TRADITION DICTATES that when a long-time host leaves a morning show, there’s an on-air goodbye party, complete with pre-taped tributes from the president, rock stars and other luminaries. The official story is usually that the host is delighted to be free at last to pursue “special projects.” Usually, however, there’s nothing at all voluntary about the departure and the host is quietly seething about having been pushed aside.
On May 1, 1998, Charlie Gibson’s last day hosting Good Morning America, I was braced to feel awkward, but he handled the situation with uncommon grace. Charlie, who’d gone out of his way to welcome me both publicly and privately, played the part of the affable retiree perfectly. And maybe he really was happy to be getting the hell out of there. He knew better than just about anyone what was going on behind the scenes and why GMA was floundering. I imagine his wife, Arlene, was euphoric; she knew how much the show and the early shift had taken out of her husband, particularly the past few years. Charlie had endured the very public tryouts of men auditioning to replace him without any promises in terms of his own future at the network. Throughout, our producers had been experimenting with different formats, inventing new segments and rejigging the show to try to play to the strengths of the fill-ins. Unsurprisingly, GMA had lost its consistency and became uncomfortable to watch, which no doubt accelerated the ratings decline.
But the impression the producers sought to create in his final show was that Charlie was entrusting the keys to a happy kingdom to his handpicked heir. To add credibility to this dynastic scenario, David Hartman, the show’s original anchor, returned for the send-off. He had some unfinished business, he announced when the three of us sat down to do our segment and the cameras started rolling: he’d never formally passed the baton when Charlie had replaced him eleven years earlier. With a flourish, David produced a conductor’s baton and handed it to Charlie, saying he should have done it a lot sooner. Charlie laughed and said a few words, then held it out to me. I hesitated for a moment. I’m not a big believer in mystical signs, but just for an instant, that baton didn’t look like an inanimate object—it looked like a living thing, crackling with sinister energy. It really did seem to be a poisoned chalice, as Tom Bergeron had said. In that moment, I knew I’d made a mistake. A big one. But there was no turning back. Smiling weakly, I took the baton and, after David and Charlie presented me with gifts and assured me that I was going to love hosting GMA, I looked at the camera and mumbled, “I don’t know how it’s going to work out.” But I already had a pretty good idea: not well.
The path to morning glory is littered with casualties: Ann Curry, Deborah Norville, Peter Jennings, even Walter Cronkite. Some really talented, charismatic people have bombed in the time slot, so of course I was concerned that I didn’t have what it took. My only hope, I decided, was to be myself: resolutely normal and relatively low-key. Maybe the fact that I didn’t have an outsized, glitzy personality would be a plus. After all, the core audience for morning television isn’t New Yorkers with attitude, it’s Middle Americans who take a dim view of affectation. I’d signed my contract telling myself, “Convince someone in Nebraska that you’re an okay guy, and maybe you have a shot.”
But once the publicity machine of American stardom cranked up and millions of dollars were being invested in promoting me, I no longer felt like myself. I was still me, of course, but now there was another me: a supersized, airbrushed version who beamed from the sides of buses. I won’t lie. It was heady and exciting, this first taste of real fame. People magazine ran a glowing article; people inside ABC who’d never even noticed me before now knew my name. All of that felt good. But it also felt fake. The gulf between the projection of the man I was supposed to be, and who I really was, had started to feel unbridgeable even before Charlie passed me the baton.
On the weekend before my debut, Lisa McRee and I were at an event in Times Square, standing below a massive billboard that showed the two of us laughing as though we were having the time of our lives. We were meant to bring that same ebullient spirit to the event, but Lisa was wearing sunglasses to hide her eyes—she missed her husband, who was still in L.A., and had been up most of the night crying—and I felt I was staring down the barrel of a gun. She was sad, I was scared, but somehow we had to impersonate the radiantly confident people up on that billboard—and we had to be able to do it not just once, to get through the event, but for two full hours every weekday morning for the foreseeable future. The surreal nature of the challenge really hit me then: I was supposed to convince people that the über-confident, carefree, Photoshopped guy on the billboard was the real me.
Probably all on-air personalities at the highest level of American network television feel this pressure. Some deal with it by drinking, taking drugs and/or behaving badly, but many cope by immersing themselves in work to the exclusion of all else, so that over time, the distinction between the public self and the private reality erodes. They become more and more like their public personas, developing a TV sheen that becomes part of who they are, even when they’re home alone eating a sandwich. The most successful anchors at ABC News had it: the carefully modulated voice, the perfect posture, the social graces to move through any event. They conducted themselves at all times as if they were being photographed (and often, they were).
