Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (32 page)

Executives at NBC had trouble feeling sorry for her, given that she had been given a contract worth five million dollars a year to essentially change jobs, but had instead reacted by crying and petulantly disappearing from the NBC scene. Even Capus sounded angry. “She burned her only friend,” one observer said, by breaking down on live television. Capus, though, mostly faulted Bell and Burke. If they hadn’t honed in on what he said to one friend was their “ridiculous, artificial Olympics deadline,” maybe viewers would have been spared the tears. Bell, meanwhile, was back in London. When
Today
lost to
GMA
during Guthrie’s first week, he issued a statement—“We are incredibly confident in the new
Today
anchor team. Although it’s premature to look at one week of unofficial numbers and draw any conclusions, we just made a big change that we didn’t take lightly, and we are in this for the long run”—and got right back to his Olympics work. Capus, back in New York, resented having to clean up Bell’s mess.

By all indications, Curry harbored little ill will toward either her replacement, Guthrie, or Morales—who maintained an upbeat attitude even though she had arguably been first in line for the cohost chair. “Natalie could have made this so much more difficult,” said one of Guthrie’s friends. Instead Morales was openly supportive of Guthrie, whom she had known for more than five years, telling her after the promotion, “I’m so happy for you. This is great for us, it’s great for the show.” It’s hard to believe, I know, but their friendship actually flourished in the summer of 2012, a truly bizarre thing in the cutthroat TV business. Speaking of bizarre, NBC medical expert Dr. Nancy Snyderman arranged a ladies’ lunch for Curry, Guthrie, Morales, and several others during Guthrie’s second week as cohost. Curry showed up, and the participants all described it afterward as cordial. Tense, yes, but cordial. No one would say what had been discussed. (Other than Guthrie’s migraine headaches, which came up early on in the meal; she had to wear sunglasses much of the time because she was sensitive to light.)

But viewers wouldn’t let the matter of Curry’s dismissal drop. Her fans kept up their campaign against
Today
, riddling the show’s Facebook page with requests that she come back—or that Lauer leave as compensation. Clearly they were reading the tabloid stories with titles like “Matt Lauer Was ‘100 Percent’ Behind Ann Curry’s Ouster.” Said one observer, “The story line is, Matt is a bad boy who’s pushed out a good Christian girl.” Some of the Web commenters turned around and asked Lauer, via Twitter, whether the rumors were true. They deserved credit, at least, for their persistence. Lauer maintained his silence while Kopf basically ignored the stories. But that was a mistake because on the Web, where all links are equal, many people didn’t distinguish between TMZ, which was sometimes wrong but often right, and NBC News, which was almost always right but occasionally wrong. Meanwhile, the incriminating video clip of Curry crying on the couch was always just a click away thanks to YouTube. And Lauer’s silence wasn’t helping.

Gumbel, Lauer’s best friend, came out swinging on July 18, saying what so many people at NBC had wanted Capus, Bell, or some other executive to say. “I’m surprised and disappointed at this idea that Ann was a martyr, that she was thrown under the bus,” Gumbel said in what seemed like a random interview with the
Los Angeles Times
. “I don’t know why she’s being portrayed as a modern-day Joan of Arc. In every job, in every walk of life, people are hired to do a job, and if they don’t do it well they are relieved of that job.” He added, “It’s a big-boy business, and when things don’t work out, people are asked to leave. It’s happened to me; it’s happened to almost everyone in this business.”

Privately Gumbel seethed at how badly NBC had botched the transition, just as it had when he was in Lauer’s position in 1989. Had the people in charge learned
nothing
? He and everyone else in the TV industry had ideas about how the network could have done it differently. They could have taped the goodbye, for Christ’s sake, and dodged a live television meltdown. Or they could have issued a terse press release on a Friday night and refused her any airtime at all. In hindsight a number of people at NBC agreed with Capus that the network should have scrapped its pre-Olympics plan and waited until the end of the year before changing hosts. “We rushed her; we shouldn’t have rushed,” an NBC executive said in December.

