Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (3 page)

Although the difference between the two morning titans was sometimes subtle—
Today
yanked many of its stories out of the same goody bag as
GMA
—
Today
seemed to enjoy it less and second-guess it more. Lauer and Curry often agitated for more meaningful stories about health, politics, and foreign affairs, but with limited success. “I want more spinach and less sugar in this big meal we give viewers,” Curry told
Newsweek
in November 2011. “Sometimes I feel personally our balance isn’t quite right.”

In early 2012 Lauer and Curry continued to complain about the tawdriness of it all, but neither they nor anyone else on the show went the additional step of conceiving a workable alternative. No one had a vision. The best the cohosts could do was show the viewers, with a bit of body language or a sarcastic smirk, or an occasional
ahem
, that they did not think that the news of a celebrity’s engagement or a potty-trained cat was so earthshakingly important. Some in the audience thought the snarkiness was an insult to the amazing animals and the pertinent celebs they, the audience, fiercely crushed on. Most just wanted more dishy/funny/scandalous segments, and sooner, please, obese-cat videos being, if the ratings are any indication, addictive.

*  *  *

If in 2011 the
Today
show was a classic New York City department store, it would have been B. Altman’s at the moment when the smartest person then working at that storied Fifth Avenue emporium looked out upon the teeming sales floor and realized that the world had shifted beneath the retail business and something was deeply and horribly wrong. Altman’s is no more, and while no one expects Studio 1A, the
Today
show’s legendary street-level venue, to become a 16 Handles anytime soon, it was apparent to anyone casting a gimlet eye on the situation that, in contrast to
GMA
, and despite Bell’s, and a lot of other people’s, best efforts,
Today
seemed a bit lost in the twenty-first century, as if all it had going for it was its rapidly dwindling 1990s momentum. Top NBC executives later called what happened to the show a “slow fade,” although no one was uttering that phrase when the fade was just starting to take effect. Still, it seemed to many as if America’s first family was going the way of the Mulvaneys in Joyce Carol Oates’s
We Were the Mulvaneys
. And now there was something else at the center of the show, something that, if it was a family, was one of those makeshift nineteenth-century frontier families in which the mommy dies and, out of some kind of no-longer-comprehensible hardscrabble necessity, the daddy marries the aunt. All anyone could say for certain was that this family-like thing costarred Ann Curry, who for so long had been but a member of the supporting cast, and that all was not going swimmingly.

But the lack of a vision wasn’t the biggest obstacle the
Today
show faced. Visions can be concocted or stumbled upon or co-opted from another show. Visionaries can be wooed over osso bucco. Much harder to come by, the one problem you can’t solve by throwing money at it, is chemistry, that elusive quality that most discussions about the medium of television center around. Chemistry is the difference between
Friends
and so many other well-written sitcoms that die in October and whose names we don’t recall; it is the reason someone as talent-challenged and unbeautiful as Ed McMahon could have so many millions of dollars to squander at the end of his improbable career. It’s important at every stretch of the daily schedule, but ask the pros: if you don’t have it in the morning, when the research shows that viewers want to smell the coffee and feel the warmth and hear the happy banter that happens when the highly paid stars are aligned, it doesn’t matter what else you’re toting, pardner. You’re Richard Nixon in 1960, you’re Big Brown in the Belmont, you’re CBS.

A lot—but not all—of what we mean by
chemistry
is ineffable. You know it when you see it, but you can’t say what it is. Tracy and Hepburn had it. John Travolta and Lily Tomlin in
Moment by Moment
? Maybe not so much. Lauer and Couric had it in historically significant proportions from 1997 to 2006, and when Couric left and Vieira slipped in beside Lauer, well, the NBC stagehands still had to spark-proof the couch. Over at
GMA
the crew—Roberts, Stephanopoulos, Champion, Elliott, Spencer—were relatively new to the game, but still so good at it they treated chemistry like a scholarly treatise: first they told you they had chemistry, then they went ahead and had the chemistry, then they told you that what you had just seen was chemistry in action.

