Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (11 page)

For Curry it was the relatively little things—starting with Lauer’s growing indifference, after a decade and a half of their working on the same set—that hurt the most, and, in the words of one staffer, “added up to an ominous feeling about her future at the show.” Among the senior producers, Melissa Lonner was her sole defender as the others fell in line with Bell, whose actions were becoming increasingly heedless and, in the opinion of some, sophomoric. One day he called staffers into his office to chuckle at a verbal gaffe Curry had made during a cross-talk with a local station. More chuckling was heard when, for reasons that went unexplained, several boxes of Curry’s belongings ended up in a coat closet—the sort of thing that would happen when a staffer left in a rush, or was unceremoniously booted off the premises.

A genuine meanness seemed to color the staff’s attitude toward their troubled colleague, something that looked from certain angles like the giddiness brought on by a sense of doom. One staff member, offended by the behavior, said “a lot of time in the control room was spent making fun of Ann’s outfit choices or just generally messing with her.” On one memorable morning, Curry wore a bright-yellow dress that spawned snarky comparisons to Big Bird. The staffer, who called this day “extra harsh,” said others in the control room Photoshopped a picture of Big Bird next to Curry and asked coworkers for a “Who wore it best?” comparison.

Given this behavior, it’s not surprising that Curry asked an aide to put together a collection of her best field-reporting clips—what people at the show took to calling her “résumé tape.”

A strange thing happened at around this time. Despite the dysfunctional nature of the
Today
family, the senior producers dusted off an old series called “
Today
Takes On,” which looked very much like
GMA
’s ongoing attempts to demonstrate that its hosts were best buds. In “Takes On” segments the
Today
hosts would together do things like rowing with the Princeton University crew team and learning how to perform acrobatic feats at a Broadway show. During the latter episode, Curry, Lauer, Roker, and Morales were shown arm in arm, ready to leap off a platform for a finale-like moment. “Don’t let go,” Lauer said to Curry, looking nervous. “I’m not going to let go,” Curry told him confidently. Viewers seemed to like the lighter-than-air segments. But if this exercise in chumminess sounds at odds with Operation Bambi, it wasn’t really—at least if you listened to those well-placed observers who said that the point was to make the seemingly inevitable banishment of Curry look like a game of musical chairs played by dear friends.

Bell was willing to go to great and complicated lengths to make the Curry “transition” a smooth one. He knew that removing her would inevitably alienate some people who counted themselves her loyal fans. But he believed that if the show, as a result, took a temporary hit in the ratings, the decline would be (if the thing was handled with the appearance of sensitivity) minor, and
Today
would rebound during the Summer Olympics. Then Bell’s bosses would be pleased, his job would be protected, and the morning show he loved would find its footing again. The Olympics loomed as both his salvation (“a once-every-two-year chance to introduce a new cast,” said one executive) and an immovable deadline. But because Bell wanted Curry to buy into the change, and show the world through her own attitude and actions that she was making a choice for herself, he was willing to wait a week, and then another week, and then another, if that’s what it took, to create the appearance of voluntary movement. In the meantime he told colleagues that Curry seemed unhappy at the show and eager to report more stories in the field. Everything Bell and his lieutenants did during this time was in the cause of “trying to get Ann to a place where she was comfortable with the move,” said an NBC executive.

But it wasn’t working. Rather than getting comfortable, Curry felt as if the walls were closing in. On May 15, while interviewing Betty White, who had stopped by the studio to promote her new hidden-camera show on NBC, Curry made a thinly veiled reference to her predicament. When White’s other show, a sitcom on TV Land, came up, Curry exclaimed, “You’ve got two shows, you’re ninety years old—honey, I mean, I barely am hanging on to one show!”

Many people believed Curry was in denial. Maybe—this is the more charitable point of view—she just didn’t know who or what to believe. Lauer, for instance, had told her he didn’t want her to leave. But he had also told her she needed to “protect” herself by hiring an agent. He was trying to help her, Lauer’s allies said—he hated seeing her in this position. Bullshit, said
her
allies—he was just trying to protect
himself
.

