Gossip (21 page)

Of Sarah Lawrence she notes that "none of us [she and her fellow students at the then all-female college] needed a psychiatrist because we lived in group therapy every day. There were no secrets among us, no privacy." Which only shows again how perfect the college was for Barbara, for her work would always have something of the warm glow of the therapeutic, of the bull session with the girls, of the therapist's couch. Her entire career, like an extension of Sarah Lawrence days, was devoted to eliminating secrets and thereby privacy.

Barbara had had some success acting in college plays, but when she auditioned for parts in New York, some of them set up for her through her father's Broadway connections, she found herself overwhelmed by fear of rejection. Instead she took various jobs in public relations. One of them was writing publicity for the local affiliate of NBC-TV, which gave her entrée into television. The spread of television, which put an end to her father's career as an impresario—with the rise of television, people went out at night a great deal less, which killed the nightclub business—was of course the beginning of her own much grander one.

Like so many young women of her generation, Barbara married in her twenties—a less than passionate marriage, in her account of it—a man named Bob Katz, with whom she discovered she hadn't much to talk about. (Not a good candidate for a Barbara Walters special, Mr. Katz.) This was to be the first of her three marriages. She also tells us that she had three miscarriages, and so, during her second marriage, to a man named Lee Gruber, she adopted a child.

Between marriages, Barbara was seen around New York with Roy Cohn, one of the most despised men in the country owing to his work as Senator Joseph McCarthy's axman in his Communist-hunting campaign. She and Cohn were never romantically entangled; he was, as was later revealed, a homosexual (Cohn died of AIDS in 1986). She says that he used her as a beard to cover his homosexuality, which she wasn't aware of at the time. He proposed marriage to her more than once; at one point, when he had bought a townhouse on the East Side of New York, in which he promised to install her sister and her now down-on-their-luck parents, she claims she was tempted. And oh yes, Roy Cohn, Barbara, ever the good gossip, also tells us, had a number of face-lifts.

Throughout her memoir Barbara provides lots of such gossipy tidbits. She reports that the actress Maureen O'Sullivan was "on a steady diet of prescription pills," which made her brief time on the
Today
show less than successful. A figure around Washington named Joan Braden used the lure of sex to secure interviews and scoops as a journalist; she was, Barbara tells us, Robert McNamara's "so-called travelling companion, after his wife's death," and supposedly "had a fling with Robert Kennedy." A colleague named Pat Fontaine had a drinking problem. The actor George Sanders's meanness wasn't just in the roles he played; he was a genuine lout. She drags in the old chestnut about John F. Kennedy bonking Angie Dickinson, informs us of Grace Kelly's unhappiness as a princess in Monaco, gives us the lowdown on John Wayne's diddling his young female assistant, and oh so much more. But then, gossiping about herself, she also tells us that she had a lengthy love affair with Senator Edward Brooke. A journalist's work, it sometimes seems, is never done.

Barbara Walters achieved celebrity by interviewing celebrity. She was famous enough to have her slight speech impediment mocked on
Saturday Night Live
by Gilda Radner as a character called Baba Wawa. Celebrity, carefully orchestrated, can take a person a long way, and Barbara has been a Toscanini of her own renown. She became the first female news anchor, sharing the job with Harry Reasoner, though her salary, to his great chagrin, was larger than his.

Such was Barbara's fame that heads of state, the biggest movie stars, people caught up in serious crimes, wished to be interviewed by her. They wanted their say before her enormous audience. She refers to landing an interview with an immensely famous person as a "get," but she was herself becoming a big get on her own. When in power, Richard Nixon helped set up interviews for her. He had his motives, she hers. "We used each other," she writes, "and that's the way it has worked out with so many guests I've talked to over the years. People come on TV because they want the exposure and a forum to advance whatever it is they want to advance. And I want something, too—the interview." One dirty hand washes the other.

