"Ninety-three degrees in San Bernardino"," says the weatherman smiling. Chung looks desultorily at a monitor. She has sat through this kind of thing for five years, listening to the same high desert lows and low desert highs, watching a parade of weathermen try to exude star quality while pointing at a satellite picture. She can finally laugh about the business now; its pretenses amuse her.
"You know how you'll hear everyone in the business, especially anchors, say they're different from the rest," she laughs. "I know that often I fall into the same thing as everybody else. I'll say, 'Hey, we're newsmen. We work very hard.' But, well, sometimes"," Chung shrugs.
Nothing has really changed in the years since Chung joined KNXT. Weathermen still chuckle smugly when they mention Barslow, and during the rainy season, anchors, reading from their TelePrompTers, jocularly demand that weathermen produce more sunshine. It is still the small talk of casual acquaintances, a steady stream of "excellent report," and "we look forward to that," and "see you at 11." Only the faces are different. If there is a certainty in the TV news business, it is that the faces will change.
It is hard to define what distinguishes a good face from a bad one, but no one disputes that a face which cannot hold an audience will not be around very long. Before Chung arrived al KNXT in July 1916, station officials conducted tests to determine the popularity of their anchors and reporters. To their horror, they discovered that some of their talent stirred no interest at all. "There was this one test," says a station insider all the time, "called the Galvanic Skin Test. Audiences were hooked up with these electrodes that measured the sweat secretion which occurred while the subject was watching television. The theory was that the greater the sweating, the more attention the subject was paying to the newscaster on the television. Anyway, one of our anchors barely scored on the Galvanic. It was as if he was dead,"
The anchorman was talented and reasonably attractive newsman. It was hard to understand why his face no longer worked. On deeper reflection, a station insider said much later, maybe the anchor’s demeanor was too serious; maybe he should have enlivened the stories a bit, projected some warmth, smiled more often – the insider can’t be sure. Smiling doesn’t always work, he says sadly; sometimes the ebullient 28-year olds fail worse than the curmudgeons. All that had been clear in 1976 were ratings, and they were abysmal. The talking heads had to roll.
At the time, Connie Chung was working in the Washington bureau of CBS News, covering the vice presidency of Nelson Rockefeller. Just 29, she had risen in seven years from being a newswriter at a Metromedia station in Washington, D.C., to being a prized network correspondent and occasional anchor of "CBS Morning News." She had covered Watergate and the 1972 presidential race between Richard Nixon and George McGovern, her work on the latter earning her a reputation for tenacious reporting. Recalls CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer: "During 1972 campaign, George McGovern used to say that there wasn't a morning in which he wouldn't wake up and find Connie Chung waiting around the corner with a microphone, ready to ask him another question. She was driven, always doing an extra spot late at night when it was needed, never afraid to ask the tough question. She chased George Meany into an elevator once, with her mike and everything. That woman could never be accused of being bashful."
Chung grimaces at a mention of the early days. "I had to learn how to be aggressive," she explains. "It wasn't enough to be good. You had to be tough to get an assignment, and then tough to get on the air. Actually, it helped to be tough just to gel a job."
She had gone to work as a secretary for Metromedia fresh after graduating from the University of Maryland. Never did she look upon her typing job as anything other than a stepping stone. "I kept telling my boss that I wanted to be a newswriter," she remembers. "I’m not sure how much attention he paid, but I kept reminding him." When the position finally opened up, Chung returned to her boss, who explained that he could not give her the job unless a suitable minority applicant could be found for Chung's secretarial post. "Rather than let the station try to find someone," she recalls, "I went out and got the person. I went over to my bank and went up to this teller I knew, this black woman. I asked, 'Ever work for a television station?' That was about it. She got the secretarial job, and I became a newswriter. If there was a shortage of reporters one night, I'd raise my hand when they needed someone to cover a story, and say, 'I'll go.' They finally sent me one night. It was a story on the brown-out in Washington,"
"It will be interesting to see what kind of positions we'll be allowed to grow into." (File photo)
She smiles, and continues. "It was always tough, and it became tougher when I went to the Washington bureau at CBS. Suddenly I was on stories that very major reporters were covering. There was a killer mentality among the Washington press. It was tougher for a young reporter because you had the creme de la crème there. If you didn't get aggressive, you'd get swallowed, so I had to become stronger. I worked on Watergate with a lot of other young reporters, and in some ways we were in competition. I'd run around crazily for hours and hours and finally get something, and I'd run back to the senior reporter, Daniel Schorr, and tell him what I'd found. Daniel would listen to me, say, 'good, good,' give me a little pat on the head, and then do the story on the air. For me, it was a matter of running around, sticking microphones in people's faces, and doing it every hour of the day. It was draining,"
Yet by 1976, she had made it, had succeeded in "Barracuda City," as she calls Washington. The network had given her the Rockefeller beat, and who knew where that might lead. Then politics interfered. Early in the year, it became clear that Gerald Ford wouldn't keep Rockefeller on the ticket. She was left covering a lame duck. Chung's ennui was deepening at the same time that KNXT was searching for new talent; still, when KNXT offered her an anchor position, she wasn't sure. She had lived in Washington through out her life, the network job looked like it might blossom into better things, and Los Angeles was a city about which she knew little.
