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Indeed, Pauley's TV career has served as a mirror for the evolving self- image of the baby-boom generation. Plucked from local TV to co-anchor the Today show in 1976, when she was just 25, Pauley at first was the precocious overachiever. With the arrival of a family (twins, a boy and girl, were born in 1983; another son came in 1986), she became that icon of thirtysomething maturity, the Woman with Her Priorities Straight. Then, during the Norville affair, she acted out a secret nightmare for a generation approaching mid- life: the fear of being supplanted by someone younger, of being put out to pasture by a cold, bottom-line bureaucracy. And she emerged victorious. No wonder Pauley has been canonized, and Norville can't shake her image as the town vixen; whatever their TV skills, their symbolic roles are fixed.
Fittingly, Pauley's new series is another reflection of baby-boomer concerns: stories on such topics as parents who don't have enough time for their kids and the trauma of turning 40. These are Pauley's concerns as well. In a round-table discussion of the 40-year milestone, Jane (who turns 40 on Oct. 31) noted she became aware of growing older "when I started listening to old Beach Boys records and felt like I was grieving for someone who had died."
America's late-blooming adulation for Jane Pauley has its ironic side. For years, she seemed the epitome of a TV newswoman who knew her place. On Today, she always played a second-fiddle role: first to Brokaw, then to Bryant Gumbel. Even to the end, Gumbel was listed as the show's anchor; Pauley was merely co-anchor. Some women at NBC News were distressed that Pauley did not fight harder for equal status. She was, for example, absent from some of the program's newsmaking trips, like its visit to the Soviet Union in 1984. Says one female staffer: "She was not a wavemaker."
Pauley says she did complain to management when Gumbel was given the pre- eminent role on Today in 1982. But she admits to being a "conflict avoider" and to putting her family ahead of her work. "Once I brought babies home from the hospital, I didn't feel comfortable marching into the boss's office and pounding my fists on his desk, saying, 'Hey, send me.' But I never turned down a trip. The difference was I wasn't lobbying. I felt I had obligations to a family. The irony is that I think that's why people admire me, to the degree that they do. Not that I've been glamorous and globe- trotting and interviewed the mighty and powerful. I'm almost celebrated for the career I didn't choose."
In conversation, Pauley is simultaneously bubbly and serene. She talks in crisp, carefully crafted sentences sprinkled with oddly legalistic phrases ("Absent such and such . . ." is one of her favorite constructions) and punctuated with self-deprecating humor and girlish giggles. She gives wholesomeness a good name. Pauley is close to her parents and her older sister, whom she took along on several Today trips. She and her husband, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, live on Manhattan's Upper West Side but avoid the New York social scene. She cooks, but not well ("Our family standards aren't that high"); goes out to a movie on occasion; rarely watches TV for pleasure.