20 
McGEE’S LAW
1971
When Hugh Downs retired from the Today show in 1971 at the age of fifty, the only people who seemed to think Barbara Walters would be a good choice to succeed him were the two of them. “I recommended to NBC that they hand over the program to Barbara,” he said. “I think the public was ready for it. But the industry wasn’t quite ready for it yet.” That included the man in charge, NBC News president Reuven Frank. “I have the strong feeling that audiences are less prepared to accept news from a woman’s voice than from a man’s,” he said.
Barbara thought she had earned the title of co-host, but she also understood the times. She had taken to heart hard lessons in realism from her father’s failed aspirations. “It never occurred to me that they would make me hostess,” she said, even in a 1973 interview using a feminine version of “host.” “It was the decision of the network that the best image of the show might be a man. Maybe they felt that it’s easier to listen to a man for two hours.”
Reuven Frank wanted to install as host an established journalist who would take the show in a more serious direction. He settled on Frank McGee, who had been a co-anchor of the NBC Nightly News. The Louisiana-born McGee was no fan of Barbara Walters, or of female colleagues in general. “He was not at ease with professionally equal women,” Reuven Frank said. Barbara was blunter. “The idea that he had to work with a woman appalled him,” she said.
McGee added daily interviews with Washington newsmakers to the show. But he bristled when Barbara, sitting by his side on the set, would cut in with her own questions. He viewed her as shallow and uninformed, as not a real journalist. When producer Stuart Schulberg dismissed his complaints, McGee demanded a meeting with Julian Goodman, the president of NBC, and included Barbara to make sure she heard the message. At the meeting, McGee argued that her participation undercut the importance of his interviews. She should stick with what he called the “girlie” interviews.
At that, she erupted. After seven years of sitting at the Today table, she wasn’t ready to go back to the days of being relegated to fashion shows and happy talk. “There are days when I come in to the studio and have to do a feature on dolls and an interview with a lady who bakes her own bread—to the exclusion of serious material,” she said soon after McGee had taken over. “On those days I could scream.”
She was no longer a newcomer to hard news. She had done substantive interviews with presidents and prime ministers as well as softer fare with actresses and authors. When McGee arrived, she was leaving for Iran to cover the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian monarchy, a spectacular event hosted by the Shah at Persepolis, the ancient desert capital of Persia, and attended by some seventy heads of state and government.
After she returned to New York, resolving the conflict with her new colleague would fall in the lap of Richard Wald, a vice president of NBC News who succeeded Reuven Frank as president. “One of my first jobs… was to sit down with Barbara and Frank [McGee] and iron it out,” Wald told me. Their perspectives could hardly have been more different. “She thought of Frank as an equal whom she wanted to approve of her. And he thought of her as an underling whom he didn’t approve of.”
When Wald told him Barbara would be covering President Richard Nixon’s historic trip to China, he snapped, “China’s not far enough.”
Wald helped negotiate new rules: McGee would ask the first three questions without interruption during remote interviews from Washington. Only then was Barbara allowed to speak. If a newsmaker came into the New York studio, McGee would decide whether she could participate at all. The agreement was kept quiet. Barbara put the best sheen on it, portraying it as her choice, not his edict. She told a reporter she was allowing the men to ask their questions first because she was trying “not to be too authoritative, or people will say I’m aggressive.”
By the time Wald and I sat down to talk, a half-century had passed since he had arbitrated that battle. He didn’t try to defend the arrangement they negotiated. He agreed it would be laughable if it weren’t so offensive by any modern measure, so sexist and insulting. But that was just the way things were then. He knew it. So did a triumphant Frank McGee. So did a fuming Barbara Walters.
Even so, Wald and Barbara became good friends and professional allies. He immediately liked her more than he did the stiff-spined McGee, a sourpuss to his colleagues. When Wald was new to NBC, he made a point of going around to introduce himself. “Mr. McGee, my name is Wald,” he said. McGee replied with a sneer, “Another one.” Wald was never sure what, exactly, he meant by that.
When Wald introduced himself to Barbara, she replied, “Hello, nice to meet you. What are you doing here?” Wald replied, “Well, I’m trying to learn how this place works.” She said, “Call me the minute you know.”