"I had been a very calculating person up until that time," she recalls, “I just decided that for the first time in my life, I'd do something unpredictable. I wasn't 30 yet. I'd never lived outside of Washington and the pros and cons were 50-50, so I said, 'Go do it.”
Once in Los Angeles, she was less than an immediate success. She often stumbled over her copy in the early days, and, always, she was stiff, distant. "I didn't know how to be myself," she says now. "I was still being the upright Washington correspondent. You know that style (she lowers her voice to a baritone), the style that's, 'Good evening, this is Uncle Walter..' I wasn't satisfied with myself, and neither was the news director. He came to me and asked me to be the person he knew. 'Can you be a little more natural?' he asked me. I tried, but it look awhile."
While Chung struggled with her style, the station desperately tried to find a suitable co-anchor. Different partners were shuttled in and out over the course of two years, "I started feeling like “Zsa Zsa Gabor,” she remembers. "Co-anchoring with someone is like being married, and I went through more marriages and divorces than 'Zsa Zsa. It got to the point where you could have put the San Diego Chicken next to me and could have done it."
She speaks very softly, in a voice nothing like the one she uses on television. Higher-pitched, punctuated by nervous giggles, it is almost the voice of a young girl. She wipes her mouth with a napkin and her hands seem terribly small. There are women who radiate power regardless of size, but Chung is not one of them. Hunched over her salad, her shoulder barely filling the width of her chair, she merely looks vulnerable. “I get as worried about things as the next person, she says. "Sometimes I say, 'Why me? I'm just another schlemiel. How did I get here?”
As if to answer, a young co-worker appears at the door accompanied by her boyfriend. Chung and the woman fall into a conversation. The boyfriend says nothing, yet his stare never leaves Chung. After awhile, it becomes funny, the sight of this young man, his eyes glazed over, hypnotized by Chung's presence. Chung seems used to it. The boyfriend keeps staring.
"She has skin like rose petals," an attorney says over lunch one day. The attorney negotiates film deals and copes with irritable actresses. He is not a man inclined to compare anything to rose petals, yet he cannot stop gushing. He has recently seen Chung at a restaurant, and cannot recall when he has last seen skin so beautiful. A fantasy girl, he says. The attorney smiles, "Like rose petals," he gushes again. “ Except she had this real sensual glow.”
It would be naive, in the face of such fascinations and obsessions, to insist that anchors like Chung are simply news people, that they are not alluring personalities whose mystique derives as much from their looks as anything else. One of Los Angeles' anchorwomen is a former Miss America; another was an air-watch traffic girl whose work clothes once consisted of a form-fitting silver lame jumpsuit. Even the motion picture industry has come to discover their latent sexuality. A new movie about a beautiful and urbane anchorwoman is in the planning stages, and the model for the leading role is, reportedly, Connie Chung,
All of which makes Chung’s bargaining power - in July, she signed a three-year contract at a figure approaching US$600,000 per year - easier to understand. An estimated 40 percent of television viewers tune to a news program because they like the anchor people, and since Chung's arrival at KNXT, ratings - and, therefore, advertisement revenue-for the station's news programs have steadily climbed. The question of salary was never a major barrier during the recent contract negotiations. Rather, the issue that delayed resolution of the talks revolved around Chung's desire that she be allowed to take time from her KNXT anchoring duties to serve periodically as a substitute co-anchor on Charles Kuralt's "Morning," the network news program. In the end, Chung received not only that but more, including assurances that she would be permitted to do occasional anchor work on the CBS weekend news and would serve as an announcer on the network's West Coast news break.
