Audition

by Barbara Walters

  Here’s an example from Morley Safer, of 60 Minutes fame, who was also doing radio commentary. I think of it even today as kicking a colleague when she is down.

  “The interview with Governor Carter is really what ended Ms. Walters’ brief career as a journalist and placed her firmly in the ranks of…what? The Merv Griffins and Johnny Carsons? What right does any reporter have to issue such a benediction?…It is as if Mr. Carter had just become Louis XIV and, without Pope Barbara’s admonition, he might be dumb with us and mean to us.”

  Here’s another: “She’s bad at it,” wrote Sander Vanocur, in the Washington Post. “Does she ever let anyone finish a thought?” (Ah, sweet revenge. I can’t help but mention that years later Sandy, as he was called, came to work as a correspondent at ABC, and not a top one at that. At that time I was on 20/20, and Sandy would come by and ask me if the program had any assignments for him. I even helped him when I could. ABC later let him go.)

  But what provoked the most wrath was a segment we sandwiched in between the Streisand interview and the Carters: a brief tour I conducted of my own apartment in New York. I really hadn’t wanted to, but we were short a third guest. I hadn’t been able to get another celebrity to agree to an interview, so against my better judgment—and it really was against my better judgment—we filled four minutes of the program with a view of my living room.

  We rationalized this by saying that we had shown Streisand’s home and Jimmy Carter’s home, so why not mine? In came the cameras to my apartment to shoot me among the gray walls and drapes and the red furniture and the fake fireplace. As it turned out, it was a good precedent to set. Most of the Specials I would do in the next twenty years or so would take place in the celebrities’ homes, and become a trademark of the programs. (Now celebrities are more concerned about their privacy, and want to be interviewed in hotel rooms.) As for my apartment, it didn’t make great television, but I thought it was hardly the worst piece of television on the air.

  Oh, yeah? More swell stuff from Morley Safer: “Sandwiched between the white bread of the Carters and the pumpernickel of Streisand, we were treated to the pastrami of Ms. Walters herself.” And this again from Sandy Vanocur. “She was interviewing herself,” he wrote. “That way, at least, the only person she can interrupt is herself.”

  Well, you know what? That first Special was a runaway smash hit. It significantly beat out both CBS and NBC. More than fifteen million people watched. “It was unlike anything viewers had seen and they loved it,” ran an article in Entertainment Weekly, written, incidentally, by a woman. “Barbara Walters had to prove she was worth a million dollars, and on the night of December 14, 1976, she did.”

  I may have been dying on the news, but in spite of the critics I was soaring on the Specials. They became the tail that wagged the dog. No matter what happened to me on the news, I continued to do the Specials that year and the next and the next and on and on until this very year. I’ve been doing them now for more than thirty years.

  As a matter of fact, in the winter of 2006, we did a tongue-in-cheek Special called 30 Mistakes in 30 Years, which ran for two hours over two nights. It was fun to look back on all the things I said and did I should not have said and done—like the “be wise” admonition to Jimmy Carter. By 2006 I could afford to make fun of myself. But thirty years earlier the Barbara Walters Specials were what kept me from being considered a total disaster.

  After the first Special it became easier and easier to secure famous guests. I continued to mix celebrity guests with newsmakers and recruited a new staff. We lined up a wonderful mix for my next Special, which would air in April, just four months later.

  This time the celebrity guests were Elizabeth Taylor and her new husband, my old friend John Warner (soon to be elected senator); the newsmaker guests were His Imperial Majesty the shah of Iran and his wife, Empress Farah, and for good measure, Barbara Jordan of Texas, the first black congresswoman from a Southern state and a brilliant orator. Jordan had burst into the national consciousness during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings of President Nixon in the summer of 1974, where she won national acclaim for her eloquent reaffirmation of faith in the Constitution. I can still hear the way she said, “the Con-sti-tu-tion,” before she voted for all five articles of impeachment. The congresswoman herself was much admired but also criticized for being blunt and aloof. I thought she was terrific.

