Audition (23 page)

I
T PROBABLY WON’T SURPRISE YOU
by this point, but the marriage did not get off to a great start, at least my half of it. We hadn’t had the time to plan a honeymoon, so one of Lee’s friends lent us his small house in East Hampton for a week. But it was winter. And freezing. Much too cold to walk on the beach, or anywhere, for that matter. East Hampton today is a very popular summer resort on Long Island, and many people go there all year round on weekends. But back in the sixties it was mostly home to self-sufficient writers and artists, and just about every restaurant was closed for the off-season. The one movie theater in town ran the same feature every night. Television had barely come to East Hampton. There was just one fuzzy channel out of Connecticut.

Lee was very sweet and cooked delicious meals—he was a gourmet cook—but all my old demons surfaced. He was a kind man and I loved him, but I wasn’t passionately in love with him. Again, and this won’t be a shock either, I felt trapped and restless. Perhaps I just wasn’t cut out for marriage. I remember when Lee produced our marriage license and told me he had to mail it to state officials for everything to be legal, I had an immediate urge to grab it, tear it up, and tell him to forget the whole thing.

If I was bad at marriage, I was even worse at skiing. It was almost Christmas and Lee had promised Carol and Zev that he would take them to Stowe, Vermont, for vacation. Therefore, our more-or-less official honeymoon took place two weeks later in that well-known ski resort. As I’ve said, I liked his children, and it was a chance for the four of us to bond as a new family. Once at Stowe, Lee and his kids whizzed down the taller mountain while I took lessons on the beginners’ hill.

I was miserable. My ski boots hurt my ankles. I was chilled to the bone in spite of my new and fashionable parka and ski pants. I couldn’t figure out how to handle my poles, let alone the skis themselves. I saw little kids taking off and moving up to the next class while I was still plodding along, trying to navigate up and down a baby slope. When my first hour lesson was finally over, I limped off to the lodge, took off the damned boots, and sat by the fire in tears. I tried again the next day but then, while standing stock-still, I lost my balance and fell over. What a klutz! It did not help that there was a sign on the ski school blackboard reading
WELCOME TODAY SHOW’S BARBARA WALTERS.
It somehow made me feel even more inadequate. Sure I could talk, but I obviously couldn’t do anything else. I went back to the lodge—for good. By the way, since my decision to give up skiing, I’ve always had a wonderful time at ski resorts. Après ski is my favorite sport.

My attitude improved when Lee and I returned to New York. I gave up my rent-controlled apartment and moved into Lee’s small but charming apartment in the West Fifties near the Museum of Modern Art. I have a touching memory of him carrying me into the bedroom on our first night together. We didn’t stay there too long because we were able to find another rent-controlled apartment, this time with six big rooms, across from Carnegie Hall. The comfortable old building, dating from before World War II, was owned by the same friend of my parents who owned the apartment I lived in before Lee and I married. The walls weren’t in great shape when we first moved in so I had them painted a pale shade of gray and bought gray velvet drapes. I thought it looked pretty attractive, especially the way the gray walls set off the red furniture I’d recently bought, some of which I still have in my apartment today. But my mother saw things differently. “The walls match your complexion,” she said, on a visit from Florida. But then she went out and bought me a lovely red crystal vase and had it filled with gorgeous red anemones, my favorite flowers. She set the vase atop the baby grand piano she and my dad had given us. (I still have the vase and the piano.) “Now,” she said, “everything looks wonderful.” Ah, well.

By this time, Lee and I had more or less settled into our marriage. We were both busy, had lots of friends and little to be unhappy about. At the office, however, another major shift was going on. Pat Fontaine had been let go and left the program in February 1964. Once again the
Today
Girl slot was open. Al Morgan got all excited about a well-known movie actress named Maureen O’Sullivan. He had been captivated by her performance when she appeared on Broadway in a comedy called
Never Too Late.
We had interviewed her on the show, during which she was articulate and witty. That cemented it for Al. Without further ado he decided that Maureen would be the next
Today
Girl. He had great difficulty persuading the actress to take the job, but he finally prevailed by persuading her that it would be steady and secure, unlike the stage. Maureen, who had something like seven children (including a daughter who would grow up to be Mia Farrow), took his advice and signed on.

