We're Going to Make You a Star

by Sally Quinn

We’re Going To Make You A Star Sally Quinn 1975. ISBN 0-671-22084-5. Library Of Congress Catalog Card Number 75-11932. First Edition. Rare. Simon And Schuster, New York. Hardcover With Dust Jacket. Printed In The United States.

Genres: Journalism, Memoir

256 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 1975

About the author

Sally Quinn is a longtime Washington Post journalist, columnist, television commentator, Washington insider, one of the capital’s legendary social hostesses, and founder of the religious website On Faith from The Washington Post. She writes for various publications and is the author of The Party: A Guide to Adventurous Entertaining, Regrets Only, Happy Endings, and We’re Going to Make You a Star, a memoir based on her experience as the first female network anchor in the United States. She lives in Washington, DC.

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sally Quinn had been a well-respected journalist for the Washington Post when broadcast television had the idea of luring her in to be their host for CBS Morning News. The time had come for women to present the news nationally. Barbara Walters led the other network and needed to be knocked off the air. CBS News didn't have much of a plan, and Quinn knew nothing about television. Through the memoir you get the sense that Quinn is a perfectionist whose whims give her style - exactly what it takes to be a good journalist if you are going to get the story.

The worst whim in her life, however, might have been taking this job. Soon she became a celebrity with the promotional push. A devastating New York magazine piece described her as - what else? - mean and bitchy and a woman who has slept her way to get to the top. A week prior to national television she still had no idea what she was doing since the promotion was important and the planning wasn't. In the early morning before she was to go on air she got violently ill and was rushed to the hospital after collapsing. Then an hour later she was rushed to the television set and broadcast live, with borderline pneumonia. The disastrous time of Quinn's appearance as co-host on CBS Morning News is detailed here with admirable candor.

The vacuousness social networking produces is obvious to everyone except those participating in it. Quinn's job as a journalist for the Washington Post Style section consisted of exactly that, detailing how networking creates power but in this case in Washington. Apparently everyone in the late 1960s and early 1970s were terrorized whenever Quinn would appear at one of their parties (her philosophy as a journalist was "let them hang themselves on their own rope"). If she didn't show up they were terrorized by the realization they weren't that important or worth considering. To point out the vacuousness everyone's need for each other produces is a lonely job; those like Sally Quinn have a lot in common with novelists like Flaubert.

What's really interesting about this book is how surprised Quinn is for being consistently misrepresented prior to going on-air, and how vicious the press could be once she was. The revenge of the mediocre against those who like to point out that they are will be with us until the end of time, and the knife-wielding used against Quinn is just one more instance of this. For someone who actually got physically sick for fear of failure before her first broadcast (it's hard not to relate to this - a million Americans watching is a hell of a lot of scrutiny), another remarkable feature of this book is how unflinching she is detailing every aspect of this failure. Unlike most memoirs this isn't to detail "the lessons I have learned"; Quinn instead places the onus on the shoddy journalism with which she was handled, the ways "the facts" used in any story are self-serving. The slander, in a way, was deserved. But Sally Quinn didn't deserve it. Everyone knows that television and accurate information do not go hand in hand. And yet here we are forty years later still believing it does. This little memoir is an excellent, early indictment of the vindictive, fragile values created by our world of social networking.

It is also an excellent study on how ad-libbing doesn't work on television. Reality television is not ad-libbing because the ratings will never depend on how well the participants speak (the concept of the show takes care of that). Ad-libbing is now a common feature on women-centered daytime programming. But are you really ad-libbing if you are performing in front of a crowd that already accepts you? I say you are not: there is no such thing as free-style if you have pre-selected your audience.

There is a clip up on YouTube of Sally Quinn's first appearance on CBS Morning News hours after being rushed to the hospital:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89Twx...
You can tell she is at unease but she doesn't appear like the nervous wreck she is. In the book she cites criticisms leveled against her refined, "Smith College" accent (which you can see best beginning at 2:10). It's one that the masses could never really warm up to, she was told. Whatever that accent entails, and it doesn't really exist anymore, I happen to find it very attractive, part of what makes studying educated women from the 1970s for me such a pleasure. They were my teachers and I love them for it.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read many years ago and enjoyed it.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quinn wrote this memoir about her disastrous stint as the host of CBS Morning News. It’s engaging and well-written, as you’d expect from Quinn. You can see the train wreck coming as you follow her in the lead-up to her first day on the job. You feel for her as things fall apart. The memoir parts are really good. But the real value in this is the inside-look at the world of network TV news in the 1970s.

Read this back-to-back with Katie Couric’s memoir. CBS chose both women to fill news jobs traditionally held by men (the Evening News for Couric) in an effort to boost ratings. Both women faced the same challenges thirty years apart. I thought this was a much better book.

First heard of this book from a NYT article (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/16/bo...) on the sexual harassment culture rampant at 60 Minutes due to Don Hewitt and Mike Wallace. Quinn brought light to this in this book, but the world wasn’t ready to listen in 1973.

Here is video of Quinn hosting on her first day - https://youtu.be/89TwxJg5wKY

Also I love this book cover!

[Hank Stuever · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in college, not long after I had spent a summer as a reporting intern in the Washington Post's Style section, many years after the events described in this book. But it's sort of a fascinating read for anyone remotely interested in what being a media celebrity might have felt like and looked like in the 1970s. Someone should have made a movie of it. (Someone still could!)

[Thom Dunn]

1975. {I remember one Sally Quinn gaff quite well. A stewardess had been blown out of an airplane at 30,000 feet (James Dickey, I believe, was later to write a poem about this sad event) and Hughes Rudd reported on it. Cut to commercial. When they came back on camera, Quinn was laughing, Rudd gave her a look, she said through giggles: "You didn't say what happened to her !")

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

More fun than Barbara Walter's Audition.

[Sandi]

Poor little Sally got the chance of a lifetime and blew it, stupidly and with great arrogance.

This is her revenge book, in which she admits to no stupidity and skewers everyone at her former network, where she bombed quickly as an early morning TV co-host.

Interesting book for those of us old enough to remember the fiasco, but should be read with a skeptical eye by those who don't remember her short-lived appearances.