golden girl and alanna nash and jessica savitch

I had been brooding around the house for two days before I realized the reason for it: I was reading (and absorbing) Alanna Nash's engaging story of the meteoric rise and tragic fall of Jessica Savitch, one of the first female anchor newscasters on network television. Woody Allen was once quoted as saying that he didn't feel he had really done his job well as a director until he spoiled people's day; I wonder if Alanna Nash thought that when she was writing Savitch's biography she would likewise create clouds in people's skies. But I am grateful to her for captivating narrative of Jessica's overheated life and bizarre death, for in Jessica's painful longings and contradictory ambitions we see refracted the values and contradictions of our time.

Jessica Savitch as Cultural Symbol

I never followed broadcast news religiously, but I was aware that the major networks were gradually trying to integrate women into reportorial and newscaster positions in the 1970s. But the first generation of women in any male-dominated profession, especially those which are highly visible (such as newscasters, ministers, lawyers, college presidents, etc.), had to walk an almost unbelievably thin tight-rope in order to survive. They had to be smart, indeed probably smarter than their male colleagues, but not too smart as to leave them in the dust. They had to be attractive but not too attractive so as to give off a "bimbo" aura. They had to appear to defer to men but not get trampled upon; stand up for themselves without appearing bitchy; learn to deal with raving sexists from the previous (and current) generation with out letting it rattle them or make them unproductive. Then, if they finally "made it," by reaching a senior position of visibility, they had to be able to play the politics of the position with aplomb so that they could maintain their position in a man's world.

From the perspective of outside observers, Jessica Savitch had successfully negotiated most of these hurdles by the time she was 30. Born in PA to a family descended from Russian Jews, she moved with her two younger sisters and mothers to New Jersey (near Atlantic City) after her father died when Jessica was 12. She was drawn early into the broadcast world while still in high school, and then attended Ithaca College because of its reputation in that area. She worked as a secretary and odd-jobs-person in the CBS headquarters in NYC for a brief time after college (making some influential friends), before moving to Houston and then Philadelphia where the combination of her brilliance and attractiveness, her on-air confidence as well as apparent vulnerability, made her a celebrity well before 30. A brief stint in WA DC beginning in 1977 was followed by an ever downward spiral into drugs, personal misfortunes and professional disappointments at NBC news in NYC.

We viewers, however, only saw the "glamor" of Jessica Savitch, which is exactly what she wanted us to see. We saw a woman who was an incomparable reader of the news, bright and direct, confident and seemingly caring, controlled and competent, coming into our homes several times a week, usually in the "near news" or the "capsule" news segments of afternoon and evening programming. Countless hundreds of journalism students, among whom Alanna Nash no doubt numbers herself, were captivated by Jessica Savitch's on-air persona: so young, so talented, so attractive, so smart, so ambitious and, apparently, so "together." She seemed in some ways to be a perfect model for a woman who had "made it" in a man's world. But then, with her tragic death in 1983 (her car flipped into three feet of water in the Delaware River canal in, ironically, New Hope, PA and she, her dog and her dinner companion were sealed in the car and drowned) and the thorough and dogged work of Nash, Jessica's story began to come out. And, it was not a pretty one at all.

Themes from a Life

I only have space to mention a few of the themes from Jessica's life as presented by Alanna Nash. (1) Jessica lost her father when she was 12 (he was in his early 30s), and she always later seemed to take her father's death as being directed at her, as a sort of personal rejection of her. Thus, (2) she tried to create a sphere for herself in which she could flourish apart from the "messy" stuff of these feelings, and broadcast news would be the area. (3) Broadcast news allowed her to create an image of herself, an image to which she became so wed that it is as if she hoped the image could swallow the person who was once Jessica Savitch. (4) She was very good at what she did; people were drawn into her on-air sincerity and impressed by her intelligence. (5) Her ambition for rising in this field was nearly unlimited; my "read" of her is that she hoped that if she was able to rise high enough, to go far enough, she would be able to "leave behind" that broken, fractured, weak and vulnerable little girl who needed but did not receive love and affirmation from her mother. (6) Her obsessive ambition and fears precluded her from having a satisfying intimate relationship or even being able to perceive who was good for her in interpersonal relationships. The love of her life was, no doubt, Ron Kershaw, whom she met while in Houston. He was every bit as smart as Jessica and just as violent in temper (and he beat her). But it was as if they were like iron tongs touching exposed hearts--they were able to slice into each other's depths without being able to protect themselves or each other from their assaults on each other.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it seems to me, Savitch may have never learned "the trade" because she was so eager to climb so quickly to the stratospere. No doubt she mastered aspects of on-air delivery, of how to report a story, and even how to write copy, but she never seemed really ever to be comfortable with the skills of being a plodding reporter--learning how to cultivate and gather sources, to follow the bouncing ball of legislation as it passed through iteration after iteration, to understand the inside realities of the political process. She was so obsessed with becoming anchor, with the aura of success that such a position seemed to suggest for her, that she never learned the "dull stuff" that is a major part of any job. But, most of all, it seemed that she was trying to use her job, her title, her image of herself as a way to avoid all the pain created by her losses of childhood.

While Nash is not given to speculating on causes (though the 300+ people she interviewed often give causal explanations), it seems consistent with her narrative that the confluence of several unbearable factors (loss of father; mother's coldness; inability to deal with these things; pressure to succeed from grandparents; role as a "parentalized" child; the pressures on women in the news profession in the 1970s) all swirled around her with as much deadly peril as the swirling waters of the Delaware River when she breathed her last. Jessica Savitch, struggling unsuccessfully to extricate herself from a flooded car stuck in the mud, is a terrifyingly accurate symbol of the Jessica Savitch who was not able to dig herself out of her own muddy issues. No wonder Alanna Nash's probing narrative made me glum this weekend.

1997