Amiable Joe

By Gerald Clarke

Don't worry. That peculiar odor you have been noticing in the morning is not burning toast. It is the smell of panic -- plump and juicy egos sizzling on a very hot griddle -- at NBC's Today show. Since the end of December, when Deborah Norville replaced Jane Pauley as co-host, ratings have not merely dropped; they have gone into free fall, a dizzying decline of nearly 25% that translates into approximately 920,000 lost households. The No. 1 morning program only five months ago, Today is now a distant No. 2, far behind ABC's Good Morning America.

Rarely has a show fallen so far so fast, and last week the network scrambled to repair it. Out went Dick Ebersol, senior executive in charge of the show, who had picked Norville and who graciously, if inescapably, took the blame for the decline that followed. (Ebersol remains head of NBC Sports.) On June 4, in will come a third host, the amiable Joe Garagiola, a onetime catcher for the St. Louis Cardinals who was one of the show's stalwarts from 1969 to 1973. "It's incredible that I could come back," says Garagiola, 64, who was dropped as NBC's weekend baseball commentator in 1988 and who seemed as astonished as everyone else that the network would now choose him to save Today. "It's quite flattering. I'm not a flat-belly, perfect-teeth kind of guy." In too will come Faith Daniels from CBS This Morning, who will become Today's news anchor.

But Bryant Gumbel, 41, whose self-satisfied manner many find as off-putting as Norville's plastic perfection, will remain. So will Norville, 31, who has been officially exonerated for the ratings calamity. "She's not on the way out," insists Today's executive producer, Tom Capra. "The ratings have slid because Jane left the show, not because of Deborah. Deborah's a solid journalist, and I believe the audience will like her as they are exposed to her." Garagiola, Capra maintains, will "bring out what is really going on with her." So it seems that one host has been hired to persuade viewers to cozy up to another.

"They're trying to repair the problem by coming at the wrong end," says Joel Segal, an executive vice president of the ad agency McCann-Erickson. "I don't see how bringing in a third person will help bring up the first two."

There have been signs of trouble at Today since early 1989, when someone leaked a memo in which Gumbel attacked almost all his colleagues except Pauley. After that, it was hard to maintain the fiction that the Today crew was a happy family, and analysts began to note that while Today was first in the ratings, Good Morning America was stealing the young female audience most prized by advertisers. Pauley's awkwardly handled departure -- it looked to many as if she had been supplanted by the younger Norville -- turned a problem into a catastrophe.

No one, particularly no one at NBC, seems to know exactly how to turn Today around. But there is a fellow in Florida who saved the show from a ratings disaster once, in 1953, and he is willing to try again. Like Garagiola, he is not a flat-belly, perfect-teeth kind of guy; but, at 38, J. Fred Muggs, the world's most famous chimpanzee, remains a crowd pleaser. "People like him because he's unpredictable and natural," says his trainer, Bud Mennella. "That show needs a spark, and Muggs has it." One thing is for certain: he couldn't hurt.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart

CAPTION: Post-Pauley Syndrome

With reporting by Leslie Whitaker/New York