Similarly, Capus had initially assured her that her seat on
Today
was safe. He still wanted nothing to change until the end of the year. But he had to start wooing Curry. A day before the Betty White interview, he told her to at least consider this roving correspondent idea. “They’re trying to offer her something that will appeal to her,” a staffer said after the meeting with Capus. “The sun, the moon, the stars—anything but sitting next to Matt every morning.” Curry rebuffed the proposal once again. But by the end of May, a month after the lunch with Bell, she started confiding in friends about the situation. According to one of them, she hinted that the correspondent job might not be such a bad thing. But then why’d she tell
Ladies’ Home Journal
on May 9 that she hoped to stay at
Today
for another five years? Some read sinister motives into the answer, but it could be viewed a different way: as proof that she truly thought she’d beat back Bell’s attempts to push her out.

Curry decided not to talk to
The New York Times
TV critic Mike Hale, who was writing a column about her role on the show and had asked for an interview. But Lauer, knowing the piece was in the works
and
that Curry’s removal was in the works, did agree to that aforementioned May 30 interview on CNN. His interviewer was a coworker and friend, Donny Deutsch, who was substituting for Piers Morgan, so Lauer knew he wouldn’t be questioned about his concerns about Curry or his complaints about the show’s sensational segments. But he would have a chance to publicly praise Curry in what would serve as a kind of advance obituary. She has “the biggest heart in broadcasting,” Lauer said on the show, calling her “incredibly talented” and more concerned about other people “than anyone I’ve met.” Without prompting from Deutsch, Lauer went on to say that he took responsibility for the show’s recent ratings struggles. “When people start to write articles about what might be wrong with the
Today
show you know where you should point the finger, point it at me because I have been there the longest,” he said. He added, “I truly feel that way, and that’s why I stick around, because I think there’s more I can do, I can do it better.” Kopf, the
Today
spokeswoman who was trying to manage Hale’s column, sent him the transcript of Lauer’s interview, and he ended up including the finger-pointing quote.

Bell also praised Curry in an interview with Hale, calling her “one of the great journalists.” Bell continued, “People nitpick certain details, but she is known and loved by our colleagues and our viewers, she’s been doing this a very long time, she’s had some moments that I don’t think anyone else could have pulled off.”

The TV screen told a much different tale. A few days after Lauer’s interview on CNN, he flew to London for special coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. So did Roker and their old colleague Vieira, now a “special correspondent” for the network. But Curry didn’t come along. She had Monday and Tuesday morning off; she was said to be picking up her teenage son from boarding school. Her absence was glaring—all the more so because the announcer said she’d be “live from Studio 1A” while Lauer was live at Buckingham Palace. Lauer had to correct the announcement. “Ann has the morning off,” he said curtly.

Lauer and Vieira joked and teased each other all morning, reminding many viewers of their good old days—and rekindling rumors in the industry that NBC had approached Vieira about coming back to cohost, succeeding the woman who had succeeded her a year earlier. In fact, after they had casually taken Vieira’s temperature by asking through her agent, Michael Glantz, if she would ever consider a comeback, and received a firm no, NBC executives dropped the matter of Vieira. They sensed she had several reasons for not wanting to return, among them a strong disinclination to be seen as hurting Curry. “There’s no way she’s going to help them with their Ann problem,” said one of her friends.

Meanwhile, viewers of the highly rated jubilee coverage were left wondering: Where in the World Is Ann Curry? Kopf’s in-box was a magnet for questions from reporters. “It’s fucking unbelievable that she wasn’t on,” an NBC executive exclaimed that day, fed up with the mixed signals the network was sending about their still-sorta-new cohost.

Curry was back on
Today
on Wednesday, June 6. It was calm, sometimes even fun in the show’s control room when I stopped by at the end of the week.

“All right, we’re on,” the jokester director Joe Michaels bellowed a minute into the show. “What do you want to do now?”

