Star Power

By Richard Zoglin

First there are the blond-haired good looks: striking but somehow wholesome, more high school prom queen than Hollywood glamour puss. Then there's the rich, honeyed voice: husky and authoritative, but free of the severe tone affected by some females in TV news. As a reader of the news, she is masterly: businesslike but warm, her eyes now wide with the drama of the day, now crinkling ever so slightly with concern. Diane Sawyer doesn't just deliver the news, she performs it.

But there's more than mere show-biz flair here. Sawyer is a fully credentialed reporter who covered Three Mile Island and the Iran hostage crisis. Later she demonstrated smarts and interviewing skills as co-anchor of the CBS Morning News. As a member of the formidable 60 Minutes team since 1984, she has traveled from the garbage mounds of Cairo to the heart of the AIDS plague in Uganda, profiled the likes of Corazon Aquino and James Michener, and given then candidate George Bush perhaps his toughest TV grilling on the Iran-contra scandal. If she never seemed an indispensable cog in the powerful engine that is 60 Minutes, she was no Tinkertoy either.

Have a conversation with Sawyer, and you cannot help coming away impressed. Intelligent, articulate, polished -- and a bit calculated. (She calls a reporter at home to amend her earlier list of favorite reading: add Doctorow's Billy Bathgate and Mann's Tonio Kroger to a shelf that already features Flaubert, Henry James and John Fowles.) In earnest, carefully molded sentences, she strives to dispel the notion that she is strictly a TV creation. "I really love what you learn every day in the business," she says. "I love the breathtaking way we walk into people's lives and ask them anything we want and then leave. For a moment you have available to you the whole universe of a person's life -- the pain and the suffering and the joy and the struggle. You can learn from it and take it with you, and then come back the next day with somebody else. That's what I like to do."

Is it any wonder that Sawyer, at 43, is the hottest newswoman in television? The sort of star news executives battle over, make promises to, open their wallets for? Last February, after more than ten years at CBS, she was hired away by ABC for a reported $1.6 million a year. The primary lure: the chance to join Sam Donaldson as co-anchor of Prime Time Live, the new weekly show that will debut this Thursday at 10 p.m. EDT. In addition, ABC dangled occasional fill-in anchor duty on World News Tonight and Nightline. The prospect of losing Sawyer so rattled CBS's bigwigs that they virtually handed her a blank check in an effort to keep her; then, when she was irretrievably gone, they ran out and hired another high-priced star, NBC's Connie Chung, to fill the gap and save some face.

And yet the question nags: Is Sawyer really worth it? Indeed, are any of TV's high-profile news stars worth the money they are paid, the power bestowed upon them, the fuss made over them? At least a dozen network-news personalities currently earn more than a million dollars a year and vie for a few high-visibility showcases. Traditionally, these slots were limited to the morning and evening newscasts, but they are spreading into prime time as well. Along with Sawyer's program, this week will see the debut of another magazine show, NBC's Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow. Its hosts: Mary Alice Williams, a former CNN anchor hired by NBC to much fanfare in March; Chuck Scarborough, a popular local anchorman for New York City's WNBC-TV; and Maria Shriver, a Kennedy. CBS, meanwhile, is in the process of revamping its four-year-old magazine show West 57th around its newest star anchor, Chung.

In the commerce of TV news, these personalities probably earn their pay. Stars draw viewers, and that means higher ratings and higher ad revenue for the network. TV's top-rated magazine show, 60 Minutes, earns an estimated $40 million a year for CBS; 20/20 brings in $15 million to $20 million annually for ABC. In a survey conducted for TIME by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 52% of TV viewers polled said they consider the anchor "very important" in choosing which network newscast to watch, though only 41% feel that anchors deserve to be paid a million dollars.

The crucial question, however, is not whether news stars deserve the money but whether they deserve the stature. Although most are competent reporters, they have reached their positions largely because of qualities that have little to do with journalism: the way they look, the tone of their voices, their on-camera charm. Yet they have influence that betokens great wisdom and judgment. They are the people America listens to, relies on, trusts. The major events of the day are filtered through their eyes and ears. News becomes bigger news simply because they are present -- in Paris for a presidential visit or Tiananmen Square for a nation's aborted experiment with democracy. The danger is that as stars become more and more important in the high-stakes world of TV journalism, they are overwhelming the news they purport to report.