*  *  *

By mid-July 2012, NBC’s promise that Curry would be back on the
Today
show as an “anchor at large,” covering highfalutin stories around the world, was starting to look like a lie. Curry hadn’t seemed to believe it when Lauer said it during her on-air farewell; and partly because
Today
hadn’t asked her to contribute anything, and partly because she hadn’t piped up with any suggestions, she seemed as gone from the show as Joe Garagiola. NBC hadn’t even set up her new office space yet. As viewers brooded about the standoff, Lauer’s popularity steadily sank.
Today
, moreover, was losing to
GMA
every single day in the total viewer ratings and barely maintaining its 898-week-long streak in the demo.

The question of whether Curry would ever return to the show was answered on Friday, July 20. At a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie,
The Dark Knight
, in the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, a crazed twenty-five-year-old gunman opened fire on the audience, killing twelve people and injuring fifty-eight others. With Bell doing his Olympics thing, Don Nash was in charge. The deadliest mass murder in the United States in over a year was obviously a big story, one to rival Tucson and Fort Hood and Virginia Tech and Columbine. On a six a.m. conference call with Nash and others, Capus decided not to send Lauer, since he was due in London on Saturday to begin preparing for Olympics coverage. Instead, he dispatched Guthrie,
NBC Nightly News
anchor Brian Williams, and another NBC news employee whom he hadn’t seen in a while, but who was in the forefront of his mind. “Anchor at large” Ann Curry, he decided, would anchor a special edition of
Dateline
from Colorado on Friday night, then cohost a special edition of
Today
with Guthrie on Saturday morning. This was, in some key ways, Curry’s kind of story. What better way to begin repairing the damage done by Curry’s departure than to have her symbolically join hands with Guthrie at the site of a national tragedy? It sounded like a foolproof plan—except for the fact that neither Guthrie nor Curry knew the other was going.

First
Today
had to get through Friday’s show. By six thirty that morning Lauer and Guthrie were at the anchor desk. They were scheduled to debrief Jace Larson, a reporter for NBC’s station in Denver, by phone at the top of the seven a.m. hour. And then what? They didn’t know. The shooting news might consume the whole show. Then again, New Jersey governor Chris Christie was on the way to the studio to talk about Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. For a politician, Christie was a tough get. Should the interview go on? Lauer and Nash talked through their options while the pop rock band Hot Chelle Rae warmed up outside on the plaza. That was another predicament: should the concert go on?

As the seven a.m. airtime approached, nothing had been firmly decided. Then at 6:59:30 a production manager ran up to Nash. The correspondent in Colorado wasn’t answering his phone.

“We don’t have Jace,” the manager said.

“Thirty seconds,” the assistant director shouted.

Nash pressed the button that put his voice into Lauer’s and Guthrie’s ears. “You guys may have to talk about this for a little bit,” he said, “I have no one to go to.” He let go of the button. The clock struck seven. About ten seconds later the production manager was shouting that Jace was on line one. That might have been the
Today
show’s first lucky break in months.

Nash wound up devoting virtually the whole Friday morning broadcast to the Aurora shootings. He scrapped the Christie interview and recorded the concert so it could be shown another day. During a commercial break, he told Guthrie she’d be flying out to Colorado that afternoon. She understood that parachuting into tragedies is a part of the
Today
cohost’s job, right up there with interviewing presidents and presenting holiday party planning segments, and she was ready to go—as soon as her boyfriend packed her a weekend bag and brought it to Rockefeller Center.

Two charter flights were booked, one for Curry, one for Guthrie—purely for timing reasons, their colleagues insisted, not because either of the women had refused to share a plane with the other. Indeed the strange truth was that, in all the confusion surrounding the fast-breaking story, no one had told either Curry or Guthrie about the reunion plan. NBC put out a triumphant press release about their pairing when both were in the air. But when Curry landed in Colorado and found out, she said she wasn’t going along with it. If Guthrie was here, too, then what was the point of an “anchor at large”?

NBC News executives spent Friday night trying to coax Curry into cohosting (Guthrie was fine with the idea), and they held out hope, into early Saturday morning, that she’d come around. But with a couple of hours before seven a.m. on Saturday, she was still holding out. Her allies said she was offended that NBC was trying to use a national tragedy for PR purposes. Her critics said she was just trying to score points in an ongoing battle with her bosses. Meanwhile
Today
show staffers, unaware of the mix-up and thus of Curry’s newly re-bruised feelings, were shocked when her name was removed from the rundown; one senior producer laughed, thinking the edit was a mistake. But it wasn’t: Curry was going to come on
Today
for only one four-minute-long segment. A young staffer was told to delete all online references to Curry’s cohosting—to pretend, in essence, that NBC had never announced it. Another was told to see whether Guthrie and Curry could be booked on separate flights back to New York.

