We're Gonna Make You A Flop

The story is almost legendary in journalistic circles by now. Several years ago, Sally Quinn, broke and out of work, went to see Washington Post editor Bon Bradlee '43, about a job. Meeting her for the first time, Bradlee offered her a position as a party reporter for the paper's Style section. Quinn accepted, and as she began to leave Bradlee asked her to leave some samples of her writing. She replied that she had never written anything before. Unabashed, Bradlee shrugged and said, "Well, nobody's perfect."

The tale has been streamlined in the retelling but it is essentially true. It didn't take long for Sally Quinn to gain a reputation as a reporter with a good eye for the embarrassing quote and the hypocritical posture, which she had no trouble finding on the Washington social circuit. So controversial were her accounts of capital parties that, according to Quinn, hosts and hostesses stopped inviting working reporters, and she was invited only to those parties she agreed not to write about. "Once," says Quinn, "a well-known hostess remarked that to have a society reporter covering your party was the kiss of death, but to have Sally Quinn there not reporting was a sign of social success."

Whether that is true or not, Sally Quinn was an undisputed success as a society reporter, despite her total lack of experience. When CBS contacted her in 1973 about a position as co-anchor of the newly revamped CBS Morning News, she told Gordon Manning, CBS' news director, "I have the perfect job at the Post, I'm deliriously happy there, and I have no intention whatsoever of leaving." But she did agree to discuss the offer, and the lure of $60,000 a year, the distinction of being the first anchorwoman on TV (Barbara Walters is not, technically, an anchorwoman because she doesn't read the news), and the prospect of national fame finally persuaded her to take the job. She had never been on television before, but inexperience had proved no handicap at the Post. "It never occurred to me," she says now, "that I would be anything but terrific."

She was anything but terrific. She stumbled over words in news reports, tossed off weak and embarrassing ad libs, and did lackluster interviews. At her best she seemed bored; at her worst, confused and even desperate. After one of the biggest promotional campaigns in television history, Quinn's TV career lasted barely twelve weeks, a fiasco that no doubt still troubles the sleep of CBS executives. Especially since Quinn has just written a book recounting her experience.

We're Going to Make You a Star is a witty, rapid-fire narrative of how Quinn became, in her words, "the laughing-stock of television." Long on punch lines and short on analysis, the book is little more than a loosely arranged collection of anecdotes, most of them amusing and some of them startling in their implications about the incompetence of CBS management. It lapses occasionally into self-pity, and more often into triviality (like her straight-faced remark that "I have never been happy in a place where I didn't like the smell"). But Quinn generally keeps a perspective that is detached enough to expose her own foolish moments along with those of the business people at CBS.

For the time being, she has very little reason to pity herself. At 35, she is one of the most popular journalists in the country, and her book appears likely to spend at least a few weeks on the best-seller list. Tanned, blonde and prosperous-looking, she has regained her sardonic self-assurance. The scars from the acne that plagued her at CBS have disappeared as completely as the awkward uneasiness that characterized her on-the-air personality.

She is pleased with the book and its early sales. "Some people have complained that it's not a profound book," she says. "Well, that's not what I intended to do. People say, 'You should have taken a year off and really done art in-depth study of CBS News and how it works.' Well, that wasn't my story. This is my story. The reason I'm happy with it is that nobody has ever quit television news and told about it."

Quinn describes in her book how CBS sent her on a nationwide promotional tour, bringing her back to prepare her for the show only a week before it went on the air. The coaching was wholly inadequate. By that time. New York Magazine had published its cover story on Quinn, which in her words described her as a "tough, mean, bitchy woman, who had no women friends, who had slept her way to the top to get the interviews and jobs, who had used her father's position to wield power, who considered herself a sex symbol and played it to the hilt, and who would scratch and claw anyone anytime to get what and where she wanted." Given the prevailing attitudes about successful women, the portrayal was not surprising--Barbara Walters, after all, has been accused of similar things--and it set the terms for the public perception and discussion of Sally Quinn.

Quinn now says she had resigned herself to the show being a disaster at least a week before it began. "Knowing that we didn't have a show, that nobody knew what they were doing, that the producer had never produced, that Gordon wasn't going to do anything, that I didn't know what I was doing--I gave up. Before I ever went on. I came so close to calling up about two nights beforehand and just saying, 'Forget it.'"

