Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (6 page)

This was followed by “awkward Ann moments” of the sort that would plague the relationship between Lauer and Curry in the months to come. Curry must have been sweating while watching the highlight reel of her career, because right afterward she said, “I knew I should have worn deodorant today, this is hard today!” Caught off guard, Lauer mock-groaned and said, “Thanks for sharing that.” Then she gave him a halfhearted hug and exclaimed, “Well I’ll share some more if you’d like!” Lauer, seeming embarrassed by her inelegant behavior, quickly changed the subject to the oversize glasses Curry, in the video, had just been seen wearing as a local reporter in the 1980s, and repeated a joke that Don Nash, the senior broadcast producer, had said in his ear: “You know, contact lenses have been great for Ann’s career.”

“I don’t actually wear them!” she blurted back. “Which is, you know, why I can’t read the teleprompter half the time!” The cast and crew all laughed loudly. As Homer Simpson has been known to say, “It’s funny ’cause it’s true.”

This was a preview of Lauer and Curry’s awkward year to come. The day before she started, Curry had told an interviewer, “I’ll be dancing with a partner who is Fred Astaire. I’ve just got to be able to go backwards, in heels. And I do love to dance.” You’d never have known it, however, from the way she repeatedly—and seemingly obliviously—stepped on Lauer’s toes. “Katie and Matt, it took them a while to get up to the same dance and move in the same steps,” one longtime NBC executive said later. “Meredith and Matt, it took them a little while, too. Ann and Matt? They’re not even listening to the same song.”

Lauer, a discreet and deliberative guy, was careful not to air his discomfort with Curry’s promotion in public. But it came up time and time again in private conversations. At the end of their second week together on
Today
, late on a Saturday night, Lauer bumped into Zucker at a party in Bridgehampton, a few miles from Lauer’s Hamptons estate. The two men hadn’t seen each other in a while. They started chatting about the changes at the show, and Zucker made it clear that he wouldn’t have appointed Curry to cohost had he still been in charge. “Yeah, well, you know,” Lauer responded, “it’s not exactly the way I would have done it.”

Bell, in conversations with friends around the same time, hinted that the “out” clause had had a lot to do with the ultimate decision (or nondecision) to make her the cohost. “It was probably a mistake,” he told one friend, “but we just didn’t want to wake up and see Ann on another network.”

Viewers picked up on Lauer’s dissatisfaction, maybe through his sour expressions when Curry fumbled her lines or told a strange joke. Some thought his overall performance as an anchor sagged. One day, according to a longtime staff member, he said to a production assistant, “I can’t believe I am sitting next to this woman.”

It must be noted here that not every day was dire for Curry or for the
Today
show, which remained America’s favorite show to wake up with. She did good work: she interviewed the Dalai Lama in July and shed light on the famine in Somalia by flying there in August. Even though she didn’t like all the softer stories picked by her producers, she loved the challenge of cohosting; she strove to be one of the best who’d ever had a seat on the famed couch.

But before long Curry wasn’t the only one whisper-talking: rumors were spreading that, because of her inability to find a niche on what was increasingly
The Matt Lauer Show
, she was on her way out. In 1989, Deborah Norville, at the start of an ill-fated thirteen-month stint as Bryant Gumbel’s cohost, had complained that the staff and the viewers of the
Today
show didn’t allow a new person enough time to succeed. “This job is radically different from any I’ve had before,” Norville said shortly after being upgraded from news anchor. “It’s a learning experience for me—and I think I can learn. All I can say is, don’t shoot me before I’m in the saddle—let me get up there and ride a bit.”

Now Curry was experiencing the same thing. When I interviewed her for a short story in
The New York Times
in February 2012, right after she had returned from a trip to the Sudan, she sounded like a woman who wanted more time. “I used to struggle,” she said, with the sharp turns that morning TV demanded. “But actually, this time, on my first day back, I was interviewing someone about why neon colors are the colors for spring. I marveled because, I remember, I switched into that gear pretty seamlessly. I felt, sort of for the first time, that I’m getting better at switching gears.” Case in point: Curry was calling from John F. Kennedy International Airport, where she was about to fly to Los Angeles to cover the Oscars. There was still sand in her suitcase from Africa.

