Jane Pauley Explains Her Self-Diagnosed Decoraphobia and Why She Can’t Move a Candlestick at Home
How did you solve it?
Eventually we found a designer, Alan Tanksley, who introduced us to celadon. Now I have a palette that is calming and beautiful, and for 22 years Garry and I have lived happily in the same palette, as long as I don’t move the candlestick. Alan married our tastes successfully.
Pauley in 1976, her first year as cohost of Today
Your first major job was on Chicago’s Channel 5 where you were the city’s first female coanchor on a major evening newscast. You were just 24. What was your home like?
My inspiration was Mary Richards’s apartment on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I furnished it with a desk from the unfinished furniture store, which I finished myself, and a sofa bed I reupholstered myself with fabric I bought. My prized possession was a Sony Trinitron color TV. The television station happened to be in the Merchandise Mart, so I was able to buy a burled wood highboy. Later, when I moved to New York, Tom Brokaw and his wife Meredith were very helpful in bringing me a little more sophistication.
You paint watercolors. Do you hang your own art up on your walls?
Why no! I keep them under the bed. I don’t sign them because when I’m gone and my children are wondering, “What do we do with mom’s paintings?” having my signature on them would make them a harder toss.
Do you collect anything for your homes?
Garry has a wonderful collection of cartoon art. We have five paintings of a 19th-century German American artist named Gaugengigl. We both love them, but that was Garry’s eye. Should I tell you Garry’s Andy Warhol story?
Please do.
I have two small-scale Warhol paintings of my husband. At a charity auction, my mother-in-law bought a sitting with Andy Warhol. She gave it to Garry, who went down to The Factory and sat for the Polaroids in 1974. Periodically, Garry would call about the pictures but heard nothing, nothing, nothing… until the next year when Garry won a Pulitzer Prize. This was unique for a cartoonist, so his work ended up on the cover of Time magazine. Suddenly, the phone rings: The painting is ready. I guess as soon as Garry appeared in a magazine, he had Andy Warhol’s full attention! When Garry went down to see, there were two portraits, and he could choose. Now, many people would have taken the first one and bought the second, but Garry didn’t. He just chose one of them. I heard this story much later and eventually called the Warhol Foundation. One year for Christmas, we reunited the second portrait with the first. So now we have this pair, though for years they were in a drawer because Garry was embarrassed to have pictures of himself on the wall. But they are actual Andy Warhols.
