Wanting It All

Siobhan Darrow is sitting still these days, on a leave of absence for the last six months, undergoing in-vitro fertilization treatments. But her mind and body are still humming from the 15 years she spent as a CNN reporter in Russia, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Chechnya and Albania. As a matter of fact, name an international conflict in the 1980s or ‘90s, and chances are Darrow was there. Her new book, “Flirting With Danger” (Little Brown/U.K., 2000, available through https://www.virago.co.uk), is about how she got the job, what was thrilling and not so thrilling, and finally why she left the job to settle in L.A.

Born in 1960, Darrow grew up in Belfast and New Jersey, depending on whether her Irish Protestant mother and Jewish American father were getting along. She studied Russian at Duke University and went off to Moscow as soon as she was sprung, only to fall in love with a handsome, moody Russian in search of U.S. citizenship (what she calls, “Love a la Russe”). The relationship didn’t last, but Darrow stayed in Moscow for several years, working for the NBC bureau there. There she met Ted Turner’s son Teddy, who was working for Cable News Network. When his father organized the Goodwill Games in Moscow (Turner’s antidote to the over-politicized Olympics), he hired Darrow to help set them up. This led to a job offer as tape logger in Atlanta in 1986, which Darrow, who was eager to leave Russia and the marriage, took.

CNN’s newsroom was in the basement of an old plantation. Darrow was soon given her own show to produce, called “World Report,” inviting broadcasters in-country to send their reports to CNN. But she missed Russia. On vacation in Ireland in 1991, Darrow saw on the news that Gorbachev was under house arrest. She flew to Moscow, became a producer in the Moscow bureau, and stayed for five years.

In 1992, she covered the breakup of the Soviet Union with Christine Amanpour, another CNN correspondent. In the fall of 1992, when Yeltsin pushed Gorbachev out of his seat, she interviewed Gorbachev. During Christmas of that year, she was in Chechnya, chasing some hostages who had kidnapped a group of schoolchildren. In 1994, she was back in Chechnya, covering the guerrilla war. This was the turning point. Though she continued on to cover Northern Ireland and the Balkans, Israel and Albania, Chechnya was the point where Darrow lost her appetite for conflict.

“For some correspondents,” she writes, “the thrill and danger of war becomes an addiction. Perhaps being near death makes them feel more alive. In Chechnya, I felt the opposite,” she writes after a particularly gruesome day.

The bravest part of “Flirting With Danger” is not, in fact, the chilling accounts of front lines and shell-dodging for interviews. It’s Darrow’s willingness to admit that much of the time she had love on the brain. Love, the need for it, the disgust with it, excitement over it, consumed a downright human portion of Darrow’s overcrowded brain. Not enough, however, to get her to settle down with any of the guys she went out with.

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Least of all, Ted Turner, the boss, whom she met in Atlanta during her first weeks on the job at CNN and went out with a full 10 months before yelling uncle. One day, Turner had his secretary get Darrow on the line. “Have dinner with me,” he insisted. “I was shocked by the call,” Darrow writes, “and afraid to go out with him. Dating the boss is dangerous in any company. But Ted wouldn’t take no for an answer. I agreed to lunch.” Turner was 50 and between marriages (pre-Jane Fonda). Darrow was 29. It was, Darrow admits, a “full-time job being with him.”

“I worked hard,” she says, “and that was one of the reasons the relationship didn’t work, even if he was the boss.”

Symbolic of her new quietude, Darrow’s rich, wavy blond hair is firmly pulled back in a ponytail. She has been trying, with her husband, Shep Faison, a reporter for the New York Times, to have a baby.

“Women in my generation think they can have everything, but they can’t. I had front seats to history, but at age 30, I realized I had missed a lot. I’d been so busy telling everyone else’s story that I barely knew my own. Life had become a blur, my adrenal glands were permanently in the ‘on’ position. I wanted to have a family. When I couldn’t find the right man, I wanted to have a baby. I decided to sit still for a year or so. I took a leave of absence.”

Why did Darrow decide to settle in Los Angeles, as opposed to London--where she was based when she left CNN--or the East Coast--where most of her friends and family live? “I had no connection to L.A.,” she admits. “I was tired of the snow and rain and frankly, I wanted to be in a place where there would be very little intellectual stimulus!” Being dropped in L.A., she admits, was a little like being dropped in a village in the Balkans. She called everyone she’d ever heard of to find her apartment, full of warm reds and pinks and carpets and paintings.

Darrow is stunned by how hard it can be to have a baby. “This is my job now,” she says. “And it’s pretty much full time.” She urges every woman she knows not to sleepwalk through that period in which it is easiest to have children.

It wasn’t until Darrow, then 39, had left her job, moved to L.A. and begun shopping in catalogs for a sperm donor (she had even ordered the sperm!) that she received a mysterious e-mail from Faison, admitting that he had been drawn to her voice several years ago and had followed her stories and wanted to meet her. “It’s such a cliche but it’s true--that when you give up looking, finally, you meet someone. And I had given up! I’d bought the sperm! That’s not just pretending to give up!”

Darrow’s mother is described in the book as an elegant woman who grew up with many servants but ended up, after marrying Siobhan’s father and alienating her family, on food stamps. The electricity might get turned off in the houses she grew up in, but the table linens were always ironed. “The feeling of growing up an outsider is a great asset to a reporter. It helps to know what it’s like to be poor.”

Looking back, in the book and while we talk, Darrow remembers another lesson she learned at 15. Working at a Dunkin’ Donuts in New Jersey, Darrow met an older guy driving a van who invited her out one night and raped her. “I wasn’t there anymore,” she writes of her reaction to the rape.

“It took another decade to understand that that place I had disappeared to that day in the woods was the same place I went whenever I was sent to a war zone as a correspondent,” she says. “We all bring psychological baggage to every story we cover. I had to be shocked into valuing my own life.”