Audition Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Lou, Dena, and My Princess Grandmother

  My Childhood

  “Skinnymalinkydink”

  Sixty-three Cents

  The Pistachio Green House

  New York, New York

  Miami at War

  “A very normal girl”

  Sarah Lawrence

  Television 101

  Bad Choices

  It Gets Worse

  Television 102 and a Strange Marriage Proposal

  Passage to India

  A Funeral and a Wedding

  Thirteen Weeks to Thirteen Years

  Becoming Barbara Walters

  Garland, Capote, Rose Kennedy, and Princess Grace

  Born in My Heart

  Dean Rusk, Golda Meir, Henry Kissinger, and Prince Philip

  Sad Times in Florida

  Winning Nixon, Losing Sinatra

  Exit Hugh, Enter McGee

  Marriage On the Rocks

  Historic Journey: China with Nixon

  A Dead Marriage and the Dead Sea

  Resignation in Washington. Victory in New York

  Fun and Games in Washington

  Special Men in My Life

  Egypt, Israel, and ¡Hola, Castro!

  The Million-Dollar Baby

  “Don’t let the bastards get you down”

  Thank Heaven! The Specials

  Photo Insert 1

  Finally, Fidel

  The Historic Interview: Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin

  Exit Harry, Enter Hugh

  Heartbreak and a New Beginning

  The Hardest Chapter to Write

  9/11 and Nothing Else Matters

  Photo Insert 2

  Presidents and First Ladies: Forty Years Inside the White House

  Heads of State: The Good, the Bad, and the Mad

  Adventures with the Most Mysterious Men

  Murderers

  Uncommon Criminals

  Over Again, Never Again

  Celebrities Who Affected My Life

  Monica

  The View

  Exit

  To Be Continued…

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Credits

  Also by Barbara Walters

  Copyright

  To the memory of my sister, Jacqueline Walters,

  and to my amazing daughter, Jacqueline Walters Danforth,

  both of whom changed my life

  Prologue

  SISTER.

  I thought for a while that is what the title of this memoir should be because it was my older and only sister, Jacqueline, who was unwittingly the strongest influence in my life. Jackie was three years older than I, but all our lives she appeared younger. My sister was mentally retarded, as the condition was called then, though only mildly so. Just enough to prevent her from attending regular school, from having friends, from getting a job, from marrying. Just enough to stop her from having a real life.

  Her condition also altered my life. I think I knew from a very early age that at some point Jackie would become my responsibility. That awareness was one of the main reasons I was driven to work so hard. But my feelings went beyond financial responsibility.

  For so many years I was embarrassed by her, ashamed of her, guilty that I had so much and she had so little. Very little was understood about retardation almost eighty years ago when Jackie was born. There were few schools that dealt with what we now call the “intellectually impaired,” few workshops where they could go and learn a trade, few employers who could figure out how to use their talents and their loyalty.

  Today Jackie could probably get a job, something simple but productive. She might even have met and married a nice man. But back then Jackie’s life was essentially one of isolation, except for the relationships she had with me and my mother and father.

  My parents protected her. They never discussed her outside the family or explained her condition to anyone. People wouldn’t understand, they felt, and Jackie would be shunned and humiliated.

  Jackie’s isolation also contributed to my own sense of isolation. As a child I didn’t have birthday parties because Jackie didn’t. I didn’t join the Girl Scouts because Jackie couldn’t join. I rarely had friends over to the house because they didn’t know what to make of my sister and I would hear the whispers—real or imagined.

  When I was older, my mother, heartsick at Jackie’s loneliness, would often ask me, when I was going out with a girlfriend or on a date with a boy, to take her along. I loved my sister. She was sweet and affectionate and she was, after all, my sister. But there were times I hated her, too. For being different. For making me feel different. For the restraints she put on my life. I didn’t like that hatred, but there’s no denying that I felt it. Perhaps you’ll be horrified at my admission. Or perhaps you’re guilty of some of the same emotions and will feel relief that you are not alone. I imagine, as I write this, that almost anyone who has a sibling who is chronically ill or mentally or physically impaired will understand what I mean.

