Surviving Nicely, Thanks

By Richard Zoglin

& The morning after the second episode of her new series, Real Life with Jane Pauley, TV's newest prime-time star sits in her office, heating a cup of coffee in her microwave oven and fielding compliments from colleagues. One of them, NBC News president Michael Gartner, is in the hall outside her door. "What'd you think?" Jane calls out. "Liked it," says Gartner, a squarish, soft-spoken executive badly in need of some peace and quiet. Pauley senses there might be more on his mind: "You talking about anything . . .?" Gartner saunters toward her and offers one suggestion for the show in a conspiratorial half whisper: "More Jane."

More Jane? Sounds impossible. No one in TV has been harder to avoid, either on the tube or in the press, over the past few months than Jane Pauley. For 13 years, she was the perky, professional, largely taken-for-granted co-anchor of NBC's morning show Today. When turmoil in the person of a blond, eager-to- please interloper, Deborah Norville, 32, engulfed the show last fall, Pauley bowed out -- and suddenly found herself the most in-demand news personality in America. She got her own prime-time show, which has drawn good ratings this summer and is almost certain to return on a weekly basis in January. She was anointed No. 1 substitute for Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News -- and then had to fend off rumors she would be made permanent co-anchor. (The job wasn't offered, nor does she want it.) She has, moreover, won the applause of millions for her artful balancing of family and career: this is a woman who quit one of the highest-profile jobs in TV so that she could be home mornings when her kids went off to kindergarten.

It is these familial, regular-Jane instincts that have made Pauley shine brightest in a galaxy of female TV news superstars. Diane Sawyer has the beauty and brains but neither the warmth nor a program that shows her off to much advantage. Connie Chung's recent announcement that she is taking time off to get pregnant seemed a bizarre blurring of the line between public and private selves, just the sort of thing Pauley has so gracefully avoided.

Her co-workers praise Pauley as generous, without pretension, easy to work with -- in short, a nice human being. "I think she is the most civil and least neurotic person I've ever met in television," says David Browning, who was hired from CBS to produce her new show. "What I always admired about her," says Brokaw, "was that she was absolutely determined not to be seduced by bright lights, big city." Cynthia Samuels, a former Today producer who now runs Channel One, the schoolroom newscast, enthuses, "She is emblematic of the best of this generation."

Indeed, Pauley's TV career has served as a mirror for the evolving self- image of the baby-boom generation. Plucked from local TV to co-anchor the Today show in 1976, when she was just 25, Pauley at first was the precocious overachiever. With the arrival of a family (twins, a boy and girl, were born in 1983; another son came in 1986), she became that icon of thirtysomething maturity, the Woman with Her Priorities Straight. Then, during the Norville affair, she acted out a secret nightmare for a generation approaching mid- life: the fear of being supplanted by someone younger, of being put out to pasture by a cold, bottom-line bureaucracy. And she emerged victorious. No wonder Pauley has been canonized, and Norville can't shake her image as the town vixen; whatever their TV skills, their symbolic roles are fixed.

Fittingly, Pauley's new series is another reflection of baby-boomer concerns: stories on such topics as parents who don't have enough time for their kids and the trauma of turning 40. These are Pauley's concerns as well. In a round-table discussion of the 40-year milestone, Jane (who turns 40 on Oct. 31) noted she became aware of growing older "when I started listening to old Beach Boys records and felt like I was grieving for someone who had died."

America's late-blooming adulation for Jane Pauley has its ironic side. For years, she seemed the epitome of a TV newswoman who knew her place. On Today, she always played a second-fiddle role: first to Brokaw, then to Bryant Gumbel. Even to the end, Gumbel was listed as the show's anchor; Pauley was merely co-anchor. Some women at NBC News were distressed that Pauley did not fight harder for equal status. She was, for example, absent from some of the program's newsmaking trips, like its visit to the Soviet Union in 1984. Says one female staffer: "She was not a wavemaker."

Pauley says she did complain to management when Gumbel was given the pre- eminent role on Today in 1982. But she admits to being a "conflict avoider" and to putting her family ahead of her work. "Once I brought babies home from the hospital, I didn't feel comfortable marching into the boss's office and pounding my fists on his desk, saying, 'Hey, send me.' But I never turned down a trip. The difference was I wasn't lobbying. I felt I had obligations to a family. The irony is that I think that's why people admire me, to the degree that they do. Not that I've been glamorous and globe- trotting and interviewed the mighty and powerful. I'm almost celebrated for the career I didn't choose."

In conversation, Pauley is simultaneously bubbly and serene. She talks in crisp, carefully crafted sentences sprinkled with oddly legalistic phrases ("Absent such and such . . ." is one of her favorite constructions) and punctuated with self-deprecating humor and girlish giggles. She gives wholesomeness a good name. Pauley is close to her parents and her older sister, whom she took along on several Today trips. She and her husband, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, live on Manhattan's Upper West Side but avoid the New York social scene. She cooks, but not well ("Our family standards aren't that high"); goes out to a movie on occasion; rarely watches TV for pleasure.

