Star Time (23 page)

What both of them left unspoken was that she was paying and that her impulsive purchase had finally laid bare conflicts inherent in their marriage.

Diane could be very determined about getting her way. The hospital’s directors found that out after appointing her to the board in the mistaken hope she would be appeased and would weaken her campaigns to win more funds for the children’s wing. Her employer recognized that her independence was a sign that she knew her clients would walk out the door with her if she left and so they had better appease her. Her determination carried over into her marriage. She took for granted that her overwhelming financial contribution automatically endowed her with greater authority to make decisions affecting the couple’s joint purchases. Greg made an excellent salary and contributed a good deal to their household expenses, but nowhere near what she could even without her salary. Never having wanted for money, she spent it freely and could afford to be impulsive about her purchases and to gain her satisfactions immediately. To reduce that authority, in fact, would have threatened her.

Although Greg saw only her strengths, Diane was actually a woman with many fears. She was afraid that Greg, whom she had pursued and whose inner strength she now leaned on, might have married her for advantage, without truly loving her, and might leave her. She was afraid of losing her father—he was growing older; he might die. She was afraid that despite her family’s social rank, some slip might suddenly cause the exclusion she had seen sink others assaulted by a problem they never saw coming. And she was afraid of something she had carefully kept from Greg during their courtship, that she was afraid to have children, afraid of the pain and of the changes childbearing would bring to her body and to her contented life; that never having had a mother, she would not know how to be one; and most of all that childbirth was
waiting to slaughter her, too, and leave her own child motherless. Saturday mornings she lavished her maternal affection on children in the hospital and came safely home afterward.  All her fears, at bottom, were of abandonment or of death, which were one and the same. She fended them off with hard work and with money—wealth and vigilance provided security.

Diane knew Greg was eager for a large family and kept her fears to herself. She knew enough about his past to know there were chairs around his heart waiting to be occupied by sons and daughters who would provide multiples of the love he had hinted had been torn from him as a child.

Greg grew increasingly resentful of how casually Diane flaunted her monetary power. That profligacy caused him to feel demeaned him and to provoke his deepest anxieties: the memory of his father’s inadequate income destroying his parents’ marriage. He needed to feel that he was, if not master, at least an equal partner. But his employment at FBS, the huge overhead his resources could not begin to pay for, and the close bond between father and daughter made that impossible. Barnett assumed an unseen dominance in their home, a ghost always lingering, like the phosphors on Greg's boyhood TV screen that never quite faded away after the set was turned off. The benefits Greg had sought through marriage were growing into a bramble of discontent between them.

The night they argued over her purchase of the country house Greg was already in bed reading when Diane entered from her dressing room. She had put on her most alluring nightgown, black and mostly open work lace on top, deeply cut, but Greg never glanced up. He turned out the light moments later and went right to sleep.

That weekend, when she took Greg up to see the house for the first time, he found parked in the driveway the red Lamborghini he had once admired when they passed a showroom and she had denigrated as being much too flamboyant. When he turned to her in astonishment, he saw how anxious she was that the
gift please
him.

“I’m stunned,” he assured her. “It’s magnificent. Thank you.”

She threw her arms around him. “And you’ll love the house just as much. I know you will.”

Greg usually drove the car only at night and on back country roads. He treasured it almost as much as he felt belittled by it.

Chris bought a small house in the Brentwood hills and turned the little beach apartment over to Marian Marcus. The two women remained close and spent a lot of their free time together. Marian had little opportunity to date and Chris little inclination. Occasionally, however, Chris met a man who interested
her,
sometimes even enough to enter
into a brief affair, but a deeper relationship never grew. None of the men could compete with her career or provide more than transient pleasure—never inducing the consistent rush that infused her while digging into a tough story or reporting a late-breaking one. And certainly not what she had felt with Greg.

One or two big stories can catapult a TV reporter to prominence. Dan Rather was with the local CBS affiliate in Houston until Hurricane Carla hit the Texas coast and the nation watched him brave the storm’s devastating force to report on it. Later, as a network reporter, he was in Dallas when President Kennedy was shot. Problems can arise when those promoted because of an appealing on-camera presence lack the training or talent to produce quality work. The collapse can be tragic.

A cautionary tale was Jessica
Savitch
, whose on-screen image endeared her to millions of viewers, but whose journalistic shortcomings were already apparent to colleagues and superiors when a probable addiction fostered by private terrors suddenly made those shortcomings evident to the entire nation during a ghastly two-minute prime-time newsbreak. As she began to read the brief headlines, her speech slurred badly and a haunted look invaded her eyes. The camera she craved and had always believed adored her had turned on her. She was on screen for only forty-three seconds, but to those watching they were endless and agonizing. Her career died that night. Only three weeks later, the rest of her followed. She and a companion were accidentally killed when their car plunged into a Pennsylvania canal in the dark.

Chris, on the contrary, had served a long apprenticeship. Experienced, talented, she was ready to make the most of her big opportunity, and she was obsessed by her work. And as Greg had once noted, she had a preternatural luck or intuition that often placed her in the path of news stories that got her noticed.

