BY 1992, WE’D MOVED BACK to Ottawa for the third time and I was reporting for my third network after Global and CTV. I was part of a cadre of young white guys covering politics and hard news—a golden boys’ competition club, not that we ever talked about it in quite that way. The mood was more collegial than cut-throat and I felt valued, like someone the network wanted to invest in and groom. But everyday life was more grey than golden. I routinely worked twelve-hour days, trudging around the corner from the studio every evening to grab a submarine sandwich for dinner and getting home, exhausted but wired, at ten o’clock when the kids had already been asleep for hours. The lifestyle, if you could call it that, was not exactly family friendly.
So when I was asked to audition to replace the male co-host of Midday, CBC’s hour-long noontime newsmagazine show, I was intrigued. I’d never longed to be an anchor, but it’s the only job in TV news with predictable hours. Everything else is shift work.
Most of my fellow travellers on the hard news career track thought I was crazy. To them, Midday seemed like a pointless detour; it was a softer show, with lifestyle and entertainment segments as well as news. The pay was also less than I was currently making, and wouldn’t go as far in Toronto, where housing—and just about everything else—was more expensive than in Ottawa. But I’d have a lot more time with my family. The trade-off seemed worth it.
The audition process involved filling in for the male co-host, who was moving on to host a show in the evening. I hadn’t ever done live television before but weirdly, though the self-critical voice in my head was too loud to ignore altogether, I didn’t feel intimidated. I was accustomed to studios and cameras, of course, and my high school theatrical training also helped me feel comfortable. The countdown to a show going live replicated that terror-filled moment before you step onto the stage, but I’d learned back in grade ten that when it’s actually time to say something, I don’t freeze. Someone once told me, “You know you’re doing what you’re intended to do if, at the moment of peak stress, your heart rate actually slows.” And that’s what happened when the cameras started rolling during my audition. My heart stopped racing and I felt focused. Calm. In the zone. It’s the same thing some surgeons say happens in the operating room: the mental clutter disappears and they’re fully in the moment, concentrating. Fearless.
As it turned out, I had a hitherto undiscovered technical skill. Midday frequently relied on a bit of TV trickery, widely used today, called the “double-ender.” It’s a cost-saving measure producers resort to when an interviewee—a rock star, say—can’t come in to the studio, and the show doesn’t have the money or resources to film both ends of the interview. Here’s what you do: film the rock star staring directly into a camera that’s been set up in his home or wherever, and question him via an earpiece that’s connected to a phone line. The interviewer on the other end of the phone line isn’t filmed, usually because there isn’t a studio available, so he can conduct the interview sprawled on his living room couch if he wants. The next day, as the tape of the rock star rolls, the interviewer re-asks the same questions in the studio, so it looks to viewers as though both sides of the conversation were recorded simultaneously. You basically need to act out the interview all over again, using the same words and the same intonation, but making it look as though you’re thinking up the questions on the spot. That was the part of the audition I aced: apparently I could fake an interview better than the other three candidates, which was key, because double-enders were the secret sauce of the show.
There was one more hurdle I had to overcome to land the job. I needed the blessing of the show’s co-anchor, Valerie Pringle, who’d been very welcoming and warm during my audition. A few weeks later, when it seemed that I was the producers’ choice, she asked me to meet her for lunch at an Ottawa hotel. It was a smart move, because if we didn’t have an easy rapport over lunch, there was almost no chance we’d develop it under the intensity of television lights. I recognized this for the final interview that it was, and tried to be especially charming and agreeable. I really wanted to work with Valerie, who was the most natural broadcaster in the country. A veteran of live television, she had a gift for making scripted comments sound like offhand, spontaneous remarks. I knew I could learn a lot from her. But she was almost forty and I was thirty-two and looked even younger. Did she really want to school someone who was obviously her junior?
