When Katie Couric was co-hosting the "Today Show" with Bryant Gumbel, the show's ratings went way up , and NBC was happy. Katie got a big office with a view. I went there to tape her for a magazine profile, and she walked me over to the windows that looked out on Saks Fifth Avenue. "Can you believe this?" she said, laughing.
There's a bit of a back-story . Katie and I met when we were both working at CNN, she in Atlanta, I in New York. Our coversations mostly took place over the phone. Katie: "Can you cut off early and give me another five minutes?" Chris: "No, I can't." She was a producer, I was "talent." (They call an on-air person "talent," even if that person is a dope.) Katie was ambitious, dedicated to journalism, and very smart.
But when CNN sent her to Washington, she was scared. She was assigned the task of showing up at the White House every morning, and telling the audience what the President would be doing that day. The first time she had to carry out the mission, she was sick to her stomach , but she put on her blazer, combed her hair, and went to the White House "so I could stand there and say,"' 'Today, President Reagan will be meeting with National Security advisor Zbigniew Brezhinski.' I was a disaster. I looked like I was fourteen, and my voice was awful."
In the immortal words of Roseanne Roseannadanna, never mind. Katie started taking voice lessons, and wrestling with what she called her midwestern twang. ("I said things like can-a-dit.") One day (twang notwithstanding) along came NBC and offered her the world. Or at least the "Today Show." She was great for the show, and the show was great for her. She travelled everywhere, she interviewed actors, writers, musicians, big shots and nut cases. In Tripoli, she attempted to pry words from Muamar Khadafi, while he sat in his tent swatting flies, and pretended he couldn't speak English. "The interview from hell," she called it, but somewhere along the way, she had found her confidence, and after that it was onward and upward. There were still worlds to conquer.
So Katie went to CBS to anchor the Nightly News. Who wouldn't be proud to sit where Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite had sat? But CBS never pulled out of third place in the ratings, and eventually, there came rumors that Katie might quit, Katie might be fired, Katie wasn't everybody's darling any more.
She soldiered on, until a couple of weeks ago when she did some interviews with Sarah Palin, the famous hockey mom, and according to the newspapers, those interviews were shown on YouTube "nearly six million times." So Katie's everybody's darling again. The fact is that I am mechanically challenged, and I don't even know what YouTube is, but it's worked for Katie. And I bet she's thinking, "Can you believe this?"
Monday, October 20, 2008
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
A Gloomy Tale
Last week, my husband got up in the middle of the night and fell down a flight of stairs. He thought he was in New York City on a nice flat floor, but he was in the woods of Suffolk County. It was no fun at all, because he sprouted large purple and red maps of the world all over his arms and chest, and his back hurts something awful
So here's what I want to know. Why do they call a flight of stairs a flight? Stairs can't fly. If they could, my husband would have been somewhere over the rainbow by now, and his back wouldn't hurt at all, instead of me dragging him to doctors in the hope that he might be pressed back into one piece. I guess the house in the woods needs to be exchanged for a ranch house that is satisfied to sit on one level. I mean, I myself fell down those perilous stairs three times. Once, my niece's boyfriend picked me up and carried me out to the car, once a kindly old lady picked me up and planted me in a chair, and once nobody else was around, so I had to phone for a taxi driver and a taxi to get me home.
A gloomy tale, but we can't all be laughing all the time.
So here's what I want to know. Why do they call a flight of stairs a flight? Stairs can't fly. If they could, my husband would have been somewhere over the rainbow by now, and his back wouldn't hurt at all, instead of me dragging him to doctors in the hope that he might be pressed back into one piece. I guess the house in the woods needs to be exchanged for a ranch house that is satisfied to sit on one level. I mean, I myself fell down those perilous stairs three times. Once, my niece's boyfriend picked me up and carried me out to the car, once a kindly old lady picked me up and planted me in a chair, and once nobody else was around, so I had to phone for a taxi driver and a taxi to get me home.
A gloomy tale, but we can't all be laughing all the time.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
ODDS and Odders: Things I Love
1. I love Sarah Palin. I haven't heard anything like her since Daisy May ran around Dogpatch in her underwear. Sarah knows how to win a war-- she hasn't yet shared her knowledge, but she has told us, "Dog-gonnit, change is comin'", and that's good enough for me. Who can resist, "You wok the wok, you don't just "tok the tok," because if you don't wok the wok, it "hurts our koz." To be sure, this may need some interpretation, but "darn" and "heck" are easily decoded, and somebody who is willing to go after both Wall Street and Afghanistan is okay in my book. I wish she wouldn't say "nucular" instead of nuclear, but George W. Bush has been doing that for eight years, and my gosh, he's the President.
2. I love the post office. At least the F.D.R. Roosevelt Station in New York city. If you go there to send a letter-- let's say to Prague-- you get a receipt for your 94 cents, and at the bottom of the receipt it says, "Tell Us About Your Recent Postal Experience." What the hell is a postal experience? Standing on line grumbling? Because it's taking so long? Discoverinng there's only one clerk at a window, and all the other windows are closed? It's mysterious, isn't it?
3. Here's another mystery. In a booklet sent out by AARP, there's a picture of a 65-year-old retired woman named Marilyn. While walking home one day, "Marilyn tripped on the curb and twisted her ankle. " What made her accident "a little easier to handle" was that AARP's Medical Supplement Plan "covered most of her medical costs." Nice, right? But, staring up at us from the botton if this page is a confession. AARP says Marilyn "is a fictitious person used for illustrative purposes."
