Audition

by Barbara Walters

  During my last two years of high school I was having smooth sailing. I was unhappy at first that Fieldston had refused to readmit me, thanks to my erratic attendance record, but I soon made new friends at Birch Wathen. Again, I studied hard and got good grades. I began to date. Mostly we went to the movies or to another friend’s house. Sex was not even a remote consideration. We were years away from the birth control pill. All my girlfriends were virgins. Me, too.

  It was a special time to be in New York. On Broadway a whole new kind of musical was gathering steam, shows with songs and lyrics that sprang from and were integrated into the plot. My father took us to many opening nights, and those evenings were as glamorous as you could get. Women dressed in long gowns, often with pearls around their necks and sometimes white ermine coats over their shoulders. Men wore tuxedos. I marvel today when I go to the theater and see much of the audience in jeans and T-shirts.

  My father took us to the opening of Oklahoma!, which made show business history, thanks to its glorious score by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and ushered in what became known as the golden age of musicals. We saw them all. We went to the opening of the revival of the 1927 epic Show Boat, to the romantic Carousel, also by Rodgers and Hammerstein, at the Majestic Theater, to Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, which starred Ethel Merman. I’ll never forget the opening night of South Pacific in 1949, with another exquisite score by Rodgers and Hammerstein and opera bass Ezio Pinza singing “Some Enchanted Evening” to Mary Martin. During this period my whole life felt enchanted.

  Our summers were as busy as our winters. At this time there were quite a few big, rambling resort hotels that were open only in the summer—the Lido in Long Island; another, the Griswold, in Connecticut; still another, the Sagamore in upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains. We went to all of them. They were full of kids my age and were very popular.

  On weekends the women got dressed up and decked themselves out with all their jewelry. The men, who came from the city only for the weekends, wore dark blue suits and ties. During the week the wives took dance lessons, and on weekends they showed off their fancy new rumba steps to their husbands.

  We teenage kids took dance lessons too. One of the instructors had a little crush on me and asked me to dance as often as he could, but he also was paid to dance with my sister. Jackie had no sense of rhythm and sort of had to be pushed around the floor, but she loved it. I had to promise the instructor that I would give him one dance for every dance he gave Jackie. Otherwise she just would mostly have sat on the sidelines.

  In my senior year at Birch Wathen, the subject turned to college. I wanted more than anything to go to Wellesley, a renowned all-female college then and now, on the outskirts of Boston, and I applied there. Some of the smartest women I would come to know later in my life graduated from Wellesley—women like Hillary Clinton, Lynn Sherr, and Diane Sawyer. I also applied to Pembroke College in Rhode Island as my “safe” choice. My third application went to a small college located in Bronxville, a town in nearby Westchester. The college was named Sarah Lawrence.

  Sarah Lawrence was an all-female college, barely twenty years old, and considered to be very avant-garde and progressive in its education. There were no exams, no required core curriculum, and no actual grades. You took only three major subjects per semester and worked closely with a professor who, following the British tradition, was known as your adviser, or “don.” It was a college that attracted the adventurous, the arty, the self-starter scholar, and the debutante. I was none of the above, but I applied because my then best friend, Shelby, was applying.

  Sarah Lawrence had a unique admissions process. When you applied you were sent a form and asked to write answers to specific questions, such as, “Name two books you have read recently which you disliked. Tell why.” And “Are you concerned with any problem in the fields of government, politics, or economics about which you would like to learn more? Why?” These questions are actually lifted verbatim off my own fifty-year-plus-old admission application, which at my request, Sarah Lawrence recently sent me as research for this book.

  I did fine on the two books I disliked—Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey, whom I criticized for his lack of “color and realism” in his characterizations, and The Snake Pit, by Mary Jane Ward, for being “repetitious” and “not offering the slightest hint as to how to remedy the sorry conditions in mental hospitals.” I also did fine on the government question, waxing on and on in my cramped little handwriting about the battle of Labor vs. Capital, about which I cared little, to be honest, but was prompted by reading about a series of recent strikes: a teachers’ strike and one targeting AT&T.

  However, my hair stood on end when I read the barefaced lies I proffered to Sarah Lawrence so many years ago. My response to “What has meant most to you in your education outside of school?” was: “Sunday school, which helped me appreciate the force of God and enabled me to increase my faith and understanding in His power.” Well, I never ever went to Sunday school! Did I think a nun was going to read my application? And then absolve me of my sin? I must have, because I can come up with no other explanation.

  Another whopper came in my answer about the experience I had had in the arts. While part of my answer was true—I was indeed “particularly fond of dramatics” (I had been in several school plays since my debut as a bird)—what was unbelievable was my claim that I had worked in a summer stock company in Connecticut and “so gained much valuable technical experience.” Good heavens! I never worked in summer stock in my life. Thank goodness Sarah Lawrence never checked the facts.

  But what was really myth shattering was the portion of the admission forms assigned to my parents. All my life I thought my mother had filled it out and that my father had added one withering, dismissive line: “Barbara is a very normal girl with normal interests.” Period. I thought he hadn’t given the whole thing much thought. But no. Looking at the original admission forms, it turned out to be my father who had written the entire four-page evaluation and it was immensely tender.

