SPENDING SOME DOWNTIME WITH DEBORAH ROBERTS AND AL ROKER, AT HOME IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE BERKSHIRES
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
Photos by Gregory Cherin
Hair & Make up by Sonya Heimann
On just about any given Friday, Deborah Roberts and Al Roker drive from New York City to the foothills of the Berkshires. When they arrive at their home in Columbia County, New York, Al makes a beeline to the kitchen and begins preparations for dinner. Deborah walks in with a bucket of fresh-cut flowers that were sitting outside their door, pulls out the long-stemmed roses and whatever else is in there, and begins making floral arrangements for around the house.
It’s like clockwork, these simple yet profoundly joyous acts, repeated every time Al and Deborah arrive at their country home. They settle in for the evening soon enough, dinner well underway and a stack of magazines waiting for Deborah to dive into. Al places another log on the fire as he chats on the phone with his best friend. This powerhouse couple, who celebrate their 30th anniversary this year, have a lot going on—like the national TV programs each co-host, Al on NBC’s Today show and Deborah on ABC’s 20/20. They also appear on other programs on these networks, not to mention the exciting personal projects that are about to come to fruition for both of them: a new book on sisters by Deborah to be published later this year, and a children’s weather forecasting series created by Al to air on PBS Kids on July 7.
Despite the swirl of so much going on, there is no other place they’d rather be than the quiet of the country for the weekend.
"I associate this place with beauty, stillness, and filling up my soul,” says Deborah.
On a very chilly Saturday morning, I drive 15 minutes from my place in West Stockbridge to their home. When I arrive, I let myself in through the side door. Al takes my coat, hangs it in the mudroom, and returns to his domain of the kitchen. How cozy and welcoming this is, I thought—the smell of breakfast being prepared, the aroma of brewed coffee, croissants and other pastries in view, the steady glow of the fireplace. Al is sautéing freshly cut leeks for a frittata, and “Love Train” by The O’Jays is playing in the background. Life is good.
I find Deborah in the dining room, leaning over a table to adjust an array of colorful flowers delivered by her friends at Chatham Flowers and Gifts. Her love of flowers stems from her mother, who had a small garden at their home in Perry, Georgia. When Deborah became older, she would send flower arrangements to her mom on special occasions. “I carried that with me,” says Deborah. Satisfied with the slight adjustments, Deborah turns to walk to the kitchen. She opens the refrigerator and rummages for ingredients to make an arugula salad to accompany the frittata.
Twenty-seven years ago, she and Al purchased 28 acres, which has since grown to this 40-acre wooded property near a lovely lake. Their first time in the Berkshires was going to Tanglewood and staying at Wheatleigh. A couple that they met suggested visiting the Old Chatham Sheepherding Co. Inn, so they did for Valentine’s Day weekend. Al then announced that he wanted to spend the whole summer there, so they rented an A-frame ski chalet.
“Then he said he wanted to get a place up here. I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,’” says Deborah. “To my shock, we started to look around. We had these ideas of an old farmhouse, but almost all of them were right next to the road.” Al was determined.
They came upon a relatively modern Colonial-style house set back from the road. Before they knew it, they owned it.
“It happened so fast,” says Deborah. “I just remember one day looking out the window, and Al's out there, he's got a wheelbarrow, looking like he's just having a great time.”
“The Black version of Green Acres!” Al interjects. They both laugh.
“I was pregnant, feeling nauseous and just miserable,” Deborah continues. “I said, ‘I cannot believe I'm up here.’ There wasn’t much around at the time, except for a general store down the hill. He was enjoying this whole rustic idea. Over time, I would notice that when we left the city, once we would get past Westchester and a little bit further up the Taconic, I would find myself exhaling.” Their children loved running around outdoors, swimming in the pool, and going on the pontoon boat—dad’s version of a floating living room. (Their daughter, Leila, is now 26, their son, Nick, is 22, and Al’s daughter from his first marriage, Courtney, is 37.) Al and Deborah enjoyed driving around and exploring the small restaurants and shops that began popping up. A favorite go-to place for Al in the mornings was The Public Market to grab a newspaper and Six Depot for coffee, both in West Stockbridge. They also loved going to Guido’s, Rubiner’s, Café Adam, and Zinc in Berkshire County, among other places. In Columbia County, they shop at the Hudson Farmers’ Market and visit nearby Bimi’s Canteen & Bar, Bimi's Cheese Shop, Le Gamin café, Eleven Six Retail Store, Bartlett House bakery café, The Maker, Wm. Farmer and Sons, Klocke Estate, Old Chatham Country Store, and other locations.