I didn’t have that sheen—and didn’t want to acquire it, either. Sure, I wanted to succeed, but even more than that I wanted to be the sort of person who could interview Nelson Mandela in the morning and still be genuinely interested in helping my kids with their homework in the evening. It may not sound like much of an aspiration, but I wanted to be a nice guy. Unchanged by recognition. The sort of man Cathy would still respect, and who would set a good example for our kids. I didn’t want to become a celebrity asshole.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to struggle long to stay grounded. There’s no other option when you don’t achieve liftoff.
I don’t know why, given the hour and the fact that young kids are often watching, the audience for morning television seems to want to see a spark of flirtation or sexual coyness between the hosts. But they do. Co-hosts don’t have to be best friends off-camera, but they do need to know and trust one another well enough that when the camera’s on, they can play off one another. Regis and Kathie Lee, for instance, rarely spent time together off the set, but they were puckish and playful once the cameras were rolling.
It was a big problem, then, that when I became co-host of GMA, Lisa McRee and I barely knew each other. Right from the start, we were under tremendous pressure to deliver a miracle, so there was no time for long, get-to-know-you talks, which might have revealed that Tom Bergeron and Lisa had had, in his words, “zero chemistry,” and that’s why I’d been offered the job. If I’d known that, I think I would have insisted that Lisa and I work together, consciously, on our on-air chemistry. It’s strange, given that misfire, that the powers-that-be at ABC didn’t plan for a longer transition to be certain that we clicked. But they seemed to be in panic mode.
Essentially, they wanted Lisa and me to conduct ourselves on air as though we were on the verge of an affair, when in fact both of us felt vulnerable and defensive—a combination, it turns out, that isn’t conducive to charming on-air banter. The bonding experience that had been planned for us—an ambitious road trip across the US, where we’d broadcast from different cities—never happened. ABC’s technicians went on strike and the roadshow, which had already been announced with some fanfare, was abruptly cancelled. Today had beaten us to the punch anyway, with its first-ever, wildly popular “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?” week, which wrapped up on Charlie’s last day and helped ensure an even more daunting ratings lead by May 4, my first day as co-host.
Viewers who did tune in discovered that over the weekend, not just the male co-host but virtually everything else about Good Morning America had changed. The show was suddenly very soft, with lots of peppy lifestyle segments. The old set, a lavish country-style home, had been replaced with one that resembled a swanky Manhattan penthouse, so Lisa and I came off as the wealthy city couple everyone hates, not the friendly Midwestern folks next door. We were both relative unknowns, so this first negative impression was especially damaging. Early on in that first show, Lisa reached out and put her hand on my shoulder, the traditional visual cue establishing in viewers’ minds that she approved of the decision to hire me. We had a pretty good patter going as we gamely tried to show off our too-slick set, but then struggled to settle into the rhythm of an entirely new format. It felt forced. How could it not? Everything was brand new, including me. And I knew that more than four million people were watching.
To have fun with the person you’re sharing that scary place with, you need to have mutual trust. It gives you the comfort to reach out and you become more engaged and more engaging. I’d had that kind of relationship with other co-anchors, and I’m sure Lisa had, too, but we did not have it with one another. At first I thought we were just experiencing some initial awkwardness and we’d grow out of it, but we never really evolved as colleagues. I had a lot of respect for her ability as a broadcaster, and she had the kind of energy and enthusiasm that are so important in morning television, but we just couldn’t seem to connect on air. We came from different worlds—she’d grown up in a wealthy Texan family, whereas mine was suburban, Canadian, middle class—and aside from being ambitious, we didn’t have much common ground. A lot of co-workers just don’t click on a personal level; easy camaraderie, where you feel a colleague elevates your game and brings out the best in you, is rare. But co-hosts should have that, or something close, and Lisa and I did not, as television critics immediately noticed. You could almost hear the knives being sharpened. Our honeymoon as an on-air couple lasted barely three weeks before people started saying our relationship was in trouble.
As the negative reviews gained momentum, Spencer Christian, the show’s long-time weatherman, was purged, severing the final on-air link to the show’s past. I liked Spencer and we did have strong rapport, but quite apart from that I thought it was a terrible idea to make another big personnel change when viewers were still struggling to get used to me and Lisa. I raised my concerns with the show’s producers, but was told the decision had been made upstairs and they were powerless to reverse it. Too much change was being forced on the audience, and long-time loyalists were reeling from culture shock.
