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In her early years at Today, Pauley was the one who did most of the looking up. "Everything that came out of my mouth was run through the Tom Brokaw filter before I said it," she says. "I was so in awe of him that there was very little spontaneity in me." She gradually gained confidence and skill, but not job security. "It seemed about every six months I would read in the newspaper about someone being groomed for my job," she says. "And" -- the self-deprecating laugh -- "it rang pretty true to me."
Steve Friedman, the former executive producer of Today who now runs the NBC Nightly News, claims the turning point for Pauley came after her first pregnancy leave. "After the babies, the megastar was born," he says. "Before that she used to go in and out in terms of attention and work. But she came back focused, confident, directed. It was a different Jane." She specialized in handling delicate interviews (grieving parents, wives of hostages) but also carried her weight in breaking news stories like the invasion of Grenada.
Pauley admits that she was taken aback when Norville was brought in last September to replace newscaster John Palmer, Jane's close friend, and given a prominent on-air role. Stories about "the other woman" threatening to take Pauley's job soon became a deluge. "I was repeatedly told, 'Jane, you're reading the newspapers too much.' My reaction to that was 'I'm not reading the newspapers, I'm watching TV!' I felt that signals were being sent." Whether NBC was trying to ease Pauley out or not, she decided the time had come to take a break -- not just from Today but from all TV -- and sought to negotiate an end to her contract. "I realized that I probably would not come back in broadcasting at the level I left it. But somehow that felt O.K." NBC, of course, didn't let that happen.
Her post-mortems on the Today affair are mostly charitable. On the show's precipitous ratings: "I don't think it was just me. It was a succession of events," notably the much publicized memo in which Gumbel criticized nearly everything about the show except Pauley. Of Gumbel, she speaks fondly: "Bryant is vastly more complicated than I am. I just found him endlessly fascinating to watch." On Norville: "I don't think any of us saw ((the transition)) being as damaging to Deborah as it ultimately was. But I think she'll be fine. Americans can be generous. I think that public opinion will say, 'This woman has suffered enough.' "
Watching the Today show now, Pauley feels no twinges of regret. "I can enjoy it and have no sense that that's my chair." It helps, of course, to have your own prime-time show, a nation's adulation and a schedule that for the first time in 13 years doesn't require you to get up at 3:30 a.m. "I'm no longer working against the flow of a normal workday rhythm in the city," she says with a glow. "I haven't set an alarm clock but once in seven months. I wake up because there's sun streaming through my windows."