  Asked about my high school experiences, he wrote that I took a “good interest” in my schoolwork; that I was proud of my “good work and good marks” that I make “friends easily and hold them.” Asked about my interests, he described me as being “literary-minded” and backed it up by saying that I read “a great deal.” He also wrote that I was interested in “dramatic theatricals,” had both “initiative and creative ability,” and that I expressed myself “clearly and tersely.” As to what present interests, if any, he would like me to outgrow, he replied that I had “no trait” that upset him, nor did I appear to him to have “any bad habits.”

  All this he summed up at the end in that one sentence about my being a “normal” girl. (That’s probably what got me into Sarah Lawrence.) But he was no normal, average American father. I held that against him for years and judged what I had always thought to be his one-sentence contribution to the application as proof that he didn’t know me at all. Reading now what he actually wrote, I realize that it’s quite the opposite—I didn’t know him.

  In any event I went off to visit Wellesley and was immensely impressed. Along with Shelby, I also visited Sarah Lawrence for a personal interview. The school seemed small, which I liked, but my heart wasn’t there.

  This is what happened. Wellesley put me on the waiting list. I would not know until late summer whether they would have room for me. Pembroke, my “safe” school, turned me down. Sarah Lawrence wanted me. I was back to the insecurity of Kappa Pi versus Lambda Pi. What if Wellesley didn’t accept me after all? Where would I go? I had applied to only those three schools. I didn’t have the confidence to wait to see if Wellesley might take me or the courage to call the school and try to convince them that I would be a perfect candidate. So Sarah Lawrence it would be.

  Sarah Lawrence

  I NEVER TOOK A science course at Sarah Lawrence College. I never took a comparative religion course or a language course or a math class. For years af
terward I used to say I didn’t learn a thing. And I would jokingly add that if I had, I might have made something of myself. But when I read the course material Sarah Lawrence recently sent me, I realized that was not true.

  Part of the reason I didn’t delve into the more important academic subjects was that I took a course called “Theater” for my entire four years. At Sarah Lawrence you signed up to take three major subjects in three different areas. One of the majors was Theater. This was amazing to me—one could really just study theater? It was also a solution to a real dilemma: I had absolutely no idea what I really wanted to do “when I grew up.” Perhaps because I had spent my whole life in the world of show business, going to clubs and plays and meeting performers and behind-the-scenes people, I thought “Theater” was where I belonged. For me, lacking any other direction, it certainly seemed like a promising course to take. I liked the idea of learning how to construct scenery, familiarizing myself with costume design and lighting techniques, but most of all it was the idea of acting that interested me. I could imagine losing myself in the role of a totally different person. Somehow I felt I would be able to do that.

  We were also assigned great plays to read, among them The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, A Bill of Divorcement by Clemence Dane, T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party, and plays by Anton Chekhov and Sean O’Casey. I was especially moved by The Glass Menagerie, because it reminded me so much of my sister’s situation. In the play there is a rather frantic Southern mother who is trying desperately to find a “gentleman caller” for her emotionally and physically fragile daughter, who spends her days playing with her tiny glass animals. There is also a son, and when the mother too often forces him to find “gentlemen callers,” he abandons the family and is then racked with guilt. Although the situation was not exactly like mine, it was similar enough to resonate with me then and even today.

  To my joy, in my freshman year, I auditioned for and won the part of Mary Boyle, the lead in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. We performed the play for three days. The audience was made up of students and any residents of the neighboring towns who might want to come. I remember the thrill of hearing applause and the joy of getting laughs, especially when the laughs came where they belonged. In many of my future interviews with actors, I so often heard that it was in college or university that they first got the acting bug. That was the case with me. I was going to be an actress. I had found my calling.

  I did take other courses. I was told that I should consider a science course, so I took something called Psychology of Art, in which I learned that the color red attracts more people than does blue. (That, at least, was helpful later on in deciding what to wear for interviews.) I also took a superb literature course and, in one spring semester alone, read Tolstoy, Thurber, Dewey, and Freud. I took a class taught by Joseph Campbell on the importance of mythology, and I took writing courses because I thought if I didn’t make it as an actress I might be a writer. I remember writing a very somber paper on death.

  I guess I was trying to explore some of the mysteries of being alive, because in addition to writing about death, I also wrote a term paper on love: Is romantic love a genuine emotion…is it something chemical…is it an invention of Western society? I still haven’t a clue. But now one reads that a possible source of romantic love is chemical and the result of a particular scent. So perhaps love is about taking the right nose drops. Who knew?

  Sarah Lawrence was a wonderful environment in which to learn. The classes were very small, anywhere from six to twelve. We didn’t sit in orderly rows but around tables. What we did was talk. And discuss. And talk some more. I learned to ask questions and to listen. I learned never to be afraid of speaking up. Every student’s point of view was taken seriously, and no one ever said, “That’s stupid” or “That’s irrelevant.”