In television, high ratings are of an importance equal to oxygen for human life: without either, death quickly follows. High ratings were never Barbara's problem; she understood how to get them. In 1974,
Newsweek
put her on its cover, claiming that her interview questions are "dumdum bullets swaddled in angora." Dumb-dumb might have been a little more like it. No one listens to Barbara Walters to learn about the delicate balance of power in Europe, the fate of the economy, or the rise of Islamofascism. They watch her in the hope that she will ask the not necessarily outrageous but the pointedly vulgar question. And she does not let her viewers down. She asks Fidel Castro if he is secretly married, and Prince Philip if his wife, Queen Elizabeth II, would soon be likely to leave the throne so that her son could become King. She queries Barbara Bush on her depression, asks Boris Yeltsin if he drinks too much, Vladimir Putin if he has ever killed anyone, Muammar Qaddafi if he is insane, and dings Martha Stewart with "Why do so many people hate you?" She asks Hillary Clinton, after her husband's divertissements with an intern is revealed, "How could you stay in this marriage?" Then she turns the dial a notch further and asks, "What if he does it again?" She reports that "I knew it would be hard for her to answer, but I had to ask."

"I had to ask" is a not uncommon formulation of Barbara's. To her dismay, she never interviewed a pope. If a pope agreed to an interview with Barbara, before it was over she would doubtless get around to asking, "Holy Father, have you no regrets about never having had children?" Camilla Parker Bowles, the Prince of Wales's second wife, refused to do an interview with Barbara, who no doubt would have asked what it's like to have a prince tell you that he wishes he were a tampon inside you. She would, you understand, have had to ask.

Barbara Walters must know that this vulgar streak, asking the low questions that are on the mass mind, is her bread and caviar. She also knows not to step out of her intellectual league. An interview with Elizabeth Taylor is going to top one with any world leader you might care to mention. How does Barbara know? Simple enough: the ratings tell her so. All very well to interview Henry Kissinger (a friend, it turns out, but then very few famous people aren't her friend), but Maria Callas on being deserted by Aristotle Onassis for Jackie (soon to be O) Kennedy rings the ratings gong more resoundingly. Late in her memoir she complains rather sniffily that "since the Britney Spearses of the world and sensational crime stories became the big ratings draws, international political leaders ... have come to be considered dull fare." But of course she knew this long before; perhaps as much as anyone in America, she may be said to have contributed to its coming about.

She comes across as a sensitive, caring woman in her television appearances—the nation's therapist, our Barbara—but she also has a taste for vengeance. Two anchors who never cottoned to her, Frank McGee at NBC and Harry Reasoner at ABC, thinking her insufficiently intelligent and thus lowering the tone of their profession, get her stiletto through belated—posthumous, actually—gossip. She reports that McGee, thought to be a happily married man, toward the end of his life "plunged into a flagrant love affair with a young black production assistant named Mamye, and had left his wife to live with her," adding that Mamye was not "particularly pretty." Reasoner is hung out to dry for his pettiness and backbiting. In her memoir, Barbara front-bites him.

Barbara Walters has all these years been living out a secret drama. In it she is a feminist pioneer who broke down all the masculine barriers and, at great personal cost, cleared the way for Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and all the other female anchors. In a line of work specializing in high pretension, why should only men be allowed to score big money as empty trench coats?

Barbara claims no one knows her politics, that when she is interviewing famous murderers, thugs, or thieves she holds back judgment—at least she does so during the interview. She will, though, let us know that she feels deeply, very deeply. Of the parents of Ronald Goldman, the young man killed with O. J. Simpson's wife, she tells us that she "ached for them." She goes in for what in the business isn't but ought to be called "the weepies"; interviewing the families of the victims of 9/11, she lets us know how wrenching it was for
her.
Repeatedly she reports that she has stayed in touch with men and women she has interviewed, to make sure we all know that she doesn't merely use these people as another "get," useful to score yet another ratings hit. She's very human, she wants us to know, and not in the least corrupted by the somewhat scurrilous job that has provided her such a smooth ride through life.

Some things even Barbara will not do. The thought of her interviewing O. J. Simpson and helping him make money on a book sickens her. She finds Paris Hilton's family's request for money for an interview with their daughter "shoddy." Complicated negotiations were conducted over money for Barbara to interview the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. "Of course I wanted to do the interview," she reports, "but I was not so ambitious that I didn't have a conscience." As part of her enticement pitch, she tells Monica Lewinsky, "I can give you the forum and the opportunity to present yourself with the greatest dignity." Monica goes for it, and the interview turns out to be "the most watched special in the history of television" and "also the biggest 'get' of my career." Monica Lewinsky's dignity, never really up for redemption, was not a keynote of the interview.

