Audition (14 page)

I was seeing another man at the same time, Henry Epstein, who was almost the opposite of Bob. I had met Henry in France, and I enjoyed his company enormously. He was very intelligent and intense, unlike Bob, who was quite phlegmatic and didn’t seem to have any passion in any direction. But Henry was short and squat, and not half as physically attractive as Bob. To me, then in my early twenties, short and squat was a turnoff. Though Henry was much more interesting than Bob and a shrewd businessman—he’d made a small fortune in New York real estate and lived in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue—I thought I was supposed to marry a man my friends and I agreed was attractive and sexy. Most of my pals thought Bob was. So I turned Henry down when he proposed and said yes to Katz Hats.

The truth is, no matter whom I married in those days, it wouldn’t have worked out. As I’m sure you can tell by my decision-making process, I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted, or where I was going, if anywhere. Young women like me graduated from college, got their first jobs, then left to get married. I’d already had
three
jobs, unlike my friends who’d all followed the unspoken timetable and been married for several years. And so my rather dreary engagement to Bob Katz began.

We spent time with his family. We spent time with my family. My father certainly didn’t have much to say to Bob or his father, Ira Katz, manufacturer of children’s hats, but then again, neither did I. The boredom grew so heavy that after a couple of months I broke the engagement.

Then two things happened. Instead of pleading with me not to leave, Bob agreed easily with my decision to call off the wedding. That bothered me tremendously. I could understand perfectly why I didn’t want to marry him, but how could he not want to marry me? I felt rejected and somehow a bit frightened. What was wrong with me?

Then there was the bookkeeper at the Katz family business. She hated me. Plain and simple. Bob’s mother was dead, and the bookkeeper had assumed her maternal role. She zealously looked after Bob’s father, as well as Bob and his brother, and called them “the boys.” I was evidently “the girl” who was going to upset her family, and she made it very clear, in her coldness and sometimes downright nastiness toward me, that I was not welcome.

I couldn’t handle the rejection, so I overruled my misgivings. I told Bob that I was fully content with him and that I was looking forward to living in his one-bedroom apartment on Horatio Street in Greenwich Village, a far cry from our penthouse on Central Park West. He must have believed me because I won him back. And I must have believed myself because I tried to woo the bookkeeper as well. For some reason I thought I had to prove myself to her, to convince her that I was a good person and not some shallow, hedonistic flibbertigibbet. She was constantly warning Bob that I was a spendthrift, so I went to the other extreme. I called her one day to tell her I had bought my entire trousseau wholesale at the designer Anne Klein, and my wedding dress on sale at Bergdorf Goodman. I even sent her the receipts to prove my thriftiness. So peace was declared, a formal wedding was planned, as was a return trip to Europe for me, where Bob would also buy supplies for Katz Hats.

Looking back it all seems insane, but I know I did it. Maybe it was the fifties you-must-get-married mentality. Maybe it was my strong desire to stabilize my life. In any event I was determined to marry Bob Katz—until two days before the wedding. Then reality set in. I was marrying a man to whom I had nothing to say. I felt trapped and scared. My mother understood and sent me to talk to my father at the Latin Quarter. He was sympathetic, too, but, as so often, removed. He pointed out that the invitations had long since been sent out. The rooms had been booked at the Plaza Hotel for the ceremony and reception. The caterers were lined up, as was the orchestra. There were even matchboxes with our names and the date printed on them in gold script. “My darling, this happens to every bride,” he said. “You’ll feel better when it’s over.”

And so, in June 1955, my father walked me down the aisle. My sister, Jackie, was my maid of honor. There were several hundred guests, some of whom, I’m sure, shed a few tears. But I was the one who really wanted to cry. My heart had never felt so heavy, but then again, my heart would feel just as heavy every time I married (I’ve been married three times), which is why, as I write this, please know that I will
never
get married again!

Years later, when I gained some celebrity on the
Today
show, stories about me would refer to my marriage to Bob Katz as “Barbara Walters’s Secret Marriage!” Well, it was hardly a secret, but it was quite miserable. Or at least I was.

