Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (7 page)

Impressed by Bell’s intelligence and his propensity for hard work, Falco offered him a job at NBC Olympics. By the time of the next Summer Games, in 1996, Bell was a coproducer of daytime coverage. He continued working his way up the Olympics ladder and, along the way, produced innumerable football, baseball, basketball, and tennis broadcasts for the network. A talented and well-regarded guy’s guy, he was not only a friend of the NBC Olympics boss Dick Ebersol but widely believed to be Ebersol’s heir apparent. Bell shared Ebersol’s love of old-school television perquisites—first-class airfare, only the best hotels and restaurants, and, at
Today
, front-row spots at the show’s concerts. His wife Angelique sometimes tagged along to the concerts and boogied just out of camera range. “Nobody has loved being the
Today
show executive producer more than Jim Bell,” said one of the show’s producers.

Bell had earned all the perks—he’d repeatedly stopped
GMA
from stealing first place. Now he was trying to stop it again. He, in concert with Burke, had not only a plan but a timeline: try to renew Lauer’s contract by April, then try to get rid of Curry by June, then reintroduce the
Today
family on the stage he knew best: the Olympics.

Chapter 4

“Here Comes the Storm!”

Which was a better party, the on-air one that the
Today
show threw for itself on January 13, 2012, to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, which featured taped congratulations from President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle—or the loud private bash held at the Edison Ballroom the night before?

The answer will depend on how you feel about Hoda Kotb rapping center stage with her ten a.m. cohost Kathie Lee Gifford, and Katie Couric rhythmically grinding against Megan Kopf’s PR boss Lauren Kapp.

Yes, the Edison Ballroom was the better party. While the hip-hop artists Pitbull and Flo Rida performed, and the champagne flowed, and a pride of former
Today
show lions like Barbara Walters and Bryant Gumbel looked on parentally from a VIP section above the dance floor, the current stars and their stressed-out producers blew off some serious steam. “No reporters!” shouted Savannah Guthrie, shy as ever, when I tried to say hi. “Me spanking Kathie Lee—that was off the record.”

At about nine, a dance band took over, and Capus jumped onstage to play a not-bad rhythm guitar. NBC paid extra for the band to keep playing till eleven thirty, an hour and a half longer than expected. Guthrie, who had no kids at home to worry about, stayed longer than almost any other cast member. “A year ago,” she said, alluding to her position as a White House correspondent for NBC and an anchor on MSNBC, “all I knew was Medicare Part B. Now I know Flo Rida!”

The next morning, Friday the thirteenth, as generations of
Today
show hosts gathered to be interviewed in the studio, Guthrie, resplendent in a bright red dress, but not wanting to overstate her role in the proceedings, stood at the very end of the line, just past Natalie Morales. This was a day to celebrate the rich heritage of the show, a day for all those
Today
veterans assembled—Barbara Walters (1966–1976), Jane Pauley (1976–1989), Bryant Gumbel (1982–1997)—to talk about how the show had changed their lives, yes, but mainly to watch the highlight reels stitched together lovingly by the staff—Oh, look, there’s me probing for the serious side of Tiny Tim!—and to listen as the Obamas paid tribute to the franchise’s importance. “So many Americans start their day right here,” the first lady said in a prerecorded piece, “watching all of you as they’re getting ready for work and sending their kids off to school.” The president picked up where she left off. “Over decades and across generations,” he said, “the
Today
show has become a part of American culture. A place where millions tune in to see how their world has changed overnight. That’s why we’re so pleased to join all of you in celebrating this remarkable milestone.” Michelle concluded, “And we know you’ll have many more years of success.” The Obamas are technically neutral in the morning show wars, though what that means is that they pay roughly equal attention to the Big Two. It’s hard to imagine the first couple doing a drop-by on, say,
Fox & Friends
.

