Audition

by Barbara Walters

  Aline’s goal was certainly worthy, but not many women were ready for such an intellectual exchange at 9:00 a.m. Still, the program would probably have plodded along if, out of the blue, NBC had not offered Aline a fantastic opportunity—to go to Paris as its first woman bureau chief. Needless to say, she accepted. (Sadly, she would die a year later of brain cancer.) So now her little morning show was adrift and, floating around, was offered to me.

  This meant that, in addition to two hours of national broadcasting five days a week on Today, I would be adding to my schedule another half hour of local television. I was hesitant. “How can I do all this?” I thought. “Will I ever see my husband or my child?” Then I was told that we could tape all five programs in one day because that would save the station a lot of money, and it would be my show to host and to book. Still, I hesitated.

  For weeks I watched Aline doing her show and decided that the premise was a good one but that the subject matter could be broadened beyond local issues. We didn’t have to deal with just a half hour on the city’s water supply, we could discuss the hot topics of the day. (Years and years later this simple idea became one of the tenets of my ABC daytime program, The View.) I asked NBC if I could broaden the subject matter and, to give the program a fresh start, if we could change the name from For Women Only to the rather cumbersome but I hoped more all-encompassing Not for Women Only? NBC agreed, and I then agreed to be the host.

  The inaugural broadcast took place in September 1971, immediately following the Today show. I was worried that there would be more of Barbara Walters in the morning than the audience could bear, but the program was an almost immediate success.

  It isn’t that I threw the baby out with the bathwater. I simply expanded the subject matter and reduced the purely public service format. When we did go the public service route we tried to make the subjects more personal and more relevant to our audience. Little by little, without making the program frivolous or reducing its intent to provide information, we changed it. Some changes were physical. To make the program more interactive, instead of seating the audience in neat little rows, I put them at round tables. This made the audience feel more relaxed and engaged with the panel. As a result they were not afraid to ask questions or challenge assumptions. Furthermore, the audience was no longer just experts but rather men and women who wrote in for tickets and therefore brought us people who asked questions the folks watching at home would most want asked. Though I didn’t know it then, Not for Women Only would become the prototype for later women-oriented discussion programs hosted by the likes of Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey and, still later, as I’ve said, my own daytime program, The View.

  To make the program more meaningful, I tried to choose themes for the show that related to the lives of both the studio audience and the viewers at home—“Is the Family Dying?” “Sensitivity Training,” “TV and Children,” to name just a few. I threw in some lighthearted themes as well, like “The Hostess with the Mostest,” which examined the best ways to throw parties. We had a really experienced panel for that one—the very funny author and Washington hostess Barbara Howar, newspaper columnist and hostess supreme Phyllis Cerf (wife of Bennett), and fashion designer Mollie Parnis, then one of Manhattan’s leading hostesses. They dished about what made a great guest and what made a great bore. It was name-dropping with a purpose, another forerunner of The View.

  I was delighted when the program took off. NBC was even more delighted. Their little local broadcast, buried in the morning before the hugely popular soap operas, was becoming a program to watch and therefore a program to be sold to advertisers. My own schedule was now insane. The addition of Not for Women Only meant I not only had to prepare for the interviews I did for the Today show, but for the varied themes of the new program.

  I had a wonderful producer named Madeline Amgott and a small staff of very hardworking women, but I still did a lot of the booking for Not for Women Only and wrote my own questions. The books and magazines piled on my bedside table reached life-threatening heights. Leisurely weekends became a distant memory, as did quality time with Lee. Why I drove myself so hard I cannot imagine. Was it ambition? Was I afraid that my days on Today would not last forever? Was it money? It couldn’t really have been the latter. NBC paid me only an extra eight hundred dollars a week to moderate Not for Women Only, which came to $160 a program. I think it boiled down to the fact that I was grateful for the opportunity to prove myself once more. I had passed another audition.

  My past work in public relations was proving very helpful. Just as I’d learned that anything about sex in the lead of a press release caught the attention of its recipient, so also was sex a surefire seller on Not for Women Only. Whenever the ratings slipped, we did a program that dealt with some aspect of sex. I remember that for one full week we explored female and male sexual dysfunctions. We had the most dignified and respected experts address these issues, and our questions were also dignified, but we managed to be candid and therefore exciting in a way few shows were in those days.

  For example, on one program a sex therapist demonstrated how to discourage premature ejaculation by using a rolled-up towel to simulate a penis and showing the audience where to squeeze it. This was valuable information. Weeks later, I was on a shuttle from New York to Washington, D.C., when a young man approached me and asked me how hard to squeeze a penis. I was about to report him to the flight attendant until I realized he had seen Not for Women Only and was seriously asking for my expert opinion.

  After several months of taping five programs in one day, we cut down the exhausting schedule. We began to tape three shows on Tuesdays and two on Thursdays. But some of the panels, like the time we had the wives of Nixon’s cabinet members, were important enough to run for the entire week. For those we continued to tape all five days in one six-hour marathon.

