Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (26 page)

But Bell was preoccupied: his top deputy, Don Nash, was on vacation, and he had a long-planned lunch with Bob Costas to talk about the Summer Olympics. In the wake of the loss, Bell and his colleagues tried to keep up appearances. “It’s business as usual,” here, said one publicist; “Nobody’s crying here,” said another. The party line was that what had happened was inevitable. “We knew it was going to happen sooner or later. It couldn’t go on forever,” Al Roker said later. Capus, looking back, said similarly, “There is no question that there was some slippage in the ratings and they were going to pass us at some point.” But Capus had said just a few days before that the streak would never end.

As will happen in such circumstances, a conspiracy theory took root: Bell, it was said, had accepted—or perhaps even cunningly engineered—a temporary dive in the ratings to pave the way for Curry’s removal, assuming the ratings would bounce right back afterward. Others at NBC heaped the blame on the network’s new parent, Comcast, for not taking the war as seriously as its previous parent, General Electric. Why didn’t Comcast yank national commercials from
Today
on Friday, repeating the dirty trick used against
GMA
in 2005? Why didn’t someone drag Lauer back from vacation? Still others at the network credited ABC for simply wanting the win more. That explanation was the most honest of them all.

In the second wave of spin, NBC people said—as Joe DiMaggio had in 1941, when his record hitting streak came to an end—that coming up short after all that time was actually a good thing. Capus, at a party two weeks later, told me that
GMA
’s one-off victory “frees us of the burden of the streak.” (“Now that the streak is over,” the great DiMaggio had said, “I just want to get out there and keep helping to win ball games.”)

After the loss there was—strangely, in the opinion of some—no rally-the-troops meeting at NBC. “Jim’s just not that kind of guy,” one of his allies said. There was instead a kind of stoic silence, a lot of closed doors and quiet cubicles. The mood was summarized by a replica of a British World War II propaganda poster hanging on the wall in the production offices between two rows of cubicles. It read, “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Capus, who had held a town hall a week earlier, fumed that Bell didn’t do more to motivate his staff.

At
GMA
, meanwhile, they were planning their Thursday-night party—but keeping the details a secret, in case the revised numbers, due early that morning, left them with nothing to celebrate. Jeffrey Schneider, the top spokesman for ABC News, wouldn’t let anyone buy champagne ahead of time, lest they jinx themselves. “We were optimistic,” he said later, “but didn’t want to get caught out between the early numbers and the final numbers.” Schneider, a twelve-year veteran of ABC, took the war especially personally, since he’d absorbed a lot of the bullets fired by NBC—and fired even more back. That’s why it was stunning, yet entirely sensible, for NBC to try to poach him.
Today
needed a lot of things, and aggressiveness was one of them. An NBC executive had called a few days earlier, right after Lauren Kapp, the news division’s PR chief, said she was leaving. But Schneider had made it clear that he bled ABC News blue. He’d invested too much in
GMA
to leave now, when the show was on the cusp of becoming number one.

On April 19, a week after that call, Schneider was huddled in his office with Julie Townsend, his No. 2. The final ratings were due between eight and nine a.m. The two PR people sounded like political speechwriters crafting two speeches, one for victory and one for a remotely possible defeat. “I don’t think I can take it if this goes south,” Schneider told Townsend. “I’m so tense right now that if I got a paper cut I’d bleed to death.”

Townsend tried to tell him it’d be all right. “No,” Schneider said. “It’s going to suck worse than anything. The world already believes that we won.” That much was true. To the reporters who covered television, Thursday was just a formality—unless, of course,
Today
came back from the dead and beat
GMA
for week 853.

A mile south at the
GMA
studio, Cibrowski joked that it was just “another day at the office,” and in some ways it was. Both
GMA
and
Today
led with the death of broadcasting legend Dick Clark.
GMA
later had an update on “Gungate,” as they called the Pippa Middleton photo scandal. Just after the eight a.m. break, the five hosts were in Times Square teasing a discount shopping segment. At 8:28 a.m., as they were walking back into the studio, Roberts whooped loudly and said, “Oh my God!” Elliott, who had been just ahead of her on the sidewalk, was so startled he nearly left his feet.

