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CONNIE Chung has revealed how David Letterman would feign being jealous of her husband Maury Povich – by mispronouncing his name.
The legendary TV anchor, 78, writes about her relationship with former late night host Letterman in upcoming book Connie: A Memoir.
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She explains that while working for NBC News in the 1980s she would often be booked to appear on the network’s Late Night with David Letterman.
Connie says that the pair had a “rollicking good time playing cat and mouse, a bit flirtatious, a bit combative, and mostly unpredictable”.
Her guest appearances would often come about when a Letterman producer would call and ask if she was going anything other than work.
If she wasn’t working, Letterman, now 77, would show up to whatever she was doing with a camera crew and turn it into a skit.
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Connie writes that one time she had planned to use her lunch break to buy shoe trees for Maury, now 85 and who she married in 1984.
Letterman picked her up in a van and as they drove around New York City they passed a bus with a huge ad for Maury’s program Current Affair on the side of it.
“I’m spending the day with this guy’s wife, and he rolls by on a bus,” Connie says that Letterman muttered.
“Dave always took great pains to feign jealousy of Maury,” Connie writes. “He’d purposely mispronounce his name, calling him Murray, Morley, or some such.”
Connie says that when they picked up the shoe trees, she made a quip about the size of Maury’s feet compared to Letterman’s but he claimed not to know what she was talking about.
Elsewhere in the memoir, Connie denies previous reports that she converted to Maury’s Jewish faith when she married him.
She says that although she never officially converted she became “essentially Jewish by osmosis”.
The daughter of Chinese immigrants also explains that with Maury she learned that “Chinese guilt is identical to Jewish guilt”.
She also reveals that the couple brought up their adopted son Matthew with Jewish traditions.
Connie details her battle with infertility before the couple decided to adopt.
Since she was already in her late forties, the couple turned to fertility doctors for artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization (IVF).”
It made travelling to cover news stories a “logistical nightmare” since she had to submit to daily injections and the extraction of her eggs under anesthesia.
Connie explains that she felt “age and workload were working against me” and that she suffered several miscarriages.
After her Face to Face with Connie Chung show on CBS was cancelled, Connie was persuaded to go public with her fertility battle.
She drafted a statement with Maury which announced that they were “aggressively” pursuing having a baby.
The couple did not spell out that they meant they were using “extraordinary measures” such as IVF and artificial insemination.
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Connie says they did not realize that it was an “invitation to mockery” and would become a punchline for comedians’ jokes.
She complains that Letterman was among those who “refused to let up”, to the point where she wrote to him asking him to “cool it” but to no avail.
Connie says she unwittingly became “the poster child for the story of the older career woman who wants to have a baby”.
After People magazine asked for an interview, Connie refused to answer questions and pleaded for them to kill the story.
Instead the magazine published a photo of her on the cover with the headline “I Want a Child”, leaving her “truly mortified” and wanting to hide.
After her body rejected every embryo they conceived, Maury – who already had two daughters from his first marriage – suggested they adopt.
They started the adoption process in 1993 at around the time Connie was made co-anchor of CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.
Two days after she was dumped by CBS in the wake of a public outcry over her coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Connie and Maury were told their adoptive son Matthew was about to be born.
Connie dedicates her memoir to “my dearest Maury and my precious Matthew, who give me unimaginable love”.
Connie: A Memoir is out on September 17.
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