The subject does not totally resist description, though. Parts of chemistry, in the TV world, come down to technique: to the questions you ask guests, the way you handle transitions to and from your cohost, the way you read the teleprompter. Perhaps most importantly, chemistry is in the things you don’t do when others are speaking. A good part of chemistry, on morning TV, in other words, comes down to principles and tricks that you can learn at the close-cover-before-striking school of broadcasting. If you do these relatively mundane things the textbook way, you minimize distractions and show your viewers and your colleagues that you feel comfortable in your role:
voilà
, the screen exudes warmth and the audience gathers round. In this sense of the term, Ann Curry flunked chemistry badly, almost as soon as she was elevated to the cohost position in the spring of 2011.

What were her faults, exactly, as Bell (and his allies) saw them? Start with the frequent faux pas. Only seconds after Lauer announced on May 9 that Curry was going to be his new cohost, she said, “I feel like the high school computer nerd who was just asked to the prom by the quarterback of the football team.”

This wasn’t just disingenuous, it was painful to endure. Asked to the prom? The MVP of morning broadcasting hadn’t invited her anywhere. He thought she was a perfectly nice human being, but not the perfect cohost—not by a long shot. When Capus, the news division president, told him that Curry was going to be his new cohost, he had said only, “OK, but…” The
but
was that their on-air chemistry had been lacking big-time in the more than two hundred times she’d filled in for Couric and Vieira.

Lauer’s opinion was important—by virtue of how much he was paid, it had to be. But Lauer wasn’t paid to pick talent, his bosses were. And they—primarily Capus and Bell—didn’t feel they had much of a choice in the matter. Curry had been the news anchor of
Today
for fifteen years, ever since her predecessor, none other than Lauer, was elevated to the cohost chair next to Couric. Having been passed over once before, Curry pushed hard for the chair this time and NBC knew she could be trouble if she was passed over again. She might indeed have had a certain Bambi-like quality, as the operation named for her suggested, but, in her own strange way, as even some of her supporters will tell you, she is as ego-driven and career-consumed as anyone who ever stood in front of a tangle of sign-waving tourists, looked into a camera, and said, “When we come back, David Hasselhoff.”

Speaking of her strange way, that was another problem. Curry’s on-air comebacks to Lauer during her first months as cohost were just plain weird—the conversational Hacky Sack often fell thudding to the rug or, figuratively speaking, wound up in the saucepan put out for Al Roker’s cooking segment. You could argue, and her supporters did argue, that this inability to make small talk on TV meant she was bad at being a phony. Yet her honest reactions to comments, features, and news stories also seemed fundamentally off, as if she had been raised on a planet only somewhat similar to our own. Then there was that unsettlingly ambiguous look in her beautiful Bambi-like eyes. As Tracy Jordan said to his psychiatrist in a 2007 episode of
30 Rock
, “Who’s crazier, me or Ann Curry?”

Most annoying to her detractors was Curry’s “whisper-talking.” When interviewing people who had just lost a child or suffered some other severe emotional trauma, Curry would soften her voice to the point that it was virtually inaudible. She offered no apologies for this trademark move. When addressing people in the first blush of shock or grief, “I have a natural tendency to lower my voice,” she explained. “It’s not even intentional. I just don’t want to make them feel that their backs are against the wall.” But what about the viewers with their ears pressed against their TV screens?

If you go back and look at the tapes from this period, you’ll see Lauer glancing slightly out of camera range, as if he’s searching the wings for the ghost of Couric or Vieira. “He would lob something to her, and he never quite knew what he was going to get back,” said a longtime
Today
staffer. “As a result, he just started playing it very, very straight, and then it looked like they had absolutely no rapport.

“At some point,” the staffer added, “Matt just kind of gave up.”

