The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane

“Alycia was always volunteering: ‘I’ll go there,’” Soto remembers. “And we’re talking about areas of the South Bronx — I mean, not the safest community in the country.” And there Lane would be, all by herself, often at night, carrying the bulky camera and a mike stick.

It all paid off when high-profile talent agent Gregg Willinger called. At their initial meeting, he knew Lane had huge potential. Very soon after she signed with him, she had an offer to more than double her salary as a reporter at WSVN, the tabloidy Fox affiliate in Miami.

Lane hadn’t been in Miami a year when her personal life started to catch up with her professional one. At a barbecue at her apartment building, she met a guy who said to her, right off, “I’m going to marry you.” Dino Calandriello, then a minor-league baseball player, was charming like that. And tall. And good-looking. And, “He cooks me dinner,” Lane told her sister on the phone. “You guys are going to love him.” It was no surprise to anyone that Lane fell hard and fast for Calandriello. When she wanted something, she went for it. “She wanted the white picket fence, and the dog, and the kids,” says her sister. “She’s always been like that about love.”

Lane and Calandriello quickly got married in 2000, all fairy-tale-like at Miami’s swanky Biltmore Hotel. Lane looked like a model in her strapless white gown, her smile so enormous it seemed nothing could ever make it go away. She was so convinced she was fulfilling her destiny that she quit the job she’d worked so hard to get, instead traveling with her husband on the minor-league circuit.

Two things brought Lane back to TV: the fact that her husband wasn’t making enough money to support them, and the Elian Gonzalez story. She was watching the Cuban boy’s saga play out from the road, regretting that she wasn’t in Miami to cover it herself. She went back to WSVN, and the following year moved over to more substantive NBC station WTVJ as a general assignment reporter. Her boss, Don Browne, thought her tape was “not great, but solid.” He was, though, extremely impressed with her writing and old-school philosophy about the business. She was more into being a hard-core reporter than being an anchor.

“She really was so afraid of the performance part of it,” Browne says. So he coached her: Relax. Slow down. Enjoy the texture of what you’re saying. Not only did she take the criticism; she asked for it, especially after Browne put her on-air as a substitute anchor, then a weekend anchor.

Lane got used to the anchor seat. She even started to like it, and felt she was ready to be a prime-time player. But WTVJ was up to its ears in female anchors, one reason why Lane told her agent to send her tapes around. The other reason was more personal: Her marriage was breaking up.

Calandriello “broke her heart,” says her sister. “She wanted to get out of Miami.”