I tried to raise the subject of our age difference in a roundabout way by alluding to the winning formula for co-hosts—pretending to be siblings, or secret lovers—then asking, “So who would we be?” Fortunately Valerie had a great sense of humour, and she burst out laughing. “Certainly not lovers! But great friends would be good.” Near the end of the lunch I asked, “Do you think we could do this together?” And her reaction was, “Yeah, um, I think it could work”—not exactly a ringing endorsement, so I thanked her for meeting me and told her that if I turned out not to be the right co-host, no hard feelings. But in truth, by this point, I really wanted the job. I wanted the regular hours, the lack of travel and, yes, the higher profile it would give me.
A few days later I was offered the position and promptly resigned as a reporter, giving up the security of a union job in order to work on contract. It’s usually the price of hosting a show, and I didn’t think twice about paying it. This job didn’t just mean I was going to have a life. It solidified my status. The network clearly had big plans for me, and that seemed like security enough.
I began working in Toronto a month later, leaving Cathy yet again to look after our kids and manage the move from Ottawa. I hoped that this would be the last time we’d have to move on my account. We seemed to be entering a new phase of life, one where the future felt secure enough that we bought a house—nothing fancy, just a solid duplex in an area with good schools, but it was still a stretch on my newly reduced salary. I was confident I’d earn more someday, but in the meantime Cathy became a lunchroom supervisor at Alex’s new school because it paid twenty-five dollars a day, and I started moonlighting, teaching journalism at a local college.
Looking back on those years, I remember them as a stressful whirl of activity, punctuated with occasional bursts of elation. Though I could usually get home in time for dinner, I was more preoccupied with work than ever. Midday was a whole new game and I had to learn the rules.
For the first time, I had to think about books, music and movies—and my own personality. A reporter’s job is straightforward: beat other reporters and get the story right, first. But an anchor’s job, especially on a softer show, is to make people like you so much that they want to spend a lot of time with you, day after day. It’s a whole different job, really, and making the transition required a strange combination of objectivity and navel-gazing. I had to pinpoint my own irritating tics and mannerisms, then eliminate them. And I had to deconstruct my own personality to figure out what was appealing about me, so I could emphasize it.
I had to show more of myself—or more of a carefully curated version of myself, anyway—and at first it felt uncomfortable. The impersonal, dialled-in reporter mode I’d always relied on had provided something like invisible body armour. Asking the questions, usually off-camera, then editing the answers and weaving them into a coherent narrative, I’d been in control, directing the movie rather than acting in it. Now I was sharing the spotlight, and the goal wasn’t to grill people or craft a story from shreds of material, but rather to have seamless, intelligent and engaging conversations with famous people. Live.
The difference became clear early on when I interviewed Premier Joe Ghiz, the retiring leader of Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province. I had interviewed many politicians in my years as a parliamentary reporter, and success usually depended on a courtroom-style cross-examination: harsh, direct questions intended to elicit straight answers. So with Ghiz I did what I’d always done, focusing on conflicts, failures and controversies during his time in office. It wasn’t the gentle swan song farewell he’d been expecting from a show like Midday, and by the time my interrogation was winding up, he was clearly angry. In my old job, that would have been a sign that I’d scored a direct hit, so I was feeling pleased with myself until we wrapped and the phone rang. It was Cathy, asking why on earth I’d been so hard on the poor man. The show’s producers were wondering the same thing, and soon the switchboard was all lit up with calls from angry viewers (this was back in the day, when viewers couldn’t eviscerate you instantly on Twitter). A field reporter doesn’t have to worry what the audience thinks about his interviewing technique but, as I quickly learned, an anchor does. Unless you’re Bill O’Reilly and it’s part of your shtick, attacking guests who come on your show is a good way to ensure viewers hate you. This doesn’t mean you can’t ask tough questions. You can, but you have to be sure, first, that it’s what the audience expects from you with that particular guest.
During my first year, I got better at longer, less scripted-sounding interviews, and found that I was pretty good at talking to authors and panels of experts, but not so good at celebrity interviews. I tried hard to ask unexpected questions, but it’s tough to knock celebrities out of their preprogrammed mode and get them to say something new, and I may have found the interaction even less enjoyable than they did.
