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Is Barbara Walters about to cry?

A crumpled, sodden tissue in hand, she dabs at her runny nose and gazes out the floor-to-ceiling window of her corner office, 10 storeys above the street. It is a drizzly New York afternoon out there, a melancholy moment in the life of the city, and here is Walters discussing her memoir Audition, which arrived in bookstores this week crammed full of lump-in-the-throat stories about her tough childhood, the people she's loved and lost, and the price of her own success. “This is going to be a very difficult two months,” allows Walters, as she considers the imminent publicity encounters.

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“There will be memories that are very painful, when I talk about my sister, when I talk about my parents – my father, especially – my daughter, some of the difficult times. They are going to be hard to talk about. They were hard to write about.”

But Walters isn't a victim of her emotions; it is the environment that has her grabbing for Kleenex.

“I have such an allergy,” she explains. Oh. That.I should have known: Walters is like the King Midas of weeping, not just infamously reducing many of her interview subjects to tears but also on occasion making her own interviewers cry. She's not the type to open her own waterworks that easily. Nobody makes Barbara Walters cry except Barbara Walters.

Audition arrived with a staggering print run of 675,000, supported by an excerpt in Vanity Fair, as well as multiple conversations on her morning kaffeeklatch The View, a prime-time special with her ABC-TV colleague Charles Gibson and an hour-long afternoon chat with Oprah Winfrey. The Oprah appearance was promoted heavily through news stories that promised Walters would discuss her mid-1970s affair with the married African-American U.S. senator Edward Brooke.

At the moment, Walters is sitting behind a sleek glass desk in an ergonomic chair that, combined with her taupe suit and thick studio makeup from a guest co-hosting spot on Good Morning America that had her out of bed at 4:30 this morning, makes her look a little like the commander of the Starship Enterprise. Her collection of Emmys sits on a low window ledge to her left. (How many are there? “You won't believe it, but I've never counted them,” she says, before proceeding to count them: 10.) Outside, her two assistants sit at desks that flank the door, wordlessly supporting their captain. Walters is certainly in control of all that happens in this room. For the last 20 minutes, she has sat with her arms crossed in front of her on the desk, her head titled at a constant 15-degree angle to her right. Her physical control is impressive; over time, it grows quietly intimidating.

In contrast to the more dispassionate farewell memoirs of other (read: male) news people, Walters's book is like much of her television work, aimed as much at readers' hearts as at their heads. Sure, there are reminiscences of interviews with all the major heads of state over the last four decades, and the book provides an entertaining behind-the-scenes history of the U.S. news business. But Walters was not just another interviewer snagging face time with cultural icons. She became a cultural icon herself by breaking through barriers as the first female co-host of a network news show, being sent up on Saturday Night Live and becoming good friends with American royalty such as Beverly Sills, Oprah Winfrey, Annette and Oscar de la Renta and Alan Greenspan.

In Audition – the title nods to the notion that Walters felt she was always trying to prove herself – she shares the struggles that went into her unique success. “What I tried to do is show that almost everybody has problems, and clay feet, and there's the good and the bad,” she says. “Whatever you think of me, good or bad, there's a lot to the story you don't know, there's a lot of heartache, there was a lot of struggle. There was survival. I hope that that helps [readers with their own struggles]. But it isn't just, ‘Let me tell you how wonderful and how glamorous and how great my life was.' There was a lot that wasn't wonderful and that wasn't glamorous and that wasn't great.”

Perhaps Walters's greatest challenge was navigating the industry's pervasive sexism. But she portrays herself as an accidental feminist: a woman who happened to be in the right place at the right time. “I think if I opened doors or paved the way – and I say this in the book – then I'm proud and grateful, but I don't think I started out waving the flag and saying, ‘I'm going to show women how to do it.' I wouldn't have known how to do that. I think if it happened I did it with my own struggles, personally and professionally. But I was not a piiioneer trying to paaave the way,” – she elongates the vowels to throw some ironic topspin on the words. “A lot of things I was able to do or did do were firsts. But I didn't start out thinking, this is what I'm going to do.”

