The Sad Tale of Jessica Savitch

"I'm Jessica Savitch in New York..."

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, Jessica Savitch was TV's golden girl, a pioneer for women in the world of television news. She had risen quickly to become the anchor of the weekend edition of NBC Nightly News and was the host for the acclaimed PBS Frontline program.

However, her somewhat bizarre personal life and addiction to drugs and alcohol caused her career to collapse. In October 1983, she appeared on her NBC newscast in an obviously impaired state (see above video), and 20 days later, as she rode with her dog Chewy in the backseat of a car driven by her friend Martin Fischbein, they both drowned when the car ran off the road and into a canal.

In the video below, Savitch is interviewed by David Letterman in 1982, about a year before her death. She was promoting her new autobiography, Anchorwoman.