Savannah Guthrie’s Excruciating Story, on “Today”
From an excruciating story comes this even more impossible detail: the home from which Nancy Guthrie mysteriously vanished, as was reported on February 1st, was the very same place where she raised her three children, Annie, Camron, and, fatefully, Savannah, the “Today”-show anchor of long tenure, whose fame has made Nancy’s kidnapping an international event. The Guthries settled north of Tucson, Arizona, when Savannah was two years old. Over a decade later, Charles, Nancy’s husband and Savannah’s father, died of a heart attack. Nancy was steadfast after the tragedy, modelling the sacrificial aspects of the Christian faith that she’d diligently passed along to her kids, showing them that life could continue—and, indeed, with all its tenacious necessities, had to continue, there was no other option—in the aftermath of a tragedy.
She conveyed this education in her house, and she held on to the house even after her daughter became wealthy enough, presumably, to move her anywhere in the world. She must have loved the place in a protective, stubborn way. It had held some hurt and some joy, had sheltered lives in their flowering, fragile years. In the fullness of time, Nancy had a Nest camera installed—one of those all-seeing eyes meant to guard the property and calm anxious nerves and provide real safety from intrusion. Perhaps one, or all, of her kids, fretting over their independent-minded mother, had advised her to get it. On the last night that anybody else reportedly saw Nancy, that camera caught a glimpse of a person clad in dark clothes, wearing gloves and a black balaclava, unidentifiable, standing at the threshold. Then Nancy was gone. Her home had been a house of mourning, a symbol of resilience, a family cornerstone, and now—bright shock—the empty scene of an unseen crime.
“It’s the house where all of our memories are, good and bad,” Savannah Guthrie said, her eyes sparkling with barely dammed tears, during a conversation in late March with her friend and former co-worker Hoda Kotb. Guthrie had returned to the “Today” show after nearly two months away, for an interview that would be broadcast across two mornings. She’d been in Arizona, enduring an ordeal the likes of which most of us can contemplate only as part of the plot of an egregiously dramatic movie or television show. Eighty-four-year-old Nancy vanished, a flood of variously credible ransom demands were levied, then . . . nothing. No more credible messages, no triumphant return, no body. Guthrie and her siblings recorded videos, pleading for news, for help, for a merciful change of heart from whoever had absconded with their mom. But still nothing.
Guthrie had agreed to do the interview as a desperate final appeal. Someone, she kept saying to Kotb—someone must know something. She’s right. You can’t just make a person disappear. Another camera, an eye tuned to the subtle strangeness of an otherwise ordinary day—someone or something, somewhere, must have caught a glimmer of the truth. Among the public facets of Nancy’s disappearance is a frank, resentful, widespread incredulity at the failure of the technological apparatus that surrounds us so ungraciously, whether we like it or not. Many of us assume that we are, at this late date in the history of the world, almost totally surveilled. Our bodies pass from one camera’s jurisdiction to another, turning the city street or suburban road into a constant cinema of overlapping angles. What’s all this footage for, if not a scenario like this one? How can an elderly woman just be gone?
That question, no less baffling today than it was back in February, haunted Savannah Guthrie’s interview. She spoke in her usual strong, musical way, but there was also something mystified and hesitant in her tone. She relayed the story of her family’s tragedy almost tentatively, as if testing her own perceptions against the recollection of the audience at home. Was this really happening at all?
The surrealism of the interview—and of the circumstance that was its context—was heightened by the fact that both Guthrie and Kotb are exemplary exponents, even under so much pressure, of the “Today” show’s ethos and sensibility. Both women occasionally smiled through their tears, telegraphing poise and control more than an overflowing inner joy. As Kotb asked questions about Nancy, whom she sometimes affectionately called Guthrie’s “mommy” or “mama,” she seemed to brace herself, and Guthrie, too, for the inevitably devastating answer. They were narrating an awful and unresolved series of events, but also still doing the “Today” show—reassuring the audience by way of their softly displayed, endlessly professional command over the medium of television.
In the interview, describing the early moments of her mother’s absence, Guthrie explained the array of terrifying thoughts that occurred to her and to her siblings. Her brother, a retired fighter pilot, “saw very clearly, right away, what this was.” A kidnapping, he said, for ransom. “He knew.” Guthrie’s instant instinct was self-blame.
“It sounds so—like, how dumb could I be? But I didn’t want to believe. . . . I just said, ‘Do you think . . . because of me?’ ” Here, something cracked in Guthrie’s held-together performance. “ ‘Yeah, maybe,’ ” her brother responded. Guthrie gasped quickly for breath as she recounted the conversation. The warm studio lights and blurred background and pinkish couch now played in haunting counterpoint to the spectacle of a daughter relaying—and still pondering—the arrival of the darkest fear: having somehow, possibly, caused harm to her mother. Of course, this was deeply unfair. The blame, almost certainly, at least partially, belongs to the unconscionable entity caught on camera, gussied up like an ICE agent or a soldier on loan from a private military contractor. But simply naming the great fear and sharing it with the millions of watchers in living rooms and hotels and airport lobbies was a trial almost too painful to contemplate.
How did she feel watching the person on the Nest camera? “It’s just totally terrifying. And I can’t imagine that that is who she saw standing over her bed.”
Whenever the interview cut back to the “Today”-show set, members of the program’s cast—Craig Melvin, Carson Daly, Al Roker—emitted an audible groan of terror and sorrow for their friend. They, too, were participating in a professional exercise, however unprecedented. But, unlike Kotb and Guthrie, out there alone on the tightrope between total journalistic disclosure and the sensitivities of morning TV, they couldn’t really keep it together. Melvin—always the empath—looked ready to head home and cry. Daly, the former teen-pop monarch of “Total Request Live,” seemed to age decades before the camera’s eye.
It all seemed, uncomfortably, like a crowd had gathered to watch Guthrie walk through the stations of some unfathomable cross. The timing of the interview—just a few days before Holy Week, when Christians like Nancy and Savannah Guthrie, year after year, stage a harrowing reënactment of an unjust, torturous death—wasn’t lost on anyone. On Friday, when the final segment of the interview aired, Guthrie spoke in boldly religious terms. She’d prayed and prayed at the beginning of her family’s Passion, and at one point, she said, she actually heard the voice of God, speaking to her. She knew where her mother was, the voice said: “With me.” Whether in this world or whisked away from it, there Nancy was, close to the divine presence.
Hearing Guthrie speak of God in this direct, personal, utterly assured way may have alerted some listeners to the fact that although “Today” has no official religion, its aesthetics—vibrant colors, kind words, total decent positivity—match that of an American public Christianity whose moral and imaginative hold lately keeps attenuating, until, suddenly, in the right, blameless hands, it seems briefly to brighten again.
Kotb announced afterward that Guthrie would return to “Today” on Monday, April 6th, the day after Easter. “My joy will be my protest,” Guthrie said. ♦