Product Description

For the past twenty-five years—first as the blithe spirit of the Today show, then as the only woman ever to anchor a network news program solo—Katie Couric has been a familiar visitor in the homes of millions. Yet, despite all her public exposure, no one—until now—has been able to penetrate the secrets behind her closely guarded personal life and her struggles in the cutthroat world of television news.

In this probing portrait of America’s news queen, bestselling author Edward Klein rips away the mask that has hidden the many faces of Katie Couric: the strong, independent woman and the needy wife and lover; the grieving widow famed for her kindness to others and the fiercely competitive diva; the consummate television interviewer and the stumbling network anchor.

Drawing on scores of interviews with people who have never spoken openly about Couric before, Katie: The Real Story absorbingly chronicles Katie’s rise to the top—from her early days at CNN and local television stations (where she was told she’d never succeed) to her phenomenal
fifteen-year run on Today. For the first time, Klein reveals the critical role Katie’s father played in her risky decision to leave Today for the hallowed anchor chair once occupied by Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

As Klein makes clear, Katie’s road to stardom has been paved with rocky personal relationships: a turbulent marriage to Jay Monahan, who died of colon cancer; testy associations with Today cohosts Bryant Gumbel and Matt Lauer; and several star-crossed love affairs, including one with a man seventeen years her junior.

Katie: The Real Story is a candid portrait of a folksy charmer, loving single mother, cunning businesswoman, feminist icon, and notorious diva. Neither a whitewash nor a hatchet job, it’s a truthful, unflinching look at a remarkable woman and the media kingdom she’s sought to rule.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #537530 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-28
• Released on: 2007-08-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

About the Author
EDWARD KLEIN is the author of five consecutive New York Times bestsellers, including The Truth About Hillary, The Kennedy Curse, and Farewell, Jackie. A former foreign editor of Newsweek and editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine, he is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair and Parade magazines.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Part I

"Let Them Know  You're Here!"

Chapter One

The Stuff of Legend

Katie Couric was in tears.

"I'm going to be fired!" she said.

It was Thanksgiving week in 1980, and Katie was in CNN's brand- newWashington bureau on Wisconsin Avenue. She was seated on a big cardboard packing box (most of the office furniture hadn't arrived yet), pouring out her heart to Jean Carper, the network's medical correspondent.

"Can you believe it, Jean?" she said. "They're going to fire me!"

Katie was a small fireplug of a woman (five-foot-two on a good-posture day), and from her perch on the packing box, her feet barely reached the floor. Thanks to her diminutive size, bubbly personality, and a wide mouth that revealed a set of tiny, childlike teeth, Katie could have been mistaken (and often was) for a high school cheerleader.

Nearly six months before-on June 1, 1980-Ted Turner and a handful of veteran journalists had launched the country's first twenty-four-hour-a-day cable news network, and these tough newsmen had trouble taking the girlish Katie seriously. It wasn't that she lacked the smarts or get-up-and-go. On the contrary, Katie was a ball of energy, an entry-level VJ (or video journalist) who was willing to work for $3.35 an hour-25 cents above the federal minimum wage. She came into the CNN Washington bureau on her days off and volunteered to run cameras, write scripts, and produce live stand-ups for correspondents like Jean Carper.

Jean had taken a shine to Katie and was distressed to hear that her protégée was going to be fired. The ax couldn't have fallen at aworse time. It was the beginning of the holiday season, and Katie was getting a pink slip instead of the Christmas promotion she had been hoping for. It looked as though Katie was all washed up in the television news business at the tender age of twenty-three.

"Jean," Katie pleaded, "what am I going to do?"

"Who told you you're getting fired?" Jean asked.

"Stuart," said Katie.

She was referring to Stuart Loory, the managing editor of CNN's Washington bureau.

"Why would Stuart do a thing like that?" Jean asked."I've told him-every time you've gone out to help me produce a segment, you've been a real asset."

Katie hadn't confided in Jean Carper that she didn't want to be a producer-someone whose name flashed on the screen for a split second during the credit roll at the end of a show. She had bigger dreams.She dreamed of being a star, and not just a relatively minor star like Jean Carper, but a major star, the biggest kind of star, an anchor at a major network with a show of her own.

Katie had been obsessed with this dream since college; in fact, she once told a college boyfriend that her goal was to become the next Barbara Walters, who at the time was co-anchoring ABC's World News Tonight with Harry Reasoner. As soon as Katie received her degree in American studies from the University of Virginia, she talked her way into her first job in TV journalism-as a desk assistant in the Washington bureau of ABC News.

"My first day at ABC," she recalled in an interview with Washingtonian magazine, "Sam Donaldson came into the newsroom, jumped on a desk, and started singing 'K-K-K Katy.'"

During her brief stint at ABC, Katie was responsible for making coffee, answering phones, and getting ham sandwiches for anchorman Frank Reynolds.

"It was the most humiliating job I ever had," Katie said.

