GOLDEN GIRL: The Story of Jessica Savitch

by Manna Nash ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 28, 1988

Biographer Nash (Dolly) presents a well-researched life and death of the NBC-TV correspondent as a cautionary tale about the American Dream: a pockmarked, broken-nosed, flat-chested, fatherless girl with a lisp becomes a sex sex symbol, women's role model, and media goddess, but behind the image is a compulsive overachiever, driven and destroyed by ambition, drugs, and neurotic dependency. While Gwenda Blair in her excellent Almost Golden (p. 419) showed Savitch as a victim of the network news machine, Nash's more personal, extremely unflattering portrait reveals a woman in trouble long before the NBC days. Savitch perceived her father's death (when she was 12) as abandonment; her desperate need for acclaim was linked to her pushy grandmother. Her college years were a record of frenzied accomplishment, with periods of exhaustion and nervous breakdown. From her first on-camera news job in Houston, Savitch seemed to have been obsessed with gaining national celebrity rather than professional competence; her personal life was already in disarray with drugs and a physically violent love affair (precursors to two brief marriages and cocaine addiction). Later, as a local anchor in Philadelphia, Savitch caught the eye of NBC, hungry for female talent; she moved to the network before she was 30, ballyhooed as a ""golden girl."" Nash accepts the overblown and manufactured image of Savitch, calling her ""a mesmerizing blonde. . .who illuminated the network airwaves. . .like no one before or since,"" while disclosing that news insiders considered her demanding, erratic, unskilled, almost unusable. On October 3, 1983, Savitch appeared on the air in a Percodan stupor and tell apart on national TV; by the end of the month, she was dead in a freak car accident. As a celebrity dirty-linen exposÉ, this has enough material to keep fans of the genre fascinated and appalled, but the material begs for interpretation that goes byhond the accumulation of sordid details and the uncritical repetition of media hype.

Pub Date: Sept. 28, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION