Producer Page 9

  Each leader had his own agenda, but the story reported that day was a simple and life-changing one. It was about establishing whether these two previous enemies could see their way clear to working with each other. They seemed to be making progress as they left the château and took their famous hour-long “walk in the woods” through the Geneva heartland behind the US Embassy. That was followed by a bilateral talk in front of a roaring fireplace. We all could see that these men had established a rapport.

  When they finally showed up for a joint business conference on a huge stage with flags from both countries raised overhead, they met in the middle and shook hands to thundering applause. Suddenly, they were on a first-name basis, Ronald and Mikhail, and the sound of clicking camera shutters was deafening.

  “As the leaders signed documents together,” Frank Sesno says, “I realized that we were coming out of a deep freeze, into a warming trend, with a good chance of clearing.”

  On January 1, 1990, many years later, President Reagan came on Larry King Live and spoke about his legendary relationship with Soviet President Gorbachev:

  KING: The liking of Gorbachev. Was that a real sense of affection? Did you, like, like him?

  REAGAN: Yes. As you know… he was the fourth. There were three leaders before him, of the Soviet Union, and I didn’t have much to do with them. They kept dying on me, but he was totally different than any Russian leader that I had met before, and I think that there was a kind of a chemistry there that set up. Now, on the other hand, I knew too much about communism to believe in words. I said that I would make my decision as to whether we were getting along on the basis of deeds. Every meeting that we ever had, I presented him with a handwritten—my handwriting—list of people that had been brought to my attention who wanted to emigrate and for [other] reasons to get out, and I would give it to him, and…

  KING: He came through?

  REAGAN: Yes… He is a likable person. You find yourself liking him. But again, knowing the difference between our two systems… I’m not a linguist, but I learned one little Russian phrase and I used it so often that he used to clap his hands over his ears, and that was doveryai, no proveryai, which means “trust, but verify.”

  We all were well aware of how fond Reagan was of saying, “Doveryai, no proveryai.”

  To which Gorbachev would say, “Vi vceda eto gavorite.” “You always say that.”

  Then Reagan would come back with, “Well… I like the sound of it.”

  This kind of bantering among world leaders indicated a comfort level between them that would support continuing negotiations. The Cold War thaw officially had begun. Now, with each summit, there was progress being made between the two superpowers that previously had been enemies.

  When I look back, I know that each leader involved had his personal agenda and each tried to do what he considered good for his country. There were no instant gains expected, they did not do it for each other, and no acknowledgment or personal praise was ever offered to anyone in particular who helped bring about this summit and make it a success. We were all just doing our jobs, and that is exactly the way it should be.

  YOU ARE PAID TO DO A JOB, SO DO IT

  It really is that simple. Do you find yourself mulling the following questions?

  • Do they like me?

  • Do they like what I did?

  • Did they say I was good?

  If you waste time and energy worrying if someone likes what you did, if they’re going to fire you, or if you’re going to get a raise, you’re on the wrong track. My advice is to not think about those things at all. Just do your job the best way you can.

  I can’t tell you how many times someone has said to me, “I thought I did a great job but I didn’t hear a word about it.”

  The truth is that you didn’t hear from anyone because you shouldn’t hear from anyone. You were hired in the first place because they expected you to do, not just an adequate job, but a great job. And that doesn’t come with praise or recognition. Just do what you were hired to do, and if you don’t, believe me, you will hear about it. If you get an attaboy once in a while, that’s a nice compliment. I try to give attaboys whenever I can, because generally when you hear from your boss, you did something he or she would like you never to repeat. If you do get called out, remember the value of constructive criticism. When it really is constructive and comes from someone smart and experienced, it’s a priceless gift. How else can you keep on improving?

  We all have insecurities that we have carried through our lives, but you can learn to put them on the back burner and just do your work. If you have a gift, concentrate on it instead of whether or not someone likes you. The more you get distracted with waiting for compliments, the more you get hung up on it, and you only get more insecure. It’s a vicious cycle and getting out of it is a relief.

  When someone complains that no one picked up a phone to tell them how great they did, I say it’s time to grow up. Welcome to the real world where your boss is sure to call you out for a mistake, but when you perform well, no news is good news.

  CHAPTER 6

  Work Harder Than Anyone Else

  By 1978, I was set on becoming a television producer, inspired by having helped organize the RFK Pro-Celebrity Tennis Tournament. At the time, there were three major networks: ABC, CBS, NBC. I decided to take my chances at ABC, not a choice that resulted from doing research and comparing my options. Rather, I chose ABC because the only producer I knew had worked there. But I never asked for his help. One day I just walked in cold and said to the ABC receptionist, “Hi, my name is Wendy Walker and I’d like to apply for a job.”

  “What would you like to do?” asked the receptionist.

  “I’d like to be a producer,” I said.

  “Do you have any experience?” he asked.

  “Yes. Well, no, not exactly.” I explained the charity tennis tournament I had helped to arrange.

  “You’re going to need a lot more experience than that,” he said. “But if you’d like to apply for an entry level position, you can do that and work your way up. Would you consider becoming a secretary?”

