The Kiss of the Anchor Man

Valerie godsoe was a deb. Her mother was president of the Junior League in Toronto. Her father was a Canadian oil man. Valerie was a top athlete and had a well-put-together little body, dark hair and large green eyes. She looked a bit like Natalie Wood. Right out of college in the early Sixties, Valerie got a super job researching and booking talent on Close-Up, a documentary television show for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She even tried out to be the hostess of a talk show and almost got it. One day, a producer showed Valerie a picture of a blond Dr. Kildare type in a suit, with a pipe and posing by a ladder. He asked her, "What do you think of this guy?" Valerie realized it was a friend of her brother's. She had never met the boy, but their families knew each other. His father was Charles Jennings, The Voice of Canada, a vice-president of the CBC. Everyone loved his father. He was a country gentleman, warm, handsome, a big Teddy bear of a man, tweed jackets, lots of dogs, beautiful socialite wife, money. Peter Jennings was his mother's darling. His father called him Golden Boy. Peter even had his own radio show—Peter's Place—when he was nine years old. He wrote it with the family maid and played theme music from Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and talked with kids. Then he was deejay P.J. with a hit teen-dance-party program on TV. So the first thing Peter did when they were introduced was to take Valerie down and show her his Mercedes convertible.

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When Kati Marton met Peter Jennings 13 years ago, she thought it was funny: They were both ABC bureau chiefs (he was London, she was Bonn), they were both children of journalists (her mother was U.P.I., her father was A.P.), they were both born outside America (he in Canada, she in Budapest), they both had had earlier marriages, they had the same aspirations and values and they had similar father fixations.

Peter was 40 when they married. Miss Marton was 30. Success came very early to Peter. Much, much too early to Peter, and Miss Marton and the children came very late. She does not think Peter was anchored in his personal life until he was 40. He was married twice before and, you know, lots of relationships. Some he can't even remember, there were so many.

They remember. The ladies remember!

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Valerie was amazed at how proud Peter was of that Mercedes convertible. Peter always had to have the biggest toys. And he went after only the top girls. And Peter wooed Valerie. Wooed her royally. Called her princess, sent her love letters, phoned all the time. Valerie had waited a long time and had never fallen in love before. But when she met Peter, she fell out of the tree on her head. Boom!

Then Peter was hired to be half of the new anchor team of Canadian television. He was 23 years old! Co-anchor of a national network newscast! When he and Valerie got engaged, the papersaid, "Ottawa's most eligible bachelor to wed."

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Of course, Peter gets short-tempered. So does Miss Marton. They fight like mad. But God! Miss Marton finds Peter irresistible! She thinks he is immensely grateful that he has this family life. Now Peter's very responsible in his private life. Very settled. And Miss Marton thinks that she and the children, Elizabeth and Christopher, as a unit, make the rest of his life possible. And they have a good time. And, frankly, Miss Marton feels she is up to the task! Peter can't mess around too much with Miss Marton! He and Miss Marton started out as equals, though he had ten years on her. So it has always been—intellectually and emotionally—a totally equal relationship. Miss Marton thinks Peter was ready for it, but not a minute before he met her. He was not ready for a relationship with a strong, willful woman. Nor was he ready to be a father. So he got rid of a lot of bad stuff by the time Miss Marton and the children came along.

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Valerie did not have a great honeymoon. It was only two days, because Peter begged to be sent away on an assignment. They moved to Ottawa and mostly saw his parents. That year was nice. They had a boat and a summer cottage. In the winter, they'd ski. Of course, Peter was vain. He would preen. He was a bit of a peacock. He was a show-off. He was a Leo! He was the king of the jungle. But it was fun. Peter even was part of the Miss Canada Pageant. He was the Bert Parks of the Far North. He even sang. Deep down inside Peter, there is a showbiz soul. He came home with 200 matchboxes with a beauty queen's photograph on them. They were everywhere: in his car, in his drawers....