Pauley keeps a tight lid on details of her family life, partly for security reasons, partly because of a determination to shield her children from the public spotlight. But there is another, more philosophical consideration. "To the degree that your family becomes part of your image," she says, "it becomes less real. Someone once referred to my family as 'authentic.' One of the reasons it's authentic is that there's no confusion between the Trudeaus and the Cosby kids. I am very sensitive to the fact that there's a certain imagemaking attendant to my career. I don't want my family to become part of my public persona. It is real."

Pauley's early life was as real as it gets. She grew up in Indianapolis, the daughter of a milk salesman who traveled half the time (though, she says, "I mostly remember him being home"). In high school Jane was a six-time loser for homecoming queen but a whiz at extemporaneous speaking. Her toughest rival in statewide competitions was another future TV star: actress Shelley Long.

At Indiana University, Pauley majored in political science and participated in a decorous student walkout during Founder's Day ceremonies, in protest against a proposed tuition increase. She remembers the incident chiefly for the distress it caused her staunch Republican parents: "It was a very low moment for my father." Nor were her parents thrilled when, after graduating from college a semester early, she went to work for John Lindsay's 1972 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, then for the state Democratic Central Committee. "Mom was mad at me all summer," she says. "My father was at least pleased that I was gainfully employed."

By Election Day Pauley had her first TV job: as a reporter at WISH-TV, the Indianapolis CBS affiliate. She specialized in farm stories, anchored a Saturday-night newscast, and found herself the butt of jokes by a local radio personality named David Letterman. After three years at the station, she caught the eye of executives at Chicago's WMAQ-TV, who were looking for someone to co-anchor the evening news. A few days after her audition, Pauley got a call from the station's news director, offering her the job and a salary more than triple what she was making. Recalls Pauley: "He said, 'By the way, what are you making now?' I told him. There was silence at the end of the phone. Then he said, 'Don't ever tell anybody that.' "

Her year in Chicago was not easy. The critics were nasty (one said she had "the IQ of a cantaloupe") and fellow reporters skeptical. "I was all too fair game," she says. "I was the first woman to anchor an evening newscast, and I was practically a college coed." A former staff member at WMAQ remembers, "She didn't know the first thing about reporting. But her on- camera presence was incredible."

Ratings were low, and her days at the station seemed numbered when NBC asked her to audition for the job of Barbara Walters' successor on the Today show. The candidates constituted a virtual Who's Who of women in broadcasting, including Cassie Mackin, Linda Ellerbee and Betty Rollin. "I assumed I was there as a courtesy," says Pauley. Improbably, she won the job. "I was very impressed with her poise," says former NBC News president Richard Wald, now at ABC. "Jane looks like somebody you would meet in your neighborhood but who is just a little smarter and more articulate, so that you look up to her."

In her early years at Today, Pauley was the one who did most of the looking up. "Everything that came out of my mouth was run through the Tom Brokaw filter before I said it," she says. "I was so in awe of him that there was very little spontaneity in me." She gradually gained confidence and skill, but not job security. "It seemed about every six months I would read in the newspaper about someone being groomed for my job," she says. "And" -- the self-deprecating laugh -- "it rang pretty true to me."

Steve Friedman, the former executive producer of Today who now runs the NBC Nightly News, claims the turning point for Pauley came after her first pregnancy leave. "After the babies, the megastar was born," he says. "Before that she used to go in and out in terms of attention and work. But she came back focused, confident, directed. It was a different Jane." She specialized in handling delicate interviews (grieving parents, wives of hostages) but also carried her weight in breaking news stories like the invasion of Grenada.

Pauley admits that she was taken aback when Norville was brought in last September to replace newscaster John Palmer, Jane's close friend, and given a prominent on-air role. Stories about "the other woman" threatening to take Pauley's job soon became a deluge. "I was repeatedly told, 'Jane, you're reading the newspapers too much.' My reaction to that was 'I'm not reading the newspapers, I'm watching TV!' I felt that signals were being sent." Whether NBC was trying to ease Pauley out or not, she decided the time had come to take a break -- not just from Today but from all TV -- and sought to negotiate an end to her contract. "I realized that I probably would not come back in broadcasting at the level I left it. But somehow that felt O.K." NBC, of course, didn't let that happen.

Her post-mortems on the Today affair are mostly charitable. On the show's precipitous ratings: "I don't think it was just me. It was a succession of events," notably the much publicized memo in which Gumbel criticized nearly everything about the show except Pauley. Of Gumbel, she speaks fondly: "Bryant is vastly more complicated than I am. I just found him endlessly fascinating to watch." On Norville: "I don't think any of us saw ((the transition)) being as damaging to Deborah as it ultimately was. But I think she'll be fine. Americans can be generous. I think that public opinion will say, 'This woman has suffered enough.'

Watching the Today show now, Pauley feels no twinges of regret. "I can enjoy it and have no sense that that's my chair." It helps, of course, to have your own prime-time show, a nation's adulation and a schedule that for the first time in 13 years doesn't require you to get up at 3:30 a.m. "I'm no longer working against the flow of a normal workday rhythm in the city," she says with a glow. "I haven't set an alarm clock but once in seven months. I wake up because there's sun streaming through my windows."