Audition

by Barbara Walters

  There were immediate repercussions. Hugh had made it very clear to Al that, after the Pat Fontaine fiasco, he wanted to have a voice in the selection of the next Today Girl. Hugh had to share two hours a day with her on the air, after all, and he had cause to be concerned. He had not been consulted when Pat was hired and, on more than one occasion during her erratic, boozy tenure, it had fallen to him to carry the show. But Al didn’t consult Hugh about Maureen. He just went ahead and, while Hugh was on vacation, hired her. So you can imagine how Hugh felt when he came back to work to discover someone he had never met was now about to share the morning desk with him. That made for some uneasiness between Hugh and Maureen and didn’t do much for the relationship between Hugh and Al. They had been at odds for some time, but now it boiled over—on both sides.

  Hugh was furious at Al for hiring Maureen behind his back. Al was furious at Hugh for challenging his authority and began to develop a real dislike of him. Hugh was perfect in the morning slot, easily projecting the viewer-friendly image of a good-natured neighbor, but Al felt that Hugh was pompous and pretentious. The bad blood between them grew to such an extent that in 1968, NBC was forced to make a choice: keep Al as the producer or keep Hugh as the host. (Hugh refused to sign his renegotiated contract if Al remained on the show.) There was no contest. Hugh Downs was popular and beloved by millions. Al was a force behind the scenes. Guess who stayed and who left?

  But that was in the future. The clear and present problem in 1964 was Maureen. Al had fallen into the trap that a great many producers still do. He saw someone who was charming and funny while being interviewed, so assumed that the same qualities would carry over to the role of interviewer. But it rarely works. Asking questions is very different from answering them, and a good deal tougher. Especially so early in the morning.

  The morning shows, I think, are the hardest to do. You have to be very versatile. One minute you’ll be interviewing the secretary of state; the next minute you’ll be cooking cheese fondue with a guest chef. Because most of these shows are live, you can’t afford to make many mistakes. You’ve also got to be able to get in and out of a commercial, in and out of a newsbreak, in and out of whatever unexpected situation presents itself. For the most part, you have to know what you’re doing. Maureen didn’t.

  It wasn’t really her fault. She had absolutely no experience or training in television, and no one took the time to work with her. She was thrust into a situation that was anathema to an actress. Her talent was to take a script, study a character, memorize the lines, and deliver them in a winning way to a live theater audience. Now, suddenly, there was no audience to play to, just the light on a camera, and there were no lines. The role she was expected to play was not the character in a script but herself. Very, very tough for her. Things did not get better with time. Maureen continually missed cues. She couldn’t control her interviews. She’d see a stagehand waving time cues frantically to her and she’d ask, on camera: “Am I supposed to end here?” Maureen couldn’t get the hang of our man-in-the-street interviews, either. These had to be, by their nature, unplanned and unrehearsed. Too often she cut off the person answering a question before he or she even had time to finish a sentence. When in doubt, or out of fear, Maureen would simply throw the segment back to Hugh or sometimes even to a commercial. She began to appear more and more confused on the air. The ghastly hour she had to awake to do the program didn’t help.

  What we didn’t know until years later, when she wrote about it, was that Maureen was on a steady diet of prescription drugs. Anyone with a drug dependency, however slight, just can’t work well under such pressure. You’ve got to be very disciplined and well grounded to do one of these shows. And you really have to have a sane life. All we knew then, however, was that she was a terrible mistake.

  DURING THE TURBULENT MAUREEN PERIOD, I had a miscarriage. We were broadcasting the program from California, and I was working very hard, too hard, perhaps. I wasn’t feeling very well, which led me to hope I might be pregnant. I cannot tell you how much I wanted a baby and how exhilarated I felt when I came home and my gynecologist told me that indeed I was pregnant. I was over the moon. So was Lee.

  Then I lost the baby.