Why didn't she? She leans bark in her chair, gazing thoughtfully into space. "Because of the New York Magazine place. That is the only reason I didn't do it," she says slowly and firmly. "Because I thought that if I didn't do the show, everybody would say, well, she couldn't take the heat. I would have had to go back to the Post with my tell between my legs, never having been on the air."

Quinn's book provoked a predictable flurry of criticism, most of it conceding CBS's mistakes but wondering at Quinn's failure to much to help herself. Time Magazine, for example, commenting on Quinn's contention that no one told her about the red light on the camera that indicates it is aimed at the performer and running, asked why she hadn't asked anyone what the light was for. Quinn laughs in disbelief, shaking her head. "If you don't know there's a red light there, how can you ask somebody about the red light? There are hundreds of lights in a studio! You've got three cameras as and there a lot of lights going on and off all the time and people are yelling in your ear, and so they said, 'Now listen, watch the guy with the hand, he'll tell you which camera is on you.' He'd go like this and I'd look that way, but sometimes he'd forget to tell me that the camera was off and I should go to the next camera."

She sighs in resignation. "People say 'all she did was whine and get drunk all the time' and 'why didn't she go out and do something?'" She leans forward earnestly, a plaintive note in her voice. "I didn't spend a lot of time in the book, and maybe I should have, just documenting every single thing I did to try to change it, every memo that I wrote, every phone call I tried to make, every criticism. We'd go in and see Gordon; we'd beg them to take the ad libs off the air. I had plans for series of things we could do, and ideas for film pieces. And Gordon would say, 'Well, we're going to have to work something out' or 'we'll have to see to this' or 'I'll get back to you.' Never anything concrete.

"I'd sit down every morning and write up lists of ideas, and I'd hand them in, and nothing happened. I begged for staff meetings. We had one the whole time I was there--forced upon them by me. We got some good ideas and thoughts, everybody threw ideas around, and it was very creative. And it was the last one we ever had. What more could I do?"

For all the reaction from the press, Quinn has heard little from people at CBS. Aside from Hughes Rudd, her co-anchor on the show, to whom the book is dedicated, only Mike Wallace has called her. Quinn portrays him as a boorish sexist who sniped at her continually behind her back at CBS. "He said that he was sorry, that he hadn't realized I felt that way. I think he was stunned by my perception of him." Don Hewitt, a producer who went with Quinn to London as her director for the coverage of Princess Anne's wedding, and who Quinn claims kept the cameras off her in retaliation for her rejection of his persistent sexual overtones, has not called her. But she says, "I've heard stories about him crying in the elevator in his apartment building, and I've heard stories about him being absolutely thrilled and it's made him a celebrity and he loves the publicity. I've heard stories that he's going to sue. And he was quoted in Time saying that my account was a big put-on." She smiles sardonically: "Which is his best number. I think he should stick to that."

Quinn blames almost everyone in the chain of command at CBS for the fiasco. "I suppose you'd have to say that Gordon Manning made the most mistakes, but they were mostly sins of omission, just not doing anything. But [Richard] Salant was president of CBS News: he knew what was going on. They all knew what was going on. And they must not have done something for a reason."

She can't decide exactly what that reason might be, but she has some ideas. "If I had the answer to how that kind of screw-up could happen. I could make a million dollars--for being a consultant. The closest thing I can come to explaining it is the fear factor--the idea that people in television are scared because there's so much money involved. Nobody wants to take the blame and so they have this kind of group decision-making where they all sit around a table and then somebody will say 'How about--?" and then nobody will say no, and there it is. And there was a lot of publicity about this, so they were publicly embarrassed."

If her account is to be believed, the disaster was probably worst of all for Sally Quinn; the embarrassment certainly was. But now back with the Post, she has regained her stature as a journalist, and she seems far away from her self-described nightmare at CBS. For her part, she contends that it was "a good experience."

"I really suffered a lot," she says, and laughs at her melodramatic phrasing. "I'm not one of those people who think that you have to suffer to be a real person. But I learned a lot about myself about what I can do and what I can't do. And that's very valuable. I learned a lot about other people--their motivations, their fears, and their insecurities. And I learned a lot about television--not as much as I would have liked to." A slightly triumphant smile crosses her face. "And I also got a book out of it." From Sally Quinn's point of view, she is having the last laugh, and she's going to enjoy it.