Opinion | I knew Katie Couric’s ‘Going There’ would be juicy — I was not prepared for exactly how tart and fresh-squeezed

In retrospect, she should have listened to Warren Beatty.

When Katie Couric was toying with the idea of leaving her perch on “The Today Show” after 15 years, in 2006 — tempted by an offer to become the face of the “CBS Evening News” and the first solo woman ever to host a network evening newscast — she ran it by the aging heartthrob (someone who’d become a “phone pal,” as she puts it, after her first husband died from cancer).

Beatty told her she was crazy.

“Who cares about the evening news? Nobody even watches it. Mornings are much more important.”

In one ear; out the other. Ignoring the advice from Beatty and others, while opting to take a pay cut (yet for a job that still raked in $15 million a year) — eager, too, to split from her toothsome, perky Katie persona — she took the gig. And wound up regretting it just as fast.

It’s just one of the ways in which Couric’s new 500-plus-page “Going There” — a book as fervently dishy as it is fragrantly honest — rates as that rare celebrity memoir that also works as a workplace manual for the hoi polloi. Couric making the cardinal sin of putting the cart before the horse. A classic case of not managing expectations.

Lured by CBS boss Les Moonves (the now disgraced mogul she calls “a close-talker with bad breath”), they both had been caught up in the “get”: him stealing away a TV golden girl from a rival network, dreams of ginning up ratings for his third-place newscast; she with a desire to make history (plus, well, ego). What ensued was a long goodbye at NBC, complete with a victory-lap final episode showcasing her newsmaking interviews and starry meet-cutes. Later, a lavish party in her honour on 5th Avenue.

Then, a massive campaign trumpeting her move by her new network, with no shortage of press, her mug on every bus in Manhattan. Eventually, another splashy bash on the other side, following her first newscast on CBS — one with a boldface crowd that included Tony Bennett and Iman.

The hype not only did not help, it was poison (in a what-goes-up-must-come-down, who-does-she-think-she-is? way). Nor did her many unforced errors — renovating her office in a sleek, overdesigned way, say, that palpably stuck out inside the traditional milieu of CBS, “like a Givenchy gown at a hoedown.” With ratings spiking initially (out of curiosity) but then dipping to record low digits, the schadenfreude spread. “Dead Woman Walking,” she was.

The main snag? Moonves had anointed her without getting genuine buy-in from his news people, the people she’d be directly working with. And, frankly, she didn’t do enough to ingratiate herself — not helpful, for instance, when at another party at Tavern on the Green (held to celebrate “60 Minutes”), Couric hung close to Moonves as those very news people eyed them suspiciously. She admits it: that public chumminess only further made her a target.

Who can’t relate to these very human dynamics within any organization? How you are perceived? The politicking. All the slights that mount. (Then add Page Six and the drumbeat of gossip to all that). Reading all this reminded me of that line in the first “Sex and the City” movie when Carrie Bradshaw — musing on her Bridezilla-ness — says, “I let the wedding get bigger than Big.”

All of which also exemplifies how “Going There” … well … goes there in terms of juice. I mean, I knew it would be juicy but was not prepared for exactly how tart and fresh-squeezed. Part woman-living-in-glamorous-New-York book (oh, you know, lunching with JFK Jr. one day, for instance), part stroll through the biggest stories of the last 30 years (from Columbine to Sept. 11, the Rodney King riots to her bubble-bursting Sarah Palin interview, to one of her most thoughtful remembrances, an eerie look back at the case of Andrea Yates, the mother who tragically drowned her five children in a bathtub), the memoir also amounts to a sweeping survey of the premium American journo trade (echoes of “The Morning Show,” for sure).

Written with colloquial exuberance, with punchy chapters, it all just works. A book that is like if Jennifer Weiner and Dan Rather had a baby.

Couric names names. Yes, she does. But what struck me the most is just how self-critical she is. How much self-assessing goes on: about some of her past interviews; about her parenting and the men in her life; about her insecurities. Even when taking into account some of the flak she’s gotten for the book in the hullabaloo around it, the whole tone to me is less snark than can-you-friggin-believe-it? absurdism.

Exhibit A (re: the rat race): “‘All About Eve’ was never far from my thoughts, and I’d moved into Margo Channing territory: someone younger and cuter was always around the corner.”

Exhibit B (re: the boy toy named Brooks who moved into her home for a while): “The older I got, the younger he seemed.”

She laments. She atones. While giving us a tour of her life — everything from her flirtation with bulimia to “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”-esque drama she once faced with a nanny to some racial blind spots in her own family — boomer Couric also blows up her perky rep and gives all: the good, the bad, the ugly.

And, yup, she talks about Matt Lauer. A lot. A sentence or two here is not enough to do it justice in all its myriad complications, but allow me to mention that she actually straight-up prints the texts between them, while the winds of #MeToo were blowing and the fall of her one-time “work husband” was underway. Their chance encounter, a year after his scandal? The thing that awkward encounters are made of.

The whole memoir, perhaps? A manifestation, ultimately, of what a shrink pointedly asked Katie, after another bad breakup, as she recounts on page 254: “Have you ever considered that maybe not everyone is going to like you?”

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani