Audition (100 page)

Finally, thank heaven, we did go to commercial, and when we came back there was a guest, Alicia Silverstone, to be interviewed and the program went back to normal. But great harm had been done. That night every news program carried the screaming match, as did all the morning news programs. Everyone loved this catfight of all catfights. Elisabeth was in despair. She never expected such a confrontation. Rosie, I am sure, must also have been miserable.

The afternoon of the outburst, Rosie announced that since the next day, Thursday, was Kelli’s fortieth birthday (it really was), she would be taking the day off. I moderated the Thursday show and opened the program by saying, “Auntie Barbara is back. There is peace in the kingdom.” But as luck or irony would have it, President Bush gave a press conference on immigration at 11:00 a.m., and our program was not seen in most of the country. My attempt at peace and humor went unnoticed.

We were about to go off on the long Memorial Day weekend and had pretaped our Friday and Monday shows. (If I write another book, remembering that the Trump business also happened during a Christmas week holiday, I may title it
My Holiday Misadventures.
) Holiday or not, the network and I waited anxiously to hear whether Rosie was coming back to the program to finish her last three weeks.

Finally the word came. Rosie e-mailed me that she would not be coming back to
The View.
She gave no reason for leaving the program. What a way to end her year with us. ABC put out a brief statement on its Web site. Brian Frons, the president of ABC Daytime, thanked her “for her tremendous contribution to
The View.
” I wrote in part that “I had brought Rosie to the show and she contributed to one of our most exciting and successful years.” Rosie’s press representative issued a statement from Rosie that said she was “extremely grateful” and added, “It has been an amazing year and I love all three women.”

So there it was. I felt exhausted and sad. I e-mailed Rosie and said so. “I am very sorry that you decided not to come back but you must have felt it best for you and your family. I want you to know that my admiration and affection for you will remain unchanged.” I meant it.

In the fall of 2007, however, I almost changed my mind when Rosie published a book called
Celebrity Detox.
She sent me an advance copy with a handwritten note proclaiming: “Here’s my book. I hope you like it. Remember Barbara Walters, I love you for real.” When I read the note I smiled, but when I read her book I wanted to cry. Rosie once more called me a liar who betrayed her when it came to the Donald Trump feud. (Will she ever get over him?) Other harsh and insulting accusations, some logical, some off the wall, filled page after page. Mixed up in the criticisms were protestations of love. It was such a seesaw of emotions that I didn’t know how to answer her.

I am not a Pollyanna, but I truly believe that Rosie did not intend to hurt me. She herself must have come to regret what she’d written, because she canceled most of her television interviews promoting the book. She also sent me a series of long, tender e-mails. I was touched by them and did finally respond. I can’t be mad at Rosie for long.

Rosie is, at heart, a remarkable and loving woman. She has admirable personal values, and if she sometimes overreacts, it is out of her misplaced rage, hurt, and passionate convictions.

However, I admit that along with the sadness I felt when Rosie left
The View
, I also acknowledge some relief. The roller-coaster ride was over. We would take a deep breath and start a new chapter of
The View.

But now came the question of where we would possibly find another high-profile, smart, funny, and savvy TV person. Brainstorm. Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi had appeared on
The View
something like twenty times over the years. Whenever we needed a special guest, we called on Whoopi. Now she was living in New York and doing an early-morning radio show. Could she, would she, also do
The View
?

She could. She would.

Our eleventh season began on September 4, 2007, the day after Labor Day. The audience went wild when Whoopi walked onstage. She sat down next to Joy and became a joy all to herself. Whoopi has such wisdom along with her humor. She is mellow and at the same time contributes to the edginess the program needs. We had made the perfect choice.

The following week, we announced that we were adding another permanent member to the cast. There would be no more different cohosts each day. Sherri Shepherd, a stand-up comedian, was becoming a favorite on our program. Like Whoopi, she had appeared on
The View
many times. She is divorced with a little boy, good-natured, down-to-earth, and naturally funny. With the two new additions to our panel, once more our ratings have soared. Joy, who has been on
The View
since day one, continues to add her own special brand of intelligence and humor. And Elisabeth is not only a lovely person off camera and on, but she more than holds her own, even when the whole panel might disagree with her. Believe me, it ain’t easy. But it works. Indeed, almost a dozen years since
The View
made its debut, the program is more successful than ever.

Bill and I wanted
The View
to return to its roots as the program you could sit back and watch while sipping your second cup of coffee, and hear different opinions, on different subjects, from different women. Most of all we wanted everyone to just have a really good time. We are.

Exit

T
HE
V
IEW
WAS A
big part of my life, but not the biggest. What I was really known for was my work on
20/20
, ABC’s newsmagazine. But I was about to change all that.

On Monday, January 26, 2004, after twenty-five years on
20/20
, I made the announcement that I was leaving the program. My contract still had two and a half years to go, and it was assumed that when it ended I would renew it for another five years. I left totally voluntarily. I had told no one of my decision except David Westin, president of ABC News, and Bill Carter, the leading television reporter of the
New York Times.
As planned, Bill Carter broke the story in his paper. This is how he put it:

After conducting some of the most memorable television interviews of the last quarter-century for the ABC newsmagazine
20/20
, Barbara Walters has decided to leave as co-anchor of the program.

Ms. Walters has informed the president of ABC News, David Westin, that she will step down from
20/20
in September, and plans to scale back her workload to five or six news specials each year, including her highly rated Oscar night interviews, in addition to her regular appearances on
The View
, the ABC show she created. ABC News is expected to announce her departure from
20/20
today.

