WebMD Feature from "Good Housekeeping" Magazine
By Lesley Dormen
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This season, Meredith Vieira is grateful for the right job at the right time, her fabulous kids, her mom's Thanksgiving legacy; and even the tough times that strengthened her marriage.
"Sit here," Meredith Vieira says in that delicious butter-pecan scoop of a voice (serious shot through with sexy, the A student who's still up for mischief). She offers me one of two small, straight-backed chairs in her cluttered dressing room/office, pulls up the other — ignoring the big, comfy leather desk chair — and sits facing me, knee to knee. "This way we're on the same level.
"It's a wet Friday in New York City, and the Today show has just wrapped. We're upstairs from NBC's Studio 1A in Rockefeller Center, where the show has been broadcast live since 1952. I congratulate Vieira on her one-year anniversary as coanchor. "I know," she says with a mock-tired groan. "Well, I didn't keel over and die." Another facet of Vieira's considerable charm is the ability to laugh at herself.
After nine years of winning fans by being loosey-goosey and candid on the ABC morning talk show The View, Vieira did some marathon mulling when she was offered the opportunity to take Katie Couric's place on the Today team with Matt Lauer, Ann Curry, and Al Roker.
"I thought, I'll have to be careful with my personality — The View was anything goes, but this is the news division. I'm basically a night person, and those hours are daunting. Will I be able to pull this off?" With the essential blessing of her family — husband Richard Cohen, 59, a writer, and their three teenagers, Ben, 18, Gabe, 16, and Lily, 14 — and a little self-restraint, Vieira hasn't looked back.
There hasn't been time, for starters. "You sign up here, and time just go-go-goes," says Vieira, who turns 54 next month. As she speaks, one hand now and again drifts upward to run absently through her silky chestnut hair sparked with blond highlights. She's dressed somewhere between on-air attire and going-home clothes; still perfectly made up, she's wearing the kind of generic white cotton V-neck T-shirt we all sleep in, and dark pants.
"This is a phenomenal job, but when I leave here I don't have a glamorous life," she says. "My idea of heaven is puttering. I just want to be home." On her wrist is a gold bracelet that her family gave her the night before she started on Today. The single charm on a simple chain reads We are with you. Love, Richard, Ben, Gabe, and Lily. "I've only taken it off once — and it was a terrible day," Vieira says. "It's never coming off again."
Terrible days have been blessedly rare for her on the show. But glorious or difficult, all of them start at 3 a.m. "It's not so much the getting up, it's having to get up and bring something to the table every day," Vieira says. "The most difficult thing is to stay in the moment and be able to switch gears. One minute you're with Hillary Clinton or covering a mine disaster, the next minute you're baking a pie or talking to Kool & the Gang. It's like a roller coaster. It takes a lot out of you."
And puts a lot back in. "There have been moments that meant a lot to me," she says of her first year. "The Virginia Tech story was moving and humbling." Talking to people involved in April's tragedy, after a student on a shooting rampage killed 32 students and faculty and himself, touched her deeply.
On the lighter side, Vieira fulfilled a girlhood fantasy and became a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall for a day last November. "The people at NBC said to me, ‘If there's something you've always dreamed of doing, you can do it here.' The next thing I knew, there I was onstage, just kicking my legs and having a great time. That was so neat. It was thrilling!
"One of the joys of this job is that you get to explore parts of yourself you'd never get a chance to express, and parts of the world you'd never get a chance to see," she says. Vieira has also traveled (with son Ben) to China, the prelude to her covering the Summer Olympics in Beijing. All this, and she's in her sixth year of hosting the syndicated version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. "It's a little bit mind-boggling," she concedes.
Now that her children are teenagers, Vieira believes, coanchoring Today is the right job at the right time. "I worried about the mornings without them. So I cried about it — that's my MO, I cry about everything — and the kids reminded me that I never made eggs for them anyway, and besides, we fight in the morning." Now she gives each sleeping child a kiss before she leaves, "as much just to check to see if they're in the bed."
Vieira has recently returned from Scotland, where she interviewed J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. I remark that Rowling seemed more vulnerable with Vieira than I'd seen her in other interviews. Vieira nods. "We really connected on a lot of levels. We have a similar sense of humor, and we're both moms. Her mother died of multiple sclerosis, and Richard has MS, so I brought her a copy of his memoir, Blindsided."
Good Housekeeping Photo Meredith Vieira
By the time Cohen and Vieira met in late 1982, he had already fallen in love with her voice. He happened to hear it earlier that year, he writes, over the audio speakers at CBS News headquarters in Manhattan, where he was a producer. "Whose voice is that?" he asked a colleague. Told she was a new correspondent based in Chicago, Cohen said, "I am going to marry that woman." He calls their initial encounter "contempt at first sight." Walking by Vieira's CBS Chicago office, he saw her lying on a couch watching Looney Tunes on TV. "Very impressive," he said. "A real journalist."
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