Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (8 page)

What was special about Lauer, he said, was an ability to comfortably talk to anyone about anything. “Matt could talk to a fire hydrant for three hours. And you need that,” Lack said. “He’d actually be curious about fire hydrants. Why paint it red? Is that where the spout goes? Why? Is there a chain on the spout? Why do you have a chain?

“You can’t teach that to people,” Lack added. “You can teach craft—you’ve got thirteen seconds till break, look at this camera—but you can’t teach curiosity.”

Lauer started filling in as the
Today
show news anchor in 1993. He got the official nod the following year, joining Gumbel and Couric as a cast member and frequently filling in for them. The newly crowned
People
’s Sexiest Man Alive was excused from the WNBC morning show gig, but he continued to host that station’s
Live at Five
until 1996—alongside, as it happened, his future
Today
show sidekick Al Roker, who at the time was the weatherman on WNBC.

As the heir apparent to Gumbel, Lauer stuck to the “certain paychecks I couldn’t accept” strategy outlined by Lindner. He turned down a chance to host a new show called
Access Hollywood
, and, partly because doing so helped him preserve his journalistic integrity, was named the new cohost of
Today
when Gumbel decided to retire. Gumbel was clearly happy to turn over the chair to Lauer, which made his fans happy; in fact, it was the kind of transition every executive dreams about. The streak was entering its second year then, and Lauer only made the show stronger. His chemistry with Couric was legendary. “Do we get credit for recognizing it and producing it well? I hope so,” said Zucker, their producer in the 1990s. “But the fact is, the two greatest stars in the history of morning television both walked into our door within years of each other in their mid-thirties. You know?”

In morning TV, some producers say, there are two types of hosts: actors and reactors. When Lauer became a cohost in 1997, Couric was the star: she was the actor, and he was the reactor to her. It was noticeable in small but important ways: who spoke first, who set up jokes, who started and ended each broadcast. Then, when Couric left for CBS, the roles changed. Lauer stepped up and became the actor, and Meredith Vieira was the reactor to him. They knew their roles and played them exceptionally well.

Lauer was skeptical that Curry could do the same. Months before Curry was promoted, while Vieira was leaning toward leaving
Today
and Lauer was weighing whether he should, too, he talked to his old friend Couric about an idea that would have dazzled the television industry—a syndicated daytime show that would reunite the
Today
legends. The idea of a one-hour daily chatfest held considerable appeal for both Lauer and Couric. Since such shows are typically taped in advance, it would allow him a much more normal home life. And they could probably make the move without taking a significant pay cut. Couric had already been talking to Zucker about a solo show that would fill the void that Oprah Winfrey was about to create by moving to cable television. Zucker told friends that Lauer called him in late 2010 (as Zucker was packing up his NBC office) and uttered a phrase that millions of Americans have no doubt dreamed of saying: “Will you create a show for me and Katie?”

Lauer and Couric also batted around the idea of another kind of reunion—as daily cohosts of the
Today
show. Lauer, according to one of his friends, was very interested in this possibility—and not just because he was anxious about the prospect of Curry sitting next to him. Despite the squabbles they’d sometimes had over A-list interviews and airtime when they worked together, “Katie and Matt knew they were better with the other one there,” the friend said.

Couric and Lauer met up several times to talk about reuniting in some way. Her representatives imagined this scenario: Couric could come back to
Today
in the fall of 2011, take over for Vieira, and cohost with Lauer for two years. NBC, during that time, could very publicly groom two new hosts. Then Couric and Lauer could hand off the show to them and move to an afternoon time period as the cohosts of a talk show for NBC stations. Curry would be stiffed again, and would almost surely stalk off. But her departure might be overshadowed by an historic Couric-Lauer reunion. Couric admits she was mildly intrigued by the idea of returning to
Today
. “I feel like it would have been a fun thing to reunite and to show that you
can
go home again,” she said. “But I also thought, there’s a reason why I left the show.” Ultimately, it was merely a great moment in mootness. Bell did ask whether she’d think about returning to
Today
, but no one at NBC ever actually extended an offer to her. (“I’m not sure if I would have considered it seriously,” she said.) And because Lauer was contractually tied to his
Today
duties for nearly two more years, and Zucker and Couric were looking at a September 2012 start date for a syndicated show, the timing was wrong for their combined attempt to replace Oprah. A reunion in the daytime “wasn’t really viable,” said Zucker.

