The romantic stone tavern perched on a quiet canal in New Hope, Pennsylvania, seemed like the perfect getaway. Located just under two hours from Manhattan, Chez Odette, a Parisian-style cabaret where Nina Simone once performed, still lured those looking to replace New York’s hard edges with dulcet tones, three-finger pours, and competent escargots de Bourgogne. On a rainy Sunday, October 23, 1983, 36-year-old Jessica Savitch, perhaps the most recognizable woman on prime-time TV, and her new love, shaggy-haired New York Post executive Martin Fischbein, 34, arrived for dinner around 5:30 p.m. The smartly dressed pair—she wore a jacket and slacks; he was in a suit and topcoat—requested a seat by the fire and ordered a bottle of white wine to share over dinner. They had spent the day antiquing and gallery hopping. They’d even brought along with them a copy of The Great Weekend Escape Book.
The typically commanding anchorwoman was low. It had been less than three weeks since she’d garbled a prime-time NBC news digest—her speech halting, her jaw awkwardly slung open—in the middle of a Johnny Carson special. The event, beamed into millions of homes, got media tongues wagging. “[Savitch] slurred her way through the mini newscast—and sounded like a 45 r.p.m being played at 33 ⅓,” Gary Deeb swiped in his nationally syndicated TV column.
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