  I blamed myself for the miscarriage. If I hadn’t been working so hard, perhaps I could have continued that pregnancy. I was devastated. I was then in my early thirties, and though most women at the time had their children at a younger age, I was still capable of childbearing. But I could hear the biological clock ticking. So I tried everything to get pregnant again. For two agonizing years Lee and I went to one doctor after another, and I took test after test. The fertility treatments available today were not even thought of then. There was no in-vitro fertilization nor surrogate mother. The very idea would have been considered science fiction. Getting pregnant was reduced to a combination of hormones and timing.

  I was told to check the exact days after my period to determine when I would be most fertile. At those times I was to take and record my temperature and make sure that Lee and I had intercourse during the hours the doctor thought best according to my temperature. If the time was right, no matter if Lee was getting home very late from one of his shows or I was getting up at the crack of dawn for my show, we dutifully made love. Then we hoped and prayed. Finally it worked. But only briefly.

  I suffered another miscarriage. Then, six months later, still another. Anybody who has been through a similar experience knows what an emotional seesaw it can be. You’re ecstatic at the high point, then you all but fall apart when you drop to the low. Looking back now, a part of me wonders if it was some sort of sign. I feel guilty even saying it, but the truth is that I’m almost thankful I didn’t have a baby. I think of my sister. Was her condition hereditary? Was nature sparing a child of mine the fate that befell Jackie? I’ll never know. And I realize how harsh it might sound now. But back then my hunger for a child did not abate even a little, and Lee and I would finally adopt a baby. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

  The concern in 1964 continued to be Maureen O’Sullivan. In August we all went to Atlantic City to cover the Democratic National Convention that would select Lyndon Johnson, JFK’s replacement, to be the presidential nominee, and Hubert Humphrey, the senator from Minnesota, to be his vice presidential running mate. It was only nine months since John Kennedy had been assassinated, and his death hung heavily over the convention.

  Robert Kennedy, who would be assassinated himself four years later during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination, somehow summoned the composure to deliver the “unity” speech at the conclusion of the convention. There wasn’t a dry eye on the floor, including the eyes of the hardest-boiled politicians, when he remembered his brother in a quote from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: “When he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night, / And pay no worship to the garish sun.”

  Maureen O’Sullivan cried, too, but for a different reason. She got fired. There were political interviews to be done with campaign experts, critics, and pundits, not to mention prominent congressmen and senators. Hugh couldn’t do all of them, and even though we writers gave Maureen plenty of research and carefully wrote her introductions, her questions, and even probable answers, she was lost and frantic. It was obvious that she just couldn’t cut it. With a fierce campaign ahead between LBJ and Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, the on-air future for Maureen O’Sullivan looked pretty grim. Al Morgan finally bit the bullet and told her, in the middle of the convention, that he would have to let her go.

  Maureen was furious and felt betrayed by Al, who had leaned on her so heavily to take the job in the first place. But I think she was also relieved. “I was nothing but a bookend on the show,” she later told reporters. The official word was that she had left the show by mutual consent, and Maureen went back to being a successful actress.

  ONCE MORE the Today show was without a Today Girl. A
l began his usual search for a star but he had a problem. He still had to pay off Maureen’s contract, which ran for another year and a half. She made a good deal of money, and he didn’t have enough left to coax a new performer into getting up each day at such an ungodly hour and taking on the task of learning the ropes of a difficult-to-do early-morning program. He had to hire someone who knew the ropes and would work for relatively little money. And he had to do it fast.

  Well, like the ingenue in a corny movie, there I was: the patient and long overlooked understudy. Hugh was all for trying me out. By this time I was a known and trusted colleague. Plus I was no threat. And I could certainly perform adequately, if not spectacularly.

  “Why not Barbara?” Hugh asked.

  The NBC bosses knew why not. In essence their unanimous response was: She isn’t known. She isn’t beautiful. Sponsors won’t take to her. But there was another response, too, and this one resonated as deeply as all the drawbacks they saw in putting me on the air: She’ll work cheap.

