Beyond Today

Somewhere within the ordered chaos of Bryant Gumbel’s small office on the third floor of Rockefeller Plaza is a letter, its edges yellowed and its message faded. * The note, circa 1981, was sent by a veteran NBC News reporter based in Germany. This man tells Gumbel to “keep your chin up.” He tells him not to worry about those shrill skeptics carping about his appointment as host of the “Today” show. He tells him that these people--mostly NBC News veterans appalled that a sports announcer has been hired to host the jewel in the crown of NBC News--haven’t even seen his work as host of the network’s NFL show “Grandstand.” They haven’t even bothered to look at tapes of his days as sports anchor of KNBC in Los Angeles. They don’t even know him! “You’re going to be terrific,” he assures Gumbel. * Gumbel stares out his window as he captures this old memory. The letter was a small gesture but, in the world of Bryant Gumbel, small gestures sometimes assume grand proportions. “It was,” he says with conviction, “one of the nicest things that ever happened to me in this business.” * Both the blessing and curse of a prodigious memory--which Gumbel possesses--is that nothing is ever permanently filed away. The past is always on call, just a neuro-transmission and nanosecond away. Old kindnesses remain vivid, as do past slights. Failed interviews are as fresh as the day they were booted. Great triumphs are as satisfying as the moment they were experienced. And facts--a bewildering array from a Promethean range of subjects--can be plucked from the memory bank as effortlessly as a salmon is plucked by a grizzly from a stream.

And so, too, has this facile mind unwittingly contributed to a less than favorable image at times. Detractors have long said that Gumbel is too good. Too glib. Too quick. Does this guy ever screw up? And the most stinging rebukes he has heard, or read, time and again are that he is arrogant. Thin-skinned. Full of himself. By God, he doesn’t even like Willard Scott, purveyor of birthday wishes to people a heartbeat away from eternity.

Gumbel remembers all of this, and it wounds him. He has been paid remarkably well ($4 million per year). He has been called one of the best interviewers on all of television. He was revered, for the most part, by his staff at “Today.” He has had more job offers than he knows what to do with. And after 15 years, he is considered the most successful, and most controversial, anchor of the preeminent morning show in the history of television. But the misunderstandings are the things that stick. Don’t people realize that he always gave it his best on “Today” and that he always demanded the same from those around him as well? Don’t they know that he has been harder on himself than anyone could imagine, always seeking perfection when perfection is unattainable?

“If I have had one consistent failing,” he said in a recent interview, “it has been my unwillingness to respond to the things that have [been said about me]. As a result, what happens is much like in politics, where you allow others to define you. So when I would get attacked, when I would be the subject of [a press article] that was clearly a blatant lie, I would never respond. I always thought it would be enough to continue to do my job as well as I could do it, and the public would appreciate it. I always gave the public, I’m afraid, too much credit.”

So, it hasn’t been as easy as it looks. Nor has it always been easy being Bryant Gumbel. He stepped down as host of “Today” Jan. 3. It was one of television’s true milestones, not because Gumbel did this job longer or better than anybody else but because Gumbel arguably was the “Today” show for most of those 15 years. His whims, tastes, ideas and proclivities were wrapped into the very fabric of the program.

Yet when “Today” soared, Gumbel was rarely accorded much credit for its success. When the show crashed, Gumbel usually took the blame. Because he’s the most prominent African American in television news, some observers have claimed that the criticism was tinged with racism. Gumbel has long held that the term “arrogant,” as applied to him, is merely a code word for “uppity.” “Have I directly challenged people [as an interviewer]? No doubt about it. No doubt about it. It’s what I do for a living,” he says. “But it’s sad that in this society that if you’re going to do that, and you’re black, you somehow are supposed to apologize for it. I’m sorry. Not me.”

On the air, he was supremely confident, a virtuoso technician who went about his workday chores with the self-assured poise of a master surgeon. At times he was, or appeared to have been, indifferent to the approval of the 11 million viewers who tuned in each morning. Steve Friedman, the former longtime producer at “Today” who hired him for the program back in 1981, says, “I have never seen a [TV] performer who is not in it for the adulation, and he isn’t. He’s in there for the work.”

Gumbel is “a very complicated, complex person, a big ball of oxymorons,” one source says. “He can be sensitive, and he can be callous. He can be sophisticated, and he can be boorish. He can be enlightened, and he can be positively primeval.”

