Maury Povich says Connie Chung was ‘making 10 times’ what he earned when they were married

Key Points

• Maury Povich says wife Connie Chung was “making 10 times” his income when they were married in 1984.

• When playfully referred to as a “gold digger” in a recent interview, the talk show icon remarked, “Absolutely.”

• The super-couple, who once coanchored a Los Angeles news program together, have remained happily married for 42 years and have raised three children.

Go ahead and call Maury Povich a gold digger. He wears the label with pride.

The tabloid TV icon got candid about the early days of his decades-long relationship with the equally iconic broadcast news journalist Connie Chung in a conversation with Adam Friedland, a member of the rising class of talk show hosts, for Interview on Wednesday.

“You have the best life ever,” Friedland told the 87-year-old, who responded, “Only because I married Connie Chung.”

When Friedland playfully threw the “gold digger” badge his way, Povich happily pinned it to his vest: “Absolutely. My wife was making 10 times what I was making when we got married. How’s that?”

Povich and Chung married in 1984, seven years before Povich would become a household name as the host of his eponymous talk show. He had worked as a reporter and broadcast news anchor for two decades before that, even coanchoring a segment on the Los Angeles CBS affiliate KNXT with Chung for a number of months in the late 1970s.

Chung’s path was similar to Povich’s; though her career began about a decade after his and shot into the stratosphere in half the time. By 1984, Chung was working for CBS as a national anchor of the programs “NBC News at Sunrise” and the Saturday edition of “NBC Nightly News.” When Tom Brokaw was out, it was Chung who’d fill in.

Povich and Chung have remained married for 42 years, rearing three children in that time —Susan and Amy, Povich’s daughters with his first wife, Phyllis Minkoff, and Matthew, a son Povich and Chung welcomed via adoption.

The couple worked on the air together again in 2005, when MSNBC launched the weekend news program Weekends with Maury and Connie. The series was canceled just a year later, but Povich and Chung remain each other’s biggest cheerleaders.

Chung enthusiastically helped Maury announce the launch of his podcast, On Par with Maury Povich, in a sweet video jointly shared by the couple on Instagram last March.

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“Hey Maury, you’re launching a podcast,” Chung tells him in the video. “Maury, on pod, par,” she struggles to say, but eventually gets the title right with Povich’s encouragement.

When she appeared as the first guest on that podcast the following month, Chung asked her husband when he feels “sexiest.” Povich replied, “On Sundays,” prompting Chung to suggestively joke, “Never on Sunday.”

“Not in our house,” Povich insisted. “It’s always been, everyone says, ‘Can we play golf on Sunday?’ Nope. Sundays [are] with Connie.”

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