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To Miss Marton, Peter is a person of tremendous ego. He has the world at his feet. Literally. The world. But he doesn't want Miss Marton at his feet. He wants somebody who is going to give it to him straight and tell him when his head gets too big, as Miss Marton does, and keep him honest. Somebody who essentially has his very best interests at heart, as Miss Marton does, and who does not just want to flatter him, as Miss Marton doesn't. Because, God, Peter's flattered! He has so much flattery!

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Valerie thinks Peter was quite confident in those days, except with his father. It always ran through Valerie's head that Peter was still trying to prove himself to his father. Honest to God. Charles Jennings was loving, but he treated Peter kind of lightly. Today, if Charles Jennings were alive, he would be so bloody proud of Peter. But he wouldn't let him know it. That's the way Canadians are. Peter's father would not give him a compliment. It really is the crux of Peter.

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In Miss Marton's opinion, the key to Peter's life is that he dropped out of high school, and he has spent the rest of his life compensating for it.

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Instead of skiing with Valerie or driving up to their little cottage, Peter always wanted to be away on assignment. Going here. Going there. Begging for assignments on the weekends. And then he got the offer to go to ABC in New York. ABC put them in a seedy little hotel room and Valerie's whole trousseau was stolen. Peter said to Valerie, "Find an apartment! Don't go on the West Side!" and disappeared. So Valerie rushed out to look for an apartment and was alone for a week in tears. She knew New York was going to be awful. But Peter was so excited, because they were going to send him all across the country!

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Miss Marton thinks that if she were to go to the telephone right this minute and say, "Darling, enough! Do something else. Anchoring World News Tonight is not good for me, not good for the kids," Peter wouldn't for a second deny her that request. But Peter would be too intelligent to ask Miss Marton not to write her books. He'd be bored with her. He'd hate it if she just looked after the house and the kids. He loves hearing about her research. He loves to hear about the people she has met. He loves to see her get excited. And that excitement is a vital part of them. Because Peter is easily bored. On the other hand, he has this incredible capacity to block out everything but the subject in front of him and just zero in. He loves meeting new people. Loves to learn from people. He's an extremely extroverted human being. He and Miss Marton don't walk down the street without Peter's talking to four or five people. He's terrifically open to people. He has not an ounce of snobbism.

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Valerie thinks part of the problem might have been that Peter realized he was too young to be married. He always wanted to be away. He was very ambitious and he wanted to prove himself. When he went to ABC, the other reporters thought he was a pretty boy. So one of the first things hewent after was Vietnam. Valerie remembers seeing a picture in a magazine of him bending over a body.

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Miss Marton's idea of a blissful evening is to read a good book with Mozart playing in the background. Peter likes to watch hockey, baseball, football. Occasionally, he will pick up a book.

Have you seen Miss Marton's latest book, darling? Miss Marton can give you a copy.

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Valerie and Peter would be introduced at parties, and that's when she first thought, Uh-oh! She would just go to the other side of the room and wouldn't watch. Because American women! She couldn't believe it! Canadian women weren't aggressive. But here! The women took one look at Peter and that was it! Peter had the frame. He had the whatever it was. They gobbled it up. Older women! Mothers! Bananas for him. Grandmothers! Wives! Daughters! He had a secretary who'd do his shirts. Iron his shirts! Valerie was flabbergasted. Flabbergasted! At the nerve. Barracudas. Unbelievable! Wife or not, it didn't matter. "Here's my phone number!" Ah. And Peter loved it, of course. That's when he really began to look in the mirror. And then, of course, she would read in the paper that Peter was having a romantic rendezvous with some blonde TV newswoman. And a blonde movie star would call: "Is Peter there?" Wheeeew. And then Valerie would read that Peter Jennings, the handsome ABC correspondent, was a bachelor. That is when the marriage started to get a little shaky.

