a basic premise of the competition for many of the previous thirty-six years. He’s “a brilliant showman,” said Victor Neufeld, a former executive producer of
20/20
who credited Goldston with having “little regard to the stale formulas that preceded him.” Goldston wanted to create a looser kind of morning show, one that was, above all else, entertaining and inviting to the audience. That didn’t mean ignoring major news stories that viewers
needed
to know about, but it meant emphasizing the stories that viewers
wanted
to know about—the toy recalls, the messy celebrity divorces, the girls gone missing—especially on the days, and there were many, when this or that disaster didn’t dominate the headlines. “The aim was relevance in everything we did,” he said.

Meanwhile, Sherwood wanted to get the chemistry just right. Rather than removing one or both of the stars, as some staffers had speculated he would, he was adding supporting actors—creating an ensemble that looked more like
The View
than like a traditional two-person morning show.

The other addition, Lara Spencer, was already close to signing with ABC. Sherwood’s predecessor David Westin had wanted Spencer, a mother of two (her husband, David Haffenreffer, is a real estate broker and former television anchor), to be “the social butterfly and the ‘mom’ of the show,” according to a
GMA
producer. But don’t be fooled by Spencer’s maternal air. She was a fiercely competitive diver at Penn State, where a professor suggested she try out sports reporting. Soon she was filing stories for the school’s TV station and applying to be an NBC page. She’d been all over the map since: she’d covered the crash of TWA Flight 800 for WABC, the ABC station in New York; hosted
Antiques Roadshow
on PBS (she cold-called the producers to get the gig); and created a short-lived game show with Cedric the Entertainer for NBC. Spencer had been a correspondent for
GMA
in the early 2000s, specializing in entertainment and family stories, but she was persuaded to leave in 2005 to host
The Insider
, a tabloid-y news show that was spun off from
Entertainment Tonight
. Now she wanted to come home. Picking up the discussion where Westin had left off, Sherwood met with Spencer on New Year’s Eve, days before he dined with Elliott. He envisioned her as the lifestyle anchor, a new title at the new
GMA
. She’d come on during the eight a.m. hour for segments about parenting, health, fitness, and entertainment—all the sorts of stories that Roberts and Stephanopoulos weren’t eager to cover. “The moment Ben Sherwood arrived [at ABC News], you could feel the momentum,” Spencer said. “I wanted in. I wanted in.”

So did Elliott. He was in the backyard of his home in Connecticut, kicking the soccer ball around with his daughter Sarina (his marriage ended in divorce in 2010) when Sherwood called in March to formally offer him the job. “He offered it,” Elliott said, “and I looked up in the sky, and then I said to him, ‘You know what? I appreciate what you’re doing in offering me this. There’s really no other way for it to end well other than that they’ll think you are the smartest man in television. Because it’s the only way it works out.’ Or it could have ended miserably. It was a roll of the dice.”