Sitting with her husband, author Richard M. Cohen, on the deck of the couple’s
airy vacation cottage on Cape Cod, she recalls the crowd that collected outside
the plate glass windows of NBC’s Today show studio while she worked: tourists,
gawkers, publicity seekers, and devoted fans such as the uni-monikered Lenny,
a military retiree who stands a daily vigil in the Rockefeller Center throng.
“I had a lot of respect for those people,” says Vieira, who
left Today in June after nearly five years as cohost. The
crowd, which begins gathering before dawn in all weather,
was a humbling reminder of the 60-year-old show’s place
in American life, she says. When she stayed after to shake
hands with crowd members—something she did every
day—“a lot of people would say, ‘We wake up with you every
morning,’ ” she recalls.
“It is tough,” interjects Cohen with a laugh. “I mean, I
have to do that!”
And so Vieira’s earnest reflection on her role in a TV
tradition makes way for Cohen’s needling wit—the natural
order with these two. Married since 1986 and the parents
of three young adults, the pair approach their life together
with a levity that belies the grave challenges they’ve faced
and continue to face.
On this bright morning, the deck looks out on a placid
cove scattered with reeds, but Cohen can’t see the vista.
Instead, he sees only an impressionistic blur. Now 63,
Cohen was diagnosed at 25 with multiple sclerosis, a nerve-destroying condition that is gradually stealing his eyesight,
balance, and strength. He is legally blind due to MS’s assault
on his optic nerves, and his right hand is so weak that he
can’t even hold a heavy book—the arm would buckle. With
a tangle of sandy-brown hair and a gold stud in one earlobe,
Cohen looks almost boyish when seated. Upon standing,
though, he gains decades: He walks deliberately, with a
cane and a decided limp, and rarely for longer than one city
block. “My life has been a continuous series of what I can’t
do anymore,” he says matter-of-factly. In contrast to his
wife’s famously velvety voice, Cohen’s voice has a scratchy
warble to it—another effect of MS.
For years, when poor eyesight was one of his few symptoms, Cohen hid his condition in order to protect his job as
a TV-news producer. He told Vieira his secret during dinner on their second date—if his illness was going to scare
her off, he has joked, “Why waste money on dessert?” She
responded with empathy and fatalism. There’s no point
worrying about an unknown future, she thought: “The
future could be a bus hitting us tomorrow.” While they were
dating and both working at CBS News, Vieira remembers,
“I would get people all the time asking, ‘Why would you
go out? He’s such a snob. I’ll walk by him, and he never
acknowledges me.’ I wanted to say, ‘My God, he can’t see
you.’ ”
By the late 1980s, Cohen acknowledged his worsening
disease to friends and coworkers. Some celebrity journal-
ists who got wind of the matter saw a ready-made sob
story, painting Vieira as the long-suffering nursemaid to her
sickly husband—a “Secret Family Tragedy,” to quote one
tabloid. In his best-selling 2004 memoir, Blindsided, Cohen
calls this story line “Meredith the martyr and Richard the
wretched.”
So when Vieira, 57, left Today, she pointedly rejected
reports that she was leaving to become a full-time caregiver.
“There’s so much speculation in the press recently [about]
‘poor Meredith with her invalid husband,’ and I want to
set the record straight,” she said at the time. “My husband,
Richard, is in good health, and that’s part of the reason I
want to leave right now.… I want to be there with him, and
I want to have fun.”
True, Cohen is probably feeling as well as he ever will,
given that doctors don’t yet know how to halt the progres-
sion of his MS, let alone repair the nerve damage it has
caused. But in the face of his advancing disease, how can
Vieira not see herself as a full-time caregiver? The family
has no aide to assist Cohen with his daily routine, in which
buttoning a shirt can take as long as 40 minutes. (“Having
somebody there would drive him crazy, I think,” says Vieira.
“He hates hovering.”) And the youngest of their three chil-
dren—each of whom grew more able to help their father as
his disease progressed—left for college this past September.
The answer, it seems, is through force of will. Both
Cohen and Vieira long ago decided that, while chronic illness might affect their life together, it wouldn’t define that
life. Now, as Vieira starts a part-time gig as a correspondent
for the new NBC newsmagazine Rock Center with Brian
Williams—and continues her 10th year moonlighting as
host of the syndicated game show Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire—they are adjusting to Cohen’s increasingly
uncooperative body as they have adjusted all along: with a
mix of realism and denial.
