CBS Correspondent Is Uneasy About Her ’60 Minutes’ of Fame

She can’t help herself--she’s watching out of the corner of her eye.

Vicki Mabrey is sitting in a dark, windowless meeting room on the eighth floor of an office building on Manhattan’s West Side. Colleagues sit nearby in padded chairs salvaged from an old movie theater. A story on the political activism of U2 rocker Bono that Mabrey has submitted for CBS’ “60 Minutes II” is airing on a wide-screen television. But she keeps glancing over at the end of a long conference table, set behind the theater seats, where a single banker’s lamp stands.

The lamp, and command of the room, belongs to Jeff Fager, executive producer of “60 Minutes II,” the young progeny of “60 Minutes,” network television’s most esteemed newsmagazine. Mabrey, formerly a reporter for Baltimore’s WBAL-TV for eight years, is now one of the show’s five on-air correspondents.

Team Mabrey is there: a story producer, the video editor and other associate producers involved in reporting the piece. Also present are a publicist and a sound-bite cop, who checks the piece against interview transcripts to ensure that people’s words are shown in precise context. A writer is there, too, in case a graceful transition is needed.

Mabrey silently gauges her colleagues’ reaction. She can sense if they are laughing, or stiffening, or relinquishing themselves to the story. Interpreting body language can be an act of self-preservation.

But the only reaction that really matters comes from the man whose face is illuminated like a conductor’s in the orchestra pit. Fager, a veteran of the original show, is driven to put his stamp on the new one. Mabrey has joked with colleagues that she doesn’t even need to look at Fager during these submission sessions, as he sends off hate rays when he doesn’t like a piece. But she watches him nonetheless.

The screening ends; the tape freezes. Fager swivels, turning his attention from video to correspondent. Mabrey awaits the verdict.

*

She thought she was an unlikely prospect to be in the camera’s eye. As a child, Mabrey developed Bell’s palsy--the deadening of a cranial nerve. It partially paralyzed the left side of her face, leaving her with a slight sag in her left lower eyelid (she can’t fully close it), and forcing her to depend on the right side of her mouth. It’s slightly noticeable on air and more pronounced in person.

When Mabrey compiled her first tape as an intern at Washington’s WUSA, she pointed out her condition to the news director. “For a long time I thought I could never be on TV because of that,” she says. “He said, ‘Don’t ever mention that to me again.’ ”

Indeed, her look has helped Mabrey to stand out in the vanilla world of broadcast journalism. She’s slender, forceful and tall--”5 feet 10 inches in flats,” she says, “but who’s ever in flats?” Her voice is a deep, rich alto; it suggests sobriety unless you hear her playful digs, often aimed at herself. Her dark hair is streaked with silver--an uncommon acknowledgment of time on a medium not known for its hospitality to aging in women.

Yet Mabrey, a four-time Emmy winner, is on the cusp of joining the small ranks of reporters who break into national consciousness as a network celebrity. It’s a prospect embraced by the network. But it’s a goal that does not appear to animate Mabrey.

Her work is informed, rather, by her own experience. Mabrey’s maternal grandparents, Frank and Hattie Johnson, a sharecropper and a homemaker in the Mississippi Delta, migrated to St. Louis in the early 1920s. The way the family tells it, Frank Johnson always said he wanted to get as far from Mississippi as possible, aiming for Minnesota.

The couple settled for Missouri, a state that was still segregated when Mabrey, now 44, was born. She was one of the first African-American students to integrate her grade school.

“I used to think, ‘I want to be a teacher of English.’ My mother and my aunts and my uncle were all educators, and my mother said, ‘Nope, that’s what was open to us. There’s a lot more open to all of you now.’ ”

More meant Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she studied political science, graduating with honors.

She later landed a training fellowship at WUSA and joined WBAL, then a CBS affiliate, as a junior producer after pestering the station for a job.

After a year, she became a reporter, covering accidents and fires and shootings. But she tried to find more compelling stories, as well. One feature, on a local photographer, led to an enduring friendship, not uncommon for Mabrey, who acquires friends the way a pack rat acquires trinkets. Mabrey later set the photographer up in her home because the woman was too poor to support herself in retirement.

In early 1992, on assignment for WBAL, Mabrey followed Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke to New York as he campaigned for a young governor named Bill Clinton. Later that day, in a cramped network editing room, her black turtleneck and black jeans drenched by rain, she and a cameraman were desperately trying to put together a piece for the 6 p.m. newscast.

