Going There

I CAN STILL HEAR the cacophony of the newsroom—the clattering typewriters, the ringing phones, the whirring copier, the syncopated conversations between producers, reporters, assignment editors, cameramen. Discordant and thrilling, like a symphony orchestra tuning up.

I'd been hired as a desk assistant—a not-so-glorified girl Friday (and Monday through Thursday too). On my first day a gangly guy with a mustache named Mike showed me the ropes: how to make coffee, where to distribute the day's newspapers, how to collate the rundowns and change the ribbon on the teletype machine while wearing white cloth gloves so the purple ink didn't get all over your fingers. Everyone had an air of I belong here and I'm doing important things; men sauntered around in safari jackets, exhaling cigarette smoke and confidence. I felt so out of place. But you have to start somewhere, and I was determined to make the best damn pot of coffee these people had ever tasted.

Desk assistants didn't have actual desks, so I found a vacant seat and started answering phones (the first time I said, "ABC News, may I help you?" I got goose bumps). And suddenly a tall, eagle-eyed figure with dramatically arched eyebrows and a shellacked comb-over bounded in—White House correspondent Sam Donaldson. He came to a screeching halt when he saw me.

"You!" he bellowed. "What is your name?"

I felt the whole newsroom look my way. "Katie," I squeaked.

"Katie! Katie!" At which point, Donaldson literally jumped on the desk and started crooning, "K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy / You're the only g-g-g-girl that I adore / When the m-m-m-moon shines, over the cowshed / I'll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door."

My cheeks started burning while everyone else just rolled their eyes and went back to their work—Sam being Sam, apparently. Then he jumped down and said, "Come with me!"

We hoofed it to the White House, about a half mile away, for the daily briefing. I was huffing and puffing in my summer shift and heels, desperately trying to keep up with Sam's long strides, as we approached the West Wing entrance. He grabbed my hand and whisked me past security, barking, "She's with me."

The press room was packed with pros holding reporter's notebooks and tape recorders. Sam plunged into the crowd while I stood stiffly against the wall, hoping no one questioned what the hell this 22-year-old nobody was doing there. I spotted legendary Helen Thomas in the front row looking like a harried housewife in a sea of men. Then they started lobbing questions at Jimmy Carter's press secretary, Jody Powell, fighting for information the nation needed to know. Afterward, Sam went off to his White House cubicle and sent me on my way. Returning to the bureau, I felt a bit dazed. Did that actually just happen?

Back in the newsroom, Mike pointed out Kevin Delaney's secretary, the person who'd be giving me my weekly schedule. Blond and so thin she was practically concave, Wendy Walker looked like she had just stepped out of Town & Country. I introduced myself and whispered conspiratorially, "Today is my first day."

"It's my first day too," she whispered back. I felt like grabbing onto her like a life raft. "Want to get lunch?" I asked.

Over salads, Wendy told me about her recent breakup with a curator at the National Gallery, about working for Ethel Kennedy and seeing Walter Cronkite do the limbo at Jackie Kennedy's 50th-birthday party in Hyannis Port. It all sounded so upper-crusty and out of my league. But later she'd tell me how her father had lost his job. After graduating from Hollins, a women's college in Virginia, she headed to Washington with $40 in her bank account and instructions to marry well. Coming from a frugal family, I realized we had more in common than I'd thought.

We shared something else too—the desire to succeed not by finding a husband but by having a career. It was the '70s—the decade of Roe v. Wade, Title IX, fiery debate over the Equal Rights Amendment, Barbara Walters becoming the first woman to co-anchor a Big Three evening newscast. I'd spent many a Saturday night for seven years watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show, transfixed by the ambitious, independent heroine setting out for a career in TV news.

Gee, I thought, I want to turn the world on with my smile too!

FRANK REYNOLDS, THE anchor of ABC's World News Tonight, gave off an air of old-school manliness. After the broadcast, he and his posse would sip scotch in his office and compare notes about what the competition had led their newscasts with. I'm pretty sure he spoke to me only once—in front of a Washington Post reporter who was writing a profile of him. I'd been asked to fetch him a ham sandwich from the deli next door, and when I returned, Reynolds looked up from the interview and said, "Thank you, dear." Largely, I guess, for the benefit of the reporter.

The backdrop of World News Tonight was the newsroom. To make sure viewers saw that it was a real, live, working newsroom, we were asked to be seat-fillers behind the anchor desk. I would always volunteer and pretend I was engaged in serious business—holding the phone to my ear, earnestly nodding and taking notes—when in reality, I was talking to my parents, urgently telling them to turn on the TV. "Can you see me? Look! I'm behind Frank Reynolds's right shoulder!"

