Sullivan Is Swimming Very Happily in a New Medium
You have to look twice to realize that the woman sitting at a desk in the middle of the windowless newsroom at all-news radio’s KFWB-AM (980) is Kathleen Sullivan. No office, no desk sign, not even a cubicle marks her space.
And the once-pert, Kate Jackson/”Charlie’s Angel” look-alike with wispy bangs, heart-shaped face and exquisite, brightly colored suits during her turn on “CBS This Morning” a decade ago now has her hair severely pulled back and is wearing ordinary garb--black pants and V-necked sweater, a blue blouse.
Of course, Sullivan’s major work station is no longer in front of a TV camera but rather behind KFWB’s microphones, where from 5 to 10 a.m. weekdays she shares the key morning-drive anchor slot with award-winning veteran Dan Avey. Her official debut is Monday, but since early January she has been engaged in on-the-job, on-air training with Avey and anchor Judy Ford, who will now be heard from 10 a.m. to noon.
In her new role, Sullivan seems as comfortable as she looks, and her easy-to-recognize, melodious voice conveys authority.
“I’m writing,” she fairly announces in KFWB’s conference room in Hollywood, after pointing with pride to some old photos on the wall, and noting that the WB in the station’s call letters stands for Warner Bros., KFWB’s original owner.
She explains that from the time she arrives at the CBS-owned station in Hollywood at 3:30 a.m. from her nearby home (she has another home in Rancho Mirage) until she goes on air, she writes 12 to 14 stories, with updates--as does her co-anchor. The morning staff also consists of an executive producer, an editor, two writers and a reportorial team. “I love to write,” Sullivan says. “It’s the one thing I missed the most.”
At 45, after a somewhat checkered career, Sullivan has come home to Southern California, and to the sort of news that she loves.
“Oh, there’s enormous appeal in radio,” she enthuses. “It’s real news. You’re not commanded by video. You’re telling what’s really going on, and you don’t have to put on [a segment about] padded bras, like they did on the ‘Today’ show this morning.
“Radio is about news, it’s about writing, it’s about getting the news out there,” she continues. “It’s delivering. It’s about immediacy. It’s about all the basics I’ve just yearned for as television news has gone off into the entertainment ozone.”
Having grown up in the Pasadena-Arcadia area, Sullivan’s early career was meteoric: CNN’s first female anchor in 1980; four years later, the so-called sweater-girl anchor covering the Olympics at Sarajevo for ABC, co-anchor for ABC’s “World News This Morning” (1982-86), fill-in on “Good Morning America” and, finally, co-anchor of “CBS This Morning” from November 1987 until she was summarily fired in 1990--nine years ago this month--amid a swirl of rumors that questioned her temperament.
Although she now jokes that her firing was “upstaged by Ivana [Trump’s] divorce,” she also says that what devastated her then was “the lying . . . numerous lies--oh, all of it. They throw anything at you to see what sticks.”
After that, it seemed she drifted. A stint with NBC cable covering the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, spokeswoman for Weight Watchers from 1993-96 (“until I got the royal boot”--her way of saying she was replaced by Sarah Ferguson), host of “E! News Daily” after anchoring E!’s coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial. And in recent years? “I’ve been working outside the media in private investment banking work.”
Sullivan segued to radio with a phone call from KFWB’s new program director, Dave Cooke, shortly after he arrived in November, having been program director at KABC-AM (790) and the old KMPC. Cooke had already used Sullivan as a fill-in host in morning drive. “Every time she went on the air she did a fabulous job, and there was a tremendous reaction from listeners. She’s just a consummate pro,” he says.
Sullivan recalls that when Cooke phoned he simply said, “Wanna go play?”
Was it hard segueing to an all-news format? “Hard? It’s delightful to walk in with people who get it, to work with grown-ups,” she says. “The energy is just delightful. I’m learning. We all learn the craft, and it is a craft. And I’m learning as we go, but it’s extremely satisfying.”
Actually, Sullivan had also done some radio news as well as evergreen commentary pieces as part of her duties at ABC in the 1980s.
As for the visibility and the fame that TV brings, Sullivan insists that she does not miss it. “I was never into fame, and I think to stay on that treadmill you have to be addicted to a couple of things: fame, celebrity, fear of failure. I thought it was a hoot. One night I had dinner at the Metropolitan [Museum of Art] in the Temple of Dendur. Donna Karan was a close personal friend and asked me to sit at her table. Alec Baldwin wanted me to be his date. He was gaga, as if he had just walked into the world. He sat there, and he says, ‘Oh my God, there’s Henry.’ So I went over and introduced him to Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, to all these people.
“He said, ‘Aren’t you just amazed at the world you walk in?’ And I said, ‘No, because I know at any moment it could be gone.’ ”
Sullivan laughs heartily. “I was fired the next day.”
Today she resists any notion that she has come down in her career. “I think a come-down is when I abandon any kind of sensibilities about being a good journalist. . . . I didn’t. There was pressure on me at one time to accept rumor as fact and I refused--in a former employment,” she says, declining to elaborate. “The thing that really pushes me is that I seek out the truth.
“Many of my colleagues choreograph their careers in television,” she adds, snapping her fingers for emphasis. “I would never say to a former secretary of state that his position as a teacher at Stanford was a come-down. It’s wonderful to be able to come home to where my family, my friends are, and to share my 20 years of experience.
“I knew King Hussein,” she explains. “I had tea with King Hussein--we were in Japan at Emperor Hirohito’s funeral. . . . I had dinner at Castro’s house, met with Gorbachev a couple of times, had lunch with Benjamin Netanyahu--I mean he’s Ben to me. I’ve known him for 20 years. I saw the world through the eyes of a Southern Californian, and I think it’s of great value.
“I remember something that [anchor] Joe Benti once said, when I was a desk assistant, an intern at KNXT-TV [now KCBS]. He said, ‘Learn the rest of the country and bring it back home.’ ”
Sullivan says she writes as if she’s talking to her mother or her aunt. And now she and Avey also have the opportunity to do a sentence or so of ad-libbing, which Cooke initiated.
But Sullivan also wants you to know something else about her. “See, I’m not this one-dimensional TV journalist; I’m not just a news person. I play golf, I love to socialize, I love my friends. I have two wonderful dogs and a wonderful life. I have great neighbors. I enjoy the life that passed me by. . . . I was constantly going from city to city, whereas now I enjoy the beautiful simplicity of a mourning dove, which I had never heard in New York.”