It was a big story in the television industry. Almost no one expected it. How to explain? Well, shortly after, for the same paper, the reporter Virginia Heffernan wrote what she called my “Exit Interview.” Here is part of that article:

H
EFFERNAN:
You’ve been at
20/20
for twenty-five years. Why are you leaving now?

W
ALTERS:
I wanted to leave at the top. I had a sensational year including the second interview with Martha Stewart. Newsmagazines in general are somewhat in jeopardy. I didn’t want anyone to say, “She was forced out. She had to leave.”

H
EFFERNAN:
But have you gotten tired of television news?

W
ALTERS:
It’s changing. For example: we’re going to hear that a woman had a love affair with a frog. The producers are going to come to me and say, “Barbara, this woman had a love affair with a frog. Diane Sawyer already has the woman lined up. Do you want to do the frog?” And I will say, “O.K., but only if I can get the frog and his mother.” And they’ll say: “But the frog wants an hour. And before you do the frog, the frog is going to do Oprah, O.K.?”

That about summed it up.

But it wasn’t only about the competition from Diane or Oprah or any one person. It was more about the changing nature of the newsmagazines. The hard-news stories we used to report on were few and far between except on CBS’s stalwart
60 Minutes.
But that newsmagazine catered to an older audience.
20/20
was after the young—the eighteen-to forty-nine-year-olds. That was the age group advertisers sought out, so increasingly we were after more celebrities, especially those with problems: more murderers and more frogs.

And it seemed that every celebrity, every murderer, every frog had a lawyer or a press agent all interviewing the interviewer to determine where they could get the most airings for their clients, what kind of questions would be asked, and how much promotion and advertising would be guaranteed. The interviewer had to
audition
to land the interview. The press agents for the celebrities were the worst, with endless demands and restrictions. (“You can’t ask this.” “You can’t talk about that.”) It wasn’t much fun anymore for me, and it certainly wasn’t prestigious.

I was plenty busy. Between 2002 and 2004 I interviewed around a hundred people for
20/20
, from Mariah Carey to Al Gore, and, after a twenty-five-year wait, a new interview with Fidel Castro. But interviews with heads of state, even someone as hard to land as Castro, were becoming less appealing to newsmagazines. Celebrities with problems were becoming less appealing to me.

It wasn’t just that. Everybody in my business works hard. Well, almost everybody. But at that point I was swamped. I was not only fully involved with
20/20
and
The View
, which by then, seven years since its debut, was running full steam, I was also doing a minimum of three one-hour prime-time
Specials
a year.

On an average day I would get into my
20/20
office at 12:30, having just finished appearing on
The View
in a different building. I would go to the ABC cafeteria to pick up a salad and eat at my desk. When I came back to my office, there was a lineup of producers waiting to discuss whatever story they were doing with me. There was also my superconscientious booker, Katie Thomson, standing with a list of future guests. Then there was David Sloan, the executive producer of
20/20
, with another list. If I was doing a
Special
Bill Geddie would be on the phone, anxious to discuss which interviews we should try to get that would not conflict with
20/20.

All this I could handle, and would have continued to, were it not for the big “get” and the pressure to be the first to secure an interview with whoever was making news, whoever was involved in a scandal, whoever was appearing in the newest film, whoever was accused of murdering his or her parents or wife or lover. In my last two years on
20/20
getting the “gets” had gotten out of control. I was not only competing with the newsmagazines on the other networks—
Dateline, 48 Hours, 60 Minutes
, and its spinoff,
60 Minutes II
—but with the new crop of nightly entertainment interview programs like
Entertainment Tonight
and
Access Hollywood
and the like. And finally, I was competing right inside my own network.

A little history.

ABC was the only network to have two competing women on two nighttime newsmagazines, Diane Sawyer and me. Roone Arledge had orchestrated that. If there was a big star on another network, Roone could not rest until he secured that star for ABC. It was the reason ABC had such a strong news lineup. For example, Roone had offered Dan Rather an anchor job at ABC while Walter Cronkite was still doing the evening news at CBS. It was CBS’s determination to keep Dan that made that network take Walter off the program in 1981, before, he later said, he truly wanted to leave. Walter had many good years left as an effective anchor, but CBS more or less said “bye-bye,” and Dan took over the news program. So Roone not only made waves at ABC, he also created choppy waters at other networks.

In 1989 Roone had lured Diane away from CBS, where she had been appearing very successfully on
60 Minutes.
He convinced her that, whereas on
60 Minutes
she was one of an ensemble, at ABC she would have her own magazine program and could choose to do any stories she wanted. Roone then created a new magazine program on Thursday nights at 10:00 p.m., called
Prime Time Live.
Diane’s partner was the brash former White House correspondent Sam Donaldson. They were described as a sort of beauty-and-the-beast pairing—the cool, lovely Diane and the boisterous and irreverent Sam. But it was a pairing that didn’t click. Still, ABC now had an hour newsmagazine at 10:00 p.m. on Thursday nights and another,
20/20
, on Friday nights, also at 10:00 p.m. Eventually, Charlie Gibson replaced Sam as Diane’s partner. By this time,
Prime Time
was successful and after a certain point we at
20/20
felt we were competing as much with
Prime Time
as we were with newsmagazines on other networks.

Then, in 1999, Diane, a terrific reporter and so hardworking, took on another formidable assignment as the coanchor with Charlie Gibson of ABC’s morning program,
Good Morning America.
That program was locked in a ferocious battle with its NBC counterpart, my old stomping ground the
Today
show. The morning shows were huge moneymakers, much more than the newsmagazines, because they had much more commercial time to sell, being on five days a week. It was therefore all the more important that Diane snag the big “get.” We at
20/20
were suddenly competing not just with
Prime Time
but with
GMA
as well and we hated the whole idea.