Wendy and I did everything we could to get ahead. We memorized the office floor plan, learned everyone's names and what they did. We came in on Sundays to do extra work (we called it "Sunday school").

One of those Sundays when no one was around, I slipped into the anchor chair. Wendy handed me a script she'd found in a trash can by the teleprompter operator's perch. I proceeded to deliver a mock newscast in full-on Ted Baxter mode, before collapsing in laughter at how ridiculous we were.

OUR FAMILY TREE was just a sapling when my parents, John and Elinor, bought a tidy four-bedroom brick Colonial for $30,500 in 1957. I was 6 months old. It had shutters the color of Georgia clay and three windows facing the street on the second floor. When I was a teenager, the middle one would be aglow until I came home at exactly 11:50 p.m., just before my curfew. Our house exuded a modest solidity that also described my family.

Emily was 10 years older than me. She always seemed to be racing around with important things to do—studying for exams, going on dates and college tours. Clara was born three years after her. She was named for my maternal grandmother, but my father didn't love the name, so we all called her Kiki. She and I shared a room; Kiki would comb my hair, put it in pigtails, and treat me like a little doll. I remember watching her rush off to a football game in her cheerleading uniform, tossing her pom-poms and megaphone in the back of our dad's Sunbeam Alpine convertible (his one midlife indulgence), thinking, I want to be just like her.

Johnny came next. When he was 5, he stuffed pebbles up his nose; my mom had to take him to the hospital to have them removed with giant tweezers. We were partners in crime, getting into pillow fights—one of which brought down a ceiling light, shattering it into a million pieces—and giving each other wedgies, which we called "creepers." Sometimes he'd pin down my shoulders with his knees and let a loogie drip dangerously close to my face before sucking it back up. "Stop roughhousing!" my mom would scream from downstairs.

No one seems particularly surprised to learn that I was the baby of the bunch. My parents would put my infant seat on the dining-room table so the whole family could stand around and watch me—my first audience. Later, my sisters would entertain their suitors by instructing me to do a cartwheel and the splits on the living-room floor or sing "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas" while they accompanied me on the piano. I was more than happy to perform.

In summer, over corn on the cob and sliced tomatoes at the glass table on the screened-in porch, I'd hold court, telling a bawdy joke or making a racy comment; my mom's eyes would turn into tiny crescents as she laughed so hard her shoulders shook, barely making a sound except the occasional snort. Attempting to maintain some dinner-table decorum, my father would suppress a smile and say, "Elin-ah! Don't encourage her!"

OUR MOTHER WAS the ultimate protector and defender—a homemaker in the most concrete sense, always doing for us, pulling for us, waiting for us to come home. She'd tell me, "Everyone needs a cheerleader. I'm yours." She was sturdy in every way. When I was little, I'd spring up and wrap my legs and arms around her and hold on like a koala bear in a eucalyptus tree.

After two years at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans, my mom moved to Chicago and lived at the Three Arts Club while working as a cartographer at Rand McNally and doing layout for Coronet magazine. All of which seemed pretty exciting to me. My dad was nearby at officer candidate school; they met at a tea dance in 1943. My mom thought he was dashing in his navy whites; he thought she was "a dish" in her red paisley dress. While she waited in Chicago, he did a tour of duty on a naval destroyer in the Pacific, once operating a smoke machine to hide his ship from kamikaze pilots. Less than a year later, they were married, and his life became hers.

The mothers I knew growing up didn't have careers, with the exception of Christine Hughes's mom. (Dr. Hughes helped us with our sixth-grade science-fair project, which entailed pumping cigarette smoke into a fishbowl to show how nicotine would cause a goldfish to lose its equilibrium, sending ours into an aquatic barrel roll.) My mom's job was us—fixing our breakfasts, packing our lunches (sometimes including little notes like Don't get stuck in your peanut butter sandwich!), driving whatever I'd forgotten (my purse, my sweater, my homework, my permission slip) to school, bringing me to piano lessons and Johnny to guitar. My mother was the family concierge, making sure we all had what we needed.

She'd always say, "Let 'em know you're there." The woman who ran our household like a boss, but had neither the opportunity nor the self-confidence to let the world know she was there, wanted more for us.

