Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (30 page)

As wonderful as Capus’s offer was, she dreaded taking the job under the circumstances. She knew very well what would come next if she said yes: outrage from Curry’s fans and people (like herself  ) who were supporters of women’s rights, attacks on her for being the bi-otch who’d benefited from Curry’s bumbles, criticism of her performance by both critics and colleagues when the ratings weren’t instantly repaired. She felt—rightly—that she deserved better than to be cast as the villain in some play she had never sought a role in.

Capus, through his slightly too-large and -long-lasting smile, asked her if she wanted the cohost job.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Guthrie’s main concern, as she told Capus, was “lowering the temperature,” by which she meant getting beyond the current crisis mode and regaining a sense of normalcy on the set. Guthrie had no idea, for example, how Lauer felt about her being promoted, or how Morales—theoretically the woman next in line for the job—would take the news. And she had to at least consider the possibility that she’d be ushered off the couch in a year, just as Curry had been. As we’ve established, morning TV could be notoriously hard on its women. Indeed, in just a few weeks Erica Hill, a cohost of the still-third-place
CBS This Morning
, would simply not be on the set one morning, and her absence would go utterly unexplained; a new cohost, Norah O’Donnell, would join a month later. (But CBS sidestepped controversy by removing Hill swiftly—“they decided on Wednesday and told us on Thursday; it happened so fucking fast it didn’t have time to leak,” said one senior producer—and then introducing O’Donnell slowly. NBC’s mismanagement of Curry made CBS seem more humane by comparison.) Taking a tack that surely would have made her agent Glantz nauseous, Guthrie suggested that the network reintroduce her to the audience as just a temporary cohost. “I’ll fill in for you for a year” and then they could decide where to go from there, she said to Capus.

This idea did not sit well with the news chief. He wanted NBC to look as if it knew what it was doing, and was proceeding with confidence according to a plan, as opposed to groping its way through the kind of difficult period familiar to anyone who has ever accidentally shot himself while cleaning a firearm. Although he had been a staunch Curry supporter, especially in his secret war with Bell, he could tolerate only this much indecision for so long. His boss, Steve Burke, wanted this done before the Olympics, so that’s what he had to do: get this done.

At forty Guthrie looked as if she was right and ready for the role. She hadn’t always been a high achiever; in high school, shockingly, C’s had been the norm for her. But in college she had begun to step up. “I was not always a big gunner academically or anything,” she said, “but over time I think I raised the standards for myself of what I thought I should do or be able to do.” After graduation her first TV job was at an NBC station in Butte, Montana—which shut down just two weeks after she started. Undeterred, she found a job at an ABC station in Columbia, Missouri. And after two years there she moved back to Tucson for a job at KVOA, the NBC station in town. But she had a nagging desire to go to law school. “She knew she didn’t want to be in local TV forever,” said her friend Ted Robbins, who taught her broadcast journalism in college and now reports for NPR. Robbins encouraged her to enroll. “I don’t say this to everybody, but I said, ‘Dream big. You’ve got the chops. There’s no reason you shouldn’t do it.’”

In 2000 she did, studying at Georgetown University but keeping a foot in the television world by freelancing as a reporter for WRC, the NBC affiliate in Washington. She recalled, “I would be at law school all day and then they’d call me and say, ‘Can you work the three-to-eleven shift?’ I’d be covering some murder in Gaithersburg or something, waiting for the eleven o’clock news, and I’d have my law book on my lap, studying.”

Guthrie earned the top score on the Arizona Bar Exam after graduating in 2002. “It was in law school that whatever was hiding in the background in my personality, in terms of wanting to be at the top of my game, rushed to the forefront,” she said. “Suddenly I was studying really hard. It wasn’t because I wanted to get an A, it was because I didn’t want to get an F.” She added, almost apologetically, “I don’t do all this to try to be Miss Perfect or something, it’s because I’m afraid that I’ll fail.”

Guthrie at that point was still torn between television and law. She had a prestigious clerkship lined up with a federal judge in Washington, but, gathering her courage, she turned it down and started sending out audition tapes. Some agents told her she’d be lucky “to get in the forties,” meaning a TV market like Austin, Norfolk, or Oklahoma City. But with help from a believer at the William Morris Agency she landed a trial correspondent job at Court TV.