Cibrowski had just told Roberts, through her earpiece, that the absolutely official results were in and
GMA
had won the week by thirty-one thousand viewers, about twice as many as Nielsen had originally estimated.

Then Cibrowski flipped a switch and spoke into all five hosts’ ears at once. “I’ll never forget that moment,” Lara Spencer said. “I mean, it brings tears to my eyes.” The hosts shouted, “Yes!” and hugged each other as the eight thirty half hour was about to begin. “The crew didn’t know why at first,” Spencer recalled, because Cibrowski had wanted the hosts to know before anyone else. An ABC photographer Cibrowski had stationed on the set shot a photo of the quintet together a moment later, their index fingers raised in the air to say, “We’re number one!” Roberts, who alone clenched her right hand in a fist, looked the happiest of all.

Elliott later said that he felt it was “symbolic” that Cibrowski had told Roberts the good news a moment or two before the others. Both Cibrowski and Roberts had been at
GMA
for a full decade. They were “the people who had worked so hard just to, you know, get us in position,” Elliott said. The new anchor saw the Nielsen challenge as something akin to climbing Mount Everest, where “there are like three or four base camps,” he said. “You don’t just leave camp and go up to the top. There’s something like the Death Zone. It’s the last camp to the summit when, you know, you’ve already gone up twenty-five thousand feet. But the last few thousand are the hardest. And boy, did we prove that.” Roberts, as Elliott saw it, was both their Sherpa and their Edmund Hillary, guiding and inspiring them toward the top. Even those less fond of tortured analogies agreed. The loudest applause was reserved for Roberts when a couple hundred ABC News staffers gathered on the fifth floor at eleven a.m. for a champagne toast hastily arranged by Schneider, who had cried tears of joy—and relief—in his office when the win was confirmed.

Sherwood began the celebration by naming the young
GMA
producers who had been in elementary school when the
Today
show started its winning streak. He mentioned the length in weeks, 852, and practically roared, “It ended officially this morning.”

Almost all work in the newsroom stopped for the next thirty minutes. A camera crew beamed the celebration to ABC bureaus in other cities. A staffer along the back wall wondered, “How long have they had that champagne here?”

Sherwood said the day represented a “victory for the whole organization” and credited, among many others, Goldston, who he said had “reimagined and reinvigorated this program.” Goldston, in turn, called for another round of applause for Sherwood: “We would have never gotten here without him.”

Sherwood, reading from index cards, thanked his predecessor David Westin and former
GMA
host Diane Sawyer, among many others, and also thanked prime-time shows like
Desperate Housewives
and
Dancing with the Stars
. “How about a round of applause for Marc Cherry?” he said at one point, referring to the creator of
Housewives
. When Cibrowski spoke, he added one more thank-you: for Tim Tebow, the show’s well-hyped guest the prior Friday. It was then the hosts’ turns, beginning with Roberts, the woman Sherwood introduced as “our captain.”

“Ben,” she said, “when you came in we had a conversation, and you promised this moment. And you are a man of your word.”

Then, to those assembled, she said, “If you have been on
GMA
, if you have cut a piece, if you have answered a phone, if you’ve had anything to do with
GMA
over the last sixteen years, please raise your hand.” As nearly everyone within sight raised a hand, she smiled and said, “You see that? You see that? It is all about team. And all of you share this very moment.”

Later Elliott remarked, “I feel almost as though I should apologize. I only had to wait fifty weeks for this.” As those in the room chuckled, Spencer, the other new kid, agreed and said they looked forward to the weeks when they wouldn’t have to wait until Thursday to know the show had won.

“This is one important step,” Sherwood said when he got the microphone back. “But here’s the deal. Back in 1994, when the
Today
show beat
Good Morning America
after a five-year run by
GMA
, what happened then, through 1994, was this brawl. They fought it out. What happened this week is that we knocked down the undisputed heavyweight champion. So what happens when you knock down the champion for a week? What do they do? Are they going to stay down? No. They’re going to come back at us and they’re going to want to kill us.” There was knowing laughter around the room. “So a brawl is about to ensue, and it’s gonna be a fight. And that’s what we want. Because before we can get to a place where we win consistently and we don’t gather every time we do it, we’re going to have to fight very, very hard for a very long time.”

