Journalist Connie Chung, who spent time at NBC, CBS, NBC, and CNN during her career, opened up about her experiences with Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer this week. She compared working with Sawyer and Walters at ABC to what Tanya Harding did to Nancy Kerrigan. She also said she got the “evil eye” from filmmaker Susanne Bier when she filmed a cameo on HBO’s The Undoing.
In a new episode of Andrew Goldman’s The Originals podcast for Los Angeles Magazine, Chung said she thought working with Sawyer and Walters at ABC would be fantastic after her experience at CBS Evening News. “When I went to ABC news, I joined with both Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer there and I thought, ‘Oh, this is going to be great. It’ll be three women who get along,’” Chung, 74, told Goldman, reports Page Six. Unfortunately, the situation was “not unlike what Tonya Harding did to Nancy Kerrigan,” Chung recalled.
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“When I got to ABC, both Diane and Barbara were in the same sort of arena of trying to get these big interviews,” Chung said. “So when I tried to go after them, I was told I could not. That Barbara and Diane were the only ones who could compete for the interview and I had to stand down. And I said, ‘Really?’” She said she upset ABC News executives after she got a 2001 interview with Rep. Gary Condit after intern Chandra Levy’s disappearance.
“Barbara paved the way for every female journalist that came after her. She has been a tremendous supporter for all women,” a representative for Walters, 91, told TMZ.
Chung also discussed her experience with Letterman, as she was a frequent guest on his show. “Off the air, he’s dark … he’s a dark, unhappy sort of, I don’t mean he’s unhappy. He is a kvetch. He’s a goyishe kvetch,” Chung said of the comedian. “He’s anti-social is what he is.”
The former journalist, who left the business in 2006, said she did not have a great experience with Hugh Grant while filming a scene for The Undoing. She told him to fix his tie and was about to give him a tip on how to look good on television when Grant asked, “Now what?” At that pint, Bier gave her the “evil eye.”
Grant “was not very friendly,” Chung said. “I had interviewed him right after Four Weddings and a Funeral for his next movie. So when I saw him, I said, ‘Oh, hi. I interviewed you … do you remember?’ And he said, ‘No.’ So, I went, ‘OK’… I figured he was getting into his acting zone, whatever that is.”
Chung began her career at CBS Evening News in the 1970s. After spending part of the 1980s with NBC News, she returned to CBS, where she co-anchored CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. He was “very Texas gentlemanly,” she told Goldman. “If I turned my back, I felt like I might be in a scene of Psycho in the shower.”