  The interview with Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner, which you read about earlier, was strange for me. Even though I was asking the questions, I felt like a third wheel. They were the couple. I was the ex-girlfriend and Elizabeth knew it. The viewers loved it, though, and that’s what counted.

  It was the interview with the shah of Iran and his shahbanou in Tehran, however, that caused a sensation. First we interviewed the thirty-eight-year-old empress in her own private library with its suede couches, walls of books, priceless Persian manuscripts, sculptures and paintings by Miró, Calder, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and even an Andy Warhol portrait of Mick Jagger, which she had chosen herself. This was her retreat. I liked the empress very much. In spite of the priceless artifacts, paintings, and her twenty-four-carat lifestyle, I found her down-to-earth and easy to talk to.

  We then interviewed the shah in another part of the palace. He was nineteen years older than his wife and had an opulent office with a gilded desk, golden telephones, and windows surrounded by gold-embossed frames. The windows were of bulletproof glass. He seemed arrogant and coldly superior, yet he answered all of my questions honestly, so honestly that there were times when I wanted to say to him, “Don’t you realize what you are saying?”

  When I asked if he felt that it was God’s will that he was born to be king, he said it was, that “it was the whole meaning of my life.” (Bear in mind that he came to the Peacock Throne only because his father, a military officer and eventually prime minister, had overthrown the former shah.) When I later asked the shah if a newspaper in his country could criticize him, he said plainly, “No.”

  “Why not?” I asked, and he replied, “You cannot insult the king.”

  This attitude contributed to his growing reputation as an autocratic dictator untouched by the needs of his people. Although the shah had made many important reforms in his country—he requisitioned some huge private estates and redistributed them to small farmers, spear-headed the training of teachers and doctors, and gave women more rights—his regime was in great danger. He and his family were said to be corrupt, and the secret security service he’d formed, SAVAK, was undeniably cruel. Indeed it was just two years after this interview that the Islamic revolution took place in Iran and the shah and empress were forced to flee their country.

  At the time of our interview, however, the shah did not feel threatened. In private life he was hardly autocratic or fierce. For example, talking about his four children, he said that he still regretted throwing sand in the eyes of his son, the crown prince, when they were on the beach and his son was annoying him. He said he sometimes cried over films with animals or children. But he never cried over himself. He said a king didn’t have that right.

  Okay. Nice personal stuff about an emperor, but hardly controversial. Then we had a joint conversation with the shah and his wife, the first time they had ever been interviewed together on American television.

  In doing my homework, I’d read in a magazine some pretty strong statements about women attributed to the shah. I couldn’t quite believe he would be so foolish as to have made them, so I decided to ask him. “Your Majesty, I want to talk a bit with you about women. I quote you: ‘You have never produced a Michelangelo or Bach or even a great cook.’ So you don’t feel that women are in the same sense equal, that they have the same intelligence or ability?”

  Now remember, the shah had introduced many reforms for women in his country, including their right to be fully educated and to leave their heads uncovered (which infuriated the mullahs). Many of the growing number of medical students in Iran were you
ng women. But in spite of this he reinforced my question about women not having the same intelligence or ability as men by answering, “Not so far. Maybe you will become in the future.”

  I then exclaimed, “You have given women in your country equality in their human rights but you do not think they are equal in intelligence?”

  SHAH: Well, there are cases, sure. You can always have some exceptions.

  ME [sarcastically]: Here and there?

  SHAH: Yes, but on the average, I repeat again, where have you produced a top scientist?

  ME: Madame Curie.

  SHAH: That’s one.

  ME: But we’ve had a lot of trouble getting ahead perhaps because of this point of view. Do you feel your wife is one of those exceptions? Do you feel your wife can govern as well as a man?

  SHAH: I prefer not to answer that.

