How I Got This Way (15 page)

But that was nothing compared to Severino’s reaction from New York. He was furious and embarrassed to have to explain to other ABC execs how this could’ve happened, how my contract could have expired so easily under the new KABC management. But rather than focus on the oversights of his successors in L.A., he made me his primary target of revenge. That night he called me from New York, his voice low and menacing as he unleashed a tirade of language that would curdle blood and other fluids. He had taken it personally,
very personally,
and told me so in no uncertain terms. Let’s just say—if I might now try to clean this up for you—that he claimed that I had, um,
violated
him in such a way that he could never forgive me, nor would he ever forget what I had just done to him. And he kept repeating this over and over again until the hair on the back of my neck began to stand up. I even thought I detected vague threats of professional retribution. Sev always sounded as if he had a little touch of the Italian mob capo deep inside of him, which is probably what made him such an effective leader. But this rant was terrifying, stirring up enough of my Irish Catholic guilt to leave me shaking. He knew exactly where your most vulnerable buttons were located and just how to push them. It was tough falling asleep that night after that call. Same thing held true for lots of nights to follow.

Also, he’d made it quite clear that my new NBC show was destined for failure. And in this case, he was right. There was no way to do a fresh 9 a.m. morning show live from Los Angeles; we would be relegated to a one-day tape delay, and worse yet, the show was cut down to thirty minutes even before we got on the air. My opening segment had always run nearly twenty minutes; it was the lynchpin to our success at KABC (and of course, later in New York forever after). Without that easygoing, extemporaneous, and newsy opening chatter, all we’d have was just another show; the rigid time strictures would simply defeat any chance we had to succeed. It was a recipe for doom—and also a loud and horrible echo of the Westinghouse fiasco. Severino had predicted we’d be gone in six months. He hit that one right on the nose. Six months would, in fact, be the total life span of the show, before the plug was mercifully pulled.

My friends were stunned but, at the same time, knew I was never going to make it being crammed into a half-hour format. My cohost, the terrific Mary Hart, was hired the very next day to anchor
Entertainment Tonight,
where she stayed for thirty years and became iconic in her own right. Meanwhile, I went into seclusion. I lived in the doldrums daily with nothing to do. Nothing, that is, except become a master at playing Pac-Man video games, which happened to be our daughter J.J.’s obsession at the time. When she was at school each day, I commandeered the machine for hours on end. Here I had gone from being the king of Los Angeles morning TV to this reclusive and lost Pac-Man addict. But I could only welcome the distraction, while waiting for another shot at . . . anything.

One night deep into this grim period, Joy and I attended a lavish wedding party for producer Duke Vincent, the number two guy in Aaron Spelling’s organization, which had created so many major hit series that continually lit up ABC’s prime-time schedule. Anyway, it was a beautiful tented backyard affair held behind a lovely home in the exclusive Holmby Hills section of L.A. I should have known that many important ABC executives would be there, and of course I should have expected Sev to walk in, too—but when he did, I still was somehow taken by surprise. Very quickly he spotted me and came over to tell me—in a not so friendly way—to meet him over in a dark corner of the yard in a few minutes.

Naturally, we hadn’t talked for many months, probably not since his last call gloating over my NBC morning failure. Our rift was no secret to most anyone who knew me. But my friend Mike Srednick, who had just caught sight of the two of us having that initial exchange near the buffet line, was convinced that peace between us could be restored and he rushed over to tell me so. He was sure that in the next few minutes Sev was going to invite me back and it was all going to be great again. While I stood waiting in that secluded corner of the yard and Sev ominously walked toward me, I could see that Srednick had strategically positioned himself close enough to watch, if not hear, this momentous conversation that was about to take place. Srednick, bless him, even had both of his thumbs hoisted up in the air, predicting a victorious outcome.