She looked up to see CBS News President Eric Ober, CBS Network President Howard Stringer and several other network officials.

“One of our best producers came up to me and said, ‘You really should meet this Baltimore reporter--she’s terrific,’ ” recalls Ober, who’s no longer with the network. “And there was this 6-foot-tall, striking woman. She was terrific. She says, ‘I’m really in a hurry, I’m working here.’ We talked for maybe 30 seconds.”

But that was enough for Ober, who called an executive responsible for the affiliates. For months, that executive beseeched Mabrey to send samples of her work to New York. Nothing doing.

She loved Baltimore, where she partied with director John Waters and casting agent Pat Moran and colleagues from work. Baltimore allowed her to indulge her delight in the offbeat, the kitschy. It had been the first place as an adult where she felt at home. She had married and divorced yet retained a vibrant circle of friends.

Eventually, Mabrey relented. She was seeing plum assignments at WBAL doled out to less experienced reporters. And she was tired of covering Baltimore’s relentless thrum of violence. But she told Ober she didn’t want to go to New York or Washington. He suggested a few other spots. Maybe Dallas, she replied. On election night in November 1992, after filing her story, she drafted her resignation letter to WBAL.

Soon after Mabrey’s move to Texas in winter 1993, David Koresh embarked on his standoff with federal agents at Waco. She camped out for seven weeks, developing sources and breaking stories.

CBS’ Scott Pelley, a colleague in the Dallas bureau at the time, says Mabrey “has that indispensable attribute that any journalist needs: luck, being in the right place at the right time.”

Yet, he adds, at Waco, “if she had faltered during the first two or three days, they would have felt nothing of sending in some big name from New York or L.A. to take over that story. It is a test by fire--that exposure of every weakness you ever had.”

A source tipped her off to the imminent arrival of federal agents shortly ahead of the raid at Koresh’s compound; on her say-so, CBS sent a dozen journalists to Waco in the dead of night, and they were able to get in place to capture that story beyond the scope of the other networks. It was considered a coup.

Right after that, she covered the epic floods in the Midwest, which again gained her the exposure on the nightly news coveted by so many green correspondents. Then she accepted an offer to go report on the strife in Haiti.

Over time, Ober kept pressing her: How about New York now? How about Washington? Finally: What about London?

London? She replied. I could do that. And she did, in mid-1995.

London allowed her to swim in deep waters of culture and watch endless hours of British TV documentaries and live in a place largely without guns, a place where she felt safer than she ever had. It also brought weeks in Bosnia and two months in Baghdad and the investigation into the death of Princess Diana.

All of which led, ultimately, back to the United States. She had joked with network officials that she’d return only if the rumor were true about a spinoff of “60 Minutes.” In late 1998, as “60 Minutes II” was being midwifed, she agreed to move to New York to become one of its original correspondents.

Initially, the weight of the program burdened Mabrey. For her first three months in New York, she lost her appetite. “That’s what happens when I get really nervous,” she says. “Some people go into binge eating. I stop eating.”

The entrance of the “60 Minutes II” front office is decorated with a big poster featuring the smiling faces of the show’s primary correspondents. Mabrey is visibly discomfited by it, looking away every time she passes.

Mabrey clearly wants this show to work, but she doesn’t act as though her place is permanent--at least not yet. Along with bookshelves, small plants and reminders of friends and stories distant, her office overlooking the Hudson River contains boxes marked “London” set aside in a corner. Many months after her arrival in New York, the boxes remain packed and sealed. And her contract includes a clause that guarantees her a job back at the CBS London bureau if things fall apart.

“I heard a quote one time that said journalists are people traveling first-class on other people’s money, and, at any point, that can change,” says Mabrey. “If so, I’ve had a great ride. I’ve got great memories, I have phenomenal mementos from all over the world. I’ll get another job doing something, and I’ll go back to flying coach.”

*

Back in the darkened conference room, awaiting the word on her story on U2’s Bono, Mabrey looks at Fager, her boss. Bathed in light from the banker’s lamp, Fager makes it clear he loathes the start of the piece.

It’ll run, he says, but not like this.

While the story focuses on the rocker’s efforts to persuade industrial powers to forgive debts owed by developing nations, Fager wants it to lead with music, not the strife of Bono’s Ireland.

Back to the editing room.