Audition

by Barbara Walters

  My father continued at the Latin Quarter until 1969. That’s when the union representing the chorus girls, the American Guild of Variety Artists, advised them to strike. The fourteen girls, reduced in numbers from a high of thirty-six, wanted a not-outlandish raise of thirty dollars a week. Loew, true to form, refused. My father was caught in the middle. One newspaper quoted him as saying, “The demands really have been a little excessive, but Loew could have settled the strike. He didn’t.” So the girls walked out. The Latin Quarter, a slightly shabbier version of its once-glamorous self, temporarily closed its doors shortly before Christmas, losing all the profitable holiday business, then closed for good. And that was the end, in New York, not only of the last nightclub chorus line but of my father’s long-ago dream. Shortly thereafter my family returned once more to Miami Beach. Their life was going downhill. Mine was on the way up.

  Now that I was becoming recognized, it made it easier for me to entice the big stars like the British actor Peter Ustinov and the incomparable Fred Astaire to do interviews with me. Great names do not guarantee great interviews, I soon learned. The absolutely worst interview I ever conducted was with the actor Warren Beatty in the mid-sixties. I had done all my usual preparation about Warren, who was coming on Today to promote his latest movie, Kaleidoscope (Warren had become a first-rank star a few years earlier, with his performance in the film version of Willam Inge’s play Splendor in the Grass). I should have known when he appeared, rumpled and bleary-eyed, that trouble lay ahead. I pressed on, however, while he sat slumped in his chair, yawning, and either grunting at my questions or giving monosyllabic answers.

  I finally resorted to the boring but necessary question—“Tell me, Mr. Beatty, what is your new movie about?” Silence. He scratched his chest, rubbed his hands through his hair, yawned again. More silence. “Well,” he finally said, “that’s really a very difficult question.” That did it. “Mr. Beatty, you are the most difficult interview I’ve ever had,” I said on national live television. “We’ll go to a commercial.” And we did.

  Warren has since become a very good friend, but by his own admission he is a tough guy to interview.

  Despite the disaster with Beatty, the amount of positive press I was getting made it easier for me to get interviews with politicians as well as movie stars. If I couldn’t always get the politician, I would usually interview the wife, and often they were more interesting than their husbands. Among them was Mamie Eisenhower, wife of former president Dwight David Eisenhower, who told me the secret of her fifty-year marriage: “We have absolutely nothing in common.” I also interviewed the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, who gave me my first tour of the White House and indirectly afforded me an unforgettable meeting with her husband.

  I was at the White House in the winter of 1968 preparing for the interview with Mrs. Johnson, when Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird’s press secretary, asked me if I’d like to meet the president. He had a spare moment or two and had evidently asked Liz if I would drop by the Oval Office. I was somewhat taken aback. I had never met a U.S. president before and had not prepared in any way to meet him. But suddenly there I was, being ushered into that famous office, and there he was, all six foot three and a half inches of him, looming over me. He swallowed my hand in his and asked if I wanted a Fresca. I’d never heard of the soft drink and thought wildly that it might be the name of a new dance, so I politely declined. President Johnson, who’d had his gallbladder removed a few years before (if you’re old enough, you’ll definitely remember the photos of him showing off his scar) and suffered from recurring heart trouble, then told me why he drank a lot of Fresca and other soft drinks. His doctors had told him he had to give up smoking, and drinking soda helped him fight the nicotine cravings. “It’s god-awful,” said the president. And with that Lyndon Johnson, who liked to shock people with his sometimes coarse behavior, made a chopping motion over his groin. “I would rather they had told me to cut off my sex,” he said.

  I was momentarily speechless. “So happy to meet you, Mr. President,” I finally managed. And left the Oval Office.

  I never interviewed President Johnson, but I’ve always wished I could have. However, there were many other people to interview for Today. I usually did two to four interviews a program, five days a week, and continued to do so, year in and year out, for thirteen years. That’s hundreds and hundreds of interviews. I obviously can’t write about or even remember them all, but certain of the early interviews have stayed in my mind, and I think they stand the test of time. These particular people fascinated me forty years ago. They still fascinate me today.