4. I love Yale Galanter. He's the lawyer who tried to get O.J.Simpson out of a recent mess in Las Vegas, "Being stupid and being frustrated is not being a criminal," said Mr. Galanter. If I ever need a lawyer, he's the one I'm going after.
5. I love my grandmother. She's not around any more, but she made me laugh. She was a passionate watcher of soap operas, and she talked back to the actors. Some guy would be vowing that he was going to marry Our Gal Sunday, and Grandma would stand up and cry out, "That's what you think, you damn fool." She was right, of course.
2. I love the post office. At least the F.D.R. Roosevelt Station in New York city. If you go there to send a letter-- let's say to Prague-- you get a receipt for your 94 cents, and at the bottom of the receipt it says, "Tell Us About Your Recent Postal Experience." What the hell is a postal experience? Standing on line grumbling? Because it's taking so long? Discoverinng there's only one clerk at a window, and all the other windows are closed? It's mysterious, isn't it?
3. Here's another mystery. In a booklet sent out by AARP, there's a picture of a 65-year-old retired woman named Marilyn. While walking home one day, "Marilyn tripped on the curb and twisted her ankle. " What made her accident "a little easier to handle" was that AARP's Medical Supplement Plan "covered most of her medical costs." Nice, right? But, staring up at us from the botton if this page is a confession. AARP says Marilyn "is a fictitious person used for illustrative purposes."
4. I love Yale Galanter. He's the lawyer who tried to get O.J.Simpson out of a recent mess in Las Vegas, "Being stupid and being frustrated is not being a criminal," said Mr. Galanter. If I ever need a lawyer, he's the one I'm going after.
5. I love my grandmother. She's not around any more, but she made me laugh. She was a passionate watcher of soap operas, and she talked back to the actors. Some guy would be vowing that he was going to marry Our Gal Sunday, and Grandma would stand up and cry out, "That's what you think, you damn fool." She was right, of course.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Paul Newman
The world is going crazy, gloom is everywhere, and on top of all that, Paul Newman died.
It's enough to make a sane person cry, but when I went back into my files-- I'd interviewed Newman long ago, though he didn't much like the press-- I started laughing. He was a funny man who didn't give himself airs, and he said what he thought. Here are a few of the things he thought, both amusing, and serious.
1. "I had the doubtful honor of being in 'The Silver Chalice.' It was the worst movie made in the 60's. It's a wonder I even survived it. It was a disaster from beginning to end. Here I was in this curly hair and a very short cocktail dress."
2. "You build up a lot of muscles playing trombone. Then you stop playing trombone and your whole face falls. As long as you keep on playing, it's great."
3. "The studio puts out that I drink 24 bottles of beer a day. I only drink 22."
4. "I believe in sauna, sit-ups in the morning, pushups etc. It's marvelous to discover at the age of 41 that you love to run. I thought I was a natural athlete, but I was a terrible football player, and I couldn't handle tennis all that well. There are readjustments you have to make in mid life. I'm convinced I'm only about 23. It's my friends who are a lot older."
5. "Because I have six kids, I worry about a military out of control, technology out of control, the pace of our lives. Can we reverse apathetic indifference to our own future in this country? The pollution, the non-responsiveness of the government to people? There are a lot of people I consider my personal enemies. i get up in the morning, take binoculars out of my pajama pockets and scan the horizon for enemies. It's necessary to thrash away like terriers at the bad things surrounding us, and do something about it."
And here is one more bit from a man who was nominated four times for an Academy Award, but never won one.
6. "You know what I'd like t do? I'd like to win about 69 nominations-- I think that's an interesting number-- and at the age of 90, crawl on my hands and knees, ridden with arthritis, to pick up on Oscar. That would be kind of stylish."
He didn't make it to 90, but he was always stylish, and he leaves a big hole in the universe.
It's enough to make a sane person cry, but when I went back into my files-- I'd interviewed Newman long ago, though he didn't much like the press-- I started laughing. He was a funny man who didn't give himself airs, and he said what he thought. Here are a few of the things he thought, both amusing, and serious.
1. "I had the doubtful honor of being in 'The Silver Chalice.' It was the worst movie made in the 60's. It's a wonder I even survived it. It was a disaster from beginning to end. Here I was in this curly hair and a very short cocktail dress."
2. "You build up a lot of muscles playing trombone. Then you stop playing trombone and your whole face falls. As long as you keep on playing, it's great."
3. "The studio puts out that I drink 24 bottles of beer a day. I only drink 22."
4. "I believe in sauna, sit-ups in the morning, pushups etc. It's marvelous to discover at the age of 41 that you love to run. I thought I was a natural athlete, but I was a terrible football player, and I couldn't handle tennis all that well. There are readjustments you have to make in mid life. I'm convinced I'm only about 23. It's my friends who are a lot older."
5. "Because I have six kids, I worry about a military out of control, technology out of control, the pace of our lives. Can we reverse apathetic indifference to our own future in this country? The pollution, the non-responsiveness of the government to people? There are a lot of people I consider my personal enemies. i get up in the morning, take binoculars out of my pajama pockets and scan the horizon for enemies. It's necessary to thrash away like terriers at the bad things surrounding us, and do something about it."
And here is one more bit from a man who was nominated four times for an Academy Award, but never won one.
6. "You know what I'd like t do? I'd like to win about 69 nominations-- I think that's an interesting number-- and at the age of 90, crawl on my hands and knees, ridden with arthritis, to pick up on Oscar. That would be kind of stylish."
He didn't make it to 90, but he was always stylish, and he leaves a big hole in the universe.
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