Audition begins with Walters promising that she wants to give the world a complete picture of her life: of her rags-to-riches-to-rags childhood as the daughter of an entertainment impresario who triumphed and then stumbled so badly he attempted suicide; of the difficulties of growing up with an older sister who was mentally retarded; of adopting her daughter, Jacqueline; of smashing glass ceilings; of her three marriages and her other love affairs.

Still, she doesn't want to give away everything: In the book, she refuses to confirm the year of her birth. “I'm being coy,” she says now, looking as if she'd rather discuss the Edward Brooke affair than this matter. “I mean, everybody seems to know my age. That's perhaps the most difficult thing to put in [the book], but it's not hard to figure out.”

I note that Wikipedia says she was born in 1929. “Do they really?” she shoots back. “And other people say I'm born in 1931.” (This means, of course, that if the later date were the real one, she'd just say so, but no matter.)

“Is this very important to you, to know exactly how old I am?” she asks, now becoming annoyed. I tell her that, no, it's not that important except insofar as it's interesting that she doesn't want to 'fess up. “Joy [Behar, co-host of The View] and I have had this discussion. She never ever, ever gives her age, but I do. But I'm not going to with you because you're pressing it so much.” A moment passes, and she adds, “It's not that big a deal. Use whatever date you want.”

Later, I ask about a nasty spat between Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell, who was a co-host of The View for a season. Walters was an accidental casualty of the fight when, after she supported O'Donnell, Trump told the New York tabloids that she had bad-mouthed her co-host in a private conversation with the egotist developer.

“Oh, that's so long ago,” says Walters, with the derision of a journalistic elder suddenly disappointed with the behaviour of the younger generation. “I mean that's – what? – that's more than a year ago.” Never mind that Walters's affair with Brooke, which she and her publisher's publicists thrust into the spotlight to promote the book, was more than 30 years ago. Walters's expression makes it clear the issue is closed.

In Audition, Walters describes the birth of her eponymous Specials, long-form interviews with celebrities and newsmakers that ran in prime time. The four-times-a-year programs were dreamed up when Walters moved to ABC in 1976, as a way of having the news division pay only half of her then-extraordinary $1-million (U.S.) annual salary. If she spent the bulk of her days as a serious and uncompromising newswoman, the Specials, produced under the aegis of the network's entertainment division, allowed for softer standards: Many subjects were given approval over the final edits of their segments. Worse, the first program included a four-minute segment of Walters giving viewers a tour of her own apartment, helping to cement her status as a celebrity in her own right.

Walters is unapologetic about the Specials. “They saved my professional life,” she explains. As they scored high ratings, Walters's own star continued to ascend. The first one, in December, 1976, featured a sit-down with Barbra Streisand and her then-boyfriend Jon Peters, as well as an interview with U.S. president-elect Jimmy Carter.

The second Special included an interview with Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband John Warner, who happened to be one of Walters's ex-boyfriends, as well as the Shah of Iran and his wife. When ratings indicated that audiences were tuning in for the stars and tuning out for the politicians, Walters and her producers realized they had to chase more celebrities. “When we started to do the Specials, I said it was like – you know, you say to people, what do you listen to? And they say Brahms and then they go out and buy hip hop or rock.”

At the time, there were far fewer TV outlets for such interviews; since then, celebrity coverage has become the beast that ate the culture. And Walters (to follow the analogy) was one of the beast's best friends, a woman who fed and cared for it when everyone else was ridiculing it for its beastliness. But one morning, she woke to see that the beast no longer recognized her as its long-time friend; it had gotten so large and so hungry that it couldn't help but eat her, too.

She explains in Audition that she left her co-host position at the TV newsmagazine 20/20 in 2004 because she was tiring of the competition for the celebrity interview. (And if even Walters has had trouble landing stars, you know things are bad; after all, she shares a publicist with Jessica Simpson, Mariah Carey and Rosie O'Donnell.) “Today, the way television is, with the exception of cable, all they want, pretty much, is the celebrity – and not just the celebrity but the celebrity with the so-called ‘back story,' the celebrity who came out of rehab. And that's one of the reasons I left 20/20, not that it's not a wonderful program, but I really was tired of that.

“If I'm remembered for celebrity interviews – so what?” she says. “I just hope people remember me with respect, and in some cases affection.”