Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (4 page)

The story calls to mind
gambaru
, a Japanese word that Curry’s mother taught her, which Curry defines as “Never ever, ever give up, even and especially when there is no chance of winning.”

After many moves due to her father’s military service, Curry’s family settled down in Ashland, Oregon, a town of twelve thousand near the California state line, in 1972. In interviews years later, she recalled being singled out for being Japanese American; in third grade a classmate called her “Jap” and she punched the boy in the mouth.

Curry was the second in her family to go to college, after her father, who started taking classes when she was a teenager. A beneficiary of the GI Bill, he wanted to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a teacher. “More than anything else, that pushed me to go,” she said in a 2001
Today
segment about her college years, which were spent at the University of Oregon, three hours north of Ashland. The film
Animal House
was shot there during her senior year, and the man she ended up marrying, Brian Ross, is visible (barely) in one of the frat-party scenes. (The two dated in college, but split up; ten years passed before Ross saw Curry on television in Los Angeles and reconnected with her. They married in 1989 and have two children: McKenzie, born in 1992, and Walker, born in 1995.)

Curry, as you may not be surprised to hear, was the kind of student who protested when the university proposed to close the library at midnight rather than leave it open all night. Infatuated with journalism, inspired by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and most of all Walter Cronkite, she dreamed of being a reporter with compassion and integrity—perhaps a foreign correspondent for
The New York Times
. Some of her professors thought she seemed like a natural fit for television, and although she’d first thought of the medium as too insubstantial and its product too fleeting for her tastes, she took an internship and then a job at KTVL, the CBS affiliate near Ashland, to pay off her student loans. At first the situation did not seem promising. An executive producer there told her that “women have no news judgment” and were too frail to carry a camera. Such nonsense only spurred her to become the station’s first female reporter, doubling for a while as a camerawoman for her stories. The station bosses eventually gave her an anchor tryout, but were so disappointed by her first day that they didn’t let her try again, according to a 1997 profile in an Oregon newspaper. (Was she already showing signs that she was more comfortable in the field than in a studio?)

Hopscotching, as so many aspiring TV stars do, from small to medium to big TV market, Curry moved north to KGW in Portland in 1981 and then south to KCBS, the powerhouse CBS station in LA, in 1984. NBC News snapped her up in 1990, first to be a correspondent in Chicago and then to host
Sunrise
, the same early-morning newscast Deborah Norville had come from. The role of foreign correspondent was still on her mind. “There are so many stories in out-of-the-way places, and I’d like to write them,” she told a newspaper reporter in 1991. “I’m fascinated with the East and the Middle East, places like Afghanistan and Eastern Europe.” Over time, though, Curry’s career goal changed. After a few years of getting up in the middle of the night to host
Sunrise
, where she bonded with Capus, the show’s producer, she started agitating for the anchor job on, of all highfalutin shows,
NBC Nightly News
. (“The dirty little secret about Ann is that she is so fucking ambitious,” a longtime colleague of Curry’s said.) Tom Brokaw, a
Today
host from 1976 to 1981, had been anchoring
Nightly
for a dozen years at that point, and he was not going anywhere. But when the weekend
Nightly
slot came open in 1993, and Brian Williams got it, Curry called then–NBC News president Andrew Lack at home one night and expressed her rather fierce unhappiness.

The
Today
show was another route to the top. The show’s history and enduring popularity made it a crown jewel of sorts inside NBC News, even if
Nightly
was still the newscast of record. “It has always been the best place to work inside NBC News,” said Capus, who was the supervising producer of
Today
for a brief period in the 1990s. Since that time
Today
has swollen from two hours to four, with a hugely popular Web site, Today.com, to boot. “It is one of the strongest brands in America,” Capus said. “It’s like Jell-O or Kleenex—it’s the brand name,” said Steve Friedman, who ran
Today
in the 1980s. “Everybody in morning television is doing their version of the
Today
show, because it came first.”

