By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 29, 2008; C01

NEW YORK He had just finished chatting up Charlize Theron, but that wasn't Chris Cuomo's favorite part of "Good Morning America." It was the post-show ritual of schmoozing with audience members and posing for pictures.

"I feel a profound sense of responsibility," says Cuomo, his small Times Square office furnished with little more than a desk and a rack with 52 ties. "I don't want the job if I'm not contributing to this common cause of serving the audience. I wouldn't want the job just for the face time."

The cadence, infused with traces of his native Queens, is so familiar, so reminiscent of his father, the former governor of New York, and his brother, the state attorney general. Cuomo turned his back on the family business, opting instead for a television career that has landed him a coveted anchor slot on ABC's morning show. But when he talks about the craft, Cuomo sounds like a politician rhapsodizing about the importance of public service.

He didn't think much of the media growing up -- still doesn't, in some ways. "It's tough to like the people who seem to be going after your family," says Cuomo, 37. He recalls unfounded rumors that swirled around his father in 1992: " 'Why isn't he running for president?' 'Some say he's a Mafioso.' That's very, very hurtful to an Italian American. It's something I think about when I do my own labeling. . . . I think it helps make me a better journalist."

While the job description of news anchor calls for Cuomo to read the headlines and chat up hosts Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts, he has become the program's fireman -- racing off to the Minneapolis bridge collapse, the Virginia Tech shootings, the California wildfires. He has also indulged in occasional stunts, such as bungee-jumping off the roof of an Atlantic City casino and looking visibly uncomfortable doing it.

"This is a very competitive environment," Cuomo says. "You have to do things to create excitement in your audience." With 4.8 million viewers this season, "GMA" trails the perennial leader, NBC's "Today," by 900,000 viewers.

He is similarly unapologetic about diving into what has become a tabloid television staple, the three-year-old Natalee Holloway disappearance. "I don't believe it's my role to judge what people want to watch," Cuomo says. "If they say, 'I want to know what happened to this girl' . . . I want to help them find out."

He is disdainful of the media's sensationalism, pointing to the recent hype about the first "pregnant man." Of course, "GMA" did that story, too. Cuomo interviewed the transgendered man's attorney, but noted the case proved only that "a man can be pregnant when he's actually a woman, biologically."

That is the unresolved dilemma of Cuomo's career. He is different -- by background, by temperament, by plain-spoken manner -- than most of the anchor aspirants who've come up through the ranks of local television. But for all his earnestness, he has to fit into a morning-show medium that values glibness and faux intimacy as well as serious interviews. He accepts the inevitable compromises as the price for pursuing harder-edged stories that he admits are tougher to get on the air. And if that means taking a flying leap off a building, watch out below.

This gung-ho spirit appeals to ABC executives. "He's funny, he's passionate, he can get very intense," says Senior Executive Producer Jim Murphy. "Almost everyone else keeps part of themselves in a box when they perform on television."

But he can also stumble. In an international gaffe last month, Cuomo said that Britain's Prince Harry had been "over in Afghanistan fighting because he's expendable," and refused to back off after Roberts challenged him. London's Daily Mirror said Cuomo had "shocked millions of viewers with his outrageous claim that Harry went to Afghanistan because he is not next in line to the throne."

Cuomo says now he respects the prince and laments that "you only get one chance to say things on live TV."

The youngest of five siblings, he grew up while Mario Cuomo was winning three terms as governor, moving to the Albany mansion at the age of 13. Political life, the young man learned, can be rough, and the media scrutiny was "a real turnoff." The Yale graduate went on to Albany Law School and became a Wall Street lawyer instead.

In the mid-1990s, the elder Cuomo says, his son told him: "You know, Pop, my job is making rich people richer." When the former governor suggested politics, he says, Chris replied: " 'You and Andrew screwed that one up enough.' That was his cute way of saying that the area was occupied by us."

What about television? Mario Cuomo recalls his son saying he was "afraid of the camera," but Chris was soon bouncing around the cable networks as a part-time political analyst, even co-hosting Geraldo Rivera's daytime show on occasion.

He was starting to garner attention, making People's 50 Most Beautiful People list and becoming friendly with John F. Kennedy Jr. "I could watch him as the ultimate example of what is expected of the child of a political figure," Chris Cuomo says. "He provided a lesson in how not to let who you are go to your head."

Cuomo's dad put him in touch with Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes, a former adversary in the political wars, who hired him in 1998.

