Features: Rene Syler Is (Almost) Ready for Her Close-Up

Rene Syler Is (Almost) Ready for Her Close-Up

Rene Syler is having an awful hair day.
“Damn, damn, damn! The front’s not right! Damn it!” Standing in front of the makeup mirror, she takes a sip of coffee out of a Styrofoam cup and teases the back of her hair. “Years of doing it myself,” she says.

It’s the first day of Syler’s new job as one of the anchors of The Early Show on CBS. Not that it matters, but she is the first black woman to host a network morning show. And she wants her hair to be right. Sunrise is still a long way off, but Syler has been up for hours. She woke up at 3:45 a.m. in her room at the Plaza Hotel across the street, took a quick shower, slipped into her clothes from the day before, and crossed the thick, empty lanes of West 57th Street to Trump Tower. The security guard waved her in (after not recognizing her the day before, he wasn’t going to make that mistake again), and from there she made her way down the flight of steep, short steps to the basement level, where uncooperative hairdos—and, CBS hopes, a failing morning show—can be spun into magic.

On this particular morning, however, Syler’s hair simply will not behave. The show’s hairstylist, Kim Serratore, a lanky blonde in a pair of brown Seven corduroys, put too much oil on Syler’s naturally curly hair, which made it flat. And despite nearly two hours of blow-drying, Velcro curling, and flat-ironing, Syler’s short bob still won’t budge.

Syler sits back down in the chair in front of the makeup mirror, and Serratore teases the back with a skinny red comb and sprays. “Just shellac it,” Syler says, defeated.

Patrece Williams, The Early Show’s buoyant makeup artist, who works part-time as a comic, puts a mixture of two different shades of makeup onto Syler’s face. Then she applies eyeliner with a tiny brush. As Williams tweezes eyebrows, Syler skims the headlines of The New York Times and goes over the pink and green sheets of show changes that are stuffed into a manila folder on her lap.

At 5:22 a.m., Syler walks down the long hallway to her office, formerly a beige box, now a vibrant, botanical green. A week ago, she and a friend painted the walls, using sponges. “Other people read or get a massage to relax. I decorate,” she says. “I made that lamp myself. I bought the base at a consignment store, got the lampshade at Pottery Barn, and put the beads on with a glue gun.”

Newspapers and miscellaneous welcome gifts blanket her desktop—flowers and a handwritten letter from her co-anchor, Harry Smith, a Starbucks bear, and New York coffee mug. There are also six hard-boiled eggs in a plastic container and a piece of pound cake, wrapped in cellophane. Over the course of the morning, she’ll nibble away the egg whites and throw the yolks in the trash. She’ll also try the pound cake, but then hurl it in the wastebasket, too—not because she doesn’t like it, but because she does.

There is a rolling rack to the right of her desk, bloated with new skirts, jackets, blouses, and pants, most with tags still attached. “This is so different from anything I’ve done,” she says, slipping out of her black top, then searching through cardboard boxes sent from home for a black camisole. “I’d wake up in the morning—what do I feel like today? Now I’ve got people telling me what to wear.”

After finding the camisole—”Target!” she exclaims—Syler changes into her first day’s outfit: an Anne Klein, Pucci-inspired print blouse in fuchsia, black, and white; black pants; and pointy black boots from Banana Republic. She tears the price tags off with her teeth. “Nobody shops better than me,” she says. “These pants? Thirty-nine dollars. I’m not cheap. I just like a good bargain.”

At 6:21 a.m., she goes upstairs to The Early Show studio, on street level. Syler takes her seat in a tall swivel chair at the far end of the opening “news desk”—a V-shaped table made of frosted-green glass and steel that looks like it was ordered from Ikea.

“Oooh, I need a cup of coffee,” Syler says to no one in particular. “Hannah Banana,” she says to Hannah Storm, another co-anchor seated next to her, going over copy. Syler yawns and clears her throat loudly. Storm chews a thick wad of gum. Julie Chen, yet another anchor, tries to find someone to get the stain out of her purple jacket. Syler clears her throat again. Williams applies more gloss to Syler’s lips. “Doggone it!” she shouts, frustrated.

