Of course, what no one ever said is that, as we all knew, our own Ken and Faith were so jealous of each other they wouldn’t even speak to one another unless the camera was rolling. Or that we had done a similar toe therapy segment the week before.
But the best part of the meetings was when the bookers regaled us with their latest war stories from the field. Not travel bookers, guest bookers—the people who line up all of the live talking heads you see on the shows—the Elizabeth Smarts, the families of infants who fell down wells, the best friends of the latest soldier to die (especially if the soldier had an interesting story to tell, that is, like if he were previously a famous baseball star). People loved this stuff, and that was why morning shows made more money for their respective networks than any other news program that aired. No one under the age of sixty was watching the evening newscasts anymore, and morning was the only growth market on the dial, so the pressure was on. But because morning shows fell under the news divisions, there were rules. Of gravest importance: no one was allowed to pay for interviews. But no one ever said anything about offering overnights at five-star hotels and tickets to Broadway shows. Or mind games. Most bookings were made over the phone, with our (mostly female) bookers sweet talking the intended guests into believing that by coming on our show, their lives would improve dramatically. But if the story was big enough, armies of bookers would descend upon the home of, say, some teenage girl from Arkansas who had miraculously escaped a traumatic weeklong kidnapping. Scores of New York City bookers would camp out at the Holiday Inn closest to her small, rural town, each one striving to become the family’s new best friend, convincing them that by going on her show (as opposed to the other shows), it would be therapeutic, inspiring to others, good for the girl. And fun, so much fun. Bookers had been known to take such girls shopping in the mall, out for ice cream, and give her all sorts of candy (never money!) so that she would pick, say, Sunrise America and not New Day USA for her first interview. Of course, while said girl might give one show the first interview, she would more often than not appear on all the other shows a few minutes later. Often, the cameras would be lined up outside her house, with a slightly different angle for each program. As soon as she finished talking to, say, Faith (via remote), she would be escorted a few feet to talk to, say, Sally.
Sometimes bookers were known to lie outright, claiming to be from a show they were not, telling the guest the interview was canceled or moved. Tom forbade our staff doing that and generally asked us to toe an ethical line, to make sure we could all face the mirror in the morning. And that might be why our ratings were slipping a bit. Joe Public was getting savvy, and potential guests would ask things of our bookers that we wouldn’t, but other shows sometimes would, provide.
I was lucky. I sometimes considered listing it on my résumé, under relevant skills: “digital editing, digital photography, French proficiency and luck.” I had somehow convinced the powers that be that I was a horrible booker, and so happily avoided the so-called booking wars that were the backbone of morning television. Well, I shouldn’t say somehow. The truth was that I was a terrible booker. On the one occasion that I was asked to do what we called a “door knock,” I basically fled the crime scene faster than the criminals. It was a few years back, up near Niagara Falls, in the dead of winter. But it wasn’t dead at all. The world seemed very alive that day, with forty-mile-an-hour gusts of piercing wind and the kind of temperatures that cause your nose hairs to freeze.
It was around this point in my career that the romance of all the travel had started to wear thin. In the earlier days, I was so thrilled to be hopping on planes and in and out of cars that it didn’t matter if I was going to stay at the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, or at some no-name motel in a polygamous hill town in Montana (though, that’s actually one story I never did that I always wanted to do—an exploration into polygamy in the Mountain West. Unfortunately, unless one of the polygamous patriarchs had murdered three of his eight wives, we weren’t interested).
Anyway, up in Niagara Falls, the story was that three young children, all from the same family, had jumped into the rapids together, in the dead of winter, involving what was either a suicide pact or an insidious push by a psychotic mother, who had witnessed the whole thing. The mother hadn’t been charged yet, but was currently at the hospital under a suicide watch herself. My job? Knock on the door and ask the poor father how he felt—and if he would like to share his story with millions of viewers, because it would be cathartic and possibly help another family from suffering the same loss. And I had to do so before the other two network fists beat me to the door.
I had been up in that neck of the woods anyway, working on a story about family-friendly casinos, when my pager went off. My pager almost never went off, so if it did, I knew I was in for something unpleasant. For a self-proclaimed newsperson, I was rather skittish of breaking stories. I didn’t look at my pager. Then my cameraman’s cell phone started to vibrate, and he was a much better newsman than I was. So we left the overlit casino where we had been shooting some footage, piled into the crew car (a fortified SUV with a gated rear door, darkened one-way windows, and more locks and bolts than a drug trafficker’s Humvee), crossed back over the bridge to the American side of the falls, and drove up to a bland one-story redbrick house, with children’s toys and bikes scattered about the yard, covered with a few inches of snow, clearly untouched for some time.
My cameraman practically had to push me out of the passenger seat, I was so reluctant to do what I had to do. But I did it. I zipped up my puffy black parka, pulled my thick wool ZBC News ski hat down over my ears (briefly catching one of my chandelier earrings in the knitting), took a deep breath and cut a path to the front door.
I could tell we were there first. No other press in sight. No trodden down, muddied up snow on the walkway. Just a few footprints of varying sizes going to and fro. The freshest ones looked like they were going fro, and I took that to be a good sign. Such a good sign, in fact, that I knocked just once on the door, and when no one answered, I slipped my crisp white business card under the door (with a short note scribbled on the back telling the sad dad to call if he wanted to share his story), turned around, announced to the crew that no one was home, and we returned to the casino to continue the other shoot.
That didn’t go over so well when, the next morning, the father of the dead kids, husband to the suicidal suspect, appeared as an exclusive on Sunrise America in tears and sobs and oh, so compelling. He was even holding his one remaining child, an infant son (postpartum psychosis was the lay diagnosis of the mother’s state), in his arms. Sunrise beat us in the ratings that morning and I almost lost my job, which was saved only because the date coincided with the announcements for the Emmy nominations, and a piece I had produced a year prior was listed as a candidate (it didn’t win, but still).
My luck got even better when, a few days later, it was revealed that the Sunrise booker had basically bought the father off by giving him the use of a new car for a two-year period in exchange for appearing on their air, which he had been understandably reluctant to do. That producer did get fired (though the father kept the car), and suddenly my work was being held up in press releases as the ethical standard to match (though my name was never mentioned—it just said something along the lines of “a producer from New Day USA was first on the scene, but understanding the sensitivity of the story and the pain of the family, she made the journalistically appropriate call to give the father some space and time.”).
Since then, I avoided guest booking at all costs and was very happy that Tom liked the American Ideals series, because they were my favorite pieces to produce. The stories were heartwarming, caught your attention, and we didn’t have to worry about competing for guests. These weren’t front page tabloid sensation stories, they were just good stories, pure and simple. And they rated well.
“Nice piece, Annabelle,” he said, when we had moved on to the housekeeping portion of the meeting. This was a bit odd because he rarely singled out praise.
I was a little taken aback. “Oh! The snakes? Thanks.”
“No, the Fardish thing. Last week’s Ideal. Nice job. We’ve been getting a good response on it.”
“Oh. OK. Thanks.” I uselessly tried to will my cheeks not to flush.
“We want to do a follow-up.