CHAPTER 1

Operation Bambi

Oh, what a thrill it is to solve, or even to think you've solved, a large, long-standing,and most of all very public problem! So it was with a sense of wellingsatisfaction, and a growing warmth that spread through his broad bosom like theaftereffect of a double jigger of single malt scotch, taken at the end of one ofthose five-hundred-dollar TV executive lunches that we're told don't happenanymore, but that most certainly do, at places like La Grenouille and the FourSeasons, every damn day, that a certain producer at NBC came to the realization,in January 2012, that he did after all know how to steer that tsunami-tossedcruise ship of a television enterprise known as the Today show intosmoother seas.

Yes. He. Jim Bell. Had. The. Answer.

To be clear, this was not exactly a eureka moment for Bell. The forty-four-year-oldHarvard-educated son of an attorney at General Electric had at that pointbeen in charge of the most valuable franchise in morning television for morethan six years. He'd identified what he saw as The Problem several months ago,even whispered about it to his friends, risking a leak that could lead to trulydisastrous headlines—but it was only now that a plan crystallized, more orless, in his mind, and he realized that it was time to turn a nagging awarenessinto an act. Time to do something.

In the TV world, as you may know, "to do something" often means "to firesomeone." A member of the Today show "family" was going down, Jack.

And so it was, unbeknownst even to the members of the "family," that a plot washatched, a plot in some ways similar to the plots one reads about in thoseraised-letter paperbacks one buys at the airport, or sees in old Steve McQueenmovies. It would feature clandestine meetings, a Greek chorus of naysayersproclaiming it far too risky, an unstoppable momentum, a cold-heartedexterminator, devilishly handsome men, alluring and dangerous women, and even,yes, a name. Let's call it—as Jim Bell did—Operation Bambi.

If that leads you to think there was something lighthearted or self-effacingabout Bell's scheme, it shouldn't. The title was not satirical. Operation Bambimay have been far less important in the general sweep of history, but it was noless earnest an endeavor than the Nazis' Operation Sea Lion or America'sOperation Desert Storm.

Still, what are we to think when what is essentially a corporate personneldecision is dressed up with a kind of dashing, pseudo-military moniker?

Two things.

One is that while morning TV is created mostly for women, it is, even at thislate date, quite obviously managed mostly by men—men who like to think interms of war, sabotage, and, well, embarrassing James Bond–y names forstuff they do in the office.

The other thing we can take from Operation Bambi is a lesson about sleepdeprivation. This is something to keep in mind as you read this book, or thinkabout this genre in general. The subtle but sometimes strikingly weird effectsof sleep deprivation can be seen everywhere in the world of morning TV, and theymake people do ... interesting things. Meredith Vieira recognized it when sheleft Today in 2011: "When you're tired all the time, you just don't feelwell. It's easy to gain weight; it's easy to get depressed. And there'sanxiety." And no amount of money can cure exhaustion. Though many have tried.Network morning TV hosts are, almost by definition, millionaires: several makenorth of five million dollars a year and one, Matt Lauer, the longest-servingand most successful of them all, makes more than twenty million. They work forproducers who make far less, though those producers don't have to do what hostsdo: appear alive and alert and attractive on the air every single morning, nomatter how sleepy or stressed or ugly they really feel. Not to put too fine apoint on it, when you're dealing with a lot of rich folks whose alarm clocks gooff at three thirty in the morning day after day, some crazy shit is going to godown.

For example, Operation Bambi.

The tongue-in-cheek name came to Bell honestly enough, when a staffer askedwhether removing this person would be like "killing Bambi." The questionhighlighted something Bell already knew: that this would not be just anotherouster. It would be big news, in the business pages of The New YorkTimes and in the celebrity weeklies, and, if not handled correctly by bothNBC and the victim, a potentially fatal blow to many people's careers. It wouldbe discussed around water coolers, on Facebook and Twitter, in hair salons andrestaurants and gyms—wherever plugged-in people, especially plugged-inwomen, congregate. That's why the severing had to be handled very cleverly, verycarefully, so smartly that when it was over, and despite what might get writtenon TMZ or Gawker, neither he nor his network would seem mean, and the questionof jumped-or-was-pushed would remain at least a bit murky. That's why it neededto be not just a "clean break" or pink slip or that classic cop-out, the phonecall to the agent, but something layered and nuanced and, well, an Operation.Heck, with a little luck, he might even be able to give a reasonable observerthe impression that the victim had been promoted—that the job they'ddreamed about had finally landed in their lap! That they'd no longer have to goto bed at nine p.m., dread the alarm clock at three thirty a.m., or toleratestrangers' questions about their strange sleep patterns!

