Miss Rona Ready for Another Run at TV

Rona Barrett can sum up in a word what the year 1988 had been like.

“Lousy.”

After all, she wasn’t starring on television. She wasn’t reporting on radio. She wasn’t writing a column. And she wasn’t editing a newsletter. And there was talk, considerable talk, that Miss Rona was not just washed up but left hanging out to dry.

Even when she appeared on “The Arsenio Hall Show” earlier this month, the only new venture she could plug was an upcoming commercial where she interviews Miss Chiquita Banana. Seriously.

“I don’t deny it. There were rough times when I thought maybe I’m not meant to go back on TV,” she admits. “But when you believe in something, you just keep going even when there are deep, dark days. The one thing you never know is when one phone call can come and change your life.”

And when it came, the man on the other end of the line just happened to be the president of NBC Entertainment, Brandon Tartikoff, wanting Barrett to host a series of 10 half-hour daytime specials starting March 6 as a change from the network’s usual fare of game shows and soap operas.

Tentatively titled “At Rona’s” and scheduled to follow the “Today” show, the specials will be set inside Barrett’s newly purchased pied - a - terre in Beverly Hills. In “my little home,” as Miss Rona refers to it, Barrett will invite three “very interesting people from different walks of life” to an intimate dinner party that will just happen to be recorded by the videotape cameras.

“I don’t call it a talk show. I call it a different kind of interview program,” says Barrett, who had been trying unsuccessfully to sell herself as the star of a talk-interview show since 1986. “The interesting thing about these programs will be to watch how people share and to find what threads they have in common and to hear what conversation they have, ranging from subjects occurring in headlines to whatever is on people’s minds.”

Though no guests have been booked as yet, Barrett says she will try for a “surprising” mix of people when taping begins in mid-February. And even though she is best known for chatting with Hollywood celebrities, she wants to interview “recognizable people” from the worlds of business, sports and politics as well.

Barrett isn’t concerned that daytime television already is overrun with talk, talk, talk--that there’s already Phil, Oprah, Geraldo and Sally, Regis and Kathie, Steve and Cristina (in the Los Angeles market alone). Or that, at times, Oprah Winfrey has gathered a group of actresses around a table and just had a a group of women talking without an audience. Or that a cable show once featured Dixie Whatley (now paired with Rex Reed “At the Movies”) interviewing her guests at a lunch table at a real New York restaurant.

“It turned out Brandon had this in the back of his mind for a long time and was just finding the right time to make it happen,” says Barrett, whose Rona Barrett Enterprises will co-produce the specials with NBC Productions.

So why did this deal with Tartikoff and company come through when so many others had fallen flat elsewhere? “Maybe they’ve got good taste,” she says with her trademark touch of arrogance.

Actually, the former gossip columnist already had deals cooking with Tartikoff, with whom she had been talking since 1986 after she left her last TV job as senior correspondent for “Entertainment Tonight” (“which I considered to be one of the worst experiences of my entire career,” she maintains).

Though claiming she never really wanted to be a producer “because the development process is one that tears your guts out,” she nevertheless tried to sell Tartikoff a series called “Untold Stories.” But he had bought “Unsolved Mysteries” just four days earlier.

Then, she said, Tartikoff suggested she create some “original novels for television,” which he could program against “ABC’s Monday Night Football” in fall 1988 as “Rona Barrett’s Night at the Movies.” When the writer’s strike began, the project was held.

The strike almost killed another Barrett idea for a summer-replacement series. But, finally, two months ago, she received an order from NBC for a two-hour movie-of-the-week that might lead to a series. As for the series’ concept, she’ll only divulge it’s a “spy thriller that’s international in scope.”

Barrett also is pushing ahead with her novels-for-television and has sold three outlines to NBC “about ordinary women who find themselves in extraordinary situations,” she says.

In short, don’t expect any thinly veiled stories about show business shenanigans. Says Tony Masucci, NBC’s vice president of miniseries and motion pictures, “the truth of the matter is we wanted Rona to draw on her experiences and take them out of the Hollywood milieu.”