Certainly that was the case with Joni Mitchell, who came on the show to promote Turbulent Indigo, one of the strongest albums of her career. She’s an icon, of course, and I wanted the interview to do her justice, so I pored over her lyrics looking for recurring themes I could ask her about and read reviews of her work and even a full-length book about her influence on folk music. I headed into the interview armed with a list of well-researched, intelligent questions, all neatly arranged in a logical order so the interview would flow well—the first clue that I was a newbie. For a conversational interview to flow, you need to listen to the answers and follow up on them, not stick to a list of prefabricated, smarty-pants questions.
The setting for our talk was weirdly dramatic: Mitchell’s record label had stuck a table and two stools in the middle of a very large empty room, and on the table was an ashtray with a lit cigarette resting in it, and a glass of what looked like water but smelled a lot like straight vodka. Joni Mitchell herself was in a playful mood. She quickly sized me up, saw that I was nervous as hell and decided to flirt with me in a way that was innocent but also mocking, and exponentially increased my nervousness. That was, I think, her aim. She seemed to be toying with me the way a cat bats a mouse back and forth, and I had no idea how to respond. Remember, she’s about twenty years older and infinitely more confident; I still have no game with women, not even women who aren’t famous singers who may or may not be tipsy. I felt like Dustin Hoffman at the beginning of The Graduate. I didn’t know how to take control of the situation and, frankly, I was afraid of her. She was a living legend, and I couldn’t read her at all or predict what she might say next.
When the crew finished setting up and the cameras finally started rolling, I read out the questions on my list with a deer-in-the-headlights expression on my face, and didn’t react or respond to her answers (most of which were wonderfully reflective and a little combative). Afterwards, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. I was thoroughly embarrassed by my performance when the piece aired the next day, and hoped I’d never have to interview another celebrity.
But I did, and eventually I got a little better at it. By the time William Shatner was booked on Midday, I’d learned that actors want to control interviews, and I had a better idea how to prevent that from happening. I thought Shatner was coming on to promote a new credit card he had lent his celebrity to, so I dispensed with that right at the top of the interview by asking, “What do you know about credit cards?” That created a moment of humour, and then I quickly appealed to his ego in a way I hoped might also confound him slightly, by steering the conversation around to his “lifelong fascination with innovation.” I could tell he was unprepared for my questions because he had to reflect before answering, but he seemed to enjoy being surprised. At the end of the interview he said, “Does the CBC know how good you are at this?”
“That’s a question I better not answer,” I said, because in truth, I wasn’t sure whether I was valued or not. The show’s ratings had plateaued, but were holding steady, not falling. I worked well with Tina Srebotnjak, who’d replaced Valerie Pringle when she moved on to another show, and I was getting more comfortable with the unscripted banter that’s a staple of every co-hosted show. Being on display, part of the story rather than narrating it, made me feel special.
But it also made me feel vulnerable, though I tried not to let that show. I never forgot that people were watching and judging me. Not only my bosses but a quarter of a million strangers. And my colleagues. And my family. And everyone who had ever known me personally. And people I’d just met on the street. And any enemies I had ever made.
Even after I had the hang of the job and was finding moments of enjoyment in it, I felt queasy after almost every show. It’s the same feeling you get the morning after a party where you had too much to drink, but not so much that you don’t remember making an ass of yourself. Oh God, did I really say that? Sometimes I’d go back and watch the tape to see just how big a fool I’d made of myself, but usually I looked surprisingly normal, self-assured even. Apparently I’d learned how to cover up my awkwardness and uncertainty and brazen it out—an essential skill for anchors, particularly male anchors. Any sign of hesitation or self-doubt is read as weakness, which is the one quality viewers simply won’t tolerate in a male host. You’re allowed to be emotional, occasionally, and sensitive. But weak? That’s the kiss of death. One American news director described the perfect male television host this way: guys have to feel they could have a beer with you and women have to imagine you secretly want to fuck them. It was crude, yes, but there was a kernel of truth in it.