So was I, for different reasons. Morning television is an upside-down world, a fact I’d never really had to come to grips with when I was just reading the news on GMA. In most TV news operations, the day begins with an ideas session, but morning shows begin with a performance of ideas that were cooked up the previous day. It was like a rocket: wake up in the middle of the night, shower, start cramming for interviews in the car on the way to the studio and then, once the cameras were on, struggle past exhaustion to try to have the kinds of fun, vibrant, high-energy conversations you’d have at a party at ten p.m., after a few glasses of wine. The pace of morning TV is so relentless that even when you’re dealing with fluff you have to be extremely focused. During commercial breaks you multitask like crazy—study your notes for the next interview because you won’t be able to look at them on air, figure out the staging for the next segment, set up the camera angles—all while trying to listen to the chatter in your earpiece.
The chief architect of a morning show is the executive producer, the content chooser-in-chief who determines the show’s tone, focus and template. Shelley Lewis, our executive producer, had been handpicked by Lisa, and had decided the path to success was to build the show around her strengths, just as Today was built around Katie Couric’s. But Lisa’s interests—relationship trends and helpful how-tos, both perfectly appropriate for a morning show—weren’t the same as Katie’s. They weren’t the same as mine, either.
Preparation is my self-protection mechanism, but over-preparation made it difficult to relax into light back-and-forths about summer fashions and home décor. Some people find those kinds of segments easy, but for me they were hard going, and I know it showed. I just could not master the correct, breezy tone. Some hosts have a genius for small talk even on subjects they couldn’t care less about, but I’m not one of them. My attempts were clumsy and laboured, and given how soft and light the show’s new template was, this was a real problem.
I’m most at ease when the subject matter is news related, or when I can have a conversation with someone thoughtful, where it’s possible to ask unexpected questions. This happens pretty frequently in longer-format interviews, but most GMA interviews lasted four minutes and were all about a rapid-fire and entertaining exchange focused on a celebrity’s new book, movie or album. Celebrities are heavily scripted and trained to stay on-message, and we had so little time that it was very hard to get much else out of them.
We often couldn’t land the big stars because Lisa and I were unknowns and didn’t have the kind of personal connections and reputations that often help seal the deal. But when “big names” were coming on the program, I’d usually argue for more time. I rarely won. Only a huge star could command eight minutes, even though the longer interviews tended to go much better and I’m sure they were more interesting for viewers, too. I felt good about the segment I did with Tom Hanks about the power of then new cyber relationships; he was promoting You’ve Got Mail, his 1998 hit. Talking about impending motherhood with a very pregnant Jada Pinkett Smith also went well. Robin Williams got more than his allotted few minutes because he brazenly stole time from the show, riffing in his inimitable fashion, knowing that only the most tone-deaf producer would cut him off. But thought-provoking conversations weren’t a staple of the new GMA. No matter how interesting or entertaining the guest was, I’d hear “wrap” in my earpiece after three and a half minutes, and I’d wind things up so we could barrel off to whatever had been slotted next. Adherence to the template was absolute, as though it had been engraved on a stone tablet and any deviations from it would invite the apocalypse. A successful show was deemed to be one that stuck to the pre-set time limits and crammed in everything the producers had planned. Spontaneity was punished with increasingly urgent reminders—“wrap,” “wrap!” “WRAP!”—in our earpieces.
On Today, the format had plenty of padding throughout, to encourage kibitzing between Katie and Matt, and over time this casual riffing had become what viewers enjoyed most. On our show, the only time allotted for unscripted chit-chat was during an affiliate break at five minutes to every hour, when Lisa, Spencer, Antonio Mora, our new newscaster, and I would sit down and just talk. That five-minute segment was sometimes the strongest on the show, but many stations cut to local news and didn’t carry it.
Any chance that chemistry would develop between me and Lisa was squashed, but the two of us never openly acknowledged the problem and talked about it, much less tried to address it by socializing outside the office. She was living alone in Manhattan, flying to the west coast to see her husband whenever possible, and I was living in suburban New Jersey with a family I barely saw; logistically, it would have been tricky. But Lisa didn’t seem open to the idea, either. The gossip columns had us feuding on the set, but we weren’t. We just worked in isolation, barely communicating off-camera. An impartial executive producer might have been able to force a change, but Shelley was Lisa’s hire and from my perspective, not approachable. She never once asked me, “How are you doing?” or proposed a remedy for the chemistry shortage. Of course, like me and Lisa, she was fighting for her life, professionally speaking, and undoubtedly had a few other things on her mind. Sometimes, extreme pressure encourages cohesion and solidarity. This was not one of those times.