Elegant executions had been done before. When ABC nudged Good MorningAmerica cohost Joan Lunden out the door in the late 1990s, she came out andclaimed it was her doing, saying in a statement, "I have asked the executives ofABC to give me a chance to do something I've never done: wake up my own childrenwith a smile, while they're still children." Here's what Lunden now says reallyhappened: "I called up and I said, 'Look, you guys, let's just say I want toleave. I'd rather leave with dignity; I don't want to go to war with you guys;and it certainly behooves you guys not to make it look like you're replacing mewith a thirty-year-old look-alike of me.' So we all agreed." And the part aboutwaking up her children with a smile? Nowadays she jokes, "I'm here to tell youthat morning with children is highly overrated!"

But viewers bought her statement at the time. In this nearsighted business,that's what matters most. The tearless termination was to the TV executive whatthe eighty-yard, post-two-minute-warning drive was to the football quarterback:a way to show his mettle. Bell was a pro. He could do this thing.

Of course, there were other possible outcomes as well, once Operation Bambi gotrolling. Anyone who remembered the beyond-awkward transition from Jane Pauley toDeborah Norville on that same Today show in 1989 knew that the oustingof a familiar TV face—which ultimately was what this operation was allabout—could also be horribly bungled. Things often turn out poorly whenmale television executives play chess with female personalities, moving them on,off, and around the set of a show that three million female viewers think of astheirs. Go figure.

Still, Bell, too, felt inextricably wound up in the Today show'sfortunes and he might have thought that he could deftly remove the cancer thatwas steadily killing the show—cohost Ann Curry, as you no doubt guessed awhile back—without traumatizing the surrounding tissue. And he might havethought this for a couple of reasons. One was that while his boss, NBC Newspresident Steve Capus, did not agree that Curry should be forced out, Capus'sboss Steve Burke did. Burke had a row all to himself on the intimidating NBCorganizational chart, a row at the top. Burke was the chief executive ofNBCUniversal, the man with the ultimate say over what happened on Today.And Burke said he backed Bell's plan.

Another reason for Bell's confidence was reinforced on the show every day, everytime Curry stumbled through a transition or awkwardly whispered to a guest. Hefelt that her sheer badness as a broadcaster was apparent to all, and that a"promotion" to a better job that allowed her to "sleep in" and, of course,"spend more time with her family" would be greeted with a national sigh ofrelief.

Bell was just doing his job, which was to cure the show of problems as theyarose and to maintain it in a state of apple-cheeked health, tasks that, if youconsulted the record, he'd carried out admirably since inheriting the show in2005. Cancer metaphors aside, Today, at that point, still had a recordof performance that stoked envy throughout the television world. It had beennumber one in viewers, and number one in the coveted twenty-five-to-fifty-fourage group known in industry lingo as "the demo," for more than eight hundredweeks in a row. Read that again: eight hundred weeks. If that sounds high toyou, imagine how much higher it sounds to the staff of ABC's Good MorningAmerica, who start every week with the knowledge that they are going to getwhacked.

The fabled "streak," as everyone called it, had started in 1995 when Jeff Zuckerwas the executive producer of Today. Zucker had taken over Todayin 1992 at the tender age of twenty-six, at a time when the show was stillstruggling to recover from the Norville disaster. The idiom "burning the candleat both ends" might as well have been coined for Zucker, as evinced by hisrapidly receding hairline. What Today enjoyed now was the TV equivalentof Joe DiMaggio's 1941 fifty-six-game hitting streak, a number one record thatseemed—to some, for a while—as if it would never be broken. Youdon't achieve this kind of success by accident. You do it by consistentlyinforming and entertaining your viewers. But wait, there's more! Because this ismorning television, you also do it by hoodwinking the Nielsen raters, figuringout sneaky ways to pay guests for interviews, sabotaging the competition, andspending a good deal of time and energy trying to divert attention from yourstars' sexual peccadilloes, marital problems, and monstrous personalities. So,like Zucker and others before him and like his counterparts at other networks,Bell was both doctor and witch doctor, fixing what was wrong, but sometimesdabbling in the dark TV arts, or at least looking the other way when his valuedunderlings did.