  “I guess so,” I said as he handed me a load of paperwork to fill out. At twenty-five, I was applying to become an entry level secretary at ABC, with no clout at all. But I was trying to keep my eye on the big picture, even though I didn’t know exactly what the big picture was. I just knew that I was willing to do what it took to find out.

  I took the typing test, I passed it (thank you, IBM Correcting Selectric typewriters), and I applied for a couple of ABC secretarial jobs. I got one! That was when I met a pretty, young, dark-haired woman and we introduced ourselves. Her name was Katie Couric, she told me, she was twenty years old, five years my junior, just out of college, and she was starting with ABC on the same exact day that I was.

  “We were like two lost souls looking for a normal person to talk to,” Katie explains. “It was her first day and my first day and we just sort of clicked immediately. I remember it was really fun to meet somebody who was completely on the same page as I was professionally, in terms of just starting out in television.”

  But while I sat at my desk as assistant to Kevin Delaney, deputy bureau chief, helping people sort out where they belonged, Katie, a desk assistant, was rushing all over the newsroom. She once told Larry during an interview, “Basically, when I started, I got Frank Reynolds his ham sandwiches and Xeroxed and answered telephones and made coffee and gave newspapers to the correspondents.”

  I made a little more money than Katie did (the only time that has been true throughout our careers), but her job was more fun than mine since she was in motion most of the time. When I look at Katie today, she looks pretty much the same as she did in that newsroom, and we still share a similar sense of humor and a drive to do the best we can at all times. We’ve both always had that drive and I only wish we had known back then that we really could do whatever we wanted to do. No one ever said to Katie, “If you want to be the fi
rst female network news anchor, you can do it.”

  Rather, people went out of their way to discourage her. Katie says, “When I started, the notion that I would have the job that I have today was laughable. I’ve always tried to enjoy and appreciate whatever job I’m in. While I had definite career goals, I wanted to be a network correspondent by the time I was thirty. I never imagined I would ever be an anchor. I just wasn’t anchor material.”

  That was what they told her. So Katie and I simply followed our designated career paths, never realizing how far we could and would go. We kept at it, we worked as hard as we could, and we encouraged each other to take chances. We were both competitive by nature, we always acted like professionals, and we fell back on our humor to get us through the tough periods, sometimes acting silly together when we were sure no one else could see us. We needed to be taken seriously and we did what was asked of us, like making sure Frank Reynolds’s cigarette was out when his show started.

  After a month or two, Katie moved in with me. She had been living with her parents since she was out of college, and I was renting a town house in Georgetown. Now, as roommates, workmates, and friends, we egged each other on.

  “We became even closer,” says Katie, “because we were living in the same house and working at the same place. We could have gotten on each other’s nerves but we didn’t. Or maybe I got on her nerves. I’m very messy and Wendy is so organized, I think she might be slightly OCD.”

  The truth was that my room was in the basement of our Georgetown town house, so in order to make it cozy and feel like a nest, I put sheets all over the walls and bought an inexpensive navy-and-white duvet cover from Bloomingdale’s. Once, I got home from CNN late at night to find Katie balancing an overly full cup of black coffee on my new duvet cover while she was trying on my clothes and systematically tossing them on the floor. A scene from The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss comes to mind whenever I think of that night. One look at her room, strewn from bed to floor with random articles of clothing, explained why she was in mine. There was no place she could sit in her own room. And she made sure to throw all of my stuff around, too. It was so bad and comical, I once found chicken bones in the pocket of a jacket she was lending me. Our Felix and Oscar relationship was in full swing.

  “We really were the odd couple,” says Katie. “Wendy had her sweaters organized by stripes and colors. Then I would come into her room and throw a striped shirt in the solid pile on her shelf. God forbid! Wendy called me Pigpen, not because I was dirty, but was I ever messy! I’m better these days,” she adds, “but I still throw things around a little bit. And Wendy still organizes my bathroom when she comes to visit, because she says it looks like a drugstore.”

  Katie and I had bought identical gray Honda Accords and mine was clean and tidy at all times. I never left a coffee cup or a piece of paper in my car, while Katie’s had half-full cups in all the holders, and articles of clothing were strewn across the backseat so you couldn’t get in. Even her glove box was so full, she couldn’t close it, so it just hung open, offering easy access to the pile of junk she had stuffed inside it.

  It was so bad that at one point, Katie’s mom came over to have a talk with me. Katie was only twenty, she explained, and this was the first time she was living away from home. She asked me to please not throw Katie out because she was so messy. I told her I had no intention of throwing Katie out, but when I tried to help her, she wasn’t interested.

  Mostly, though, we had a great time as roommates. “I would wake Wendy up to borrow a skirt,” recalls Katie, “and she would wake me up to French braid her hair. When she had to tell off a boyfriend, I would create a script with her so she could call him up and know exactly what to say.”