  It was madness. The wives—Barbara Bush (husband George H. W. was then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations), Adele Rogers (husband William was secretary of state), Lenore Romney (husband George headed the Department of Housing and Urban Development), Anne Richardson (husband Elliot headed the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare), and Martha Mitchell (still more or less sane when her husband, John, was the country’s attorney general)—arrived in the studio with their clothing changes on hangers so that each day a segment ran, they’d look different. We had a ten-minute break after each half-hour taping session so everyone, including me, could change clothes. All of us chattered away and compared outfits. It was like being back in the dorm at Sarah Lawrence.

  Our efforts paid off. Within six months of the revised show’s debut, the ratings tripled. NBC’s Washington affiliate picked it up, for which I was paid an additional $300 a week. That’s when Lee Stevens went to the brass at NBC and suggested that they syndicate Not for Women Only with Syndicast, a national media distribution company. NBC did, and within a year or so the program was running in eighty cities. Thanks to Lee I was making $5,000 a week from Not for Women Only, twice as much as I was being paid for the Today show. NBC was turning a handsome profit as well.

  It’s pointless to play the “what if” game, but I could kick myself now for not asking to own a piece of Not for Women Only. Had I had my own production company then, as I do now (Barwall Productions), I could have owned Not for Women Only and had a syndicated program that could have gone on for years. Just call me Oprah. (I tend to exaggerate.) Oprah, who is the best there is, established Harpo Productions, Inc., in 1986, which owns, produces, and distributes the Oprah Winfrey Show, the most successful talk show in television history, across this country and abroad. (At last count her program was being broadcast in 132 countries.) She’s one smart lady. Yet I’m not sure, as part of the news division, that I could have “owned” Not for Women Only. In any event I didn’t ask and I didn’t get.

  Being in the news division dictated a lot of what I could and could not do. It still does. For instance, the women currently on The View are provided with clothes every d
ay if they want, and the designers are given credit. But not me. I can’t, because as a member of the news division I’m not allowed to accept “gifts” and I can’t give credit, which is seen as an endorsement. I almost always wear my own clothes when I’m on the program, or any program for that matter. I manage this with a lot of mix and matches.

  In the early days of the Today show when I needed a varied wardrobe, designers like Kasper gave me samples to wear. I was a sample size back then, and Kasper was a dear friend. Sometimes, if I liked a particular outfit, I could buy it at cost. I remember I once purchased what I now think of as a quite hideous outfit comprising a purple plaid coat with two skirts, one the same purple plaid and the other a solid purple. I then bought two jackets, one plain purple, the other once again plaid. I could mix and match for days of ghastly outfits. I even found purple leather boots. I was the cat’s meow. Or rather, the cats all meowed when they saw me.

  I had other designers who were friends and either loaned me clothes or offered them to me at a reduced price. One was Halston, who was then the very hottest designer. All the socialites and movie stars of the time were buying Halston clothes. His muse was Liza Minnelli. Halston made me many mix and matches—a dark red coat with a dark red skirt and dark red pants for traveling, along with a beige skirt and a beige sweater to be worn with a dark red belt and the dark red coat. I took this whole outfit to Romania when the Today show traveled there. I didn’t need anything else. Halston was very expensive, but his clothes were so basic and practical I wore them for years. Some of those pieces I still wear today, like the deep red pants with the matching coat—and this is more than thirty-five years later.

  I never wore provocative clothes on the air. None of us did in the news division. I wore suits or dresses with high necks and long sleeves. My body hardly showed at all, except for my legs in the miniskirt phase. It was an unspoken rule then that the only way for a working woman to be taken seriously was to be sexless.

  Things are much more relaxed now, but the basic rule for women anchoring news programs hasn’t changed that much. We basically still wear suits. It’s only in relatively recent years that I’ve begun to wear pants instead of a skirt for a serious interview. I distinctly remember one of the first times I did this, and it was to the White House, no less. It was in January 1996, when I was scheduled to interview First Lady Hillary Clinton about her new book, It Takes a Village. A fierce snowstorm had closed all the New York airports, but I was determined to get to Washington. (I was worried that Mrs. Clinton, who was facing a new round of scandalous allegations about Whitewater, might not reschedule if I canceled.) So I put on a pair of pants and snow boots and clumped myself to the subway to take the train from Penn Station. When we finally crawled into Washington I clumped my way in knee-high snow up Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. There was Mrs. Clinton, also wearing pants. I thought she might change for the interview, but she didn’t, and for the very first time, she wore pants in an interview. She looked great. Mrs. Clinton is quite small on top but rather large in the hips. The pants flattered her figure, and now one rarely sees Senator Clinton in anything but pants suits.

  On an earlier trip to the White House, this one in 1970, the weather was kinder and my outfit far dressier. The dinner was formal, and I wore a black high-necked and long-sleeved dress. No big statement there. Washington is a very conservative city when it comes to fashion. Lee and I had been invited to a dinner for the great American painter Andrew Wyeth. I’d interviewed Wyeth the year before for Today, but the central character of this story was not Mr. Wyeth but Richard Nixon.