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When he's on a case, like the house Miss Marton and he were building in Bridgehampton, Long Island, he was on the phone to Miss Marton every hour. Peter is not the kind of man who says, "Darling, surprise me!" When Miss Marton pops into his ABC office unannounced and he's up to his eyeballs, he jumps up from his computer, gives her a big hug, says he's gotta go to make-up, and while he's in the chair, they fight happily about whether it's going to be brick or blue stone around the pool. He was involved in every bathroom tile. They fight about everything. The chintz. They fight about the chintz. He is deeply absorbed in the kids' schools. He is on every committee. He is the auctioneer for the school benefits. Peter has enough energy, in Miss Marton's opinion, to kill them all. On vacations, he wants to sail, hike, ski, scale mountains, and he never sleeps. At home, the kids like to get into their bed; they almost always wake up with four of them in bed.

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Not even the first year was up and ABC made him anchor man. It was 1965. He was 26 years old. It was just after Christmas. He and Valerie discussed it. He was a bit distraught. He said, "I'm not ready! It's ridiculous! I want to prove myself first. I don't want to just go on the air!" He wasn't prepared. He was insecure. There was agony. But anyway, he had no choice. He knew the snide remarks. Cronkite made a joke about Peter's putting dark circles under his eyes. And Frank Reynolds was quite angry about this kid. And there was all the publicity. He became an 8"xlO" Hollywood glossy. But he did very well, considering!

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Miss Marton must say that she is much thinner now than she was before. She had always considered herself a rather zaftig person. She's 5'7" and used to weigh 125 pounds, and if now she registers 110, that's heavy. She doesn't want the children to suffer from having a larger-than-life father, so she makes a point of keeping her identity very much alive. She wants them to know that Mom and Dad both work equally hard and that part of Daddy's job is being well known. She gets a little impatient with the amount of time that is expended getting attention. That is not Miss Marton's favorite thing about this life. The attention! The sort of artificial attention.

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Yes, Valerie thinks Peter carried it off very well. But she was always solidly behind him. They had sort of a buddy marriage, until she started to get a little jealous and insecure.

Valerie would just have Peter back from a trip and all to herself and then a woman would call in the middle of the night. "Is Peter there?" Oh, please! So the marriage had to be uncomfortable for him. And he'd withdraw into a mood. So she couldn't communicate. He was very private. Wouldn't talk about his emotions. Wouldn't show them. She threw an ashtray at him once. That's about it, really.

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Miss Marton was very ambitious in her 20s. She had one broken marriage as a result. She had been married to a perfectly nice Philadelphian with whom she had gone to graduate school, and he became an international banker and she became a hot-shot TV reporter, and he was the casualty. She didn't want that to happen with Peter.

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Valerie has heard people say that Kati doesn't give Peter permission to walk around the block. He seems a bit (continued on page 114)The Anchor Man(continued from page 108) terrified of her. It's amazing! It's unbelievable! Valerie has never heard anything like it! But what's good for the goose is the gander—maybe Kati went out on Peter first (that's what some people say) and had the affair with the Washington Post writer Richard Cohen. Have you seen that guy? Short and ugly. And it got in all the papers. Then Peter and Kati had the big separation. And that got in all the papers. Then they had the big reconciliation. Well, maybe they both had affairs, who knows? Anyway, they are back together, and in Valerie's opinion, Peter seems to have a pretty great marriage. Anyhoo, Kati's intelligent. Kept her maiden name. The whole bit. And she has his kids, and that is what Peter really wanted. He was very careful not to have kids with the first two wives. That's all Valerie is going to say. (Peter met Annie, the second wife, the photographer, the brunette, Lebanese, in the Middle East. No one knows much about her.) Peter has affairs with blondes but marries brunettes. But Kati's tough. Peter respects her. Kati has written a couple of books. She was ABC's Bonn bureau chief. And she's dynamite-looking! Young! She certainly is doing a lot more than Valerie. Valerie is only writing her little newspaper column now, but she used to book talent for Skitch Henderson, then became a producer at Metromedia, then did publicity at Revlon, so she isn't totally chopped liver. But how can Peter be so afraid of Kati that he won't have even one drink with his old friend?

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Peter will often shout at Miss Marton across a dinner party, "Darling!"—you know, sort of showing off—"who composed opus blah blah blah?" And Miss Marton will shout back, "Blah blah blah." Peter likes to parade Miss Marton's intelligence and worldliness. All of that is very important to him. He loves the fact that Miss Marton is an author.