  Hugh persisted, and this time Al, who rarely agreed with anything Hugh said or wanted, joined forces with him. The trick, they decided, would be to give me some on-air support. I would be on the program three days a week. The other two days there would be two different women, both well known to our viewers. Sometimes, when appropriate, I would also appear with one of them.

  I was very fond of both these women. One was Judith Crist, the witty and acerbic movie critic for the now-long-folded newspaper the New York Herald Tribune. She was already appearing on the program giving her film boosts and pans. The other woman was a brilliant and delightful art historian named Aline Saarinen. Aline had, for quite a while, made art exhibits and other cultural matters not only understandable to our viewers but entertaining. She was the only person I have ever seen on television who was able to do this effectively. The widow of the renowned Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, she had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar and gone on to become managing editor of Art News as well as an award-winning art editor and critic at the New York Times. Aline had caught Al Morgan’s eye in 1962 when she appeared on a CBS special about Lincoln Center, then under construction. She was an intellectual without being pretentious, so NBC executives agreed with Al’s decision to hire her as a contributor. However, they didn’t think she could carry a show alone.

  In those earlier days of the program, both Hugh and the Today Girl of the moment did the commercials. It went with the job. But the sponsors didn’t want Judith or Aline to do them. Judith was too caustic, they thought, and Aline so erudite and elegant that she might turn off the audience. On the other hand, I was neither caustic nor erudite, and in those days certainly not elegant. So the commercials fell mostly to me. One of the program’s biggest sponsors was the canned dog food Alpo. These commercials were done live and featured real dogs panting away and licking their chops waiting for the bowl of Alpo to be placed between their paws. While the dog gulped down the yummy glob, the person doing the commercial would extol the virtues of this dog food above all others. My first week on the air, I was assigned the commercial. The famished dog, on a leash but with a mind of his own, practically dragged me across the studio floor along with his bowl. The dog howled with pleasure. I howled with laughter. The sponsors howled with satisfaction.

  There would be conjecture that Al’s upgrading to brains over beauty was fueled by the growing women’s liberation movement and the consciousness of women’s inequality in the marketplace. But I doubt it. Though Betty Friedan’s classic call to arms, The Feminine Mystique, had been published to great acclaim in 1963, and Congress had just passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting job discrimination on the basis of race and gender, I think Al’s motive was more self-serving: If one of us was sick or didn’t show up or bombed, he’d have two other women waiting in the wings. The three of us were his insurance against disaster, much like the story of the advertising producer who hired triplets for a Johnson & Johnson diaper cream commercial to ensure that at least one of the babies wouldn’t have diaper rash on the day of filming.

  Here’s how the setup worked. Judith Crist was Today’s movie and theater critic. Aline was Today’s art critic. I was just me. No one knew exactly what my role really was, including me. “I’m a Lord-Knows-What,” I would tell TV Guide three months later. In the meantime I was, thank heaven, no longer to be called the Today Girl. That airhead title and role was finally retired. If asked, I was to be referred to as a Today reporter.

  I started in my new role in October 1964 with no big fanfare, no publicity, and no official announcement. Because there was no hoopla, there were no expectations from viewers. I was on the air regularly before anybody realized I was there, three mornings a week and then, slowly, five times a week. Soon I was on even when Judith or Aline had their scheduled appearances. I conducted a lot of the celebrity interviews, introduced and narrated the fashion shows and other so-called women’s features, and, where I had the most fun, sat at the desk and ad-libbed with Hugh, Jack Lescoulie, Today’s sportscaster, and the program’s newsreader, Frank Blair. I began to feel that I was doing well, and even though my future was far from assured, I was exhilarated.