The remedy proposed by senior network executives was that I needed to be more like Matt Lauer. Presumably, if I could do that, it would ignite our on-air relationship and all our problems would be solved. For all I know, they were urging Lisa to be more like Katie Couric; we’ve never compared notes. Now, Matt was—is—extremely good at what he does. He’s also generous-spirited. He sent me a really kind and encouraging note when I started hosting GMA, and was always collegial and friendly when I bumped into him. So I liked him as a person but I came to hate the sound of his name because I heard it so often. Eventually a senior executive packed me off to Matt Lauer school: after our show wrapped for the day and I was thoroughly exhausted, I was confined to a room with some show doctors to watch hours of his interviews on Today. According to the show doctors, even Matt had needed training to become Mattish. Apparently they’d worked with him to develop a three-beat interview technique—get the smile, hit them hard, then leave it soft—and they wanted me to perfect it, too. They would run tapes of my interviews, pointing out how they didn’t fit the Matt mould, and then instruct me to refashion them on the spot into three-beat interviews.
Critics said I seemed “smart” and “affable,” but that’s not enough to carry a morning show, as was also noted. On a personality-driven show, a relatively quiet personality is not a plus, as I was all too aware. I wanted to get better at the job. My tendency after every show was to focus on all the things I’d done wrong, and I was definitely open to constructive criticism and guidance. What new host wouldn’t be? But I was being coached to get further away from my real self. “Just copy the guy on the show that’s doing well” isn’t constructive criticism. It’s destructive. The not-so-subtle subtext is, “We don’t value anything about you as a journalist.” This was particularly alarming because it was my journalistic skills, not my looks or connections or knack for witty repartee, that had got me the job in the first place. Finally I balked and told the executive I was through with show doctors. I was becoming dangerously distracted during interviews, more focused on trying to channel Matt than on interacting with the person right in front of me. The whole experience really shook my confidence—not just in myself, but in my managers. What were they thinking? We couldn’t possibly take on the market-leading show by creating a pale imitation of it. Our only hope was to do something entirely different and try to change the game.
Quickly.
Three months after my debut, the decline of GMA was the talk of the town. Someone inside ABC was leaking to the papers, and almost every day “Page Six” ran an item about some gaffe I’d made or gleeful gossip about our ratings, which were tanking to unprecedented depths. There was ongoing speculation about who’d replace me, and when. It got so bad that even Jeff Zucker, who ran Today, felt moved to express sympathy. “I was here at a time when we got a lot of unfortunate press and a lot of unfortunate rumours swirling around us,” he said, reminding reporters of the debacle when Deborah Norville replaced Jane Pauley. “I know how hard that is to live through. I feel sympathy for people who have to have a bomb squad open their newspapers every day.”
A bomb squad would have been helpful. Security guards, too. The whispering and snickering, whether around the water cooler or in the papers—I hated it, but tried to act unfazed. At home, Cathy tried to support me, pointing out that it wasn’t all my fault, and that despite everything there had still been some good interviews and good shows. Intellectually I knew she was right, but it didn’t make much difference to how I felt, which was humiliated.
Especially after being told to “man up” by the executive who’d hired me, in the first and only face-to-face meeting he ever arranged with us while Lisa and I co-hosted. Bizarrely, though our ratings were in free-fall and GMA was the most important revenue-generator in the news division, we had almost no contact with or coaching from senior executives. It was as though no one wanted to get his hands dirty trying to fix the problem, for fear we’d take him down with us.
Four months in, David Westin finally summoned me and Lisa to his office. He looked at me and barked, “You’ve got to be more like a quarterback. Tougher, stronger, more masculine.” Then he looked at her and said, “And you have to do your homework, know what you’re talking about.” I think she was as shocked and embarrassed as I was. We’d thought of ourselves as journalists, but clearly he viewed us as character actors. Or maybe caricatures. Lisa was from Texas, so she’d been cast as the head cheerleader, and I had broad shoulders, so I’d been cast as captain of the football team. But that wasn’t who I was. I’d been hired because I can think on my feet, not because I was buff or hearty or all-American. Westin concluded by telling us we needed to work together as a team and he wanted to see the changes by tomorrow morning.
Stunned, Lisa and I retreated to our offices to try to shake it off, and then met with the senior producers for a soul-searching session that lasted well into the day. We talked as a group about how we could create a better show and what we needed to make it work. I remember asking for a looser template, more time for both of us to show our personalities and work on developing some on-air rapport. Westin’s dressing-down had forced us together, but expecting two green hosts to rescue a failing show and vindicate his first major decisions as news president was naive. The problems with the show went much deeper than us.
And, as I admitted in this meeting, work wasn’t the only place I was facing a huge challenge. I came clean with the team about what was going on at home.