Not that my mom and dad were helicopter parents—I was given plenty of freedom to roam and make mistakes. It was the '60s and '70s, when you could hop on your bike in the morning and not come home until dinner. (My dad would holler "Katieee!" on the front step, while Mr. McMullan had perfected a whistle that signaled my friend Janie to head inside.) But if there was any hint I was seriously veering off course, my mother would swoop in.

In tenth grade after school one day, I was making out with my boyfriend, Steve Elliott, in his basement. He went to another high school, was two years older, was the product of divorce, and his mother worked—all of which sounded a bit dicey to my parents.

Suddenly, we heard banging.

Steve and I untangled and sat up. He craned his neck and saw my mom's Keds through the window well. I quickly collected myself, ran upstairs, and opened the front door.

"Mom," I said, my face flushed, my hair a mess.

"Come with me," she ordered and threw my orange Schwinn Varsity bike into the back of the station wagon. I wanted to crawl under the vinyl seat. We didn't say a word the entire way home.

My mom was born in 1923, just three years after women won the right to vote, decades before we'd enter the workforce in real numbers.

Sometimes I wonder: What if little Elinor Hene had been told the sky was the limit? If she'd come along a generation later, what might she have been—a graphic artist? She loved to sketch and paint. A stockbroker? When the AIDS crisis hit, she bought shares of Trojan condoms. Head of operations at some big company? She certainly ran a tight ship. Who knows—maybe she wouldn't have changed a thing.

MY HOURS AT ABC were brutal. Going from the morning shift to afternoons to overnights totally screwed up my body clock. Driving down Canal Road after work one afternoon, I felt certain my life was over.

I'd been living at home. The Peter Max bedspreads I'd begged my mom for in junior high had been replaced by granny-friendly rayon quilts; the chartreuse walls had been repainted cream. As much as I enjoyed my mother's home cooking, I wanted to be on my own. Fortunately, one of Wendy's roommates was moving out, and she asked if I wanted the spot. What could be better than rooming with Wendy, her friend Margaret, who worked on Capitol Hill, and Leslie, who had a golden retriever named Amy?

They lived in a townhouse on Dent Place across the street from the fire station, a 15-minute drive from my parents and just a few blocks from the heart of Georgetown. On weekends we'd grab turkey and Brie on baguettes from the French Market or head to Au Pied de Cochon (the Pig's Foot—yum) for omelets and fries and to flirt with the sexy French waiters. At some point, Wendy started dating Sam Donaldson (back when no one batted an eye at workplace relationships). One day he showed up at our door in a white shirt, white pants, white belt, and white shoes. I turned around and yelled, "Hey, Wendy, the Man from Glad is here!"

I was a total slob and Wendy was meticulous—she almost had a coronary one day when I balanced a mug of coffee on her crisp white duvet. I'd sometimes rifle through her sweaters, disrupting her elaborate system, everything organized by color and pattern. Knowing the Oscar/Felix thing might not be working for Wendy, my mom drove over to Dent Place one day and pleaded with her not to kick me out. Wendy told her not to worry.

THERE WERE A handful of female correspondents at ABC, and I studied their every move: Bettina Gregory, a Rosalind Russell–style toughie; motherly Ann Compton, who covered the White House with Sam and hired me to babysit her kids when I was looking to supplement my $7,000 salary; tall, striking, platinum-blond Cassie Mackin, who practically glided through the newsroom on her cool confidence.

I was just as fascinated by the male reporters: Rising stars Charlie Gibson and Brit Hume calling in on the "hotline" (a literal red phone with a special ring) from Capitol Hill with big scoops; Lou Cioffi, a foreign correspondent who got so miffed when I asked if he was a cameraman (honest mistake—at the time, he was wearing a Members Only jacket and xeroxing his expense report). Don Farmer was a 20/20 correspondent, married to Chris Curle, a gorgeous and talented local anchor at the ABC affiliate WJLA. During one high school summer, I had taken a journalism class that included a field trip to the station. I remember walking by Chris Curle's desk and seeing, alongside legal pads and pens, hot rollers and a Clairol makeup mirror. Wow, I thought. So glamorous.

One afternoon, I snuck upstairs and poked my head into Don's office. "I have some story ideas for 20/20 I'd love to show you," I said. He smiled encouragingly, knowing the chutzpah that required, and invited me in.

I read him the six ideas I had typed out, including one about a treatment center for gambling addicts in Pikesville, Maryland. Don listened and nodded, then thanked me. I left him the list and headed back to the newsroom.

I don't know if he ever actually used any of my ideas. But I do know that getting on Don Farmer's radar changed my life.