March 28, 2024

From Christine Quinn, a Memoir More Personal Than Political

In college, schoolwork was not a priority. “I didn’t really care about the classes,” Ms. Quinn writes, adding, “I am also an unbelievably slow reader, who has to read things a couple of times to digest them.”

And she offers this frank assessment of her physique, courtesy of her gruff but caring father, Lawrence Quinn: “You’re big-boned. You would have been good back in Ireland in the fields flipping sheep.”

In an affecting but carefully assembled 240-page memoir, Ms. Quinn, the City Council speaker and a Democrat, offers a breezy, confessional and sometimes opaque look at her transformation from middle-class Long Island daughter to front-runner for mayor of New York City.

She recounts being called a homophobic slur in middle school and feeling too “frightened and upset” to tell her family. She discusses the guilt she still carries from her teenage years, when her mother died of cancer. “I have not totally gotten over the sense that when things are going bad, it’s my fault and mine alone,” she writes.

But Ms. Quinn’s candor about her personal life is as notable as her vagueness about politics. There is not a single reference to the slush-fund scandal that has been her lowest point as speaker. She says little about her relationship with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whom she calls “my colleague.” The battle over term limits is disposed of in two pages, while thousands of words are devoted to her wedding last year.

The memoir, titled “With Patience and Fortitude,” after the twin marble lions at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue, is to be released in June, three months before the Democratic primary for mayor; a copy was obtained by The New York Times. A common accouterment of high-profile political campaigns, the book is a sign of the national interest Ms. Quinn has attracted — and some rivals have begrudged — as she vies to become the city’s first female and first openly gay mayor.

Ms. Quinn, who wrote the memoir with Eric Marcus, whose other credits include an autobiography of Greg Louganis, had to juggle finishing the manuscript with her responsibilities as Council speaker and mayoral candidate. The book, a slim hardcover with a larger-than-average font, is being released a month later than first announced.

Flashes of Ms. Quinn’s humor appear throughout. She cites “Downton Abbey” to describe her grandmother’s work as a maidservant. Running a political campaign meant keeping “a zillion balls in the air at once.” When she began dating her future wife, Kim M. Catullo, she notes: “Things with Kim moved crazy fast. It was like the old joke: What do lesbians bring on a second date? A U-Haul.”

Still, much of the prose can be flat and unadorned, and some passages offer curiously little insight. On why she chose a career in government: “I really like being with people and doing things with them, and it has always made me feel good to get things done.”

On the therapeutic benefits of horseback riding, which Ms. Quinn describes as “the activity that sustained me” as a teenager: “If you have ever looked into the eyes of a horse, you know what I mean. Sadness and kindness flow from them.”

Ms. Quinn does not discuss why, as speaker, she supported overturning the term-limits law and allowing Mr. Bloomberg to run for re-election in 2009. “I struggled to balance what was best for him, for the city, for the City Council and for me personally,” she writes. The experience “was tough, but on reflection I have no regrets about my decision.”

The book is more revealing when it comes to Ms. Quinn’s relatives, many of them immigrants who arrived poor in New York City from Ireland and later struggled with alcoholism. She recalls an early lesson in gun control from her grandmother, who confiscated pistols from their relatives in the Police Department at family gatherings. “At the end of the evening,” Ms. Quinn writes, “she would decide who was sober enough to get their gun back.”

She writes with frankness and empathy about her father’s reticence and the pain of her mother’s cancer. “Just thinking about all her sorrows makes me sad for her,” Ms. Quinn writes. “I really doubt I would have become the first woman — or the first L.G.B.T. person — to be elected speaker if I hadn’t been driven by a leftover sense of guilt and responsibility for my mother’s illnesses and absences.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/nyregion/from-christine-quinn-a-memoir-more-personal-than-political.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Advertising: ‘Today’ Show Anchor Lauer Jokes About Low Ratings

But the first upfront presentation by the new NBCUniversal News Group, at a luncheon at the New York Public Library on Thursday, put on a happy face, making light of problems and playing up strengths.

Toward the end of the presentation, Matt Lauer, the co-anchor of “Today” whose tenure has been the subject of news coverage this week, strode out on stage with his co-anchor, Savannah Guthrie.

“I would like to tackle a teeny white elephant in the room,” Mr. Lauer said as many of the 400 people in the audience leaned in. “We hate being the news.”

