The Big Stage

It was a brilliant autumn morning, the kind that inspires poets and painters. The air was crisp and the sky was cobalt blue, and downtown in lower Manhattan, the Twin Towers were burning. I stared in horror at the TV screen, unable to properly process what I was seeing. I listened as Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson described how two planes loaded with passengers had crashed—one into each tower—and that the United States was under attack. I could barely move. I could not believe what I was seeing. Are those people jumping from those buildings? The enormity of the tragedy was incomprehensible. The events of the day were still unfolding, but the suicide bombers on those four hijacked planes would carry out the most devastating attack on our nation’s soil since Pearl Harbor. Like millions of people, I will never forget exactly where I was standing, and how the room felt frozen as I watched those towers, engulfed in flames, knowing people were dying. I will also never forget that on that searing morning, I was hungover. Really hungover. Dry mouth, swollen eyes, shaky hands hungover.

The night before, my future husband Marc and I went to the premiere of a movie, written and directed by a friend of his. The dinner party afterward was at the 21 Club, a vintage New York restaurant favored by the city’s power players. The ceilings are low and the tables are always packed and close together. It was a lovely dinner with the director and his cast, with plenty of wine poured by attentive waiters. When I got home, I kept the evening going, talking to my parents, who were visiting and preparing to leave early the next day. We stayed up several hours more, drinking more wine. By the time I went to bed at two a.m. on September 11, I had been drinking slowly but steadily for six hours. And now, in the bright morning light at nine thirty, I was paying the price. I grabbed a bottle of water to rehydrate and went back to the television. Information started coming in. The doomed airplanes were all United or American Airlines passenger jets, headed to the west coast from the east coast. I panicked and dropped my water. My parents were on an American flight that morning from JFK to San Francisco. I dumped the contents of my purse on the floor, frantically searching for the paper with their flight number on it, then sat back on my heels holding it in my hand waiting for Diane and Charlie to tell the flight numbers of the hijacked planes. It felt like forever, but finally I learned my parents’ plane was not one of those hijacked. But I had no idea where they were, if they had boarded, if they had taken off before all flights in our nation were grounded that day. They did not have a cell phone. I could only wait for them to call. But now, I needed to get to work. I threw on some clothes and raced down to the ABC studios. Peter Jennings had taken over the live coverage by then. It was he who stopped everyone from talking when the Twin Towers began to crumble and fall. There was a horrified hush throughout our teeming newsroom, in the control room and on the set, as we watched thousands of people lose their lives that very moment. The Pentagon, that field in Pennsylvania… it was all so brutally unreal.

By the time I arrived at ABC, other correspondents were already on the scene of the devastation downtown. I was asked to remain at the studio in case Peter Jennings needed to take a break. I had anchored other breaking news events in the past already—several hours without break on the day John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane crashed at sea, and again when the FBI raided a Florida home to return Elian Gonzales to Cuba and ended an international stalemate. It could be true that they needed me there that day to spell Peter. But I feared the assignment editors could see how horrible I felt. I spent a few hours drinking Gatorade, logging images, taking notes, and praying no one would notice me. In late afternoon, I was told I would anchor ABC’s round-the-clock coverage overnight—relieving Peter at eleven p.m. Eastern time, anchoring until Good Morning America came on the air the next morning. I went home, ostensibly to get some rest before the overnight shift, but also to finally sleep off that now-distant celebration of the night before.

The next few days felt surreal. We all worked nonstop. I went down to the Pile, as they called it, the wreckage of the towers that spanned blocks, still smoking, the ashes and bits of paper still floating through the air. Rescuers and their dogs crouched deep in the massive debris, straining to hear any sound of life underneath. We all prayed for a miracle, that someone beneath would make a noise and the rescuers could pull a person free. That didn’t happen nearly enough. The stories we told in those days were simply heartbreaking. I held it together until the third day, September 14. Late in the afternoon, desperate to clear my head, I grabbed my sneakers from my desk drawer and went out for a run in Central Park, a block away from the office. I was jogging around the Reservoir, breathing in its serene beauty. It was clear, crisp, and oddly quiet. The skies over the nation were still closed to international flights, our borders still sealed. I had never experienced a day in Manhattan without the drone of jumbo jets lumbering nonstop overhead. Suddenly, the silence was pierced by the deafening roar of fighter jets. I stopped jogging and looked up at a pair of F-15s streaking across the sky, flying straight up the center of Manhattan.

They were heading south directly overhead, and for some reason that’s when it really hit me: we had been attacked. Our skies are being patrolled. We are at war. I stopped, leaned over with my hands on my knees, and cried.

