Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV (12 page)

She also had to realistically consider what this new role would entail. Yes, she’d have her own unit of producers—but she wouldn’t be tied to any specific show, so she’d have to fight for airtime on NBC’s newscasts just like every other correspondent. “Frankly, foreign correspondent at a broadcast network is not even a full-time job these days,” one longtime observer said, remarking on the scarcity of foreign-news coverage on the networks.

While Capus and Barnett secretly negotiated in Capus’s office on the third floor of 30 Rockefeller Center the week of June 18, Curry kept showing up for work, though some mornings she looked rattled on the air. Staffers not privy to Operation Bambi could sense that something big was brewing—word was spreading about her hiring Barnett—though they didn’t know what, exactly. Curry’s friends could sense the same thing. One friend had been planning a blowout party to celebrate Curry’s first full year as cohost, but those plans were scrapped.

The rumors came to a head on Wednesday, June 20, the same day that
The New York Times
published Mike Hale’s review of Curry’s first year as cohost. Hale zeroed in on Curry’s difficulty “with the abrupt shifts in tone that are required of the morning show host” and her tendency to try too hard while chitchatting with Lauer and quizzing newsmakers. But those flaws, he wrote, were less important than this one: “As you watch the show, there’s an inescapable sense that Curry is outside the group in a subtle but unmistakable way, like the stepsister Cinderella without a prince.”

Eight hours later I wrote this on
The New York Times
Web site: “NBC executives are making a plan to replace Ann Curry on the ‘Today’ show, only a year after she became the co-host of the newly vulnerable morning television franchise.” The secret was now out. The timing of the two stories was coincidental. I had asked Bell for a comment, and Capus and Curry, too, but no one had responded. Capus and Bell later blamed my story for torpedoing the negotiations. Curry later said the story prevented her from leaving
Today
gracefully. But neither she nor Capus nor Bell tried at all to stop or stall publication, as the subjects of stories often do.

Public knowledge of the negotiations may have helped both sides: it applied pressure to Curry and Barnett to accept the offer before the Olympics, but it also allowed Curry to rally her fans, now that they knew what NBC was doing. In the end, Curry felt she had little choice but to take the new contract. ABC wasn’t calling to hire her. Neither was CBS. She wasn’t going to make nearly as much money anywhere else. So she was stuck at NBC, doing what NBC wanted her to do.

Word spread around NBC at four p.m. on the twentieth that the story of Curry’s imminent departure from
Today
was about to come out. A colleague called Lauer, who was at the gym, to give him a heads-up. “My hands are clean,” Lauer responded.

About an hour later, Curry called in sick for the next morning’s show. She feared she’d be overcome by emotions on air.

The story hit
The Times
’ Web site at five fifteen. “NBC Prepares to Replace Ann Curry on
Today
,” read the headline. A group of
Today
show staffers huddled around one person’s computer—as if they didn’t all have their own—and read it together. The story quoted a person who knew Curry who said she was leaving with great reluctance: “She got her dream job, and she doesn’t want to let it go.” Later in the day Bell told colleagues that Curry was the source of the story. But she was not.

With Curry out “sick,” Hoda Kotb, who was on a day trip to Nashville and about to board a flight back to New York, was lined up to fill in for her. (People at NBC speculated that Kotb was chosen to shield Guthrie, Curry’s usual fill-in, from criticism.) But as the evening wore on, Curry had a change of heart. After all, how would it look if she didn’t show up for work in the morning? How would her fans react? She e-mailed a group of producers and said, “I’m coming in tomorrow”; the e-mail was forwarded to Bell, who replied with one confusing word, “Discussing.”

Matters sorted themselves out during Kotb’s flight to New York. When she landed, at about nine p.m., she found out that she was off the hook. Curry was going to host for at least one more morning.

*  *  *

“ANN’S CANNED,” read the front page of the
Daily News
the next morning. It wasn’t quite true yet. But the vibe in Studio 1A on that Thursday was something other than business as usual. Before the broadcast, a security guard stood watch outside Curry’s dressing room. His presence might have been connected to a security breach earlier in the week, when an unauthorized man had talked his way into the studio. But it was also true that Curry was being very careful about whom she saw and who saw her. When a producer, Sean Reis, came to brief Curry before the show, he was briefly admitted inside the dressing room, and saw that she was in tears.