“Thank you for your legacy,” Curry said to the assembled group after Tom Hanks rolled out a birthday cake. Huh? Anniversary, shmanniversary: in terms of impossible-to-respond-to comments, it was, for her, business as usual. Then all the hosts were shooed outside for a class photo on the plaza. The moment would double as a televised champagne toast to the staff of
Today
, dozens of whom stood to the sides of the assembled all-stars. It was a little after nine a.m.—making this a long morning for the guests who had arrived before six for hair and makeup. Walters, eighty-three, had already left, as had ninety-one-year-old Hugh Downs. When Couric asked Lauer what was coming up next, he teased her: “What, do you have somewhere to go?” Lauer, standing symbolically in the center of the group, huddled for warmth with the woman who had succeeded Couric as cohost, Meredith Vieira. Out here they ducked raindrops and wondered what was taking so long. It seemed one cohost was missing: Curry.

When she ran outside a minute later, a sharp gust of wind blew through the canyons of Rockefeller Center. The raindrops temporarily turned to ice pellets, stinging the faces of the assembled hosts. Curry positioned herself on the periphery of the group, lest she appear to be butting into the center of the shot. But she was the cohost of
Today
—the center was where she belonged. Vieira noticed and shouted “Ann! Ann!” convincing Curry to dart over to her.

The last person involved in the photo shoot to come outside was Jim Bell. He took his place beside Lauer and Curry and nodded to the camera when the control room cut to a shot of him holding his champagne glass high, seeming to savor the moment. One might have reasonably asked why he seemed so purely triumphant, since there was real reason for concern. The week of the anniversary party, the
Today
show averaged 5.54 million viewers, about 677,000 more than
GMA
. The same week a year earlier, the gap between the two shows had been 1.13 million. Total viewership of the two shows had stayed more or less the same, meanwhile, which meant that a substantial stream of
Today
viewers were defecting to
GMA
.

As the icy drizzle started to intensify, the hosts and producers dashed back inside, dropping their half-full champagne glasses on a table by the entrance. Curry, before she went inside, looked up at the angry sky and said, a little bit too presciently, “Now here comes the storm!”

*  *  *

Actually, the dark clouds had been gathering above the gleaming Lauerdome for years. Pretty much everyone in the industry agreed that Lauer was the best male morning show host in history. Capus would say it perfectly later in 2012: “It’s as if the man was born to do a program like
Today
.”

But he’d been doing it for longer than just about any
Today
host ever had, even Couric. His contract wasn’t set to expire until December of 2012, but in 2010, before Comcast formally took control of NBC, Steve Burke had been concerned enough about the waning enthusiasm of
Today
’s longest-running host to reach out to him. Burke had heard secondhand stories about Lauer telling makeup artists and golfing buddies that he was looking forward to waking up when he wanted to, not when his iPhone alarm dictated. “Matt had told people that he was not happy on the show and was not happy with the direction of the show,” said one NBC executive. “You have to think about how tired he must be,” said another. Lauer’s wife Annette, who nearly divorced him in 2006 amid affair rumors, wanted him to quit the morning grind and stop dividing his time between Manhattan, where they had a 5.9-million-dollar Park Avenue apartment, and the Hamptons, where they had a fifteen-million-dollar estate on twenty-five acres. Annette kept reminding him that Bryant Gumbel, his predecessor and best friend, seemed to be enjoying his days in semiretirement.

With two years still left on Lauer’s five-year contract, Burke invited Lauer to a get-to-know-you dinner, the first of many that they had in 2010 and 2011. Lauer was honest about the fact that he might want to leave at the end of his contract term—“I’ve been doing this a long time, and I don’t know whether I want to keep doing it,” he would say—and Burke honestly sympathized. He just wanted Lauer to know that NBC’s new owners respected
Today
, and NBC News, and most of all him.

Lauer in turn wanted assurances that Comcast did not have plans to change
Today
into a tabloid-style show. If that was what they intended, that was their prerogative—but he didn’t want to be a part of it. Lauer took his role on
Today
seriously, just as Gumbel had in the eighties and nineties. He saw himself as the keeper of its flame. He had watched the show himself, growing up in the New York City suburb of Westchester, and studied telecommunications at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in the late seventies. He interned during his senior year at WOWK, a CBS affiliate eighty miles south of Athens in Huntington, West Virginia. When the station offered him a job producing and writing the noon newscast, he jumped—and dropped out of college four credits shy of a diploma. (The credits were in a classic literature course and he thought he’d find time to finish later, but never did. He wrote a paper about his experiences since college to get an honorary degree in 1997.)