I was obsessed with work, but I was supposed to be. Working long hours and not having much of a life was and still is a badge of honour for men, whether or not they have families. It’s a sign that you’re successful, important, going places, and I felt I was. I almost never unplugged. It was my job to know what was happening in the world, which was a time-consuming endeavour pre-social media and smartphones. In the nineties, I had to turn on CNN or log on to my clunky home computer to see if there was e-mail from producers or editors. I vividly remember being at Erica’s fifth birthday party, surrounded by balloons and cake, and sneaking off to watch the news. I was only fully untethered during the few weeks of vacation I took each year.
I tried to fight the chatter in my head to be present for my children when I was home, which I was much more often than when I’d been a reporter, but I wasn’t always successful. I’d be on the floor playing cars, Lego, ponies, but my mind might be somewhere else entirely. There was often a hyped-up, antic aspect to our “quality time” because I was trying so hard to make up for lost time and ensure our time together was special and memorable. We’d go tobogganing and I’d fake extravagant wipeouts at the bottom of the hill; at the pool I’d toss the kids around like bean-bags, trying to cram a summer’s worth of fun into an afternoon.
As the kids grew, it became clear that Alex needed more from me than Erica did. Even as a very little girl, my daughter was self-possessed and calm, navigating the world with a certain comfort and grace. Making friends seemed easy for her, but for him it was a struggle. Alex was creative and curious about the world, with a sweet and caring soul, but solitary by nature. He just didn’t seem to know how to connect with other kids, especially boys. There was often a moment in a play date when Alex would provoke his guest, knock down his sandcastle or take a toy away, and I’d be embarrassed, apologizing for the sudden turn of events. He could be a pot-stirrer but he wasn’t a mean kid, so his behaviour was baffling. Maybe he just wanted attention, and couldn’t figure out how to attract the good kind.
Unfortunately he was already familiar with the bad kind. Slight and small, Alex was a magnet for bullies, though it took me awhile to realize the severity of the problem. Work consumed so much of my mental real estate that issues with the kids tended not to register until they’d become serious problems. I only really understood what Alex had been experiencing when he was in grade two and Cathy told me another boy had been pushing him around and fondling him. I was horrified. I’m not sure Alex knew how wrong this was—he didn’t tell Cathy what was happening right away, and he never mentioned it to me—but I was stunned that a kid his own age was basically molesting him. My tendency in a crisis is to go into fix-it mode, so instead of sitting down with Alex and trying to reach his injured soul, I went straight to the principal’s office. Apparently the school suspected that the kid was himself being abused at home. I remember thinking, “Well, that’s too bad, but I don’t want him anywhere near my son.” I tried to build up Alex’s confidence, play-wrestling with him and encouraging him to believe he could stand up for himself. Cathy took a different tack, talking to teachers, trying to engage the bully’s mother, brokering play dates with the nice kids, supporting Alex emotionally.
Instead of becoming more confident, though, Alex seemed to internalize what was happening to him, then take it out on Erica, who looked up to him and trusted him a little too much. Once when she was sitting on the couch, her braid trailing over the back, he came up behind her and chopped it off with a pair of scissors. (If there was some provocation, it’s long since been forgotten by both parties.) He teased her and excluded her in some of the ways he was being teased and excluded.
Yet, in a sense, he seemed to want not to belong. He wasn’t a shrinking violet. He was proudly, stubbornly self-isolating. I carved out time to try to introduce him to sports, thinking that would help him make friends, but every attempt I made to involve him in soccer, baseball—any sport, actually—ended with Alex going off on his own, either hiding from the crowd or withdrawing into his world of fantasy. For him, a soccer game became an imaginary spaceship battle, not a quest to move the ball toward the other team’s net.