At 6:28, Curry—unsmiling but no longer visibly upset—walked downstairs to the studio. She affixed a microphone to her blouse and took her seat at the anchor desk. She didn’t speak.

Lauer came in a minute later and chatted with Don Nash. Then he took his seat at the desk. He didn’t speak either. He didn’t acknowledge her, and she didn’t acknowledge him. They both just stared down at their scripts.

The time passed painfully slowly: 6:32…6:33…6:34… Curry brushed her hair out of her eyes. Lauer hunched over, as if carrying a heavy weight on his back. He sipped his coffee, wiped off his reading glasses, and waited to record the first tease for local stations. The most promotable story was Lauer’s exclusive interview with the Connecticut mother whose children had all died in a Christmas Day fire. Lauer read the tease, looked down, looked back into the camera, bantered with the control room producers, and waited for his next cue. Ten minutes had passed now, and still he hadn’t said a word to Curry or turned right to look at her.

If it was chilly in the studio, outside on the plaza it was already eighty degrees. The news ticker that encircled the studio said nothing about Curry’s status, of course. And no one on the show said anything either, despite the fact that curious viewers were tuning in to see if Curry would appear for work. (Among those viewers were the producers of
GMA
, who guessed that
Today
would have Savannah Guthrie fill in. They were impressed that Curry showed up.) Curry maintained her composure, handling segments about the hot weather and the Jerry Sandusky trial as if it were any other day. But she did come up with one sly way to acknowledge the surreal situation. Four minutes into the show she wrote to her 1.2 million followers on Twitter, “Good morning.” It was no big deal—except that Curry didn’t usually post anything on Twitter during the show. “Good morning” was a wink to her fans—and they caught it, posting thousands of heartfelt replies. Her name was a trend on Twitter by the end of the first hour. “Save Ann Curry,” some of the Twitter messages read. “Don’t give up the fight,” said others.

During the second hour, the
Today
control room made the mistake of showing the words “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” below Curry’s face as she interviewed Steve Carell, the star of a new movie called
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
. The industry Web site TVNewser caught it, posted a picture of the graphic, and asked, “Really, ‘Today’ show?”

Why did Curry even show up for work that morning? Some at the network suggested she was trying to drum up public support: soldiering on, they said, was a way of garnering sympathy. “It sounds like she doesn’t want to go quietly,” one senior NBC staffer said after Thursday’s show. Her detractors compared her to Conan O’Brien, who was briefly made the host of
The Tonight Show
in 2009. When his predecessor Jay Leno’s attempt at a ten p.m. talk show failed, NBC proposed to move Leno to eleven thirty and O’Brien to 12:05 a.m. O’Brien resisted the plan and gained widespread support on social networking Web sites. O’Brien’s resistance was public: he issued a press release about his predicament and made it the punch line to jokes on his last week hosting
Tonight
. Curry, in contrast, said little while NBC’s mishandling of her became the punch line. When Curry appeared on Thursday’s show, an anchor at another network e-mailed Kristof and said this:

Really fucking cruel how NBC is treating her.

She does a lot of great and important work.

Kristof wrote back:

She’s irreplaceable. I’m hoping she lands with her spotlight intact.

The anchor followed up:

One of the worst things about tv, the way executives destroy their own talent.

Very telling detail in Bill Carter’s book on late night—zucker suggesting best case scenario is leno works at 10, conan at 1130. Second best is one of them succeeds and the other is so damaged he cannot compete against NBC.

They may or may not have cared who was damaged in the long run, but Burke, Capus, and Bell were determined to come out of this difficult moment with all of their talent smiling. That was starting to look like an impossible mission. Before that fateful Thursday broadcast was over, Lauer, who after a lengthy holdout had only recently agreed to let NBC set him up with a Twitter account, was deluged with messages asking him if it was true that Curry was being forced out, or accusing him of getting her fired. Some commenters didn’t bring up Curry at all; they simply informed Lauer that he was “obnoxious,” “terrible,” and “lame.”