Mostly, though, they’re happy to stay home.
That might surprise those in New York City who know Deborah as a self-proclaimed fashionista on the set of 20/20 and around the city. “When I come up here, I'm fashionable country,” she laughs. “I've discovered all these small businesses up here. For instance, Frances Grey is a woman who makes these great hats. I wear these hats with my overalls and my sneakers.”
Up to this point, Al has barely spoken a word, deep into making the frittata. I ask him about the ingredients. He hesitates. “Whatever you’ve got in the kitchen.” He then reaches for a block of Shelburne two-year cheddar from Bimi’s and turns back to sauteeing sausages that will be added to the leeks and a half-dozen or so beaten eggs. (A variation of this recipe is in his new book, Al Roker’s Recipes to Live By, which he co-authored with his daughter Courtney.) He says his love of cooking started when he was a kid growing up in Queens, watching his mother in kitchen.
“Cooking is basically jazz,” he says. “You can improvise once you've got the basics down.”
Al finishes preparing the frittata in a cast-iron skillet and slides it into the preheated oven. He sits with Deborah at the kitchen counter. Their conversation is punctuated with laughter as the photographer snaps away, waiting for the moment when Deborah throws her head back in laughter while holding a mug of coffee. Al can’t help himself and jumps right in.
“Kind of like a ’70s sitcom,” he says. “My greatest moment was the freeze frame at the end of Seinfeld.”
Cue Deborah: “He thinks we live in a sitcom,” she says with a smile, then goes through a dialogue that she obviously has had with Al prior to this setting.
“He'll say something, and I’ll say, ‘Don't ever say that again,’” she says, lovingly poking fun at him.
“Well, the audience thought it was funny.”
“Look, Al, there's no audience in our lives. Stop.”
“If there was an audience, they’d think we were funny.”
“Forget it. Knock it off.”
In this instance, there is a small audience, and we laugh all the way to the family room, where the interview officially begins while the frittata bakes.
Anastasia: Al, Deborah, you two have so much going on. How do you balance your work life and personal life?
Deborah: This has been a huge factor in helping us do that. If we were in the city all the time, it's still busy, it's still loud, I still feel compelled to go out and do something even on the weekends. I think we struck a balance by being able to come up here. All these little things that we do—like going to the farmers market or going to a small restaurant and having dinner, or just staying home and eating dinner—revolve around relaxing, and that's where we are able to find some balance.
Al: Deborah is a much more social person. Left to my own devices, I would almost never leave the house outside of work. I was very fortunate that I got to interview Oprah for my 70th birthday. One of the things that stunned me was Oprah is an introvert. I'm extremely shy and introverted. Deborah really, literally, draws me out.
Anastasia: How do you describe the Berkshires to your friends in the city who have never been here?
Deborah: You've got a little culture, you've got a little rural, you've got a little mountains. I sort of describe it as sort of the hinterlands of New York City.
Al: We straddle the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires, so we can claim both. Our favorite things when the kids were much smaller was the most wonderful farmers market at Great Barrington. We would bring a blanket and spread it out. There was a guy who used to play music for the kids. It was very Small Town America. You could keep an eye on your kids but also buy stuff from the farmers market, wander around while the kids were being entertained.
Anastasia: You two are celebrating your 30th anniversary this year. How did you meet?