•

Valerie broke up with Peter while she was in love with him. Peter knows that. Anyway, they separated. Valerie paid half the bills and got the apartment and the sandbox coffee table. Peter wanted the sandbox coffee table. Valerie said, "I did the PR for it! I got it on Carson! It's mine! It's mine!" Then Peter wanted the apartment. Valerie said, "I found it, I decorated it, Iknocked the walls down, I paid the rent; two days later, you went off for three weeks!"

Since then, Valerie has gone out with tons of Hollywood actors and lots of handsome men, but really, nobody ever was like Peter. Nobody. Women just came up and threw themselves at him. He didn't even have to make love to them. He just sort of teased them into falling in love with him. And once he got a little acclaim and with his voice being so magical, he didn't have to do anything. Just walk into a room. Just walk into a room!

He used to pull his ear for Valerie when he was on the air live. He'd send her a love message. But then he started going on trips, and when he'd come back from a trip and pull his ear, Valerie knew it was for somebody in Atlanta or Indianapolis or wherever he'd just been. Valerie thought, This ear thing is getting to be a bit of a fetish!

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But Peter is by no means perfect in Miss Marton's eyes. He's on overload all the time. He can be very absent-minded. Miss Marton gets annoyed with him for that. Yes, of course, Peter's a vain person. Yes, and, well, Miss Marton is vain, too! She doesn't trust anybody who's not vain. And Peter has plenty to be vain about. He's a very good-looking man, with a very healthy appetite for life. And he's giving this job everything he has. But there's a whole other life seething beneath the surface. And Miss Marton hopes he gets on with that life, too. Naturally, he is vain about his professional abilities. He should be. Proud is what Miss Marton means. He can go on the air with five seconds' notice and make sense out of nonsense. He doesn't speak down and he doesn't put on airs. He was young enough at 25 to start from scratch when he quit as anchor the first time. And he was old enough to realize that he didn't want to make it on his pretty face, like all those blow-dried jobs—and maybe this comes from his father, or maybe it just comes from him, Miss Marton doesn't know—he wanted to make it as a really good reporter. His career was made in Saudi Arabia and Jerusalem. That's what he wants to be known as: a reporter. He never identifies himself as an anchor man. The bottom line on Peter, in Miss Marton's opinion, is that he is a very decent man. He has a very nice attitude about his fellow man. He has a great sense of public service, which he got from his mother. He comes from a very old, solid, affluent family. He believes that if you are lucky, you make sure you give part of it back. Miss Marton thinks Peter is one of the great men. He is one of the most uncynical persons Miss Marton has ever met. Alan Pakula, the director, calls Peter an "innocent."

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Anyhoo, Valerie wants to get married again. Oh, well, she hopes! If any woman is created to live with a man, it's Valerie Jennings! She's made the old-fashioned way. She loves cooking. She loves to look after a man and pack his clothes. And she's more secure now.

Valerie doesn't think Kati knows this, but after Peter and Kati had their first baby, Elizabeth, Peter took her over. In the pram! To show her to Valerie! And Elizabeth was so beautiful! But Valerie had mixed feelings. Peter cared enough to show Elizabeth to her, yet it broke her heart, of course.

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It's odd, but to Valerie, Peter wasn't sexy. See, to Valerie, Peter wasn't earthy. Peter was pristine. Really. Pristine. Shy. Very virginal. Peter was a more pristine kisser than anybody else Valerie has ever been out with. He was kind of old fashioned. He was a bit pristine back then. She means kissing. He didn't kiss Valerie with the earthy lust that everyone else did.

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Once upon a time, Peter Jennings was wealthy, handsome and raking like the blazes.