Alex needed friends—he needed to know how to get along with other kids. So I decided to sign both of us up for Scouts. I’d been a Scout for a few years at about Alex’s age, and I’d liked racking up badges and being a leader of my pack. I thought it would be a fun activity for us to share, and a good way for him to meet other kids. But, as Alex quickly made clear, he did not think Scouts was fun. In fact, he hated everything about it. He’d disliked group activities since he was a toddler, but now he could go on strike more effectively. He’d just refuse to engage, parking himself under a table in a way that seemed designed to attract attention, while the other Scouts diligently tied knots and did crafts. I’d signed up to be a Scout leader, so I had responsibility for helping run our get-togethers, and I was both embarrassed—no parent wants his or her kid to be the one under the table—and unsure how to respond. Did Alex need my support? Should I hunker down under the table with him? Or would it be better for him to be ignored so he’d eventually be forced to join the group? I leaned toward the latter option, believing I was acting in his best long-term interests, but after a few weeks Alex simply refused to go. Would. Not. Go. However, I was the only male Scout leader, the rest were single mothers. I couldn’t just bail. So for the rest of the year, I helped other little boys who weren’t related to me learn to pitch tents and sell Christmas trees. If Alex was jealous, he wasn’t jealous enough to change his mind and come with me.
It took me awhile to recognize that my desire for my son to have an easier childhood than mine was actually making both our lives more difficult. He had no interest in fulfilling the dreams I’d had for him of being a sporty, popular kid. I was dragging him off to activities he rejected with increasing ferocity, and it was hard not to feel frustrated and occasionally angry about it, especially since I was knocking myself out to make time to do this stuff with him.
We had so little time together. Why couldn’t we connect? The irony wasn’t lost on me: I’d learned to connect just fine with an audience armed with remote controls. With Cathy and Erica, too. The only issue was with my son, the person I felt I should have been able to bond with most effortlessly because we were the same gender, shared the same genes, and I loved him so much. I couldn’t figure him out, really, though of course in the rearview mirror, it’s so plain. Alex was just a lot like me.
In 1994, with no warning, my career imploded. I learned that after two years, I was being replaced at Midday to create an enticing opportunity to retain an up-and-comer who was being courted by another network. He wouldn’t be ready to take over for five or six months though, and in the interim, I had to keep his seat warm.
It’s not uncommon for hosts to be shuffled off one show and onto another, and at first I hoped that was the plan for me. I wanted to stay at the CBC, preferably in Toronto, where my family had settled in and was happy. But none of the executives at the network would take a meeting with me. Or look me in the eye. No one was talking about a new assignment. The writing was on the wall.
Suddenly I was no longer a golden boy but a thirty-four-year-old who wasn’t sure how he was going to hang on to his house. We were struggling to make our mortgage payments as it was. I was still under contract, so I wasn’t allowed to go out and beat the bushes for a new job. I had no idea what I was going to do once my contract was up, how I was going to provide for my family. Cathy was comforting, but clearly scared. So I pretended to feel more optimistic than I did, and both of us made sure the kids didn’t know what was going on.
This was the end of my starry-eyed idealism about journalism. It felt like losing my religion: profoundly disappointing and dislocating. Until that point, I’d believed loyalty was appreciated, hard work paid off—the universe was essentially orderly and fair, and people tended to get what they deserved. Now I saw that sometimes you did, sometimes you didn’t. It was a crapshoot. I’d worked my ass off, but going the extra mile hadn’t protected me from being screwed over. I had every bitter, frightened, angry feeling a man has when he loses his job and is forced to take stock.
When I did, the picture wasn’t pretty. The truth was, I was trapped. Now that work seemed pretty pointless, I wanted to be home as much as possible. That’s where I felt most fulfilled, and where I felt best about myself. But I was the sole provider. I needed to find another job where I could earn as much or more than I was currently making. Having been out of the job market for years, Cathy couldn’t go back to work and earn what I could. Nor could she make up the shortfall that would be created if I took a major step down the ladder. And Erica hadn’t even started school—who would look after her if both of us were working?
