By Michael F. Duggan
Forty years ago, at little past 7:00 on the rainy evening of October 23, 1983, Jessica Savitch left the Chez Odette restaurant in New Hope, Pennsylvania, with Martin Fischbein, vice president of the New York Post. Fischbein was driving and exited the wrong way out of the parking lot and down the towpath of the Pennsylvania Canal on the Delaware River. There were no guardrails along the canal and the car flipped over the edge, falling 15 feet upside-down into four or five feet of water. Sinking in the mud, the car doors of were effectively sealed. Unable to get out, Fischbein (who was knocked unconscious), Savitch, and her Siberian husky, Chewy, drowned.
Savitch had been NBC’s “Golden Girl”—the gold standard for the female broadcast news reporter of the late 1970s and early eighties and one of the first women to anchor a nightly network news program. On the air, she projected charm, competence, and confidence and was unflappable. But stories abounded of a private life in turmoil, including a failed marriage, drug use, and the suicide of her second husband, Dr. Ronald Payne. There were also stories that she was a perfectionist who was difficult to work with. In spite of the stories of substance abuse, the autopsies showed that Fishbein and Savitch had had no more than a single glass of wine between them at dinner.
During a live 60-second top-of-the-hour news update on October 3, 1983, she slurred her words and was clearly off her game. This led to speculation that her career was in crisis and perhaps over at NBC (even though she had supposedly signed a contract for another year at the network and was also hosting the new PBS news magazine Frontline). She would do a flawless news spot later than night and then over the coming days and weeks.
There is something especially somber about people now long gone but who live in memory as living memory recedes. It is as if they will be soon forever lost even there. Perhaps this is the natural course of things. Eventually we will all be forgotten. Except for a couple of tell-all books and a movie based on one of them, Savitch seems mostly forgotten these days. The killing of 241 Marines in Beirut on the same day, followed by the invasion of Grenada, all but wiped the news of her death off of the headlines. Rather than sympathy, the tragedy and sorrow of her life became ammunition for resentful stories.
I couldn’t care less about the gossip, rumors, or even the truth about Savitch’s private life and personal problems. Insofar as memory persists, she deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of a generation of women reporters, now retired or late into their careers, that include Linda Ellerbee and Judy Woodruff.
Savitch and Chewy were cremated together and their ashes were scattered into the ocean at Atlantic City. She has no headstone.