Sam Donaldson stayed home in New Mexico, but Diane Sawyer came Thursday night to the Park Avenue apartment of Holly Peterson to mark the 25th anniversary of “Primetime Live,” the late, lamented ABC news magazine.
Rick Kaplan, the show’s executive producer, told the crowd of over a hundred former staffers how Peterson — the novelist daughter of Blackstone Group founder Pete Peterson — had accompanied Sawyer on a trip to Moscow to interview Mikhail Gorbachev.
Peterson had majored in Russian at Brown, but just before the big meeting with the Russian contingent, she approached Kaplan and confessed that while she knew the words for “dog” and “newspaper,” she wasn’t exactly fluent in Russian.
Besides a tribute to the late Roone Arledge, the ABC boss who had created the show, the evening’s highlight was a rendition of “The Primetime Live@25 Song” to the tune of “Let It Go.”
As ABC exec Mark Lukasiewicz played piano, Rondi Charleston belted out:
“Our stories used to roar with power ’cross the land
We threw the book at all the crooks — that was the master plan…
Let it go, let it go
We were lucky to have such fun
Let it go, let it go
But remember all we’ve done
Here we stand, and here we’ll stay
And let’s finally say
The ‘Live’ never really worked anyway.”