There were immediate repercussions. Hugh had made it very clear to Al that, after the Pat Fontaine fiasco, he wanted to have a voice in the selection of the next
Today
Girl. Hugh had to share two hours a day with her on the air, after all, and he had cause to be concerned. He had not been consulted when Pat was hired and, on more than one occasion during her erratic, boozy tenure, it had fallen to him to carry the show. But Al didn’t consult Hugh about Maureen. He just went ahead and, while Hugh was on vacation, hired her. So you can imagine how Hugh felt when he came back to work to discover someone he had never met was now about to share the morning desk with him. That made for some uneasiness between Hugh and Maureen and didn’t do much for the relationship between Hugh and Al. They had been at odds for some time, but now it boiled over—on both sides.

Hugh was furious at Al for hiring Maureen behind his back. Al was furious at Hugh for challenging his authority and began to develop a real dislike of him. Hugh was perfect in the morning slot, easily projecting the viewer-friendly image of a good-natured neighbor, but Al felt that Hugh was pompous and pretentious. The bad blood between them grew to such an extent that in 1968, NBC was forced to make a choice: keep Al as the producer or keep Hugh as the host. (Hugh refused to sign his renegotiated contract if Al remained on the show.) There was no contest. Hugh Downs was popular and beloved by millions. Al was a force behind the scenes. Guess who stayed and who left?

But that was in the future. The clear and present problem in 1964 was Maureen. Al had fallen into the trap that a great many producers still do. He saw someone who was charming and funny while being interviewed, so assumed that the same qualities would carry over to the role of interviewer. But it rarely works. Asking questions is very different from answering them, and a good deal tougher. Especially so early in the morning.

The morning shows, I think, are the hardest to do. You have to be very versatile. One minute you’ll be interviewing the secretary of state; the next minute you’ll be cooking cheese fondue with a guest chef. Because most of these shows are live, you can’t afford to make many mistakes. You’ve also got to be able to get in and out of a commercial, in and out of a newsbreak, in and out of whatever unexpected situation presents itself. For the most part, you have to know what you’re doing. Maureen didn’t.

It wasn’t really her fault. She had absolutely no experience or training in television, and no one took the time to work with her. She was thrust into a situation that was anathema to an actress. Her talent was to take a script, study a character, memorize the lines, and deliver them in a winning way to a live theater audience. Now, suddenly, there was no audience to play to, just the light on a camera, and there were no lines. The role she was expected to play was not the character in a script but herself. Very, very tough for her. Things did not get better with time. Maureen continually missed cues. She couldn’t control her interviews. She’d see a stagehand waving time cues frantically to her and she’d ask, on camera: “Am I supposed to end here?” Maureen couldn’t get the hang of our man-in-the-street interviews, either. These had to be, by their nature, unplanned and unrehearsed. Too often she cut off the person answering a question before he or she even had time to finish a sentence. When in doubt, or out of fear, Maureen would simply throw the segment back to Hugh or sometimes even to a commercial. She began to appear more and more confused on the air. The ghastly hour she had to awake to do the program didn’t help.

What we didn’t know until years later, when she wrote about it, was that Maureen was on a steady diet of prescription drugs. Anyone with a drug dependency, however slight, just can’t work well under such pressure. You’ve got to be very disciplined and well grounded to do one of these shows. And you really have to have a sane life. All we knew then, however, was that she was a terrible mistake.

D
URING THE TURBULENT
M
AUREEN PERIOD,
I had a miscarriage. We were broadcasting the program from California, and I was working very hard, too hard, perhaps. I wasn’t feeling very well, which led me to hope I might be pregnant. I cannot tell you how much I wanted a baby and how exhilarated I felt when I came home and my gynecologist told me that indeed I was pregnant. I was over the moon. So was Lee.