Snippets of conversation flew back and forth like code, almost indecipherable to an observer. “Talent heading in,” someone said over a walkie-talkie. “Take Syria B-roll,” a woman said from the back row during a news segment. “Just have her throw to Al,” a man said to Michaels. Later, Roker and Michaels pretended to spar when Michaels showed two weather graphics out of order. Roker yelled through his microphone with a smile, “Do I have to come down there and staple the rundown to your forehead?” Michaels joked, “I’d like to start over. Can we start over?”

Come to think of it, their banter would make good TV.

Here, in the belly of the
Today
show beast,
GMA
was mentioned only when I brought it up. CBS was never mentioned. But once in a while Lauer and Curry’s concerns about content sprang to the surface, as when
Today
showed video of Ukrainian politicians punching each other in a brawl in parliament. As the video was shown over and over again during a news segment, Curry’s mouth was agape in disgust. To protest the replay she started shaking her head no, knowing that the producers could see her in the control room. Later in the hour Curry interviewed a former Miss USA contestant, Sheena Monnin, who claimed the pageant was fixed. Monnin, booked on
Today
via a series of Facebook messages, was a fan of Curry’s; after the interview she told Curry, “I’ll only do you.” How many more Sheena Monnins were out there, watching
Today
every day just to see Curry?

Because Curry’s imagined new role was going to be wide-ranging, beyond just the confines of the
Today
show, it fell to Capus to finish what Bell had begun at La Grenouille. Capus wanted to proceed slowly. But Burke, like Bell, still wanted to see the transition happen before the Summer Olympics. So in early June, with less than two months to go, Capus told Curry to go get a lawyer.

The lawyer Capus suggested to Curry was sixty-five-year-old Robert B. Barnett, a partner at the Washington firm Williams & Connolly. She agreed and signed him up. Barnett was uniquely situated because he did a dizzying number of different deals with all the major networks. He juggled corporate clients like Comcast (yep, the parent company of NBC), politicians like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and a stable of television stars like Brian Williams and Lesley Stahl. He routinely cut deals for splashy TV interviews tied to his clients’ books. A genial man, at least until he invoked attorney-client privilege, he used the word
we
when speaking about the networks, as in “We produced a prime-time special.” He was then in talks with all the networks about options for an exclusive interview with Amanda Knox, the American woman who was accused of murdering her roommate in Italy in 2007. So he was anything but naïve.

Curry might have viewed Barnett at first as a bulwark against her bosses’ efforts, which were misguided in her mind, to rein her in. These secret wars happen all the time: a television star tells an agent or lawyer to “make it go away,” whatever “it” is. Sometimes the agent or the lawyer succeeds. But in this case Barnett conferred with Curry’s bosses and came back to her with bad news. “This is much more serious than you think,” he told her, according to a person directly involved in the cohost change.

So the negotiations began. Curry’s existing contract, worth nearly four million dollars a year, was coming due, and NBC was proposing that they rip it up and start over with a contract reflecting her new status as a roving correspondent. It’s noteworthy that NBC didn’t propose to just pay her off and be done with her—it truly wanted to keep her in the fold. The revised contract was worth about five million dollars a year for five years, according to two people with ties to NBC. It stipulated that Curry would be a national and international correspondent for NBC News. She’d have her own unit within the news division to produce her stories. She’d also anchor an unspecified number of prime-time specials. But she wouldn’t anchor
Today
.

Curry wanted to believe the network was sincere, and not just trying to avoid a messy transition. “This is maybe for the better,” she told one confidant, citing the chance to tell the stories of poor and disenfranchised people that were basically invisible on television. “I think she saw, on the merits of it, some advantages in leaving the cohost job and focusing on reporting,” said her friend Nicholas Kristof. “At the same time,” he added, “the way it was handled by NBC was just unforgivable. They humiliated her; they treated her in a way that I thought was just utterly insulting.”

After a tense meeting on June 15, Curry cryptically posted to Twitter a quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: “You must do the things you think you cannot do.” Partly Curry felt she had indeed failed. But the other part of her felt she had been betrayed—not just by Bell, but by Lauer, too. Why would she want to stay at a network that treated her this way?