It is an evening in 1979, and a 14-year-old girl named Holly Morris is sitting in the living room of the family home in Palatine.
Her father, TV sportscaster Johnny, is, as usual, still at work. The three older children, Debbie, Dan and Tim, are elsewhere in the house.
The TV set is on and Holly’s mother, Jeannie–who happens to be in the kitchen making dinner–also is on the TV screen, giving a taped report about the Cubs.
“Mom,” shouts Holly, “You’re on TV.”
Jeannie Morris comes out of the kitchen and sits down next to her daughter on the floor. They watch the segment in silence.
“What did you think, honey?” mother asks daughter.
“Oh, you always look so phony on TV,” says Holly.
Now, more than two decades later, roles have been reversed. It’s Holly who is on TV narrating her own show, and her mother who’s watching.
So, Jeannie, how is Holly on TV?
“She’s great,” says Jeannie, who speaks from more than just parental bias. She and Holly are now a team, collaborators in an ambitious venture called “Adventure Divas.” One part TV travel show and one part Web site, it aims to “to unite adventure travel and everyday heroines . . . to explore intriguing cultures and extraordinary women.”
Mother and daughter, 64 and 34 years old and now living in Seattle, hope to inspire other women not only to travel but also to discover, as Holly puts it, “the diva within.” Though the definition of “diva” can, Holly says, “be very broad, covering women who have touched the lives of others, from your mother to a bus driver in Russia to Eleanor Roosevelt,” the TV show more precisely seeks to focus on “women emerging from social and political cocoons and doing something of note.”
On Thursday, Holly stars in a one-hour television show called “Cuba: Paradox Found,” the first in what Holly and Jeannie anticipate will be a series and the centerpiece of “Adventure Divas.” The show premieres on PBS (8 p.m. on WTTW-Ch. 11), but already there is the Web site (www.adventuredivas.com) as well as a line of apparel–just T-shirts at this point–and big dreams.
“The idea is to have a girl-driven media empire,” says Holly. “The TV show is just the most visible element.”
Most of Holly’s professional life has been spent in publishing and writing. “I was not well-versed in television, even though I grew up with parents who were both in the business,” she says. “But I respect the power of the medium.”
“Adventure Divas” is part of a growing number of TV/Internet companies aiming their products directly at women. It started more than two years ago with the Web site, which immediately began generating hundreds of positive e-mail responses.
“It told me that there was an audience out there,” says Jeannie. “We get all sorts of e-mails that say, in essence, `I’m one of you.’ We (society) have forever deemed women as creatures who are only looking for security, who are loath to take risks. Holly and I are thinking in the opposite way. We are all about confronting your fears. When you can harness your fears, that’s when you have the best time. You are empowered.”
Pat Mitchell, president of CNN Productions and Time Inc. Television, told the Tribune last year, “Women represent the fastest-growing Internet population and television audience that remains unserved.” A Jupiter Communications study predicts that by 2003, women will be spending $53 billion a year on Internet purchases.
Those eager to grab a hunk of that rich market include such powers as Oxygen Media (oxygen.com), an interactive Web and cable TV network headed by Oprah Winfrey and Geraldine Laybourne, former Nickelodeon Network executive; iVillage.com, backed by such media heavyweights as America Online; and Women.com, fueled by cash from Microsoft.
Though some would see this as the logical and inevitable next step in the feminist movement, some dismiss it as a trend that further “ghettoizes” women.
In an angry essay in a recent edition of The New York Times Magazine, writer Francine Prose assailed what she calls “the virulent cultural separatism currently generating a profusion of products and services created specifically for women. . . . On the surface it’s a feminist’s dream: women earning more and using the clout that only hard cash can command.”
But in exploring many of these new Web sites, shows and products targeted toward women, Prose finds that “the culture being sold to women not only reinforces retro cliches and stereotypical notions of male and female behavior, but also is the cultural equivalent of out-of-date baby formula that, through some regrettable corporate error, gets shipped to Third World countries.”
Jeannie Morris agrees, but says “Adventure Divas” is different.
“Much of what is available is just a cloning of what’s already out there, in magazines and television programs,” she says. “It is all about limitations, how to protect yourself, how to deal with your fears. But we are about having no limitations, about confronting your fears. We call ourselves the not-Martha Stewart brand for women.”