  I recently came across a book that helped explain a lot about the impact Jackie had on my life. It’s called The Normal One: Life with a Difficult or Damaged Sibling, written by Jeanne Safer, a psychotherapist who grew up with a very difficult brother. I recognized myself on almost every page: “the prematurely mature child; the looming responsibility for a sibling’s care and well-being; the compulsion to be an over-achiever; the fear of failure.” I wish I had read the book earlier in my life, but I’m not sure it would really have made a difference. Jackie would still have been Jackie. And the same set of circumstances would have driven my life.

  Much of the need I had to prove myself, to achieve, to provide, to protect, can be traced to my feelings about Jackie. But there must be something more, the “something” that makes one need to excel. Some may call it ambition. I can live with that. Some may call it insecurity, although that is such a boring, common label, like being called shy, that means little. But as I look back, it feels to me that my life has been one long audition—an attempt to make a difference and to be accepted.

  My sister was a very pretty child. Her mental condition had nothing to do with her physical appearance. She was fair haired, fair skinned, with a sweet smile, shorter than I, curvier than I. I had dark hair, a sallow complexion, I was often told, and was skinny. “Skinnymalinkydink” was what my parents lovingly called me. (Yes, it was meant lovingly.) You wouldn’t have known by looking at Jackie that there was anything different about her, until she opened her mouth to talk. Jackie was the worst stutterer I have ever known. She stuttered so badly that sometimes when she was trying to get a word out, her tongue protruded from her mouth. My parents tried almost every technique available to help her as she was growing up, but nothing seemed to make a difference. At one point they even took her to see the man who supposedly helped Britain’s King George VI get over his speech impediment. He couldn’t do anything for my sister. It was frustrating to listen to her. It was hard to be patient and easy to mock her. My first memory of my sister is when I was about three and Jackie six; the boys in the neighborhood were pulling at her skirt and making fun of her because they’d heard her talk. We both ran crying into the house.

  Until Jackie died from ovarian cancer in 1985, I worried about her, supported her, made decisions for her that my parents couldn’t make, and agonized over the fact that although I couldn’t always love her, she always loved me. She taught me compassion and understanding. (In later years these feelings would be important to me in interviewing.) Often frustrated herself, often cranky and prone to tantrums, she never expressed resentment or jealousy of me.

  When my daughter was born, I named her Jacqueline
—Jackie. I wanted the grown Jackie to feel that she, too, had a child, because I knew by this time she never would. So yes, though I had mixed feelings about my sister, I do believe the love was stronger than the resentment, and the sympathy for her was overwhelming.

  I tell you all this because young people starting out in television sometimes say to me: “I want to be you.” My stock reply is always: “Then you have to take the whole package.” They laugh politely, not knowing what I’m talking about, and I don’t elaborate. I’ve guarded my sister’s privacy for years. And though she was the central force in my life, she was part of the package that I’m about to unwrap on these pages.

  That package also includes my brilliant and mercurial impresario of a father, my loving but frustrated and conflicted mother, the amazing and celebrated people I met from childhood on, and my professional career in television. Oh, that! But mostly this memoir is a personal story of how and why I got from there to here.

  Before I end this prologue, let me tell you a story. Back in the sixties, when I was appearing daily on NBC’s Today show, I was living on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street. My apartment was across from Carnegie Hall and on the corner of a very busy street. It was also near several large hotels that catered to businessmen. Perhaps because of this, the corner was the gathering place for some of the most attractive “ladies of the evening.” Each morning at five o’clock I would emerge from my building wearing dark glasses, as I hadn’t yet had my makeup done, and I was usually carrying a garment bag. It seemed obvious to the “ladies” that there was some big “number” I had just left. Now, bear in mind that, even then, I wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. But I would emerge and look at the young ladies, some of whom were still teenagers. “Good morning,” I would say. “Good morning,” they would answer. And then I would get into this long black limousine with its uniformed driver, and we would glide off into the early morning light. And you know what effect all this had on the ladies?

