Innocent Spouse (21 page)

The day rolled on, and the phone never stopped. I made beds with the phone wedged between my shoulder and my ear. I served lunch on the phone. Went crabbing at the dock on the phone. I closed up the house on the phone. The others helped, of course, and whenever I had a break I filled them in on the latest about what had happened in that Paris tunnel.

We got back to D.C. and there was another conference call with Wendy and Becky. “Why haven’t you called Tom Cruise at home?” Becky demanded.

“Well, first off, I don’t have his number and no one will give it to me. Second, he’s not at home; he’s in London starting a film.”

“What’s the film? Where’s he shooting? Where’s he staying?”

“I don’t know.”

They were delighted that actor Steven Seagal was available. “He’s stayed at the Ritz,” Wendy said. “He’s been driven in that same car and he knows the driver. Paparazzi chased him in that same tunnel!”

“This is huge!” Becky exclaimed. You have to understand that in the circus that is entertainment television, “huge” isn’t quite the same
thing as it is in the real world. I was becoming increasingly cynical about the news that we in the business deemed critically important: the lingering tendrils of the O. J. Simpson saga, the macabre drama around the brutal murder of child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey, the crisis of Christian televangelist and
LKL
regular Tammy Faye Bakker, any celebrity scandal or actor with a terminal illness, and now the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed. We were turning their personal tragedies into a celebrity fest. The worst things in the world equaled monster ratings, and the ratings were everything.

Wendy, Becky, the other producers, and I compiled a wish list of knowns and unknowns that ran about three feet long, small print, single-spaced. It had more names than the Washington social register but for Monday’s show we’d confirmed only Seagal and Michael Cole. We also had a few eyewitnesses, and we hoped to get French police officials and Scotland Yard. Then Becky said she wanted to speak with me privately. “Wendy only wants you to work on two people—Michael Cole and Anna Wintour. Nobody else! We’re streamlining.” Since I had Cole in the bag, it meant I was after only one person, Wintour, the longest of long shots.

I didn’t see why Becky had to make this assignment privately or why Wendy didn’t tell me herself, but this was television. “Okay,” I said.

My colleague and friend Dean Sicoli called me at home that evening to tell me that Wendy didn’t want the staff to talk to me. “She had Pam Stevens tell everyone ‘Don’t talk to Carol.’ ” Sometimes working in television was crazier than working at Nathans.

When I got to the
LKL
office on Monday, the morning of our first show about the Paris crash, Wendy wasn’t there. She and Larry had flown to Los Angeles on previously scheduled business. I sent her an e-mail message. “I heard last night that you instructed Pam Stevens to tell the staff not to talk to me or work with me. Is this true?”

Finally Wendy responded. “What you heard was hearsay. This isn’t my problem. You know the source. Settle it with her.” Later, on a staff conference call, Wendy said, “We all love Carol. She’s part of the team. We work with her and she works with us.” What can I say to that? Not much. A job in the television pressure cooker always keeps a person on her toes.

But I still had a job, thank God, and all the phones were ringing nonstop. Every button on the receptionist’s console lit up with a new call or flashed with an old one on hold. Pam and another member of our booking team were having a vocal tug-of-war over a potential guest whose publicist was on hold. The receptionist, Dorsey Edwards, wanted to give one of them the call so she could handle the other ringing lines. The argument got louder. Finally Dorsey stood up and exploded.

“All of you are so, so, so un-fucking-professional!” Her voice rose on every
so
. “So fucking rude! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Every one of you!” We’d had blowups in the office before, but this was the Mount St. Helens of eruptions. “You should all be ashamed. I’ve never seen anything like it! You butt in on phone calls, you interrupt conversations, you make impossible demands, and you bark orders like General Patton. I’ve never worked anyplace so unprofessional, and I worked in the restaurant business, for God’s sake!” Dorsey sat down, put her head in her hands, and burst into tears. I was probably the only one in the room who got the picture.

