First thing in the morning: hair, makeup, a swig of booze. For Hoda Kotb, the co-host of the fourth hour of NBC’s Today Show, it’s all in a day’s work. From 10am EST to 11am, Kotb and her co-host, Kathie Lee Gifford, have a fortifying drink. Or two.
“Yes. We really drink on the show. We don't drink a lot. But some days we have a little more than others. And if you're the last guest, too bad for you,” Kotb told “Off the Cuff”. (Comcast is the parent company of both NBC and CNBC).
Kotb switches into an impersonation of her Egyptian-born mother. “My mom was like, ‘They think you're an alcoholic.’ I go, ‘I don't even drink that much.’ I really don't,” she said. “She doesn’t love it because she’s very much like, ‘Oooh my friend said you were drinking and I said you don’t. And she said she saw you. So, you do.’”
Kotb says there hasn’t been widespread public condemnation of their consumption of alcohol: “You'd think that it would turn into a whole thing. But (it hasn’t). And I think it's because it's more of kind of an accent on the show as opposed to the show.”
Kotb previously was a correspondent for Dateline NBC, who’d covered both domestic and international stories—the War on Terror, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami, to name a few.
“I think professionally, you know, I was always the worker who just worked hard and hoped to be noticed," Kotb said. "Life doesn’t work that way.”
She said it’s a trait that professional women often share, to their detriment. “I actually think women bosses see better. I think they see that trait—the bragging versus the hard work. But I do think for women, there's a place in the middle where we need to be. There's a place where you're not a jerk. You're not braggy. But you are honestly saying what you've done.”
In March 2007, Kotb was diagnosed with breast cancer.
“Quickly your life snaps into weird focus. You realize there are margins that you didn't know existed before. There's a beginning and an end. So decisions that I would struggle with before I got sick came very easy after, because now you don't have time to waste. This person is not worth my time. This job isn't fitting me right,” she said.
“After I got better, I said, ‘I'm going do something I've never done in my life. I'm going to ask for that damn job.’”
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She got the job. She began hosting the fourth hour of the show when it debuted in September 2007. She describes the transition in her New York Times bestselling book, “Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer and Kathie Lee.”
“It was just a weird thing for me because I had been so buttoned up doing news stuff. Opinions and feelings weren't to be shared ever. So I had a news corset, man. It was tight, tight, tight. So I'm sitting next to, you know, 'Crazy.' She's talking and just saying whatever she wants. And I'm like, 'Don't say that. Say this. Don't say that. Look at camera one, camera two, camera one, camera two. It just got so boring.'"
“I was so distracted with all the things I needed to remember that she looked at me in the middle of the show and says, ‘I'm right here.’ She said, ‘Do me a favor….’ She goes, ‘Get rid of the cards.’”
Kotb tossed the research cards. “It was the first time it clicked. She talked. I listened. I spoke. She listened—sometimes. It just started working.”
Almost immediately, the lines between her public and private lives were blurred. “Imagine if you sat next to somebody who just asked you anything, and you're stuck. If you say, ‘No, thank you. I don't want to talk about it,’ then you're a dud. And if you say it, your business is out there.”
Case in point—when Gifford asked Kotb about her personal grooming habits, live on the show. (If you’re really curious, do a search. I’m not telling.)
“That was a weird day. I mean, do I regret that? Yes, I do regret that. That's a definite regret because there's nothing more humiliating than going outside the next day and someone going, ‘Hey, you look good.’ I was like, ‘You didn't say that yesterday. What happened?’”
In May 2013, she made Maxim Magazine’s annual “Hot 100” list. “It's usually girls who have their ta-tas out and you know, giggling around. I was really surprised 'cause one of these things is not like the other,” she said referring to her breast reconstruction surgery.
“Then I saw Manti Te'o's invisible girlfriend was in there. She was ranked higher," she said. "The person who doesn't exist.”
In 2010, the Today show won an Emmy. Fame, said Kotb, is “all fleeting. People who suddenly really think they're somebody—don't be ridiculous. You were nobody a week ago and you'll be nobody tomorrow.“