很久沒來了. 向大家問好! 想補課,就錄了一大段,錄完後才發現第一段已發過,不想重錄,就這樣發上來 了
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PART 6
Don't Let the Turkeys Get You Down
On Rejection and Resilience
If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter.
-Anton Chekhov
If I thought I had experienced challenges early in my career, I hadn't seen anything yet. The time in my professional life that required every drop of resilience in my personal reservoir came during my first two years as the anchor of the CBS Evening News. There had been a great deal of hype over my hire. I was the first woman to solo-anchor an evening newscast on a major network, and the significance of that wasn't lost on me. In fact, when I was offered a job on the Today show fifteen years earlier I told Michael Gartner, then the president of NBC News, that I would accept the job only if Bryant Gumbel and I were going to be equal partners. I didn't want to be relegated to cooking and fashion segments, and I wanted assurances that that wouldn't happen. So in a moment of extreme moxiness I told him “It's really important to me that there's a fifty-fifty division of labor.” I had been covering the Pentagon and didn't want my news chops or credibility to be eroded. So he relented. Almost. “Fifty-two, forty-eight,” he told me. “And that's my best offer.” I agreed. I think I had the audacity to insist on an equal division of labor because I was well aware of how images from television can shape attitudes and values. God knows I was influenced by watching the adventures of a career woman named Mary Richards every Friday night on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and by the show Julia, starring Diahann Carroll, about an African-American nurse and single mother.
When CBS came calling, I once again thought about the importance of seeing a woman in the role of solo anchor. I would be shepherding a broadcast that had been largely the domain of white males. That, coupled with the challenge of reinvigorating a genre that had a declining viewership, made the opportunity too exciting to pass up. But little did I know what lurked ahead.
As Linda Ellerbee once wrote, “Some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.” Well, I was the statue for about two years, and let me tell you, it's not a lot of fun. From my very first day, I was pounded for everything from the color of my jacket (it was white, tropical-weight wool, and perfectly acceptable after Labor Day!) to my eye makeup and the way I held my hands. There had been a great deal of publicity before the first broadcast, and in the initial few weeks the ratings were high. But when they started to head south, it became open season for the critics. Despite fifteen years covering major news events and countless hard-hitting interviews, they claimed that I didn't have the “gravitas” (Which I decided was the Latin word for testicles) required to be at the helm of such a prestigious enterprise. I often felt like the protagonist in T.S. Eliot's famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he spoke of “the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase...pinned and wriggling on the wall.” The very public vivisection was at times painful and hard to understand. During that dispiriting period, I often imagined one of the New York City buses with my face splashed across the side running me over on West Fifty-seventh Street. Somehow, it seemed a fitting O. Henry-esque ending to my current predicament. My sense of humor was getting pretty dark in those days.
My friends from NBC urged me to “come home.” It was very tempting. Some days I just wanted to pull a Steven Slater, the fed-up JetBlue flight attendant who said, in so many words, “Take this job and shove it,” before he slid down the escape chute. I found solace on, of all things, a coffee mug on a co-worker's desk that read, “Don't let the turkeys get you down.” My friends were also great listeners and morale boosters. And I had many heart-to-heart conversations...with myself. “You've been successful before,” I told myself. “You have something to offer. You haven't changed.” I realized that whatever your path, whatever your calling, the most damaging thing you can do is let other voices define you and drown out your own. You've got to block them out and find that place deep inside you, shaken but still intact, and hold on to it. As many wise people have said, you can't always control the circumstances, but you can control how you respond to them. Even during those tough days, a voice inside me kept saying, “Keep going. You're in the big leagues. Put on your big-girl pants. You're not a quitter. There will be better days ahead.” And there were. The broadcast got stronger, the team came together, and I got better. I fell back on my dad's advice: “Just do the best you can.” And that's really the only thing we can all do, every day.
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