  I gave them hope.

  Perhaps this book may do that for you.

  So here it is, the whole package, from the beginning.

  Lou, Dena, and My Princess Grandmother

  MY MOTHER, Dena Seletsky, met my father, Lou Walters, at a charity dance in Boston in 1919. They were introduced by a friend of my father, who would later marry my mother’s sister. My mother was twenty-two and quite striking, with long, black hair, high cheekbones, a big bosom (too big, she always thought), great legs, and lovely brown eyes through which she could barely see. She was dreadfully nearsighted and always wore thick glasses, the bane of her existence. Whenever she posed for pictures she took them off.

  My father, then twenty-four, was not especially good-looking. He was short, about five seven, slight of build, and had light brown hair and a prominent nose that he would later have surgically reshaped. He, too, wore glasses, but had a different problem with his sight. He had a glass eye, having lost one of his eyes from the shards of a shattered milk bottle in a childhood accident. But he was always impeccably dressed and had a certain elegance, probably because he had grown up in England. He had an English accent, very appealing then as now.

  He was also well on his way to making his first fortune. My father was in the business many people envied but rarely dared enter—show business. He opened his own booking company, the Lou Walters Agency, in Boston around the same time that he met my mother.

  Vaudeville was king in the prosperous post–World War I giddiness known as the Roaring Twenties, and my father owned the keys to the kingdom, at least in New England. Vaudeville halls were packed with people who never stopped partying. And my father kept the party going. You wanted flappers? The Lou Walters Agency had them. You wanted a Charleston band? No problem. Magicians, dancers, comics, big stars, little stars—my father had them all. The money was pouring in. He was only in his twenties.

  My mother, on the other hand, was working in a men’s neckwear store, wrapping packages. Not much of a career, but her father, who was in the shoe business, had heart trouble, and she was helping her parents support the six younger kids. My mother, I am told, always seemed above her job. She, too, had a certain elegance that set her apart from most of her friends. She spoke beautifully and had a good, if slightly caustic, sense of humor.

  My parents married a year after they met. May 30, 1920, is the date that officially began their often tortuous relationship, one that somehow lasted for nearly sixty years and survived personal tragedy, the heights of success, and the depths of financial ruin.

  On paper they seemed ideally suited for each other. Each was a member of what seems now to be a huge family—seven children. Each was a child of immigrant parents whose journey from persecution in the “old country” could be the history of thousands of Jewish refugees transforming their lives in America.

  Both sets of my grandparents came from what was then part of the Russian empire and is now eastern Europe, my mother’s family from a village in Lithuania and my father’s family from Lodz, Poland. (This discovery would have startled some members of the family who firmly believed my father’s “superior” side of the family came from the scholarly and highly religious city of Vilnius, known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania.) I’m no genealogist—my cousin Shirley was the self-appointed historian of the Walters family until her death in 1997, and she always claimed their superior Vilnius connection—but the old records I found, while researching this memoir, show the 1868 birth of my paternal grandfather, Isaac Abrahams, in Lodz, and the birth of my maternal grandfather, Jacob Seletsky, at about the same time, in Russia.

  Both the Seletskys and the Abrahamses are thought to have joined the flood of Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in imperial Russia. By the 1890s, my mother’s side of the family seems to have immigrated directly to America, where they settled in Boston. My father’s side of the family went to London.