The gossip Web sites were no less active. While NBC was keeping mum about Curry’s fate, TMZ and Radar Online were saying that Lauer had effectively stabbed her in the back. In their enthusiasm for pummeling Lauer, they also dredged up allegations about Lauer’s extramarital affairs and reprinted the salary figure—twenty-five million—that he had so strenuously denied.

Capus, Bell, and Kopf all fumed as complaints about Lauer piled up. He was the future of the franchise. But he was also its possibly egg-flecked face. Prophetically, Andrew Wallenstein, of
Variety
, wrote on Friday morning that Lauer “stands to lose” in the wrenching transition to come:

Put yourself in the sensible shoes of the soccer moms who are the foundation of the “Today” fan base, and Curry’s departure could come off in a way that isn’t too flattering for Lauer. The broad strokes of the media coverage to date appears as: “Today” is in trouble, Curry is the weak link, and Lauer believes she needs to go.

And that narrative will only get worse on TV where Lauer risks looking caddish as he tosses aside his on-air partner and trades her in for what will probably be a younger, more conventionally beautiful-looking woman, if the reports of the ascendance of Savannah Guthrie and Natalie Morales are to be believed.

Oh, the soccer moms are going to just
looove
that.

On an almost primal level, the Lauer-Curry pairing feels uncomfortably close to a bad Lifetime movie. She devoted 15 years of her life to “Today” only to get kicked to the curb to make room for another female. And whether you like Curry or not, viewers have to be feeling for her given the beating she is taking in the press.

Thursday the twenty-first passed by without a deal, despite rumors that Friday would be her final day on the broadcast. Some executives at NBC grumbled that by not doing the inevitable and signing her contract, Curry was behaving unprofessionally, holding the show hostage to her emotions. “Some of them are ready to pull the plug,” meaning fire her, claimed one person with ties to the negotiators on Friday. All weekend, all Kopf could do was deny that anything unhappy or untoward was about to go down. On Monday morning Lauer took his regularly scheduled day off and Willie Geist of
Morning Joe
filled in for him. Curry looked a little happier on air, and apparently off air, too: she and Geist chatted freely in the makeup room before the show, and the makeup artist remarked afterward, “That was the most she’s talked in a week.”

Backstage, Curry wouldn’t speak to Bell; when she had a question about a segment, she contacted Nash. (“Your girlfriend’s on the line,” Bell quipped when Curry called Nash from the set, according to a colleague.) She was barely seen in the office after the show—“AWOL,” said one producer. On Tuesday morning, with Lauer back in the chair next to her, TMZ claimed that Curry didn’t want to stay at NBC. That wasn’t true; neither was the report of her ten-million-dollar yearly salary, or the report that Guthrie’s deal was already done. But the stories did further damage to the family that NBC had spent years and millions building up and up and up. “Even if you loathe Curry, you have to feel sympathy for her,” observed Jon Friedman of MarketWatch. “NBC News used to be very good at handling major on-air change,” noted David Zurawik of the
Baltimore Sun
. “The passing of the baton from Tom Brokaw to Brian Williams was textbook for how it should be done. But what NBC News president Steve Capus and his lieutenants are doing to Ann Curry as they let her twist in the wind at ‘Today’ is brutal.”

Capus felt he was the one twisting in the wind. The apropos word for Curry’s attitude might have been the one her mother had taught her,
gambaru
, meaning “Never ever, ever give up, even and especially when there is no chance of winning.” But by Tuesday the twenty-sixth she had begun to accept her fate as a highly paid but probably underused NBC semi-star, and Guthrie had begun to talk to the network about reluctantly (under these circumstances) taking over.

Curry felt surprisingly little antipathy toward Guthrie. But she worried that her departure, if handled wrongly, would hurt
Today
even more than it already had been. “Ask them to call me something that’s still related to the
Today
show,” she said to Barnett ahead of a scheduled meeting with Capus. Barnett subsequently proposed “
Today
anchor at large,” and Capus agreed. The last sticking point in Barnett’s negotiations with the network was office space. This was a real prize in the close quarters of Rockefeller Center, and Curry wanted contiguous office space for her and her new unit of producers. On that matter, she got what she wanted.