  Garland, Capote, Rose Kennedy, and Princess Grace

  IF EVER THERE WERE two brilliant, mixed-up, hugely talented artists, they were Judy Garland and Truman Capote. I interviewed each of them on Today in 1967.

  Garland’s career was already in decline. Her drinking and pill addiction had long since caused her to be abandoned by Hollywood. But music halls still loved her, and she was performing to standing ovations at the Palace Theater on Broadway. During one of her afternoons off, I went to do our interview. I was told to be in her hotel suite at noon. I was there. She was not.

  By 3:00 p.m. Garland had still not appeared. If it had not been the legendary Judy Garland (Elizabeth Taylor, another legend, would make me wait just as long), I would have left hours earlier. But finally Garland emerged from the bedroom—tiny, only four feet eleven inches, wearing a dress she said she borrowed from her teenage daughter Lorna Luft—and proceeded to bowl me over with her charm, her humor, and her pathos.

  Daughter Liza (“Liza with a Z”) Minnelli had just married Peter Allen, a singer-songwriter her mother had discovered in Hong Kong and who opened her acts for her. Allen, a talented performer himself, although never in either Judy’s or Liza’s league, was rumored to be gay, and the marriage ended five years later. But back then Judy was rapturous about him. “He’s a marvelous boy who is mad about her,” she gushed to me, “and Liza is a lovely lady. I’m just terribly happy, terribly proud.”

  The marriage was later called a “mistake.” (Liza would go on to make at least three more marital “mistakes,” following the same pattern as her mother.) Judy, who’d had four marriages by the time of our interview and would have another brief one in 1969, attributed her marital failure rate to her assorted husbands. “The minute they get entangled with me, they say how difficult it is to be married to me,” she told me. “Well, why didn’t they think of that before?”

  “The only mistake I ever made,” she went on to say, “the only harm I ever did was sing ‘Over the Rainbow.’” And then she laughed, although she wasn’t entirely kidding about her signature song from The Wizard of Oz. She must have been sick of singing it night after night, year after year, whenever and wherever she performed.

  But what a tough life she’d had. Though much had been written about her background, it was chilling to hear her tell it in person. She had been performing, she told me, for forty-three years, pushed onstage by her mother when she was a very small child. “My mother was a witch,” she stated. “She would stand in the wings of the theater in which we were performing and if I didn’t feel good, if I was sick to my tummy, she would say, ‘You get out and sing or I’ll wrap you around the bedpost and break your ass.’ So,” Garland said, “I would go out and sing.”

  Then came the movies, over two dozen for MGM alone, including the classics with Mickey Rooney, whom Garland described as “the most marvelous gentleman and the world’s greatest talent.” For the child star, however, life in Hollywood was not marvelous in any way. “We worked night and day,” Garland told me. “I never went to a real school. You worked six days a week, sometimes seventy-two hours at a time. I could go weeks without a day off.”

  And what did it get her? Sitting there, tiny and curled up in the hotel chair, dressed in her daughter’s outfit, she was pathetic. “Today I am broke,” Garland admitted. “So I better just go out there tonight and do what I always do—sing.”
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br />   It would be her final run at the Palace. Two years later Garland died in London of an overdose of sleeping pills. She was forty-seven.

  TRUMAN CAPOTE HAD A LIFE that was, in its way, not terribly dissimilar from Judy Garland’s. The author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Capote began working for The New Yorker when he was just seventeen. He achieved fame with his first book, the best-selling Other Voices, Other Rooms, when he was only in his twenties. Capote, a notoriously heavy drinker, died of liver disease in 1984 at the age of fifty-nine. But back in 1967 he was riding high.

  He was being celebrated for his brilliant 1966 so-called nonfiction novel, In Cold Blood, which was being made into a movie starring Robert Blake (whom I would interview years later when he was accused of murdering his wife). Truman had also made social headlines just a year before our interview by hosting a legendary masked ball in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel honoring Katharine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post. It was referred to as the “Black and White Ball” and was packed with what were dubbed “the beautiful people.” Scores of celebrities—journalists, society people, politicians, and movie stars—covered their faces with elaborate masks, the women in black or white ball gowns, the men in black tie. It was a triumph. (By the way, I wasn’t invited. I wasn’t a big-enough celebrity, and I was hardly considered a member of “the beautiful people,” thank goodness.)

  In 2006 Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Academy Award portraying Capote in his prime in the film Capote. To my pride and pleasure, Hoffman told me at a party that he had watched my interview something like fifty times to capture, as he did so well, the personality quirks of the character he would play.

  There was much for him to draw on.

  “Are you ever bored?” I asked Capote. “No, because I’m terribly curious,” he replied. “It’s very hard for me to get bored because even when somebody’s being actively boring I’m interested in how they are boring me. I’m analyzing that, and so that keeps me entertained.”

  “What do I do when I feel blue? Read. I hardly ever feel blue. But I have a great sense of tragedy. I take a tragic view of life, and it’s really that which accounts for the frivolous things that I do. It’s sort of a compensation for having this completely dark view all the time.”

  Another of Capote’s answers from my interview forecast his eventual decline.

  “The only thing I couldn’t do without is my own conviction about my own creative gifts. If I didn’t have that, I think I would feel very desolate. You see, the thing about me is that I’m really several people. I spend a great deal of time alone and I work very hard. Then there’s this other side of me that is constantly keeping up with everything. I need people.”

  Ten years later Capote wrote too honestly and bitingly about the “beautiful people” who were so important in his life. When they abandoned him after he exposed them in print, he went into the despair and desolation he had described in our interview and all but stopped writing.

  His last memorable quote from the interview has to do with art and God.

  “I happen to think that art is a form of religion and a way of reaching God. Occasionally and very rarely, in sudden moments, one feels in art a state of grace. It is as though a voice from a cloud is speaking to you and dictating to you what is transmitted through your hands to art. It is a religious experience.”

  Years later I had the opportunity to interview the great actor Sir Laurence Olivier. When I asked him how he wanted to be remembered, his answer was very similar to Capote’s. “Something like an expert workman,” he said. “A workman?” I repeated. “That sounds so prosaic.” “Does it?” said Olivier, reflecting for a moment. “Well, I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God’s a workman. I don’t think there is anything better than a workman. Or workwoman.”

  THEN THERE WAS MY INTERVIEW with Rose Kennedy. God was not a workman to Mrs. Kennedy. He was central to her whole being. She attended Mass every day. Her faith in God gave her courage, conviction, and most of all, solace. I quote her now because of what it says about her remarkable sons.

  Mrs. Kennedy, the wife of Joseph P. Kennedy, the very wealthy and controversial businessman and onetime U.S. ambassador to the Court of Saint James’s, was the mother of President John F. Kennedy, Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy, and six other children. Two of them, Joseph Jr. and Kathleen, were killed in plane crashes in the 1940s. Another daughter, Rosemary, was brain damaged and lived in a special home where she was cared for most of her life. Then, in the 1960s, President Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy were assassinated. It must have been agony for a mother to bear. But Mrs. Kennedy never lost her verve, her courage, or her faith.

  Growing up in Boston and having summered on Cape Cod, both places where the Kennedys had homes, I felt a special kinship. As I’ve already told you, Joseph Kennedy Sr. had spent a good deal of time at the Latin Quarter in Florida. Mrs. Kennedy, however, never set foot in the club. To a very large degree husband and wife lived separate lives. For a long period of time Joseph Kennedy conducted an affair with the motion picture actress Gloria Swanson. He even produced several movies for her. Mrs. Kennedy, by all accounts, both knew and accepted this arrangement.

  She was a good-looking woman herself, dark hair, a dazzling smile, very thin, and very chic. It seemed almost natural to her that her husband had other romantic interests, a trait his sons inherited if the hundreds of stories are to be believed. Mrs. Kennedy remarked that her husband had rarely been with her when she gave birth to her nine children. “No matter,” she said with a smile and a wink. “A diamond bracelet makes up for the loss.”