"I was born," says Jennings, "and raised in sort of a partly urban but also semirural Canada, where the Scots-Irish work ethic was very strong. I am the son of a very accomplished broadcasting father, whom I admired immensely and probably to this day think I haven't passed, though in some ways, I've clearly passed. That is not an admission I am quite comfortable in making to myself.... My mother is a woman of immense charm and from a much better family, socially, than my father was. Scottish. But she felt much more comfortable in my father's milieu than she did in her father's milieu. I inherited from her a tiny measure of social grace that I might not have got otherwise.... I have a very limited education, so at the age of, I don't know, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, somewhere in there, I decided, Holy Jesus! I better get going here, or I'm going to be digging ditches. When I was growing up, digging ditches was regarded as the worst possible thing you could do. It's interesting that Dan Rather's (continued on page 226)The Anchor Man(continued from page 114) father dug ditches. And Dan loves extolling those virtues now. [Smiling] I think there is no virtue whatsoever in digging ditches. Whatsoever. Not to denigrate his or anybody else's lather who digs ditches. But it is not a life ambition to dig ditches."

Yes, Jennings' conversation sounds like an Edith Wharton novel when the scene shifts to the country house and there is some snooty chap at the card table, but he is really an extremely handsome and gregarious fellow, in pink-and-white tattersall, like a bunch of mixed chrysanthemums, with his sleeves rolled up and the top button undone, a reddish-pink paisley tie, and the trousers of a dark-blue suit and black loafers. He is sitting in a tweed easy chair in his office just off the ABC newsroom. Anyone else with his looks would have high-tailed it to Hollywood and firmly resolved never to work again.

Not Jennings.

He strove and sweated to overcome his face. Oh, not completely—he was too clever for that. A smart man in television news can go further on his looks than he can on anything else.

"I meet a lot of young people who are boring." says Jennings, leaning over and pulling up his socks, the right, the left, then the right, leaving the left but going back to it after a moment, then drawing down his trouser leg. His office is a perfect rectangle of Eskimo prints, Eskimo gods, Eskimo statues and a Persian carpet. Everything cozy. Tom, the male secretary—to what extent he signals a victory for Miss Marton every wife must decide for herself—brings coffee on a tray.

"Now, I don't face this prospect," says Jennings, "but some men who turn fifty somehow, apparently, I'm told, go through this ... this thing by which they have to totally date twenty-one-year-old females. I just can't imagine dating a twenty-one-year-old girl! I haven't met one who's interesting in years! What would you say to one?"

He draws back his head and shuts his eyes. "Owwweeee!" he says.

He opens them.

"I don't know." he says. "I don't think women begin to get interesting till they're thirty. My wife is forty and I think she's really interesting!"

Then, in a soil of tender reverie, scratching his elbow, he bethinks himself of Miss Marton. It is impossible to know what he thinks exactly, but the day I met Miss Marton, she was haberdashed in a stiff straw hat with a low crown and had pink polish on her toes and was sitting by the pool in the sun in her garden in Bridgehampton. Her glistening blue-and-white bathing suit was cut upon her shapely figure with such candor that she may as well have been stark naked. In short, one could see they have a marriage of the purest possible kind.

•

Yes, women are fond of Jennings. He has one of the great reputations in world journalism. Jennings' reconnoiterings are so celebrated that he has begun, in his monogamous state, to be venerated, His opportunities alone would have driven a man of more effrontery to the grave by 1976, or 1977 at the latest.

"I started when I was eleven." says Jennings. "Her name was Sandra Dubiner. She lived in Toronto. The first woman I was really in love with lived in a little town. Her father was a schoolmaster. Her name was Jeannette Staples. I remember competing with a vast number of people for her favors and losing. I harbored ambitions for her for many Years. I have not seen her since. It would probably not be a good thing for either one of us. We're probably a bit long in the tooth."

He shakes his head fondly.

"I mean, I haven't seen her in thirty years! In fact," says Jennings, "I haven't seen her in more than thirty years. I understand she has four children. The last time I checked, she was living in Kingston. Ontario. I have no idea if she knows what I do. She may think I run a hardware store. I have no idea.

"But what's going on now is a good deal more interesting than what was going on then. I would be nervous to go to my high school reunion. I mean, most of us wouldn't recognize one another. I would forget people's names or something and they would be offended, and then I would really be upset.

