She was a talented, smart, beautiful, but troubled network news star whose story inspired Will Ferrell to make the flick Anchorman the Legend of Ron Burgundy. But she had one of the most infamous and watched on air meltdowns in the history of network news. I'm Patty Steele. Three weeks after that, Jessica Savage was dead at the age of thirty six. That's next on the backstory. The backstory is back.
You know what, I finally realized self confidence has pretty much nothing to do with how talented, smart, good looking, rich, or entitled you are in life. How sexy you are. Yeah, maybe a little bit, just because self confidence can make you sexy. But confidence is its own thing. Perfect example, the NBC News anchored Jessica Savage. She was beautiful, well educated, good journalist, network star, but riddled with self doubt, which led to coke addiction, terrible love affairs, and her career
defining on air meltdown. Three weeks after that awful October primetime downfall, she was dead at the age of thirty six. No matter how much you have and how far you go in life, if you don't have the inner piece that comes from real self confidence. You're always trying to make the pain go away, you know. Jessica Savage was
born in Wilmington, Delaware, in nineteen forty seven. Her mom was a Navy nurse and her dad at a clothing store, but he died when she was twelve, and Jessica and her mother moved to the Jersey Shore, just south of Atlantic City. During high school, she got a job at a local radio station hosting a rock show, and pretty quickly was hired as a newsreader and regular disc jockey, first female DJ in town. Jessica later said she was hopelessly awkward as a teenager, but hearing her own voice
on the air gave her a sense of direction. After she graduated from high school, Jessica went to Ithaca College, majoring in communications. She was an announcer on the college TV station, and she worked on the radio in nearby Rochester, New York. As soon as she got out of college, she got an administrative job at CBS News Radio in New York, but without any professional experience, they said no
to an on air job for her. So despite her insecurities and lack of social skills, she was tremendously ambitious and with the help of friends, she used a WCBSTV studio off hours to make a TV audition tape. She sent copies to hundreds of TV stations around the country looking for an on air job. She got fewer than a dozen responses and only one job interview. Amazingly, even with no broadcast news experience, she was hired by a
station in Houston, Texas as their first female reporter. A few months later, they gave her a weekend anchor shift, and one of her reports ran on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. She was on her way. Within a couple of years, Jessica was working as a reporter and anchor in Philadelphia. She was part of a team there with two men, and they became wildly popular. But she desperately wanted to be a network reporter, and in
nineteen seventy seven she was hired at NBC News. Jessica said in her autobiography that when she first tried to get into TV news, she was told she couldn't because she was a woman. Later, once she was in, she said she was told she only got the job because she's a woman. In fact, her relationships with men in the news business actually inspired Will Ferrell to make the two thousand and four comedy anchorman The Legend of Ron Burgundy.
In order to counter snarky critics who said she was hired for her beautiful blonde looks and promoted ahead of more seasoned mail journalists, NBC had her due reporting work on top of anchoring. She was just NBC's second woman to anchor a weekend national newscast, and later the first woman to anchor the weeknight edition of NBC Nightly News, filling in for anchors John Chancellor and David Brinkley. Over time, she was a regular on Meet the Press and on
the news magazine Primetime. She also anchored sixty second news updates between primetime TV shows, which got huge ratings. The more successful she became, the more self doubt she experienced. It's the impostor syndrome. You've heard of that, and that triggered her drive for perfection, which was never satisfied, driving herself and everybody around her nuts. She'd throw massive temper tantrums if things weren't done exactly her way. She was
starting to unravel. It was becoming apparent that drug use was fueling both her drive to work around the clock and her tantrums. Cocaine was apparently her main drug of choice, and it got so bad that coworker Linda Ellerby went to their boss and said, you have to get this woman some help. She's in trouble, Ellerby said. The executive replied, we're afraid to do anything. We're afraid she'll kill herself on our time. Others said she was losing weight and
her hands were regularly shaking. NBC big shots began to focus their attention on other female journalists, like Connie Chung. In the summer of nineteen eighty three, they removed Jessica as anchor of the Saturday Evening News and replaced her with Chang. From then on, Jessica's only regular appearances on the network were on the NBC News Digest segments, and that drove her even deeper into emotional instability. During those years,
Jessica also had a difficult romantic life. She dated a network exec who also had substance problems and abused her. In nineteen eighty she married an ad executive, who divorced her eleven months later when he realized she had a serious drug problem. Within months, she married again. This time she married her guynecologist, also a drug user, who five months after their wedding, wound up hanging himself in their apartment. Jessica found the body. Now it's October third, nineteen eighty three.
Jessica is on air for her sixty second NBC News Digest segment. It's during a Johnny Carson primetime special, so there were millions of viewers. Jessica starts slurring her speech, pausing and even ad living her report it made no sense. Insiders blamed drugs, Jessica blamed a faulty teleprompter, and her agent blamed pain medss. He said she was on after surgery. Well, whatever it was, it was the death knell for her career at NBC, although she was also hosting Frontline, a
new public affairs documentary on PBS. Fast forward three weeks before NBC knew what to do with her, and it's October twenty third, nineteen eighty three. Jessica had just started dating Martin Fishbein, vice president of the New York Post host. They'd driven to New Hope in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, beautiful little old town. They'd had dinner at a romantic French restaurant after a day of going to galleries and antique shops. Jessica's dog, Chewy was along for the ride, too, great
big husky. As they left the restaurant around seven point thirty, Fishbine was driving and Jessica was in the back seat with Chewi. It was a stormy night with heavy rain and fog. Fishbine apparently missed warning signs and drove out the wrong exit from the restaurant. They wound up on the towpath of the Old Delaware Canal. Their car veered too far to the left and slid over the edge, going down fifteen feet into the canal, landing upside down in five feet of water. Problem is the car sank
into deep mud and that sealed the doors shut. They were trapped inside as water poured in. The wreck wasn't found for hours, but it was clear the pair had struggled to get out before drowning, along with Chewy the dog. Autopsies showed no drugs and very little alcohol in their bodies,
just a bit of wine for each of them. In the ensuing forty years, books about her have been written, and documentaries and movies have been made about her, including of Course, the two thousand and four Will Ferrell comedy. Everybody has their Achilles heel. For Jessica, never being satisfied with herself, her looks, her talent, her accomplishments made her very short life very sad. Hope you like the Backstory
with Patty Steele. Please leave a review. I would love it if you'd subscribe or follow for free to get new episodes delivered automatically, and also feel free to dm me if you've got a story you'd like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory is a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis duran Verroup, and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our writer Jake Kushner. We
have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Feel free to reach out to me with comments and even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steele and on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the Backstory with Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't know you needed to know