  ME: But you have made your wife the regent of this country. If you die, your wife heads this country. And yet you are not certain she can govern as well as a man?

  SHAH: I can’t say; I don’t know how she would react in a crisis.

  All this time the empress had sat silently by her husband. I then said to him, “Well, I admire you for your honesty, but what you are really saying is women are nice in their place. Nice, pretty creatures.” At which point I turned to his wife and said: “Your Majesty, say something, please. How do you feel when you listen to this?”

  Her eyes brimming with tears, the empress looked at her husband and said quietly, “I don’t think you really believe that.” Her voice got stronger as she continued: “But what have men done to the world, really? Have they achieved something that today makes the world so perfect? Politically, economically, relationships, progress? So let us not classify people.”

  I asked then if she thought she could govern as well as a man and she replied, “Compared to my husband, it is difficult, because there are very few heads of state with thirty-six years of experience behind them and with his intelligence and his capacity. But compared to somebody else, I think, why not?”

  I could only imagine their conversation in their bedroom that night. I was also concerned because the next day I was scheduled to talk further with the shah about oil prices, as Iran controlled so much of the world’s oil. We could not complete this interview without asking about oil, and I was afraid I had offended him and he would cancel the session. His aides agreed that he was probably annoyed with my questioning, but the next day the shah was smiling and friendly and our interview went on as planned.

  The conversation with the shah and empress aired in April 1977, and to this day there are still people who talk about it with me. And here is the truly important part. When the shah was forced into exile and it was later revealed that he had cancer, it was his wife who took over and managed not only his care but every aspect of their lives—where they could travel, how they would live, and the multitude of decisions that had to be made for thousands of their exiled countrymen.

  Empress Farah now lives a quiet life. She spends as much time as she can in Maryland, near her grandchildren and her eldest son, who would have been emperor had the revolution not occurred. We still see each other. I admire her courage and dignity, and Iran could have done worse than to have had her as its leader (and, in fact, it has).

  Although this Special also did very well in the ratings, the Elizabeth Taylor interview drew many more viewers than the one with the shah and empress. Even fewer people watched the interview with Barbara Jordan. It was like asking people what kind of music they like and they reply “Bach”—and then go out and buy rock. The celebrities carried the program. So we made a decision that affected almost all of our future shows—more celebrities and fewer politicians and newsmakers.

  The result was that when we did our third Special, we featured Bob and Dolores Hope, Bing Crosby, and Redd Foxx, who was starring in the sitcom Sanford and Son. We continued to do each interview from the subject’s home. This had proved to be a great part of the appeal of these programs. Our viewers loved seeing how the stars lived.

  Redd Foxx’s house was an eye-popper. Everything had a fox on it—the drapes, the carpets, the lampshades. But in his bedroom there were not foxes—there were live monkeys. His bed faced a glassed-in area, sort of like an aquarium, only with monkeys jumping around. The glass cage was air-conditioned, kept at the right temperature for the monkeys, and they could stare at Foxx and he could stare back. I stared at all of them in disbelief.

  The Hope house was lovely, traditional, and undistinguished. Dolores Hope was also lovely, an understanding wife to a husband who more often than not was away. It was a pleasant, uneventful interview.

  The interview with Bing Crosby was a surprise. The seemingly affable, easygoing Crosby turned out to be as strict and rigid a parent as one could find. Many young people at the time were beginning to share a room and sleep together without marriage, but when I asked Crosby how he would feel if one of his seven children wanted to share a bedroom with someone they were going with, he said he wouldn’t speak to them ever again.

  Flabbergasted at his answer, I asked, “If one of your sons said, ‘I like this girl and I’m living with her and we’re not getting married,’ you would never speak to him?”

  I will never forget Crosby’s dismissive answer: “Aloha, on the steel guitar.” (My producers and I still use that expression today if we want to get rid of something on a show.)