After years of being defined--or as he might see it, ill-defined--by a public and press not always charitable in their assessments, Gumbel now has a chance to start over. For the first time in a career that has proceeded with the clockwork precision of a morning TV program, Gumbel has set out on his own. How he approaches this next chapter in his career may well mean the difference between greatness and mere competence.

In late November, Gumbel sat down for an extended interview, displaying a side of himself that did not always come out on the air. He was solicitous and gracious. There was no evidence of the infamous prickliness or the coarse guys-will-be-guys exterior he was said to sometimes wear around the studio.

Foremost, he was intent on setting the record straight. No, he was not behind the Deborah Norville fiasco. Yes, he was wrong to write the memo excoriating “Today” staffers, but no, it was never his idea to write it. No, he does not hate his mother (the implication of a 1988 Sports Illustrated profile) and no, he is not striving to become his much-admired and now-deceased father (the theory of numerous other profiles). And yes, he was right to take some time off when he was passed over to interview O.J. Simpson immediately after Simpson’s acquittal in his murder trial.

Gumbel was also decidedly pessimistic about race, which for him is ground zero in America and where many of its problems are rooted. “The facts of race in America are desultory. We’re building a permanent underclass. I see an absence of willingness of people to accept others, and I see an increase in hostility among people who certainly couldn’t be classified as racists,” he says. The picture is just as bleak in his industry, where there are few black on-air network news people and fewer black network executives: “Any time you can say it hasn’t gotten better, you can say it’s gotten worse.”

Yet Gumbel’s own career prospects look good. He was juggling offers from ABC (the rumored host of a new Thursday night program that would include live elements, or becoming Hugh Downs’ replacement on “20/20” upon Downs’ retirement) and CBS (a possible magazine show, plus a lucrative syndication deal that would involve the telecast of a show on Westinghouse’s huge group of TV stations). Both networks have asked him what he wants to do. NBC was also in the running, although barely. Sources say that there was a last-minute flurry of talks to keep Gumbel on “Today” in almost a Johnny Carson-like capacity. Those talks collapsed and nothing new has developed since.

Gumbel, who said he would make his final decision well into the new year, appeared likely to take a “hiatus,” an idea that may have been inspired by his former co-host and friend, Jane Pauley.

“I told him he should negotiate six months [off],” she says. “I know Bryant and I know that like a lot of us, he has this fantasy of not having to do anything someone tells him to do, but having the freedom to do only what he wants.”

Gumbel, in all likelihood, will disappear from the airwaves until this fall. “I don’t live to be on television. I really don’t. I’m not dying to be the most famous guy who ever did this. I’m not dying to be the richest guy who ever did this,” he says. “We joke around [my] house that I’m so much of a hermit and recluse, but there’s an awful lot of truth in that,” he says. “Would I take a year or two years off right now? It’s unlikely because there are just too many opportunities right now. Might I take a little time off? Yeah.”

He will not lack for anything to do. He has drawn increasingly close to his children, Bradley, 17, and Jillian, 13, and has become enmeshed in their school and sports activities. He has been married to the former June Baranco, an artist, for the past 23 years. He is a fanatical golfer who boasts a forbidding seven handicap and plays as often as 200 times a year. He attends to many of the details of his annual charity golf tournament, “The Bryant Gumbel Walt Disney World Celebrity Golf Tournament,” which raised $602,000 for the United Negro College Fund last March. He is also a weekend scribbler who has churned out portions of a dozen books--”mostly thrillers and historical fiction.” They are, he explains, “half finished, a third finished, in various stages. I don’t go all the way because I’m just way too critical.”

At age 48 and a millionaire more than a dozen times over, Gumbel is also thinking hard about a legacy beyond the world that he has known. He is considering creating a foundation that would underscore the achievements of prominent African Americans. He wants, he says, to “gather a larger group of role models, to use others as role models and do something to highlight success in the African American community.” He talks of “uniting African American people of substance and achievement and see what together we might accomplish to capitalize on the success of a number of individuals. Although they are individually strong and successful and, to a certain extent wealthy, together they might be a much more potent force.”