Deborah: Al was working at WNBC, and I was at NBC, but he would fill in from time to time on the Today show for Willard Scott. I was starting to fill in for Deborah Norville—another Georgia girl, by the way—on the Today show. I knew who he was from being on the air, and he had discovered who I was, the new correspondent. We were just chit-chatting, and he was so nice. A lot of people, when I came to the network, I found were a little standoffish, a little cold. It’s like, you're at the big show now. People weren’t particularly affable. Al was so friendly and warm …. But I was a busy correspondent and running around and dating. Al was divorcing at the time, or about to get divorced. We were friendly, and then over time, we became friendlier.
Al: I was in the friend zone.
Anastasia: When did it change?
Deborah: It shifted when I was sent to Barcelona to cover the Summer Olympics. I was going to be gone for about two or three weeks, and I asked Al, “Would you mind stopping by my apartment and watering my plants once or twice and maybe pick up my mail?” He said, “Sure, no problem.” I thought that was really nice. And then when I came back, not only had he done that, but he had fresh flowers in the house for me, and he put a couple of things in the refrigerator.
Al: Most guys might have looked in other places, but I looked in the kitchen to see what was there and opened up the pantry. I mean, cobwebs. I opened up the fridge, and there was almost literally nothing in there. The apartment she had moved in had been recently renovated maybe six months earlier. I opened up the oven just see how dirty it was. It still had cardboard on the racks. I was staring at it and just couldn't figure out what this meant. “Oh, my God, she's never used it!” The day before she got back, I stocked her fridge, I stocked her pantry, and then left flowers as a “welcome home.”
Deborah: He reached out again at some point and said, “I'd love to take you out to dinner.” Prior to that, I probably had not even entertained the thought. I said, “Okay, sure, let's go out to dinner one night.” So, that was the beginning of making our way towards something more romantic.
Anastasia: Are you both romantics?
Deborah: Al is the romantic in the relationship. He will not only surprise me, like he did when we came up here with a little getaway to a country inn, but he will slip a little love note in my suitcase, or two love notes in my suitcase when I'm traveling someplace. So, when I go to unpack at the hotel, there's a note underneath my underwear, which is so sweet. Or, when I come home from a late-night shoot, or maybe I was traveling and arrived at the airport late, I’ll come home at 11:30, and there are a couple of candles on in the house to say “welcome home.” Or if I mention a book that I really want to read, the next day, he’ll have a little present wrapped for me. It will be the book. So, he pays attention. I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not quite as good at it as he is.
Al: It's not big things. It’s little things.
Deborah: That's what means more, the little things.
Anastasia: How lovely. What projects are you working on now?
Deborah: We've got our second season of 20/20, so I am chasing a lot of true crime stories. I also contribute to Nightline and Good Morning America. I do a lot of celebrity-focused stories or social issue stories, which I really enjoy. I have a few of those coming up. I'm also working on my second book. I wrote Lesson Learned and Cherished: The Teacher Who Changed My Life a year or so ago. Now, I'm writing about the sister who shaped my life. It's all about sisterhood. I'm from a large family—two brothers and six sisters. I thought it would be interesting to explore the sister relationship—the challenges, the ups, the downs, the beauty, the intrigue. Like I did before, I'm interviewing a ton of people about their relationships. Viola Davis is in it. Shonda Rhimes is in it. And a lot of just average people, friends of ours, colleagues of ours, on what it is about a sister and what the challenges have been; how they've maintained the relationships and how they've sometimes had frayings around the edges of their relationships. I happen to have a number of sets of twins who talk about what that relationship looks like and how unique it is. It includes my story with my sisters.
Anastasia: Al, how about you?
Al: I’ve got an animated kids show on PBS called Weather Hunters. The dad is a TV weather guy named Al Hunter. His wife, Dot Hunter, is a TV news producer. And they have three children: Corky, who's the pre-teen; Lily, who's the eight year old; and a five-year-old boy, Benny. I’ve been developing this so long, our kids were actually that age when I started this. It's going to debut in July on PBS. The first season's 40 episodes.
Deborah: He’s been working on this for 10 years.
