Jessica Savitch
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Image:Jessicasavitch sm2.jpg Jessica Beth Savitch (February 1, 1947-October 23, 1983) was an American television news reporter.
Savitch was born in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania; near Philadelphia, the eldest daughter of Jewish American parents, David Savitch and Florence Goldberger. When her father died in 1959 from kidney disease, her mother moved Jessica and her two sisters to Margate, New Jersey, outside of Atlantic City. As a teenager, Jessica's career in broadcasting began with voice-overs at an Atlantic City radio station. She eventually scored her own program called Teen Corner where she played music and discussed current events.
Jessica Savitch majored in communications at Ithaca College. Her local broadcasting work led her into modeling jobs and television commercials. After college, she was employed in a clerical position at CBS in New York, which led to her eventual hiring at KHOU-TV in Houston, Texas.
In 1972, she was spotted by a TV news talent scout who recommended her to KYW-TV in Philadelphia, which was looking for a fresh young face to compete with a rival station's news team. She took the job for a small amount of money, but soon signed a lucrative contract, allowing her to move into a Washington Square luxury apartment and meet powerful contacts.
Jessica got her first national exposure during KYW's nationally televised debate between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter (1976). Within a year of that debate, she was covering the U.S. Senate at NBC.
Critics and old-school newsmen felt that she lacked the experience for national network news; David Brinkley is said to have called her "the dumbest woman I have ever met". But audiences loved her, and she soon became one of the most popular NBC anchors.
As her career skyrocketed however, her unstable personal life became increasingly messy.
She continued an on-again, off-again affair with Ron Kershaw, whom she met in Houston while he was a reporter for rival station KTRK, and who reportedly gave her beatings that even NBC's make-up artists couldn't conceal. After breaking up with Kershaw, Jessica was married twice.
Jessica's married her first husband, millionaire Mel Korn, the head of a Philadelphia ad agency who was more than twenty years her senior on January 6, 1980. However, months after the wedding the couple started experiencing problems in their marriage. Mel Korn began to have serious financial troubles with his company and Jessica increasingly focused most of her time and energy on her career. The couple rarely saw each other and separated in November 1980. By the time Jessica & Mel separated, she had begun having an affair with her gynecologist, Donald Payne. Payne was a closet homosexual who had recently gone through a bitter divorce of his own. Donald Payne became Jessica's second husband when she married him on March 21, 1981, just a few weeks after her divorce from Mel Korn was finalized. During their brief troubled marriage, Jessica suffered a miscarriage and Payne suffered from depression and was diagnosed with kidney disease. Payne committed suicide on August 1, 1981 by hanging himself in the basement of their townhouse.
Rumors and allegations of screaming rants, cocaine binges, and promiscuity were spread about her bizarre behavior on and off the set. By 1983 Connie Chung had replaced her on the Saturday edition of NBC Nightly News, and Frontline had nearly eliminated her on-screen appearances.
The most bizarre incident in her career was a one-minute prime-time news update on the night of October 3, 1983. Savitch's delivery of the news report was slurred and incoherent. Savitch told her bosses that her teleprompter had gone out, but her agent claimed that she was on medication for a head injury.
On the evening of Sunday, October 23, 1983, Savitch had a date with Martin Fischbein, Vice President of the New York Post. They drove from her apartment in New York City to the small village of New Hope, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia. They drove home with Fischbein behind the wheel and Jessica in the back seat with her dog, Chewy. Either ignoring or not seeing the "No Vehicles" signs in the pouring rain, Fischbein drove out of the wrong exit and up the towpath of the old Delaware Canal. He veered too far to the left and the car went over the edge into the shallow water. The station wagon fell about 15 feet and landed upside-down, sinking into deep mud which sealed the doors shut, trapping the occupants inside as the water poured in. The wreck was discovered by a local resident at about 11:30 that night. Rescuers found Fischbein's body still strapped behind the wheel, and Jessica's and Chewy's in the rear. The bodies were taken to Doylestown Hospital for autopsies. The Bucks County coroner later ruled that both had died from asphyxiation (by drowning). He noted that Fischbein was apparently knocked unconscious in the wreck but Jessica was not and had struggled to escape.
Her story was told by author Alanna Nash in a 1988 book titled Golden Girl: The Story of Jessica Savitch. The book was the basis for the 1996 motion picture Up Close & Personal starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Another well-known book about Savitch is Almost Golden: Jessica Savitch and the Selling of Television News by Gwenda Blair. That work served as the basis for the made-for-TV movie Almost Golden: The Jessica Savitch Story.