More immediately, though, Gumbel was on the verge of ending his 25-year association with NBC and vacating his office--full of sports books and a dozen or so teddy bears that viewers had sent him when he made an offhand remark about how much he liked them. Gumbel’s ties with NBC News were at times strained by miscommunications and personality clashes. As Ed Hookstratten, his agent, puts it: “He’s not an apple polisher. He was never one to be close to management. He believes that one person should drive the bus and that person is Bryant Gumbel. Who’s to say he’s wrong?”

Gumbel’s relationship with the current steward of NBC News, Andy Lack, has been cool, even hostile. “I’ve had better relationships with other NBC presidents, no doubt about that,” Gumbel says bluntly.

In fact, at one point, Tom Brokaw, a big booster of Gumbel, interceded with Lack to patch things up. Brokaw declines to talk about what he said to Lack but did say that Gumbel “knows how I feel and it would be a big loss if he did go away.”

Lack, who declined to comment, has had his own reasons for frustration. A few months or so after Gumbel announced a year ago that he planned to leave the show, there was some discussion about him remaining after all. But by that time, Lack had decided to install “Today” news anchor Matt Lauer as Gumbel’s replacement.

Lack was also angered by Gumbel’s reluctance to contribute in any meaningful way to either “Dateline NBC” or the new cable channel, MSNBC. “He wanted [Gumbel] to be the Larry King of MSNBC,” says a source. Gumbel reportedly thought the idea insulting. “It was like telling him to leave the New York Yankees for the Columbus farm team,” a source says.

But the major--and public--fallout came over O.J. Simpson, an old friend of Gumbel. In October of 1995, NBC West Coast president Don Ohlmeyer persuaded his pal to talk to the network (Simpson backed out a few days later). Gumbel badly wanted the interview, but Lack chose Brokaw and Katie Couric, Gumbel’s co-host, instead.

Gumbel was infuriated or, as he puts it, “pissed, I was pissed, flat out pissed. It’s ludicrous to argue that you can do the O.J. stuff [on ‘Today’] every day for a year and a half, and then suddenly he’s set to be interviewed and [Lack says,] ‘Oh no, you can’t be objective.’ ”

But Gumbel says he also got mixed signals and that Lack also told him that Simpson had requested that he not handle the interview. “I continue to be unsure of what the truth is,” Gumbel says. “Is the truth that O.J. asked me out of it, in which case--excuse me--are we fond of allowing our interview subjects to determine who deals with them?”

Gumbel left the show for a week, taking some vacation days. “I could not see myself sitting on the air and promoting [the interview] with a smiling face and acting all happy, when me and the rest of the world knew I didn’t like it,” he explains.

Predictably, the press reaction was furious. “Gumbel Grumbles,” a headline in the New York Daily News read. Another reporter wrote that Gumbel was “pouting.” Gumbel says, “The man’s an idiot.”

*

Bryant Gumbel never doubted his ability. he was one of those people whose personality seemed to emerge fully formed into the world at birth. He was, say most friends, exactly what he is today.

What Gumbel had, always, was pure poise. He had the easy assurance of someone who appeared to know where he was going--even when he didn’t. David Boone, a management consultant who helped Gumbel get his first job in journalism, says, “He was very, very confident [and] was the kind of person who was going to lay out his own road map.”

In fact, the road map was laid out for Gumbel by his father, Richard Dunbar Gumbel, an esteemed probate judge in Chicago who died when Gumbel was 23. In life and in death, he was the only idol his two sons, Bryant and Greg, ever had.

Greg Gumbel, Bryant’s older brother and a sportscaster with NBC, says, “We would be nowhere near where we are without the backing, the urging, the pushing toward being educated. [He always said,] ‘Handle yourself well in public and in person-to-person relationships.’ ”

So enormous was this influence that Bryant has had to deal with a history of speculation (mostly in print) that his perfectionist drive has been fueled by a desire to please the ghost of his father. “Hogwash,” Gumbel says. But the profound influence is indisputable. “He was,” Gumbel says, “able to succeed on a lot of levels--as a family man, as a friend to a lot of people, as a judge. He was a guy whom everybody looked up to. He was just a natural leader.”

In 1966, Gumbel went off to Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, majoring in Russian history and thinking about entering the legal profession because his dad had offered to leave the bench and begin his own practice if both sons would join him. However, “his first love was writing,” says Rhodes Johnson, a roommate during Gumbel’s junior and senior years. Gumbel bagged law school and went to work.

