Early in her broadcasting career, Katie Couric tried using her given name, Katherine, onscreen: “to counteract my Campbell’s Soup Kid looks,” she writes in a new book that has been leaking like unburped Tupperware throughout the media ecosystem.

During the chirpy morning hours of “Today,” the show that made Couric famous, relatability trumped authority, and so “Katie” prevailed.

Never destroy it.” (It was discovered in his study by a horrified great-granddaughter.) Then there is Couric’s first husband, Jay Monahan, whose bugle-blowing passion for Confederacy re-enactments Couric once saw as “a benign hobby” — throwing him an Old South-themed 40th birthday bash complete with a Scarlett O’Hara Barbie doll atop the cake — but now finds queasy-making, even as she continues to mourn his death from colon cancer at 42?

Soon after our heroine, modeling herself after the fictional Mary Richards, burst into the business as a 22-year-old assistant, a midlife Sam Donaldson leapt atop a desk to serenade her with a World War I song (“K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy”).

Like Richards, Couric turned the world on with her smile and clearly benefited from the not-always-appropriate attentions of powerful men.

While she was a young associate producer for “Take Two,” a daytime program at CNN — then nicknamed Chicken Noodle News — Couric unblinkingly dated a director and swiped on Frosty Cola lipstick to flirt with the playwright Neil Simon at a news conference.

Hearing salacious rumors about Lauer and a production assistant, Couric wrinkled her nose at the affront to Lauer’s then-wife rather than the big “duh” of workplace harassment.

He was ousted five years later and eventually became, Couric writes “the Leon Trotsky of 30 Rock,” their awkward texts trailing off: “It was as if Matt never existed.”.