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Gadget shopping and gabbing with Greta |
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By Betsy Rothstein
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Posted: 09/06/07 06:42 PM [ET] |
Greta Van Susteren isn’t the sort of glowing, lip-glossed, on-screen bombshell that Fox News turns out in such large numbers. But she doesn’t look like a geek, either.
Yet the 53-year-old anchor slips into intense geekdom with the college-aged employees at the Apple Store at Pentagon City Mall.
Today, she is dressed in white Levis, a blue and green striped button-down shirt and sensible flats. She is 5 feet 3 inches tall and slim, with smooth shoulder-length blond hair, bright white teeth and minimal makeup. She isn’t dowdy. But she isn’t polished — her nails are clean, not painted.
Personality? Pugnacious and outgoing. More unafraid than fair and balanced, but she is those things, too.
Inside the Apple Store, one of the young men in green T-shirts asks, “Can I help you?”
“No, but I can probably help you, though,” Van Susteren replies. She asks about new iPhone products, ear buds, a wireless scanner and the third-party Bluetooth headset.
She knows her gadgets; she has three cell phones, two iPods, six Apple laptops and piles of power cords that she carries with her around the world.
Van Susteren’s quip to the shop assistant comes off more funny than obnoxious. “I’m teasing you!” she says, and the frightened look fades from the young man’s face. The truth is, her offer is dead-on. She knows her Apple products.
The store’s staffers eventually tire of our photographer following the TV personality around, and they tell us to stop taking pictures.
Where is this petite know-it-all from? They want to know.
“MSNBC,” Van Susteren says without missing a beat.
Who is she?
“Paula Zahn,” she says, extending a hand to one of the green shirts.
The assistant says, “Grandpa really likes MSNBC. It’s always on at our house.” Van Susteren smiles.
Later, in the food court, more security people approach and want to know why we’re taking photographs in the mall. Van Susteren takes out her iPhone and secretly snaps a picture of a Fox spokesman discussing the matter with the security officer.
“You have to pick your battles,” she says. “They’re probably way out of line, but this is not worth the fight … Which one of you wants to spend the night talking to security at the mall?”
But she’s a lawyer and she doesn’t like what’s happening. “I’m sure there is a civil rights law being broken here,” she says quietly.
Van Susteren was born and raised in Appleton, Wis., and came to TV by accident in 1991. “I had no burning desire to do TV,” she says, explaining that she was a lawyer and a law professor.
When then-D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was arrested on drug charges in the early 1990s, local Channel 9 invited her on as a legal expert. Her TV appearances took on a life of their own as she began appearing regularly on CNN — first to analyze the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, then the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the event that put Van Susteren on the map.
So is O.J. guilty? “I know he was guilty,” she says, “but they failed to prove it. I’ve been to the crime scene. I lived and breathed it. He’s a talker. He’s a big talker. In some ways he’s a hard interview because he doesn’t stop talking.”
In 2002, she moved to Fox News. Nielsen has rated her 10 p.m. show No. 1 in cable news for the past five years.
Van Susteren’s move to Fox drew attention in part because of the eyelift surgery she had at that time. It put her on the cover of People magazine, which shocked her. She says she hasn’t had the procedure since, but the bags have not returned.
“I thought we were here to talk about gadgets!” she says, desperate to change the subject. “I didn’t know that plastic surgery was supposed to be armed robbery. I didn’t know I was supposed to keep it a secret.”
Fox doesn’t tell her how she should look, she says, and doesn’t tell her what to wear. She has more freedom there than at CNN, she says. She was at CNN “at a very corporate dysfunctional time,” she says, adding, “That’s actually not insignificant when you’re trying to do your job.”
Still, she recalls CNN fondly, particularly the time she filled in for Larry King and had to wing an interview with the president of Romania after they forgot to put in her translation earpiece.
Like any interviewer, Van Susteren hates it when subjects give her one-word answers. She also prefers not to interview those who are intoxicated. “In live TV you can’t just stop and ask, ‘Sir, are you drunk?’” she says.
Her favorites? “Bill Clinton’s a blast,” she says. The same goes for the 95-year-old mother to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), whom she recently interviewed. “What a hoot she is!” Van Susteren beams.
Van Susteren’s latest delight is her blog: www.gretawire.com . Although it launched in 2002, it recently received a technological makeover and offers behind-the-scenes glimpses of what she does, including man-on-the-street interviews. Among her latest postings: “Sen. Larry Craig — creep or criminal?”
More than once during our afternoon of gadget shopping, Van Susteren speaks of being a “journeyman” in the field of journalism — more like a print reporter in the field than the TV personality she is. She speaks of her week on a bus in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and seeing bodies floating in the flood.
Another poignant story for her was the murder of five young Amish girls in a school shooting. She marvels at the community’s sense of forgiveness. “They’d quietly go by us in the midst of their misery,” she recalls. “They were so nice to us.”
The fond memory dissipates and Van Susteren has to get back to work.
What’s her favorite gadget? The RIM BlackBerry Curve. “I love my Mac, but the BlackBerry really is everything,” she gushes.
“There are no frills with it. It works. The BlackBerry does everything — so solid in terms of performance.”
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