He hated his job as a N.Y. sales rep pushing industrial paper products. He quit, goofed off a bit, then sought out Boone, who helped him land at the now-defunct Black Sports, a print magazine, where he wrote voluminously and with great passion.

A year later, the Baltimore Sun offered a job. But the timing was bad. The offer came only hours after his revered father died. Shortly after he went home to bury his father, Gumbel got a call from a program manager at a Los Angeles TV station, KNBC. He was looking for a weekend sports anchor. Was Gumbel interested? Gumbel, who had dreams of becoming a great sports scribe, wasn’t sure because “we didn’t have blacks on TV and I had no reason to believe I could go on.”

He tried out anyway. Friedman, Gumbel’s first boss in TV, recalled that he and his colleagues liked to watch the endless tryouts for the job “because we were starved for entertainment. We’d watch all these bozos and laugh at ‘em. And then one day, this guy got up and he was better than anybody we had.” It was October 1972. Gumbel had just turned 24. He was hired on the spot.

Gumbel was a real reporter, happy to spike the avarice and silliness of the bloated sports world. He wasn’t a goofball on the air. No smirks. No giggles. It was all business.

A minor legend began to take shape. Gumbel didn’t have to read from cue cards and could do a stand-up in one take. He memorized facts, scores of stats, which he could recite years later as a play-by-play man for the NBC manifold sports telecasts. His bosses also admired his remarkable ease in front of the camera. No Stumble Gumbel, they called him.

He was promoted to run Channel 4’s entire sports department. By 1976, he was commuting to New York to co-host “Grandstand,” NBC’s NFL pregame show. For the rest of the decade, Gumbel spent every waking minute reporting on, commenting on and announcing every major sports telecast NBC put on the air.

But nothing had prepared him for the call he got from Friedman, who in 1981 was executive producer of the “Today” show and had already lured Gumbel to the show as a contributor. After a five-year stint, Brokaw was leaving as host and Friedman wanted Gumbel to replace him. Gumbel wanted two weeks to think about it, but he was fairly certain what the answer would be: no.

There were serious problems at “Today.” Six years earlier the show had been rocked by the premiere of “Good Morning America,” which had just overtaken NBC’s 30-year-old morning dynasty. Gumbel also knew he was an unpopular choice in the news division because of his sports pedigree. Friedman had fought a bitter battle with a crusty NBC News president, Bill Small, over Gumbel, because Small was intent on handing the reins over to Chris Wallace, a no-nonsense Washington reporter and son of Mike Wallace. Small had also decided that the next host would read the news and host the show. Gumbel thought that idea stupid, for the simple reason that news-reading was not his forte. Hosting was. He refused to do both.

He had pretty much made up his mind to reject the offer, until he had dinner with a former “Today” host, Joe Garagiola. “ ‘It would be the greatest thing you ever did,’ ” Gumbel recalls Garagiola saying. “ ‘You would see things, go places, meet people that you can’t ever dare dream.’ ”

Friedman got his man. But Gumbel had to fight entrenched resistance at news. Fred Francis, NBC’s veteran war correspondent, recalls that time: “It was terrible. It was like the perversion of the news business, that we had named this jock.” Francis, who later sent Gumbel the supportive letter telling him to keep his chin up, told his colleagues that “this guy just [reported] a baseball strike and broke every major story. He’s a good reporter.”

Gumbel now says race may have played a minor role in the near rebellion over his appointment: “I suspect that some of the naysayers were using sports as their concern when race was. I don’t know. I never will.” However, “nothing in this country happens absent race [and] the idea that race was not a consideration is absurd.”

He stuck it out. Three years later, the show was a hit but the reign was short-lived. A morning show is a fragile blend of personalities, style and form. It is this mirage that draws bleary-eyed viewers back to the TV set, morning after morning. During the next four years, the illusion that Friedman, Pauley, Gumbel and assorted cast members created was one of a slightly dysfunctional, but always lovable, family. It worked brilliantly, until Friedman left the show and Marty Ryan, a senior producer and close friend of Gumbel, took over in 1987.

Depending on who tells the story, Gumbel was complaining loudly and often to Ryan about his pet peeves, such as the show’s reliance on a wide range of contributors (some good, some not) and the ungainly Willard Scott weather segments.