Dorsey’s outburst was the perfect aria for our seventy-two-hour office death-of-Diana media opera—and the opera had scarcely begun. It was only the end of the first act and everyone on the staff was coming apart. To top it off, and amazing as it now seems, Larry King and Shawn Southwick got married—suddenly—that same week in a Los Angeles hospital where Larry—just as suddenly—had been scheduled to undergo emergency coronary bypass surgery. He’d had heart disease for years. The ceremony took place at dawn; Wendy was a witness. They wanted to be married before Larry went under the knife. I’m not sure who wanted it more. At the last minute, the doctors decided Larry didn’t need the surgery—that an angioplasty would do—but the wedding went ahead anyway. After the ceremony, the happy couple flew to New York for Larry’s angioplasty. In the midst of the Diana frenzy, Wendy gave the full staff a report on Larry and Shawn’s wedding in a late-night conference call.

And Tuesday morning I kept my promise to Spencer and went with him to his first day of kindergarten at his new school.

———

I’
D GONE TO
public schools and believed in their value, but at that time in Washington the city’s public school system was something to be avoided if at all possible. Even city leaders conceded that fact. There were good schools within the system, but they were heavily subsidized by parents. The best required an application process similar to private schools. Most middle-class Washington families who wanted to send their children to public school moved to the Virginia or Maryland suburbs when their children reached school age. That wasn’t an option for us. During all the back-and-forth with the IRS and my lawyers, I’d kept my moderate savings account out of the picture. I used every dime of it to pay for Spencer’s school. Just in case our world went south, I paid the full tuition in advance for kindergarten through the third grade. I wanted Spencer’s education to be a certainty. Even if the IRS took everything else away, he’d still have that.

The school I chose, part of the Washington National Cathedral, was solid and established, and most of his friends from preschool were starting there, too. I felt confident it would bolster him, make him feel safe. It attracted parents who were typical of Washington’s comfortable and powerful “haves”—politicians, lobbyists, lawyers, journalists. Most of them were there that first day, too. I wasn’t sure if I still fit in with those glossy, mannered mothers and fathers, or even if I wanted to, but it didn’t matter. Spencer was happy to be there with his friends.

Parents stood around outside, chatting in small groups. Everybody looked good and spoke politely and was on their best parental behavior. I milled around in my jeans and blazer, saying hello to a few people I knew. I could tell from his exuberant mood that Spencer was reveling in having this time with me, making him like every other kid whose parents were there, and making us altogether more normal than whatever it was we’d become. Seeing his happy face, his confidence, I knew I had done the right thing in not taking off for London and leaving him to start school alone.

“Hey, Mom, look at this,” Spencer said, pulling at my arm, pointing to a big green tube slide. “This is so cool.” He jumped in and disappeared. From down at the bottom I heard a faint voice cry, “Come on, Mom, you do it, too.”

I looked around self-consciously, making sure no other parents were watching, and climbed in. Before I could register what was happening,
Whoosh!
, I was speeding down the chute at top speed. It swerved to the left, then swerved to the right before shooting me out at the end. Wham! Bam! Butt on the ground, feet in the air, splat in the sandy dirt. Not a particularly glamorous arrival but Spencer was delighted. He jumped up and down, laughing and clapping. The parents standing at the bottom of the slide looked down at me with a slightly puzzled expression. I got up, dusted off my jeans and jacket, smiled, and stuck out my hand.

“Hi, I’m Carol Joynt,” I said. “Spencer’s mom.” We shook hands all around.

“Nice to meet you.”

Spencer beamed. I was behaving, in his eyes, like a parent. Yes, for an instant, we were like everyone else, Carol and Spencer Normal.

T
HE NEWS BUSINESS
covers “real” people every day, and every day people in the news business think they understand the real world so they can tell us about it. In fact, some of them believe they’re authorities on it; very few of them are. They do travel to a lot of places most people don’t get to go and see a lot of things most people never see except on television—and they do it on somebody else’s dime. (Actually dollars, and lots of them.) But the truth is, most of those in the present-day mainstream news business live sheltered, privileged lives, far removed from the reality most people face. Maturity and authentic life experience are not prerequisites for the job. How you look tends to matter more than what you are and what you know. Of course there are exceptions. They prove the rule.

