NEW YORK — If there’s a question of how to make a marriage last, Maury Povich may have the answer.
Povich is one-half of a TV power couple with his wife, veteran news anchor Connie Chung. The pair, who’ve been married for 41 years, are still taking life as it comes – if not quite day by day.
“Every time an anniversary comes around, I tell her that we’re going to take this marriage one decade at a time,” he says.
They met as fellow TV news journalists working at Washington, D.C., station WTTG, nearly 20 years before they wed in 1984. Now in the next act of their careers, Chung, 79, and Povich, 86, balance their busy working schedules (his “On Par” podcast and her new bestselling memoir) with visits to their Montana ranch, where they spend part of the year outside of their home in New York.
The secret sauce is lots of understanding, and more than a sprinkle of love, he says.
“We love each other to death. There are a lot of days we don’t like each other, and that’s fine.” But, Povich says, “I think, more than anything else, the reason why it worked is because we understood the business we were in. I mean, I’m married to my wife. She comes home, she says, ‘I have to go to Pakistan. I’ll see you in a week or so.’ OK, fine, I understand that. Some people, some husbands, might say, ‘What the hell is that? Who’s going to take care of the kid?’ So what? And if I say, ‘I’m going to go to Nashville to do a week of [interviewing] country music stars,’ [she says,] ‘OK, fine.’
“The understanding of what we go through, the pressure we’re under a lot, I think that kind of care has gone a long way with the two of us,” Povich says.
They share one child together, 30-year-old Matthew, in addition to two more from Povich’s first marriage, as well as their 4-year-old golden retriever, Taxi. Their shared careers in the TV journalism industry, Povich says, helped strengthen their bond.
“She’s been my go-to personality all these years. I have always thought of myself as Mr. Chung, and I still do,” he says. “She was a big star way before I ever was, and I don’t mind.”
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Povich recalls being “a local news anchor and reporter, traipsing around the country trying to make a name for myself.” Meanwhile, Chung “was a star at CBS, when she was 25 years old in Washington, covering Watergate and all the activities that were going on in the early 1970s, and then she became a big anchor in Los Angeles, and then a network anchor.”
But Povich “was still trying to find myself.”
“I’d get fired from a job. [Then] I left the job I was at, [and] I worked in four different cities in seven years,” he says. “We got married in 1984, and within two years, Rupert Murdoch brings me to New York to start the show called ‘A Current Affair,'” the TV newsmagazine which ran for four years before “The Maury Povich Show” began airing in 1991.
“The rest is history. And I guarantee you, it’s because that woman agreed to marry me,” he says.