Ryan told Gumbel to put his complaints in writing. He did. He panned some contributors, a few who were presumably even friends. Yet the harshest words were for Scott, a beloved, almost legendary, fixture on the show, whose sometimes clownish shtick gives the program a circus-like atmosphere. Gumbel was not amused: Scott, he wrote, “holds the show hostage to his assortment of whims, wishes, birthdays and bad taste.”

Gumbel calls the infamous memo “less of a power grab than it was a plea for somebody to take control.” Ryan, he says, “did not have control.” Ryan, currently the executive producer of Fox’s Sunday morning news program, will only say, “I initiated [the memo] and it was a mistake on my part.”

Many observers now agree with Gumbel’s assessment, particularly with regard to Scott. As Cliff Kapler, a longtime senior producer on the show, says: “The length of [Pauley’s or Gumbel’s] interviews would be determined by the one absolute variable that was hard to control, ‘Willard’s Weather.’ ” If Scott ran long, as he was wont to, it would cut deeply into a Pauley or Gumbel interview.

“That was my point,” Gumbel says. “My failing, obviously, was in a poor selection of words, and maybe in writing it down. To the extent that [the memo] hurt people, I truly am sorry.” Did he ever have a personal problem with Willard afterward? “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.”

When the memo was leaked to Newsday later, it seemed to confirm critics’ charges that he was arrogant, sparking an explosive backlash that had been simmering. A 1988 Sports Illustrated profile had implied that Gumbel’s then-68-year-old mother, Rhea, was living in near-poverty because her son would not support her. (Her comments supported the notion of a breach.) But Gumbel says the writer misinterpreted his mother’s shyness and entrenched habits. For example, “He wrote that after dad’s death, she had to sell the car. Well, my mom didn’t drive. Or my mom was in the same apartment. My mom was scared to move. She’s just a shy lady. I love my mom dearly.” The piece, say friends, devastated Gumbel.

And then there was the ’88 Olympics. Gumbel’s hosting of the Games had led some viewers to complain that Gumbel was not sufficiently pro-American in his coverage. Some suspected that was one reason NBC’s ratings for the Games were a disappointment.

By 1989, “Today’s” ratings began to rapidly crumble. “One of the things I resented about NBC enormously was [management’s] seeming unwillingness to do anything to support me,” Gumbel says. “Their defense was, ‘Well, if we would seem to be supporting you, it would merely attract more fury,’ to which my comment was, ‘Hey, guys, I’ve got news for you, I’m getting so much fury right now, I don’t know how much more we can get.’ ” He adds, “I did not forgive them for that. I really didn’t.”

Matters got worse. NBC bosses added Deborah Norville, and when Jane Pauley eventually left, “Today” began a stunning ratings free fall that it only recently--and fully--has recovered from.

“I was angry at everybody up and down the line,” Gumbel says. But he didn’t fight to save Pauley nor did he try to derail Norville. “What am I supposed to say? No [to her appointment]? Then the headline the next day would be, ‘Why Does Bryant Gumbel Hate Deborah Norville?’ So it was kind of a lose-lose.”

The replacement of Norville with Katie Couric, a “Today” correspondent and Pentagon reporter, to the show in 1991 worked, as Friedman explains, because “if you surround [Gumbel] with likable people--[weatherman] Al Roker, Katie, Matt Lauer--then that’s fine. What you can’t do is surround him with people [viewers] don’t like.”

Up to Gumbel’s departure, “Today’s” ratings were as strong as they had been in 10 years, with “Good Morning America” deep in second place most of last year.

*

So who exactly is Bryant Gumbel? Friends and colleagues say that to truly understand the man, one must understand his passion for golf. Weekends of 54 holes are not uncommon. He belongs to four clubs--Waccabuc (across the street from his home in New York’s Westchester County), Whipporwill, Burning Tree (near Washington, where George Bush sponsored his membership) and Hudson National, perhaps one of the most exclusive clubs in New York. Many of his closest friends are golfers, including Matt Lauer.

Gumbel calls this obsession “embarrassing.” Arch-perfectionist that he is, golf has become for Gumbel an all-encompassing meta-phor in an endless search for perfection--a search for the perfect swing, the perfect wedge shot, the perfect putt.

