When September ends
In September 1989, Norville graduated from substitute to full time when the Today producing team—led at the time by Dick Ebersol—promoted her to news anchor. But her arrival coincided with Pauley’s separate realization that she was ready to exit the morning show game and NBC altogether… and that’s where the trouble started.
In her 2004 memoir Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue, Pauley recalled informing Ebersol of her decision on Sept. 7, two days after Norville joined her and Bryant Gumble on the Today show couch for the first time since her promotion. To this day, she’s adamant that the two events weren’t connected.
“My exits have always been fairly momentous,” Pauley says. “The fact of it was that after 13 years, a network is entitled to make changes. And I said, ‘Let me help you welcome my successor.’”
But producers declined that offer and media watchers—including then-Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales—rushed in to fill the information void. “[Shales] saw three people on the sofa saying, ‘Good morning,’ and immediately sees All About Eve,” Pauley explains. “After that, we were off and running.” (Shales died this past January.)
As Today’s succession narrative took shape in the press, Pauley—to use reality TV parlance—received the hero edit while Norville got the villain edit. And the network explicitly forbade either of them from trying to correct those mistaken impressions.
“NBC told me, ‘Do not speak to the press,’” Norville recalls, adding that her agent told her she could be fired for violating that network directive. “I was between a rock and a hard place with no choice. I had to be quiet.”
For her part, Pauley says that NBC’s insistence on silence was “unfair” to Norville. “It inevitably cast her in an unfortunate light, which is why I was saying, ‘Let me help you.’” Complicating matters further was the fact that Pauley was trying to to exit her NBC contract, and the network was reluctant to let their star anchor head out the door.
As September gave way to October, Pauley abandoned the idea of a hard break with her employer, instead deciding to look for a post-Today role within NBC. She made her final morning show appearance on Dec. 29, 1989, and went on to launch the short-lived Real Life with Jane Pauley series before settling into a decade-long stint co-anchoring Dateline. Pauley eventually left NBC in 2003 and currently hosts CBS News Sunday Morning.