I won’t belabor you with all the details, but I remember that when we weren’t sightseeing on our honeymoon, we had little to talk about. I knew in my heart and in my mind that I was not at all in love with Bob. And even though he was physically attractive, I felt little sexual desire for him. During many of the days, Bob was busy buying straw and ribbons for the next season’s crop of children’s hats. In those times I did whatever sightseeing Bob wasn’t interested in by myself. I was not unhappy then.

I was also not unhappy when our honeymoon was over and we returned to New York to what was now “our” apartment on Horatio Street. It was time to play wife. I spent my days cleaning the small apartment, walking around the neighborhood, which was new to me, watching television, and burning the spaghetti sauce. I didn’t look for a job, nor did I socialize much with my friends.

My mother came down to the apartment soon after I moved in to help me fix it up, but the dark, tweedy gray bedspread I picked out on Fourteenth Street only made the apartment gloomier. She had tried to convince me to buy a hot pink bedspread, but I was trying to be practical and reasoned that the dark gray bedspread would last much longer and wouldn’t show the dirt. That dull bedspread seemed like a perfect symbol of the marriage.

Bob was a decent man, but it became clearer every day that we had nothing in common. I wanted to shake my despondency, and I tried. I shopped, more or less cooked dinner, asked him about his day at work, spent time with his family, and watched television with him at night. Bob left the apartment very early and didn’t like to go out once he returned home. We both knew the marriage was in trouble and decided things might be improved if we moved uptown nearer my parents and friends. We applied a temporary Band-Aid by renting a small but cheerier apartment at Eighty-first Street and Madison Avenue. I decorated it and had a small dinner party or two, but I was still depressed. It would be years before the book and then the film
Diary of a Mad Housewife
elicited such recognition from housewives like me, but in the fifties, women thought their unhappiness was
their
fault, and their fault alone. So I did what so many other women did: I went to a psychiatrist.

He was a young man with a placid face and, in true Freudian fashion, rarely asked me a question and rarely made a comment while I prattled on about my failures as a wife. What I needed then was some advice on how to either live in this marriage or how to get out of it. He was no help at all.

One possible solution, Bob and I agreed, was for me to go back to work. I was pleased to have his support. At that time very few reasonably well-off married women worked outside the home. It was seen by some as a failure on the husband’s part to make enough money. But Bob liked the idea that I’d be able to buy my own clothes and be more financially self-sufficient. And so it was, in 1955, that I got another job in television, this time at CBS as a writer on the year-old
The Morning Show.

Early-morning television had become a phenomenon with the debut of the
Today
show on NBC three years before, and CBS was trying to play catch-up. At the outset few had thought anyone would want to watch television between 7:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., but the creator of the
Today
show, NBC vice president Sylvester “Pat” Weaver (Sigourney’s father), had proved them wrong. In spades. Within eighteen months of its debut, “Weaver’s folly,” as skeptics had called it, became one of the most profitable programs on the air, and, of course, remains so to this day. There we were at CBS, trying to challenge the highly popular host of
Today
, Dave Garroway, and his even more popular sidekick, a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs. You know the old show biz adage about never following an animal act? Well, we weren’t following J. Fred Muggs, we were trying to beat him. It was a near-impossible task. That chimp got more fan mail than Dave Garroway and even made a highly publicized world tour.

This is not to say
The Morning Show
did not have its share of talent, even if they were
Homo sapiens.
A young Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood were the first cohosts, with future Olympics broadcaster and
Wide World of Sports
legend Jim McKay doing the sports reports. By the time I arrived Collingwood had been replaced by the actor Dick Van Dyke, who would go on to win three Emmys for his own long-running TV series with Mary Tyler Moore. The program then, as with the morning shows now, was a mix of news and entertainment; the boundary lines were already somewhat blurred. But in 1955 Dick was up against it at CBS. We all were.

My job was to write and produce segments, mostly fashion shows using live models, which would help attract women viewers. There was no thought of my appearing on television. The only on-camera job for a woman then was as a weather girl.