Sawyer, more than any of her colleagues, embodies all the contradictions of TV news: that uneasy mix of journalism and show business, reporting and acting, substance and style. Her experience as a reporter, while not negligible, is on the slender side. Sawyer came to network news rather late, at 32, after spending nearly eight years as an aide to President (and then ex- President) Richard Nixon. As a correspondent, she won respect for her doggedness and intelligence, but she was helped by some shrewd career moves and smart packaging. At 60 Minutes, for instance, she benefited from a corps of the best producers in TV news; still, according to insiders, she had difficulty with the format and was less productive than the show's other correspondents. "She's a monumental talent," says executive producer Don Hewitt. "But her coming to the broadcast didn't do that much for us. And her leaving has not even remotely crippled 60 Minutes." (She will be replaced this fall by Meredith Vieira and Steve Kroft, formerly of West 57th.)

Few TV newspeople, moreover, have moved in such glittery social circles. Sawyer has kept company with a raft of celebrities, from Warren Beatty to Henry Kissinger, and last year married director Mike Nichols. She was the subject of a glamorous (too glamorous for some of her colleagues) Annie Leibovitz photo spread in Vanity Fair magazine. At CBS she cultivated friendships with founder William Paley and president Laurence Tisch, both of whom have taken a personal interest in her career. Says a veteran CBS hand: "She's the best politician I've ever come across."

"Ambitious" is a word often used to describe Sawyer, but the fact is that others have had ambitions for her as well. In 1986, as her CBS contract neared renewal, Sawyer was avidly pursued by NBC. To keep her, CBS upped her salary to $1.2 million and promised to give her additional projects besides 60 Minutes: subbing for Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News and hosting a series of Person to Person specials, patterned after the old Edward R. Murrow interview series.

But the anchor stints were sparse (reportedly because Rather was jealous of her), and Person to Person never got off the ground, largely because of Hewitt's resistance to letting his 60 Minutes star do outside work. That left an opening for ABC News president and chief starmaker Roone Arledge. In May 1988 he approached Sawyer with a proposal to co-anchor a new prime-time show he was developing. She declined, saying she did not want to leave 60 Minutes in the lurch as it was gearing up for a new season. But when Arledge tried again in January, she was more receptive. A deal was consummated in two weeks. "I always thought Diane was very good," says Arledge, "but I never had anything right for her until I came up with this show. Look at the success that Barbara Walters has had: she is set apart from the rest of the industry. I think Diane will have that same kind of success."

Just what the new show will be was still in flux just days before airtime. Produced by Richard Kaplan, formerly of Nightline, the live weekly hour will be a mix of interviews, reports on breaking news stories and town meeting-like discussions. Sawyer describes it as a "lateral slice" of the week's news. Arledge compares its free-form structure to Olympics coverage: "The idea is that we will be all over the world where things are happening." What is most apparent is that Prime Time Live has been predicated on -- and will succeed or fail because of -- the chemistry between its two stars.

It's a match that might have been made in a Hollywood mogul's heaven: the loudest reporter on the White House lawn meets the classiest lady in TV news -- "a sonata for harp and jackhammer," in Sawyer's words. The pair represent different roads to TV stardom as well. Donaldson, unlike most of his fellow TV news stars, gained fame because of his brash, sometimes abrasive reporting rather than his on-camera charm or polish. He and Sawyer plan to engage in unrehearsed, possibly disputatious colloquies about issues, but Donaldson insists that the clashes won't turn into routs. "One of my fears was that I would be perceived as the bully," he says. "But if we have a disagreement, Diane is not going to be intimidated. I will probably be the one getting the sympathy votes." "We have a natural adversarial relationship on a lot of issues," says Sawyer. "But it's not going to be 'Diane, you ignorant slut!' "

The star system, of course, is hardly a new phenomenon in TV news: Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Huntley and Brinkley were certainly as popular as any of % the current luminaries. But salaries and network bidding wars entered a new phase in 1976, when Arledge lured Walters away from NBC for $1 million a year. The rise of superagents like Richard Leibner (who represents Sawyer, Rather, Shriver and Mike Wallace, among other network news stars) has brought about an escalation of salaries and an increase in the clout these personalities wield.