“I thought that was a pretty good answer,” he said. “She’s a very, very smart woman and that was apparent from the moment I met her.”
They became so close that when she wanted to see Deep Throat, a pornographic movie that had gained mainstream attention when it was released in 1972, she demanded that he escort her.
“Everybody’s talking about it,” she told him. “I want to see it. I can’t go by myself.” They agreed they would go the next day, after Today was off the air, to the 12:30 p.m. showing at the World Theatre. Wald’s wife was less than pleased. “I go home that night and I explained to my wife, ‘I’m going to take Barbara Walters to a porn show.’ And she said, ‘You will not.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am,’ and we had a big fight about it.”
For the movie, Barbara donned a disguise: oversized hat, dark glasses, and, for some reason, gloves. “I don’t want anybody to know who I am,” she explained. She also brought food in her purse for them to share, given the lunchtime hour. When they arrived, the theater was packed. The only seats available together were in the middle of the center section, forcing them to climb over a long row of other patrons.
Wald described the scene to me in an interview at the Century Club, one of those private New York enclaves so old-school that cell phones and audio recorders could be deployed only in the waiting room. By then he was ninety-two years old, tall and bent and long retired, but every detail of the episode seemed fresh in his mind, and more hilarious than ever. As Wald’s voice rose louder and we dissolved into laughter over the memory of the infamous pornographic movie, a respectable sort sitting in an upholstered chair across the room began to peer at us over his Financial Times broadsheet with clear disdain and perhaps a little alarm. That reaction presumably would have been even more common at the time.
“We start walking our way through and people are shouting as we’re going through, ‘Take off your hat, lady!’ and Barbara is not taking her hat off when we finally sit down,” he recalled. “The man behind us, as we are sitting down, says, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, take off your hat, lady.’ She won’t take her hat off. She reaches down into her bag. Pulls out all different kinds of candy and she said, ‘We’re going to eat candy and watch the movie’ in a loud, Barbara Walters voice. I said, ‘Missus, will you kindly shut up?’ And the guy behind me says, ‘Yeah, tell her to shut up.’ ”
By now the movie was under way. The plot, such as it was, involved a woman looking for advice on achieving an orgasm. A psychiatrist discovered that her clitoris was located in her throat, and she developed a particular technique for oral sex, dubbed “deep throat.” As a provocative poster for the movie asked, “How far does a girl have to go to untangle her tingle?”
Barbara began to offer her own running commentary. She may have been insistent about keeping on her big hat as a disguise, but she made no effort to disguise her distinctive voice.
“She says sarcastically to me, ‘What a wonderful dialogue,’ in a loud Barbara Walters voice,” Wald recalled. He tried to point out that the woman’s eloquence might have been hurt by her sexual engagement. “ ‘So what?’ I said. ‘It’s hard for her to speak at the moment,’ and Barbara says she could find a way. Well, twenty-five minutes later, the movie is fairly repetitious; has no deep plot. Barbara says, ‘Okay, we’ve done it.’ She stands up and starts to walk out, over me. I said, ‘Well, at least give me a moment to get up.’ ” They both began climbing over the long row of moviegoers still watching the screen, or trying to.
“As we’re walking out, she turns to the assembled,” Wald recounted. “She said, ‘Don’t tell me how it comes out.’ ” At that point, he said, “I realize that she was not exactly a serious person all the time.”
Facing the implacable hurdle that was McGee, Barbara devised a way to work around him. Their arrangement set rules for interviews from the New York studio. But nothing stopped her from arranging interviews outside the studio and asking the first question herself, along with all those that followed. “If I just came into the studio every morning, I would never be chosen as the interviewer instead of another man,” she said. “I have to get my own interviews. I’m not whining or bitter, feel no competition with the other men—that would ruin the show. But there are certain things I have to do to maintain my position.”
It was a crucial decision, one on which the rest of her career would turn. In a way, she would have McGee to thank. “[T]hat’s when I got the reputation of being ambitious and aggressive in pursuit of interviews,” she said with no regret. “The ‘pushy cookie.’ ”
She began sending handwritten letters to newsmakers she wanted to interview, especially those who had rarely done interviews and who might be game to talk someplace other than the Today studio. She sat down with elusive auto executive Henry Ford II in Dearborn, Michigan. Presidential daughter Tricia Nixon in Monticello, Virginia. Renowned conductor Leopold Stokowski in his New York apartment. Cornelia Wallace, the wife of presidential candidate George Wallace, at a campaign office in Alabama.