I knew our financial predicament was my problem to solve. And I also knew that any viable solution would require me to act against my own interests. I couldn’t pull closer to Cathy, Alex and Erica, the way I wanted to. I’d have to pull further away and hope like hell that I wouldn’t lose the next job, too. If I could find another job, that is. Depleted by anxiety, I lost weight, stopped sleeping. I was consciously, undeniably, unhappy. Seething. Hurt. In pain.
Nevertheless, the face I presented to the world bore no resemblance to my emotional reality. Every day I went on TV and acted as though I didn’t have a care in the world. Game face. I knew that if I let my hurt and anger show on camera, it would only make me look bad. I was being paid to perform, not to emote. To act “as if” while somehow making the audience feel that they were seeing and connecting with the real me.
But at times the cognitive dissonance was so extreme, I felt like I was losing it. One morning, sitting on our front steps in Toronto and waiting for Tina, my Midday co-host and friend, to give me a lift to the studio, I actually said out loud, though no one was there, “If this is it for me in journalism, I need a sign.” What happened next sounds like an unbelievable plot twist, but trust me, it really did happen. I got to work and there was a message on my dressing room phone: a recruiter for ABC News wanted to talk to me about anchoring World News Now, the network’s overnight newscast.
I was about to be a failed Canadian broadcaster. Not in a million years would it have occurred to me to apply to an American network, and I never did find out who sent the recruiter my tapes. She didn’t know how they’d wound up on her desk, either, but she didn’t seem to care. She wanted me to come to New York to interview for the job. I booked a flight immediately. When I got there, six of the top people at ABC News interviewed me, one after another, in an imposing, darkened conference room. It felt like a Star Chamber, because the walls were lined with photos of the network’s biggest names—Peter Jennings, Barbara Walters, Ted Koppel, Diane Sawyer, Sam Donaldson, Charlie Gibson—all lit with pinpoint lights, so their eyes appeared to be staring at me. The executives asked me things like “What did we do wrong last night on World News Tonight?” and “What kind of stories do you like to report?” I must have answered with no trace of the desperation I felt, because a week later, I was offered the job.
It was like being cut from the minor leagues, then being offered a contract with the Yankees. Even the most ardent supporters of Canadian broadcasting tend to view American network news as the big time, and as a friend of mine put it, getting hired by ABC was the best “fuck you” exit he’d ever heard of.
Nevertheless, I was conflicted. I’d have to move my family from a place where they were happy; working nights would mean I’d get to see even less of them. Living in the US concerned me, too. It was familiar yet foreign, and I had no idea what it would be like for my kids to grow up there, how it would affect them. But the salary was double what I was making at Midday—a surprise, since we’d never discussed money during the interviews—and ABC would also pay for our move. For Cathy and me, the money was a game changer. Even if I’d had another offer in Canada, we knew the pay wouldn’t come close.
There was something else, too. Another Canadian, Thalia Assuras, was then the co-anchor of World News Now, and while I was in New York for the interview we’d run through a mock-hour to see whether I could pick up on the quirky style of the overnight show. I hadn’t known Thalia in Canada, but she couldn’t have been more welcoming. I instantly felt comfortable with her, which was lucky because there was a brash, flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants quality to WNN, and I knew I had to be more aggressive and willing to take risks than I had been on Midday. So partway through my audition I challenged Thalia to a game of anchor desk hockey, with a “puck” made out of scrunched up paper and our pens for “sticks.” I told her I wanted to see if she’d been working in the US too long and had lost the hockey skills that are the birthright of all Canadians. She hadn’t. She killed me, the cameramen laughed, and we moved on. But one thing was clear: if I had to work unreasonable hours, live at opposite ends of the day from my family and somehow survive in the big leagues, then at least being part of Thalia’s team would be fun. Fun was not something I was having much of at Midday.