  Our dons oversaw all of our courses, addressed any personal or academic problems we might have, and in general kept us on the right track. We were also expected to write very lengthy reports on an area of our particular course that most interested us. (I didn’t know how to type in those days, and my handwriting is small and cramped. How any of my professors waded through my reports is a miracle to me.) Once written, these reports were dissected and discussed with each of us. All this required a great deal of original thought, research, and organization, which I am certain has helped me with my work, even to deciding which stories I chose to do.

  I lived in a dormitory called Titsworth, named after an early benefactor of the school, Julia Titsworth. You can imagine the jokes, but I loved the name. We even had a song I can sing to this day. It goes: “My girl’s from Titsworth. She’s really down to earth. I get my money’s worth…from progressive education.”

  We all lived in suites—two bedrooms with a bathroom in between. I was very fortunate, my first year, to have a brilliant roommate named Myra Cohn, who later became a poet and an author of children’s stories. Myra was a senior who had asked for a freshman to be her suite mate, and the college picked me. Myra was the sort of person who wrote impassioned political letters to the school newspaper but also, incongruously, played the tuba. Why? To develop her lower lip, she said.

  My four years in Titsworth spawned other enduring friendships. One was with Marcia Barnett, who called me Bobbie, a nickname that stuck for four years. In turn I called her Mike. Another was with a tall, awkward, funny lady named Anita Coleman, to whom I remained close until the day she died of cancer. Her daughter, Liane, is my godchild. Then there was—and is—Joan Rosen, whose father was a judge in Maine. Joan went on to marry Dr. Paul Marks, the longtime president and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Joan decided in our junior year that our little group at Titsworth wasn’t serious enough, so she moved to another dorm. That same year I was elected president of Titsworth, an office that came with a seat on the college student council. I had no interest whatsoever in the student council but I loved “getting” Joan because I, the unserious one, served on the student council for two years and she did not. Nonetheless Joan and I have been friends for life. She is a very special and accomplished woman who for twenty-six years directed the graduate program in human genetics at Sarah Lawrence (which many universities used as a model) and founded and directed the first graduate program in health advocacy, also at Sarah Lawrence. Both graduate programs bear her name.

  Sarah Lawrence was particularly conducive to forging relationships. None of us needed a psychiatrist because we lived in group therapy every day. There were no secrets among us, no privacy. There was one payphone per floor, and when it rang whoever answered it would scream the girl’s name—as well as her caller’s.

  For almost two years I mostly dated doctors. Usually they were young residents. Through one, I would meet another. Marcia Barnett, aka Mike, was going out with someone at Yale Law School, so eventually I switched from doctors to lawyers. I spent a lot of time at Yale. I hated the football games I had to attend, but I definitely enjoyed the stirrings of my sexuality.

  One law student boyfriend would take me back to my hotel room after the evening’s major activity, which was usually drinking rum and Coke from paper cups. There was no question of his spending the night—those were very innocent days—but I remember pretending to fall asleep so that he could touch my breasts under my sweater. Though kissing was okay, God forbid you should act as if you enjoyed what we called “petting.” By feigning sleep, I reasoned, he wouldn’t think I enjoyed it. But I did.

  Sarah Lawrence was only half an hour from the city, and I went to New York on most weekends. So that you don’t think that sex was the only thing on my mind, I sometimes went to Greenwich Village to listen to the lectures given by one of my professors, William Phillips. Phillips, the cofounder of the Partisan Review, was an intellectual of the highest order, and I was all puffed up when he took a liking to me. The college’s proximity to New York also lured people who otherwise might not have wanted to teach at a far-off campus. One was the noted British po
et Stephen Spender. I loved listening to his voice and the way he used language so easily and melodiously.

  It was easy to go home for the weekends, but the situation there was still depressing. My father was hardly ever there. Not only was he moving back and forth between Miami Beach and New York, he was also traveling extensively through Europe in search of new acts and talent. That left my mother and Jackie on their own. Almost every single night, my mother took Jackie to the movies. When they ran out of new American movies to see, they went to French or Spanish films, even though Jackie had difficulty reading subtitles—anything just to pass the evening hours. Then, a miracle! I passed along a suggestion from Bobbie Altman, a friend at Sarah Lawrence, that my parents buy a television set for Jackie. Television, relatively new, had been a lifeline for Bobbie’s sister, who had cerebral palsy. And so a bulky black-and-white Du Mont television set became the center of my sister’s life. Television was particularly entertaining for her because she knew so many of the popular performers, like Milton Berle and Jackie Gleason, both of whom had worked for my father. There were several variety shows on the air at the time, and most of them featured the same jugglers, plate spinners, and singers who had appeared at one Latin Quarter or the other. Television provided great entertainment for Jackie, but I don’t think any of us realized the impact it would have on our lives. I don’t mean just on my own future. It wasn’t only Jackie who loved to stay at home to be entertained. Soon it would be the rest of America, which meant that people would not be going out to see showgirls, no matter how extravagantly they were dressed or undressed. The rise of television was the beginning of the end of my father’s success.

  IT WAS ALWAYS with a sense of relief that I returned to my new life at Sarah Lawrence. President Harold Taylor and his rather haughty wife, Grace, often invited teachers and students to their off-campus house for meetings, lectures, and stimulating conversations. We’d sit on the floor in their house with their big sheepdog, Ben, talking, talking, and talking.