It may be a snappy slogan, but it’s not an easy sell, as the Morrises discovered when they started shopping their “Adventure Divas” idea to TV executives more than two years ago.
“It was all a sort of, `That’s really cool, but . . . ,’ ” says Jeannie.
One executive with a national cable network said: “We love the title. We love Holly. But most of our audience doesn’t get out of their hometowns, let alone travel outside the country.”
That kind of thinking compelled the Morrises to take the risk of financing “Adventure Divas” themselves.
“It’s been a struggle to get this done. We had to raise the money and make the show to prove the idea,” says Jeannie. “What made it tough is that while we knew we’d identified a large underserved audience, the risk-averse boys who run TV . . . just couldn’t make themselves bite.”
She didn’t lose faith, and neither have those who know her.
“Jeannie’ll get it done. She always does,” says Sharon Barrett, a maker of Emmy-nominated documentaries and a former Morris colleague. “As long as I’ve known her, she’s been a strong supporter of women but never a loud feminist. She’s not a dreamer. She’s an inspiration, a believer–a doer.”
Jeannie Morris is from an era when adventure for most women was defined by marriage and children and risk was changing the meatloaf recipe.
A high school cheerleader in her native Redondo Beach, Calif., Jeannie Myers married Johnny Morris in 1960. They had known each other casually in college, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Johnny was a rising star with the Chicago Bears, drafted to play flanker in 1958. For the first years of their marriage, Jeannie stayed in California while her husband spent the season in Chicago. She joined him here in the fall of 1963.
This was long before big-money sports contracts–Morris’ first-year salary was $8,500–so the couple and their two young children, Dan and Debbie, lived in a two-room apartment in the New Lawrence Hotel in Uptown, where many other Bears couples resided. A 1963 football championship bonus of $6,000 enabled the family to move to the suburbs.
There were two more children, Tim and Holly, and, in the year Johnny retired from the Bears and began his sportscasting career, a job for Jeannie. In 1968 an editor at the bygone Chicago’s American had called Johnny and asked if he could write a column for the paper. “No, I can’t,” he said. “But my wife could.”
And so was born “Football Is a Woman’s Game.” It appeared under the byline “Mrs. Johnny Morris” in the Sunday section called Today’s Women. Eventually, the column moved to the sports pages and later to The Chicago Daily News, where she was allowed to write about sports other than football.
She began contributing feature pieces to WMAQ-Ch. 5, where Johnny was the lead sportscaster. In 1971 she wrote the best-selling sports biography “Brian Piccolo: A Short Season.”
But such accomplishments didn’t diminish the sexism she encountered. One day in the early 1970s, as Jeannie was asking questions of baseball great Ted Williams, he erupted: “What’s this shrimp female doing in my dugout anyway?”
“I didn’t really think of myself as some brave pioneer while it was happening,” says Jeannie, who is a bit over 5 feet tall and a few pounds over 100. “I just enjoyed the work. Sure, there were some problems being a woman covering sports, but in many ways I was protected by the fact that I was Johnny’s wife and by the fact that I was also a writer.”
The family lived in Palatine and Jeannie balanced, before it became the norm, a career and motherhood. Life was hectic and during a rare family vacation in the Cayman Islands, she made a bold suggestion: “Why don’t we just do this for a year? Just travel around?”
Johnny liked the idea, even though a local TV executive warned, “Do this and you two will never work in TV again.” The family packed up in 1973 and took off for a yearlong camping trip through Europe and Russia.
“That experience imprinted me for life,” says Holly. “It gave me a love of travel, a sense of possibilities.”
It also manifested itself in a book written by Jeannie, “Adventures in the Blue Beast,” which was transformed into an Emmy-winning children’s documentary. In the show, 8-year-old Holly is seen reluctantly scrubbing the roof of the van known as the Blue Beast and saying that she was chosen for that chore “just because I’m the lightest.”
She now calls that her “feminist awakening.” Though she is careful in her use of the word–“there is no single definition of that word now, things aren’t black and white,” she says–she does believe her generation is hungry for female role models of all types.