For Gumbel, no place could be closer to heaven. “It’s a place where you can get away from the rest of the world,” he says. “In golf, whatever you do, you did. There is nobody there to share the blame or nobody to enjoy the award. It’s just you.” Perhaps not coincidentally, Gumbel began to play shortly after he started at “Today.”

One of the raps--and it is widely considered a fair one--that Gumbel has heard over and over again is that he is a male chauvinist. He has been blamed for fostering a frat house atmosphere on occasion at the “Today” studios that even Couric has reportedly chafed under. “He has a disproportionate amount of testosterone surging through his veins,” she says jokingly, but adds, “Off the air, we’re friendly but very, very different people in terms of our sensibilities and attitudes. It’s just who we are. We work really well on the air and we peacefully coexist off.”

But the golf course is a place where a good joke, no matter how sexist, can be appreciated. Says Lauer, games are “a bit lighthearted. It’s a little bit like college buddies getting together, and there’s a lot of kidding, a lot of abuse when the pressure is on.”

So the golf course is where judgments, other than personal ones, cease to exist. The outside world no longer intrudes. It’s also a place where the color of one’s skin is irrelevant. It is a pure meritocracy. As a young boy, Gumbel may have first realized that such an ideal place could exist as he delved into “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” the book that influenced him more than anything he had ever read or ever would read. “Malcolm X preached self-esteem and self-responsibility,” he says. “You had a responsibility to prepare yourself as much as possible, to educate yourself, and [he said] it was possible to stand up and be who you are and be accepted, with no apologies needed.”

No apologies needed. Accept who you are. Prepare yourself. They were also the lessons of Richard Gumbel. But when Bryant got to the “Today” show, he had some harsher lessons to learn. He was not only drubbed by NBC News veterans, but blacks as well. Some even said that he acted too white to get where he was. These shots made him “really, really, really mad,” recalls Nancy Gist, a friend since childhood who’s now an official at the Justice Department. “He found the suggestion particularly distasteful that he had tried to be white in order to succeed in journalism.” But there were whites who believed much the same thing. Even more hurtful, some believed that he was overreaching.

Gumbel appears neither angry nor bitter when launching into a harangue against his detractors. His words, however, reveal his true feelings: “The idea of an African American man exercising a degree of authority and intelligence and being unapologetic for both is unnerving to people who are either insecure or have certain racial hang-ups. Then it becomes easy to say, ‘Oh, he’s arrogant.’ Am I arrogant because I’m not being jocular and laughing at everything? Am I arrogant because I’m not saying thank you on an ongoing basis for having this job? Am I arrogant because I view myself as the equal of the people I am interviewing? Am I arrogant because I’m unapologetic for the way I present myself? I’m trying to figure out what it is! I was always taught to think that arrogance was the result of somebody who obnoxiously contends that they are better than someone, but I’ve never thought I was better than anybody. I felt I was the equal of everybody.”

Gumbel’s thoughts on race in America are ever-changing, say friends. He refuses to talk about O.J. Simpson, but Gumbel believes that a nation’s obsession with both trials symbolizes “where we are. I said to somebody that if O.J. killed his first wife, Marguerite [who is black], and her friend, then do I think George Will and William F. Buckley would have written about it? No way on God’s green earth. They wouldn’t have even noticed.” For those who say the trial is about murder, not race, Gumbel has this message: “That’s crap.”

He blames TV for the country’s continuing racial malaise. “Television news has fostered this image that the drug problem is a black problem, when in fact it’s just the opposite. The average drug user in this country is a white guy in his mid-30s, or the idea that welfare is a black issue. Well, most people on welfare are not black. That, too, would probably come as a shock to Americans.”

And what about that other big misunderstanding, the one that so many viewers have embraced for so many years? The one about this man--this handsome, brilliant, dedicated man--who is arrogant, too smart, too clever? His friend Gist echoes a thought that Gumbel most assuredly believes as well: The fact that he and other accomplished, strong black men in America find themselves battling such impressions in 1997 “is a comment on the ongoing unresolved racial issues that are woven throughout this society.”

So perhaps that is why Bryant Gumbel spends so many hours on a golf course. Perhaps that is why he locks himself in his study late at night, working away at his novels. Perhaps that is why he will take off the next few months to carefully think about the rest of his life.

No apologies needed.