Meanwhile, here was Sev, my former beloved boss—whom I unwittingly “betrayed” because KABC hadn’t gotten around to offering me a contract to continue my local morning show, whereas Grant Tinker had promised me his whole network, very much to my regret, of course, in retrospect—now glaring deeply into my eyes for an awkward moment. And as Severino began to talk, I knew that Srednick was prematurely celebrating my return to Sev’s good graces. What Sev had to say was not good at all. It was as if no time had passed between conversations—he just picked up where he’d left off on those torturous late-night phone calls he’d made to me after my NBC deal was completed. (He had been relentless, expressing his utter disgust with me during those early weeks.) As he had vowed previously, he vowed once again, this time face-to-face: He would never forget what he believed I had done to him. Over and over again he repeated that immortal Italian quote—that chilling phrase describing the worst thing you can do to an Italian male, or any male—signifying the end of our long, great friendship. (My pal Srednick was beyond stunned to have misread the moment so completely.)

And that was also the end of that night’s wedding party for me. There was no point in even trying to return to the happy festivities. Instead, I returned to my lingering unemployed Pac-Man hell, wondering what would become of my so-called career. As it happened, nearly two years had passed since the NBC nightmare, and several months since my gruesome backyard square-off with Sev. Now it was January of 1983, and quite unexpectedly I received a call from a New York–based William Morris agent named Jimmy Griffin, whom I’d never met. But he informed me that he’d just had a meeting with John Severino. On a hunch—with me planted firmly in mind—Jimmy reminded Sev that the local New York WABC-TV morning show had tanked miserably since the departure of its veteran host Stanley Siegel. He knew that this was nothing less than an enormous humiliation for the most prestigious station on the whole ABC network. But he also knew, to some degree, how Sev felt about me. Maybe he didn’t know just how terrible the breach between us had gotten, but he took a shot anyway. In the middle of his pitch, he said very earnestly, “If you think with your head and not your heart, Sev, you
know
Regis can turn your mornings around here on Channel 7.” I will always be indebted to Jimmy for that one line, which, I think, brought about my return to New York City.

Because somehow, Severino’s head must have grasped what his heart had for so long refused to accept, much less consider.

Sev told Jimmy to have me call him, which I did, expecting the worst and receiving not a warm but at least a straightforward and businesslike proposal. He suggested that Joy and I come to New York for a long weekend to explore the idea of possibly moving there. He also mentioned that even he hated New York, warning me, “It’s cold and it’s dark and ugly here. I just want you to know that.” I said I knew that, but I didn’t care. So shortly afterward, on Presidents’ Day weekend that February, we arrived on a Saturday night and checked in at the legendary Plaza Hotel. At the time, ABC kept an upper floor reserved for guests and network affiliate honchos, so we were terrifically impressed; this, I sensed, seemed to be the star treatment. Along those same lines, great seats had been set up for us at Broadway shows like
Dream Girls
and
La Cage Aux Folles
. It was all very exciting, but Severino did have a point: After spending all those years in California, the weather in New York seemed colder than ever. The snow was piled high and dirtily in the streets. And of course, we worried about how Joanna and J.J. would ever get used to these gray concrete canyons, jammed with people rushing in all directions at once. We also looked at some potential apartments that might suit us. They all seemed so small and cramped. No doubt we would miss our good-size home under the warm sunshine, our backyard with the pool, the green lawn and the palm trees in front of the house. It became a monumental decision to make, and at the end of the weekend we were beside ourselves trying to fathom whether the lifestyle change was the right choice. Really, it was simply driving us nuts.

Finally we decided that we just couldn’t make the move. We’d have to stay in California; this cross-country urban shift would clearly be too traumatizing for our family to stand.

But how could I tell Severino? I would have to go see him in person—for the first time since that awful backyard encounter, no less. So I went over to the ABC building on Sixth Avenue and entered his office prepared to deliver the bad news. He was cordial until I told him I couldn’t take his offer. Then he and his chief network lieutenant, Mark Mandala, started in—these two passionate Italian big shots—working me over, but doing it in the most peculiar way. They started carrying on as though I weren’t even standing in the same room with them.

“He could be a big star here!” Mandala yelled out, like he was convincing himself of the fact.

“But he don’t wanna come here!” Severino yelled back, reverting to old-style street grammar, as he did whenever getting himself heated up.

