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ANCHORING CALIFORNIA
PAGE 7 OF 7
"I'm extremely family-oriented," says Tokuda. "That's the key to understanding me." When it comes to members of her family Tokuda talks fast, as though to fit in all she wants to say about each of them. "Here's the thing for me about Los Angeles that's so wonderful — I have family all over the place here! Richard's two sisters moved back here within six months of when we did, and all of them have been away for years. And my baby sister's here who I'm very close to." Of her siblings, Tokuda is closest to younger sister Marilyn Tokuda, an actress successful enough to have supported herself through her acting. "Last night she was over for dinner because it's her birthday. She was on Magnum P.I. a lot. The other day we rented All of Me and my girls said, 'Hey, there's Auntie Marilyn.' She was with Nick Nolte in Farewell to the King, the only one of his movies that didn't do well. It was a big part. She's very active with East West Players. She's been hired to direct a student play at USC, an Asian American play." Tokuda claims that Marilyn, who is married to a wardrober, is the real beauty of their family.
| "In the summer when we were living up in Piedmont, I would get home and my daughters would say, 'Let's play', and I'd say, 'Okay, I'll be the farmer' and I'd work away on my garden." |
Then there's Richard's father Monty and his wife, also named Marilyn.
"Marrying into that family..." There is a long pause as Tokuda tries to balance her words precisely on the cusp between candor and discretion. She backs up a bit and tacks on a preface: "Richard and I come from very different backgrounds. Monty and Marilyn have been extremely welcoming to me, and loving. The first time I went [to their home] was different than anything I was raised with. They're more than nice. Monty was more than nice." Talking about in-laws Tokuda is as animated as in discussing her own family. At the same time she is compulsive about leaving out personal details — no matter how innocuous. Richard provides a clue as to what his father may be like. "My father didn't raise me like a show-business family."
"There's a feeling of family and that warmth here that I could never find in the Bay Area, no matter how long I stayed there," says Tokuda. "My sister, his sisters and his parents. We see them all the time. I really have spent most of my free time with family!" Even cousins on both sides of the family are warmly included in Tokuda's regular family gettogethers. Richard Hall agrees that, unlike up in the Bay Area, down here most of their free time is spent with family.
Tokuda's passion for family centers on her daughters. Recently, when Mikka had a sinus infection, Tokuda's weekend and weekday spare moments were given over to seeing her through. The demands of anchoring two evening news broadcasts force certain compromises in her daily routine. She typically doesn't get home until some time after midnight, well after her two daughters are asleep. Despite the presence of a live-in babysitter, Tokuda tries to wake up at 7:30 or 8 to have breakfast with the girls and to take them to school. At about 9:30 she returns to bed in the hope of getting another hour and a half of sleep. Getting up again around eleven, she jogs for about a mile and a half. "I am the slowest jogger you have ever seen in your life!"
An advantage of Tokuda's off-beat schedule is that it lets her join Maggie for lunch and serve as an assistant room mother. Upon returning home Tokuda might spend an hour on her organic garden before work. "I am a fierce organic gardener," she says, once again exposing her 60s roots. "Now I'm having to plant another one because we're just building a new house. In the summer when we were living up in Piedmont, I would get home and my daughters would say, 'Let's play', and I'd say, 'Okay, I'll be the farmer' and I'd work away on my garden."
Arriving at the station at 3 p.m., Tokuda goes in for makeup which she doesn't wear outside of work. Then she familiarizes herself with scripts for the 5 p.m. broadcast as they come in. Under a deal with co-anchor Paul Moyers, she goes home between broadcasts on alternating evenings. Subtracting two-way driving time, Tokuda gets two and a half hours with her family every other evening before having to return by 9:30 to prepare for her late broadcast.
"And for the 11 o'clock you start the drill all over again," she says, revealing a sense of how wearying the routine must be. "I really like working stories, but it's harder to do on this shift. I come in early to work on the interviews, then once I do the field work, I can write it and look at tapes between broadcasts. I haven't done much story work since I started on this shift." She recently developed a report on a Watts performing arts high school that manages to send all its students on to college. The impulse behind stories like that, says Tokuda, comes from her feeling that there aren't enough stories about underprivileged minorities.
"Those of us who were first through the gate owe something to those who come later," she says. Tokuda is almost apologetic about having said that; she knows that it puts her at risk of sounding pious and corny. But the issue matters to her. She herself might not have considered going into TV journalism had there not been a Japanese American woman reporter on one of the Seattle channels.
"Every time she would come on the air," recalls Tokuda, "my family would get all excited and crowd around the TV set."
Having paid dues early in her career as a reporter and a weekend anchor, Tokuda is now able to enjoy free weekends. There was a time when she and Hall saw them as time to spend with each other. "Now we always end up spending them with Mikka and Maggie because it feels like we don't see them enough during the week." She and Hall try to schedule a Tuesday date whenever he isn't out of town, which, complains Tokuda, is too often. Recently, for example, Hall has been in Thailand filming his documentary on Heaven and Earth.
Tokuda's preoccupation with family and privacy might strike some as odd in a woman who makes herself available to ten million pairs of eyes ten times each week. That apparent contradiction, however, is merely the common paradox of media personalities and politicians who have learned that they must nurture in private the substance they must offer for public consumption. What makes Tokuda a rarity is that she remembers that her real life is off-camera. Rather than holding her life in abeyance to her career, she has assumed all the risks and obligations of being a real person, with her own personal needs and agenda. As L.A.'s TV sets go dark for the night, Wendy Tokuda is on her way home to her real life with her real family.
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