  When Katie moved out into her own place, I came over to help her organize it, but it was futile. From the boxes all over the place to the impossible tangle of her gold necklaces in her jewelry box, it was a lost cause. The main area where Katie and I connected was in our work ethic. Although we had fun together, we were all work and very little play since we were both so focused on our careers. In fact, on Sundays, instead of hanging around our apartment or meeting friends for brunch, we went into ABC to volunteer our time. There, we wrote copy, logged tapes, went out with camera crews to various locations, and basically, we learned every phase of the business. All for no pay. We called it Sunday School, and we spent as much time as possible learning the news business and increasing our “skill sets,” a term no one used back then. Whatever you called it, my motivation was clear. I wanted to learn everything I could as quickly as possible in order to figure out what I was really good at. If I had to work harder than anyone else, that was fine with me, because I knew that the harder I worked, the better chance I had of getting promoted.

  Even as a secretary, I loved the feeling of being in the newsroom, the dimmed lights, the conversational buzz, and the constant clicking sound of the ticker tape. Everybody was puffing away on cigarettes (the room was always filled with layers of smoke), we communicated on big old telephones that were hooked into the wall with thick, coiled black wires, and I had a dinosaur of an electric typewriter on my desk, which was located at the very back of the newsroom at the Washington News Bureau.

  Nevertheless, there I was, in Frank Reynolds’s newsroom, where live TV news broadcasts were aired every night. Little did I know that one day I would be the White House producer for his son, Dean Reynolds, or that Dean and I would date for a few years. At the time, it was all new to me and truly alive with lights, the teleprompter, and massive motion and activity. I would watch various people scrambling around to get those pieces out as the news broke. Producers were editing at the last minute, suddenly changing something, and then literally racing down hallways, yelling, “We’ve got it, we’re coming.” And into the tape deck the video would slide, just in the nick of time. Just like a movie, but this was real.

  My desk sat at the end of a long hallway just outside bureau chief George Watson’s office. Once a show was ready to air, if you had enough clout, you were invited into the bureau chief’s office to watch the show from there. I was not in a high-enough position back then to be invited into George’s inner sanctum, but I watched with envy as other people ran in and out of there, wondering what eventual piece of this pie might be mine.

  In the meantime, I worked nonstop on scheduling for the various production assistants, directors, and assistant directors who all needed to be at work at different designated times. I became the go-to girl to find out what time each individual person needed to show up, so I met and talked with everyone every day, since they all had to check in with me. ABC was airing news shows constantly, including a Sunday public affairs show called Issues and Answers which eventually turned into the much fancier show: This Week with David Brinkley.

  One Sunday, George came in to ABC to finish up some work. Since my desk was located directly next to his assistant’s empty desk, he noticed me right away and said, “Wendy, what are you doing here on a weekend?”

  “I always come in on weekends,” I told him. “So does Katie. We call it Sunday School.”

  When it came out of my mouth, I thought it sounded lame. But George was impressed while I continued to soak in information and revel in the bustle of the newsroom. Getting promoted was always on my mind, so after several months, I applied to be the booker for Good Morning America (GMA). Susan Mercandetti, the GMA booker and a dear friend, was being promoted and I had my eye on her job. I had never booked a show, but it didn’t seem beyond me. The truth was, it was a lot different back then, since there were so many fewer venues for guests and so many people were eager to get on the air. Susan was the best booker in the business.

  I would be remiss here, by the way, to omit the fact that Susan Mercandetti gave new meaning to the term “Rolodex.” People had real ones back then, not virtual Rolodexes on the Internet, and Susan lugged her huge one around with her wherever she went. I remember being with her at Martha’s Vineyard when she pulled out t
hat crazy Rolodex. It really was the real thing! I didn’t end up getting her job, which mortified me at the time, but when I look back, I see that I didn’t deserve it. I needed some more experience.

  The next job I didn’t get but I think I actually did deserve was replacing one of our PR staffers, Jan Smith. Since she wanted to be a reporter, she was leaving her post as ABC public relations assistant to go to Kansas City, to “work on her reel.” When someone wanted to become a reporter, it was common practice to go to a smaller market to get experience and create a reel of film. Then you would come back to the big city and land a job in the larger market, using your reel as an audition tape. I was eager to make the jump to PR assistant, but I didn’t get that job, either.

  Then one afternoon, my boss, Kevin Delaney, walked over to my desk and said almost apologetically, “Wendy, I need you to take a cab to Capitol Hill right now. Our correspondents Charlie Gibson and Ted Koppel are there, the phones are ringing off the hook, and they can’t get any work done. They want somebody to come and answer phones. Would you mind doing that?”

  Quite the opposite. It sounded great to me, and I jumped into a cab and headed for Capitol Hill to answer phones and do whatever else anybody needed. I only did this once but I loved being where the action was, it was the coolest thing ever, and I wanted to do more of it. The only hard part was jumping in the cab since, after my Paris incident, I am incredibly frightened of them to this day. But that was how much I wanted it!

  It was 1979, during the Iranian hostage crisis, when Roone Arledge, the head of ABC news at the time, created a show called America Held Hostage. Roone had made a commitment to do a special every night that the hostages were in captivity. The show was expected to last for a couple of weeks, but the crisis went on for a tragically long period of time, 444 days, and so did the reporting. In the beginning, several different anchors were used, but ultimately, Ted Koppel, who anchored the show more than anyone else, became the permanent host and the show was eventually renamed Nightline.