Today, as the networks fight to retain their dwindling audiences, prime-time news programming is becoming more desirable because it costs only about half as much to produce as entertainment fare. And to compete in the glitzy arena of The Cosby Show and Dallas, stars are a must. Other entertainment elements are creeping into these shows as well. On Prime Time Live, Sawyer and Donaldson will be joined by an unusual (for a news show) featured player: a live studio audience. Both Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow and the revamped West 57th will feature dramatized "re-creations" of events, a dubious enterprise that blurs the line between news and entertainment. (Even ABC's World News Tonight tried the technique two weeks ago, with mock-documentary footage ostensibly showing suspected spy Felix Bloch handing a briefcase to a Soviet agent. Anchor Peter Jennings last week apologized on the air that the footage had not been clearly labeled as a simulation.)

On the evening newscasts, too, stars are being hyped more than ever. Facing growing competition for the news viewer -- from cable outlets like CNN, aggressive local stations and syndicated shows -- the networks are trying to stress what makes them distinctive: namely, their anchors. That's why Rather, Jennings and Tom Brokaw can be seen jetting off to Eastern Europe or China whenever the President (or a Soviet leader) hops an airplane. Network executives gamely defend such trips on journalistic grounds, but they are primarily promotional gimmicks meant to showcase the network's resident Bigfoot. "We're almost defining news in such a way as to say something's not important unless an anchor is there," says Everette Dennis, executive director of the Gannett Center for Media Studies. "That's regrettable. Sometimes the specialists on a particular subject ought to be the ones dominating the coverage, not the anchors, who are by definition generalists."

News personalities, of course, bring special skills to their jobs that are not always appreciated. They must be able not only to report the news but to communicate it effectively. An appealing on-camera demeanor is no less important than a writer's prose style or a magazine's layout. "You have to be a special combination of person to be the focal point of a successful show," says NBC News president Michael Gartner, a former newspaper editor. "You have to be a good journalist, and you have to be able to deliver the message -- which a print person doesn't have to do -- in person, in somebody's house."

Yet an excessive focus on stars has its costs for the news division. For one thing, it diverts resources from bread-and-butter reporting. Salaries for top people keep going up even as the networks trim their news budgets to the bone. Says former CBS News president Ed Joyce: "You simply cannot pay a large stable of news stars these million-dollar salaries in the diminished economy that now exists in television without it coming from somewhere. My concern is that it is happening at the expense of the basic responsibility of network news organizations: to maintain bureaus overseas, to maintain bureaus domestically, and to cover the news coherently and responsibly."

What's more, these news stars -- whom the networks must keep happy at all costs -- are wielding more and more power behind the scenes. CBS's Rather, who is managing editor of the CBS Evening News as well as its anchor, is a force to reckon with at CBS News, with a major say in the assignment of reporters and even news executives. NBC's Brokaw too has been accused of becoming an "anchor monster," of engineering the departure of former News president Lawrence Grossman and of being reluctant to yield the spotlight to correspondents who might threaten him, such as Chris Wallace (who has left the network for ABC's Prime Time Live). In order to keep Nightline's Ted Koppel happy, ABC gave him an unprecedented contract that allowed him to set up a production company and make news specials both for ABC and for independent distribution.

The anchors insist that their power has been overrated. "Careers did not go into decline at NBC because anyone argued with me," says Brokaw. "I protected Chris Wallace. I said it was a mistake to lose him." CBS News president David Burke has clipped Rather's wings a bit by shifting some of the anchorman's supporters out of key executive positions.

Then there is the problem of what to do when stars collide. Sawyer and Rather are a case in point. The CBS anchorman insists that he did not prevent Sawyer from anchoring the CBS Evening News and that he even told her she would % be considered the front runner if the network decided he needed a co-anchor. Those close to Rather, however, are skeptical that he -- or either of the other two network anchormen -- would willingly agree to share his platform with a dynamic female like Sawyer.

Sawyer has proved that she can fend for herself in the corridors of power. Her determination to reach the top rung on the network ladder has been matched by her adeptness at making the right moves on the way up. That political savvy probably dates from her Louisville childhood. Her father was a Republican county executive active in state politics; her mother was a teacher. At 17, Diane won the America's Junior Miss competition. Her talent: reading an original poem about the Civil War and singing songs representing the North and South. A newspaper account at the time described Sawyer as a straight-A student who "wants to study foreign languages, for a possible career in diplomatic and foreign service. Her other interests include journalism."