Let's put this in perspective. Jim Bell does not under normal circumstancesstrike the people he works with, or the reporters who cover television, as acynic, an a-hole, or a backstabber. To the contrary, he is, according to thetestimony of many who know him well, a terribly nice guy, the kind who takes thetime to e-mail a list of must-eats to a reporter who's drinking his way throughBarcelona on vacation. (Let me take this opportunity to thank him again forpointing the way to Euskal Etxea and Cal Pep.) A lot has been made of Bell'sphysical size (at six foot four, he can be imposing) and his history as aHarvard football player, including by him. At his first meeting with Lauer, hefamously described himself to the anchor as "a big guy who likes bigchallenges." But Bell is also an unusually intelligent man, even if he sometimesconceals it behind his laconic sports-producer persona. He has a polymath'sfascination with the wide world of news and pop culture that Todayinhabits, and a reputation as a straight shooter, inspiring deep loyalty amonghis senior staff. Though he has struggled at times to lose weight, he seems notto sweat at work. "You'd want him as your platoon leader in the trenches," saidone of his deputies. "The guy is just totally unflappable."

Bell cracks jokes in the male-dominated control room with the best of them. Hecritiques his lower-rated competitors with a smile, almost always seeming to bean inch or two above it all, which he literally is. But by January he wasshowing signs of being affected by the grind and the burdens of morning TV, and,well, things happen. No wonder, then, that the friend who called him"unflappable" wouldn't put his name to the quote, or that Bell wouldn't put hiscontrol room jokes on the record so that they could be printed here. This is agenre that has claimed many victims, starting with Dave Garroway, the first hostof the Today show when it premiered in 1952, the man whose on-airsidekick was not a smart-'n-sassy woman or a warm-'n-fuzzy weatherman but achimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs. Garroway, perhaps not the most mentally healthyperson to begin with, succumbed to the pressure of filling all that airtime, dayafter day, in a fascinating way. He saw ghosts, felt he was being followedeverywhere, and eventually, long after he left the show, shot himself in thehead.

No one was suggesting that Bell was about to go all Dave Garroway on himself oreven pull an Arthur Godfrey (in 1953, morning show host Godfrey fired hispopular house singer Julius LaRosa on the air; all these years later it stillmakes for a cringe-inducing moment). But tough stuff had indeed been happeningon Bell's watch. The ratings for the Today show had started to erodeeven before Vieira left in June 2011; her exit and Curry's entrance sped up thetrend, thus helping the long-suffering second-place GMA creep closer tofirst. As if the vulnerability of the streak, now nearly sixteen years long,wasn't enough to quicken the pulse, the biggest star of theshow—Lauer—was thinking about leaving Today at the end ofhis contract cycle. The fact that he was being forced to sit next to Curry wasone motivating factor for Lauer—it's hard enough to wake up in the middleof the night when you adore your coworker, and it's even harder when you don't.Lauer was firmly in the "don't" camp. But there were other factors, too, likehis wife, Annette, who had stayed with him despite several rounds of verypublic, very painful rumors about his extramarital affairs. Annette wanted himto retire, and some days he felt the same impulse. This was hard work, muchharder than most viewers ever realized. If he left, what would happen toToday? Bell had no obvious successor lined up.

Given that Bell faced so many huge problems in such a short time, could anyonecriticize him too harshly for coming up with Operation Bambi? Convinced, as hewas, that Curry had to go, the operation as he saw it had three parts: a)convince Lauer to extend his contract, which was set to expire in December 2012,b) remove Curry from the chair next to Lauer's, and c) replace Curry with theup-and-coming cohost of the nine a.m. hour of Today, Savannah Guthrie.Yes, this was all very perilous, but as still another kind of doctor,Hippocrates, told us, desperate times call for desperate measures.

But what is it that makes morning show people so desperate, so murderous oftheir colleagues and competitors, so willing to bend the rules? It's all becausethe stakes are so high. Today and GMA are the pinnacle of thetelevision profession. For NBC and ABC, respectively, they are the profitcenters of the news divisions that produce them; they basically subsidize therest of the day's news coverage. In the Most Valuable Viewer category, otherwiseknown as "the demo," every hundred thousand viewers represent roughly tenmillion dollars in advertising revenue yearly. In other words: convince onehundred thousand more MVVs to watch every day and make ten million dollars. Spurthe same number to stop watching and watch the ad dollars evaporate. No wonderthe producers of these shows pop Tums as they await the overnight ratings. Theirjobs and the jobs of many beneath them hang in the balance. And besides, mediamoguls don't like to lose.

What people not in the business sometimes don't get is that being number one inthe ratings has a value all its own. Not just in the amount that the winningshow's salespeople can extract from advertisers—though there's that:Today took almost five hundred million dollars in 2011, 150 million morethan GMA—but in reputation, in influence, in sheer televisionindustry power. Today had the upper hand in booking A-list celebrities.It had the clout to insist that a politician talk to Lauer before anyone else.It had the right to call itself "America's first family."