Speaking of weather, we used our reports primarily to boost viewership of
The Morning Show.
One gimmick followed another. First we tried cartoons. Then, for a short time, the national weather report featured a young woman supposedly underwater in a glass tank drawing circles on a map with a grease pencil to show the area being forecast. Then we tried an archery champion shooting arrows into a straw map. But no matter what we did, nobody watched the show. Looking back on those segments, perhaps it was understandable.

A new production team was brought in, with extraordinary talent: Fred Freed, who would later move to NBC and hire me for the
Today
show; his associate producer, Robert “Shad” Northshield, who would also move to the
Today
show; and the show’s talented director, Av Westin, who would stay at CBS for twenty years before moving to ABC to become executive producer of—guess what?—
20/20!
I had no way of knowing then that I had joined a fraternity of colleagues and friends with whom I would work for the next thirty years. All I knew was that the show was fighting for its life.

Replacing Dick Van Dyke with Will Rogers Jr. and renaming the show
Good Morning!
did not help. While Junior had the easy smile and familiar twangy voice of his famed cowboy-humorist-columnist-entertainer father, he didn’t have his father’s common touch. Or any touch at all. Behind his back we added a clause to Will Rogers Sr.’s famous quote that he’d never met a man he didn’t like—that is, until he met his son. Will Jr. didn’t have his father’s humor, either, despite the efforts of his young writer, a fellow named Andy Rooney. Even Andy couldn’t instill much spontaneity into Will, but every bit of wit or wisdom he uttered came out of Andy’s typewriter.

For all the show’s floundering, there were memorable moments, at least two of which involved me. I made my on-camera debut on
Good Morning
!—in a bathing suit. When one of the models for a bathing suit segment called at 5:30 in the morning to say she wasn’t coming, Av Westin drafted me to take her place. “Go out there,” he told me. “Put on the suit and talk about what you’re wearing.” So I did, praying I’d remember to hold in my stomach. To this day I have the photograph of my first and last television appearance on
Good Morning!
and I don’t look half bad, though nobody ever called me from
Sports Illustrated
for their bathing suit issue.

The second memorable moment came from a tragedy: the collision on July 25, 1956, of the Italian luxury liner
Andrea Doria
and the Swedish ship
Stockholm
in a dense fog bank off the Nantucket Light. Fifty-one people were killed, but many others survived, thanks to the ships that answered the distress calls, including the
Ile de France.
A thousand passengers from the sinking
Andrea Doria
were brought to New York during the rescue, and Av Westin ordered me to go down to the pier, in the middle of the night, to see if I could persuade some of the survivors to be on the show. This was my first hard-news story, and an invaluable experience in dealing with chaos. Many of the passengers were in shock, others hysterical. “What a horrible experience you’ve been through,” I said to one after another. “You must be feeling terrible. But could you come into our studio tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. to tell us about it?” A surprising number—at least to me—said yes, and I preinterviewed them so I could help plan the broadcast. The next morning we went on the air with what proved to be an exclusive report on the collision. As horrible as the accident was, I had a sense of genuine satisfaction that we beat the
Today
show to the story.

It is always a difficult call when you are interviewing people caught in a tragedy. We all cringe when we see reporters shoving a microphone under a victim’s nose and asking, “Did you lose anyone? How do you feel?” But sometimes, as with the case of the
Andrea Doria
, the questions must be asked so that the viewer can appreciate the extent of the misery. There are times when you want to put your arms around a distraught person but you must restrain yourself. It isn’t considered professional. Tact, sensitivity, and common sense are all important. Maybe the right word is “judgment.”

But there are the times when your own emotion does take over. Not long ago I was doing a story on transgender children. I was talking on camera with a ten-year-old girl, born biologically a boy. As she was describing her deep sadness, she burst into tears. Instinctively I took her in my arms to comfort her. When the program was actually aired, my producers felt that I was not behaving as a reporter and might be criticized. We cut that section out.