How I Got This Way (20 page)

W
hat did happen to me next, however, would be the beginning of fifteen years in the spotlight with the One Who Changed Everything. Well, actually, nothing about the format of our morning program changed, then or ever really, except that my new cohost would quickly enough establish herself to be something of a human tsunami—unpredictable, unrestrained, uncompromising, unstoppable, and most of all, impossible to ignore. She arrived on that last Monday of June 1985, flushed and slightly breathless, with a song in her heart and a pair of running shoes on her feet. That was because she had just raced up Sixty-seventh Street from the set of
Good Morning America,
where she’d then been working for a couple of years as a special correspondent and occasional fill-in host for Joan Lunden. In fact, she’d just pinch-hit for Joan again that very morning when, mere moments later, she made her debut beside me as Ann Abernathy’s full-time replacement. She burst into our little WABC studio a few seconds after we’d gone on the air. “My new cohost can’t even get here on time!” I hollered, teasing her from the start, which she would reciprocate in kind (believe me!) for the rest of our long ride together. In fact, I think it took her all of about one show before she first called me a jerk on live local television. That, of course, continued throughout all our years of live national broadcasts as well. But it was her special way, I think, of showing me affection and respect, as only she could. I think.

Yes, Kathie Lee Johnson had landed on the stool to my left and, from day one, the wattage level in that studio of ours would only get hotter, as she got better and better, month by month. She instinctively knew just how to go out there and really let it rip between us. During and beyond those years she’d spent in Hollywood—where she frequently watched my old show with its original zinging give-and-take Host Chat segments—Kathie had gone on to work all kinds of TV jobs, including one quick season on the mostly unseen sitcom spinoff series
Hee Haw Honeys
. She eventually made her way to New York, but in addition to her
Good Morning America
duties (which nicely showed off, in glimpses, her larger-than-life personality and no-holds-barred opinions), she’d also just begun turning up in national commercial spots everywhere, singing about the joys of taking those Carnival Cruises. Her signature big-energy shipboard beltings of song pitches like
“Ain’t we got fun . . .”
and
“If my friends could see me now . . .”
would continue to run throughout most of our years together, making that cheerful disposition of hers all the more inescapable—not to mention that voice (but I’ll get back to that in a moment). She could do it all, as naturally and as unself-consciously as they come—the best assets any broadcast personality can have, honestly.

Anyway, I’m sure it was that winning realness of hers that had captured the heart of Frank Gifford, the former NFL New York Giant great and ABC
Monday Night Football
commentator, with whom she’d worked a bit on
GMA
before joining our show. Somewhere not long into our second year of cohosting
The Morning Show,
they were married, and we eventually learned that her nickname for him was “The Love Machine”—which she knew would set off fits of exaggerated groaning from me. But that was key to what we were doing. We always found a way to stay edgy and needle each other, either gently or without much mercy. Each of us did our share of eye rolling when the other one revealed some story from our personal lives, whether about that infamous dark cloud of mishaps that follows me around (
which, by the way, it does
) or about the blinding sunshine and rainbows that lit up her world as a doting mother and adoring wife, etcetera. I used to always say, “I had to shield my eyes the first time I met her!” We kind of came across as diametric opposites, which seemed to give the audience as much of a kick as we got from our silly ribbings of each other. But we clicked. Gelman—as in our considerably younger, longtime executive producer, Michael Gelman,
who insists on always being right
—decided that the key to our success came from the “subliminal sexual tension” between the two of us. I told him he was crazy, that there was no sexual tension at all. At least on my part, anyway. But I’m pretty sure that that held true for her as well.

Besides her natural knack for cohosting, there was something else she could do, too: sing beautifully. Both of her parents had musical backgrounds, so her genes were primed for it, and she started singing as a kid in Maryland and never stopped. To this day, she’s always ready to burst into song, which still happens now and then during that entertaining fourth hour of the
Today
show she does with Hoda Kotb. But in our years, she already had her own nightclub concert act down pat and drawing increasingly good crowds. Somewhere along the way, as I mentioned before, I’d started doing a club act myself and had been opening in Atlantic City for headliners like Tony Bennett, Steve and Eydie, and of course Don Rickles. It had been great training for me. Then she came up with the idea for us to work together on a nightclub act of our own, which actually turned out to be pretty good. Our agent, Lee Solomon, one of the William Morris stalwarts, booked us into all the best show places around the country, which in those years were booming, especially in Atlantic City. (Those days are sadly over now in Atlantic City and in so many other major venues.) But we made quite a team out there, taking our alternate turns onstage and also doing a lot of fun material together. In fact, we got so hot we used to do two shows a night on Fridays and Saturdays before packed houses.