  Beyond that he said if his only daughter, Mary Frances, told him that she was having an affair, he would tell her to take her things and move out and he would never, ever, talk to her or see her again. He seemed to have conveniently forgotten his own reputation as a philanderer in his younger days. But now he insisted that that was how he, a Catholic, had been raised, and he knew of no other way to behave.

  Still, in spite of this rigidity, which I daresay some people might agree with, I liked Crosby. I liked the fact that he took second billing on films, and I liked the way he told me he wanted to be remembered as “not a bad fellow who sang a fair song in tune most of the time.”

  Most of all I liked the way he treated my mother.

  For the very first time I had taken my mother on one of my assignments, and I took her without my sister. My father was in the nursing home, Aunt Lena had agreed to look after my sister, and my mother had finally agreed to travel with me alone. She loved Bing Crosby from all of his films, and this visit thrilled her so much.

  Crosby had a magnificent estate on the outskirts of San Francisco. To take care of it, he had a wonderful English butler named Alan Fisher, who had worked for the Duke of Windsor before coming to America. Mr. Fisher took my mother all over the beautiful house and prepared a special tea for us with buttered scones and little sandwiches. My mother was so elegant and charming that day. She was at her best, and both Crosby and his butler doted on her. I wished that I could have taken her on every interview I did. She deserved the respite, but even during this magical time for her in California, she worried about how my sister was getting along and called home constantly.

  The visit with Bing Crosby remains very important in my eyes, not only because of my mother but because it turned out to be Crosby’s last interview. He died six months later of a heart attack in Madrid, Spain, after playing eighteen holes of golf. He was seventy-three. After his death, Alan Fisher sent me a pair of Crosby’s eyeglasses. He said he thought nobody would miss them and that my mother might like to have them. She did.

  After the first two or three celebrity Specials, more and more of the biggest stars of the day agreed to be interviewed. I remember Lucille Ball, sitting next to her husband, Gary Morton, and saying bitterly that Desi Arnaz, her former husband and the man who was her partner for so many years on and off camera, drank too much and was never around. Yet it was obvious because she couldn’t stop talking about him that she still loved Arnaz.

  She went on to tell me she was devastated when her marriage to Arnaz broke up. They had everything, and she couldn’t understand what went wr
ong. “He had to lose,” she sighed. “He had to fail. Everything he’d built he had to break down. Even our marriage.” She’d married Morton in part, she said, because unlike Desi, he liked to stay home and she never had to worry where he was. But to this day, because I Love Lucy is always running somewhere in syndication, millions of people still think Lucy and Desi were the happiest of married couples.

  I talked with Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion, in his home on Chicago’s South Side. There must have been thirty people sitting around. I had never seen so many hangers-on. No wonder he couldn’t hold on to his money. Ali began the interview by teasing me. He said I should look up to him because men are made taller than women. “God made man in his image. He didn’t worry about no woman. He made the woman out of his rib.” For a moment I felt I was back with the shah again, but then Ali laughed and said, “I’m just having fun.” And fun he certainly was in those days.

  Then there was John Wayne, the man who had sent the telegram that so buoyed me up during my first terrible months at ABC. He agreed to an interview and we finally met, first aboard his 136-foot yacht, the Wild Goose, which had been a navy minesweeper, and later we talked at his home in Newport Beach, California. I expressed surprise at how elegant the house was, and Wayne shot back: “Why not? I’ve been to school. A lot of us country boys have good taste.” I also remember that Wayne, seventy-one, particularly wanted to talk about his young female assistant, Pat Stacey, whom he obviously loved. Separated from his third wife, he wanted to have his devotion to her recognized. “I have a very deep affection for Miss Stacey,” he told me. “I have a very pleasant life with her.” Up until this interview the public did not know about “Miss Stacey.”

  “Duke,” as Wayne was called, had been ill, so at the end of our conversation, I asked a question I have often posed since and which, in his case, seemed all the more appropriate. “Do you have a philosophy that sums up your thinking today?”