Remembering Roger Grimsby, the colorful, complicated WABC 'Eyewitness News' anchor

Starting with this story, Newsday is launching a bimonthly series, “Legends of Local TV and Radio,” which will look back at some giants of  New York broadcasting. All larger than life figures, they were part of an era when radio and TV commanded everyone’s attention from the self-appointed media capital of the world.

The “Eyewitness News” story on the king of “Eyewitness News,” Roger Grimsby, was informative, just not too informative.

There was no mention of the anchorman’s heavy drinking, or the fraught relations with his staff, nor the $1 million salary, reputed to be the largest in all of TV news.

Instead, the pictures did all the talking. Grimsby, in his mid-50s at the time, looked miserable in this softball “Get to know the anchorman!” piece.

Where was that trademark smirk, the fast-uptake, and the funniest/smartest/quickest anchor in all of television? His face was ashen, drained. He was probably reluctant to do the profile but there were other forces at work, all larger than Roger.

By the early ’80s when this aired, cracks had started to appear in the once impregnable WABC/7 news fortress on Columbus Avenue. Newcomer WNBC/4’s “Live at 5” had punched holes in its walls and WCBS/2 was gaining too.

In an apparent attempt to explain away this somber side of his partner, Grimsby’s longtime co-anchor, Bill Beutel, assured viewers that “he is a very shy man.”

“Bashful, not shy,” Grimsby corrected.

It was almost as if Grimsby could see the future — his own. Within a few years, he would be gone — a casualty of those ratings, that salary and (by some accounts) the drinking. After a brief stint at Ch. 4, then a station in San Diego, perhaps the most gifted, easily most cantankerous, anchor in New York TV news history was done. Grimsby died on June 23, 1995. He was 66.

‘HERE NOW THE NEWS’

These days, Roger Grimsby is best remembered for how he opened thousands of broadcasts (“Here now the news”) or closed them (“Hoping your news is good news”) than for that devastating wit or those withering controversies. A TV giant then, he’s largely a TV footnote now.

Few were as colorful or complicated as the man who anchored Ch. 7’s 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts from 1968 to 1986. A huge hit with viewers, he battled colleagues and management behind the scenes, words and a withering glance his weapons of choice.

Jim Murphy, a veteran TV news producer, now retired, who joined “Eyewitness” in 1981 and produced the 6 p.m. show, said Grimsby was “a brilliant, funny, interesting man [and] a very serious journalist. He wasn’t cruel — one word I would never use with him — but was he cutting? Absolutely. There was just a lot of pomposity in other anchors or correspondents that he thought was definitely undeserved and he had great fun popping those bubbles. That’s who he was. He didn’t put up with fools or the barely competent, or with mediocre talent who thought the world of themselves.”

AL PRIMO CREATES 'EYEWITNESS NEWS'

Probably the single most important person in Grimsby’s professional life was Al Primo, who created the “Eyewitness News” concept that launched Grimsby and Beutel into the stratosphere. The Pittsburgh native, who died in 2022, summed up Grimsby in his memoir this way:

“There was something in [his] angry attitude and acerbic wit that resonated with New Yorkers. He had an on-camera delivery that might best be described as a combination of constipation and pissed-off, but he was New York and could launch a hilarious quip in a nanosecond. In a city that dealt with the likes of broiling subway cars and garbage strikes on a daily basis, having a cheery, rose-colored-glasses anchor just wouldn’t make sense.”

Primo wondered about the source of his anger, and recalled a story Grimsby, who was adopted, had told him. After finding his birth mother, Grimsby knocked on her door, and when she answered, he said, “  ‘I just wanted to see what you looked like,’  ” then turned and walked away.

A Variety reporter once dismissed “Eyewitness News” — reporters in the studio debriefed by the anchors — as “happy talk,” except viewers never saw Grimsby do “happy” once in 18 years. Who then was the real Roger Grimsby?

A NEWSMAN’S ORIGINS

Born in Butte, Montana, in 1928, adopted by a Lutheran minister in Duluth, Minnesota, Grimsby went to a Lutheran college (St. Olaf) then to New York to study history at Columbia. During Army service in Germany and Korea, he joined the Armed Forces Radio Service in 1953 and stayed with radio for decades. Each weekday he’d go a few blocks away from Ch. 7, where he wrote and delivered the entire daily 15-minute newscast for one of ABC’s radio networks.

After a string of TV jobs in the Midwest, he headed west and to stardom, at San Francisco’s ABC-owned station, KGO, where he was anchor, news director and reporter (including from Vietnam). In its official history, the station called him one of its “first celebrity anchors.”

In 1968, Grimsby was hired to anchor Ch. 7’s 6 p.m. broadcast, “Roger Grimsby and the Noisemakers.” The on-air staff included gossip columnist Rona Barrett and sports commentator Howard Cosell while Jimmy Breslin read his New York Daily News column on the air. The show was a disaster.

EARLY DAYS OF 'EYEWITNESS NEWS'

Primo wrote that when he got there in ’68, the news team looked “like they just rolled out of bed,” while Grimsby — with a “penchant for wearing brown suits, matching brown shirts and white neckties” — an “off-the-rack extra at a mob funeral.”