But it was all part of the momentum that our syndicated
Live!
show had been picking up as we rolled into the nineties. We were flying high, and the ratings kept flying even higher. Gelman would put us through the paces and had us do a lot of physical business on the show, which usually wound up going haywire. Every time some new trend came along, we tried it. I remember one New Age healer–type guest who would place hot rocks on your body to release aches and pains. Naturally, I was on the table, shirtless, waiting for my pains to go away when Kathie Lee took advantage of the situation and dropped some rocks on a very sensitive, delicate area of my anatomy, which brought only more pain to another part of my body that was doing okay up till then. I also believe we were the first show to introduce those bulky fat suits that made us look like Japanese sumo wrestlers. We’d go at it, and our awkward sort of roly-poly tussles on the mat made for some very funny segments. Not to mention all the laughs we got when she won every match.

Then again, her competitive athletic streak was never to be taken lightly. She’d show her stuff whenever we’d mix it up with the many sports stars that came on the show. I forget who was first, but he was one of the great basketball shooters in the game. He and I were tossing ball after ball at a hoop we’d set up, all to no avail. Nothing would drop for either of us. Exasperated by this miserable scene, Kathie Lee scooped up one of the balls and just flung it recklessly at the basket and . . .
swish.
Even Kelly Ripa, who would later follow in Kathie Lee’s footsteps so perfectly, has consistently done the same thing over the years.
Yes, it gets embarrassing!
But the audience loves that stuff—because it’s not
them
looking so inept!

In any case, throughout our tenure together, Kathie Lee and I got into some memorable Host Chats of every stripe and color, which of course is the unpredictable nature of that opening segment. I would always find some new little irritant or major crisis to bring up at that table where we perched, and she would attempt to sort through whatever my stupid mess of the moment happened to be. Even as our popularity rose to greater heights, for instance, I would talk of having doubts about how I was spending my life—not that I had any real alternative in mind. But she would usually shake her head at my grousing and try in vain to talk me down off one ledge after another. Here’s just a taste of one of those special exchanges. . . .

ME:
What have I done with my life? I spent it in front of this stupid camera! For what?! It drives me crazy when I think of the way I squandered my life.

KL:
The sad thing is, he really means that. You said that to me privately the other day and I got very upset.

ME:
An unremarkable life!

KL:
You’re so wrong.

ME:
Doing a little show in the morning?! Please! It means nothing in the grand scheme of things! Unremarkable! I’ve got a better word: insignificant! You think I’m kidding? I mean it from the bottom of my insignificant heart. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

KL:
You need therapy.

ME:
I came to the wrong place for it, I’ll tell you that much.

You’d probably imagine that working together nearly every weekday for fifteen years could bring some bumpy moments along the way. Not between us, though. Toward the end of our run, I heard her tell Larry King the same thing: “Once in a while, we get on each other’s nerves,” she said—yes, please note that
she
said that! “But,” she continued, “we’ve never had an unkind word between us in fifteen years. Never.” Then, with great comic timing and a smile, she added, “Our
lawyers
have spoken. . . . No, I’m just kidding. We never have.” Which is the absolute truth. For that matter, I hope you don’t think I’m bragging here, but in all thirty-five years of working with cohosts, I can’t remember a backstage squabble with any of them. I always knew how important it was for the show and for our on-camera chemistry to stay on friendly terms. True, once in a great while, something might be inadvertently said that stung the other’s feelings. But that was very rare. Nevertheless, some obstacles came up along the way for Kathie Lee. Some bad moments that the twists of life had thrown at her and which I thought she handled so well. They were tough times to get through, but she was a stand-up fighter. Like she also told Larry King: “You know what? I am, if nothing else—even if you hate my guts, you’ve got to give me credit for being one hell of a survivor in this world.” I happen to give her all of the credit there is to be had in this world for it and was very proud of the way she so gracefully navigated through those difficult situations. In fact, I learned that all these ladies, each and every one of my cohosts, were a lot tougher than many of the TV guys I knew.

The latest and last one, who I’ll tell you more about soon, is no exception in that department. So, naturally, everyone likes to ask how did Kathie and Kelly get along when they met after the eventual changing of the guard in the cohost seat? Well, I’d like to tell you that there was always that underlying tension between them—especially over me!—and that it was just a matter of time before there would be screams and slaps and calls to the police to break it up. I’m only kidding, of course—but, you know, I really would have loved to have seen that. No such luck. Nope, Kathie Lee sent Kelly flowers on her first day, and it’s always remained a very warm and cordial dynamic between them. In fact, a few seasons later, Kathie Lee even guested on Kelly’s ABC sitcom
Hope & Faith,
in a winking inside-joke kind of episode where Kelly’s character (ironically, a former soap opera star who’d fallen on hard times) got a waitress job in a diner where she was angling to replace a certain longtime waitress, at least momentarily, so as to take over serving the table of a big-shot Hollywood director who’d come in for a meal. That longtime waitress she wanted to bump was played, of course, by Kathie Lee, who later came on our
Live!
show to talk about the very funny premise of that episode, among other things. . . .

ME:
We were just reminiscing here about
Hope and Faith,
and Kathie Lee did a bit on Kelly’s show. She played a waitress—

KR:
And I played a new waitress that comes in and tries to replace her.

KL:
Yeah, that was hysterical. I said something that was so defiant to you—

KR:
You said, “You think you could do
my
job?!”

KL:
“You think you could just waltz in after I’ve worked here fifteen years and do my job?!”
And you said something that was funny, too. You said, “Well, I’m hip, blond, and buff . . .” or something like that.

KR:
I think I said, “I’m buff, I’m funny, I’m smiley. How hard can it be?”

KL:
“
How hard can it be?
” Yeah, right. Yeah, I hated you.

Fortunately, everybody laughed—the three of us most of all, I think. I happened to take another look at that particular
Hope & Faith
episode not long ago, since it was on my mind while writing this, and I thought you’d enjoy seeing how that sitcom dialogue exchange between them actually played out. Kathie Lee’s character told Kelly: “Over my dead body. Listen, missy, I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. The people love me. You really think you can just step in and do
my
job?” (This got screams and big applause from their studio audience.) And Kelly’s character, Faith, replied: “I don’t see why not. I got a great face, a hot bod, and a big mouth. How hard can it be?”

Well, as they both knew well by then, the cohosting job is harder than it looks, but nevertheless it’s also a terrific thrill when things are really clicking. And in the course of that fifteen-year run that Kathie Lee and I rode out together, we had clicked plenty and it really changed our lives in such enormous ways. We were lucky enough to pile up so many great memories and unforgettable television moments. Then one day—which was February 29, 2000 (oddly enough, the official Leap Day in that Leap Year)—Kathie Lee announced she was going to be leaving the show later that summer. It was a move that she’d been toying with for quite some time. And during that time she had grown into so many more things than just a cohost: She was, in fact, a one-woman conglomerate, who already had, among other projects in the works, her own clothing line at Wal-Mart and also a cosmetics line, while having continued on as the big-voiced face of Carnival Cruises and, maybe most important of all to her, she was becoming a prolific songwriter and even more polished stage performer with a bunch of CD albums on the market. I caught her one day reeling off dictation letters to her assistant down in her office and I realized,
This woman has become a mogul in her own right
. Then it further dawned on me that our show gave her the one hour a day when she wasn’t making executive decisions. On
Live!,
as I’ve said before, she didn’t have to conquer the world, so she just conquered
me
instead! Besides which, she had done a few big musical turns on Broadway that gave her truly great pleasure. And once you’ve had a taste of that kind of magic out on the Great White Way, the lure of those footlights can be overpowering. She was ready to spread her wings and soar on to new adventures.