Hot water with lemon for Julie, please!
“I need a cough drop and some coffee,” Syler says. “Patrece, did you darken my mole?”
“Remove that mole,” Smith says.
“Harry, Mal-vo? Male-vo? Mal-VO?” Storm says.
Syler shakes hands with Chen. “Good luck,” she mouths.
“—shot down on the streets, Puerto Rican girls just dyyying to meet you,” Smith sings.
“Ah, where’s Kim?” Syler says. “I feel like I have the Frankenstein look today. Big, square head.”
Six minutes to air!
“Are we ready?!” Syler says, clapping her hands. “Harry? Kim, Kim, Kim, Kim! Help me with my square head.”
“It’s SpongeRene SquareHead,” Storm says, not looking up from her scripts.
“Is it a square head? Is it a rectangle? Is it a parallelogram?” Smith says, from his seat on the other end.
Four minutes!
Serratore steps in and pokes Syler’s hair with a comb again.
Clear of affiliates! Less than two minutes to air!
Syler stretches, exaggerating the movement, cartoon-like. She punches Tony, the stage manager, in the arm.
One minute! Let’s get through it!
Syler pulls at her shirt to get out the wrinkles. “Tony? My pillow?”
He brings her a pillow for her back.
“Here we go,” she whispers, punching her fists in the air.
It’s 7 a.m. Showtime.

Over the next 120 minutes,  the four co-anchors—handpicked by network execs for their ability to read news, ad-lib, and smile on cue—will attempt to resuscitate CBS’ terminally ill morning show, which has lagged behind the other two networks for as long as anyone can remember. Most recently, of course, was the mismatched pair of Bryant Gumbel and Jane Clayson. Everyone said that the pair lacked chemistry. Bryant was too arrogant; Jane was too bland. Viewers tuned out by the millions.

NBC has Katie and Matt, Al and Ann; ABC has the smart ones, Diane and Charlie. What could CBS do to regain some of its audience? Well, after The View’s Meredith Vieira turned them down, the network got an idea. What if, like The View, CBS had four anchors instead of two? Like The View, the new Early Show anchors could kibitz and spar over current news topics; also like The View, they could interview subjects in a group or in pairs. The other networks feature pull-from-the-crowd makeovers; CBS would do that, too. The View has designer fashions for less; so would the new CBS show. There would be segments outside, just like Today, where viewers could hold signs and be interviewed by roaming anchors. Of course, there would also be celebs, musicians, authors, and segments on health. Everybody else does. So would CBS.

Lagging so far behind the others, The Early Show faces a formidable challenge. Today, the biggest moneymaker in network television, is watched by more than 6 million people and earns more than $250 million a year; Good Morning America pulls in 4.6 million viewers and earns more than $100 million; The Early Show is watched by 2.6 million people and earns more than $40 million a year in profit. Besides the three network morning shows, viewers are tuning in to morning programs on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends and CNN’s American Morning with Paula Zahn.

Early Show executive producer Michael Bass says that his show is different. “I think it’s fun. It’s smart and fun. I think we have a great combination of smart and fun.”

But the secret sauce of morning TV is something much more mysterious than intelligence and merriment. It’s also the element that The Early Show had been lacking and all of the others had in abundance.

“Everybody says, ’Chemistry, chemistry, chemistry,’” Syler says. “But you’re not going to know if you have chemistry unless you spend time together.”

But they didn’t spend any time together. There were no tryouts. No focus groups were brought in. Instead, the anchors were hired then introduced to each other at a promotional photo shoot just two weeks before they were to go on the air.

“We’re supposed to play nice and smile and act like we’ve known each other,” Syler says. “But you know, it went swimmingly! If we had any more chemistry, then we would have spontaneously combusted!”

Indeed, the four seem to be, at this point anyway, completely besotted with one another. Smith says that Syler is stunning. “She is no shrinking violet,” he says, “nobody’s wallflower. I can’t tell you how impressed I’ve been.” Chen says, “I don’t know if it’s her natural energy, but she’s so excited and vibrant and so, you know, like, positive.” Storm says, “From day one, it’s like she’s been doing network TV her whole life.”

The Early Show’s deliberate effort at political correctness is hard to miss. There’s veteran newsman Harry Smith, 51, who hosted the CBS morning show once before but who’s better known these days for his A&E series Biography. Hannah Storm, 40, is a former sportscaster for NBC and a mother of three. Former The Early Show newsreader Julie Chen is the show’s ingénue and only on-camera holdover from the previous incarnation. At 32, Chen is the youngest of the foursome, and she also hosts CBS’ Big Brother. Rene Syler, 39, is the only host without any previous network experience. The four anchors will switch places each day to reinforce a “team” aspect of the show and downplay any hierarchy.

“Syler’s comfortable with the camera, she’s very attractive, she’s very quick, and she has great personality,” says Bass, the show’s producer. And Syler, unlike the others, is black. “Oh, yes, obviously,” he says. “One of our goals in putting together this foursome was to have people be diverse in terms of background and life experience, and obviously that covers a lot of things. It covers ethnic background. It covers where you’re from.”  