After suffering from fatigue and a tingling sensation in her head for many months, Cathy had seen several neurologists and had had a number of MRIs. All showed the same thing: six small, white patches in her brain. The doctors didn’t agree on what these abnormalities meant. Some said they were consistent with multiple sclerosis, but others were less convinced that an MRI could provide a definitive diagnosis of the disease. Finally, a few months after I took over as host, Cathy got an appointment with a New York neurologist who was touted as the top guy in the field. He reviewed the MRIs and snapped, “You have MS. No question.” He had the bedside manner of an ill-tempered robot. When Cathy began to cry, he asked, with something close to a sneer in his voice, “Why are you crying? At least you know now.” It was the closest I’ve ever come to throttling someone in my life. I said, “You’ve just told her something devastating. Of course she’s upset!” He shrugged. “She might need a cane soon, and maybe a wheelchair in ten years. That’s not so bad.” Then he sprinted off to do something else, leaving us alone in his office, in shock.
My protective instincts were surging, but I had no idea what to say. How could I ease the news that her life, and our family’s life, was about to change, and not for the better? I couldn’t. Platitudes would only minimize what Cathy was feeling—and what I was feeling, too, which was very scared and very sad. I could hold her, try to comfort her, grieve with her, let her know I’d walk this difficult path with her and love her, always. But I couldn’t give her hope. I didn’t know enough about the disease yet to know that there was even any hope to give.
Somehow, we pulled ourselves together and left the hospital. I had a photo shoot for a TV Guide profile, which was the last thing I wanted to do at that moment. Cathy headed back to Summit on her own (it must have been an awful and lonely trip) and I got a cab to the photo studio in Chelsea Piers in Lower Manhattan. People fussed over my clothes, my hair, the lighting—all that fluffing and good cheer seemed almost obscene, given what had just happened. I was there but not there, detached and unable to fake the hearty buoyancy the photographer required. I couldn’t stop thinking about Cathy, how frightened and anxious she felt. And how anxious I felt for her—and for myself and our kids. Cathy was the linchpin of our family. She took care of all of us, made us feel good about ourselves, and deeply loved and appreciated. She knew me better than anyone in the world, and loved me anyway. The idea of this beautiful, energetic, loving woman confined to a wheelchair was unbearable. But we’d have to bear it. Cathy and I both figured that her experience would mirror that of her close childhood friend, who’d been immobilized by a severe attack of MS shortly after our wedding. We didn’t know yet that the progression and severity of the disease is different for each individual.
The photo that was taken that day for TV Guide shows me leaning against a wall looking diffident and sad. The photographer probably thought the problem was my less than brilliant career, but the crestfallen expression on my face was that of a man who’s just been told that the love of his life is about to be ravaged by a cruel degenerative disease.
It takes time for the pace of MS to reveal itself, so neither of us knew how quickly it would disrupt her daily life. But already, her life had been disrupted by anxiety. If Cathy’s fingers tingled, she didn’t know if she’d just worn them out on the computer, or if this was the announcement of an MS attack. She became hyper-aware, trying to figure out which physical sensations were benign and which might be symptomatic of the disease. Only one thing was certain: she felt awful. Every day she had to inject herself with a medication that made her nauseous, and she was tired all the time.
Worrying about Cathy’s health and the impact it would have on our family added an undercurrent of despair to my life. The only positive thing I can say about this terrible time is that her illness helped me keep my troubles at work in perspective, and also kept me thinking about the present and the future rather than dwelling on the past. I researched the disease, finding out everything I could, and was heartened to learn that Cathy’s case was apparently quite mild, and she might not develop severe, life-altering symptoms for many years. Nevertheless, looking around our small home, I realized it wasn’t wheelchair friendly, so I got in the habit of looking out for bungalows that would be more suitable.
We told the kids about the diagnosis but we sugar-coated any discussion of the long-term toll the disease might take. I wanted to take care of Cathy but it was hard to do that effectively when I was getting up at two a.m. every day. In the afternoons, though, we switched places in one small way: I became her sleep guardian, looking after the kids whenever I could so that she could nap and build her strength. We hoped that might slow the progression of the disease. We didn’t tell many people what was going on because she didn’t want to be pitied, so I often had to come up with excuses for friends and people at the kids’ schools as to why she was suddenly unavailable. I also turned down some last-minute assignments for GMA, declining to chase big stars to try to land the kind of interviews that might have helped the show gain traction. Initially I didn’t explain why I was saying no, and producers may have had the impression that I wasn’t willing to work hard enough. After all, people like Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters would do anything, at any time, to beat the competition and land an interview. Before Cathy got sick, I was the same way. But now my instinct was to try to do my job to the best of my ability, then head home to care for my family.
Our private struggle didn’t stay that way for long. Shortly after I told GMA senior staff about Cathy’s diagnosis, there was a story about it in the television gossip section of USA Today, which was picked up across North America. Suddenly everyone in two countries knew. I can only assume that someone in that brainstorming session leaked the information. Who knows what the motive was, but it was a cruel violation of Cathy’s privacy. Thereafter, wherever she went, people were polite but pitying, as though she had just months to live; at school, our children faced questions and suddenly they had new worries and concerns about their mother. Their private lives were now public, too.