  My cousin Shirley loved to tell the fairy tale of how my paternal grandfather met, and subsequently married, my grandmother. In Shirley’s version, Isaac Abrahams, then around twenty-two, arrived in London orphaned, uneducated, and penniless. He somehow met a well-off family named Schwartz who had left eastern Europe some years before and by then owned several highly profitable knitting mills in England. Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz, impressed by Isaac’s intelligence, manners, and good looks, more or less adopted him, giving him a job as an apprentice in one of the knitting mills and educating him as well, starting with teaching him English.

  Enter their daughter, Lillian.

  Every fairy tale has to have a princess, and Lillian, their only daughter, more than filled the role. On holidays her parents sent her to the knitting mills with baskets of food—turkeys, geese, ducklings, bread and cakes—for all the apprentices. On the fateful day the princess first laid eyes on the handsome orphan, according to Shirley, Lillian was wearing a pale blue coat and a little white ermine muff and hat. It was love at first sight. Forbidden love. The best kind. The plucky princess followed her heart and, ignoring her family’s orders to give up this penniless suitor, eloped with Isaac.

  The Schwartzes weren’t thrilled with this marriage, but they had trained Isaac well in the mills, and he became a prosperous custom tailor in London. And the princess became a mother—seven times: first Rose, my cousin Shirley’s mother; then my father, Lou; followed by Harry, Barnet, Rebecca, Belle, and Florence. (Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz.)

  While Lillian and my grandfather Isaac were begetting my father’s side of the family in London, my maternal grandparents were busy with their own begetting in Boston. My maternal grandfather, Jacob Seletsky, who started his life in the new country as a peddler, had gone into the shoe business with his brother, Joseph, when he met and married my grandmother Celia Sakowitz, in 1895. They, too, produced seven children: my mother, Dena; her sister, Lena (not much imagination in this family); and then a whole slew of sons—Edward, Samuel, Max, and twins, Daniel and Herman.

  I never did know my maternal grandfather, but I remember my grandmother Cel
ia very well. She was short and stout with thick glasses, like my mother. Everybody listened to her; she was evidently strong and tough. She spoke English with a heavy Yiddish accent, and the few Yiddish words I remember I learned from Grandma…like nebbish, meaning sweet but pathetic…or mishugus, meaning a whole lot of stuff going on…or mishuga, meaning crazy person…or farbissener, a sourpuss. There must be better spellings of these words, but you get the drift. Unfortunately my mother’s side of the family did not have a historian like Shirley, so if there are any colorful Seletsky stories, I don’t know them.

  The Schwartzes had educated my grandfather well, and Isaac became an avid reader and writer. He passed that passion for reading on to my father, whom I picture always with a book. Isaac also passed his talent for writing on to his eldest son. As a schoolboy in London my father received a silver medal for academic excellence for an essay he’d written. Needless to say my father was declared brilliant by his family.

  But Grandfather Isaac must have been having a difficult time in London. The clothing trade in the East End was notorious at the time for its abuse of immigrant Jewish laborers. The working conditions were beyond terrible, with low-paid employees, many of them children, jammed into hot, airless rooms with little or no sanitation, seven days a week. Such “sweated labour,” as it was referred to then, gave rise to the term “sweatshop”—and inevitably to social unrest and riots.

  I don’t know if Isaac owned a sweatshop or worked in one, but it is believed that the bitterness and unrest in the clothing business, which spawned a strike in 1906, led him to pick up his family and relocate to Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Though there was a sizable and growing number of Jewish immigrants there, the family didn’t stay long. They immigrated to America in 1909. My grandfather Isaac and his three sons—my father, Harry, and Barnet—arrived in New York from Liverpool aboard the SS Cedric on August 28. According to the passenger manifest, they were detained overnight on Ellis Island because my father’s loss of an eye required a doctor to certify his ability to enter the country. When they were released they stayed with relatives, eventually moving to Rivington Street, in a community of Jewish immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They were joined there seven months later by my grandmother and the four girls, who arrived on the SS Columbia. They, too, were detained overnight on Ellis Island until my grandfather came and picked them up. And my family’s American odyssey began.