Guthrie and Curry were separated by several miles during the
Today
show on Saturday. The former was near the crime scene, the latter was at a hospital. Instead of repairing the damage caused by Curry’s demotion, their one segment together somehow made it worse. Curry appeared stone-faced as she introduced her story about a young couple who had survived the shooting. It wasn’t Guthrie with whom she had a problem; the women would wind up flying back to New York together later in the day. But the split screen at the end of the segment—with the show’s past on the right and its present on the left—was a bitter reminder of all that had gone wrong for
Today
.

Chapter 17

Total Victory

NBC needed the Olympics the way Smokin’ Joe Frazier needed the final bell in the Thrilla in Manila, the way George Washington needed nightfall in the Battle of Brooklyn.
GMA
was beating up on
Today
every single morning among total viewers, and was now surpassing its once-glorious rival dangerously often in the precious demo (although it had still not won a full demo week). The Olympics were two weeks of guaranteed wins for
Today
, sitting right there on the schedule, looking delicious. Reaching the Games, even in a degraded state, was all that mattered.

Lauer flew over to London first, on Saturday the twenty-first of July, because he had to prepare to cohost the opening ceremonies coverage the following Friday. Guthrie, Morales, and Roker joined him there on Wednesday the twenty-fifth, having flown overnight from New York. On location at the Tower of London on Wednesday for its first pre-Olympics broadcast,
Today
pretended to have the castmates pull up to Lauer’s location in one of London’s iconic black cabs. “We’re always looking for some good shtick to open up the show,” Morales said afterward, calling it a “classic little opening scene.”

The hosts then scurried up to a small stage overlooking the Thames. They were sweating heavily in the thick British heat. As a makeup artist patted Guthrie’s face during the first commercial break, she joked, “I know, I’m sorry, it’s like a full-time job right now.”

“When people come to visit the show, even in the studio, they’re always surprised by how much activity there is,” Lauer said, off camera, to me. “How much running around there is. How much moving from one place to another. It’s a little bit like a two-hour workout. We like it that way. We like the chaos and the spontaneity of morning television. But we’re supposed to make it look easy. Even though it’s not as easy as it looks.” Conjuring up the viewers at home, he said, “These people are in their curlers, they’re brushing their teeth, they don’t want to see us frantic over what’s happening. They want to see us in control and calm, starting their day off on the right note.”

Lauer was a different man with Guthrie than he was with Curry, at ease and ready to tease, on the air but even more so off. Twenty minutes into Wednesday’s show in London, when there was a glitch during a live shot with Ryan Seacrest—his first appearance ever as a contributor to
Today
—Lauer said “Sorry, we thought we lost you,” and Guthrie joked, “We’re going to blame jet lag.” Right after the commercial break started, Guthrie and Lauer fake-debated off the air about who had rescued the segment. “As far as I’m concerned, I saved it,” Lauer said. Guthrie sarcastically answered, “Yes, yes, you were the life preserver of that.”

Back on the air, Guthrie started the 7:24 a.m. shill for upcoming stories, then looked in Lauer’s direction, expecting him to finish with the words “After your local news.” He, for some reason, didn’t, so after a slight pause she said them. This sparked another round of off-camera teasing between them, with Guthrie pretending to be the veteran host: “Am I going to have to teach you ev-er-y-thing?” Lauer grinned.

The three hours of
Today
—even the nine a.m. hour emanated from London—were a sweaty blur for the cast and crew, who sprinted from interview to live report to Olympics party planning segment, but a comfortable blend of news, entertainment, and Olympics promotion for the viewers at home. “It’s great to get out of the studio every now and then,” Nash said. Picking up on that thought, Roker elaborated: In New York, “You don’t get this extended period of time to be together. This is almost like we’re at camp. We get to hang out with each other.” Lauer, sitting nearby, chimed in, “The good news is, it’s almost like camp. The bad news is, it’s almost like camp.” Roker laughed and added, “Matt short-sheeted my bed last night!” The hosts seemed to be saying, “See,
GMA
? We have chemistry, too.”