& The morning after the second episode of her new series, Real Life with Jane Pauley, TV's newest prime-time star sits in her office, heating a cup of coffee in her microwave oven and fielding compliments from colleagues. One of them, NBC News president Michael Gartner, is in the hall outside her door. "What'd you think?" Jane calls out. "Liked it," says Gartner, a squarish, soft-spoken executive badly in need of some peace and quiet. Pauley senses there might be more on his mind: "You talking about anything . . .?" Gartner saunters toward her and offers one suggestion for the show in a conspiratorial half whisper: "More Jane."
More Jane? Sounds impossible. No one in TV has been harder to avoid, either on the tube or in the press, over the past few months than Jane Pauley. For 13 years, she was the perky, professional, largely taken-for-granted co-anchor of NBC's morning show Today. When turmoil in the person of a blond, eager-to- please interloper, Deborah Norville, 32, engulfed the show last fall, Pauley bowed out -- and suddenly found herself the most in-demand news personality in America. She got her own prime-time show, which has drawn good ratings this summer and is almost certain to return on a weekly basis in January. She was anointed No. 1 substitute for Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News -- and then had to fend off rumors she would be made permanent co-anchor. (The job wasn't offered, nor does she want it.) She has, moreover, won the applause of millions for her artful balancing of family and career: this is a woman who quit one of the highest-profile jobs in TV so that she could be home mornings when her kids went off to kindergarten.
It is these familial, regular-Jane instincts that have made Pauley shine brightest in a galaxy of female TV news superstars. Diane Sawyer has the beauty and brains but neither the warmth nor a program that shows her off to much advantage. Connie Chung's recent announcement that she is taking time off to get pregnant seemed a bizarre blurring of the line between public and private selves, just the sort of thing Pauley has so gracefully avoided.
Her co-workers praise Pauley as generous, without pretension, easy to work with -- in short, a nice human being. "I think she is the most civil and least neurotic person I've ever met in television," says David Browning, who was hired from CBS to produce her new show. "What I always admired about her," says Brokaw, "was that she was absolutely determined not to be seduced by bright lights, big city." Cynthia Samuels, a former Today producer who now runs Channel One, the schoolroom newscast, enthuses, "She is emblematic of the best of this generation."