  But what could make up for the loss of so many of her children? The following is what she told me in November 1968. (That month would have been the birthday celebration of her son Robert, who had been assassinated just five months before. It was also the fifth anniversary of the assassination of her older son, Jack.)

  “I just made up my mind that I was not going to be vanquished,” she told me. “If I collapse then it would have a very bad effect on the other members of the family. So I think I owe them a certain calmness and encouragement and that’s what I try to do.”

  She continued, “I am interested in a lot of things. I have children and grandchildren. I have this motto which I found in one of Jack’s favorite books. It was actually said with regard to England but I adopted it as my own motto. ‘I know not age or weariness of defeat.’ And I don’t analyze my feelings. I just keep on being interested.”

  I went on to ask Mrs. Kennedy whether, when her children were young, there was talk of one of the sons being president. She replied: “Well, I think their father always had that idea. But I wasn’t conscious of it when they were growing up. I was just very much occupied in seeing that they were mentally, physically and…” Here Mrs. Kennedy paused, and I threw in, “Psychologically?” “No,” Mrs. Kennedy said, “morally all right.”

  She went on. “You know, they talk about a Kennedy dynasty but I’m quite sure that there will be another family who will come right along and that is what makes life exciting.” Then Mrs. Kennedy laughed. “That and the absurdity of life also makes it exciting for everybody.”

  Four children dead and she could laugh and talk of the absurdity of life? A remarkable woman.

  I ended the interview by asking if she ever gave her sons advice. She said she had told Jack, during his presidency, that he should not stand with his hands in his pockets and that he would look much better if he held his hands behind his back as the British did in photographs. She also recalled giving Bobby some advice in a letter but ended it by saying that it might be the last time she would write such a letter because “Socrates, who used to give a lot of advice, was finally given hemlock to drink.”

  No wonder Rose Kennedy was one of my favorite interviews.

  THE KENNEDYS in those days were considered American royalty. But we actually had our own royal princess, though my interview with Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace of
Monaco, didn’t give me quite the pleasure that the Rose Kennedy interview did.

  The interview with the beautiful ex–movie star, which I recently watched again, took place in Monte Carlo in August 1966. It isn’t one of my happiest memories, nor, I daresay, was it hers.

  The 1956 marriage of the cool, patrician Grace Kelly to the eligible bachelor Prince Rainier was called “the wedding of the century.” Monaco, the tiny principality on the French Riviera, is chiefly known as the home of one of the most picturesque and well-known gambling casinos in Europe. It is also known as a tax haven for millionaires who can save money while they moor their yachts, play blackjack, or just sun themselves at the topless Monte Carlo Beach Club. Monaco, and its principal (and I think only) city, Monte Carlo, is smaller than New York’s Central Park. But no matter. Prince Rainier was European royalty. And with her perfect features, blue eyes, and blond hair, Grace was our version of American royalty. Most of her leading men, from William Holden to Ray Milland to Bing Crosby to Clark Gable, all of them huge stars at that time, were said to have been in love with her. But one day, while she was in Cannes filming To Catch a Thief with Cary Grant, she was introduced to the bachelor prince and voilà! as they say in French-speaking Monaco, an engagement was soon announced.

  She was the Princess Diana of her time, and for weeks reporters covered every aspect of the engagement and wedding. The public couldn’t get enough of it. Who were her bridesmaids to be? What was she going to wear? They showed copies of the hats Grace was supposedly going to take on her honeymoon. I think I even bought one.

  It was a fairy-tale wedding. Escorted down the aisle by her father, Grace, wearing a gown designed by MGM costume designer Helen Rose, presented a picture as elegant as Hollywood could create. But this wasn’t Hollywood. This was real. Grace Kelly, our golden-haired princess, then disappeared behind the walls of the palace in Monte Carlo, and we only read about her or saw photos of her from then on. She never made another film.