Hearing that today, Sawyer laughs in surprise: "Really! I thought I wandered aimlessly into this profession." She went to Wellesley, majored in English and marched in one campus protest -- against mandatory Bible class. ("I have to confess I was ambivalent about it, because I loved Bible class.") Meanwhile, she suffered through an identity crisis and an undernourished social life, which she traces to the Junior Miss "aberration." "I only dated four or five times in college," she says. "I went to my first mixer my first year, and I heard some guy say to his date, 'That can't be her. She's nothing special.' And I slinked out of the room and never went to a mixer again. I became very self-conscious."

After graduation she got a job as a weather girl at a TV station back in Louisville. Too nearsighted to see the western half of the map from the East Coast, she made jokes on the job. "I had no interest in the weather," she says, "and it showed nightly." Later she did reporting; her first assignment was to follow Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas on a hike through Kentucky's Red River gorge. Toting the camera and recording equipment herself, she fell backward into the gorge while trying to get a shot. The Justice's comment: "Are you new at this, dear?"

"I felt that the journalist's perspective was home for me," Sawyer says, "but I really wanted to know something about making decisions, taking responsibility." That led her to Washington, where her father's connections helped her land a job in the White House press office. She started answering phones, was soon writing press releases and eventually became a chief assistant to Press Secretary Ron Ziegler. Her personal contact with President Nixon at the White House was limited: their only face-to-face encounter came when she accidentally barreled into him on the stairs leading to the Situation Room. The eager young press aide made a better impression with a piece she wrote for a magazine that expressed Nixon's feelings about his mother. The President called to compliment her; thereafter he dubbed her "the smart girl."

"She brought an intellectual spark to the press office and creativity that was invaluable," remembers Ziegler. Another colleague recalls, "She had a great deal of political sensitivity for someone her age. She was smart and cunning, very clever and resourceful. She was dogged in her approach to things: she covered all the bases." Loyalty was another of her hallmarks. One Washingtonian recalls sitting next to Sawyer in the cheap seats at a radio and TV correspondents' dinner in 1973. Satirist Mark Russell was taking swipes at Nixon's Watergate troubles, and the audience was laughing; even Ziegler seemed to roll with the punches. But Sawyer broke down in tears.

Dealing with the gathering Watergate storm, Sawyer recalls, was "bruising, nerve-deadening torment." Her response was to devour all the information she could about the scandal. "I read all the newspapers and all the testimony and all the lawyers' briefs," she says. "I became a kind of walking computer. Even the lawyers would call me occasionally because I seemed to have everything on file." Only after the famous "smoking gun" tape, released just days before Nixon's resignation, did Sawyer become convinced that the end was inevitable. She was one of the stalwarts who rode on the plane that carried Nixon to San Clemente after his farewell speech. What explains her loyalty? She ponders the question quietly for a few seconds. "When someone's life is shattered," she says, "there is only humanity."

To some friends, however, her loyalty went beyond reasonable bounds: Sawyer remained with Nixon for nearly four more years in San Clemente, helping Frank Gannon (whom she was dating) gather material for the President's autobiography. "I had the illusion of indispensability," she explains. Her job was to assemble all the on-the-record material about Watergate and the Final Days -- an assignment that led to some tense moments with the former President. But she does not regret the experience (she and Nixon still correspond regularly): "I knew that being out there with him was going to be a seminar the likes of which one could never attend. I had a real sense of the Shakespearean, dark history that I was going to be a minor character in."

Her role in that Shakespearean drama caused something of an uproar at CBS, when, shortly after leaving Nixon in 1978, she was given a reporter's job by Washington bureau chief William Small. Several correspondents, including Rather, openly expressed opposition to her hiring. "Conversations would stop as I entered the room," she recalls.

Gradually, though, she earned her colleagues' respect. For several months she labored in relative obscurity, doing legwork on stories that rarely made it on the air ("They called me queen of the stakeouts"). Her big chance came after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. She broadcast live reports from the damaged reactor -- borrowing a producer's tennis shoes so she could stand atop the microwave truck in the rain without slipping off -- and got her first major exposure on the CBS Evening News. After a stint covering the 1980 presidential campaign, she was assigned to the State Department, where she impressed her bosses with her hard work and excellent sources. Says former CBS News president Richard Salant: "I think she was the best State Department reporter we ever had."