That was the case the morning she arrived early at L.A. International to catch a midday plane to Phoenix where she would shoot a story. She had not eaten that morning and went to the cafeteria for a sandwich. A group of airline employees were seated in the booth behind her. Before she understood their whispered words, she sensed a tremor of apprehension in the tone. She interrupted them and asked if something had happened. A woman who recognized her as a television reporter confided that a plane en route to Hawaii had suddenly turned back to LAX with engine trouble and would try to make an emergency landing within the hour. Chris raced to the phone.

She was the only reporter on the scene. Her crew shot the only video of the 747 as it approached the runway on just two of its four engines, suddenly dropped the last ten feet into a crash landing that flattened the
landing gear, and then skidded along the ground, spraying sparks. Her network led with the crash story that night.

“Three people were killed,” the network’s anchorman began the lead-in, “and dozens hurt when a charter-airline jumbo jet made an emergency landing just past noon today at Los Angeles International Airport. Our own Christine
Paskins
was at the scene for this exclusive report.”

Chris’s opening showed her standing in front of the still-smoldering wreckage. “Less than two hours ago, this Pan-Pacific Airlines 747 was on its way to Honolulu filled with happy vacationers . . .”

Chris’s face and name became engraved on a lot of memories that night

and instinctively trusted.

That impression deepened a month later. She was out with a crew in downtown L.A. when a high-rise fire began in the area. Again her story became the broadcast’s lead. She was bemused to note that little had changed from her days in local—a good fire with great visuals could always get you the top of the broadcast. One envious competitor swore she must be striking the matches and sabotaging landing gears to get to the scenes so fast.

Greg became the youngest corporate vice president at the Federal Broadcasting System when he was named to head a new department for long-range planning, called Corporate Planning and Development. He had been moved around the company a good deal, but Barnett had never taken Greg under his wing as Greg had hoped he would and seemed to keep tabs on his son-in-law’s performance only to be sure he was not an embarrassment. Greg hoped that this new post would grant him real responsibility at last.

He and a small staff of financial and business analysts worked six months to fashion a vision of where the network should be in ten years and a strategy to get there. Satellites were changing television. FBS should be investing abroad now, linking up with networks in other countries. More important, it should be expanding its fledgling cable channels and buying or investing in new ones. Cable was quickly becoming a giant viewer lure, gaining viewers and revenue at the expense of the over-the-air broadcasters. Greg futilely tried for two months to gain a spot on Barnett’s schedule to present the plan. Finally, he demanded that Barnett’s executive assistant

his secretary before the terminology changed

carve an hour out of her boss’s schedule for him.

“So you can see,” Greg concluded, “if we continue to limit our thinking to over-the-air broadcasting in the United States, FBS and the other broadcasters will share a shrinking audience and stagnant
revenues. But if we think of ourselves as a worldwide service for communicating entertainment and news—by cable, by satellite, by videocassette, and every other means—our market is far larger.”

Barnett commented, “I’ll think about it.”

With that Greg and the plan were dismissed and he reluctantly realized that Barnett Roderick was not a man given to long-range thinking, particularly other
people’s
, and he did not like to be pushed. The Chairman's strong suit was reaction: to the showing of a pilot, to a business opportunity on which the company could quickly capitalize, or to a problem that had to be resolved.

Dispirited, Greg had to concede that once more he had been moved into an undemanding position with an impressive title and salary because his failure in a critical role would be too visible. Other people who failed could be dismissed, but not Barnett Roderick’s son-in-law. Greg wore the trappings and reaped the rewards of some authority at FBS, but he merely went through the motions of accomplishment.

Once, when he approached his father-in-law with a request for more responsibility, Barnett told him flatly, “You’ve still got a lot to learn.”

The subject was closed.

Like a film of dust, a vague depression began to settle on everything in Greg’s life as he became increasingly conscious of owning almost nothing in it and controlling even less. He had set out from western Pennsylvania intent on making his mark and gaining admiration. But Diane and her father had actually provided the mark, which denied him that admiration. Even from her he now occasionally sensed an unconscious lessening of the respect that had originally attracted her.

Chris’s guiding wisdom that women in news had to work twice as hard as men to gain half the credit was never truer for Chris than after she was shifted to London. She had lobbied for a year with the network brass to get posted there. Once considered important for a correspondent who hoped to make it to the top, a stint abroad provided direct exposure to world events, as well as the personal polish that could transform a small-town kid into a dashing “broadcast journalist.” Peter Jennings and Dan Rather had both been prepped for the anchor chair in a London post.

The tradition started during World War II when London was the headquarters for Edward R. Murrow and the daring young men and, for only a short time, women reporters that he and William L. Shirer recruited to broadcast war reports back to the States—among them Eric
Sevareid
and Charles Collingwood. On the basis of absolutely no evidence, women’s voices were assumed to be too high to sound authoritative to listeners. Four decades went by before market research disproved the sexist myth.

Chris’s reports from Great Britain, Ireland, and the European continent became a valued feature of the nightly news and rapidly enlarged her stature. But the workload was crushing.

Even after she hired someone for the second slot in the bureau, she still routinely put in fourteen- to sixteen-hour days six or seven days a week and had a scant personal life. If she
had
met an interesting man, she would scarcely have had the time to recognize him. She was always racing to the next interview or back to the office to write up and record her narration. When covering a breaking story, she stayed on duty until after the program in New York had transmitted all its feeds to the various time zones, so as to be available to insert last-minute updates via satellite. She lived out of a suitcase and did much of her sleeping on airplanes streaking across Europe to the latest news eruption.