Emmys and a Mike Nichols Photo: What Diane Sawyer’s Desk Reveals

By Guest 

“You’d be surprised how many people are home during the day,” says Diane Sawyer, gazing out her 12th-floor office window at the monied co-ops that line Central Park West. Sawyer, 69, puts in 12-hour days, often not leaving until after 8 p.m. “We’ve had a lot of material to get through,” she says. That includes her sit-down with Bruce Jenner, set for a two-hour special April 24. She won’t say why she’s planning a Middle East trip (though President Obama’s Iran deal could offer a clue), for which she keeps an ideas file with pages torn from books and magazines: “I mutilate books. When you’re on an airplane, people look at you like you’re savage,” she says. There is a yoga mat and hand weights in a box; her trainer makes office calls: “We do the stairs.”

Sawyer just moved back to the corridor that houses 20/20, on which she’s been a staple for nearly two decades. Previously, she was in a second-floor office off “the rim,” where World News producers are based; today, David Muir occupies that perch. “I just had this sense of now is the time,” says Sawyer of leaving the evening news anchor desk. “And David was so ready. Everything was seamless, and that’s how you know.” In a photo temporarily tacked up to the wall, Sawyer is on the World News set with her late husband, director Mike Nichols, daughter-in-law Rachel and Rachel’s 4-year-old twin girls. But a portrait of Nichols — who died in November — is lovingly framed. When asked to assess “Hollywood people,” she says what could be a eulogy: “They are looking for psychological and human truth with no idea if it’s going to work because they’re working in the imagination. I think they’re such a gift.”

[Reported by Marisa Guthrie and originally published at The Hollywood Reporter]

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