Back in Chicago after the trip, Johnny and Jeannie went back to work at WMAQ, then were lured by bigger contracts to WBBM-Ch. 2 in 1975. They were the city’s No. 1 media couple. In 1983, a newspaper headline proclaimed, “Johnny and Jeannie Morris Have a Marriage That Works.”
But headlines can be deceiving, and anyone reading between the lines of the story might have sensed trouble, as in this quote from Jeannie: “Some years we can’t even get Johnny (because of his additional duties as an analyst for national CBS football telecasts) with us for Christmas. . . . I believe that one reason we’ve had a good marriage for 21 years is that he’s never home at night. He’s never been involved in housework or feeding the children.”
Three months after that article, the couple separated. Divorce came in 1985.
By then Holly was on her way to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she would graduate Phi Beta Kappa with a women’s studies degree.
“She was a pretty strident feminist while she was in college,” says Jeannie. “She would scream if I used the word `girl.’ It just had to be `woman.’ But she did help reframe the experiences of my life. She took me from being what was an active feminist to being a political one. I learned a great deal from her.”
Holly returns the compliment: “It took me a long time to appreciate what my mom had accomplished in her life and career. But once I did, I started to learn how deeply she had influenced me, allowed me to be the kind of adventurous and curious person I am.”
After her divorce from Johnny, Jeannie continued to work with him at Channel 2 but she sensed that even as she had grown as a producer, writer and analyst, her image was locked in the past. Leaving Channel 2 was the only way to break the “Johnny’s girl” image. In 1988 she packed up her pride and prizes–including a dozen Emmys–and quit.
She did a couple of freelance sports pieces for WBBM and began to spread her creative wings. She produced “The Science of Sports” for Bill Kurtis Productions; “Science Held Hostage: RU486 and the Politics of Abortion,” for the Turner Broadcasting System; “The Search for Shangri-La” for the New Explorers series. She also wrote a biography of Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun, but publication has been hampered by Moseley-Braun’s lack of cooperation and highly publicized troubles.
Meanwhile, Holly was working at Seal Press in Seattle, one of the country’s largest publishers of feminist literature. She began there as an intern and was soon editorial director. She developed and edited the firm’s successful imprint, Adventura Books, a line of titles that celebrated women’s travel, outdoor and sports activities.
A fisherman herself–she also sky-dives and snowboards–Holly published on her own a pair of anthologies of fishing stories by women, “Uncommon Waters” and “A Different Angle.” Her own writing has appeared in anthologies and in literary journals and magazines, including The New York Times Book Review.
Seal publisher Faith Conlon says, “Holly was very nurturing. She let (writers) find their way. She’s a very sensitive person.”
In 1997, Jeannie and Holly took separate trips. “I went to Sumatra for a month and I came back determined to change my life,” says Holly. “I wanted to do something that would get me out from behind a desk, something that could take advantage of my work in publishing, my writing and my traveling.”
Jeannie, who by now had moved to Seattle, had just returned from filming the Shangri-La project in Nepal, and was still affected by her her experiences producing an hourlong PBS documentary, “Expedition Inspiration,” the story of 17 breast cancer survivors who climbed 23,000-foot Mt. Aconcagua in Argentina.
Back in Seattle, mother and daughter talked about their experiences and about how they might translate into a project they could do together.
“Holly had the name, `Adventure Divas,’ and it struck a chord right away,” says Jeannie. “We thought there was a market for celebrating women (around the world who are) striving for effective change in their lives and that this could be done while chronicling adventures inherent in traveling.”
The combination of their skills, experiences and philosophies was ideal: Jeannie’s TV expertise and contacts, Holly’s travels and publishing connections.
“Of all the kids, Holly is the last one I ever thought would wind up on TV,” says Jeannie. “She was always so literary.” Tim is a Chicago broadcaster and producer. Dan works as an engineer and pilot for Boeing. Debbie is an artist in Utah.
Johnny Morris is proud of all his kids. He lives in the northwest suburbs now, remarried for many years and with a 16-year-old daughter named Ashley. He spends his time, he says, “managing my investments, playing the ponies, playing golf and watching Ashley play tennis.”
He is being inducted into the Chicago Television Academy’s Silver Circle next month, one of seven people being honored for “significant contributions to Chicago broadcasting for 25 years or more.” He talks to his former wife and his daughter regularly, and he has seen the first episode of “Adventure Divas.”