Al: I’m Al Hunter. Holly Robinson Peete plays Dot, my wife. We've got three young kids from Los Angeles who are doing the voices. Al Hunter became a TV weather person because his grandfather, Wallace Hunter—and it’s based on a fact—was a meteorologist for the Tuskegee Airmen, who had their own cadre of Black meteorologists. He was also an inventor. We’ll bring a little history into it. LeVar Burton plays the grandfather. Sheryl Lee Ralph plays our next door neighbor, Ms. Joyce. I'm really proud of it. It looks at STEM and WISE. Every teacher I've ever met, when it comes to elementary school, the thing that kids are most interested in is weather. Especially now, weather plays such a big role in our lives.
Anastasia: That’s wonderful. There’s also a big change on the Today show.
Al: Much the same with Good Morning America [GMA], these shows are built for transition. Folks at GMA have been very fortunate in that they've had the same frontline folks for a long time, which is terrific, and they're great journalists. They’ve got great chemistry together. Being able to transition that can be fraught, but we were very fortunate in that Craig Melvin has been there. He’s a great journalist, but he's also just a great guy. On the one hand, I'm gonna miss Hoda every day, but I'm happy for her. She makes no secret of it: She's a 60-year-old single mom with two small kids. You don't get that time back. I'm in a different place. My kids are grown. We've transitioned into being grandparents, which is in itself an exciting adventure.
Anastasia: You all seem pretty close.
Al: Yes, we are. Sometimes, I feel a little odd man out only in this part. They are all 20 years younger than me. They're at a different place, family-wise. They all have younger kids. I think Carson's got a son who's in high school. Sheinelle’s got a high school student. But everybody else has younger kids. They always laugh and say, “How can you be doing all this stuff?” I say, “Because I got all this bandwidth, because I’m not raising little kids anymore. You’re doing this job and young kids.” One of the things that I marvel about Deborah is that in my job, I’m kind of in the comic section of news. I do the lighter stuff. Deborah is right in the middle of it. Deborah has been a terrific journalist, and she's also a wonderful mom. And the kids know that. At the end of the day, she's their mom. I don't think they would ever think, oh, mom chose something else over us.
Anastasia: Have your jobs changed through the years?
Deborah: Oh, gosh, a lot. Our lanes were very clearly defined when we first got together. Al almost strictly did weather. Every now and again, he might do a celebrity interview that fit in his sphere. Now, obviously, you do a lot of climate-type stories. There's a bit more overlap now.
Al: The thing that professionally has worked for us is that we both kind of wore off on each other.
Deborah: He’s encouraged me to loosen up and be myself a bit more sometimes. There were times when I would get offered to do a story, and I thought, that's too light. For instance, when Good Morning America first asked—or it might have been Nightline that asked—would I do the Barbie movie? This was a few months before all the hooplah. They said, “Deborah, would you be willing to go out to LA and interview Margot Robbie and the team about The Barbie movie?” And I was, like, “The Barbie movie?” And our son said, “Mom, the Barbie movie? You? Are you kidding?” Al said, “I'm gonna tell you right now. That's gonna be a huge hit.” I said, “Al, I just don't know.” He said, “I'm telling you, you ought to do that one. There's going to be a lot of buzz. This movie is going to be a big one.” Of course, I wound up not only having a blast doing the interview with Greta Gerwig and Margot and Ryan Gosling, it turned out to be this huge movie. When Nightline and Good Morning America and World News Tonight wanted to do something, I had interviewed the cast, and I appeared on all these broadcasts talking not so much about the lightness of the bubble gum pink, but just this sort of juggernaut of a movie. It was because Al's instincts were that sometimes you got to look beyond what you think is just sort of the lightness of something, and just go and enjoy it.
Anastasia: What interviews stand out to you?
Deborah: I interviewed Michelle Obama before she was first lady, and that was big because, first of all, I booked the interview. I had met her at something, and she was willing to do it because she trusted me. She was just intriguing and a little mysterious to a lot of us. So, I enjoyed that. I also interviewed Ivanka Trump, during the time when people were so critical of the Trump administration. It was an opportunity to kind of understand that family and her thinking. I was proud of that because, you know, opposite ends of the spectrum sometimes. I did a story with a woman who went back to Ethiopia to discover her roots, and that one won an Emmy. Let’s see, who else. The cast of The Bear. I enjoyed that because that's outside of my wheelhouse. Al said to me, “You’ve got to interview them.” And I was, like, “The Bear? I don't know.” I hadn't been watching it. Then I did. That was really a lot of fun. Then they went on to win all these awards. It’s kind of a mixed bag of serious names of politicians and celebrities, and just sort of average people who have overcome and dealt with something fairly big. I interviewed Gypsy-Rose Blanchard when she got out of prison.
