Barbara Walters interviews Barbara Walters

In her new memoir, "Audition," the iconic television journalist plumbs the troubled childhood and love life of her ultimate subject -- herself.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Women, Media, TV, Memoirs, Feminism, Barbara Walters, Rebecca Traister, Life

May 6, 2008 | It's tough not to distrust an autobiography in which the author refuses to disclose her exact age. But Barbara Walters does just that on page 14 of Audition, her memoir, which hits stands on Tuesday. "I am now in my seventies, and that is as specific as I will get," she writes in an opening-sentence parenthetical in the chapter "My Childhood." Too bad for the optimistically ageless Walters that Wikipedia, the Internet Movie Database, Yahoo and several prominent astrology sites have all felt free to get more specific than she: The television journalist was born on Sept. 25, 1929; she will turn 79 this year.

But Walters' bizarre coyness at the start of what she clearly feels is a soul-baring work -- "In this book I basically bleed for 570 pages, " she told columnist Cindy Adams -- is merely symptomatic of the slightly prim distance she keeps from her own beguiling, twisty, readable story.

Walters has essentially produced a printed version of the perfect Barbara Walters TV interview, in which she coughs up tantalizing nuggets about her love life (an affair with the married Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, who teases her about being the oldest woman he's ever dated, while she tells him he's "the blackest man" she's ever been with); her troubled childhood (Walters' mother once sent her to her father's nightclub to plead with him not to abandon the family); and her own buried insecurities ("I desperately wanted playmates, to have friends over to my house, to belong instead of always feeling like an outsider"). There are barrels of personal trivia ("I developed the bladder of a camel ... I don't perspire") and a heaps of solemn self-diagnosis ("I knew that I had my mother's love, and I remember her often saying that she wished she had six of me ... But in my mind then, it didn't seem like enough") and more Borscht-belt comedy about her eccentric Jewish relatives than Woody Allen's "Radio Days."

The steady clip of interview fodder is diverting but somehow sterile and performed. It's so hard to divorce her style from her story that I found myself often imagining her paragraphs, many of which include questions she's asking herself, as Vaseline-lensed exchanges, with Barbara Walters leaning in conspiratorially and asking, "But was it a tewibble childhood?" while across from her, Barbara Walters takes a meaningful pause and replies softly, "I had wuv. I never wacked for food or clothes."

Walters' descriptions of on-scene, in-person, heavily (and often too cozily) sourced television journalism may seem exotic to anyone who's grown up in the age of tabloid TV, and especially to those who now consider journalism, of both the celebrity and political varieties, to be an art best practiced at the computer in pajamas.

But Walters' career spanned (and in fact, she helped shape) the transformation of news into entertainment and entertainment news into uncut gossip. Walters, with her inimitable interrogatory style and drive to plumb the depths of prominent personalities transformed presidents into regular Joes, murderers into celebrities, and celebrities into commodities to be haggled over by morning shows.

It is surely fortuitous, if not planned, that Walters' book is being published right now, smack in the middle of Hillary Clinton's historic run for president and at the moment Katie Couric's ticking time bomb of a tenure at CBS seems primed to explode.

Walters was the first female co-host of the "Today" show and the first woman to co-host a network news program. Her 1976 move from NBC's "Today" to ABC's evening news program, for a then-unprecedented million dollars, created a media shit-storm that makes Couric's ascension to the solo anchor chair at CBS feel like it took place during a warm summer rain shower. As Walters describes, in a paragraph that still feels uncomfortably relevant 30 years later, "A woman doing the network news was unheard of and certainly not something I had ever considered. The prestigious position had always been a male bastion, and the prevailing thought was that delivering the news about politics, wars, and natural disasters would not be taken seriously if done by a woman."

After weeks of public negotiations with the two networks, Walters, like Couric, decided to leave the comfortable climes of morning television. "What an event it will be," she remembers her agent telling her. "You'll be making broadcast history. You'll be changing the world for other female journalists." Naturally, when she finally made the leap, NBC preempted her by announcing they were cutting off negotiations because of her high-maintenance demands.

Walters, who comes off as more than a little ambivalent about her own role as a groundbreaking professional woman, casts herself as a reluctant history maker. "It was not in my nature to be courageous," she writes, "to be the first. I was the same person who chose the so-called lesser sorority in high school rather than take a chance on not being chosen at all."

Walters nonetheless takes care to report on the very public drubbing she received at the hands of her male peers during the summer between her departure from "Today" and the start of her tenure at ABC. "I am trying to have an open mind about it," was the less-than-supportive statement her future co-anchor Harry Reasoner made to the papers. CBS News president Richard Salant asked, "Is Barbara a journalist or is she Cher?" while Walter Cronkite announced that Walters' move gave him "the sickening sensation that we're all going under."

Walters is clearly still pretty pissed, if ultimately triumphant. With all the men in her business whining publicly about the news industry going to hell in a (woman's) handbag, she notes that when she got her big salary, "you know what? Almost every television journalist, including Harry Reasoner, walked into his boss's office, demanded a raise -- and got it. Well, you're welcome."

She also doesn't have a great deal of sympathy for any trials faced by those younger newswomen whose world she changed. While she spares precious few words about Couric, the journalist and pop-culture pioneer who will most often be mentioned alongside her in the future, Walters allows a paragraph or two about the softer waters into which Couric belly-flopped two years ago when she left for CBS.

"There was little uproar over the salary CBS was giving her," Walters writes. And, she adds, "NBC gave her the most glorious send off ... There was a gala going-away party for her ... and an equally warm welcome awaiting her at CBS." Walters grudgingly concedes that in 2006, "there were articles and editorials about whether Katie would succeed, but nothing scathing or mean when she left NBC; no lies and nothing deliberately hurtful." Perhaps Walters is forgetting the great "gravitas" debate of '06, as well as the reams of personal criticism aimed at Couric, her makeup and wardrobe teams, and her clickety heels. Or maybe Walters simply, and perhaps rightfully, feels that those obstacles were nothing compared to the mountain of gender resentment and antipathy she scaled.

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