Alive, Well and Anchoring in L.A.

Tawny Little--Miss America 1976 and the most glamorous personality at KABC-TV Channel 7 during that station’s heady days of news supremacy in the late ‘70s and ‘80s--has been anchoring the news at KCOP-TV Channel 13 for the last two years.

Which itself may be news, it seems, to a lot of folks.

“Oh, it’s really frustrating that not very many people even know we’re here,” Little said. “I had an appearance in a parade in Perris [last month], and people come up to me and they still think I’m on Channel 7 to this day--and I haven’t been there for five years. It’s amazing.

“Or a lot of other people said, ‘Oh gee, you aren’t working anymore. Are you just taking care of your kids? We really miss you.’ Which is equally frustrating. It’s very nice that so many people are solicitous of my well-being, but I wish they knew what was going on here.”

What’s going on at KCOP is far from pretty. Despite pouring tens of millions of dollars over the last decade into the effort to build a news identity, Channel 13’s 10 p.m. show remains mired in last place. New sets, a new newsroom, new news directors, new formats, new anchors: Nothing has made a measurable difference.

Rick Feldman, Channel 13’s general manager, admits that over the years, he has wondered whether it was worth it to do news at all. But news, he said, is the one area of his business that a station manager can’t analyze strictly in hard, cold economic terms.

“If you don’t have it, what’s to differentiate you from USA cable?” Feldman said. “It takes a long time to build a successful news operation, and maybe we’re stretching that out longer than I would have liked because this market is so competitive, but I’m very proud of our product.”

Though the 10 p.m. broadcast is in distress, both Feldman and news director Steve Cohen have been heartened by the performance of KCOP’s 7:30 p.m. newscast, which premiered last September. Though ratings for the program are relatively low, they are good enough to make the effort a financial winner. Within a year, Cohen expects that program “to be an important economic pump for the station.”

Little, who anchors both nightly shows with Alan Frio, joined KCOP after 15 years at KABC and five at KCAL-TV Channel 9.

“I know that if people sample us, they’ll find reasons to watch,” she said. “One of the reasons I came over here was [Cohen’s] pitch that we try to provide a service to the community. To provide useful information--how to survive, how not to get ripped off--instead of just crime headlines or voyeuristic action footage. I think a lot of the stations have lost their way, lost sight of what we in news are actually here for.”

For all her notoriety, fast public life, high-profile marriages--including one to “Dukes of Hazzard” star John Schneider--Little, now in her 40s, divorced three times and a mother of two school-age sons, is disarmingly open and self-effacing.

During an interview conducted half in her office and half in the station’s makeup room, she rolled her hair in curlers in preparation for her broadcast while amiably answering any and all questions, from whether her glamorous image, perpetuated by her dating such movie stars as Kevin Costner, hurts her credibility as a serious newscaster to whether being Miss America qualified her to be an anchor.

“This is going to sound ingenuous, but I didn’t really set out to be famous and live in that kind of limelight,” she said. “But I was here on TV and so young and impetuous and full of vim and life, and I gravitated that way. It was exciting, of course, but it obviously caused me a lot of pain in my life. Divorces are no fun. Public, tabloid romances are no fun. Not what anyone would want. I wish I was married once in my life and my children were with me with their father and I was in Williamstown teaching. But that didn’t happen.

“And I would love it if people would think that I want to date businessmen or bankers, but they don’t. So when they introduce me to people, they just assume that I want to meet actors. It’s a major point of frustration. But it’s what people expect of me. . . . And as the public sees that, some people would actually think that it’s an enhancement--that it’s all very exciting and great. But there are a lot of people who don’t find that stuff at all attractive. So it’s been a double-edged sword, I think, to this day.”

As a teenager, the New York native yearned to be a college professor. She majored in linguistics at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and intended to specialize in “language acquisition programs for elementary-age schoolchildren.” She entered the Miss America pageant, she insisted, with hopes of winning scholarship money to continue her education.

“Well, things change when you become Miss America,” she said. “And all of a sudden I had all of these offers to be on television. I was 19 years old and I thought I’d be crazy if I didn’t investigate some of them, because I knew these people wouldn’t be knocking on my door in five years. And I really thought I would do it for a couple of years and then stop. That was 21 years ago. I still love the idea of being a college professor. I still have those dreams. I never got to finish school. I’m unbelievably frustrated.”

When she hit the air at Channel 7 in 1977, Little admitted, she was much too young and inexperienced and she had to struggle for years to try to overcome the “ridiculous amount of baggage” she arrived with. On top of that, those were the days of “happy talk” news, and Channel 7 was the king of the ratings and the king of chit-chat. And, as if the noose of a lightweight image wasn’t tight enough, the station also asked Little to host several frivolous entertainment shows like “A.M. Los Angeles,” “Eye on L.A.” and “Hollywood Close-Up.”

“How schizophrenic is that, not only for me, but what is the audience supposed to think?” Little said. “I was very concerned about that, but the station wanted its anchors, especially me, to do all those shows. So I think it wasn’t until I moved to KCAL that I fully overcame the Miss America thing--and that’s after 15 years at KABC.”

But at least back then, for better or worse, the audience knew she was on TV.

“I know,” Little replied. “We would come out of ‘Roots’ and have a 25 rating for the 11 p.m. news at Channel 7, and now I look at our rating and it’s a 2 and I think, ‘Oh, my God, how can this be?’ But we will never have those days again.

“I’m glad I was on the air in Los Angeles in the ‘80s. That was an unbelievably heady time. But it was also a time when we really didn’t serve the public, with all the games and manipulation we did to get ratings. Anything to get ratings--series on the Nielsen families or whatever. It was wrong. And that’s too bad, because that’s when people really watched news. I’m much more proud of what we’re doing here.”