For Meredith Vieira, it's finally ‘Today’

Mum on the hours
What about those hours? What about that often-discussed, much-dreaded 4 a.m. wake-up? Vieira got some sage advice on that point from Tom Brokaw. Shortly after she was named to the post, the NBC newsman called Vieira to congratulate her. “He told me this wonderful story about how when he first stared working on the “Today” show and made a mention of the hours on the air and that it was sort of a grueling schedule to get up at 4 or whenever he got up,” says Vieira. “He got a letter from a woman who worked in a factory and had worse hours than his. She sort of scolded him in a nice way. She said, ‘You’re so lucky to have the job you have I would love it if my job, which has similar hours, was nearly as exciting as yours.’ He said after that he kept his mouth shut.”

Vieira says she’ll take advantage of those early hours to spend more time with her family. “My son [Ben] is captain of the soccer team and I am going to every single game,” she says emphatically. “And I’m going to be cooking meals they don’t want to eat because I’m so bad at cooking meals.”

It’s Vieira’s devotion to her family that almost derailed her fast-track career 15 years ago. She landed the token female slot at CBS’s testosterone-charged “60 Minutes” in 1989, but negotiated to work only part time so she could be with baby Ben. She became pregnant again and then, on doctor’s orders, told her bosses that she couldn’t fly. Forced to choose between her career and family, Vieira chose family, and she left the show in 1991. That made her a pariah to some working moms, a hero to others.

But her children, Ben, now 17, Gabe, 15, and daughter Lily, 13, are still her top priority, and her deal with “Today” stipulated that there’d be limited travel — although she’s giddy about the prospects of covering the Olympics, with her family in tow.

Slide show   It’s a New Day Today From ‘Millionaire’ to mom, Meredith Vieira will soon begin a new role -- co-host of  “Today.”

Her husband, news producer Richard Cohen, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when he was still in his 20s, before he and Vieira were married. They recently celebrated their 20^th wedding anniversary, but she’s the first to admit that it hasn’t always been easy. “I think any adversity, any struggle, strengthens you, because you have to become stronger,” she says. Cohen — who also battled and beat cancer and whose illness has made him legally blind – wrote about it all in his brutally honest yet deeply moving memoir, “Blindsided.”

Vieira actively fundraises on behalf of MS, and that may be one of the things that keeps her in touch with reality. Her father was a doctor and her mother a homemaker, and she credits her parents, both first-generation Portuguese-American immigrants, with giving her values. Her three older brothers, she says, gave her a tom-boyish, tough-cookie take on life. “They keep my feet on the ground,” she laughs. “Even when I try to float away.”

Vieira isn’t the sort of person to see the glass as half empty. “My cup is more than half full,” she says, “It’s flowing over.” And if she forgets that, her children are quick to remind her. “They are wise,” she says. “In the moments when I complain, they tell me to be quiet. They tell me I’m the luckiest person in the world and, by extension, so are they.” She pauses. “They say, ‘Mom, enjoy this. And don’t forget, we want tickets to SNL’.”