And H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s top staffer, at his West Wing office.
The White House press corps couldn’t believe how and why she had gotten what was believed to be Haldeman’s first TV interview. A skeptical New York Times reporter called her to find out. “She said that she had first suggested the interview to Mr. Haldeman in September and convinced him at a Washington meeting in December to make his first television appearance,” the story said. “She said that this was not a case of the White House seeking television time to attack its critics.”
She interviewed Haldeman for more than an hour. The Today show would stretch the news across three days. (Four months later, the White House “plumbers” would break into Democratic offices in the Watergate Office Building, eventually forcing Nixon to resign from office and sending Haldeman to jail for conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury.)
“What things, what kinds of criticism, upset the President?” she asked near the end of their session. He leveled the harshest of charges against those who had criticized the White House’s eight-point peace plan for Vietnam, in effect accusing them of treason. “After the whole activity is on the record and is known,” he said, “the only conclusion you can draw is that the critics now are consciously aiding and abetting the enemy of the United States.” Those critics included South Dakota senator George McGovern, who would win the Democratic nomination to challenge Nixon’s reelection that November.
“Nixon’s Aide Says Peace-Plan Foes Help the Enemy” was the headline on the New York Times story, which led the front page. His comments “set off a fusillade of counterfire from high-ranking Democrats,” the top of the Washington Post story said. Diplomatic correspondent Don Oberdorfer called Haldeman’s comments “the strongest yet by an administration official in reply to critics of the peace proposals unveiled Jan. 25 by Mr. Nixon.” Both stories credited Barbara by name. His comments sparked such a firestorm that White House press secretary Ron Ziegler tried to distance the president from them, telling reporters Haldeman was expressing “his own personal point of view.”
Afterward, Haldeman sent her a friendly note. “Thank you for making me a household word,” he wrote. Of course, he was helping to do the same for her.
One of Barbara’s strengths was emerging: her comfort with powerful men and her ability to forge a connection with them. If anything, a dark side made men more interesting, more appealing to her. That applied to her view of Nixon, too. She had interviewed him at the White House a year earlier, her first formal interview with a president. She had met him while filming an interview with his daughter Tricia in 1969. She found Nixon “charming” and at the end of her career called him the sexiest president she had met, an assessment that was not widely shared in the press corps, or elsewhere.
On the Today show set, turmoil was brewing.
McGee had left his wife of three decades to live with a much younger production assistant, Mamye Smith, who was Black. Barbara found the romance astonishing, belittling Mamye as “fun, giggly, inefficient, and not even particularly pretty.”
Wald took a kinder view, telling me that McGee had found the love of his life and acted on it, despite the risk that disclosure of the extramarital and interracial affair could have ended his career. That was a quandary Barbara would face down the road as well, when she would make a different decision for herself.
McGee’s romance was an open secret, but it never made the gossip columns. “[E]veryone in journalism knew it, but… no one would print it,” said Sally Quinn, who was then making a short-lived stint as co-anchor of the CBS Morning News. In a phone conversation at the time with Barbara, she pointed out that the courtesy of discretion wouldn’t have been extended to either of them. They were often the topic of anonymous barbed items about their behavior on and off the set, some of them accurate and some not.
“A blatant example of sexism in news reporting,” Sally complained. Barbara laughed with resignation. “That’s just the way things are,” she told her.
There had been rumors on the set that McGee was ill, though no one understood precisely what was wrong or how serious his condition was. His skin was pale and his silver hair seemed to be falling out; he began to insist on using a private makeup room, out of the view of the others. Wald could see that McGee was in excruciating pain as he took his seat on the set, aided by a solicitous Mamye Smith. But McGee flatly denied he was sick. Both the TV audience and the NBC brass were clueless about how dire his situation was.
