Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 3, 1993 TAG: 9306020144
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
"You have to understand," Chung says, "that I look very scary without makeup. Very scary. So you're asking someone who knows the truth." Pause. "I'm serious," she insists. "Very scary."
It isn't sexist to ask her about being attractive, because the same question could be put to people of either sex who make a living parading their faces across the TV screen.
Like for instance handsome Dan Rather, whom Chung has just joined as co-anchor of the previously co-anchorless "CBS Evening News." It's the first major change in what folks at CBS reverently refer to as The Broadcast since Rather took over from Walter Cronkite in 1981.
Is Chung excited? "Yeah," she says drowsily, puffing on a Marlboro Light a few days before the debut.
Rather kissed Chung when they appeared with network honchos at the team's unveiling. Three times. "I think it was natural for us to be normal," Chung says. "We were actually reacting normally tothe fact that we were very happy to be there."
CBS announced the Dan & Connie Show on May 17, barely three weeks before launch date. Normally such a change would betrumpeted months in advance. But CBS had a deadline: the affiliate meeting in New York scheduled for May 26 and 27. Network executives knew they had to do something to soothe affiliates restless over thefact that the mercurial Rather is mired in second place among network evening newscasts.
"ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings" is first.
So though everyone will deny that Chung was added to the "Evening News" for ratings, there is no more logical explanation. The debate within the business is over how big an effect she'll have and on whether Rather is really happy with the arrangement. He says he is. "He has no choice," says a colleague.
Chung is talking, and smoking, in a lavish suite at the Waldorf Towers. Downstairs, in the plain old Waldorf-Astoria, affiliates are screening previews of next fall's stale-looking network lineup. There is polite laughter and applause.
When Chung appears to talk about her forthcoming magazine show, "Eye to Eye" (premiering June 17), the applause seems more than polite. The affiliates love her. The viewers love her. But not everyone who has worked with her loves her.
Colleagues, requesting anonymity, make remarks like these:
"She's very bright but has absolutely no interest in news."
"She hasn't read a book in 20 years."
"She has decided that being Connie Chung is more important than being in the news business."
And yet even detractors will concede Chung is dynamite on the air. "When the red light is on, she's talking into that camera and she's broadcasting her brains out," one news executive says.
That special, enormously marketable quality has brought her from a mere $450,000-a-year job at NBC a few years ago to the $2 million she reportedly makes at CBS News. When she took several months off for the announced purpose of trying to have a baby with husband and talk-show host Maury Povich, CBS cut her back to half salary, a hardship million bucks per annum.
Whatever terrible things are said about her, Chung laughs them off. "I never believe my own press," she says blithely. "Good or bad."
As for that very public announcement about trying to have a baby, which was the reason Chung gave for dropping out of a previous CBS magazine show, Chung says now she does regret the hullabaloo it caused, but doesn't know how she could have done it differently.
"Maury and I decided the only way we could handle this was to be honest. If I released a statement, that would be the best way to handle it because I didn't want to talk about it."
Do she and Maury still want to have a baby? "Well, I've always thought positively, but I'm going to be 47 in August," she says.
In the ballroom, sandwiched between sitcoms and cop shows as the fall presentations continue, Chung charms the affiliates from the stage. Standing in back against a pillar, Howard Stringer, the CBS Broadcast Group president who lured Chung over from NBC in 1989, smiles a proud papa's smile.
"She communicates so directly with the audience, there's no wall between her and anybody," he exults. So even if Chung hasn't read a book in 20 years, that's hardly a requirement for the job.
The job is to be Connie, and it's obviously just what she was cut out to do.
Washington Post Writers Group
Tom Shales writes about television for the Washington Post.
by CNB