So I said yes to ABC and then waited to be approved for a visa. During that time I told almost no one about the job offer. I didn’t want to jinx it—what if some US immigration official decided not to give me my papers? For two months I continued to host Midday and continued to be shunned by the news division management. When my work visa finally arrived, I was so pissed off that I bypassed my bosses altogether and let the president of the CBC at the time, a very nice man, know that I was heading to ABC. My value shot up dramatically with that announcement, because suddenly it was, “What would it take to keep you?”
I exited with my head held high, and the fact that I was heading to the US changed the optics. Now the public narrative wasn’t that I’d failed and been replaced, but that I was a rising star who, regrettably for Canada, had been lured to the Big Apple. But the story other people believed didn’t change the truth or how I felt about it, which was bruised and full of self-doubt. I’m sure that being let go during a downsizing feels awful, too, but at least you can blame the economy and look around and know that other good people also lost their jobs. This rejection felt personal, and it was. Anchors are evaluated as much on the basis of their likeability as their journalistic ability, and at Midday my personality had clearly been found wanting. What made it worse was that I wasn’t even sure how, exactly, I was inadequate. Was it one thing? Or everything about me?
Although I’d landed another, even better, job, I now secretly doubted my ability to do it well. And because my raison d’être as a father was to provide for my family, knowing I’d nearly failed them made me doubt myself to a degree I couldn’t admit even to Cathy. I didn’t want her to doubt me, too. And neither one of us wanted our kids to know how close we’d come to losing everything.
My old colleagues viewed anchoring World News Now as a plum job, but I may well have landed it because no American would put up with the hours. They were brutal: each fourteen-hour day began at ten p.m., when we’d dredge up anyone who was still awake to do interviews, then research and write stories before broadcasting from two to four a.m. and again from five to six a.m. At noon, I’d head home and try to get some sleep. It was the quintessential immigrant experience: come to America, the land of opportunity, work like hell and try to get ahead.
For the first six months, I lived in a hotel room so small that only a bed could be wedged into it. There was no space left over for a chair, much less a desk. I’d moved to the US by myself in January 1995, partly so the kids could finish out their school year in Toronto, and partly so I could hedge my bets. I was doubtful that I could make it in New York. The city intimidated me and I felt out of synch with it—which I was, given the strange hours I worked. My hotel was situated like the prow of a ship at the apex of Columbus Avenue, so cars roared past on both sides all day while I was sleeping. Or trying to. I spent most of my waking hours dizzy and vaguely nauseated from sleep deprivation. I lived on deli food, worked out to fill up the empty hours when I wasn’t working, tried not to think about how unhappy I was. But once, jogging in Central Park, I broke down and cried. I wanted to go home. I missed my wife, missed my kids, who were growing up without me. But there was no job back home. And my family was depending on me.
I needed to figure out what the problem had been at Midday and fix it, so the same thing didn’t happen again. I thought about what I was projecting, what my persona was, how to keep people watching in the middle of the night when they were, in all likelihood, trying to fall asleep. Because of the hour, the feel of the show was a little wacky and the job required a slightly tongue-in-cheek approach. It wasn’t my natural on-air mode, but I worked on it and even started to enjoy myself.
The team at World News Now included some of the most talented producers I’ve ever met. The challenge of programming a two-hour show every day rested with a staff of about a dozen people, led by Terry Baker and Victor Dorff, who shared the subversive sense of humour that was a hallmark of the show. Victor, in particular, would bend and play with the conventions of television news and encourage us to make fun of them, with straight faces. We were exploring the same territory Jon Stewart later mined so expertly on The Daily Show, but at the top and bottom of each hour, we had ten minutes of serious, no-kidding-now news.
