The Boston Globe

Mornings look a lot easier now on the “Today” set. The baton has passed and with it the alarm clock. The critics have slowed their speculation about the menage a trois in the morning: See Jane and Deb Fighting Over One Job!

Indeed, the big news at Rockefeller Center this week is about the Japanese takeover of the building, not about the hostile takeover of the “Today” show. But the long-running Jane and Deb debacle held enough messages about how to manage and mismanage change to fill a case study.

For openers, NBC bungled the move from one co-host to another out of an almost lethal inability to manage relationships. Their vision of a gracious transition was plunking Deborah Norville down on a sofa next to Jane Pauley. It was as subtle as a man presenting a new stepmother to the kids before the divorce had been announced. No wonder the cry went out for Mom.

Then there was the issue of age. Deborah Norville at 31 was somehow typecast as a younger woman ousting Jane Pauley at 39. Women are traditionally divided into two age categories—too young or too old. But the gap is usually more than eight years. As Phil Donahue said to Pauley on his free-ranging show on Oct. 30, “If you’re old, I’m finished.”

Age was a hit on Norville as well as Pauley. If 39 isn’t an older woman, 31 isn’t an ingenue. Pauley herself was 26 when she went to the “Today” show from Chicago where one reviewer said, “She has the IQ of a cantaloupe.”

But of all the intriguing footnotes to this tempest in a TV set, I was most struck by everybody’s blanket assumption that Jane Pauley had to be forced out. Behind that assumption was a second one: she would never choose to leave. Indeed, no one in his or her right mind would voluntarily vacate one of the handful of jobs that other people would kill for. They are supposed to hang on to power, prestige and the peak of the pyramid.

It is a tribute to Pauley’s credibility that people even paused in the midst of conspiracy theories to hear her say that she was choosing to find out “what happens next.” For a long time, she said, “the very idea of ‘next’ was terrifying. And then one day I realized it wasn’t anymore. In fact, I began to find it intriguing to toy with the notion of change.”

Pauley admitted on Donahue that she might not have begun to toy with change if Norville hadn’t come on the set. But the “external jolt,” as she called it, was not exactly an electrocution. She went on to tell Donahue, “I am a woman who does not cease to breathe out of the television studio. And I’m a woman of an age when you really start defining what a successful life is…. That may or may not mean being a television star.”

This mother of three is not going from “Today” to Yesterday’s rubbish heap. She’ll be working on a prime-time show at a superstar salary. Moreover, if anyone who has gotten up before dawn for 13 years can be certified sane, I would give Jane the badge.

So, if we have trouble accepting her willingness to change, to step off a perch, then how much harder it is to believe that anyone might truly want to move on and do something else, even something the public would define as “less.”

Sooner or later, any star who lives long enough—football player or president—becomes a has-been by the world’s definition. Most of us are going to experience major changes that are not necessarily rungs on an ever-upward ladder. We will go along recreating life, and even, as Pauley put it, redefining a successful life. If we can accept that for others—without always paying attention to the scorekeepers—maybe we can accept it for ourselves.

In a reverie called “Composing a Life,” Mary Catherine Bateson, the daughter of Margaret Mead, writes: “Continuity is the exception in twentieth-century life and adjusting to discontinuity is … the emerging problem of our era. …Of any stopping point in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.”

Today is always temporary.