Rivera's show has been attracting twice as many viewers in recent weeks as it did at this time last year -- fueling CNBC's challenge to CNN, still the leading cable news network by far. In the first three quarters of 1998, CNBC's household viewership was up 43 percent over the same period last year, while CNN's rose by only 11 percent. "As long as the market and the president's libido is up, so is CNBC," jokes Bob Reichblum, the CNBC exec in charge of prime-time programming.

But now that the Clinton story is just about played out, Rivera, who has bolstered his role at CNBC with a visible new post at NBC News, personifies the challenge of every talking head on the air: How will he keep his audience and profile in a post-Monica media world and return to regular news? Will a man who thrives on adrenaline-laced over-the-top megastories still deliver for NBC covering more standard fare? Or will he be a $36 million P. T. Barnum without much of a show?

The prospect doesn't seem to trouble network news chiefs, who were recently embroiled in a full-scale bidding war to bring the outcast newsman back into the network fold. Last December, after a secret meeting with ABC president David Westin about the possibility of his taking over Good Morning America (Rivera turned down the offer) and then a very public flirtation with Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel, Rivera signed a five-year, $36 million contract with NBC. The deal guaranteed him a news-anchor slot at CNBC and, for the first time since he was pushed out of ABC's 20/20 in 1985, brought him under the much-coveted umbrella of a network news division.

The Rivera juggernaut took off in July, when NBC's Today show gave him a plum assignment covering Clinton's historic trip to China, enraging foreign correspondent Andrea Mitchell, who was bumped from the trip. Rivera's high-stakes comeback effort accelerated in late August with the debut of Upfront Tonight, a half-hour newscast airing on CNBC at 7:30 p.m. that he co-hosts with former Hard Copy reporter Diane Dimond. The broadcast, which has exceeded initial ratings projections and drawn fair reviews, relies heavily on NBC news packages and its Washington correspondents.

Rivera's rehabilitation culminated last month with the debut of The Geraldo Rivera Specials, a series of prime-time documentaries produced by NBC News in which Rivera reprises his seventies WABC Eyewitness News persona as a crusading street reporter. The first special, Blacks and Blue, examined tensions between the police and the black community in Pittsburgh and topped its time slot in the ratings. Rivera confirms that while NBC News president Andy Lack and Don Ohlmeyer, the head of NBC's entertainment division in Los Angeles, shot down the idea of his hosting a weekly Sunday-night in-studio talk show to go up against 60 Minutes, he's still gunning for the slot: He views the documentaries as a first step in ultimately persuading the network to let him take on the venerable, high-rated CBS news magazine.

Still, Rivera has a long row to hoe before he can shed his negative journalistic rap, even within his own network. A Rivera ally close to the negotiations with NBC says the deal was essentially forced on Lack, who "hates Geraldo's guts," by corporate bigwigs who were willing to make what some saw as a Faustian bargain to keep their money-making star happy. Rivera will say only that "Andy came up with the money and fought a lot of intramural battles. He should be credited. It's not easy being in my corner." (Through a spokesman, Lack says he supported bringing Rivera to the network.) Rivera then ran afoul of Tom Brokaw by seeming to suggest in a TV Guide interview that he wanted Brokaw's job. Rivera insists he meant to say only that unlike Brokaw, he was part of a new breed of anchor who does more than "read a script." (Brokaw, who has suggested that Rivera would never be welcome on the evening news, now declines to comment on Rivera.) NBC White House correspondent David Bloom won't appear live on any Rivera broadcast because he doesn't want to "get beat up by Geraldo," according to one NBC exec. The feeling is mutual. One evening off-air, Rivera referred to NBC reporter David Gregory as a "slightly less-well-informed guest."

Then there was the flap in August when Rivera broke the story that an FBI laboratory had found "human genetic material" on the dress that Monica Lewinsky had turned over to Starr. After the show that night, which beat out CNN's Larry King in the ratings, an increasingly common occurrence, a celebratory Rivera, flanked by a retinue of friends and his publicist, stopped by Elaine's for a drink and a few forkfuls of fried calamari. "This could really be it, a major step for me," he told me. Drawing on his sense of what Hollywood calls "the three-second I.D.," he volunteered: "Instead of your story being 'Outlaw Comes to the Network,' it could be 'Geraldo Rivera, Journalist!' " Then he dramatically excused himself to answer queries from the wires, Nightline, and the New York Post.