With a nationally known Democrat as a father, the younger Cuomo says, "people didn't want to give me jobs because they didn't think I'd be able to be accepted as a regular reporter. For Roger Ailes to put a Cuomo on Fox News Channel, that didn't scream 'immediate benefit.' " Ailes, says Cuomo, "taught me everything."

ABC hired him as a correspondent the following year. "He's very intelligent, he's a curious person and he has a strong presence on the screen," says ABC News President David Westin.

Within four years, Cuomo was a co-host of "Primetime," and in 2006 he was tapped for early-morning duty at "GMA," prompting speculation that he might eventually succeed Sawyer as a co-host.

Cuomo faced several months of adjustments, from reading off the teleprompter -- he's still not a natural -- to nimbly dancing from one segment to the next. "One minute you're crying about someone losing their puppy, and the next you're talking to an actor about his role," he says.

But Cuomo made his presence felt. "For everyone it was initially like having a Great Dane in the studio," Sawyer says. "He has boundless energy. He comes in my dressing room with three suggestions for my interviews."

That same enthusiasm is on display when Cuomo is pressing Hillary Clinton last week about whether she would "bomb Iran" if it attacked Israel -- Clinton made news by saying U.S. forces could "totally obliterate them" -- or asking Keira Knightley about her latest "steamy love scene." And as an amateur chef, he takes such segments as Emeril Lagasse's Mac and Cheese Challenge quite seriously.

"He called me out on the air," Sawyer says of their competition. "I won for best meat loaf. He's never gotten over it."

The family is suitably impressed. "I am surprised at how well he's done it," says Andrew Cuomo, who is 13 years older. "He's my little brother. I remember changing his diapers."

Television, he says, is not such a leap for Chris: "He's trained as a lawyer, which is a big benefit to what he does. He asks the right questions. He understands politics. He understands how change comes about in society."

When Andrew, who failed in his own gubernatorial bid, won the New York attorney general's job in 2006, his brother joined him for the victory speech. "Do I understand the sensitivity? Yes," Chris Cuomo says. "When it comes to my brother and my family, there is no objectivity. There's only unconditional love."

He admits it was "tricky" to cover the prostitute scandal that sunk Gov. Eliot Spitzer, whom Cuomo knows slightly, saying he was sensitive to the "toll" on Spitzer's family and avoided reporting "every salacious detail."

Cuomo is instinctively wary of journalists and grants few interviews; it took him months to agree to speak to The Washington Post. "We argue about it often," says his wife, Cristina Greeven Cuomo, who is editor in chief of Gotham and Hamptons magazines and also writes for the Washington-based Capitol File, which is owned by the same company. "He doesn't want to do publicity and yet he's on TV. Isn't that an oxymoron?"

They met at a party in 1998 -- "he was a big ladies' man," Cristina says -- and he "came on a little strong. He was playing the tough guy." The suitor later called to apologize, they had lunch, and three years later they were married.

Cuomo's sense of competitiveness is unrelenting. An all-American rugby player in college, he took up paddle tennis in recent years. "He's actually unbelievably good," Cristina Cuomo says. "You can't get a ball past him." She is an avid skier, and "I finally got him out on the slopes. In three days he was better than me. Of course it's annoying."

That drive also makes Cuomo hypercritical of his own work as he reviews his videotapes. "He's always his father's son," his wife says. "It's never good enough. They strive for perfection."

When he's not reading about muscle cars -- Cuomo rebuilt his 1969 Firebird convertible -- he dotes on their children, 2-year-old Mario and 5-year-old Isabella, whom he picks up from school. He occasionally talks about them on the air, but "I'm not going to trot my kids out every two seconds because they're cute," Cuomo says.

Cuomo describes himself as an advocacy journalist, and his bosses like that. "He's had a real yearning to seek out the untold stories, particularly of the disadvantaged," Westin says. "He's almost a crusader. It's a form of old-fashioned, muckraking journalism."

Sounding like a courtroom lawyer, Cuomo talks about pursuing corporate malefactors and "putting people in the chair" for cross-examination. His "GMA Gets Answers" segment resembles a staple of local television, and Cuomo admits that such stories often help only one person. Last fall, however, an insurance company changed its overall policy after Cuomo did a story on a 3-year-old boy who needed a motorized wheelchair not covered by the family's insurance.

"It's the most important thing I can do," Cuomo says, pounding the desk. "What frustrates people about these stories is you tell them what the problem is all the time, but you don't hold anyone accountable."

That earnestness may seem over the top at times, but it is the key to Cuomo's sense of himself. "I'm not good at faking the funk, as Robin likes to say. My shtick is having no shtick."