It would be years before I would look back at the attacks on 9/11 and see that in the unprecedented, tragic events of that terrible day, there was a tiny hidden message for me, one that said it is not normal to be that hungover in the morning. Normal people don’t need to drink several glasses of wine to feel comfortable at a dinner party or to talk to their own parents. What are you drinking to escape: the anxiety? Or yourself?

But my slide into problem drinking was very slow and very gradual. It didn’t make a scene or scream out for attention. After 9/11, it receded into the background for a few years, before making a spectacular return to center stage.

My professional life to that point had been a successful climb through the ranks of broadcast journalism. I had attended one of the best journalism schools in the country and went on to work in local news, moving quickly from smaller markets to bigger ones: first Reno, then Phoenix, on to Chicago, before arriving in New York and the national stage. I worked for three years as a correspondent for Dateline, and filled in as co-host of the Today show on NBC before jumping to ABC in 1996. My career had thus far been one of unbroken ascent. To all outward appearances, I was an effective and dedicated journalist carving out a significant place for myself: calm, composed, with unwavering focus. Inside, however, I was still as anxious and insecure as ever—certain someone would surely see that I was in over my head and that my confidence and professionalism was a façade.

I was very happy at NBC and might have stayed there for my entire career had Roone Arledge, one of the most powerful, innovative, and persuasive network executives in the history of television, not come knocking at my door. Roone was the man who created the Olympics as a nonstop prime-time extravaganza (and ratings behemoth). He oversaw the creation of Monday Night Football, 20/20, and Nightline. He was a programming genius.

Would I be interested, he asked, in coming over to ABC to possibly take over for Joan Lunden as co-host of Good Morning America?

Who wouldn’t say yes? I didn’t ask any of the important questions, like Does Joan know you want to replace her? How will she, and the rest of the team, feel about my arrival? I blithely signed up, thrilled with the potential opportunity to do more of the live morning television I had grown to love filling in for Katie Couric on Today.

GMA had slipped in the ratings to number 2, and with tens of millions of dollars in advertising at stake, network executives were intent on turning things around.

When I arrived in the spring of 1996, there was already a shake-up under way. GMA had always been in the entertainment division of the company, but shortly before I came over from NBC, Roone took over GMA and moved it to the news division. Personnel changed; management was let go; people lived in fear for their jobs. I was the first hire from the news division, replacing a veteran newsman, Morton Dean, who was highly respected and well loved. I had no idea what I was walking into, and I wasn’t experienced enough or mature enough to pay attention. Some staff at the show resented my arrival, and I only made matters worse because I was oblivious to what was going on and was easily offended at the cool greeting I received. It was all exacerbated by the breathless reports in the newspapers that I was there to replace Joan. She was still very popular with many viewers and staff, and she was understandably upset at the speculation that she was on her way out.

I learned I was not welcome on my first morning there, when I was ushered to a tiny room to do my research and get into hair and makeup. The rest of the cast were all in the big, bright room down the hall, filled with laughter and preshow bonding.

There were some other unpleasant events—one morning someone taped a paper with the word bitch written on it to my chair, and unflattering stories about me started leaking to the gossip pages.

Joan had been a big star for many years. I, on the other hand, was framed as an ambitious, younger upstart. It was a classic All about Eve scenario. All this media attention was new to me and bewildering. At NBC I was a peon; nobody had ever once written a story about me in my career. My job was to report the news, not make it. But the jump to ABC had set off a frenzy of rumors and backbiting fueled by anonymous sources.

I was rattled and defensive. It felt like I was back in third grade, only I wasn’t sure who the bully was this time. I began having panic attacks again, a handful of times, on the air. I would have a hard time catching my breath and would feel nauseous, terrified I would vomit. “I have a touch of the flu,” I would gasp to my producer, Dan Woo. He was a wonderful man, and he was singularly kind to me every day.

“Just tell me how I can help you,” he would say. “We’ll get you through this.”

I never told him it was anxiety, not the flu, even though he knew what was going on each morning and may have understood why I was anxious. I could not trust my secret with anyone. It would make me too vulnerable. Someone might say, “Oh! Well, people who have panic attacks don’t belong on live TV! Get a different job.”

It wasn’t the first time my anxiety took hold of me and shook me like a rag doll. I had a terrible attack a few years earlier, in Chicago, while anchoring the ten p.m. newscast on a Saturday night at WBBM. I was alongside a veteran anchor, Mike Parker. As the show started, my heart began to pound. I am not sure what set my panic off that night. Possibly I had too much food in my stomach. I like to eat very little before going on camera, just enough so I don’t get shaky from hunger. Too much food, and I feel full and get anxious. It was a little like Goldilocks: not too little, not too much. I might have been tired, not feeling quite right.

