Lisa Mcree Brings Texas Roots And Global Smarts To `Gma'

NEW YORK - Lisa McRee is discussing the synthesis of critical thinking and media manipulation when a young woman peeks inside her office and whispers, ever so timidly, that her, uh, trees have arrived.

The wide grin that spreads across McRee's face as two workers come wobbling in with floor-to-ceiling indoor plants suggest this is welcome news. McRee apologizes for the interruption without taking her eyes off the greenery.

Looking at the modest office she uses to conduct daily chores as new co-host of "Good Morning America," it's understandable.

McRee isn't the superstitious type, but she's storied for being overly prepared, whether it's knowing her interview subjects or having her surroundings just so. Her work has been described as "polished" and "refined" and "studied," almost to the point you wonder: Is she a talented news woman or gifted actress playing a talented news woman?

In a business in which external cosmetics are vital and refined smoothness is rewarded, particularly among women, McRee - Fort Worth, Texas-reared, California-educated - is astutely aware of the industry's double standards, its fierce politics, its paralyzing categorizing. She feels preparation is her best effort to equalize the playing field.

Weeks before coming aboard to New York after a three-year stint as evening co-anchor at KABC in Los Angeles, she picked up a New York Times article asking whether she had been chosen to replace "GMA" veteran Joan Lunden out of sheer looks, whether she was merely a younger, perkier model, slipped in place like a set of fresh batteries.

McRee laughs about the story, satisfied that The Times at least "used a decent picture."

At 35, McRee is a decade younger than Lunden, who also sports hair that's short and blond, and a smile as wide as the one on that old Kool-Aid pitcher.

In her office at ABC studios, she is trying to create her own sense of place - a little Texas, a little California - a sense of a thinker who will never learn enough. She sees this as her War Room, so to speak, a mixture of home comfort and bomb shelter, for what might lurk ahead.

McRee has been on the offensive since winning the "GMA" sweepstakes, the plum network morning host assignment with big money, high visibility and early morning (though quite cushy) hours. But with this dream job, McRee is now at least partly saddled with the responsibility of jolting "GMA" out of its stupor.

For the past two years, NBC's "Today" has hammered "GMA" in nearly every ratings demographic available, from city dwelling hip-hoppers to heartland dairy farmers. Worse, "CBS This Morning" is creeping up from the rear.

McRee smiles and says she's no savior. But you don't take over a network show and not worry about audience numbers. She certainly has to be comforted by her first-week audience grade: only 200,000 abandoned the show.

"We're in transition; the hosts are the core of what we do," says Shelley Lewis, "GMA's" deputy executive producer. "But having hosts jell is merely a matter of time."

Ask McRee about this, and she delivers a "hey, whatever" facial expression. Just as on-air, she appears about as calm as a windless summer evening in her native Lone Star State; foremost on her mind is relating to the audience and not messing up the large amount of ad-libbing required for a live two-hour broadcast. Ratings are farther down the list.

Just as important to McRee is forging her own identity, which could be difficult in such a stiffly formatted medium.

McRee has exhibited a flare for the quick line both in her interviews and in the happy-talk structure with co-host Charlie Gibson. But if McRee is to showcase her hard-news abilities, she'll need a nice little disaster story to drop in "GMA's" lap.

"Her greatest strength is that she has the thing that's needed to do morning television, and that's intellectual curiosity," Lewis says of McRee. "She's just as likely to propose a story on a very serious topic as on something that is fun."

Along her office windowsill is a long line of books - the bookcase hasn't made it here, either - "Communication and Cultural Domination," "Critical Theory," "Becoming a Post-Industrial Society," "The Politics of Broadcast Legislation," "Telecommunications in Crisis" - just a few examples of the lighter reading fare.

One might suggest this as a plant to distance McRee from the morning television stereotype of head cheerleader as anchor. Let's remember that the ABC publicity machine, when providing details of the host turnover, ever so gently told of McRee's hard-news experience while hoping not to make Lunden (a consumer reporter and weather anchor before landing on "GMA") appear as the hard-news lightweight she was.

Thing is, McRee's career really is a textbook case in paying dues. She exited WFAA-TV in Dallas in 1992 to deliver news in the wee hours for the ABC overnight news program "World News Now," ditching that to host "Lifetime Magazine," and bailing from that ship to anchor at KABC.

In 1993, McRee had also reported for newsmagazine "Day One" and, many seem to have forgotten, substituted for Lunden on "GMA."

But her "intellectual curiosity" dates back further. She's the daughter of a mobile entrepreneurial insurance exec and - it's best to take a breath here - attended kindergarten in Denver, first grade in Kansas City, second grade in Fort Worth, part of third grade in Honolulu and Fort Worth, fourth grade in Fort Worth, and fifth and sixth grades in Scottsdale, Ariz., before returning to Fort Worth for junior high (Meadowbrook) and high school (Eastern Hills, Class of '79).

She didn't mind the transient lifestyle set by parents who saw change as growth. "They bought into the Will Rogers thing," she says. "Never let school interfere with your education."

First a political science major at what's now the University of North Texas in Denton (two semesters), McRee then graduated from the University of California, traveled to Egypt, studied foreign policy and Arabic, and worked for a San Diego congressman until she found that she could no longer stomach politics.

"I found that I didn't like all politicians," she says. "And more important, I wasn't wild about the people who worked for politicians."