Then I lost the baby.

I blamed myself for the miscarriage. If I hadn’t been working so hard, perhaps I could have continued that pregnancy. I was devastated. I was then in my early thirties, and though most women at the time had their children at a younger age, I was still capable of childbearing. But I could hear the biological clock ticking. So I tried everything to get pregnant again. For two agonizing years Lee and I went to one doctor after another, and I took test after test. The fertility treatments available today were not even thought of then. There was no in-vitro fertilization nor surrogate mother. The very idea would have been considered science fiction. Getting pregnant was reduced to a combination of hormones and timing.

I was told to check the exact days after my period to determine when I would be most fertile. At those times I was to take and record my temperature and make sure that Lee and I had intercourse during the hours the doctor thought best according to my temperature. If the time was right, no matter if Lee was getting home very late from one of his shows or I was getting up at the crack of dawn for my show, we dutifully made love. Then we hoped and prayed. Finally it worked. But only briefly.

I suffered another miscarriage. Then, six months later, still another. Anybody who has been through a similar experience knows what an emotional seesaw it can be. You’re ecstatic at the high point, then you all but fall apart when you drop to the low. Looking back now, a part of me wonders if it was some sort of sign. I feel guilty even saying it, but the truth is that I’m almost thankful I didn’t have a baby. I think of my sister. Was her condition hereditary? Was nature sparing a child of mine the fate that befell Jackie? I’ll never know. And I realize how harsh it might sound now. But back then my hunger for a child did not abate even a little, and Lee and I would finally adopt a baby. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

The concern in 1964 continued to be Maureen O’Sullivan. In August we all went to Atlantic City to cover the Democratic National Convention that would select Lyndon Johnson, JFK’s replacement, to be the presidential nominee, and Hubert Humphrey, the senator from Minnesota, to be his vice presidential running mate. It was only nine months since John Kennedy had been assassinated, and his death hung heavily over the convention.

Robert Kennedy, who would be assassinated himself four years later during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination, somehow summoned the composure to deliver the “unity” speech at the conclusion of the convention. There wasn’t a dry eye on the floor, including the eyes of the hardest-boiled politicians, when he remembered his brother in a quote from Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet:
“When he shall die, / Take him and cut him out in stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night, / And pay no worship to the garish sun.”

Maureen O’Sullivan cried, too, but for a different reason. She got fired. There were political interviews to be done with campaign experts, critics, and pundits, not to mention prominent congressmen and senators. Hugh couldn’t do all of them, and even though we writers gave Maureen plenty of research and carefully wrote her introductions, her questions, and even probable answers, she was lost and frantic. It was obvious that she just couldn’t cut it. With a fierce campaign ahead between LBJ and Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee, the on-air future for Maureen O’Sullivan looked pretty grim. Al Morgan finally bit the bullet and told her, in the middle of the convention, that he would have to let her go.

Maureen was furious and felt betrayed by Al, who had leaned on her so heavily to take the job in the first place. But I think she was also relieved. “I was nothing but a bookend on the show,” she later told reporters. The official word was that she had left the show by mutual consent, and Maureen went back to being a successful actress.

O
NCE MORE
the
Today
show was without a
Today
Girl. Al began his usual search for a star but he had a problem. He still had to pay off Maureen’s contract, which ran for another year and a half. She made a good deal of money, and he didn’t have enough left to coax a new performer into getting up each day at such an ungodly hour and taking on the task of learning the ropes of a difficult-to-do early-morning program. He had to hire someone who knew the ropes and would work for relatively little money. And he had to do it fast.

Well, like the ingenue in a corny movie, there I was: the patient and long overlooked understudy. Hugh was all for trying me out. By this time I was a known and trusted colleague. Plus I was no threat. And I could certainly perform adequately, if not spectacularly.

“Why not Barbara?” Hugh asked.