So it was a pretty big deal when Lack named Curry the show’s news anchor in 1997 at the same time that Lauer, the news anchor for the prior three years, ascended to the cohost chair. Curry’s assignment was supposed to be temporary, but Lack loved Curry’s work—“No one says, ‘Back to you, Matt’ better,” he said—and made it permanent three months later.

Once Curry arrived at
Today
, she seemed to forget Brokaw’s chair and focus instead on Couric’s by jockeying to fill in every time Couric was away. The tense rivalry between the two women was an open secret; producers who were around the pair at the time said Couric thought Curry was fake. On the air, though, Lauer, Couric, Curry, and weatherman Al Roker were not just a happy family, they were “America’s first family,” a title NBC memorably attached to them with this jingle:

Katie, Matt, Al, and Ann,

first on your TV.

America’s first family:

Today on NBC.

This was the beginning of the golden age of the
Today
show. Though Katie, Matt, Al, and Ann didn’t know it yet, the streak had begun. The foursome—backed up by Zucker in the control room—carried the show and its viewers through the death of Princess Diana in 1997, the Columbine school shooting in 1999, the scary but ultimately overhyped Y2K crisis, and the presidential election in 2000. They also ushered in an era of big morning stunts, the best being “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?” which sent a jet-lagged Lauer all around the world in successful pursuit of…well, basically ratings. Said a very jealous producer at another network, “It’s probably the only really exceptional idea that any of the morning shows have come up with in the last twenty years.” What it was for Lauer was a pinnacle of his personal and professional life. During the 1998 WITWIML, somewhere on the road from Cairo to Venice to Athens to the Taj Mahal to Sydney, Lauer produced a diamond ring and asked his then-girlfriend, Annette Roque, who had come along for the wild ride, to marry him. It shows you how long ago 1998 was in morning show years that his proposal of marriage wasn’t taped and teased and broadcast twice, first at regular speed and then in the form of a joshing slow-motion replay.

By 2000
Today
had become a ratings juggernaut that made
GMA
’s last winning week, in December 1995, a distant memory. Zucker began his ascent of the NBC food chain, becoming president of the network’s entertainment division. The producer who took over
Today
, Jonathan Wald, maintained the show’s ratings and reputation through the biggest story to ever occur on the morning TV shift: the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Some days the gap between
Today
and
GMA
was two million viewers wide. But one week in December, three months after the attacks, sportscaster Bob Costas filled in for Lauer and the gap shrank to eight hundred thousand. At NBC “alarm bells went off,” Wald said. Three months after that, on the day after ABC televised the Academy Awards, the morning-after show by
GMA
came within sixty-five thousand viewers of
Today
, giving more ammunition to those who wanted to shoot the show down. When asked about the ratings, Wald delivered a classic comeback to the
New York Observer
: “If they get the Oscars five nights a week, they’ll have a great shot.” Fluke aside, the staff of
Today
took the threat from
GMA
seriously. “We all got together and said, ‘We’ve got to be more aggressive and we can’t let anything fall through the cracks,’” Wald recalled. “We went back to a couple of chestnuts: women and health; women and money. It wasn’t about getting more celebrities or more concerts or anything like that, it was ‘Let’s go back to what this audience really cares about.’”

Couric renewed her contract at the end of 2001 for a then-record fifteen million dollars a year, guaranteeing Curry at least another five-year wait for the cohost chair. It was a long game that she played. On morning TV, familiarity breeds security. Consider for a moment that Curry sometimes filled in when Couric was on assignment or on vacation. Consider, too, the precedent that NBC had set by moving Lauer from the news desk to the cohost desk in 1997. These things instilled in the viewer the expectation that Curry was “in line”—that she would someday succeed Couric, who was making it clear to anyone within earshot of the makeup room that she wanted to do something else when her contract expired in 2006. For NBC there was an inherent risk in this situation: viewers, many of whom had waited and waited for promotions themselves, wanted to see Curry rewarded for her perceived loyalty, and if they saw anything else they might take their eyeballs elsewhere, with disastrous consequences for the show’s bottom line.

