New York — 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.”
Veteran television journalist Barbara Walters prepares to sign her new book at Border's Books in Vienna, Virginia, May 8, 2008. Audition: a Memoir, reflects on her illustrious career, her lonely childhood as well as an affair with married black Republican Sen. Edward W. Brooke that finally ended when she and the Massachusetts senator decided disclosure could ruin their respective careers. (Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images)
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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.
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