Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski went from being fired and frustrated at 39 to having a TV show, a radio show, a book and a happy family at 42. Here’s how she turned her life around.
IT’S FIVE AM on a Wednesday morning at MSNBC’s Manhattan studio, and Mika Brzezinski is trying to tell a story. It’s difficult because she’s also getting her hair washed and reading the day’s news-papers on her Black-Ber-ry. Brzezinski, head back, holds the device above her face while a stylist scrubs. “Your job,” I prompt. “How did you get your job?”In a circus-worthy feat of multi-tasking, Brzezinski, who has to be on air in an hour, starts to talk—while still read-ing and being lathered—in almost perfect, ready-to-print sentences. She tells me that two and half years ago, she was facing the most stressful day in a television newswoman’s life: her fortieth birthday. It didn’t help that Brze-zin-ski was not, as she is now, cohost of both a highly rated morning show and a nationally syndicated radio show, and author of a forthcoming book. Her glory days at CBS News (as a correspondent for 60 Minutes and an-chor for the CBS Evening News) were over. She was, to put it plainly, well on her way to being another bit of blonde road-kill on the TV highway. Her family’s Christmas card that year depicted Brzezinski in a bathrobe, toting a bottle of vodka, with her two daughters holding up a sign that read, PLEASE FIND HER A JOB, PLEASE!
Although she looks like one of those golden, gorgeous creatures (even before makeup) who think a business obstacle is having to give up the corporate jet, the reality is that Brzezinski’s path to TV celebrity status has been complicated. In 1997, when she was 29 and the mother of a two-year-old, Brzezinski landed a plum gig: anchor of CBS’s national overnight news program Up to the Minute. She was confident she could balance a grueling, high-powered job and family life the way her parents had—dad Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and mom Emilie Benes Brzezinski was a successful artist—but having it all turned out to be cruelly stressful. “I was weeping every day,” she says. Then, only months into the new job, she got pregnant again.