"In fact, all my life, part of me wished to be excruciatingly normal. And, obviously, part of me wanted to be different. And I suppose I've ended up somewhat more different than normal. Or more different than average, I guess. And that has its pluses and its minuses. I envy people who grew up in my home town and kept their same set of eight friends for lo these many years. They are very limited in some ways, but in other ways, they are very secure and tied to the ground and have something that is essential to them. They've never had to go off exploring Saudi Arabia or Java."

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Jennings appears thinner, darker, more expensively dressed and thicker-haired on television. It is no accident that Jennings and Rather and Brokaw are as handsome as William Hurt, the actor who played an anchor man in the movies. And Jennings is better than anybody at anchoring, because he is the easiest to watch, which is what you are supposed to do with television. He turns slightly and, coughing thoughtfully, looks al his right loafer, a very unchic tasseled affair with sides rising up like rowboat gunnels and the shine of a Naugahyde dashboard.

"Exploration!" he says cheerfully. That's the thing! Every time I turn around, the best thing that can happen to me is to explore. When I come in here in the morning full of piss and vinegar because I've been out and met somebody interesting or seen something interesting. I come in off the floor. And the people with whom I work that I resent most are the ones who don't come in having explored something the night before. I mean, they've all got access, they've all got derivative power here. And they should be Out using that power and exploring!. Everything! Art, boxing, veterinary medicine, bowling ... I mean, you choose.

"I'll even stand ... my wife calls me a street-corner talker. I will talk and want to talk to anybody at great length, go to the movies and miss the movie because I'm talking to some homeless guy on the corner, and she doesn't approve of it to the degree I do it. I worry about the homeless a lot. I think I'm more worried about the homeless than about anything else. And I am quite engaged with the homeless. Yes, I'm a Christian. Yeah. I'm a churchgoer. Saint Ann's in Bridge hampton. Anglican, as I call it."

Jennings says he likes competition, but he doesn't think he's particularly aggressive, He doesn't think he has "clubbed his way to the top)." and his desire for fame is getting "smaller all the time.... When people used to write, some years ago, if people wrote something horrible about me, I'd really get desperately upset. Desperately upset! Because one does not think of oneself as being bad. Bad! And, therefore, should not be torn apart. Now if they do it—and, fortunately, they don't do it too often—I say, Well, OK. You can't have everybody love you. But I don't have a particularly thick skin. But I don't want to be loved by everybody. No. No. That would be rather bland. I think that would presume I was rather bland," he says, smiling. He has the kind of vanity that is like a boutonniere in the lapel. He is really such a lovely, graceful flower of a fellow. The perfect combination of motion pictures, Edward R. Murrow and teatime at the Stanhope. And switching legs, dropping one to the floor and picking up the other, plucking at his trousers and dropping and pulling in his chin, he sighs happily.

"But I lie in bed and worry." says Jennings. "Why I didn't do a better job yesterday. How I'll do a better job today. It's always been very useful to me to think that I was going to be fired tomorrow. It made me work harder. One of my bosses once said to me, 'Why do you hate management so?' And I said, 'It keeps me sharp!' My wife says I'm not happy if she's not criticizing something. I call her up and ask her every day, 'How was the program?' When she says, 'Fine.' I say, 'What do you mean, it was fine? Wasn't that terrible? Wasn't this awful?'

"Novel things! I like novel things. I like novel ideas. When I watch our own broadcast every day. I squirm when it's been predictable. I don't watch myself, I watch the pieces in the broadcast. And when we've done something that's unpredictable or novel, whether it's light or soft or intense. I'm very pleased. "

•

Around lunchtime in the fall of the year, Jennings is spotted on a side street, about five blocks from the office, in the embrace of a small dark-haired young lady. She must have just fallen on the curb and Jennings is brushing her off. Later, he is seen traveling in a cab with a blonde. Observed from the back, the woman looks old enough to be and probably is his mother. In the winter, he is observed on West 81st, across from the Museum of Natural History, very early in the morning, walking down the street, laughing and hugging a thin dark-haired young lady. They look very happy. This, however, turns out to be his wife.

"Valerie has gone out with tons of men, but nobody was like Peter. Women threw themselves at him."