Connie Chung — the former ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN anchor — has dished in a revealing new interview on behind-the-scenes tensions with colleagues including Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters and Dan Rather, as well as her seemingly flirtatious relationship with David Letterman, and how she ruffled Hugh Grant’s feathers during her cameo in the recent HBO hit “The Undoing.”
On Andrew Goldman’s “The Originals” podcast for Los Angeles Magazine, Chung said that working with Rather at CBS was like a scene out of “Psycho,” while her treatment at ABC working with Walters and Sawyer was “not unlike what Tonya Harding did to Nancy Kerrigan.” She also said of Letterman, “Off the air, he’s dark,” and recalled how she got the “evil eye” from the director of “The Undoing,” Susanne Bier.
Chung, 74, began her career as a “CBS Evening News” correspondent in the ’70s, before heading to NBC, and ultimately winding up back at CBS as its marquee co-anchor with Rather in the ’90s. But while Rather was outwardly “very Texas gentlemanly,” she told Goldman, “If I turned my back, I felt like I might be in a scene of ‘Psycho’ in the shower.”
Later, “When I went to ABC news, I joined with both Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer there and I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be great. It’ll be three women who get along.’”
Instead, she found a scene “not unlike what Tonya Harding did to Nancy Kerrigan,” because, “when I got to ABC, both Diane and Barbara were in the same sort of arena of trying to get these big interviews. So when I tried to go after them, I was told I could not. That Barbara and Diane were the only ones who could compete for the interview and I had to stand down. And I said, ‘Really?’”
She wound up upsetting the ABC applecart by landing a 2001 interview with Rep. Gary Condit about the disappearance of intern Chandra Levy.
(Excerpt) Read more in: Page Six