It was as if the grown-ups at ABC News had given us the keys to the car so we could take it for a little joyride in the moonlight, the only proviso being that it had to be back in the garage, without a single dent or scratch, in time for Good Morning America. We kept up our end of the bargain most of the time, but not always. One night we viciously mocked footage of North Korea’s then newly installed leader, the infamous Kim Jong-il, inspecting his troops—unaware that Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, was meeting with a high-ranking delegation of North Koreans the very next day. Terry and I were called on the carpet; even dictators, we were told, deserve a modicum of respect. So the next night, we reran the exact same footage, only this time I read out the ridiculously hagiographic and respectful praise the North Korean state media had heaped on these images of their “Glorious Leader.” It was the kind of thing you could get away with only at WNN, and working there was like being part of a band of late-night pirates who took over the newsroom, and the brand, while everyone else was asleep. I started to have fun, the most fun I’d ever had in television.
When I realized that I’d probably survive at ABC, I went house hunting. Manhattan was out of the question. Too expensive, too urban. I traipsed around towns in Connecticut and New Jersey, looking for the combination everyone who works in New York looks for: the shortest-possible commute, the best public schools and the most affordable yet attractive housing. One weekend Cathy’s mother stayed with the kids in Toronto so she could come down alone and we did a blitz, finally settling on a tiny Cape Cod–style house in Summit, New Jersey. It was barely a thousand square feet—exactly what you buy after narrowly avoiding financial ruin, as we had in Toronto. I took a video of our new house for the kids, glossing over the fact that all four of us would share one bathroom. I also filmed the walk to Alex’s new school, so he’d have a clearer idea what his life would be like. Cathy and I both talked up the town to the kids: So pretty! So close to exciting New York! The extravagance of my praise for this wonderful new place was roughly proportional to the guilt I felt about uprooting everyone once again.
In the summer of 1995, we moved into what Cathy called our dollhouse. I loved feeling that everyone who mattered most to me in the world was within arm’s reach, literally, and also took great comfort from the fact that we were no longer in danger of going under financially. Cathy and I were determined to live not only within our means but beneath them. Even our one big splurge—a mattress, the first good-quality one we’d ever bought—was highly practical. Sleep was now my holy grail, as it is for anyone who works the night shift. A comfortable bed, an ample supply of melatonin, an eyeshade, earplugs, a white-noise machine to drown out the racket the kids made when they got home from school—I had it all, and occasionally could even get five uninterrupted hours of rest.
Every weekend I switched over to a normal schedule, awake during the day and asleep at night, so I could spend time with my family and run around doing errands. But I felt as you would if you flew to Japan and back every week—jet-lagged, exhausted and frequently short-tempered. I was pretty much a zombie. Cathy shouldered most of the burden, and reaped most of the pleasures, of raising the kids. There wasn’t much left for us as a couple in those two fleeting days of the weekend before I would return to living on the opposite side of the sun.
All too often, and to my regret, my family got only scraps of attention, because that’s all that was left once I’d satisfied my bosses and indulged my own need to recover, physically and emotionally, from my workday. I could be counted on to put a roof over their heads and food on the table, but rarely for spontaneous outings or even relaxed dinner table conversation. When work is a high-energy race to get to the point and close a story, it’s hard to flip a switch and change modes at the end of the day. When I got home, I still kept driving toward conclusions and solutions, rushing to get to the point, to get things done.
I felt like I was running up a mountain I couldn’t see the top of, and just needed to keep going, as fast as I could. There was no particular destination in mind, just a direction: higher.
But I wasn’t blind. I knew I’d become a visitor in my family’s life, which, most of the time, seemed to go on smoothly without me. After the Midday debacle, I would gladly have stepped out of the limelight and dialled back my career several notches if money grew on trees. The lasting lesson of that experience was that being with my family was a hell of a lot more fulfilling than being in a TV studio. I couldn’t act on that knowledge, though, because I now had a job that gave me even less time with them.
From the outside, it might have looked like selfishness, focusing on my career the way I did. But to me, it often felt like self-sacrifice. I was being torn away from the people who made me happiest because I had to support and protect them. The fact that I was the one doing the tearing only made it worse because it meant there was no one else to blame. The person selling my happiness down the river was me.