  I hadn’t seen the president in the six months or so since he’d persuaded both Prince Philip and Henry Kissinger to sit down with me for the Today show, and I didn’t know whether he’d even remember. But he did. When I jokingly thanked him for being the best booking agent I’d ever worked with, he laughed and said:

  “Who do you want me to get for you next, Barbara?”

  “Well, there is someone,” I responded.

  “And who might that be?” he asked.

  “You, Mr. President,” I said.

  The call came in from the White House almost a year later while Lee and I were packing to go on a minivacation to Palm Springs. It was Ron Ziegler, President Nixon’s press secretary. The president was ready to do an interview with me for the Today show. Was I available? Lee and I started unpacking.

  For a television journalist to sit down for an exclusive chat with the president of the United States was quite rare at the time. Remember, there were only three networks. Fox, CNN, and MSNBC were still in the future. But Nixon was going into an election year with falling poll ratings, so I guess the members of his administration wanted to woo Today’s audience. And with reason. Nixon was seen as secretive, arrogant, and isolated from the public. His enemies had nicknamed him Tricky Dick, and a favorite poster at the time showed a picture of Nixon over the legend: “Would YOU buy a used car from this man?”

  The war in Vietnam that Nixon had inherited also continued to divide the country. Though Nixon was steadily withdrawing U.S. troops and replacing them with Vietnamese troops, he had also broadened the war in 1970 by invading Cambodia and Laos to cut off North Vietnamese supply lines. The resulting firestorm of protest on U.S. campuses had led to four students being killed by the National Guard on Ohio’s Kent State University campus.

  The Nixon White House, particularly its designated mouthpiece, Vice President Spiro Agnew, was blaming the press and “ideological eunuchs” for the antiwar violence. My old friend and former boss Bill Safire, who was by then firmly entrenched in the Nixon administration as a speechwriter, came up with Agnew’s famous description of the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism” and topped that by denouncing any critics of Nixon’s policies as “hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Alliteration games aside, it was a bitter time in America. There was no gray area. You were either a hawk or a dove. The patriotic mantra of Nixon’s supporters, the so-called silent majority, became: “America. Love It or Leave It.”

  No wonder the White House wanted to project the image of a kinder, gentler Nixon to the public. The Today show was the perfect vehicle.

  The interview, my first with a sitting president, took place in the Blue Room of the White House in March 1971. Nixon seemed very nervous as the camera crew set things up. He kept complimenting me on my knee-length boots—“Those are very nice boots.” “They look very comfortable.” “Are those boots as comfortable as they look?” When we finally got under way, I asked the usual questions about our involvement in Vietnam, and the president supplied the usual answers about not giving in to dictators. We could not simply cut and run, he said. (Where have I heard that since?) This was important information, but I felt that, for our morning audience, it was also an opportunity to learn more about this secretive and remote man. After dealing with the foreign policy questions, I took a deep breath and said, “Mr. President, there has been a lot of talk about your image and the fact that the American public sees you as rather stuffy and not a human man.” I realized that I had just called the president of the United States “stuffy” to his face and I could see his eyes narrow, but I plunged on. “Are you worried about this image, Mr. President?”

  Well, I’d opened a Pandora’s box. The president went on and on about his lack of interest in his image and polls and press clippings that he professed never to read. “Presidents who do,” he said, “become like the athletes, the football teams and the rest, who become so concerned about what is written about them that they don’t play the game well.” He warned that an elected official “must not be constantly preening in front of a mirror,” but should be doing “the very best possible job he can do for this country. And that is what I am doing.”

  On and on he went, getting more dismissive of any public criticism. “Anybody who takes his temperature with a Gallup Poll,” he claimed, “isn’t going to be a good leader.”

  It made for a fascinating intervie
w, a rare glimpse of the man’s real personality. We ran the interview almost totally unedited, a precedent, for two full hours on the Today show. Today you could never do that. The audience simply doesn’t have the attention span. But times were different then, and there was great curiosity about Nixon’s character.

  The interview didn’t help Nixon’s poll numbers, but it did enrage the other networks. The custom at the time was that a president never went on one network unless it was a pool broadcast for all three networks. But at that hour of the morning CBS had Captain Kangaroo, and ABC wasn’t even on the air, so their complaints fell flat. (It would be another four years before A.M. America would start, becoming Good Morning America ten months later.)

  As I was becoming more respected as a journalist, I was also, to my great sadness, becoming vilified by a man whom I loved as a performer and whom I thought of as a friend of the family. Frank Sinatra, no less, became a vehement and vocal enemy. For most of the rest of his life he regularly complained about me publicly and ostracized me privately, for the craziest reason.

  First, some background. I had known Sinatra off and on for years. He’d performed at the Latin Quarter back in the sixties when his popularity waned. At that time he was particularly nice to my sister. I’d loved him for that. He’d even written her a sweet personal letter when she asked him for an autographed picture. Jackie treasured that letter all her life. My parents adored him, and although we had heard and read of the angry and occasionally violent side of Sinatra, we thought of him as a kind friend.