Rene Syler was born on February 17, 1963, the oldest of two girls, and raised in a predominantly white, middle-class suburb in Sacramento, California. Her father worked for the Social Security Administration; her mother had a part-time job as a teacher’s aide for troubled students. In high school, Syler was a B student, ran track, and worked afternoons at Del Taco. She didn’t date and never went to a homecoming dance or prom. She says, “I’d go home at night, crying and wishing that I was popular and part of the ’in’ crowd.”

At California State University at Sacramento, Syler majored in psychology and worked her way through school by waitressing at T.G.I. Friday’s. After she received her bachelor’s degree in 1987, she enrolled in the school’s master’s program, planning to focus on abnormal psychology and work in a mental hospital. Part of the program required her to work the phones at the suicide prevention center. One night she was reading, trying to stay awake for her midnight-to-7 a.m. shift, and she saw an article about Liz Walker, who was the highest-paid black anchorwoman in the country at the time. “I thought, ’That’s what I wanted to do,’” she says. “’I’ve always been good at English. This is for me.’”

And so, with no prior interest or experience in journalism, Syler set her sights on a career in the highly competitive field of television news. Just like that.

“This is the kind of person I am,” Syler says. “This is a thumbnail sketch of me. The next day, I called an African-American woman who did weather at one of the Sacramento stations. I said, ’My name’s Rene Syler, and I’m interested in getting into television. What do I need to do?’ She said, ’Get on as an intern at a TV station, make yourself a resume tape, get a job. In that order.’”

Syler immediately dropped out of the master’s program, signed up for an introduction to broadcasting and writing class at a Sacramento junior college, and got an internship at a local station in the production department. She spent most of her time learning to operate the camera and run the teleprompter for the anchors. On the weekends, when she wasn’t working at T.G.I. Friday’s, she’d go in to the station, rip wire copy, practice writing stories, and go out with photographers that needed a reporter. “I just devoured everything about it,” she says. “It’s all I could picture myself doing. All of the pieces just went click, click, click, click.”

After six months, she got a job at the CBS affiliate in Reno, Nevada, for $15,000 a year as a reporter and weekend anchor. She covered crafts fairs and Lions Club events, but just one month later, Syler was lured to the rival station across the street by the news director, who upped her salary by $10,000. She was 25.

Less than a year later, Syler took a job in Birmingham as weekend anchor for WVTM-TV, the ABC affiliate. She was the only black person on local television. “When I got there,” she says, “the first story to break was the Shoal Creek Country Club story, the country club that wouldn’t allow black members. And I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach—what have I done by moving here?”

In 1992, just before her two-year contract was about to expire in Birmingham, Syler met WFAA-TV Channel 8 news anchor John McCaa at a National Association of Black Journalists convention. McCaa took a tape back to executive news director Marty Haag. After meeting with Haag, Syler was hired as the new morning anchor, and eventually she anchored the noon newscast, too. Breaking into a top-10 market, Syler felt that she had made it. Plus, after moving to Dallas, she met Channel 8’s station manager, Buff Parham, and the two became friends. Eighteen months later, they were married. She stayed at Channel 8 until 1995. When her contract expired, she wanted a better time slot; Channel 8 chose not to renew her contract. After taking a year off to have her daughter, she moved to KTVT-TV Channel 11 in 1997, where she was the noon and 5 p.m. anchor and eventually the noon and 6.

Last spring, everything appeared to be falling into place. She had just moved into the 5,500-square-foot house in Southlake that she and Parham had carefully designed themselves—down to the light fixtures and burgundy stain for the concrete floors. Her schedule, 9:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., allowed her to spend evenings with her husband, who loves to cook gourmet meals, and their children, 6-year-old daughter Casey and 4-year-old son Cole.

It was, for a working mom in the broadcast business, about as good as it gets. According to Steve Pickett, a reporter at Channel 11, “You may find somebody that doesn’t like her, but I don’t know any. She doesn’t have the ego that some people have in this business.”  

Syler says that she wasn’t looking for a job, but that didn’t stop her agent. “One morning,” she recalls, “after spending a couple of hours in the dental chair, I get a call from my agent, who said that he sent an e-mail to Andrew Heyward, CBS news president, who was looking for a new anchor for the CBS morning show. I said, ’No! I just bought a house!’ He said, ’Rene, just follow this through to the logical conclusion.’ So he sent a tape over. It was a tape of a cooking show, and I don’t cook! It was like mirth and mayhem! I had a fire extinguisher! It was one of these crazy sort of tapes. It was not a news tape. They said, ’Wow, I’d like to see her anchor.’ So they watched the 6 p.m. news on satellite that night.”

The next week, CBS flew Syler to New York for an interview. In a hot, stuffy room, she met with five executives who wanted to know what she watched on television. “Cartoon Network,” she told them. “And Nick Jr., because it’s a Viacom product. [Viacom owns CBS.] I told them stories about my children. My son, who’s 4, is on a soccer team and will not kick the ball! I’m like, ’Would you please kick the ball?!’

