Former NBC Talent Booker Details `Gumbel Gate' In Book

When she left NBC's "Today" show, Judy Kessler wrote a novel based on her experience there as a talent booker.

"Morning Sickness," she titled it.

No publisher would print it.

"The characters were all so unappealing," recalled Kessler.

When the truth reveals so few innocent characters, why bother changing names? For the second crack at "Today," Kessler stuck to the nonfiction approach.

"Inside Today: The Battle for the Morning" (Villard Books, $20) hit bookstores earlier this month. The sound you could hear at 30 Rockefeller Center - where NBC's studios are located - was probably the fppp, fppp, fppp, of pages being flipped.

"Today" executive producer Jeff Zucker "was reading the book out loud during staff meetings," said Kessler, who visited Seattle yesterday to promote her book. "Everybody was Xeroxing their parts of it. Someone once told me you should never put an index in a book like this. Then people will only read the parts they're in."

TV Guide couldn't wait. Last month the magazine published two installments of excerpts. They titled the first "Gumbel Gate."

Bryant Gumbel, the "Today" co-host praised for his intelligence on the set, and nailed for his Cuban cigar-puffing arrogance off it, absorbs some of the hardest punches packed in Kessler's book.

Let's listen to an unnamed male "Today" colleague quoted by Kessler on page 102: During the daily meetings to plan the next day's show, Gumbel "would give his assessment of everyone's bust size and he would say things like, `You know I could sleep with that one if I wanted to.' "

Gumbel, the man who proved he was not just a miscast former sports anchor by his brilliant performance in a week-long series of "Today" broadcasts from Moscow in the fall of 1984, also liked to dangle dead mice in women's faces to startle them, it is said. And hide behind doors on all fours and bark like a dog.

Kessler fell into television in 1980, after several years writing for "People" magazine. For her four years at "Today" she reeled in guests, especially celebrities, to help fill two hours of air, five mornings a week. A large part of "Inside Today" reveals the trials of the talent booker.

"You turn on the TV and see these people sitting there - Liz Taylor, Madonna, Ross Perot - but nobody has any idea what lengths people like me had to go to get them there.

"It was cutthroat. It was terrible," said Kessler, who after leaving "Today" jumped to "Entertainment Tonight."

She devotes a chapter to the dogged efforts by the morning shows in 1985 to reach hostages from a TWA flight hijacked by members of the Islamic Jihad. Kessler recounts the equally intense efforts to land a post-Betty Ford Center interview with Liz Taylor.

"They thought it was as important as finding a cure for cancer," Kessler recalls.

Behind Kessler's collection of tidbits worthy of a gossip column, a deeper theme lurks:

How could a TV program run by a group of men who often talked and behaved like they were in a locker room hope to appeal to a core audience of women viewers?

Much of the time, it couldn't. An illuminating case in point being the rise and fall of Deborah Norville.

One morning in 1989, Norville was named the show's anchor and became the future of "Today"; Jane Pauley was the past.

"One day Deborah was on the couch; the next she's pushing Jane aside," said Kessler, who grew up in Seattle and was the first woman elected student body president at Franklin High (class of '65). "It was this bizarre soap opera being played out before the eyes of millions of viewers."

Many of them appeared to show their sympathy for Pauley by tuning out. Only later did NBC's testosterone-laden brain trust manage to stumble across what Kessler thinks is a fairly obvious concept.

"I don't know a single woman," she said, "who'd like to see someone younger, blonder and sexier at 7 in the morning."

Judy Kessler is scheduled to appear on "Geraldo," midnight Wednesday on Channel 4.