Sallying Forth

I remember every time I went to a new school when I was a little girl, I tried so hard to impress the teacher that I became an "A" student as soon as I possibly could. I learned awfully early that somebody's first impression of you is usually the lasting one.

--Sally Quinn, in a CBS News publicity release

Prim and tailored in a plain striped blouse, she bit her lip nervously and read the news off the TelePrompTer in an arid monotone. "Wouldn't you know the first day I come on television I start out with a sore throat and a fever?" Sally Quinn apologized to viewers. (Two hours before air time she had been in the hospital.) "Well, a fever is all right as long as it doesn't make you delirious," sympathized CBS Correspondent Hughes Rudd. "Actually there have been a lot of people on television who were delirious--they're usually running for public office."

Unfortunately, Quinn's debut last week on the revamped CBS Morning News was not delirious in any sense. The show's former anchor men, the no-nonsense team of John Hart and Nelson Benton, had failed to attract a big enough audience compared with NBC's 22-year-old juggernaut of the morning schedule, the Today Show (an estimated 1.7 million viewers v. 5.2 million). In an effort to pep up the ratings, the network created a more relaxed format, with more room for ad-libbing.*

A wry, tough-minded novelist and correspondent, the gravel-throated Rudd is a 14-year veteran of the CBS News Service. Quinn, 32, was hired (at a reported $75,000 per year) from the style section of the Washington Post, where she was known for aggressive reporting and a caustic wit. ("Poison Quinn," Norman Mailer dubbed her.)

On her first show, Quinn followed a report on child labor among migrant workers with this comment: "I can remember when my mother and father wanted me to clean my room--I thought that was child labor." After a segment about Chesapeake Bay's contaminated clams, she recalled covering a crab derby in Maryland. As the week went on Quinn lapsed less frequently into such limpness; she laughed more easily and appeared to gain confidence. Future weeks may bring further improvement. Surprisingly, none of the first five shows capitalized on Quinn's talent for interviews.

Overall, the first impression was a letdown after the advance publicity that suggested Quinn would threaten Today Show Hostess Barbara Walters' ten-year feminine hegemony on early-bird TV. Even with such a smashing blonde anchor person it was a cheeky assumption for CBS to make, especially when that anchor person's previous television experience was mainly as an assistant to CBS News President Richard Salant during the 1968 conventions--and as a onetime guest on Walters' Not For Women Only. Little wonder that on a publicity tour for the new show, one interviewer greeted Quinn acidly with: "Your roots are showing."

In a New York magazine profile by Quinn's former Post colleague (and now former friend) Aaron Latham, she was portrayed as a sassy bundle of ambition who was more interested in capital sex than politics. Quinn called the story an "incredible hatchet job" and at tributed it to New York Editor Clay Felker's resentment because she recently turned down a job offer from him. According to Quinn, Felker said, "Sally, you were born to be a star, and you should have let me make you one," then slammed down the phone. Replies Felker: "Sally is a goddamn liar."

Quinn has a penchant for making news as well as reporting it, and her behavior sometimes invites squabbles like the New York magazine one. For four years, she has carried on a rather public liaison with Warren Hoge, city editor of the New York Post. Once, in an interview with another Washington newsman, she proudly described her story about Iran's Empress Farah this way: "It took me four days to get the interview, and then I had to promise my body over and over to the higher-ups."

The daughter of a retired Army general, Quinn's peripatetic "Army-brat" life caused her to attend 22 schools before she graduated from Smith College in 1963. She intended to be "a famous movie star" but gave it up after only six weeks of trying to be an actress in New York. Over the next few years, she worked as a go-go girl, a public relations agent for a Coney Island animal husbandry exhibit, and social secretary to the Algerian Ambassador in Washington. The story of her subsequent hiring by the Washington Post may contain a moral for those who would make too much of her present lack of background in TV. "Can you show me something you've written?" asked Managing Editor Benjamin Bradlee. "I've never written anything," admitted Quinn. Pause. "Well," said Bradlee, "nobody's perfect."

* ABC-TV has also announced plans to get into the morning competition with a new show, probably mixing news with entertainment, some time in 1974.

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