And I needed an even better game face. I was now “the GMA host with a sick wife,” yukking it up on the set while my family suffered. The predicament I was in felt both bizarre and very wrong: I was embattled at work and going through something terrible at home, but still merrily chirping “Good morning, America!” when the cameras rolled. Very few people could understand just how difficult this was, but Connie Chung did, and she reached out to me, sending a lovely note letting me know that a good friend of hers had MS and was doing really well. She went on to write, “You know, Kevin, doing that kind of program (two hours live) works best when you have close to an ‘I don’t care’ state of mind. You are very good. Go out there with a confident state of mind.” I didn’t really believe that I had much reason to be confident, but her note meant the world to me. It showed me that other people in my profession could empathize with what I was going through, and at least one of them was rooting for me.
In every man’s life there are times that test and define your toughness. This was mine. I had to hold my family, my career and myself together, and not let anyone who didn’t know me well even sense my vulnerability. It took me awhile, but I found that place, that toughness, and have called on it many times since.
Cathy and I found a way forward, too. The routine of daily life is good in that way—pick up the kids, pitch ideas at the story meeting—and the rhythms are so well-known that you can maintain them even when you feel numb. But the worry was insidious, weaving its way into our daily lives. How much longer would she be whole?
When I’d agreed to host GMA, I’d known I’d be working around the clock for at least the first couple of years. But I’d underestimated, hugely, the distance the job would put between me and my family. We still lived modestly, in the same house, and the neighbours didn’t treat me any differently. But the gulf between how I actually felt, and the strength and confidence I was trying to project, was getting wider every day. My career was exploding in a uniquely public fashion; the hurt and embarrassment were so deep, and the effort I needed to make in order to deny my own emotional reality was so strenuous, that I had very little left for my family. Even when I was present, part of me wasn’t really there.
I saw an opportunity to make it up to Alex, at least, when the first American to orbit Earth, John Glenn, was given the chance to do so again on the space shuttle Discovery. Alex and I shared a passion for space and science fiction, and GMA had plans to broadcast Glenn’s October 1998 launch live from Cape Canaveral. I asked for a pass so Alex could join me in Florida, and the producers readily agreed. We shared a flight down, and on arrival the lead producer had arranged a surprise: we stopped en route to the Cape at the studios of Nickelodeon TV—Alex’s favourite station—for a VIP tour. He got to watch shows being filmed and dip his hand in the famous green slime before climbing into a limousine and heading for the tiny spit of land where rocket ships have been launched since the dawn of the space age. We were both kids that day, climbing into simulators, gasping in awe at the size of the Saturn rockets lining the road.
The next day, with a Shuttle simulator right behind us, I was joined by two of the original Mercury Seven astronauts, the guys with the “right stuff,” Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra, for GMA’s coverage. I was able to call on a depth of knowledge I’d been accumulating since I was Alex’s age, but something even more important happened that day. Those guys I shared the stage with had been my boyhood heroes, and Alex was there to be introduced to them. How many men get to introduce their son to their own heroes? Especially astronauts?
That bright moment couldn’t last, though. On my return to New York I reached out to Charlie Gibson, the only other person I knew who might understand the price GMA extracted from a father and husband. He had raised a marvellous family not far from where we lived in New Jersey, and had had his own rough start at Good Morning America. The senior producer of the broadcast at that time had confided in me that Charlie had been a regular visitor in his office, uncertain about whether he was really a good fit for the format. The producer had advised him to give it time and try to relax, act more like himself—wonderfully supportive advice that was exactly the opposite of what I was hearing from my own managers.
Charlie is a good listener, and over lunch he offered a few suggestions about how I might improve my on-air performance. When we got to the family pressures that come along with a big job where you clock in in the middle of the night, he admitted his wife had shouldered most of the burden of raising their children, as Cathy was doing with ours. I hadn’t talked to many people about her diagnosis, which had been splashed across the papers the previous week, but I did tell Charlie I was ready to give up on GMA, since every part of me just wanted to be home to take care of my wife and children. I left the lunch feeling better that I’d been able to be completely honest with someone who truly understood the show’s problems. But my burdens were still with me.
As the ratings slide continued, the attempts to make me over became more desperate. My personality, my hair, my glasses, my clothes, the way I spoke—everything about my appearance needed to be changed, apparently.