During the first block of the newscast (approximately seven minutes), I began to feel like I couldn’t get enough air. I couldn’t speak, and I felt queasy. My hands started to tremble. At some point, I was sure I was going to vomit. I clenched my jaws together and stopped reading the script, fighting the urge to throw up. Thank God we were reading live to prerecorded video, so the audience couldn’t see my distress. Mike, however, saw me freeze and shut down: after a few seconds of dead air—no one talking when I was supposed to—he jumped in and read my part. When we went to commercial the producer asked, “Are you okay?” I could hear the concern in her voice. Mike was not as understanding. I had just left him holding the bag on live television. He turned and looked at me with disbelief. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he said.

Minus the expletive, they were the exact words that our neighbor in Okinawa had said to me when I panicked as my mom left to give birth to my sister. Twenty years later, the message was still the same. You are wrong to feel this. It is embarrassing. Hide this at all costs.

At ABC, panic didn’t just strike me while on live television. It happened at other times, too, once in particular during my first year there. Every fall, the network hosted a luncheon at Tavern on the Green for its important major advertisers. Every prominent journalist at the network was seated at a table with several of these advertising VIPs and instructed to be charming. Halfway through the meal, World News Tonight anchor Peter Jennings would take to the stage and talk about current affairs and politics, and then ask each of the anchors and correspondents a question about news events or stories they had recently done. All the big names were there: Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Sam Donaldson, Ted Koppel, Connie Chung. Each one, when called on by Peter, stood up, took the microphone from their table, and, with all the confidence in the world, winged these beautifully crafted, often funny, and always insightful answers.

My turn came at the end, and by then I was a basket case—all my insecurity was raging. I am not as smart as Barbara and Diane. I am not as charming as Connie. What am I doing here? I can’t remember what Peter asked me, but as I reached for the microphone I was shaking so badly I actually could not stand. I stayed seated, even as others motioned to me to get up. I gripped the mic with both hands. Peter’s question had something to do with the military and their families, so I told the story of my dad going to Vietnam, about the effect it had on my mother and Chris and me. I explained how conflicted my dad felt about the war, how he came to believe we had no business being in Vietnam (in later years my mother told me that he had almost resigned from the army at this point). I rambled on. I don’t know what I said, but it made some kind of impression on Roone Arledge. A few days later, he pulled me aside. “What you said at that lunch was impressive. Well done.”

Many years later Peter Jennings surprised me when he referred to my father’s time in the army. I looked at him quizzically. “How did you know my dad was in the army?”

“I remember you speaking about it when you first came here,” he said. I was amazed and impressed that he remembered my rambling, panicky remarks that day. Praise of any kind from Peter was to be treasured. He was smart, and tough, and dedicated. He did not suffer fools gladly. If he said something was good, you could take it to the bank. Years later I filled in for him, anchoring World News Tonight for a week while he was on vacation. When he returned he sent me an email: “Nice job last week.” That was it. But coming from Peter, that was a lot. I was over the moon.

That first year and a half at ABC, while I was at GMA, drinking was never a problem. You simply couldn’t get up at four thirty a.m. and do your job if you drank too much. I limited myself to one glass a night. A daily glass or two of wine had become a habit after work since my earliest days in the business. The only difference was, in the beginning, when I was usually broke, I poured my nightly glass of discount wine out of a box. By the time I got to GMA I could afford to uncork a chilled bottle of buttery California chardonnay, or a crisp French Chablis. Wine helped me quiet the insecurity that had been with me since I was a girl. It never occurred to me to seek professional help. I had never in my life discussed my anxiety with anyone, not a soul. I didn’t talk to my mom about it, even though I had chased her down the driveway in full-blown panic. I still believed it was shameful, a weakness. Talking about it would somehow make the fear and insecurity more tangible, more real. It never occurred to me that other people in the world might feel the same way. The idea of seeing a therapist about it was so foreign to me you might as well have suggested I go to the moon to learn how to manage my anxiety. I didn’t grow up in the kind of home where we talked a lot about our feelings, or our fears, and it is hard to describe a panic attack to someone who has never suffered one. All I can say even today is that when it hits, you feel you cannot breathe, your heart feels like it will explode it is pounding so hard and so fast. I often fear I will vomit, that my body will sprint far away from my control—that terror will hijack every single part of me and make me flail or scream or do something even more embarassing. Once, when I was eleven, my family was camping in France. Chris, Aimie, and I were at a playground with all the other children at the campsite, pantomiming to communicate with the kids from other countries. Suddenly, my little sister tumbled from the swing set, hitting the gravel path hard, face-first. She stood up, screaming in shock and fright, tears streaming down her cheeks, blood gushing down her chin. She came running straight toward me, her arms out. And in that moment, I panicked. I turned and ran for our mother. My anxiety overrode my capacity to think, or to help her. My love for my sister was not calling the shots for my brain and my body. My panic was, and it told me to run away from her. That is what a panic attack does. Your body takes over. You reflexively flee whatever it is that is terrifying to you, even when it’s just your hurt little sister who desperately needs you.