Barbara was rarely clueless. Lee Stevens of the William Morris Agency, who had succeeded Ray Katz as her agent when Katz had moved to the West Coast, negotiated a three-year contract that she signed in September 1973. In it, Stevens won a significant raise for her and slipped in a new provision that the other side seemed to barely notice: If Frank McGee were to leave the show for any reason, voluntarily or involuntarily, she would have the title of co-host with whoever succeeded him.
Seven months later, McGee died of pneumonia, a consequence of an agonizing, secret battle against bone cancer that he had been waging for four years. He had managed to stay on the job until six days before his death. From a hospital bed, he assured the show’s producer he would be back by the end of the week. He was fifty-two years old.
Mamye was by his side when he died. She told Jet magazine that their plans to be married had been stalled because McGee’s wife wouldn’t agree to a divorce. The estranged wife would preside over his funeral, and soon afterward, Mamye was fired from the show, though she was later hired elsewhere at NBC. She filed a complaint charging NBC with racial discrimination; the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity eventually dismissed it. None of that made the mainstream press.
“Frank dead?” Barbara said. “I couldn’t believe it. We all thought he was sick, but we had no idea how ill he’d been.” The day he died, in April 1974, she was in California. She flew back to New York and appeared on the show the next day. “Our own Frank McGee will not be with us this morning or any other morning,” Walters said with an empty black chair to her left. Later, she privately noted the irony of the hundreds of condolences she received from viewers, “a testament to the seemingly pleasant—and totally false—relationship I’d had with Frank.”
NBC announced that the network would search for a new Today host. Lee Stevens called the executives. “You mean co-host,” he reminded them. Three days after McGee’s funeral, the network released a statement that made it sound as though the groundbreaking promotion had been their idea, not an obligation that executives hadn’t taken seriously when they had signed her new contract. “I wasn’t billed as a co-host until it was over—literally—McGee’s dead body,” Barbara said. At more than one dinner party over the years, she would note the best thing that had happened for her career was McGee’s sudden demise.
“Barbara Walters will be cohost of the NBC Television Network’s Today program from now on,” read the statement from Donald Meaney, vice president of television news programming. “This is the first time the program has had a cohost and Today is now the only network news or public affairs program to have a female cohost.” (Sally Quinn already had appeared on the CBS Morning News for a turbulent six months, but in the news role as co-anchor, not the broader purview of co-host.)
The announcement wasn’t accompanied by a bigger office or a salary hike or more say over the program, Barbara said. Even so, she said, “co-host” was “a very satisfying title.”
Meaney was close to Barbara Walters and a booster of her career, but in an interview years later he described her as “often difficult” and “determined [to be] an anchorperson.” She wasn’t afraid to raise her voice and push, he said. “She was willing to do whatever was necessary.”
Those were qualities that could make her hard to take—she cautioned female colleagues that ambitious women were routinely labeled “bitches”—but they were also qualities she presumably needed to do things no woman had ever done before. After her breakthrough, every morning television news program would have a female co-host. By 2006, both main anchors on one network morning show would be women—Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts on ABC’s Good Morning America. In 2018, Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb became the first pair of women to anchor the Today show, Barbara’s old stomping ground.
Barbara’s new standing meant she had some control over who her co-host would be, and how they would work together. She and her bosses wanted a man who wouldn’t make her look old in comparison—she was forty-five years old at the time—and someone who would complement rather than clash with her forceful persona.
The list of prospects included journalists at NBC, among them Tom Brokaw, Tom Snyder, and Garrick Utley. It included some who were working elsewhere, including Dick Cavett and Bill Moyers. Harry Reasoner of ABC was considered. It was “one of the most coveted on-the-air positions in all television,” Les Brown wrote in The New York Times. Moyers removed himself from consideration because the job involved reading commercials on the air. Brokaw also found the idea of doing ads “repulsive”; besides, he didn’t want to leave the White House beat during the Watergate scandal. Snyder was seen as a big personality who might clash with the forceful co-host.
In July, Wald announced that Jim Hartz had been chosen for the job. He was then working four floors above the Today studio as an anchor on the evening news shows at NBC’s New York affiliate, WNBC. “Jim doesn’t mind sharing the stage with me, and he isn’t offended when I try to help him,” Barbara said when he was named. In other words, he wasn’t Frank McGee. Now she would be free to pose the first question, and more.