In an interview in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Bryant Gumbel has something to say about the success of "somebody who should remain nameless"--his ex-Today show partner Katie Couric.
Gumbel thinks his former morning mate gets too many props for the success of the top-rated show, while he remains underappreciated. "I do think the comparison is a little unfair in light of the fact that I won in two different decades with two different cohosts," he tells the Times. "I won with different executive producers, I won with different studios."
Sound like sour grapes? Well, it gets worse. He also accuses this "nameless person" as being decidedly less perky than her smiling persona suggests. Gumbel claims she "went through five assistants in five years, three or four makeup and hair people and had a prime-time news show that failed to make the grade."
Good thing Gumbel doesn't live in a glass house. His prime-time news show on CBS, Primetime with Bryant Gumbel, also folded after a less-than-stellar reception. Eyeball network execs shut down the show in August 1998 after just one season of low ratings. (Couric's show didn't exactly fail, by the way. Now was absorbed by the Dateline family of nighttime news programs.)
When he actually mentions Couric by name in the story, he does make a half-hearted effort to sound like an adult. "I never picked fight with Katie; I never once undermined her," he tells the paper. "For however much we may or may not have liked each other, if you ask her point-blank if I ever said anything mean to her, she'd say, 'No. Never once.' "
There's no love lost between the two TV personalities. Rumors of a frosty relationship dogged the duo up to Gumbel's Today departure in January 1997, when he turned his anchor chair over to the hunky Matt Lauer. Couric herself has made it clear the two weren't the best of friends. "We were never really that close," she told George magazine in 1997. "There was a lot of creative tension. Well, there was a lot of tension. I don't know how creative it was."
"There were some Academy Award-winning performances by both of them," a Today insider tells the Times. "I don't think either one of them wanted to spend one minute together." Another Couric coworker rallies to her defense. "Katie becomes an easy scapegoat for his being ticked off that he never got the same acclaim she did."
Perhaps the long-running grudge was the impetus behind Gumbel's latest venture. The veteran newsman will be back on the morning shift November 1 as the host of The Early Show on CBS in the network's new studio overlooking New York's Central Park.
Pray for Gumbel's newest victim, er, coanchor, Jane Clayson.