“I said, ’What you see is what you get with me. I’m not particularly glamorous or graceful. I’m a geek. I’m not a girly girl. I’m a former jock. I’m loud and obnoxious. So if you’re looking for someone who is quiet and beautiful, that’s not me.’

“Besides,” she says, “I had a job. I had a good job. It wasn’t like if I hadn’t gotten the job, it would be the end of the world.” She didn’t hear anything for a week. Then another week passed.

Then, suddenly, she was summoned to meet with Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS. “I did the noon news that day, ran out of there, and went to Ann Taylor,” she says. “I bought this black suit with a red power blouse and went to the airport.”

Syler met with Moonves in New York the next morning. “He said, ’Are you ready for this?’ At first, I was like, ’No, no, no.’ Then I realized this would be a lot of fun. The whole idea of divorcing myself from the teleprompter and not being so straight news would light me on fire! We talked about morning TV and what the mission is here—that the morning-show wars are serious, and CBS wants to be a player.”

Less than a week later, with a three-year contract in hand, Syler was back in New York, smiling for pictures with people she’d never met. Then, it was back to Dallas. And later that same week, back to New York for a week of rehearsals. It would be like this for months to come. Five days in New York and two at home, in Dallas. Although she was given a travel budget, to save money, she would fly coach. Her husband of nine years and two children would stay behind. For the first eight months, Syler will live in a 784-square-foot, $3,700-per-month furnished apartment.

Syler says that she still isn’t sure exactly why they hired her. “People ask me that all the time. I have no idea,” she says. “I don’t know what they were looking for, but I suspect they were looking for someone like me. I think maybe I got the interview because I was black, but I think the total package is what sold them.”

Then, after a second or two, she says about herself, “Here’s someone who can hold her own with other people—and remember the key here is demo, 25 to 54—a mother, and black, which I think was an added bonus. She’s smart, she’s witty, she’s funny, mother, team player.”

 Harry, you’re on camera one.  Julie, you’re on camera two. Hannah is on camera three. Rene is on camera four.

“Let’s put this baby in the can and make America a better place to live!” Smith says.

And so it begins. At the top of the first day’s show, each one of the anchors alternates reading news stories—there is no newsreader—and pitches to the local affiliates for the weather. There is also no Al Roker. In the first hour, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani hawks his new book and pretends to be one of the new Early Show anchors—if only!—urging viewers to stay tuned for an upcoming makeover segment. In the View-ish, get-to-know-us portion of the show called “Early Line,” where the anchors chew over an important, current news topic for three entire minutes, Syler and Storm, both mothers of small children, disagree over whether they would send their children to school with a sniper on the loose. But the issue is irrelevant. The sniper suspects were caught the week before.

Then, in a painfully long segment outside, Chen and Storm interview a President Bush impersonator as if he is actually the president—then pretend to be surprised when they learn differently. After that, Storm and Syler talk to Everybody Loves Raymond stars Doris Roberts and Peter Boyle, who play Raymond’s parents, about parenting tips. It plays a bit odd, even to the accomplished actors. “Well, we knew you needed our help, so here we are,” Boyle says, underscoring the obvious.

The program hobbles on. By the show’s end, all four anchors are outside in the 40-degree weather, shaking hands with the scant crowd that has gathered for free Krispy Kreme donuts and Starbucks coffee. “Keep watching! Tell your friends! Everybody, come back tomorrow!” Syler says through chattering teeth, working the audience like a politician.

Four days later, after the anchors and production crew celebrate the first week of shows with pastries and champagne toasts, Syler takes a car to LaGuardia and catches a 12:02 p.m. flight to Dallas. The plane is late. She doesn’t get to pick up her children from school like she’d planned; instead, they meet her at the gate.

“The first week was hard. I was so lonely,” she says at home, barefoot and in faded jeans, a light blue t-shirt, and not one speck of makeup, curled up on a leather sofa in front of an oversized television illuminated with cartoons. Her daughter Casey sits beside her, reading a book aloud to herself. Her son Cole wiggles across the floor on his belly, causing her to laugh so hard that she snorts. It is not a TV laugh. “I thought that when I took the job it was going to be easier than it has been,” she says. “It’s going to be tough. When I’m home, sometimes I can’t help but be sad.”

She will catch a flight back to New York the next day.

“My hope is certainly that it works. If it doesn’t work, you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna deal with it,” she says, grabbing a handful of microwave popcorn. “It’s just TV. It’s not like I’m a brain surgeon. If I screw up, no one’s gonna die.”