Connie Chung isn’t quite done spilling all the behind-the-scenes gossip about her former colleagues just yet.
Last week, the legendary news anchor spoke to Andrew Goldman on Los Angeles Magazine’s The Originals podcast, comparing her time working with Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters to “not unlike what Tonya Harding did to Nancy Kerrigan,” working with Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News to being “in a scene of Psycho in the shower,” and calling David Letterman “dark, unhappy sort of.” But Chung, who sometimes cohosted the Today show as Jane Pauley’s substitute throughout the ’80s, had a few more things to say about her then coanchor, Bryant Gumbel, that didn’t make the podcast’s final cut.
In a Q&A taken from that conversation and published on the magazine’s website on Monday, Goldman asks the reporter if Gumble suffered from “bigshot-itis.” Chung replied, “I would say so. I’d be sitting beside him, but I was invisible, and we would see him at those same celebrity golf tournaments [as Donald Trump.] And oftentimes I was invisible to him as well.” She added, however, that “in recent years he’s become a different guy.… He married a wonderful woman [Hilary Quinlan]. She said, ‘Whatever it is between the two of you, we’re not doing that anymore.’”
But while Chung has had a long, storied career full of big scoops and even bigger accolades, she says her greatest accomplishment is having a strain of marijuana named after herself. “You know, Andrew, there is nothing I am more proud of, nothing,” she told the host. “I mean, you can take your Pulitzers, you can take your Emmys, whatever. This is arriving.”
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