Everybody likes to be pampered. The news business, particularly television, pampered me as much as Howard did, maybe more. Every day’s mail brought a pile of new books from publishers. I took that for granted. We all did. Broadway publicists sold me the best house seats for the hot new shows. Nothing not to like about that. Every day was a little bit of Christmas. I was invited to important dinners with important people and got a good seat at a good table.

The grittier parts of the job were also touched with fairy dust. When Charlie Rose and I flew to San Francisco to interview Charles Manson, he was the one behind the bars, not us. We could walk in and out of the prison. We could view San Francisco Bay at will. A day spent with a paralyzed and wheelchair-bound Christopher Reeve, in the process of a taping for
Larry King Live
, was humbling but also a privilege few could experience. It was tedious waiting for Elizabeth Taylor to come down from her hotel room, get in the limo, and ride to the studio for an interview with Larry, but on the other hand, how many people get to spend an entire afternoon with Elizabeth Taylor?
My son got to meet some heroes, such as actor Bill Murray, who got goofy with him in makeup, and Titanic explorer Robert Ballard, who posed with him for a picture. Spencer; his new live-in babysitter, Erica Hart; and I were guests of Disney for the perk-heavy VIP maiden voyage of their new cruise ship.

Certainly my life at CNN was interesting and sometimes glamorous, but it was about as close to the real world as the Washington media’s annual self-promoting lovefest—the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—where the “journalists” get dressed up in their finest duds to tell one another how great they are and to count the celebrity notches in their belts. When I was introduced as a producer for CNN, people would ask me about serious world issues or events in Washington, assuming I
knew
. After all, I was a producer for CNN. I had to know what was going on. You can get used to people assuming you know what’s going on. They’ll even grant you gravitas. Look at George Will, the poster child for gravitas. Almost anyone who’s on television in Washington is granted the assumption of authority.

It was fun to live in that bubble of faux importance where it’s so easy to believe it’s all about you. It’s not. People who forget that can find themselves quite alone when, voluntarily or forcibly, they leave the bubble for the chilly world outside. I’ve lived it both ways. Once I gave up the news business, and became only a saloon owner, nobody asked me about the world again. Ironically, owning a small business, being a solo parent, battling the IRS, I knew more about the world than ever before, but if I wasn’t working for a network or a newspaper, what could I possibly know? That’s life out in the cold. It’s tough. I understood and didn’t fault anyone.

After spending the day dealing with a recalcitrant general manager at the business I had inherited, or preparing my son for school, or listening to lawyers explain the latest restrictions put on me by the IRS, I would spend the evening reconciling my real and shrinking bank balance. That’s why it became difficult to show up at
Larry King Live
with a smile and to take seriously whether I did or didn’t have a home phone number for Tom Cruise. I didn’t blame Wendy. She had a job to do. She wanted me to be the person she’d hired, doing the job she’d hired me to do. From CNN to Nathans, people wanted life to be the
way it was when Howard was alive. I did, too, but I knew that was gone forever. I’d learned my lawyer talk: You can’t unring the bell.

Of all the precious things Howard’s death cost me, the worst was my faith in him, but what hurt the most at that moment was the way it set me up to fail at
Larry King Live
. I didn’t actually quit the show for another year, but after Diana died I was a falling star who checked in, did what she could, and checked out. I played my hand. They knew my limits. I’d like to say I flamed out but no, there was nothing spectacular about the way my career faded away. Just a slow fizzle.

In the meantime, I loved being in the bubble when I could. I used any excuse for a trip to New York. The babysitter, Erica, was excellent and also the apple of Spencer’s eye. She’d just graduated from Georgetown University and was taking a chill year. Nobody had to push me to go, and I could leave without guilt. I called Spencer in the morning, again after school, and at bedtime. Of course I missed him but I knew he would enjoy my good mood when I brought it back home. Sometimes, when the trip butted against a weekend and it was practical, I took him with me. We’d see family friends, wander in Central Park, tour museums, eat and play, and generally have a great time in the greatest of cities.