The job was “perfect, written in the stars,” Guthrie said, for it blended her interests in television and law. Guthrie traveled across the country covering events like the Michael Jackson child molestation trial in 2005 in Santa Maria, California, where she cute-met the BBC producer Mark Orchard: the Court TV and BBC live shot positions were side by side, and, well, the rest was B-roll. Orchard at the time had just split up with his wife Anne Kornblut, a
New York Times
reporter, which would later lead to unfair claims that Guthrie was a home-wrecker. In fact the two women are friendly: when Kornblut remarried in 2010 and had a child in 2011, Guthrie was invited to the baby shower.

Guthrie and Orchard were married in 2005, but they divorced after three years. By then Guthrie had moved on up to NBC, thanks in part to Court TV’s publicity strategy. As a way to generate attention for itself, the channel sought to book correspondents like Guthrie as guests for legal news segments on other networks. So Guthrie started appearing on MSNBC and on the
Today
show. “That’s how I think I came to the attention of NBC,” she said.

When her Court TV contract came up for renewal in 2007, NBC snapped her up and made her a correspondent in Washington, as well as an occasional fill-in daytime anchor on MSNBC. Her first experience in that latter post came on March 10, 2008, the day of New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s spectacular downfall. “Someone handed me a piece of paper and it said, ‘Eliot Spitzer involved in a prostitution ring.’ And they said, ‘Go’ and I said, ‘There is nothing here. Involved in? What does that mean?’” Her years at law school and on Court TV had borne fruit. She chose her words carefully on the air, making a smashing first impression.

Later in the year, after briefly covering Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s vice presidential campaign, Guthrie was made an NBC correspondent at the White House, backing up Chuck Todd. She was obviously being groomed. Todd and Guthrie hit it off, and a year later they started cohosting a post–
Morning Joe
morning newscast,
The Daily Rundown
, on MSNBC. Not long after she got the White House beat, however, she’d started looking for a way out of it. The reason, she said, was hard to put into words, but it’s clear that she internalized the stress of the position. “You can never feel that you know everything, that you’ve talked to everyone, that you have enough sources. I just put a ton of pressure on myself,” she said.

The toughest career move she ever made, though, was probably the one she made by not fleeing Studio 1A after Curry had her on-camera meltdown on June 28.

Guthrie’s ascent at
Today
had started slowly, with a morning or two reading the news on
Weekend Today
; then a morning or two filling in as a weekend host; then a morning or two reading the news on the weekday show. Baby steps. At first she didn’t see
Today
as a career trajectory for herself. She
was
looking for a way off the White House beat. But for a while in 2010, Guthrie feared telling Steve Capus about her desire to get the hell off Obama’s lawn. Although those around her knew that Guthrie was a rising star at NBC, someone the network wanted to keep happy, she, in full Debbie Downer mode, was afraid he’d say, “Well, that’s your job—it’s the White House or nothing.” If she wanted out, she said, “I honestly thought, ‘I’m going to have to leave TV.’”

As usual, her worst fears about herself weren’t realized. “To my surprise and happiness, when I finally confessed, ‘OK, I kind of think I want to be moved off the White House at some point,’ he didn’t say, ‘Get outta here,’ he said, ‘OK, we’ll have to come up with something for you.’ I was relieved.” That “something” became the nine a.m. hour of
Today
, cohosted by Curry, Morales, and Roker. With Curry being bumped up to cohost in June 2011, the hour needed a new cast member.

When Capus came to Guthrie’s office in Washington to talk through the possibility with her, she was leaning back in her chair, reading a law journal.

“Really?” he asked.

“This is catnip to me. I love this,” she told him, though when interviewed for this book she added, “Don’t get the wrong impression—
People
magazine was probably hiding inside of it. I’ve fully reconciled my flighty side and my nerdy side.”