Curry rambled on for a little while about having a “real chance” to redefine the
Today
show cohost role. I thought nothing of it at the time. But I wondered later if she’d been campaigning, in effect, to keep her job. Did she know that, within months of her debut as cohost, Bell had begun to think about what a succession plan would look like, whom it would involve, when it would roll out? By the end of 2011 he had a specific successor in mind: Savannah Guthrie, the former White House correspondent who had joined
Today
as the cohost of the nine a.m. hour in June, at the same time Curry ascended to the main seven-to-nine cohost job. He’d seen how Lauer and Guthrie clicked when they shared the screen, and he made that happen more often by ensuring that Guthrie was the first, second, and third choice for fill-in when Curry was away. To colleagues he trusted, he said, “I think Matt and Savannah are the best pairing I have.”

For a while Bell and his lieutenants wondered if they should let Curry remain next to Lauer, but replace news anchor Natalie Morales with Guthrie, thereby injecting some new energy onto the set. In that scenario, Morales would have been moved to the weekend show. But the idea didn’t get very far: NBC, always worried about too much change in the morning too quickly, extended Morales’s contract in early 2012, although she wasn’t being seriously considered for the top job. Only Guthrie was.

Guthrie, born in 1971 in Australia, grew up in Tucson, the Arizona city where her family settled in 1975. Her father, a mining consultant, suffered a heart attack and died when she was sixteen. She went to college a few miles from home at the University of Arizona and studied journalism, then climbed the TV ladder like Curry and wound up at Court TV covering the Michael Jackson trial in 2005. NBC poached her in 2007 and gave her a prestigious White House posting a year later. People in high places at NBC loved her, though she seemed uncomfortable when told that—a sign of shyness that to many at NBC only increased her charm. Guthrie was important to Bell not just because of the particular talents she brought to the show, or even the way she got along with Lauer, but because she represented an answer to the question “If not Ann, who?” “Not Ann” started a civil war of suits inside NBC. On one side was Bell. On the other was Capus, who was fond of Curry and wanted Bell to give her a chance. Sure, she probably wouldn’t last for five years like Vieira did. But Capus wasn’t convinced that there was an imminent problem.

Here’s the rub: it sounded like his boss, Burke, was, and that was something he had to reckon with in the political scheme of things. Burke, who had blessed Curry’s promotion mere months before, now thought Curry was hurting the show. Well, not Curry per se, but her dicey serve: “When Ann plays tennis with Matt,” Burke told a colleague, “he hits the ball over the net, and she doesn’t always hit it straight back.”

When Burke spoke that way, Capus—who’d earned the nickname “Rage” for his short temper—thought Burke was channeling Bell, and he resented Bell for going over his head. The relationship between Capus and Bell was disintegrating.

*  *  *

Things hadn’t always been bad between them. Before Comcast took control of NBC in January 2011, Capus and Bell had had a cordial if distant relationship, according to underlings and friends of the two. Capus beamed with pride for NBC News,
Today
included. Since the
Today
show was the main source of profits for the news division, Bell had a lot of autonomy: he was basically the president of the
Today
show (“Jim’s attitude is ‘I pay the bills around here,’” said one of his lieutenants), but was deferential to Capus when he needed to be. And Capus respected Bell’s producing talent and political acumen. But they never really clicked. Capus was the street fighter, the state school guy—Temple, in Philly. Bell was the Ivy Leaguer—Harvard. When Comcast came in, the differences came out. Steve Burke and Bell bonded early on, which helps explain why there was widespread talk that Bell was in the running for Capus’s seat or for a top spot at NBC Sports. In August 2011 Burke appointed Bell the executive producer of the Summer Olympics in London, the successor to Bell’s mentor Dick Ebersol, who’d had that title for twenty years. Now Bell was in charge of
two
of NBC’s most important investments.

Capus didn’t quite understand why Burke was so enamored of Bell. Even before Bell began campaigning for Curry’s removal, Capus thought it was high time to hand
Today
over to a new producer. But Burke decided to let Bell try to juggle the morning show and the Summer Olympics. Capus was assured that the Olympics thing would be temporary, and then Bell would refocus on
Today
. But he was annoyed nonetheless.

What seemed to bother Capus most was the belief that Bell had undermined him in meetings with Burke.
Undermined
is a strong word, but it was true that Bell had told Burke, “We need to make a change” at
Today
—beginning the process that would become known as Operation Bambi. The Bell/Burke friendship “shaped all the Ann stuff,” an NBC executive said later.

Bell’s voice seemed to be coming at Capus (and Curry) from any number of directions. In a gossipy feature called “Workplace Confidential” in the January 16 issue of
New York
magazine, an anonymous source was quoted as saying, “If the show’s audience doesn’t gravitate to Ann Curry soon, could NBC buck its own succession plan, much as it did with Conan and Jay Leno, and have Savannah Guthrie replace Ann? She’s got that girl-next-door quality, and Ann can sometimes come off as disingenuous in interviews. And I don’t see a situation where they could remove Ann and keep her at the network (she wouldn’t be happy staying on as a special correspondent, and she is no longer hosting
Dateline
). There would be nowhere else for her to go. Unfortunately, that’s the way those things play out.” After the item appeared, Curry went to the
Today
show’s spokeswoman, Megan Kopf, and asked if the PR department was ferreting out the source of the blasphemy. It’s unclear what she was told, but the real answer was no, it wasn’t.

One thing that concerned Bell mightily was the way Curry’s performance affected Lauer’s. The star seemed disenchanted not just with his costar but with the entire show. Suddenly Lauer, the five-alarmer charmer, didn’t have especially good chemistry with
anyone
on the set. While Bell might have denied this, others could sense that the host wasn’t trying very hard, wasn’t rising to the occasion. According to many of his colleagues, Bell saw the problem as Curry. If she wasn’t sitting next to him, “Matt would get the stick out of his ass,” Bell told several of them.

Bell may have been right in his opinions, but some of his subordinates thought he was starting to let his anger, and his dread about the ever-improving
GMA
ratings—the ABC show was now about half a million viewers behind
Today
—affect his judgment. One afternoon in January, he called his senior producers to a meeting in one of the NBC Sports conference rooms, a dozen floors above NBC News and thus out of view of the rest of the
Today
staff. Things weren’t good: the more closely one analyzed the ratings trends, the more clearly they favored
GMA
.

This mattered beyond the confines of the seven and eight a.m. hours. Sherwood, the ABC News president, and Goldston, the man he’d tasked with turning
GMA
around, were trying, in tough economic times, to expand the news division into new time slots and onto new platforms. They wanted
GMA
to have an afternoon talk show spin-off. They wanted ownership of more hours in prime time. A win by
GMA
would go a long way toward making the division’s other dreams come true, just as years of wins by
Today
had expanded NBC News’ fortunes and real estate. And now it was all so close. “It just felt that we had the magic,”
GMA
cohost Robin Roberts said. “That we had become what the other place used to be.”

Today
, though, was conceding nothing. Tucked safely away in the NBC Sports department with his colleagues, Bell felt he could be frank about what he saw as their single biggest problem—guess who. Bell strongly criticized Curry’s broadcasting skills and suggested that she was largely to blame for the weakened state of
Today
. To some of the producers in the room, both his indiscretion and his comments themselves were shocking. One in particular, senior producer Melissa Lonner, spoke up in Curry’s defense. Lonner, the only Asian American on the senior staff, and Curry had vacationed together with their partners; she couldn’t possibly sit quietly, especially when Curry wasn’t there to defend herself.

“Ann feels like she has no support,” Lonner said. “She feels like she’s all alone.”

But Bell didn’t back down. He never explicitly told anyone to stop giving Curry the best segments or to ignore her ideas. But before long his denunciation of Curry trickled down to the lower-level staffers, as he must have known it would. According to one member of the
Today
team, “The message was ‘She’s dead. She’s a dead woman walking.’”

*  *  *

Bell was the prototypical battle-scarred veteran of the morning wars. He had been hired by Zucker, at Ebersol’s urging, to produce
Today
in 2005, and had at that time beaten back a fairly serious threat from
GMA
. Zucker liked Bell because he had ample live television experience and had thrived in a big and complex organization, NBC Olympics. Bell began work at NBC in 1990, as a production assistant in an Olympics unit that was compiling profiles of athletes for the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona. At that time he had no aspiration to run part of a TV network. He’d happened to be in Spain, taking a year off before law school, when a person in NBC’s human resources department who knew Bell’s dad called and asked him to assist Randy Falco, a top NBC executive, on a trip to Barcelona. Falco had ruptured an Achilles tendon and needed to be pushed in a wheelchair (and occasionally carried up and down stairs where there were no ramps).