With my wine consumption curtailed on the early shift, my main way to keep the anxiety at bay was to work out—sometimes twice a day during that time. I’d run in the park, or hit the treadmill and Stairmaster, sweating and stewing about what I could do to make things go better at GMA. I was working hard, but the plain fact is that I was miserable at the art of office politics and developing allies. I was naïve, and too insecure to ask anyone for help. At the level of the game I was playing, this proved to be my Achilles heel.

By the summer of 1997, the GMA drama was in its final throes. Yes, Joan Lunden was going to be replaced, as long rumored. But not by me. The job instead went to Lisa McCree, a local anchor from Los Angeles with short blond hair and a big, sunny smile. It was a painful time. I was humiliated that after all the ballyhoo about me replacing Joan, I had been snubbed. I tried not to read all the news stories and the speculation about why I was passed over. I focused on the new job I was assigned at the network—as a correspondent for the news magazine shows 20/20 and Primetime Live. I pretended everything was fine, that my fragile confidence had not been shaken, and that every secret fear I nurtured had not just been confirmed.

Liberated from the four a.m. alarm clock, I began drinking more, partly to numb my disappointment and partly because I had begun dating a well-known movie actor who was interesting, exciting, and very much liked to drink. I dated this man on and off for two years, and he was very, very disciplined when he was shooting a movie. When he wasn’t, we drank. Nights out with him usually started with a martini at his apartment. I had never had one before. Martinis seemed so elegant and soigné: the beads of condensation on the cocktail shaker; the muffled click of the ice cubes, like a pair of dice that you shake in your hand before you roll them; and the stemware with its triangular silhouette. We would go out and order a bottle of wine with dinner, and a brandy with dessert.

One weekend, we were in Vienna, where he was being honored. Afterward, we flew in his plane to Spain, to his vacation house. When we boarded, there was a big bowl of caviar, cooling in crushed ice, and a big bottle of vodka. We ate and drank it all before the plane landed two hours later.

I had never drunk alcohol like this before, and I took to it. It was a welcome distraction from my disappointment at work. I didn’t feel quite so insecure when I was with him, toasting the sunset in Majorca with our chilled goblets of Spanish wine. And I didn’t even think I was drinking excessively. Everyone else around us, our friends, our dinner companions, all seemed to drink the same way.

But someplace, way deep down inside, I must have known I was going overboard. On my birthday that year, as I was heading out of the office to meet this man and some friends, my assistant called out after me. “Have fun! Don’t drink too much!”

I nearly stopped in my tracks. Why would she say that? Does she think I drink too much? Do people know I am out drinking every night? Or was that just an innocent pleasantry? I couldn’t tell. I still don’t know. But she definitely hit a nerve. I didn’t want to be known for that—for drinking too much. That would be horrible. I think that night I cut back, but just a tiny bit.

In my new position at 20/20, I traveled a lot, all around the world. Frequent flying comes with the territory when you are a network correspondent, but I hated flying. Those airplane trips that seemed so exotic and exciting when I was a child were now stressful. I felt claustrophobic on planes, completely out of control—probably because I was. I had grown to hate being in confined spaces when I could not get out. When I first came to New York, I avoided the subways in rush hour, because squeezing into a crowded train that often stopped in the middle of the tunnel would send me into a full panic. I didn’t like elevators, either—the rides up and down were something I endured when I could not take the stairs; during every trip in one, I was tense, poised to completely lose it if the doors were too slow to open.

But airplane rides were the worst: unavoidable, and hours long. On one flight, I did actually panic. My heart was pounding so fast I thought I would die of a heart attack, and I was sweating and shaking. I needed to get out—now. I got through it by asking for a glass of wine, but it left me shaken. What if, crazy with anxiety, I had tried to open the airplane door? I went to my doctor and, for the first time, told someone about my panic. He gave me an anti-anxiety prescription that I carried everywhere. I never took the pills, not then, at least. But just knowing I had them with me and could take one if I needed to was a comfort.

That, and the wine I was now ordering on every flight. It wasn’t always anxiety driving me to ask for another glass; it was sometimes boredom. Flights were more fun when you had a little buzz. I thought nothing wrong in drinking while flying, plus everyone else in business class was ordering a Scotch on the rocks or a beer before takeoff.

It was insidious and slow, this habit I was developing to calm myself with wine—no longer just after work, but any time I felt anxious, or bored. It was only a matter of time before the occasions in my life that “would clearly be better with a chardonnay” stretched and expanded, and began to encompass other more mundane hours in my day.