And to think that just a year ago, as the joke goes, Barrett couldn’t get herself arrested in the entertainment business.

When Lee Solters, a veteran celebrity press agent, ran into her one day this winter, he was as surprised as if he had seen Greta Garbo. “We nodded in acknowledgment. And then I realized that I didn’t know what she was doing these days.”

Neither did she. Ask Miss Rona why she all but disappeared after 30 years of covering Hollywood, including two decades as one of the entertainment industry’s most visible chroniclers, and she sighs theatrically. “I don’t mind telling you that I’ve been rejected more times than Carter has liver pills. It’s been the most discouraging year I have ever had. It’s as if I might never have been Rona Barrett.”

But the fact is she didn’t want to be Rona Barrett, gossip columnist, any longer. “I made it very clear that I just wouldn’t do that work again,” she says.

But she quickly found out that changing her image within the industry was going to be more painful than cosmetic surgery.

“People love putting you in a slot. They said, ‘You’ve only covered Hollywood. What makes you think you can do anything more?’ Sure, people wanted me to do Hollywood. But my blue sky was to do my version of (Larry) King and (Ted) Koppel. And if I couldn’t do that, I really didn’t want to go back on television.”

Barrett herself admits that she is a TV personality who “must grow on you. People say, ‘I hate her’ or ‘I adore her’ because I have never been a middle-of-the-roader. And so, when you have those extremes, the people in power have to believe in you and give you time to start finding and building an audience.”

She certainly has had plenty of opportunities to do so, especially after the former nationally syndicated columnist broke into TV in 1966 by landing a spot on KABC’s 11 p.m. newscast.

By the mid-1970s, her reputation was well-established. She had come out with a novel, a juicy autobiography, and a record album, “Miss Rona Sings Hollywood’s Greatest Hits.” And then there was her how-to tome: “Rona Barrett Tells You How You Can Look Rich and Achieve Sexual Ecstasy.”

When she joined ABC’s “Good Morning America” in 1975, she wielded enormous power. “My office alarm was set for the two times she was on each morning,” recalls press agent Solters.

And still, Barrett complains bitterly, “there were people at the network who said, ‘Get her off the air. She’s terrible.’ ”

But she made a misstep when she jumped to NBC in 1980 for an embattled stint as the West Coast anchor of “Tomorrow” with Tom Snyder, who wasn’t at all happy about sharing the spotlight. Their fights were legion, culminating when Barrett refused to appear with him.

For a time, she was a regular on “The Today Show” and in 1982 even had her own weekly prime-time program on NBC, “Television: Inside and Out” which was canceled just four weeks later. She then launched the “Barrett Report,” a $1,200-a-year-subscription-only confidential newsletter intended for executives in the entertainment industry and on Wall Street. Soon it became clear that by the time she could get the product in hands of subscribers, the items weren’t that newsworthy.

When “Entertainment Tonight” made her an offer “I almost couldn’t refuse” in 1985, she insisted on following what was happening in Hollywood’s board rooms as closely as she used to follow what was happening in its bedrooms.

Richard Frank, the former president of Paramount Television and co-creator of “Entertainment Tonight” who now is president of Walt Disney Studios, was among those who wondered whether her business reporting might be too inside for the show’s audience. “It was very good stuff, and we all appreciated it,” he recalls. “But you’ve got to understand that the people who sit in Springfield, Ill., care more about how many shrimps are served at the Emmy Awards than they do about David Begelman doing something at a studio.”

During her years away from show-business reporting, Barrett acknowledges that she’s missed it. “As Walter Cronkite once said, ‘Now and then there’s a fabulous story and I go for my fireman’s hat and I say, “Where’s the fire?” ’ And that’s when I remember that I don’t have the forum.”

At those times, she reminds herself that “there’s another area I belong in.”

Whether her new NBC interview show realizes that remains to be seen. For instance, will viewers accept her doing interviews with, say, Orel Hershiser or Gary Hart?

“I think it always takes a very long time to initiate new things,” she explains. “It’s true. I am synonymous with Hollywood. But can I not break out of that mold?”