Curry was not the only person at the network playing a long game. Neal Shapiro, who had succeeded Lack as president of NBC News, also saw Curry’s moment of leverage looming several years in the distance. In 2003, soon after Jane Pauley decided to leave
Dateline
, the newsmagazine she had cohosted with Stone Phillips since its inception in 1992, Shapiro brought up Curry’s name at a senior staff meeting with, among others, Zucker, NBC Sports & Olympics chairman Dick Ebersol, and NBC uber-boss Bob Wright. With Pauley gone, Shapiro saw a way to get Curry off the
Today
cohost track without offending the audience. “I said Ann should be the full-time cohost at
Dateline
, joining Stone,” he recalled.

The beauty part of Shapiro’s plan was that, while it would have been done partly to head off a public relations disaster later, it had the advantage in the grand scheme of network business of making perfect sense. Character-driven stories of the sort that Curry delighted in were a staple of newsmagazines, and her previous contributions to
Dateline
—exclusive stories about the McCaughey septuplets, for instance—were highly rated. Said Shapiro: “The audience would understand moving to prime time was a great promotion and there would be no backlash against
Today
.” And there was this: “By making her a host of
Dateline
, we could open up the news anchor job on
Today
to someone like Natalie Morales or Hoda Kotb”—and start grooming another successor for Couric.

Ultimately, though, Zucker quashed the plan. “He said America loved Ann and that we couldn’t disrupt the ‘first family of TV,’” Shapiro recalled. “He said that the
Today
show was the most important show we had, and that taking Ann off the show was too big a risk.”

Maybe Zucker was right to keep her at the news desk for the time being. Still, that was hardly the same thing as saying that Curry was right for the cohost chair. By 2005, Zucker—who was well on the way to becoming CEO of all of NBC—had squeezed Shapiro out of his job and replaced him with Steve Capus, who had successfully produced
NBC Nightly News
for the four years prior. Separately, he had also hired Bell to run
Today
and Phil Griffin, an MSNBC executive, to oversee the show. When Couric prepared to move over to CBS, all four of these men had a role in choosing her successor—which would have been a Big F’ing Deal for any business, and especially for one like NBC that prided itself on picture-perfect transitions (Pauley to Norville being the exception that proved the rule). And all four were skeptical of the short list of thirty- and fortysomething women who had put themselves forward for the job. Zucker instead pursued the fifty-two-year-old Meredith Vieira. “Following Katie Couric’s run at the
Today
show was gonna be one of the most difficult things for anybody to come in and do,” he recalled. “And I was incredibly nervous that the next person would come in and fail. I thought it required somebody who had incredible broadcasting chops and tremendous confidence. And as I looked around, it became clear that Meredith was the perfect, and maybe the only, person who could do it.”

But he had to talk Vieira into taking the chair while keeping Curry and the other candidates in the dark. One day in October 2005, knowing she was busy and might rebuff a sit-down meeting, he offered to give her a ride from her first job, cohosting
The View
, to her second job, giving away money on the game show
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Her agent Michael Glantz had told Zucker that getting her was a total long shot: ABC had tried and failed to woo Vieira to host
GMA
years earlier. But Zucker went for the ride anyway. He instructed his driver to go slowly since the distance between the two TV studios was just three city blocks, and when Vieira hopped in the SUV, he got right to it. “I know your story,” he said. “I know you have gone down this road before, but don’t discount this before you think about it.” He described the
Today
show gig as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one that she was perfectly and uniquely fitted for. “These opportunities almost never come along,” he said, “and you should grab it.” Vieira said one of her hesitations had to do with the hours. Zucker had no good rebuttal for that one. But he said that her travel schedule would be limited, and promised that he’d be personally involved. Then she asked why he would pick someone who was three years older than Couric—in television, a business that prizes youth above almost all else, transitions almost always happen in the other direction. But for Zucker, the unconventionality of the Vieira pick was part of the appeal. He liked that it would surprise people. The SUV pulled up to the
Millionaire
studio and Vieira, noncommittal but not outwardly opposed to Zucker’s idea, hopped out. Then Zucker pulled out his cell phone, called Glantz, and said, “I think we have a shot.”