SURVIVING THE NEWS WARS

At 20 minutes to midnight Wednesday, still feeling a charge of excitement from the day, the chief anchor--and managing editor--of Metromedia’s Channel 11 news walked briskly down the back steps of the station to her new snappy red Honda Prelude.

Suddenly, Marcia Brandwynne, virtually the only woman who holds that dual role in a major media market, knew what she was going to tell the Southern California chapter of American Women in Radio and Television, which honors her at a special luncheon today.

“When I started out in this business, they said a woman would never be a producer, would never run things. Never, never, never! But I’m bringing them with me,” Brandwynne said of her team, “the producer of the 8 o’clock (Debbie Biringer), the producer of the 11 o’clock (Alyce Luft) and the executive producer (Dana Milliken). . . . I’m going to point to them and say, ‘And now look.’ ”

And look at Brandwynne--the survivor.

After a most unceremonious firing 3 1/2 years ago by Channel 2, after all the speculation and innuendoes (from unnamed sources) that she didn’t quite fit the Southern California glamour-girl image, after two former agents said she would never make it to a network because, well, she’s “too ethnic,” Brandwynne has come back--she says so herself--”stronger.”

She has a new agent, Ed Hookstratten, whose roster includes Tom Brokaw and Bryant Gumbel; there is, on Hookstratten’s orders, a new hairdo that heart-shapes her face as well as a host of new blouses and jackets in hot pinks and other neon brights, instead of the drab earth tones she used to favor.

Now, she insists, even the lighting’s better. “I no longer look like an Iranian hostage. . . .”

At 42, Brandwynne, a thinking-person’s anchor, retains a sense of humor and a keen sense of herself--as well as a vision of the kind of news she wants (and doesn’t want) to present. “I don’t want car accidents on my news, I don’t want gratuitious violence. . . .” She readily reveals her age, but not her salary because “that starts a thing that makes for craziness, but it is ample . I could no more complain about salaries in this business,” said the Brooklyn-bred woman who had to work her way through San Francisco State over an eight-year period.

Now, a year and a half into her position at Metromedia, she maintains she’s relaxed. The other night she worried, is she too relaxed? Her fiance, Jud Taylor, a director of television movies (“Tailgunner Joe” about the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy; “Out of Darkness” about the Son of Sam serial murderer), had told her that “I didn’t have the kind of crisp energy that’s needed on the air . . . an actor’s edge.”

At his urging, Brandwynne looked at her tapes, breaking one of her “real rules. I don’t (usually) go look at myself,” she says, “because I never like what I see. I always think I don’t look very pretty. I always think my mouth moves funny. And I never want to inhibit myself from being natural.”

As it was, she had enough to worry about. Last week was the first week of the two half-hour newscasts--the 8 o’clock as well as the new 11 o’clock, designed to bracket a two-hour movie. Agreeing with her director’s critique, Brandwynne “decided to pull it (her energy level) up, to feel it from within.”

Brandwynne needn’t have worried. After more than a decade of anchoring, beginning at a small independent station in Oakland, going on to the ABC affiliate in San Francisco before coming to Los Angeles in 1979, she still speaks of “the edge of discomfort” that being on television brings, no matter how comfortable she gets physically in the anchor booth, even to the point of slipping off her shoes and reading barefoot.

“It’s not pleasant,” she explains. “It’s the fear of making a fool of yourself. The fear is, my own personal fear is, that my brain will simply stop operating, that I will go to sleep, or that my brain will simply leave me, and maybe I won’t speak English. If you’re looking into crazy fantasies, when you’re interviewing somebody to simply lose all notion of where you’re going, that’s the greatest fear, that you’re brain won’t snap-to when you need it to.

“I think that’s the mild discomfort that you’re on the edge of a little bit of danger when you’re on television.”

But don’t read her wrong. She will also tell you that she thinks she’s “interesting looking” with “lively eyes.” “You have to have a decent image of yourself, because esentially you’re looking into a black hole, and what comes back at you is really how you think people are looking at you, what they’re seeing. So essentially you have to feel they’re seeing something very valuable and very good and smart. . . .”

And Brandwynne loves her work. She relishes being a part of management, being in on all the meetings, having a voice in hirings, deciding who has “presence” and who doesn’t, and most important, setting priorities, overseeing producers, laying out the show. “I would never have taken this job,” Brandwynne says flatly, “without the ability to shape the news broadcast the way I think it ought to be shaped.”

While the firing in July, 1982, burned, it apparently left no lasting scars. Any firing is bad enough but when it is reputedly based on something so elusive--and personal--as presence, there is an extra burden. “I was worried that somehow I would fall into the depths of depression, and I was looking for it. . . .” She went to see a therapist she knew in San Francisco who assured her that while she would “suffer” and feel angry and a sense of loss, she would maintain her self-esteem.

She sold her Los Feliz house. “I was so frightened I would never get another job,” Brandwynne recalls. “It’s so frightening to get fired anyway, and when you’re your only support. . . .”

She went up to Canada where Taylor was filming, and wrote a 10-page treatment for a television series. Norman Lear, who was interested, entitled it “Good Evening, He Lied.”

“It was a real mash of the newsroom, a real parody on the newroom. It was real black humor,” Brandwynne says, “and I think it probably came out of my absolute anger. I was very, very angry because I didn’t understand a reason for it (the firing). I never found out a reason; nobody talked to me. I don’t know what got into me but when I started to write, it just came pouring out. . . .”

