Word: savitch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...precipice. And her death in a freak accident last week, at the age of 36, will probably give her a place in pop iconography, another televisible symbol of burning drive that guttered out. The reality did not perfectly fit the already emerging legend. But NBC Newscaster Jessica Savitch left resonances...
Before being hired by NBC in 1977, she said to an associate, "I'm going to be a network anchor, and I'm going to do it fast." In short order, Savitch was a cool and collected on-air presence in American living rooms. She covered the 1980 political conventions, anchored NBC's Saturday edition of the nightly news and was a featured correspondent on the network magazine shows Prime Time Sunday and NBC Magazine. Her greatest exposure came from 60-second prime-time updates, now called NBC News Digest, which she began...
When the light went out, Savitch faced an overload of personal tribulation. A 1980 marriage to Philadelphia Adman Mel Korn ended in indifference in less than a year. A few months later, she married Gynecologist Donald Payne, 45, then suffered a miscarriage. In August 1981, she discovered Payne, who had been tormented by physical and mental illness, hanging from a basement rafter...
...Savitch became increasingly isolated after the tragedy, and her career seemed to stall. She took a partial leave from NBC to host the PBS program Frontline, and later lost her Saturday anchor slot. There were rumors that she had turned to cocaine to fuel her still relentless pace. Friends deny it. "Work is my narcotic. I get high from it," she told a colleague. But some fellow workers wondered, notably after she slurred words and stammered on a recent Digest spot...
...Perhaps Savitch was beginning to sense that she might never be fully admitted to the magic circle: Rather, Brokaw, Jennings. But she did not relent. Last year the newscaster published a Pollyanna autobiography, Anchorwoman, that seemed like an extended press release. Says Barbara King, who helped her with the book: "She thought if she could renew the old glory, one of the networks would offer a bigger and better job." None did, but a new deal with NBC reportedly raised her salary to nearly $500,000; the network was considering her as a substitute on Today during Jane Pauley...