Settle for More
Megyn Kelly
Harper
352 pages; $29.99
Even had there been no news in Megyn Kelly’s new memoir, Settle for More, the book would have drawn a considerable audience. Ms Kelly, the 45-year-old anchor on Fox News, has emerged as this presidential election’s unlikely feminist heroine and Hildy Johnson, the intrepid gal reporter who made herself indispensable to the brass and resisted the herd mentality of the men around her. She was the hen in the Fox house, taking it upon herself to ask at nearly every turn: Shouldn’t we be concerned that the Republican nominee for President is profoundly disrespectful of women in his public discourse? And accused of being a sexual predator at that?
That man, Donald J Trump, is now America’s President-elect. After reading Ms Kelly’s book, scheduled to be published on Tuesday but obtained early by The New York Times, I must say I feel nervous for her. Many journalists are already concerned that Mr Trump has little regard for their professional responsibilities or First Amendment rights. Settle for More won’t allay their fears.
Ms Kelly writes that her problems started in August, the Monday before the first Republican presidential primary debate. She had just done a segment on her show, “The Kelly File,” that infuriated Mr Trump. He refused to make his own scheduled appearance on her show unless she phoned him personally.
“I almost unleashed my beautiful Twitter account against you,” she says he told her, “and I still may”.
Then, the day before the first presidential debate, Mr Trump was in a lather again, Ms Kelly writes. He called Fox executives, saying he’d heard that her first question “was a very pointed question directed at him”. This disconcerted her, because it was true: It was about his history of using disparaging language about women.
She doesn’t speculate where the leak came from. (She reports. You decide.) But that’s another unambiguous takeaway from this book: Parts of Fox — or, at the very least, Roger Ailes, the network’s chairman until July, when he was given the boot after several allegations of sexual harassment were made against him — seemed to be nakedly colluding with the Republican presidential nominee.
Her story becomes more byzantine. On the day of the debate, Ms Kelly writes, she woke up feeling great. Then an overzealous, suspiciously enthusiastic driver picked her up to take her to the convention centre. He insisted on getting her coffee, though she’d repeatedly declined his offer. Once it was in her hand, she drank it. And within 15 minutes, she was violently ill, vomiting so uncontrollably that it was unclear if she’d be able to help moderate that evening. It was so bad that she kept a trash pail beneath her desk throughout the debate, just in case.
Ms Kelly never says outright that someone tried to poison her. (A stomach bug was going around, she notes.) But the episode spooked her enough that she shared it later with Mr Ailes and a lawyer friend of his. Foul play? Again: She reports. You decide.
As we all know, Mr Trump did unleash his beautiful Twitter account on Ms Kelly after that debate, and it threatened to upend her life. He called her “overrated,” “angry,” “crazy” and “a bimbo”; he went on CNN with Don Lemon, opposite her show’s time slot, and said there was blood coming out of her eyes, “blood coming out of her wherever”. (My favourite response to this: Katie Couric wrote Ms Kelly a note asking: “Are you OK? Do you need some Tampax?”)
The hectoring went on for weeks. “Every time Trump acted up,” Ms Kelly writes, “it was like he flipped a switch, instantly causing a flood of intense nastiness”. Ms Kelly’s voice mail box filled with invective and obscenities. People phoned in death threats. Ms Kelly’s young daughter asked her what a bimbo was; a suspicious man showed up in the lobby of her apartment building; her family took an armed guard to Disney World.
Usually, if a presidential candidate impugns the integrity of a journalist, the head of the news organisation rushes to his or her employee’s defence. But Fox is no regular news organisation, and Mr Ailes was no ordinary boss. It turns out that Mr Trump and Mr Ailes have a number of things in common, besides their politics. Both are 70-something tycoons. Both are obsessed with loyalty, thin-skinned and fragile. And both face accusations of sexual harassment from a number of women. The anchor Gretchen Carlson was the first to make this claim in public against Mr Ailes. But she was by no means the only one. As Radar Online has already reported, Ms Kelly confirms in her memoir that about a decade ago, she, too, was on the receiving end of Mr Ailes’s advances.
She declines to get into many specifics, apart from his conjecture about the “very sexy bras” she must own and how he’d like to see her in them. “But suffice it to say, he made sexual comments to me, offers of professional advancement in exchange for sexual favours.”
This book will doubtless have sex appeal among gossips and Kelly obsessives. But the author wants to do more than tell a juicy story. She’s positioned this book as a self-help guide — please see the title — and I was, I’ll confess, quite curious about this aspect of it, reading Settle for More in the way a springer spaniel might read the memoir of a Siamese cat.
I will admit I was hoping to find a bit of springer spaniel in her. And she is, on occasion. But she’s also a celebrity with an image to manage. Her message is that with hard work, and an attentiveness to our true needs, we can achieve such things.
Like most superstars, Ms Kelly is a metabolic anomaly. She’s willed herself into her own spectacular existence. Along the way, she got the best of the next President of the United States. And the worst.
© 2016 The New York Times News Service