It’s debatable whether Lauer gave her a chance at all. Curry didn’t think he did. She told her friends that she tried to soften Lauer up by taking him out to lunch a couple of times, but she didn’t feel that he reciprocated her gestures of goodwill. They almost never socialized outside of the office. At first Curry tried to think positive and attributed their lack of quality time to the fact that both she and Lauer had children to attend to. What would you tell yourself, if you were her? Later on she told herself that Lauer, the Alpha Dog, was uncomfortable with her own alpha-ness.

Curry had branded herself years ago as an international reporter, ready and willing to parachute into any trouble spot on the map. She was the first anchor, for instance, to report from Sri Lanka after the devastating 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. “By the time everybody else realized how big a deal it was, Ann was already on a plane,” one of her former producers said. Curry had strong feelings about using television as a force for good—but what came across as inspirational to some seemed overly righteous to others. And it may have been a particular turnoff for Lauer. “She was so determined to prove that she was a real journalist, she got in the way of herself” by trying to prove how much knowledge she had, said one person who was interviewed by Curry many times on the show. “When television types do that, particularly women, they rarely succeed.” A lot of people echoed the sentiment. They said, rather simply, that Curry “tried too hard.” And the harder she tried, the more grating and insincere she seemed.

It was Bell’s job to fix these problems, or at least address them. Tape reviews are part of the job for executive producers, just as they are for athletic coaches: with the talent, they look at highlights and more importantly lowlights, pointing out things little and larger that could be done better next time. These get-togethers not only address particular problems, they tell the person under review that she’s worth the time and effort; that she’s been given a great TV job for a reason, after all. The reviews usually end with both producer and talent feeling better.

But those conversations with Curry barely happened after she started cohosting, even though for a lot of reasons (see above) she seemed like the ideal candidate for a tape review. “She got no feedback from Jim Bell,” one of her allies inside NBC News said later. “Ann just became more and more anxious as the days, weeks, and months went by, because she was not getting that kind of feedback.” Maybe she
was
getting the feedback, but was ignoring it—that’s what Bell’s allies said. “He was trying to be constructive,” said one who blamed Curry for lacking self-awareness and being in deep, almost supernatural denial.

Everyone agreed on this, at least: Bell didn’t always have the best bedside manner. Their conversations sometimes left Curry even more off balance. Pulling her aside after a show in early September 2011, Bell said to her, “Matt thinks you’re too happy, too excited.”

“Too happy?” Curry said.

Curry stood there for a moment feeling confused. Was she being told to tamp down her natural exuberance? If so, what was she to make of that instruction? Exuberance had gotten her all the way to the top of the
Today
show.

*  *  *

Ann Curry was born on November 19, 1956, on the island of Guam, where her father, Bob, a chief petty officer in the US Navy, was stationed. He had met her mother, Hiroe, a rice farmer’s daughter working as a streetcar ticket-puncher, in occupied Japan after the end of World War II. He kept riding her streetcar until he mustered the courage to ask her out to dinner.

Based on a story Curry recounted in a 2005 book about fatherhood,
Big Shoes
, by her colleague Al Roker, it seems fair to say that she received the perseverance gene from both parents.

“My parents were both 18 years old—kids—and they fell in love,” she wrote in the book. “But they had to overcome many obstacles before they married. My father was told that if he married a Japanese woman, his eyes would start to slant, and he would turn into a ‘bamboo American.’ The military wanted to protect him from making a rash decision at a very young age, so he was transferred to Morocco. Although her family also opposed the match, my mother sobbed, believing she was saying goodbye forever to her one true love. My father did not give up so easily. For the next two years, he wrote to her and sent money to her struggling family. Eventually, he got himself transferred back to Japan. There was a big, tearful reunion. Only when he held my mother did he realize something was terribly wrong—she was almost skeletal. She’d been diagnosed with tuberculosis. The military wasn’t letting its men marry women who had the disease, so my mother used her sister’s X-ray to get the license. My parents married, and then my mother had surgery performed by a team of American and Japanese doctors. They took out 90 percent of one of her lungs, but she survived. For the next few months, my father nursed her back to health. Her mother, who’d been against the relationship, finally told her, ‘You will never find a man who loves you this much—I bless your marriage.’”