It got to the point of absurdity. One of the senior producers decided my eyes needed to “pop” behind my glasses, and suggested I get my eyelashes dyed. I did, stupidly, at one of those cheap estheticians you find on every block in Manhattan. They used jet-black dye, so I came out looking like a boyish hooker. Cathy and I had to go out for a business dinner that evening and at one point I noticed she was staring at me with a look of horror on her face. “The dye started to bleed partway through dinner, and you looked like Iggy Pop,” she told me on the way home. I walked into work the next morning, self-conscious as hell, marched up to the producer and asked her how my eyes looked. She thought it was a huge improvement.
The most senior executive in charge of GMA at the time invested a little more generously in my physical transformation. A company was commissioned to adjust my look in dozens of ways on paper, as though I were a paper doll: different hairstyles, different glasses, no glasses, all different colours of suits and ties. About thirty “Kevins” were then trotted out for a focus group, which critiqued them all before settling on “Optimal Kevin,” who had longer hair with a well-defined part, no glasses or less obtrusive ones, and a penchant for blue suits and green ties.
I was also being told that my accent and word choices were suboptimal. Early in my tenure at ABC News I had had elocution lessons with a speech coach on Manhattan’s East Side, the go- to linguist for Canadians at the network who needed to learn how to say “White House” without the telltale northern inflection. I’d sit on the couch in the speech coach’s well-appointed apartment, and we’d practise saying “ahww” together for minutes at a time. I had to hold my index finger and thumb at opposite corners of my mouth to experience the feel and look of an American “ou,” not just its sound. Americans opened their mouths wider than Canadians, and the sound that came out was a little more nasal. I’d learned how to say “out” and “about” instead of “oot” and “aboot.” And I’d learned that whereas a Canadian emphasizes the first syllable of the word “adult,” an American puts the stress on the second syllable.
Still, I made some blunders that only a Canadian would make. Some everyday Canadian words—“eavestrough,” “toboggan”—aren’t common in the US, a fact I learned the hard way when I unwittingly used them, instead of “gutters” and “sled,” on GMA. And I had trouble getting worked up about baseball, a game that arouses less interest in Canada than, say, hockey. My lack of baseball knowledge was considered a deep and troubling flaw during the World Series. A male co-host’s lack of passion about sports verges on unforgivable. Unmasculine.
My low point in terms of cross-cultural blunders came during an interview with Arnold Palmer, who asked what kind of golfer I was. I replied, “You wouldn’t even want me to carry your clubs—I’m a putz.” The New York–born executive producer’s voice coldly informed me, via my earpiece, that “putz” is the Yiddish word for penis, and ordered me to apologize to the audience immediately. I decided to handle it a little differently. Issuing a lengthy, serious apology would derail the whole interview and possibly make my gaffe seem even more offensive. So I waited until the end of the segment to apologize, and said, “I’m a putz for saying ‘putz.’ ”
A dry sense of humour had worked well on other shows, particularly the overnight broadcast World News Now, so I asked the executive producer, Shelley Lewis, if I could borrow a producer and a friend from that show to help me enhance my performance. She agreed, and Victor Dorff joined me at five in the morning in my dressing room to look over the day’s content with an eye toward creating the “moments” that might help lift the show. After a month of that, Shelley pulled me aside one day and told me Victor wasn’t helping me. I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but let’s just say it didn’t bolster my self-esteem. I had to tell Victor myself that his services were no longer required, and I added, “You should get as far away from me as you can. I’m going down and don’t want to take you with me.”
I never knew if Lisa was being picked apart in the same way; I assumed that Shelley was shielding her somewhat. Whatever the case, it was clear to me that ABC News executives were running for cover and I was being set up to take the fall. When the TV Guide article finally ran, months after the photo session on the day of Cathy’s diagnosis and at the height of the press pile-on about the show’s troubles, it was headlined “The Toughest Year of His Life.” The article correctly noted that ratings were in free-fall, the show lacked focus and the hosts lacked chemistry, and mentioned that Aaron Brown was the latest name being floated as my replacement. There was no mention of a replacement for Lisa, though she didn’t escape criticism altogether. According to unnamed sources, the writer reported, “McRee is freezing Newman out, on- and off-camera.” For the record, she denied it, calling me “a wonderful journalist,” while Westin praised my “superb reporting skills” and Shelley vouched for me as “smart and charming and quick on his feet.” However, as the article also reported, Westin would not confirm that I would remain anchor of GMA.
“I just want the uncertainty to end. It’s not healthy for anyone on the program,” I’d told the journalist, sounding very much like a host who’s already got one foot out the door. And I did. I wanted to stop pretending to be a QB, or Matt Lauer, or Optimal Kevin. I wanted a job where I could be myself and people would value what I had to offer. It’s one thing to feel desperately unhappy when you’re searching for the cure for cancer or fighting for freedom. It’s quite another when you’re hosting cooking segments. As I told TV Guide, “I don’t mean to belittle what I do, but it’s just TV. It’s not my real life. What matters to me are the people I love.”
