Tamron Hall gets emotional talking about faith, motherhood and her new talk show
Article By Associated Press // EEW Magazine // Women
(L-R) Bill Geddie, Tamron Hall and Talia Parkinson-Jones attend ABC's TCA Summer Press Tour Carpet Event on August 05, 2019 in West Hollywood, California. (Credit: Getty)
When Tamron Hall decided to leave NBC after the network gave her prime “Today” co-hosting slot to Megyn Kelly, the journalist threw herself a party — a pity party.
That included plenty of tears and a bit of feeling sorry for herself— to the point that “my mother said to me, ‘You can always come back to your room here,’ and I’m like, ‘Mom that’s not in the plan!’”
She didn’t have a specific plan when she left in 2017. All she had was faith that something bigger had to be on the horizon.
“I leaned on my mom, and my mother has the saying, ‘God didn’t bring you this far to let you go.’ And so at some point I could not just keep regurgitating the line leap of faith — I had to believe it,” she recalled, laughing, in a recent interview. “I’ve got to believe in something, so why not believe in myself?”
That belief has paid off with amazing dividends for Hall, who not only now has a husband and a 4-month-old son Moses, but her own eponymous show.
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Hall was hosting the successful third hour of the “Today” show with Al Roker when NBC decided to make room for Kelly. Hall decided to opt out of her contract instead of taking a lesser role. Kelly later imploded in the slot after making racist comments.
“Tamron Hall” is entering an already crowded talk space in syndication, including a new entry from Kelly Clarkson. Hall, 48, is not concerned though, because what she thinks “Tamron Hall” will provide is a unique factor —herself.
Though she lives in Harlem and has been a New Yorker for years, there’s a universal appeal that Hall enjoys that even she didn’t realize until her time off, as she traveled the country speaking at events.
“I’ll never forget, we were in Houston, right after I had left and there were these couples who happened to be white, and it was the husbands (who said), ‘Team Tamron! Team Tamron!’” she said, laughing.
In the early days of preparing for her show, unbeknownst to most involved, Hall was also working on another project — having a baby with her husband, music executive Steve Greener, whom she married earlier this year.
Hall went through IVF to conceive and recalls getting shots to prepare for the procedure as she was crisscrossing the country while shooting “Deadline: Crime With Tamron Hall.” She laughed as she recalled getting a shot from her celebrity hairstylist Johnny Wright while in the back of an Uber.
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It was a process Hall had been through several times in the past, unsuccessfully. Though some women might have postponed the process during such a busy time, Hall had learned through past experience that it didn’t really matter.
“Both (the show and the baby) were so out of my control and that was the similarity,” she said. “I can only put so much into both of those.”
Now that both have come to fruition, she finds herself doing the working mother juggle and relishing the opportunity. Tears came to her eyes as she recalled having left her son for a recent trip and returning home to find him sound asleep as her mother watched over him.
“I took that as, ‘Mom, I’m safe, I’m good, I’m going to sleep restful right here, right now, you go do it Mommy, you go get it,’ and that’s been satisfying for me as a working mom, because there’s been a lot of real guilt,” she said.
She recalled her own mother, a single mom at 19, working multiple jobs to provide for her children.
“So now I get this daytime talk show, far more glamorous than working in a leather factory, and I get to come home to my mom sitting right there, helping me with my son,” she said, through tears.
It’s an emotional moment, but also a very relatable one, and what she hopes to convey with “Tamron Hall.”
“That is my life. That’s the show I want to do. That’s the voice I want to have. And I think that it’s where I’m supposed to be,” she said.