  I quickly discovered an odd disparity in my on-air and off-air persona. On camera, from my very first appearance, I felt calm, composed, and confident. Almost nothing threw me. I was an eager extrovert. Off camera, I was an introvert. If Lee and I were invited to a party, and he was out of town, I wouldn’t go alone. I was that self-conscious and still am, though less now. I won’t dance alone either. To this day I sit out the fast dances where dance partners do their own thing. Flailing around on my own makes me feel like a broken umbrella. I wait to dance until the music is slower and my partner can hold me securely in his arms. But I am not alone in this split personality. Many performers, and, to a degree, on-camera journalists are performers, are open and easy on television or onstage but very shy in private life. Robert De Niro comes to mind. A great and expressive actor on film, he’s almost tongue-tied in person. On the other hand there are people who in private life are exuberant and even exhibitionists, but who suffer from such excruciating stage fright that they can’t even rise to give a toast.

  At one point Al sent me to a voice specialist to try and overcome my problems with pronouncing r. Lazy r’s are often a product of being born in Boston, with its particular accent. So I tried to fix it. These days I’ve all but conquered the problem. But then the new speech pattern the specialist prescribed sounded phony and stilted. When several viewers wrote in asking why I was sounding so funny, I abandoned the specialist and went back to my natural way of speaking. Although I did try, no kidding, to avoid sentences with too many r’s.

  Hugh was wonderful to work with. He was always very generous in the assigning of interviews and didn’t just grab the good ones for himself. He was confident and didn’t have a jealous bone in his body. Over the many years we would work together, we never had a cross word. My relationship with Hugh, in fact, was one of the most satisfying of my life. Not only was I his protégée in a way, but we became great friends. He had a wonderful wife, Ruth, and at that time two small children, a girl, Deirdre, and a boy, nicknamed HR. When the Today show traveled abroad, Ruth usually accompanied Hugh and included me in their dinners, so I never felt alone.

  Hugh and I had different personalities and different styles, yet we complemented each other. He was more contemplative and thought of himself as something of a philosopher. His questions during interviews were gentler than mine, but he never restricted me from asking what I wanted. In short he was, and is, one of the truest gentlemen I have ever known.

  One of my first interviews on Today was with Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s glamorous sister, who attended Sarah Lawrence College at the same time I did back when she was Lee Bouvier. We lived in different dormitories, and she didn’t stay long at Sarah Lawrence, but still, I thought she might remember me, if not from college, then perhaps as one of the few female reporters tagging along on
the India trip with her and her sister. But she didn’t remember me at all. By now she was married to an exiled Polish prince named Stanislas Radziwill. When I asked Lee what I should call her in the interview, she replied, with a bored look, “Just call me Princess.” Okay, Princess.

  These early interviews highlighted another difference between my professional self and my private self, a difference I’ve never understood. It emerged in the editing process, a critical phase of almost every story in which I’ve always been very involved. To my surprise I discovered I was, and am, as decisive as anyone can be. I knew precisely what should be left in and what should be taken out. Just like that. (I have always been a terrific editor, if I do say so myself—and I do say so myself.) But in private life I can barely make a decision. I second-guess everything from if I should wear the red or blue dress to where to go on vacation: Europe? South America? the Bahamas? Maybe I should just stay home. My daughter says my flip-flopping is because I am a Libra, the astrological sign whose good traits include being “diplomatic and urbane,” and my favorite, “romantic and charming,” but whose not-so-good traits start with being “indecisive and changeable.” On my gravestone I want inscribed: “On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.”

  For quite a long time Lee (my husband, not the princess) got up early every morning to watch me on Today. This was no small gesture on his part; he was a “night person,” as are most theatrical producers, and he usually stayed up till the wee hours going to Broadway plays and then on to Sardi’s or Lindy’s with all the other theater people. He also often had to go to one or the other of his theaters. Getting up at seven was torture for Lee. After a few months he started to check to see what time my particular spot was on and then set the alarm so he could catch just me. But even that wore thin, and after a while Lee stayed gratefully asleep while I greeted the rest of the country as it awoke. I totally understood Lee’s sleeping, although it gave us less and less to talk about when I came home for dinner.