A few months later, she switched to CNN, because advancement at the fledgling cable network was likely to come a lot quicker than at ABC. Ever since then, she had been pestering CNN's Washington bureau chief, Stuart Loory, to give her a shot on-camera. But Loory, a hard-bitten newsman who had been managing editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, didn't think Katie had the right stuff to become a reporter.

To begin with, Katie suffered from stage fright. In front of a camera, her voice shook, her hands fluttered, her nose ran, and she stumbled over words. Her high-pitched, untrained voice didn't match the aura of grave moral authority that the startup network was striving so hard to achieve. Her looks didn't help, either. The simple truth was, Katie didn't fit the mold of CNN's female anchors-pretty young things with long blonde hair. Katie might be cute, but she wasn't conventionally beautiful, and her mop of dark brown hair didn't add much to the overall package.

Even so, Katie had been given several opportunities to prove herself on air.

"One morning, an anchor in the Washington bureau failed to show up, and the producer running the show put Katie on in his place," recalled Reese Schonfeld, who had cofounded CNN with Ted Turner and was its first CEO. "I got a call from one of the guys on the newsdesk in Atlanta. 'Hey, look, they've got Katie on,' he told me. I turned on the TV and, sure enough, there was Katie, white-faced and scared stiff, and looking all of fourteen. I called the producer in Washington and told him, 'Never put anyone on the network without first asking me or the producer in Atlanta.'"

Reese Schonfeld's orders had the force of law at CNN, and everyone interpreted his words to mean: Never put Katie on the air again. In the face of such an edict, Katie's chances of becoming an on-airpersonality at CNN-much less an anchor-were nil. And now, it appeared that Stuart Loory had sealed her fate by giving Katie her walking papers.

***

Jean Carper placed a consoling hand on Katie's shoulder.

"Let me see what I can do," she said.

"Oh, would you, Jean?" Katie said. "I'd be so grateful."

"I'll call Reese."

Jean Carper didn't waste any time making good on her promise to intervene with Reese Schonfeld, the man who ran CNN on a day-to-daybasis.

"Katie's in tears," Jean told Schonfeld when she reached him on the phone in Atlanta. "She's crying because Stuart Loory's about to fire her. I think it'd be a big loss to CNN if that should happen."

Reese Schonfeld was receptive to Jean Carper's appeal. She was one of his most valuable correspondents and had broken many important medical stories that were popular with CNN's viewers. What's more, although Schonfeld was loath to admit it, he was ready to believe the worst about his Washington bureau chief, Stuart Loory.

Jealousy and competition colored the relationship between Schonfeld, the top dog at CNN's headquarters in Atlanta, and the prickly Loory, who ran the Washington bureau as though it was his independent fiefdom. From day one, Loory was a thorn in Schonfeld's side. As faras Schonfeld was concerned, Loory's background in print journalism only aggravated the situation, since it made Loory a poor judge of TV talent.

After he hung up with Jean Carper, Schonfeld was struck by a thought. He recalled that a popular CNN husband-and-wife anchor team, Don Farmer and Chris Curle, had expressed an interest in bringing Katie down to Atlanta to work as a junior producer on their afternoon show, Take Two, which was modeled after The Today Show. In fact, now that Schonfeld thought about it, Take Two's talented director, Guy Pepper, was a big Katie fan, too.

And so, Schonfeld summoned Don Farmer, Chris Curle, and Guy Pepper to his office.

"Do you want Katie on your staff?" he asked Farmer.

"You bet," said Farmer, who swung a big stick at CNN because he had made his reputation in TV's big leagues-as an ABC foreign correspondent and later as ABC's Capitol Hill reporter during Watergate.

"I used to share an office with Ted Koppel and Sam Donaldson at ABC," Farmer said, "and Katie was a desk assistant who'd pitch stories to us. You know, 'This energy bill . . . maybe you need to . . . wouldn't it be great . . . blah, blah, blah.' Katie was a ball of energy, bright and cute. I like Katie because she can write and she's a one-man band: ask her to go find so-and-so, and she'll research it, take the bull by the horns, set it up, get the crew, comeback, edit, and do the narration."

"And you?" Schonfeld asked, turning to Guy Pepper, who hadn't said anything up until now.

"Oh, yeah," Pepper said rather matter-of-factly. "She'd be great."

The story of how Katie Couric barely escaped being fired by CNN was the stuff of TV legend.

In the years to come, Katie would never tire of recounting how CNN's bungling bosses failed to spot her potential. Even after she became the star of The Today Show and was recognized as the most popular female broadcaster of her generation, even after she joined CBS as the first woman to solo anchor an evening news broadcast, even after all that, resentment and bitterness over her treatment at CNN remained fresh in Katie's memory. "I had nobody on my way up saying, 'We're going to make you a star,' and I think that really helped me," she once told Newsweek. "It forced me to work."

That was part of the Katie Couric legend, too.

She had climbed to the top on her own.

