Candidness of co-anchor working well on ‘Morning’
For Gayle King, being Oprah Winfrey’s best friend has its privileges — and some obligations.
One was alerting Winfrey to what was happening on television.
“They used to call me ‘Gayle King, Eyewitness News’ because I’d call and say, ‘Oprah, turn on the TV, O.J. is on the run,’” King said over lunch in Manhattan.
“She once said, ‘There’s this show ‘Friends’ — have you heard of it? They’re coming to me and asking if I want them on the show.’ I was always her touchstone for what was going on in the world.”
These days, 3.7 million others are getting updates from King, too — viewers who watch her on “CBS This Morning,” which is celebrating its fifth anniversary.
At 62, King has reached a new pinnacle in a fourdecade career — as a morning TV star alongside co-anchors Charlie Rose and Norah O’Donnell. She recently signed a lucrative long-term deal to remain with the program, which launched with the claim that “The News Is Back in the Morning.”
King’s willingness to speak her mind adds a what-willshe-say-next tension to the show, drawing people in.
“You watch her, and you can see there is no guile,” said Bryant Gumbel, host of “Real Sports” on HBO.
“Her edit button, like mine,
doesn’t work. My edit button doesn’t work in an acerbic way. Her edit button doesn’t work in a nice way. Sometimes she says things that make me laugh out loud. She’s a good person, and she has natural curiosity and natural enthusiasm.”
King, who hosted a talk show on Winfrey’s OWN network before joining CBS in 2011, said that TV work has long made her happy.
“I would say I’m having the best time of my life, but I was having a great time anchoring local news.”
Particularly gratifying is being on a set displaying the world map used on “CBS Evening News With Walter Cronkite,” the newscast her father watched.
“My dad died when I was a freshman in college,” she said, “and I do wish he could have seen that.”
King, a Maryland native who as a child lived in Turkey, where her father worked as an electronic engineer, has never let the TV
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business control her life. She was once asked by Winfrey to move to Chicago so she could be groomed to take over “The Oprah Winfrey Show” as the host toyed with leaving to pursue more acting roles.
Then an anchor for the CBS affiliate in Hartford, Connecticut, King turned down the opportunity because she wanted her two children to grow up near their father, whom King divorced in 1993.
Even though she stuck it out in Hartford, King’s long friendship with a powerful media icon such as Winfrey has given her a rarefied existence that made her well-known on the celebrity circuit even without being on television every day. Those connections, she said, haven’t altered her worldview.
“I have some fancy friends,” she said, “but I’m still a girl who likes a sale.”