Sherwood led a toast to NBC. “They were the champs for 852 straight weeks. We owe them respect and we owe them a big round of applause for what they did.” A not-quite-as-big round of applause followed. Stephanopoulos, raising an unopened bottle, said, “Let’s start another streak!”

*  *  *

Roberts had to hurry to her doctor’s office right after the champagne toasts. There she was told definitively that she had MDS. “That’s usually life,” she told me a couple months later, right between a
GMA
taping and a chemotherapy session. “You can dream, hope, and pray for how you think something’s going to be, and how it actually happens or doesn’t happen is usually so far from what you thought it was going to be.” Roberts, resting in her dressing room after the show one day, looked at the photo taken of the cast together on the nineteenth, with her fist in the air and Elliott’s and Champion’s arms around her back. Copies of the photo had been placed in silver frames and given to all the hosts. “I so look at that picture differently than everybody else,” Roberts said. “Because that is the day that it was like, ‘Yeah, it’s MDS. Yes, you’re going to have a bone marrow transplant. Yes, you’re going to be out for a chunk of time. We don’t know when.’ It was all this…it was such a gray area. It was just maddening.”

On the day of the historic win, no one at the show except Champion and a couple of her personal producers knew she was sick. After the doctor’s appointment, at about two, Roberts texted him and Spencer. “Where are you guys?” They happened to be getting a manicure and pedicure together about half a mile away. Roberts walked up to the nail salon, Spencer recalled, “and she just burst into laughter and shook her head, because there we were, Sam and I, with our feet in the tub.”

Roberts headed home, and Elliott met up with Champion and Spencer for an afternoon of pre-celebration before the staff party at six p.m. Cibrowski’s secret party planners had reserved a rooftop penthouse overlooking the Hudson River on Sixty-Seventh Street, an easy walk from the office. It also happened to be a few doors down from Roberts’s apartment building.

Roberts knew she had to go. But, understandably, “I wasn’t really into it,” she said, and as soon as she hit the street she thought of turning back. Then her doorman said, “Hey, your friends are here!”

There in front of her were Champion, Spencer, and Elliott. It looked like a self-referential post–eight a.m. spot on
GMA
. “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, they came to come get me!’” Actually, they were lost, and a little tipsy, but Roberts didn’t realize that at the time, and she was moved by their seeming thoughtfulness. “So I think, like, ‘Oh c’mon Robin, suck it up and go to the party.’ I hugged them and we’re walking down the street and people are shouting out at us. Then I realized, ‘You guys didn’t come to pick me up, did you?’ And they say, ‘Oh, you live here?’”

The six-to-eight party went until nine, then ten, then eleven. There were no speeches this time, just drinking and dancing. (Though there was a little bit of work done: ABC had obtained an exclusive photo of George Zimmerman taken the night of the Trayvon Martin shooting, so a few producers had to confer about it. The photo wound up being the lead story the following morning.)

“We had worked so incredibly hard for that moment,” Roberts said. She didn’t want to spoil it by telling anyone about her diagnosis. She came close to telling Sherwood, but “I was like, ‘How in the world can I say something right now to him?’ I mean, this is his shining moment. He came back for this.” Still, Sherwood said later that after spending time with Roberts that evening he “went home with a sense of apprehension that something was up.” It would be six weeks before Roberts told anyone else at ABC but Cibrowski about her condition. (“I needed somebody to know,” she said, “in case I woke up one morning and I didn’t want to come in.”)

Roberts was back at work the next morning for a hungover edition of
GMA
. “These people are dragging today,” director Jeff Winn said at the end of the first hour. In the control room a row behind Winn, Cibrowski and his lieutenant Denise Rehrig discussed how to handle the show’s on-air announcement of the big win. “I don’t want to mess it up,” Cibrowski told her, knowing that his boss, Sherwood, and his boss’s boss were taking it very seriously. They would divide the happy task: one host would thank the viewers, another ABC’s stations—after all, they, too, had been in second place for so long—and another would mention the Other Place. During a commercial break at 7:25, the writer stationed next to Rehrig, Simone Swink, typed out, “We tip our hat to our colleagues at NBC for their amazing streak…”