“I think they’ll make this thing go,” he says. “They’ve approached it the right way. You know, Holly never showed any interest in TV.
“Is she good? I think she’s really good. As good as Jeannie and I were?” He paused for a laugh. “She’s just as good as we were, but it’s a different kind of TV, a different time. I was just looking at a clip of my very first broadcast. I was terrible. She’s a lot better this early in her career.”
Holly and Jeannie smile at hearing that.
“Jeannie and I really went into this as partners,” says Holly. “I was not seeking motherly advice but understood my mother’s gifts and how we might make a pretty good team.”
Faced with TV networks afraid to open their pocketbooks or demanding too many compromises and controls, the pair put together some $250,000 of their own money and that of six investors. They spent it on transportation and other travel expenses for a crew of five and for eventual production and promotion costs.
In February 1998, they took off for Cuba.
“We didn’t go there to swoon around the myth of Che Guevara or to resolve the secret of Castro’s resilience,” says Holly. “We wanted to find Cuban women fruitfully pursuing their dreams.”
During 12 days, they found:
Gloria Rolando, an Afro-Cuban filmmaker whose latest project is about American Black Panther Assata Shakur, who escaped prison in the United States and received political asylum in Cuba, where she has lived since 1979. Asked by Holly, “What is a diva?” the filmmaker replies, “A dream woman, and a woman who dreams.”
The three women of Instincto, a rap group.
Carilda Olivar Labra, a septuagenarian poet. “We knew she was a diva when we spotted her 30-something husband,” says Holly.
Emelia Machado, a Santeria priestess.
The trip was not without its problems–missed trains, wrong turns, empty gas tanks–but those “adventures” give the finished TV product a spontaneous feeling.
A three-minute promotional video was edited with the help of an old friend in Chicago, and eventually the show took final shape. Jeannie credits Holly with making it work. “My job was just to steer the ship and not let anybody do anything stupid. It’s Holly who guided the entire process. It had to be that way in order for it to be unique. It was her vision that had to drive and shape the show.”
Says Holly: “Jeannie, to her credit, didn’t push me around.”
“It wouldn’t have worked if I had,” says Jeannie. “Holly really surprised me. She is so natural on camera. All I tried to do was keep her that way.”
“Not the easiest task,” says Holly.
“We both gained, I think, a new respect for each other, not as mother and daughter, but as women, as individuals,” says Jeannie. “I also learned a great deal about business. Being executive producer put me in a whole new game.”
“Let’s just say she operated on a theory of creative fascism,” says Holly.
Both women laugh. It’s a nervous time, as the show’s debut approaches. “Of course, I’m anxious,” says Jeannie.
“We are hoping the show will really light a fuse and get the investors we need. We are not so much seeking investors as much as we are people or organizations that share our vision,” says Jeannie. She and Holly have been promised underwriting from Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI), the Seattle-based outdoor sporting gear and apparel company.
In the weeks before the show’s national premiere, Jeannie was in Seattle, finishing some new Web elements, researching and planning trips to Brazil, Eritrea, Mongolia, Iceland, Turkey, New Zealand and South Africa; Australia looks like the next destination.
Holly has been working too. She was in Borneo, acting as one of the three correspondents for the “Lonely Planet Treks” series for the Travel Channel.
“Travel inspires me, especially travel that forces me to face my fears, to overcome challenges and obstacles,” Holly says. “I am happiest on the road. There’s a clarity.”
But she still feels a bit insecure about her TV work. “I’m not polished, but that’s part of what makes it work, I think,” she says. “I just try to let my curiosity drive things.”
For the “Adventure Divas” Seattle TV premiere, mother and daughter are planning a party. They are inviting lots of friends and the people who helped them produce the show.
Holly’s boyfriend of three years, photographer Mark Van S., will be there. He went to Cuba with Holly before the documentary team arrived and he hopes to travel with the team on their other adventures.
He and Jeannie will be present when, sometime this summer, the thermometer in Seattle breaks 80.
As has been her confronting-your-fears habit for the last few years, on that first 80-degree day in Seattle, Holly will drive to an unused expressway ramp that juts 40 feet above Lake Washington. She will stand there for a few moments, spread her arms, jump. And make a splash.