Tragic Sign-Off for a Golden Girl
Jessica Savitch: 1947-1983
Near its end, her life seemed to carry a storybook warning: ambition may lead to power and fame, but the path beckons to a 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.
She had had a meteoric rise. Spurred on by a father who died when she was twelve, the aggressive Pennsylvania golden girl with the pale blue eyes seemed unstoppable. One of her Ithaca College journalism professors told her, "There's no place for broads in broadcasting." So she worked her way up from radio disc jockey and newsreader to TV reporter and local anchor in Houston and Philadelphia; she put in 16-hour days to eliminate any chance that newsroom chauvinists could tag her as an electronic bunny.
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 in 1981.
At 33, her position secure even in the nervous network world, she remained driven and dedicated, a perfectionist who rarely relaxed. In newsrooms she was sometimes jokingly referred to as "Jessica Savage." The former general manager of Philadelphia's KYW-TV, Alan Bell, recalls, "There was a show-must-go-on quality to poor Jess. In the grand tradition of laughing on the outside and crying on the inside, when the red light went on she'd be out there giving 158%."
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.