During the negotiations to free the Iran hostages, Sawyer's reports often wound up on the CBS Morning News. "I would sleep all night on two secretarial chairs so I could get up at 4 a.m., stalk the halls and see what I could get," she recalls. Her live exchanges with Charles Kuralt led to her being tapped as the show's co-anchor, and Sawyer made the leap from journeyman correspondent to network star.

As co-anchor with Kuralt and later Bill Kurtis, Sawyer helped boost the ratings for the No. 3-ranked morning show to their highest levels ever. Colleagues were impressed by her dedication. "She would show up at 2 o'clock in the morning and write her own copy," recalls a producer. "This was unheard of. There was no way you could not respect her." But she soon grew dissatisfied with the low priority the Morning News was given at the network and with the trivia she was sometimes forced to handle. "I thought this is not really what I should be doing," she says. "It was time to move on."

/ That's when Hewitt came calling with an offer for her to become 60 Minutes' first female correspondent. Joining the old-boy network of Wallace, Morley Safer, Harry Reasoner and Ed Bradley was not easy, and reviews of her performance were mixed. Producers found her, as usual, to be a trouper -- willing to go anywhere, endure any hardship for a story. "She has a lot of cold blood," says producer Anne de Boismilon. "You can never feel fear coming from her." Others, however, grew impatient with her for endlessly tinkering with stories. "She could drive a producer crazy fixing, then fixing again and again," says one source. "What she needed was a baby-sitter to tell her to get on with it."

Outside the office, Sawyer is praised as unfailingly gracious and generous. When relatives of co-workers are sick, she sends cards and fruit baskets; her thank-you notes are known for their eloquence. Her own life-style, meanwhile, is far from extravagant. In the New York City apartment she occupied while single, "she preferred no decor," says a close friend. "Basically, what she had was an awful little table in the living room with a couple of small couches and some dying plants." Admits Sawyer: "I'm hopeless. I'd just as soon send out for pizza and sit on pillows in front of the fire."

Her marriage to Nichols has changed some of that; they are planning to redecorate their brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and they have a house in Connecticut and a ranch in California. Sawyer is even getting involved in cooking. "She does it the way she does everything," says Nichols. "She cuts out 35 different versions of the recipe. We do it together. It is very detailed and sometimes complex." The pair met two years ago on a Concorde flight from London and went to lunch a couple of times to discuss doing a profile for 60 Minutes. Nichols finally confessed that he didn't want to do the piece -- but wanted to keep having lunch. "All of her is always available all the time," he gushes. "She uses more of her brain than almost anybody I know."

Sawyer's enthusiasms also run to tennis and movies, and Nichols has been introducing her to old films on the VCR (her most recent discovery: Renoir's The Rules of the Game). Nichols sat in on run-throughs of Sawyer's new ABC show and offered some suggestions about lighting and blocking. But, says Sawyer, "we're not very good consultants on each other's careers. We're very good, astute experts on each other and being happy." Notes a colleague: "She's like a kid, madly in love for the first time."

Sawyer resists dwelling on such personal matters: it pains her that her journalistic accomplishments are overshadowed by questions about her looks, marriage and glamorous life-style. "We're a Madison Avenue country," she sighs. "I'm not sure that we make a distinction between newspeople and celebrities. And I think there is a distinction. The distinction lies in what you do every day -- what you do to get stories and how far you will go and how much you will dig for them. All of the rest of the attention that comes to you because you're on the air seems to me an irrelevance."

It is no irrelevance, however, to the executives who pay Sawyer and her fellow news stars million-dollar salaries and bet entire prime-time shows on them. Nor is it an irrelevance to the audience that tunes in, not to watch the nbc Nightly News or a new show called Prime Time Live, but to see Tom Brokaw or Diane Sawyer or Connie Chung. This is perhaps the ultimate irony of TV news in the celebrity age: reporters spend their careers trying to become stars, only to lament, once they make it, that they are treated as stars rather than reporters. The complaint may actually be sincere, but it almost doesn't matter. It's good for the image.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart by Cynthia Davis

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With reporting by Melissa August/Washington, Mary Cronin and William Tynan/New York )