Today's Reading
INTRODUCTION
MILLION-DOLLAR BABY
1976
She had been warned.
Barbara Walters had finally won the anchor's chair, the prize she had long sought and one that NBC News had refused to give her. ABC, then the third- ranking network with little to lose, offered her the job of co-anchoring the nightly news with Harry Reasoner and hosting four annual specials for the then-breathtaking salary of a million dollars a year. She was the first newswoman—the first newsperson, in fact—to get such an astronomical sum. She achieved that distinction by shrewdly playing each network against the other. But her price came with its own price. No one would ever let her forget it.
"Barbara Walters: Million-Dollar Baby?" The Miami Herald asked in a headline trumpeted across all six columns at the top of page 1. "A Million-Dollar Baby Handling 5-and-10 Cent News?" ridiculed a column in The Washington Post. Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, asked sarcastically, "Is Barbara a journalist or is she Cher?" Walter Cronkite said he had experienced "a first wave of nausea, the sickening sensation that perhaps we were all going under, that all of our efforts to hold network television news aloof from show business had failed."
Despite that queasy feeling, Cronkite demanded a big raise himself, to $900,000 a year, plus summers off, membership in private clubs, and a corporate plane to take him to and from Martha's Vineyard. "Walter complained about me getting $1 million," Barbara said. "But he soon was the great beneficiary. He didn't complain about making a lot more money a year, because I broke the mold, very loudly."
Loudly, and to the particular dismay of Harry Reasoner. He got a raise, too. But he didn't want to co-anchor the news with anyone. Especially with a woman.
"You're going to have a rough time," veteran broadcaster Howard K. Smith cautioned her beforehand. "Do you know that?"
"I'm beginning to think so," she replied. But she had no idea how bad it would be.
Smith was her predecessor on the show and a member in good standing of the old boys' club, part of the fabled team of CBS World War II correspondents known as the Murrow Boys. He had begun co-anchoring the evening news in 1969, paired first with Frank Reynolds and then with Reasoner. In 1975, to Reasoner's satisfaction, Smith had been sidelined to be a commentator. He knew better than anyone how unenthusiastic Reasoner was about having a partner on the air.
"Be strong and stand up to it, but he's not going to treat you well," Smith predicted.
Smith didn't do her many favors, either. On the Friday night before Barbara's debut the following Monday, Smith delivered an essay on the evening broadcast. He called Walters "network television's first female anchorman, a lady whose beauty sometimes disguises a talent rarely equaled in this craft." He noted that women were making inroads in other jobs in TV news as well. "Now on this report I will answer to a lady anchorman, Barbara," he said, referring to his continuing role as the show's occasional commentator. "Any bruise to the male ego is assuaged by the thought that if you've got to go, then being a male island in a sea of pretty women, well, what a way to go." The condescension came from the man who supposedly was in her corner.
Reasoner made no pretense that he was on her side.
He was fifty-three years old, with graying hair and an affable manner that masked his sharp edges. He had already described himself on the air as a chauvinist, proudly out of step with an age in which women were pushing for more parity in the workplace and more possibilities in their lives. He made comments about women and about feminism that would have cost him his job a half-century later. They raised eyebrows even then.
He opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. He endorsed a bride's vow to "obey" her husband, "observing" that women "who are submissive to a husband with a strong personality seem to be happier than those who are equal or dominant decision-making partners." He called the first issue of Gloria Steinem's Ms. magazine "pretty sad" and predicted it would soon fail, although he said "the girls" who were putting it out were "prettier than H. L. Mencken if not as good when it came to editing." He questioned whether the advent of the first female anchor would really be a "step forward."
When female flight attendants were battling sexist stereotypes and airline rules about their appearance, he said he preferred that they retain an ornamental role. "They should remain patches of color in the business of flying," he opined. "They should be there for a few years and then, like the clouds outside the windows, be replaced with soft and fluffy new ones."
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