So Connie Chung has reached the top of her profession. The days of doing midnight radio spots are gone forever. Nowadays, she does some writing for the 4:30 news, which she anchors, and a little rewriting for the 6 and 11, on which she teams with co-anchor Jess Marlow. Mostly, however, her job revolve around reading a TelePrompTer. It is something that she remains sensitive about, the notion that she and other anchor people are little more than polished performers reading a script. She confesses to moments when she wants to yell at herself "to get off my rear and do some stories on my own."
"I started feeling like Zsa Zsa Gabor, Co-anchoring with someone is like being married, and I went through more marriages and divorces….”
On the one hand, I know each day I come in here that I do a good job at what I'm hired to do - anchoring," she says. "But I started as a reporter and still I think of myself as a reporter. I know I'm not doing enough stories. Sometimes the guilt starts to suffocate me. There have been times when for 24 hours a day, I've felt guilty. Really, it's made me feel like a lazy person at times."
Chung confides that (for entertainment) she prefers small gatherings with close friends. There is no hint of the party girl here, no sense of any fascination with sybaritic Hollywood. There is only the sense of a rigidly disciplined woman, and the air of an equally disciplined past. The daughter of a former diplomat for Chiang Kai-shek's regime, she grew up in a middle-class family where initiative seemed to be the chief rule. Living at home while attending college, she campaigned for a student government position with the help of an older 'sister who hung posters. "I was kind of different, being a commuter going against all these people in sororities and fraternities," she recalls, "I won, but I had to work hard to do it. I did a lot of running around and talking."
She has seemingly led her life the same way, always running: across streets to persuade a bank teller to take a job she wanted to vacate, running into an elevator to chase down a labor leader, running for scoops to please a senior reporter. She is running still, even if there isn't a release any longer for all of her competitiveness and ambition. She stays late at the station following the 11 o'clock news, and on weekends, she spends much of her time catching up on her reading. "I still get The Washington Post," she says. "It's a week late, but I read it all the time." She stops then, realizing that her talk about long work hours and weekends spent with newspapers makes her sound terribly reclusive. "I can be wild and crazy, too," she quickly adds, a little defensively.
But she does not go out often. Rather, she enjoys getting together with close friends at their homes. She says she feels little choice in the matter. "If we go out, and I get recognized then it intrudes on their evening," she says. "Being appreciated by people is nice, and I am loathe to be mean to anyone who approaches me. So I try to talk to most people who say, Hi. But if I'm having an intimate dinner, it doesn't work out so well"
But there is not much time for dinners, she says. She sounds bothered by that. She spends time these days thinking about what it means to be 35 and single. "Sometimes I really have to wonder about it," she says. "I mean, most people my age are married and have children. All sorts of people tell me I should get married. Even our driver down in El Salvador, this wonderful older man who sounded like Humphrey Bogart, kept telling me I should do it. He'd say, 'Connie, sweetheart, you have to get married. Have a family, sweetheart.'"
"Without getting into it", she continues, "a social life can sometimes be difficult. My schedule is different than most people's, and that makes things harder. It's hard to find the time often to do what you would really like, and even when you can, well, it's difficult."
She pauses, and laughs. "Yeah," she says, "you wouldn't believe all the people who tell me I should get married. Sometimes it makes me feel a little strange. I'm here in my mid-30s, but often I still feel like a kid."
She begins talking about her youth, remembering little slights: a note from a teacher who complained that Chung talked too softly, momentary despair over not being named a cheerleader. She recalls Friday nights in high school when, without a date, she would go to sock hops and end up dancing with other girls. "I looked like a 10-year-old Chinese boy," she remembers, "flat-chested and a little kid's face. I hadn't learned anything about makeup. I was one of those kids who never quite made it into the 'in' group. I was always on the outside somehow."
"I can't be sure what I'll be doing in the future," she continues. "I think it's important at some point to get some experience in foreign correspondence. Maybe 15 or 20 years from now I'll be doing that, I'm not sure. But I know whatever I'm doing. I have to keep my reporting skills up. It's easy to lose that, you know. You can forget how to ask the good follow-up question, or how to do a story on deadline. These are all things 1 have to do if I want to keep improving."
Chung looks out the panel window at the newsroom. "I'm part of the second generation of women that have come into television news," she says. "It will be interesting to see what kind of positions we'll be allowed to grow into. Somebody like Barbara Walters is from the first generation, and she is really the only one who is at the very top. I admire her so much for that, for her lasting power. Others haven't been that fortunate. Maybe an older woman is simply judged more harshly than a man."