Anastasia: How about you, Al. Anybody stand out?
Al: I'm an amateur cartoonist, and I got to interview Charles Schulz for the 50th anniversary of Peanuts. It was announced he had colon cancer, stage four. Six months later, he asked me to come out and do his last interview. That was very bittersweet. Most recently, getting to interview Oprah. From a historical standpoint, I got to interview Lena King, who, at the time, was 99. She was one of the 12 remaining women in
The Six Triple Eight at the time. There’s now a movie about this Black female battalion, the only one to go overseas and revamped the mail system. The quote that still haunts me—not haunts, but I just think it's so poignant—was this: I asked, “Why did you all do this? What was the reason?” “We wanted to show everybody how much we love this country, even though it didn't always love us back.” They so far exceeded what was expected of them.
Anastasia: Deborah, what was it like working with Barbara Walters as a young journalist? What did you learn from her?
Deborah: I grew up idolizing Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Carole Simpson, all of these women who had made it in the business. Of course, I sat at home and just watched 20/20 and watched Barbara Walters. I was aware when she became the “million dollar woman.” When I joined the 20/20 team, they were still doing the debriefs on the set with Barbara and Hugh Downs. If you were reporting on a story, the day you were taping, you'd sit on the set and talk to Barbara or Hugh about the story. That was monumental to me. I was sitting there, and I kept looking down at my notes. She just grabbed the paper and threw it away. She said, “You know what you're going to talk about. Don't look at your notes; talk to me.” I was terrified. She was trying to send a signal, which is, be you. Own your knowledge, own what you're doing, and just go for it. Don't rely on notes. Be an informed and competent journalist. It terrified me at the moment, but it meant so much to me. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I was sort of nervous because women were still making their way in this industry. When you take off to have a baby, sometimes there was an expectation that you're not as interested. Barbara said to me, “That's so great. Take some time and really enjoy your family. I wish I had done a little bit more of that.” At first, I thought, does she really mean this? And I think she really did mean it. She was reflecting a little bit on her life. That was so antithetical to what you would think of Barbara Walters, who was this hard-charging workhorse, giving a young correspondent a little bit of advice: “Don’t forget to prioritize your life a little bit.”
Anastasia: Al, I want to ask you about the parades. You've hosted the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade since 1997 on NBC. And you’ve also hosted the Rose Parade for 26 years. What is your favorite part of these parades?
Al: It’s not really the floats. It’s when people come up and say, “You're part of my Thanksgiving; you're part of my holiday.” I always remember my siblings and I, we'd watch the parade. Our mom's making dinner. In New York, when the parade was over, the local TV station, Channel 11, would show March of the Wooden Soldiers with Laurel and Hardy. So we'd watch that. Then we’d get up and we'd get dressed. We’d always eat early, around 3 o’clock. I've done the tree lighting for so long. What people don't realize is that it was in 1983, when I started at WNBC. It was the last five minutes of the local news. It wasn’t even a national show. So, it’s being a part of the holiday traditions.
Anastasia: Was it special to have the West Stockbridge tree this past year?
Al: Yes, because I know that tree. When we take that cutoff to Great Barrington, we pass it. I was like, oh my gosh, I actually know the tree! For a family to say they were the owner of one of fewer than 100 trees that had that honor, that's pretty cool.
At this point, the frittata had been taken out of the oven, rested for 30 minutes on the counter, then was put back in the oven to be warmed up again. That’s our cue. Time’s up. Our interview is over. Time to dig in. We all gather around the kitchen island, where Al and Deborah slice up the frittata and share a piece of country living with each of us. And all was good. In fact, it was great.
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