From WOWK Lauer hopped from market to market, with stops along the way in Richmond, Providence, and Boston, but the infotainment shows he fronted kept being canceled—a sequence of failures that left him doubting his future in the television business. Then WWOR, at the time an independent New York City station, called. The station wanted him to host
9 Broadcast Plaza
, a three-hour morning talk show. This show, he said later, “was a precursor to a lot of the lowest-common-denominator talk shows you see on the air now. The producers booked debates on ridiculous subjects, brought in people from both sides, and loved it when those people screamed and stuck their fingers in one another’s chests.”

Lauer said he probably shouldn’t have taken the job. The breaking point was the station’s proposal that he read live commercials, the same way
Today
cohosts had in the 1950s. After he resisted he was fired, but not before Ken Lindner, a TV agent in Los Angeles, was so impressed by one of Lauer’s interviews that he flew to New York to meet Lauer in the flesh.

“What would make your heart sing?” Lindner asked Lauer at their lunch meeting.

Lauer joked that his heart would sing if he stayed employed for more than thirteen weeks at a time. Then he answered honestly: “I’d like to host the
Today
show or be Larry King.”

Well, if that’s the goal, Lindner thought, you’re on the wrong track. Lauer needed a hard news background, breaking news experience, and the kind of credibility that you’re not going to get on shows like
9 Broadcast Plaza
.

In retrospect, then, the pink slip from
9 Broadcast Plaza
was a very well-disguised blessing. Lauer spent the subsequent fifteen months mostly unemployed, helped along only by temporary work from ESPN and HBO, while Lindner shopped him to stations. There were offers for Lauer to host infomercials, proposals for him to tape pilot episodes of game shows—but the two men had agreed that if Lauer ever wanted to host a show like
Today
, then, as Lauer put it in a 2007 interview, “There were certain things I couldn’t do, there were certain paychecks I couldn’t accept. We stuck with that strategy to the point of pain.”

Lauer and his golden retriever Waldon had moved out of Manhattan and into a cheaper rental fifty miles north of the city. Rent was coming due when, desperate for cash, he answered a help-wanted ad from a tree-trimming company. Rationalizing the phone call, he thought, “I love the outdoors. I can operate a chain saw. I am young enough to climb trees.” Out in the wilderness no one would see him, thus he might be able to return to television someday with his dignity intact.

The next call was from Rockefeller Center—and it wasn’t about trimming the Christmas tree on the plaza. It was from the office of Bill Bolster, the general manager of WNBC, the network’s flagship station in New York City. Bolster’s assistant asked Lauer, “Are you available tomorrow night?” The assistant had no idea, of course, that Lauer was flat broke and holed up in a cottage with his dog. “Of course,” he answered.

Their dinner meeting was held at the 21 Club, the celebrated restaurant two blocks from Rockefeller Center. Bolster wanted Lauer to anchor
Today in New York
, the six-to-seven a.m. show on WNBC that preceded the nationwide
Today
. Lauer jumped at the opportunity. WNBC was the perfect place for him to build up his news credentials—the perfect practice for
Today
. Before long he was being noticed in two important places: the
Today
show control room and the NBC executive offices. Jack Welch, the CEO of GE, which owned the network at the time, “was a huge champion of Matt’s,” Andrew Lack recalled, as was Zucker, who noticed him early on at WNBC. The networks promote their morning shows by having “cross-talks” with big-city stations during the six a.m. hour, and Zucker noticed that when Lauer chatted with Couric or Gumbel in these teases, he had a comfort level that many local anchors lacked.

When NBC began to look for a new
Today
news anchor in 1993, Lack took a look at the tapes and at the live newscasts Lauer was cohosting. And he started checking off the boxes: Whip-smart. Experienced. Relatable. Humble. Self-deprecating. Lauer had it all. “You know, it’s not hard to spot talent,” Lack said humbly. “Whoever saw Mickey Mantle swing a bat first knew this guy could play baseball. Matt’s a Mickey Mantle.”