Every day just before broadcast, a high-stakes poker game took place in the newsroom, and “our star anchorman was among the regulars.” Primo stopped the game, got rid of most of the on-air staff, and enforced a dress code on everyone else.

He could do little about the feuds. Grimsby called Barrett “Rona Rooter,” but Cosell got much worse. If he wasn’t on the show for some reason, Grimsby might explain that “Howard Cosell is out walking his pet rat.” If a Cosell segment ran long: “Howard, if birds were words, you’d be covered in white.” He once introduced Cosell as “president of the Howard Cosell Fan Club.” Cosell lashed back while Grimsby pretended to be asleep.

The wiseguy shtick was a huge hit, and by 1970 — when Beutel was added to the anchor desk, to soften the brittle Grimsby — “Eyewitness” had begun the fast ride to the top where it would remain for years. Some of Grimsby’s zingers remain the stuff of local TV legend. During a show in 1981, a flustered Mara Wolynski was about to do a news report in the studio when she gave the finger to the stage manager who was just off-screen. Cut to Grimsby: “Well, as Ms. Mara Wolynski would say, we’re No. 1!”

Some were of the “what-the-hell-was-he-thinking?” variety. In 1976, when introducing the new weatherman, he said, “Lie back, relax and enjoy the weather with Storm Field” — echoing the comment about rape that had gotten Tex Antoine suspended (then fired) a few weeks earlier.

 ‘I THINK I KILLED ROGER GRIMSBY’

“My impression of Roger is that he had a tough exterior but at heart was a real softy, although he was able to hide that very well,” said Melba Tolliver, the pioneering anchor and reporter — and News 12 charter anchor — who joined Ch. 7 in the late 1960s. “He mocked everybody and not necessarily behind their back.”

Magee Hickey, the WPIX/11 veteran reporter who began her career at Ch. 7, remembered someone who “was so smart and so sarcastic but also loyal to the people he liked.”

Then there were those he did not like, and the feeling was mutual. Joan Lunden wrote in her recent memoir (“Joan: Life Beyond the Script”) that when she was about to fill in for a vacationing Beutel, a sputtering Grimsby yelled, “You don’t deserve to sit next to me and to anchor the [expletive] New York ‘Eyewitness News!’,” then called her “Barbara” the rest of the show (Barbara Walters had just joined “ABC Evening News.”) Lunden went on to co-host “Good Morning America” for 17 years.

Larry Kane, dean of Philadelphia TV news who anchored WABC’s 11 p.m. broadcast for a year in 1977, got ABC to hire a driver and limo to get him back and forth from Philadelphia, where he was still an early evening anchor. Grimsby took to calling him “Limo Larry,” and Limo Larry was not amused. In his own memoir, Kane wrote that he and his driver “on more than one occasion” found Grimsby “sprawled between trash cans” on Columbus Avenue, near his favorite bar, Paddy McGlade’s. Kane judged his former colleague “cruel” and “troubled.”

Next up, Geraldo Rivera, who had joined in 1970, then broke one of the big local TV news stories of the decade, an investigation of conditions at Staten Island’s Willowbrook State School. Years later, Rivera wrote Grimsby “would regularly try to trip me up during the broadcasts” by changing a “scripted lead-in, or ask me a bizarre or tangentially related question he knew I would have a tough time answering, just to see me squirm in living color.” Marty Berman, Rivera’s friend and longtime producer, said the relationship got so toxic that Rivera moved his office to the basement of the studio building.

One night, after the 6 p.m. show, Berman said Grimsby went to Rivera’s office where they came to blows. Berman now recalls that “at 10 that night I got a knock on the door of my apartment and it’s Geraldo who doesn’t look well. I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ [and] he said, ‘I think I killed Roger Grimsby.’  ”

Rivera said he’d dropped Grimsby after a couple of punches “and he didn’t get up.” They went back to the studio where Grimsby was prepping the 11 p.m. and had “applied makeup to both black eyes.” Berman said Grimsby “never mentioned anything about the fight, never acknowledged it.” (Rivera left “Eyewitness” in 1975.)

EXIT GRIMSBY

The end for Grimsby arrived abruptly in 1986, when ABC’s new owner, Capital Cities, and new station boss decided to clean house. After Grimsby was fired, he told New York Magazine, “They’re trying to depict me as a hopeless alcoholic. I’d like to know how I got drunk doing radio from 1 to 4 p.m. and then going straight to television.”

But the drinking had become a problem. Jim Joyce, a field operations specialist for ABC News, who was an “Eyewitness News” director and Grimsby friend, recalled that “between shows Roger and Bill and others would go across the street to Chip’s and McGlade’s. Every night there was happy hour and people got happy. Toward the end of his career, unfortunately, Roger probably started imbibing too much.”

Murphy, Grimsby’s longtime producer, said, “I don’t think they fired him because he was a drinker although maybe he was getting a little more out of control. It was a combination of money and just being tired of having to deal with him.”

He added that “I have worked with some of the most important and famous broadcast journalists of the last half century, and to me, he was the most unique — a combination of intelligence, journalistic skill, a sense of humor and a sense of self.

“I’ll always remember him as the best.”