So Vieira left, Curry came in, and Lauer contemplated leaving for less awkward pastures. By the time the sixtieth anniversary show rolled around, everyone had started to say that Lauer was inching toward the exit. “I think our competitors started thinking that way,” Capus said. “I think the people who cover us started thinking that way. It became an echo chamber. Everybody started talking to each other, ‘Hey, Matt’s leaving, Matt’s leaving. What are they going to do, what are they going to do?’”

But Lauer himself wasn’t as certain as everyone seemed to think he was. Yeah, he’d been on a strange sleep cycle for fifteen years. He’d been trailed by paparazzi from the
National Enquirer
, which had repeatedly printed rumors about his cheating on his wife. (For what it’s worth, some executives at NBC told me they believed the rumors, including the one about a relationship with Natalie Morales. But no one believed the malicious claim that the
Enquirer
said was circulated by competitors about a “love child.” A spokeswoman for Lauer and Morales denied the affair and called the allegations reckless and irresponsible. Maybe what’s more important is that the executives didn’t think Lauer’s behavior, real or imagined, had hurt the show.) At work he’d uttered countless words put in his mouth by writers and producers who didn’t share his news sensibilities. Who would sign up for more of that? Then again, he made more money in a week than most Americans made in a year. He had a four-day workweek, access to NBC’s fleet of corporate jets, and a small army of staff to prep him for stories and persuade presidents to talk to him. His television program was one of the most popular in the country. Men fantasized about being him; women fantasized about sleeping with him (surely some of those men did, too). To an entire generation of aspiring television journalists, he represented the pinnacle, the peak of the profession. And, at age fifty-four, he had so many productive years ahead of him.

A deliberate person by nature, and also genuinely unsure of how he felt about moving on, Lauer said he wanted to postpone negotiations with the network until after the Summer Olympics, which would end in August, four and a half months before his contract expired. “He was saying, ‘I’ll wait until the end of the year and then see what’s out there,’” said one of Lauer’s friends.

Lauer was well within his rights to suggest such a thing. But Burke and Bell couldn’t be that patient. They wanted Lauer locked up contractually by April 1, a date that Burke rather arbitrarily came up with. So in February Burke officially put Lauer in the loop about the plot to replace Curry with Savannah Guthrie. Not everyone agrees on the sequence of events here. Lauer’s protectors say Burke never explicitly stated the connection between Lauer’s renewing his contract and Curry’s losing her cohost chair. They say he told Lauer that Curry would be gone regardless of his decision to stay or go. Lauer was against it, these people say, and he told them immediately that he thought it was a bad idea. “You’re willing to risk losing both of your coanchors?” he asked, and was told yes.

But this sequence of events makes very little sense. Why would NBC take that risk?

Other people with knowledge of what went down say that Lauer’s staying and Curry’s leaving were explicitly connected by Burke. According to one of these people, Burke told Lauer, “We need to sign you so we can do Ann.” This makes more sense. As a top NBC executive said to me after the fact, “Matt’s decision guided everything else.”

What is clear is that, despite reports to the contrary, Lauer never negotiated to have Curry’s ouster guaranteed in writing. Lauer didn’t want or need such a cutthroat clause because he was assured early in the process that she was a goner. Suddenly one of Lauer’s biggest hesitations about sticking around—that he’d be sitting next to Curry for years to come—wasn’t even worthy of a second thought. That’s how this business works.

To further motivate him to make up his mind quickly, Burke offered Lauer a financial incentive—a signing bonus of several million dollars, according to one person with direct knowledge of it—if he reenlisted by April, and said NBC was immediately opening the so-called contract window that allowed him to talk to other prospective employers, rather than waiting until later in the year to open it.

One signal that Lauer had come around to NBC’s expedited timeline was that he started those preliminary discussions as soon as NBC said he could. Lauer had a late breakfast at the Manhattan power spot the Regency with Richard Plepler, a copresident of HBO, where Gumbel had a monthly sports newsmagazine. He also had an early lunch with Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News, about a spot on
60 Minutes
. CBS wasn’t prepared to offer Lauer even half as much money as NBC; as Fager later put it, “it was a pure play on pride.” Still, Fager sensed that Lauer had thought about the possibility. “When any one of us has a contract up, you see it as an opportunity in life to make sure you’re going in the right direction,” he said.

