No One Dodges Lisa

When NBC and CBS finally get around to starring women on their hard news shows, they will find competition already waiting for them. This fall 37-year-old Lisa Howard has become television's first and only woman with her own network news program. It is short (five minutes) and in housewives' time (2:55 p.m.), but it is all Lisa's.

Lisa has achieved this distinction by scrambling harder than six monkeys peeling the same banana. One night last week, she taped interviews with 1) Adlai Stevenson, 2) the suddenly unemployed employees at the New York Mirror, and 3) Dr. Benjamin Spock--all within three hours, dragging mobile cameramen behind her by their sagging tongues. Next day she trapped the Russian Cosmonauts under the stars at Hayden Planetarium.

This is the sort of thing she has long been famous for among TV and radio reporters. Political leaders, domestic and foreign, have learned that there is no dodging Lisa Howard. Once when Nelson Rockefeller was seeing absolutely no one from the press, Lisa caught him coming out of a conference room. Rocky saw her and dived down a staircase. Lisa, outweighed but more nimble, sprinted downstairs, too, planted herself in front of him and got her interview.

Fidel Fell. When Mme. Nhu arrived in the U.S., ABC was first with a TV interview with her--because Lisa Howard had leaped on a plane and flown to Paris to talk to her there, getting the jump on reporters back home. She has a longstanding relationship with Nikita Khrushchev. It began when Khrushchev first came to the U.N. in 1960. Lisa, then working for the Mutual Broadcasting System, hung around the Russian embassy until Khrushchev emerged, batted her eyes at him, and charmed him into agreeing to an interview. Later at the U.N., while Khrush was fixing that loose heel on his right shoe, Lisa was talking her way onto the Assembly floor. When the session ended, she cornered Khrushchev. He shrugged, took her downstairs, and taped a recorded interview with her that lasted one hour and 48 minutes. People often shrug and acquiesce when attacked by Lisa; it seems the easiest way out.

Lisa's next target was Fidel Castro. For nearly a year she wrote to him through neutral embassies, slipped a letter to Fidel into the hands of Anastas Mikoyan, and persuaded miscellaneous ministers and ambassadors to ask Castro to see her. Finally her friend Alex Quaison-Sackey, Ghanaian Ambassador to Cuba and the U.N., helped get Lisa a visa. She stayed in Cuba four weeks, kept pelleting Castro with the pleas of her contacts. Castro succumbed, spent eight hours talking privately with her, and recorded a 40-minute interview after that.

Sex or Sense? Lisa operates professionally with all the canvasbacked insensitivity of the trained newshound, but personally she is as sensitive as a gouty toe. She suspects darkly that newsmen want to write her off as a pushy Clairol blonde who forges forward by making more sex than sense, and because she was once an actress in TV's daytime serial The Edge of Night. But she insists that she was a student of politics long before she began to act, cites articles she contributed to liberal magazines like Progressive World when she was 22, and notes that she is a longstanding member of the Lexington Democratic Club in Manhattan. She was proposed as a candidate for the New York state legislature in 1960. She is married and has two daughters, one teenaged.

She will reluctantly admit that being a woman does help at times. When the Shah of Iran visited the U.S., Lisa was the only TV reporter to interview him. "I just walked up to him, took him by the hand, and sat him down on a couch," she reports.

Think what the Shah of Iran might have done if NBC's Chet Huntley had tried to take him by the hand.

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