Randy Price

March 1997

Changing the channel

After years of overworking (and overdrinking), news anchor Randy Price is learning moderation, Type A style
by Christopher Muther

For Randy Price, long a familiar face on WBZ (Channel 4) and now the morning news anchor for WHDH (Channel 7), changing channels involved more than simply hitting a button on his TV remote control. The openly gay anchor's recent move to WHDH was the final step in a public climb back to respectability after a very public fall from grace.
The fall came in the form of a drunk-driving arrest in the spring of 1995, which spurred Price's departure from WBZ. It was a move that benefited both parties -- Price was ready to move on to new challenges, and WBZ was looking to shed a potential embarrassment. After sitting out most of 1996, due to a standard non-competitive clause in his contract, he returned to the air on WHDH late last year.
Price's friendly, calm face on the morning news belies what he refers to as his problem with "excessiveness." But after years of trying, Price, 47, says he's finally tamed his Type A demons -- the ones that tempt him to do too much, whether it be drinking, working out, or just plain working. His life now, he says, is shaped around what matters to him most, his partner of 20 years.
"The silver lining . . . is that because I had time off and because I had such a public display of bad behavior, I was forced to seriously focus on these things and make discoveries that these patterns have been here my whole life," Price says. "Maintaining balance and maintaining my personal life has become foremost for me."
While he has focused his energies on his coastal-Maine home, his slightly larger-than-life existence in his three-story house still speaks of someone who can't completely abandon his over-the-top ways. Price awakens every morning at 1:30 to prepare for his 60-mile commute to Boston. He co-anchors the news from 5 to 7 a.m. and then delivers news briefs from 7 to 9 a.m. during the Today Show. He returns to his house in the early afternoon, tends to his show dogs -- 12 cocker spaniels and one Doberman pinscher -- and still finds the time to run eight miles. If the weather permits, he'll putter around in his sizable garden.
When Price worked at WBZ, he balanced all of those pursuits with numerous social engagements, resulting in a schedule that allowed him to see his partner only on weekends, and a lifestyle that eventually led him to spin out of control.
"There really isn't anything for money or visibility that's worth getting as far out of control as I was," he now says. During an interview at the WHDH studios, he recalls that at the time of his 1995 arrest for drunk driving, "[I was] . . . training for a marathon. I was out until midnight at a fundraiser drinking and then driving home."
The fundraiser, the Fenway Community Health Center Women's Event, marked the beginning of the end of Price's career at WBZ. He left the dinner well after midnight to head back to his Maine home. Before he made it there, he was pulled over in Hampton, New Hampshire, and arrested on drunk-driving charges.
In Hampton District Court the following month, Price pleaded no contest to the charges, and paid a $420 fine. It was his second arrest for drunk driving. The first was in December 1991 when he was stopped in Brighton at 4:50 a.m. for driving the wrong way down Soldiers Field Road after leaving a Children's Hospital Telethon party at WBZ.
"For me, it's much greater than alcohol," Price says. "It has to do with things being in balance in your life. I had many more things askew than drinking too much and driving. That's why I don't dismiss it as just an alcohol-related incident, although I do consider that I'm an alcoholic, and I do avoid alcohol.
"It's always misleading with discussions of problems with drug dependency and alcohol," he continues. "People like to think of alcoholics as people who drink enormous amounts, and as people who only have a problem with drinking too much. I've had other problems with excessiveness, whether it's running, gardening, or whatever."
Price doesn't attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings; instead he spends time every day focusing on himself and what he needs to do to keep himself in check. As a result of his second arrest, he began to realize, he says, that his problems with alcohol are an extension of the excessive traits in his personality. "Anyone who knows me will tell you, fall-down drunk was not my problem," he says. "The problem is going out and burning the candle at both ends."
During his 18-month hiatus from television, Price did more than meditate on life. He oversaw construction of his and his partner's dream house. From Price's description, the couple's new Kittery Point home sounds like a natural extension of their personalities.
The expansive layout of the three-story house reserves the entire first floor for the couple's 13 dogs, and also has an adjacent television room ("I encourage the dogs to watch 7 News every morning," Price jokes). The second floor is the main living space with the kitchen, dining room, and living room. The bedrooms are located on the third floor.
"If you're a homebody and you put all your emphasis on the time that you have at home, then there's no greater treat than having a beautiful spot," Price says. "Despite working in a public arena, we're not people who enjoy public kinds of things. There's such limited time for anybody in life to enjoy themselves. Usually the last thing we want to be doing is restaurant- hopping or going from event to event, so we enjoy being at home."
Price's quiet oceanside existence is in stark contrast to his high-exposure job and his public openness about his personal struggles. As WHDH's website boasts, Price was the first openly gay news anchor in the country, and he has been forthcoming about his struggle with alcohol.
As Price tells it, he was never exactly in the closet about his sexuality, he was simply never asked by anyone if he was gay. While at WBZ, he says, he never tried to hide his personal life from his coworkers. WBZ news anchor Liz Walker recalls first meeting Price's partner, a medical-insurance executive, at a party the couple threw at their home. "It was just like meeting your partner or my partner," she says. "There was no big deal about it."
That kind of casual attitude extended to the newsroom. Walker says even when news of Price's sexuality started making the rounds through the local media, there were no incidents at WBZ.
"Randy is the kind of person the rough-and-tumble-machismo-homophobic-type people love equally," she says. "I have never heard of any incident or anything negative ever said about him. People knew it, but it just didn't seem to be an issue. That is just who he is, and there's so much more to who he is that there was never a problem."
Aside from numerous speaking engagements and a stream of letters from gay colleagues at television stations nationwide and from families of gay men and lesbians, Price says little has changed in his professional life as a result of his very public coming out. Rather, it's his decision to deal with his tendency to overextend himself that has had the most impact.
"I have a lot of factors in my life that I consider to be much more important than the type of type of TV program I do, or the amount of money I might make," he says. "I have actually found myself in a position where I made more money than I needed to make up for the lack of life or the lack of meaningful existence that I had. I had to learn to say no to certain things in my life and yes to the important things. I think we all struggle with that. We're all trying to prioritize our lives and find the balance."

Airing out
Randy Price's openness about his sexuality became big news simply because there are so few openly gay on-air broadcast journalists. According to Mike Frederickson, president of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association (NLGJA), 70 percent of the organization's members are print journalists and only 30 percent are broadcast journalists. Of that 30 percent, he estimates, fewer than half are on-air personalities.
Yet broadcast journalists who do come out usually find that their professional life remains unchanged. Price maintains that it's had no effect on his professional life. And Steve Gendell, a former Today Show correspondent who now works on the magazine show American Journal, says his coming out on the weekend edition of the Today Show was not a "life-altering decision."
"It made sense at the time, and I'm glad I did it," Gendell said in a telephone interview from Boulder. "Since then it's never been an issue, no matter where I've worked."
Darrel Adams, the NLGJA's vice-president for broadcast and executive producer at KSTP-TV in Minneapolis-St. Paul, said he was outed by a coworker almost seven years ago. Subsequently, he became a "lightning rod" for closeted coworkers who need someone to talk to. Now Adams, who has also worked as a reporter and anchor, advocates for broadcast journalists to come out. "If every broadcast journalist came out, we could have a profound influence on the gay-rights movement," he says.

Christopher Muther is a frequent contributor to One in Ten. He can be reached at cmuther@aol.com.

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