But what about the people at CNN, like the director Guy Pepper, who had gone to bat for her? Normally, directors were low on the TV totem pole, but at CNN, Guy Pepper was the exception to the rule. He possessed a brilliant grasp of the electronic medium and was viewed by his bosses at the struggling cable network as an indispensable man. All that-plus his talent for schmoozing and playing office politics-had earned Guy Pepper a great deal of influence.

"Of that early CNN crowd," said Judy Milestone, a researcher on Take Two, "Guy understood TV best of all. He was always getting the show on the road. He had a good sense of how to put all the pieces together, and he understood the technical part. Guy could think of something and figure out which ca...

Customer Reviews

Coming of Age and The Big Makeover
Edward Klein, author of "The Truth About Hillary," "The Kennedy Curse," and "Farewell Jackie," has turned his attention to one of America's most important media icons, Katie Couric, in his "Katie: The Real Story." Klein felt that there were many unanswered questions about Couric - What explained her extraordinary success in the world of morning television? Who helped her on the way to the top? - and set about to find the answers.

After two hundred interviews with both her critics and most ardent supporters, he has produced the first unauthorized biography of Couric with the claim that "Katie" was not based on a negative premise. He intended to be scrupulously fair while saying something true and important about this media icon.

The book is a tightly woven story of Couric, "America's Sweetheart," from childhood (Arlington, Virginia) to her role today as anchor for CBS Evening News. Klein's inside sources describe Katie in her early professional years as young and hungry - "one of the most ambitious women I have met."

She has abundant self-confidence, is cheerful, carefree, and fearless but is easily hurt, quick to tears, and susceptible to feelings of embarrassment and humiliation. She projects an image of a strong and independent woman but privately she is extraordinarily needy and dependent on the support of men.

Couric's father is a soft-spoken man with conservative values. He was a reporter then publicist for the National Association of Broadcasters. Katie showed her father's fascination with journalism, particularly TV journalism. He always said that the number one job was Walter Cronkite's, as anchor for CBS Evening News.

"Katie" provides plenty of background, not only on Couric's rise to the top, but also a behind the scenes look at CNN, NBC, and CBS. Klein provides little known tidbits on how Katie barely escaped from being fired by CNN, her years at CNN Headquarters, and the help she received from the CNN executive, Guy Pepper, with whom she had a long-standing affair.

Some of the juiciest tidbits of the book center on the NBC's Today Show and Couric's rise to America's Sweetheart including departure of Jane Pauley, the rise and the fall of Deborah Norville, the difficult Bryant Gumbel and his eventual dismissal, a growing rivalry with Diane Sawyer, her marital strife with husband Monahan, and her efforts to become more glamorous. Through it all, Couric transforms into a diva with all of the perceived negatives.

The book contains sixteen pages of pictures detailing Couric's life. While this is a fast read, it took some time to get through it as my wife kept taking my copy to read for herself. That is about as good a recommendation anyone can give for this book!

Klein Rips Away The Mask That Has Hidden The Many Faces of Katie Couric!
Edward Klein's Katie: The Real Story is a probing portrait of the multiple personas of Katie Couric -- the strong independent woman and the needy wife and lover, the grieving widow famed for her kindness to others and the fiercely competitive diva, the consummate television interviewer and the stumbling network anchor. Many critical of this book consider it to be a hatchet job and/or a whitewash. In my opinion it is neither. I view it to be a truthful, no-holds-barred portayal of a woman who used every wile she could to claw her to the top of her profession. While this can be said about many successful men as well, it doesn't make it any less true about Katie Couric. Couric never seemed to mind using her femininity to help her reap the rewards she so desparately desired. However, she was the first to cry "sexist" or "jealousy" to anyone who pointed this out in regards to CBS paying her $75+ million to be the first solo anchorwoman on a network nightly news program. Further, she never seemed to hesitate using these defensive mechanisms to counter claims about being less successful than anyone at CBS ever expected her to be. To me, and apparently to many viewers and industry experts, Couric's rapid decline from queen of morning television to the falling star of evening news is that, at heart, Couric is not an anchor person -- sober, authoritative and wise. Rather her failure to-date as a solo anchorwoman is due to those qualities that helped her meteoric rise on The Today Show -- her cuteness, funniness and girlish charm. These do not seem to be the qualities many people want when watching a "hard news" program. Klein succeeds in delivering an unflinching book about a woman who is fast to blame anyone else but herself for her lack of success in making her monumental career move. In short, Katie: The Real Story is basically a book about a woman who could not reconcile her ambition with her personality.

Interesting viewpoint.
Working in the print media for 11+ years I found it interesting to read the possible (if true) behind the scenes look at TV journalism. I've had enough experience working for a major newspaper to know, much of this does and can happen for those who will do anything it takes to get to where they want in their career, no matter who gets sacrificed along the way. I have always been a Katie fan, even though I am extremely conservative. This book does leave you wondering who the real Katie really might be. There were many quotes from both sides..Katie fans, and not Katie fans which I would imagine have to be true if they are named and quoted. I think a lot of what was written was exactly what viewers were seeing for themselves.