“From the bottom of my heart, I promise to spend all my time and energy the next several weeks and months trying to keep Savannah out of the headlines,” Mr. Lauer said. His jocular remark drew appreciative laughter.

“But you said all press is good press,” Ms. Guthrie said. Mr. Lauer replied, “Yeah, that didn’t work out.”

More seriously, Mr. Lauer said, “We want to go back to being the most-watched morning program — and least talked-about morning program.”

Mr. Lauer also earned laughter from the agency executives in the audience for a remark he made at the end of the presentation, after a performance by Apollo Roberts, a sleight-of-hand artist known as the Gentleman Thief, in which he and Ms. Guthrie took part.

“You knew you were coming here to get your pockets picked,” Mr. Lauer said. “You just didn’t know it was literal.”

After the presentation, a reporter asked Mark Miller, executive vice president for advertising sales at the NBCUniversal News Group, part of the NBCUniversal division of Comcast, when executives had decided to address the “Today” situation in a lighthearted fashion rather than ignore it and whether they had been pleased with the positive response from the audience.

“I don’t think we want to make any comments on the record,” Mr. Miller replied, adding that he would be happy to provide them “once we talk to the press guys.”

Later, Megan Kopf, vice president for public relations for “Today,” answered in a statement the question asked of Mr. Miller.

“It’s no secret that the ‘Today’ show has been in the press recently,” Ms. Kopf said, “and we decided to bring it up in our own way.”

Ms. Guthrie, approached after the presentation, said: “Everything’s good. We’re hanging in. It’s better than the press would have you believe.” Mr. Lauer, with a smile, said his banter came “off the top of my head.”

Patricia Fili-Krushel, chairwoman at the NBCUniversal News Group, alluded to the “Today” situation in her opening remarks when she talked about “why the press is just so fascinated with us.”

Needless to say, she did not discuss how or why “Today” had fallen from first place in the morning show ratings race, nor did she talk about the search for a new president for NBC News to succeed Steve Capus, who resigned on Feb. 1. But she called “Today” “more than a television show” and lauded it has having “the most upscale audience on morning television.”

“We are really pleased with the direction it’s headed,” Ms. Fili-Krushel said.

She played up the benefits of advertising not only during “Today” on weekday mornings, but also on shows that run opposite “Today” on two other channels that are part of the NBCUniversal News Group: “Morning Joe” on MSNBC and “Squawk Box” on CNBC. Combined, the three have an audience of 43 million, Ms. Fili-Krushel said.

In addition to Ms. Fili-Krushel and Mr. Miller, the audience heard from Peter Naylor, executive vice president for ad sales at NBC News Digital, who discussed plans to bring back in the summer the msnbc.com Web address that disappeared in July 2012 at the end of a partnership between NBC News and Microsoft.

At that time, msnbc.com was renamed NBCNews.com; the MSNBC channel is now found at tv.msnbc.com. MSNBC will again have “online platforms and mobile platforms to call its very own” under the MSBNC.com rubric, Mr. Naylor said, adding that a redesign of NBCnews.com is scheduled for the fourth quarter.

And in keeping with the theme of talking up “Today,” Mr. Naylor said the show’s Web site, today.com, would be “getting a fully functioning digital studio” of its own, to be housed at Studio 1A at 30 Rockefeller Center.

“Today” was also represented on stage at the presentation by Willie Geist, Kathie Lee Gifford, Hoda Kotb and Al Roker. (Lest there be speculation about the absence of the show’s news reader, Natalie Morales, Mr. Lauer told the audience she was in Vatican City, covering the papal election.)

A phalanx of other NBCUniversal News Group anchors and reporters attended, among them Maria Bartiromo, Mika Brzezinski, Jim Cramer, David Gregory, Tyler Mathisen, Chris Matthews, Lawrence O’Donnell, Rebecca Quick, Carl Quintanilla, Joe Scarborough, Andrew Ross Sorkin (who also works for The New York Times), Alex Wagner and Brian Williams.

The NBCUniversal News Group presentation was the most recent entry on a lengthy list of upfront presentations — so named because they take place ahead of the coming fall television season — for 2013-14. Many presentations are taking place earlier than usual as networks and channels pull forward their annual efforts to draw ad dollars.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/business/media/today-show-anchor-lauer-jokes-about-low-ratings.html?partner=rss&emc=rss