When offered the nine a.m. hour and then a second title, that of chief legal analyst, Guthrie didn’t hesitate. She loved the mix of stories on the show—“It fits all the different facets of my personality”—and all the opportunities to apply her law degree to boot. “The reason I love the
Today
show is because we do real news, we cover politics, do legal things, but it’s really fun to clown around on a cooking segment, too, or to go to a concert and dance,” she said. Guthrie’s ability to dance and profound inability to cook became running jokes on the nine a.m. hour. She quickly bonded with Roker (despite his playful tendency to call her Samantha instead of Savannah) and Morales.

Guthrie said that when she was given the nine a.m. job, “There was no part of me that thought, ‘Oh what’s the next thing?’ I was so happy to be there.” Not only wasn’t she striving for the top job on
Today
, her friends said, she feared the perception that she was. Yet when Capus told her that Curry had failed her yearlong stint in the seven and eight a.m. hours, and asked her to move up, she knew she had to accept his offer. No network journalist says no to the president—certainly not when one of the most prestigious jobs in the television world is there for the taking, no matter the circumstances.

*  *  *

Four minutes after Curry signed off, Guthrie took her place on the couch, right near where the tissue box should have been. It was time to start the nine a.m. hour of the
Today
show.

Normally the super-soft third hour starts outside on the plaza, with the cohosts surrounded by a sea of adoring fans. It was a handoff of sorts, a time when Lauer and Curry would say goodbye and Morales, Roker, and Guthrie would take over. On June 28, though, Curry had already left and Lauer chose not to participate. So Guthrie, Morales, and Roker sat on the couch and pretended nothing out of the ordinary had just transpired.

Part of one’s job as a morning show host is to divine what the viewers are thinking (“This fat cat may be cute, but what about his health!”). Guthrie sensed right away that Curry’s sign-off had gone not quite as well as Evel Knievel’s Snake River Canyon jump, but she had no time to figure out even what her own feelings were, or to compose a proper face. She wrapped up the nine a.m. hour by leading a cooking segment, then immediately joined Lauer at the anchor desk—which, if Curry’s supporters had had anything to say about it, would have been sealed off with crime scene tape at that very moment—for a network-wide special report at ten a.m., when the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Obama administration’s health care overhaul was announced. Guthrie’s versatility reminded a lot of people at NBC why they’d elected to go with a legal analyst and former White House correspondent rather than a red-carpet chatterbox from the E! network. As Capus pointed out, “If we wanted to pursue someone perhaps flashier from the show business world, we could have. But we weren’t aiming for an immediate ratings surge. We were thinking long-term.”

The next day, Friday, Guthrie cohosted
Today
with nary a hint of how awkward she felt. A few hours after the broadcast, NBC confirmed with a press release what everyone already knew: that she was the chosen one. She’d start the new job on July 9, a schedule that allowed for emotional recovery and the banking of some sleep. Under the terms of her new contract, Guthrie would be paid about three million dollars a year to cohost
Today
, one-eighth as much as Lauer, the show’s veteran, who, it turned out, had renewed his contract and gotten his raise during the very last week of the
Today
show’s streak back in April. Guthrie’s lack of long tenure was one of her most attractive qualities in the eyes of NBC execs. At age forty, she could have a long career. If everything worked out.

*  *  *

In the immediate wake of the Ann thing, as it became known around Studio 1A, the mood around NBC was…well, a mixture of numerous emotional elements, but perhaps most notably relief. Yes, the nasty messages continued coming in to Lauer, who was wrongly seen by many as being 100 percent responsible for his cohost’s departure. And yes, Curry herself was in hiding: her closed office door bore a red Post-it note that read, “DO NOT ENTER.” Yet as horribly as her send-off had gone—and as sure as a lot of people at NBC were that a lot of other people at NBC were to blame for the on-air debacle—there had been almost universal support for the change itself…which was, let us thank the Lord, now behind them. Lauer “looked relieved,” said a staffer, “because he was.” And why shouldn’t he be? He would no longer need to load his eyes with daggers before each broadcast. Guthrie, a woman who cared deeply about turning the
Today
show around, was now on the case. “It’s like the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders,” said another staffer.

In a memo to his twelve senior staff members dated July 10, Jim Bell tried to rally his troops and find the bright side of his show’s fall to second place in the ratings: