METROPOLIS BEHOLD! CATHERINE THE GREAT ASCENDS TO CNN

July 7, 1988: Catherine Crier sits atop her wooden judge’s bench, orchestrating yet another civil trial in the 162nd District Court. This is long before CNN. Long before Crier will grace the front page of USA Tbday and the fluffy back section of Time magazine. Long before her blonde head will be beamed across the country each weeknight at six.

This is just another humdrum morning at the Dallas County Courthouse, haggling over another simple, no-name case: a young Arkansas woman, an aspiring actress, had come to Dallas seeking work. She had rented a house in University Park-a house, it turned out, that had two side doors that did not lock. One night, when the woman was home sleeping, a man came through one of the doors and raped her. Now she is suing her landlords, claiming they knew about the faulty locks but never fixed them.

The rape victim, auburn-haired and freckled, takes the witness stand. As she begins to speak, her eyes fill with tears. At 5:30 in the morning she had felt someone on her bed. He had talked to her. He had put a knife to her throat. He had pulled down his pants. It had tasted, she recalls tearfully, like a dirty toilet.

The room is still. Jurors lean forward in their chairs, intent on catching every word. The witness’s sister, sitting in the back of the room, dabs her eyes with a tissue. Then suddenly, there is a noise. It is a strange noise. A slightly grating noise. A sound like sandpaper against wood, only more intimate, less frenetic. It is a bizarre noise, a noise in no way related to the workings of a courtroom. Or the testimony of a traumatized woman.

Heads turn, including mine. The noise is coming from the front of the room. It is coming from the judge. It is Catherine Crier. Filing her nails on the bench.

Later in the day, after lunch, the young woman’s testimony went on. Judge Crier continued with her manicure. The bottle of red nail polish, hidden by the high bench, could not be seen. Only the steady, stroking movements of the hands, the sharp, antiseptic smell wafting toward the back of the room, and the post-adjournment flash of new, gaily painted nails would give Her Honorable away.

And so the obvious question: what kind of judge would give herself a manicure on the bench? What kind of judge-or human being, for that matter-would scrape away at her fingernails during a young woman’s tearful description of a rape?

A future television anchorwoman, perhaps.

But that’s too simple. Before she was an anchorwoman, Catherine Crier was a judge. And before she was a judge, she was a lawyer in a tony downtown law firm. And before she was a tony-in-training, she was an assistant district attorney. And before she was an assistant district attorney, she was a law student, a Tri-Delta at UT Austin, and a part-time model. and before that she was a rich little girl from Dallas’s high society.

Any two or three of which could lead to inappropriate, eccentric, egregious, egoma-niacal behavior.

Behavior that Crier denies exhibiting. “Well, I don’t have any recollection of filing my nails on the bench,” she says. “Geez.” (A heavy sigh.) “I don’t have any comment. I mean, I don’t remember filing my nails on the bench.”

But there are other examples of runaway ego, patrician insensitivity.

Such as: during the week of June 26, 1989, Harold Taft, Channel 5 meteorologist by evening, expert witness by day, testified in a trial in Crier’s court. He had been hired by the defense to describe the force of gale-like winds that had ripped the roof off The Dallas Morning News’s Piano printing plant. Damages and court costs could have amounted to more than $500,000. Taft took the witness stand. He began to speak. Several feet away, Judge Crier began sawing away at her fingernails. Taft doesn’t remember it: “I really wasn’t even aware of it,” he says. In fact, he adds, he can’t even remember being in Crier’s court. Crier doesn’t remember the incident, either.

But someone on Crier’s staff was in court that day and remembers it clearly. Remembers cringing. Remembers going up to the judge during a break in the proceedings and telling the judge that her behavior was not appropriate-especially in front of someone as well known as Harold Taft. Crier had shrugged it off. “She was too into herself,” the staffer recalls. “She always thought she was better than everybody else.”



ASK PEOPLE WHO KNOW CRIER TO DE-scribe her, and most will begin with the same two adjectives; beautiful and brilliant. Beyond that, 35-year-old Catherine Crier is a real crapshoot.

Tough, they say. Aloof. Funny. Insecure. Ambitious. Self-centered. Caring. Sensitive. Driven. Sexy. Raunchy. Very private.

A tease. A scorpion. An egomaniac. A clotheshorse. A man’s woman. The Barbie of the courthouse.

“She’s complex,” says her friend, State District Judge Anne Packer. “Absolutely.”

Which, in my book, is a nice way of saying, “Sure, she’ll rip your throat out. But then she’ll gift-wrap it for you.”

Good friends like Packer-and there are a handful of them in Dallas-are slavishly loyal to Catherine Crier. They dismiss their friend’s alleged eccentricities, attributing them largely to the pressures of being a young, beautiful, single woman grappling with tremendous success, insidious jealousy from other women, and constant come-ons from men (who inevitably get shot down).

Add to that-if you can believe it-the fact that Crier, according to one close friend, is basically insecure. “She’s one of the nicest, most insecure people you’ll ever meet,” says Dallas lawyer Cheryl Jerome. “She thinks she’s ugly. She doesn’t know how she ever did modeling. She doesn’t think she’s bright. . .She has this bizarre view of herself, but I don’t know where it comes from.”

Some say it comes from the fact that Crier was plump and homely as a kid, not popular in school and wed only to her horses. She also, according to friends, has a difficult relationship with her mother, though she is close to her father. The result, people say, is a woman who is obsessive about how she looks and who is very much focused on, not METROPOLIS to mention eager to please and impress, the men around her.

Though Crier’s friends say she is a romantic who dreams of finding “Mr. Right across a crowded room,” love hasn’t been her strong suit so far.

In law school, she met and later married a fellow student named Michael Barrett. He was 11 years her senior and a head shorter than she, but friends agree that Crier “was crazy about him.” After a few years at the district attorney’s office, she joined his law firm, Riddle & Brown, where he was a partner. Then she ran for judge in 1984-supposedly with Barrett’s urging and a huge wad of his firm’s money-and the marriage began to suffer. After a long period, during which both grieved, she left him. They divorced after nine years of marriage.

Today, Michael Barrett is remarried and Crier is dating a Dallas real estate man named John D. Ward. “He adores her, and she adores him,” Packer says. “They play golf together-that’s her new sport-but I don’t think she’s interested in getting married right now.”

What she is interested in is becoming a fabulous television star. In a whirlwind move. Crier tossed off her robe in late September, packed up her leased apartment at The Beverly on Turtle Creek Boulevard, gathered up her fall wardrobe from The Gazebo (her favorite place to shop), and flew off to Atlanta. All she left back in Dallas was her Great Dane Bailey, her horse Beau, her 1988 baby blue Cadillac, and a $636.72 Neiman’s bill.



ACCORDING TO FRIEND AND FOE, CRIER was ready to get out of the courthouse months before she ran for reelection in 1988. She was bored. She was restless. As far as she was concerned, they say, she had mastered being a judge. She had done it.

Lawyers found themselves scrambling to find other judges to sign temporary restraining orders because Crier was nowhere to be found. Staff members found themselves picking up her slack. She didn’t attend judges’ meetings. She was known to run to The Gazebo at lunch.

Crier bristles at the criticisms. True, she says, she doesn’t think she would have run for a third term. False, she says, she wasn’t bored during her second term-she just had different ideas than some as to what her job was all about. “I perhaps did not find myself as active in the judicial meetings, not because of any displeasure with the bench, but because I felt sometimes that my time was better spent with my court than the focus of those meetings.” She was out of the courthouse a lot, true, but virtually all her free time was spent teaching legal seminars and making speeches.

Still, she says, she had been thinking about what else she wanted to do. Then, last Christmas, she met a San Francisco-based agent. Jack Hubbard, formerly the head of recruiting for CBS News, through a mutual friend. “As a result, getting to know me and the things I was interested in, he was curious as to whether I would consider a change of career,” Crier says. “I thought it was very intriguing.”

They made an audition tape, and Hubbard started hawking it. Buena Vista Productions, a division of the Walt Disney Co., and CNN were both interested. Disney had several new shows in development, including a legal affairs talk show, and was interested in Crier for any one of them. It had also considered her for a spot at its Los Angeles station, KHJ. Serious negotiations began. But there were sticking points-one of which was that Disney wanted an eight-year commitment. Crier says she wasn’t ready for that.

“CNN had not come through with a decision to make me an offer when I was talking with Disney,” Crier says. “So when CNN did come through, I was very excited. And very pleased.”

The deal she and CNN finally agreed on and signed, Crier says, was a three-year commitment to be an anchor/correspondent, with a number of feature assignments required of her, for an annual salary that is less than six figures.

Despite the rumors that have dogged Crier since she walked away from her $87,250-a-year judgeship, this was no quarter-mill ion-dollar deal. “Think of the money!” someone close to her, who believed the rumors, said to her shortly after she resigned. “No, think of the acclaim!” Crier replied.

Getting that acclaim is, finally, what Catherine Crier is all about. Not three full days into her new job as an anchorwoman. it was not her stiff performance or her shallow knowledge of the business or her allegedly cool relationship with Bernard Shaw that was giving Crier concern. It was the fact that reporters back in Dallas were not fawning over her performance. The day after The Dallas Morning News rated her a “flat C” on opening night, Crier had not only read the review, she was obsessed with it.

“When I talked to her on the phone yesterday, what she was mostly concerned with was the press she was getting in Dallas,” says her friend Anne Packer. “She told me, ’I’m getting great press in Philadelphia and Los Angeles-they’re saying in another month, I’ll be another Diane Sawyer’ So what’s with Dallas?”

Maybe Dallas sees what a local psychic once saw in her. While she was still a judge. Crier called upon a psychic to see what the future held for her. Though the psychic tried and tried to get a handle on her-falling into his obligatory trance, trying to “track her.” as they say-he came up blank. He saw nothing, absolutely nothing, in her future.

“Sometimes people connect and some times they don’t,” Crier recalls the psychic telling her. “I just don’t feel anything. I just can’t read anything” Crier laughs the ex perience off: “I was in and out of there in two minutes,” she says. But maybe the psychic was right on the money. Maybe, just maybe, there’s nothing in Catherine Crier worth connecting with.