“The people would love him!” cried Mandala.

“What’s the matter with you?” said Sev. “Don’t you hear him? He don’t wanna come here!”

“He doesn’t know what he’s missing!”

“Don’t you understand? He don’t wanna come here!”

It all began to sound like something out of
The Godfather
. And that’s the way it went until I finally decided to insert myself into the conversation. After all, this was me that they were arguing over. I spoke of the problems that troubled us most about moving east, so they might better understand: the comfortable house I would be leaving, the school situation for the kids, the physical uprooting of our lives, the New York weather, noise, sirens, etcetera, etcetera. But I was no match for these two Italians (even though I’m one-half Italian myself). In fact, they began to speak strictly in their native language and were getting louder and louder with each sentence that I didn’t quite understand in the first place.

Then Severino stopped and stared at me for a long time. I thought to myself,
Good God, he’s not going to lapse into that scary “violation” diatribe again, is he? Because I couldn’t take it.
But instead he spoke English, and of course, being Severino, he had another plan to dangle before me. In a suddenly friendly tone, he said, “Ehhhh, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna give you a clause in your contract that nobody else has ever gotten. We are gonna call this clause ‘The Misery Clause.’ You work here for one year, then you come to me after that, and you say to me, ‘Eh, I’m miserable!’ Then you can leave and go back west . . . or we can talk some more about a new contract that you’ll like even better.”

I got excited. Usually, in my previous Severino contract go-rounds, I’d be stuck with four-year deals with no escape hatch. I very much liked the idea of giving myself a chance to try out New York for a year, and if we didn’t take to it, we could get out and go home. I figured that Joy and I and the girls would know by that time whether we could adapt to this whole new way of life. I convinced myself to think of it as a kind of vacation. But then my mind began to hedge again. They saw it in my eyes, and that’s when they swept in for the kill—making me an offer I couldn’t refuse, in true
Godfather
terms. They would fly me home every other weekend during the summer. I could live in the meantime at the Essex House in a nice suite overlooking Central Park. We were getting close. I took a chance on asking for one more perk. I told them my sainted Italian mother had been born on Fifty-ninth Street; her father worked on the Hudson River as a stevedore. It was just a few blocks from where my new home station, WABC-TV, was located. She hadn’t been back to New York in years. My folks had relocated to the West Coast not too long after my career began out there. How she would love to see her old Fifty-ninth Street neighborhood again, I told them, and the Church of St. Paul the Apostle on the corner where she’d gone to mass every Sunday. . . .

There was quiet in the room when I finished. Sev and Mandala looked at each other. Then Mandala walked over toward me, reached into his pocket, pulled something out of it that looked like a plane ticket, and slammed it onto a table beside me.
“This,”
he cried out,
“is for Mama!”
(Of course, God only knows what or who that ticket he produced so suddenly was actually for, but Mandala sure had Sev’s same flair for the dramatic!) She would get her homecoming trip to New York from L.A. as part of the deal.

And so it was a deal, all based on a contract with an unheard-of Misery Clause. I headed back to the Plaza, where Joy was waiting for me in the Oak Room bar. When I’d left her earlier, we had agreed—after a long, tortured weekend of weighing all the possibilities and potential problems—that we’d stay in L.A. Now I was going back to tell her that we were staying in New York for at least a year. She was stunned, although a part of her—her shopping part—loved the idea. On the flight back to California, we alternated between feelings of triumph and despair. Were we really doing the right thing?

As we drove up Plymouth Street in Hancock Park, where we lived, it was a beautiful sunny day, and we could see both of our girls playing out in front of the house near one of the palm trees. The sight was such a far cry from the manic city whirl that we’d left just a handful of hours earlier. My heart sank all over again. I thought maybe we couldn’t make the switch, not even for a year, not even with a Misery Clause.

But, you know, we did it. It wasn’t easy. There was another brand-new show to start up, with plenty of problems to overcome. But on that first Monday in April of 1983, we got our
Morning Show,
as it was then called, going and going strong, too. And it’s been a dependable hit for the last twenty-eight years.