Forrest Sawyer, Connie Chung and several other high-profile anchors had already pulled me aside, saying, “What you need to focus on now is trying to control your landing.” All of them had experienced public failure to some degree, and their advice was to accept the inevitability of it rather than trying to fight it, and to focus on what would come next. Barbara Walters urged me to do the best work of my career and make sure it was the most serious work so far. She said it was how she’d bounced back from career disappointments and resurrected herself as a journalist. Ted Koppel, the host of Nightline, kindly walked across the room at an event and threw me a lifeline, saying, “You can work for me when the time comes.” Peter Jennings was also supportive, and told me he’d make a place for me. I felt lucky that some key people still had faith in me.
I had been requesting a meeting with David Westin for several weeks, with no response. Then, one December morning in the car on the way to work, I read a column in the New York Post suggesting I was a lightweight as a journalist. To me, the story read like a plant, something that had been handed to the paper by the network, and I was alarmed. There had been no shortage of speculation and bad reviews, but until that point no one had ever challenged my intellect or journalistic credentials. If those were trashed, I’d never work again. So after the show wrapped for the day, I marched up to Westin’s office and asked to see him immediately. When I was told he was unavailable, I announced that I would sit outside his door, for the rest of the day if necessary, until he was free. And I did. By the time he agreed to see me I was pretty worked up. I don’t remember exactly what either of us said, but at the end of the meeting we were both very clear that there was no future for me at GMA and I didn’t want there to be one, either. Right afterwards, I had a previously scheduled meeting with the network president, Bob Iger, who’s now CEO of Disney. Bob was gracious and understanding, and I asked him for one thing that would allow me to bow out gracefully: passage to a job at Nightline, which Ted had already told me was mine for the asking. Bob thanked me for my work and said he would discuss it with Westin.
The end came exactly the way it had all began, with a phone call at home one night. I could tell David Westin was tense on the other end of the line, and mercifully, he got right to the point. Shelley, Lisa and I were all being dropped from the show. Lisa was already on her way home to L.A., but I was expected to host with Elizabeth Vargas the next morning and for a few weeks thereafter, until the new team was in place. He told me he’d introduce me to them the next day. I was frankly surprised he was still willing to trust me with hosting, knowing I’d been toasted. I decided to take it as a compliment: he knew I was too professional to have a meltdown on air.
I saw this as an opportunity to shape my departure, save my career and show what I was really made of. The next morning I asked for five minutes before air to address the studio and control-room staff. By then anyone who’d read a newspaper already knew Lisa and I had been fired. I thanked everyone for their support over the past eight months, and told them that I didn’t want a single viewer sensing anything was amiss at GMA. We needed to provide stability during this transitional period, and I intended to provide it.
After that first post-Lisa show I was summoned to Westin’s office and there sat Charlie Gibson and Diane Sawyer. It was the first time I had any idea who’d be taking over, and I was relieved: the network was throwing its biggest stars at the problem, so they obviously knew it was the biggest kind of problem, one that went far beyond having a Canadian host with pale eyelashes. Charlie looked a little sheepish but was gracious as always, and Diane was very comforting and warm. I expressed concern about how traumatized the staff was after all the upheaval, and ABC vice-president Phyllis McGrady, who had helped engineer the change, kindly said that the sign of a great host is caring about your crew. They were trying to take some of the sting out of what had happened, and I was grateful they cared enough to try. When I was told that I would be joining Nightline for a short while, I felt tremendous relief.
Shortly after that meeting, Charlie and Diane walked into the offices of GMA, to surprised gasps and delighted applause. ABC issued a press release minutes later announcing their appointment, which became front-page news. Just as had happened in Canada with Midday at the CBC, I had to keep the seat warm until my replacement was ready to take over, but this time I was thankful. Those three weeks convinced me that I wasn’t solely responsible for the show’s crash and burn. The shows I did with Elizabeth were some of the best of my tenure. We trusted one another and quickly developed good chemistry; I was more relaxed and in charge, feeling part of a supportive team and knowing the end was near. It took being fired for me to grow into the job.
On my final Friday, I talked about the highlights coming up on Monday, when I’d be long gone. The producers had booked Joan Lunden, Charlie’s former co-host, who was going to talk about “life after GMA.” I saw the opportunity. I paused after reading the teaser, and added, “Maybe I’ll stick around to ask some questions, too.” The crew laughed out loud, and I signed off with a quick thank-you to viewers. Despite everything, there were still millions of them.