Lauer’s only really serious discussions were with the Walt Disney Company, the parent of ABC, which had become the home for Couric and Zucker’s forthcoming daytime talk show. Disney had been putting out feelers to Lauer for years. Thus it hardly seemed notable when Ben Sherwood, who knew Lauer from his time at NBC, met him for a social lunch on the East Side of Manhattan shortly after stepping into the ABC News presidency at the end of 2010. But now Disney was in full pursuit mode. In early March 2012, a few weeks before Burke’s proposed April deadline, a wide-ranging package was put on the table by ABC: Lauer could join Couric on her talk show, have a high-profile role at ABC News, and contribute to ESPN, the sports empire also controlled by Disney. Notably, the package did not include a role on
GMA
. ABC thought, rightly, that Lauer would not even consider such an act of betrayal. Besides, as a practical matter, he didn’t want to wake up early anymore. At least that’s what he told Disney.

Lauer had a fruitful meeting with Disney chief executive Robert Iger in New York, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. Iger, one of these people said, was genuine and “touched all the right buttons.” Lauer also sat down repeatedly with Anne Sweeney, the president of Disney/ABC Television Group. The same person who praised Iger said Sweeney “didn’t seem to care as much about Matt coming to ABC.” She wondered whether Lauer, or any news personality for that matter, was worth a twenty-million-dollar-plus annual salary while ABC was actively trying to reduce anchor and reporter salaries elsewhere. But others with knowledge of the negotiations disputed this. Either way, the prospect of reuniting with Couric—and with Zucker, the producer of the syndicated show—was evidently quite tempting for Lauer. ABC thought, for a little while at least, that it had snared NBC’s star. “There were a number of days where it seemed to us that Matt was gonna come,” Sherwood said later.

One reason the ABC folks might have gotten that impression was that Lauer’s talks with NBC got off to such a poor start. Another person with knowledge of the negotiations pointed out that Lauer “was not happy with the management change there”—by which the person meant Comcast and Burke. None of this has ever been said on the record, and odds are it never will be: paychecks in Lauer’s league come with the understanding that no ill will toward the company will come out. But it exists, right alongside immense gratitude for the opportunities the company affords him. Comcast “was blowing it in the early going,” one of the people with knowledge of the negotiations said. “Not over money—there was money. But there was a coldness to it. A coldness to it.”

NBC took the talks seriously; they were known internally as the “big picture” discussions, since the network was ready to offer him just about anything to stay. Want more stories on
Dateline
? Easy. Want a show on the Golf Channel? Done. But remember: Lauer had tried to warn his bosses about what a Curry-cohosted
Today
show could look like, and they’d gone and done it anyway. For that reason, among other obvious ones like money and curiosity, the door to ABC “was wide open. Wide open,” said the person, who wisely noted, “David Letterman went to CBS for one reason only. NBC opened the garden gate and said, ‘Bye.’ That’s the only reason David Letterman is on the CBS television network today. NBC opened the garden gate with Matt. They’re fortunate to still have him.”

Lauer had all the leverage in the world. NBC had no obvious successor, a clear failing on the part of the network executives—but also a testament to how few men out there are in Lauer’s league. Ryan Seacrest is one of them, and when his name was floated in late 2011, he didn’t do much to discourage the speculation; nor did Bell, who may have wanted the world to think that
Today
had options in case Lauer up and left. But let’s be honest: Seacrest, who already had his own morning radio show, wasn’t about to upend his life in Los Angeles to host
Today
, and NBC wasn’t about to put him in that chair without grooming him for years. His talks with NBC were primarily about a fat new contract encompassing everything from E! to the Olympics. The eventual contract included a bit about his being a special correspondent on
Today
, propping the door open for a real seat in Studio 1A someday. But for the time being that seat was still Lauer’s. Right around April Fools’ Day he decided to stay at NBC, the network that had made him a superstar. Maybe he’d just used ABC to scare his bosses, or maybe he got scared by the prospect of leaving. Lauer, after all, is so predictable he’s borderline boring: he once called himself “a bit of an OCD person” and, as evidence, said, “God forbid someone comes over and moves a coffee-table book; I move it back three inches to where it was.”