In the spirit of the times, Barbara gossips about herself. Well, not really about herself but about members of her family. She talks about the complications of her parents' marriage, about the difficulties of her retarded sister, and finally, most lengthily, about her only daughter, Jackie. (The perfect daughter for Barbara, a mischievous mind might say, might have been Monica Lewinsky herself.) Raising Jackie is all sweetness and light, till one day the girl turns up missing lots of classes at the Dalton School, doing drugs, and hanging with the wrong sort of boys. At one point the kid runs to ground. But it is a story with a happy ending: Jackie is eventually found, detoxed, deprogrammed, and is now back in the game, running a "small residential outdoor therapy program" in Maine for wayward girls. Barbara "supported her in every possible way ... and our relationship became closer and closer." Why keep the whole thing quiet? Why suppress an inspirational story? Why observe the thinnest desire for privacy? She pitched the story of her and her daughter's saga to NBC's
Dateline,
which bought it.

Barbara's last big shot has been a daytime program called
The View,
in which four or five women, neither notable for their reticence nor overly concerned about their dignity, talk about the "personal aspects of our lives." ABC, Barbara allows, would go with the idea for the show only if she agreed to appear regularly on it. On
The View,
celebrity guests, yearning to keep the flame of their fame alive, come on and are invited to do as the regular members do. "Just plop yourself down on our couch," Barbara writes, "and discuss your film and your sex life." What fun! And another ratings winner for Barbara.

Pretty amazing, all of it. Why has this woman, whose charm is not always evident, but who has lots of energy and boundless ambition yet no obvious talent to accompany either, why has Barbara Walters become, with the possible exception of Oprah Winfrey, the most famous woman in America? She has gone, as the Victorians used to say—though no one, surely, could be less Victorian than Barbara—from strength to strength. Now in her eighties, she admits to being a little tired of the game. "Celebrities with problems were becoming less appealing to me," she notes, and the competition for "gets" becoming tougher all the time, with Diane Sawyer and Katie Couric and Oprah now on the hunt.

Give Barbara her due: week after week, year after year, she has created gossip through the simple agency of asking the most tasteless questions of famous people, who were themselves tasteless enough to answer her. Not just anyone could have brought it off. Yet to her it all seems to have come so naturally.

My first book,
Divorced in America: Marriage in an Age of Possibility,
was published in 1974, the same year that
People
magazine began publication. Because mine was in good part a personal book—half of it taking up the issues, questions, and problems entailed in divorce, the other half chronicling my own experience going through a divorce—the editors of
People
must have thought that here was a subject made for their magazine. A young woman reporter was sent out to interview me, with an amusing Hungarian photographer driving a tan Mercedes in tow. They must have thought they had a good gossipy story, but what they hadn't counted on was that I lived, by their lights, an abnormally quiet life.

The reporter wondered if they might take pictures of my then lady friend, who would a few years later become my wife, walking along the beach of Lake Michigan. But publicity to my friend was of no interest; in fact, she thought it more than a touch vulgar, especially publicity of the clichéd thoughtful-couple-walking-along-the-beach variety.

As for me, I ostensibly had no life to speak of. I chiefly read and sat in front of a typewriter, tapping away at essays, stories, articles, and book reviews. For complicated reasons, I had custody of my children, but I didn't want them dragged into an issue of
People,
and I made that plain at the outset. I did in those days play tennis, so the Hungarian photographer took scores of shots of me whapping away at tennis balls. The reporter sensed that the real story must have been my ex-wife, who no longer lived in the same city I did, and she wondered if she might be allowed to get in touch with her. I had taken the greatest care to leave my ex-wife out of my book, never blaming her for any share in the breakup of the marriage or speaking of any flaws or weaknesses in her character; I wanted above all not to seem the typically disgruntled partner to a divorce. So despite relentless pursuit on the reporter's part, I refused to reveal the whereabouts of my ex-wife, thus depriving
People
's story of any gossip value whatsoever. I was the subject and cause of an extremely boring story—perhaps, I like to think, the most boring ever to appear in its pages.