About nine months later, when her contract (and paycheck) ran out, she went to work for Lear. When Lear got sidetracked on another project, she left. In February, 1984, five months before Metromedia hired her, she became executive vice president of Carol Burnett’s movie production company. At the time she said she had no plans to return to television news.

“In an odd way, one of the really good things I learned about myself in the whole firing episode is that I did not need to be on television, that I didn’t need to have people recognize me, that I could pursue other avenues. And I went to Europe and I started taking piano lessons and I started taking French lessons, and I just decided that I wanted it to be a time where things were going in. “

Brandwynne, who still studies French privately with a UCLA professor, remembers the minutiae of the night she was fired. “The best story I have,” she says, humor now filtering the heartache. “I was invited to the opening of the Universal Ampitheatre. I was beside myself. I went. I think Frank Sinatra was opening it. And I had bought a wonderful dress, a white, beautiful, Jean Harlow dress; it was a show-business night, you get to see behind-the-scenes Hollywood, and I was excited to go, and I put on the dress and in the middle of my putting the makeup on to go, I started to cry and all the mascara went all over the dress. . . .”

“How do we pick the news?” asks Brandwynne. “Four, five weeks ago, I was speaking to Tony Cox (formerly of Channel 2 whom she recently persuaded to come over). I had read an editorial about ‘black English.’ It was very clear that there has got to be some way of teaching black children the language of trade and upward mobility. And I cut it out (and said), ‘I want to do a story on this.’ . . . Well, he went out, found the school where they are teaching, whatever you call it, regular English, and he just took off on the editorial, and three weeks later, four weeks later, there’s a whole bunch of stories on black English.

“And Tony says, ‘Hey, we beat ‘em.’ ”

The same sort of thing happened with a story on teen-age pregnancies after Brandwynne read an article in the scholarly Wilson Quarterly about teen-age pregnancies, and she assigned Saida Pagan to follow it up. “We did a five-part series; it was excellent. A month and a half later, Time magazine did a cover story. Now I can’t tell you what pleasure it gives me to come up with (an idea) that beat Time . . . to anticipate what the big stories are going to be.”

Besides shunning car accidents and other such violence in her newscast, Brandwynne also says she avoids “stories that don’t have meaning, a broader meaning. I don’t want self-aggrandizing news conferences on our news. If we’re gong to cover a news conference, it has to be a small part of a larger story which explains what the issue is. . . .

“People are tired,” she sighs, “of light features.”

Wednesday turned out to be a particularly fruitful night. The 11 p.m. broadcast led with the second toxic spill on the Ortega Highway. Metromedia’s reporter had gotten in before the police barricades went up. “All Channel 2 had were flares at the highway,” Brandwynne exulted afterward. “Channel 4 only had a map, and (Channel) 7 didn’t show.”

At first, Marcia Brandwynne (her real name) wanted to be a ballet dancer. She went to Manhattan’s “Fame-d” High School of Performing Arts and studied at the School of American Ballet. “I was skinny but at about 14 my body got in the way. They tried to switch me to modern dance, but I had it in my head I wanted to be Maria Tallchief. I even got a locker next to hers so I could sit and watch her and just smell her perfume. . . .”

At 16 she came to California to visit her older sister, Lois, who was studying at Mills College on a music scholarship (today she is a concert pianist and teaches music at UC Berkeley), and Brandwynne knew she would never go to Hunter College back home. Her childhood had not been particularly happy. Her father, who later remarried, was gone from home by the time she was 3. Nat Brandwynne was a bandleader who worked for years at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas; only when Marcia was living on the West Coast, and took up golf so she could play with him, did they become close. Her mother, Ruth Brandwynne, lives in Berkeley.

Brandwynne studied at UC Berkeley for about a year, but it was “too big, too impersonal,” and switched to San Francisco State, majoring in psychology. “Like other psychology majors, I wanted to find out what made me tick.” But she was also interested in foreign affairs and politics. “I must have had 35 different jobs working my way through college,” she recalls, noting that when she got a job at a radio station (as a secretary) she took to it like a duck to water.

Brandwynne, who has taught television news at the USC School of Journalism, likes to tell her students to “follow their instincts” and make career choices based on what they love doing. Talking about her students, she really sounds maternal.

One of her career--and personal--breakthroughs came in 1975. She was a popular co-anchor, and when the male anchor-lead left, the station manager refused to give her the position. “They said a woman could never do that job; nobody will ever believe a woman to be the authority. I told them I quit. . . . I didn’t go to work for a couple of days until they relented.”

Still, she has learned to temper her reactions. In 1980, Channel 2 decided that two female anchors (she and Connie Chung) were one too many on the 11 p.m. show. “I really felt terrible. It was the first time I had not been successful.” She paused. “I really have a good sense of myself. I was foolish at the time. I complained a lot. I learned a lesson. If you have troubles at work, you should really hold it in and deal with it, deal with your own disappointments, quietly.

“But I was such a mouth. Everything I feel goes directly from my heart into my mouth; it bypasses the brain sometimes. If there’s a change in me now, it’s that things go through the brain (first). It’s a matter of getting older.”

Whatever her future brings--publisher Rupert Murdoch is scheduled to take over Metromedia in mid-March--Brandwynne maintains she is looking forward to the change. “I’m curious, to see what he will do, but you know what? I’ve got a year and a half on my contract. It happened to me once, and it could never have the same effect.”

As the conference for the 11 p.m. show was about to begin, Brandwynne reflects: “It’s been a very inteeresting job. And there’s a tremendous amount of camaraderie. That’s what’s nice about a smaller station. We’re all in it together.”