Audition (24 page)

The NBC bosses knew why not. In essence their unanimous response was: She isn’t known. She isn’t beautiful. Sponsors won’t take to her. But there was another response, too, and this one resonated as deeply as all the drawbacks they saw in putting me on the air: She’ll work cheap.

Hugh persisted, and this time Al, who rarely agreed with anything Hugh said or wanted, joined forces with him. The trick, they decided, would be to give me some on-air support. I would be on the program three days a week. The other two days there would be two different women, both well known to our viewers. Sometimes, when appropriate, I would also appear with one of them.

I was very fond of both these women. One was Judith Crist, the witty and acerbic movie critic for the now-long-folded newspaper the
New York Herald Tribune.
She was already appearing on the program giving her film boosts and pans. The other woman was a brilliant and delightful art historian named Aline Saarinen. Aline had, for quite a while, made art exhibits and other cultural matters not only understandable to our viewers but entertaining. She was the only person I have ever seen on television who was able to do this effectively. The widow of the renowned Finnish-born architect Eero Saarinen, she had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar and gone on to become managing editor of
Art News
as well as an award-winning art editor and critic at the
New York Times.
Aline had caught Al Morgan’s eye in 1962 when she appeared on a CBS special about Lincoln Center, then under construction. She was an intellectual without being pretentious, so NBC executives agreed with Al’s decision to hire her as a contributor. However, they didn’t think she could carry a show alone.

In those earlier days of the program, both Hugh and the
Today
Girl of the moment did the commercials. It went with the job. But the sponsors didn’t want Judith or Aline to do them. Judith was too caustic, they thought, and Aline so erudite and elegant that she might turn off the audience. On the other hand, I was neither caustic nor erudite, and in those days certainly not elegant. So the commercials fell mostly to me. One of the program’s biggest sponsors was the canned dog food Alpo. These commercials were done live and featured real dogs panting away and licking their chops waiting for the bowl of Alpo to be placed between their paws. While the dog gulped down the yummy glob, the person doing the commercial would extol the virtues of this dog food above all others. My first week on the air, I was assigned the commercial. The famished dog, on a leash but with a mind of his own, practically dragged me across the studio floor along with his bowl. The dog howled with pleasure. I howled with laughter. The sponsors howled with satisfaction.

There would be conjecture that Al’s upgrading to brains over beauty was fueled by the growing women’s liberation movement and the consciousness of women’s inequality in the marketplace. But I doubt it. Though Betty Friedan’s classic call to arms,
The Feminine Mystique
, had been published to great acclaim in 1963, and Congress had just passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, prohibiting job discrimination on the basis of race and gender, I think Al’s motive was more self-serving: If one of us was sick or didn’t show up or bombed, he’d have two other women waiting in the wings. The three of us were his insurance against disaster, much like the story of the advertising producer who hired triplets for a Johnson & Johnson diaper cream commercial to ensure that at least one of the babies wouldn’t have diaper rash on the day of filming.

Here’s how the setup worked. Judith Crist was
Today
’s movie and theater critic. Aline was
Today
’s art critic. I was just me. No one knew exactly what my role really was, including me. “I’m a Lord-Knows-What,” I would tell
TV Guide
three months later. In the meantime I was, thank heaven, no longer to be called the
Today
Girl. That airhead title and role was finally retired. If asked, I was to be referred to as a
Today
reporter.

I started in my new role in October 1964 with no big fanfare, no publicity, and no official announcement. Because there was no hoopla, there were no expectations from viewers. I was on the air regularly before anybody realized I was there, three mornings a week and then, slowly, five times a week. Soon I was on even when Judith or Aline had their scheduled appearances. I conducted a lot of the celebrity interviews, introduced and narrated the fashion shows and other so-called women’s features, and, where I had the most fun, sat at the desk and ad-libbed with Hugh, Jack Lescoulie,
Today
’s sportscaster, and the program’s newsreader, Frank Blair. I began to feel that I was doing well, and even though my future was far from assured, I was exhilarated.

I quickly discovered an odd disparity in my on-air and off-air persona. On camera, from my very first appearance, I felt calm, composed, and confident. Almost nothing threw me. I was an eager extrovert. Off camera, I was an introvert. If Lee and I were invited to a party, and he was out of town, I wouldn’t go alone. I was that self-conscious and still am, though less now. I won’t dance alone either. To this day I sit out the fast dances where dance partners do their own thing. Flailing around on my own makes me feel like a broken umbrella. I wait to dance until the music is slower and my partner can hold me securely in his arms. But I am not alone in this split personality. Many performers, and, to a degree, on-camera journalists are performers, are open and easy on television or onstage but very shy in private life. Robert De Niro comes to mind. A great and expressive actor on film, he’s almost tongue-tied in person. On the other hand there are people who in private life are exuberant and even exhibitionists, but who suffer from such excruciating stage fright that they can’t even rise to give a toast.

At one point Al sent me to a voice specialist to try and overcome my problems with pronouncing
r.
Lazy
r
’s are often a product of being born in Boston, with its particular accent. So I tried to fix it. These days I’ve all but conquered the problem. But then the new speech pattern the specialist prescribed sounded phony and stilted. When several viewers wrote in asking why I was sounding so funny, I abandoned the specialist and went back to my natural way of speaking. Although I did try, no kidding, to avoid sentences with too many
r
’s.

Hugh was wonderful to work with. He was always very generous in the assigning of interviews and didn’t just grab the good ones for himself. He was confident and didn’t have a jealous bone in his body. Over the many years we would work together, we never had a cross word. My relationship with Hugh, in fact, was one of the most satisfying of my life. Not only was I his protégée in a way, but we became great friends. He had a wonderful wife, Ruth, and at that time two small children, a girl, Deirdre, and a boy, nicknamed HR. When the
Today
show traveled abroad, Ruth usually accompanied Hugh and included me in their dinners, so I never felt alone.

Hugh and I had different personalities and different styles, yet we complemented each other. He was more contemplative and thought of himself as something of a philosopher. His questions during interviews were gentler than mine, but he never restricted me from asking what I wanted. In short he was, and is, one of the truest gentlemen I have ever known.

One of my first interviews on
Today
was with Lee Radziwill, Jackie Kennedy’s glamorous sister, who attended Sarah Lawrence College at the same time I did back when she was Lee Bouvier. We lived in different dormitories, and she didn’t stay long at Sarah Lawrence, but still, I thought she might remember me, if not from college, then perhaps as one of the few female reporters tagging along on the India trip with her and her sister. But she didn’t remember me at all. By now she was married to an exiled Polish prince named Stanislas Radziwill. When I asked Lee what I should call her in the interview, she replied, with a bored look, “Just call me Princess.” Okay, Princess.

These early interviews highlighted another difference between my professional self and my private self, a difference I’ve never understood. It emerged in the editing process, a critical phase of almost every story in which I’ve always been very involved. To my surprise I discovered I was, and am, as decisive as anyone can be. I knew precisely what should be left in and what should be taken out. Just like that. (I have always been a terrific editor, if I do say so myself—and I do say so myself.) But in private life I can barely make a decision. I second-guess everything from if I should wear the red or blue dress to where to go on vacation: Europe? South America? the Bahamas? Maybe I should just stay home. My daughter says my flip-flopping is because I am a Libra, the astrological sign whose good traits include being “diplomatic and urbane,” and my favorite, “romantic and charming,” but whose not-so-good traits start with being “indecisive and changeable.” On my gravestone I want inscribed: “On the other hand, maybe I should have lived.”

For quite a long time Lee (my husband, not the princess) got up early every morning to watch me on
Today
. This was no small gesture on his part; he was a “night person,” as are most theatrical producers, and he usually stayed up till the wee hours going to Broadway plays and then on to Sardi’s or Lindy’s with all the other theater people. He also often had to go to one or the other of his theaters. Getting up at seven was torture for Lee. After a few months he started to check to see what time my particular spot was on and then set the alarm so he could catch just me. But even that wore thin, and after a while Lee stayed gratefully asleep while I greeted the rest of the country as it awoke. I totally understood Lee’s sleeping, although it gave us less and less to talk about when I came home for dinner.

Our polar opposite schedules were not as difficult for me as they were for Lee. True, the hours were ghastly, but over time, they became a habit. I used two alarm clocks to make sure I woke up at 4:30. I wanted to be in the studio by 5:30. In order not to disturb Lee, I used to get up in the pitch black, tiptoe into my big closet, turn on my light, close the door, and dress there.

In the early days I washed my own hair every other day at home. On those mornings I got up even earlier, at 4:00. Once I was in the studio, my hair would be set in big rollers and dried under a large hair dryer. Then, and during all my ensuing years on
Today
, I would be made up by a wise and kind woman named Bobbie Armstrong. Years later, when I left NBC to go to ABC, Bobbie continued to work with me and was the greatest makeup artist, as well as the greatest comfort, I could have.

Back on the
Today
show, the hour or so before I went on the air was some of the happiest time I would spend. If Judith, Aline, and I happened to be on together, we gossiped away, shouting over the noise of the hair dryers. We all, including Hugh, got made up in the same large room, and it was there that we read scripts, made changes, and wrote notes for ourselves. Although the writers wrote the introductions to the interviews and suggested questions, I usually changed the introductions to suit what I thought sounded most like me, and I often rewrote my questions. The writers didn’t mind. After all, I had been one of the writers myself. The atmosphere in the makeup room was warm and happy. We all genuinely liked one another.

Sadly, little by little, things were getting to be less congenial at home. There were those times when Lee, quite naturally, wanted me to go to the theater with him. Otherwise how could I share things in his life? I tried, though sometimes I would leave the theater after intermission. He understood, of course, and was very gracious about it, but he certainly would have preferred to have his wife by his side. To Lee’s credit he never asked me to give up my job. And we never competed with each other. I was in television, but was certainly not famous then, and we took pleasure in each other’s successes, even if we rarely shared the actual experience. We also, of course, were still trying to have a baby, and that didn’t make our lives easier.

On the air things were only getting better for me. The viewers seemed to like me, the sponsors liked me, the Alpo dogs really liked me, and more and more I was on along with Judith and Aline, not just on my specifically assigned three days. After a few months it was decided that things were getting confusing and that it would be best if I became the only woman at the desk with Hugh while Judith and Aline went back to their specialty roles. Judith became NBC’s freelance theater and movie critic. Aline, in addition to occasional appearances on
Today
, became NBC’s general correspondent on the arts and, later, the host of NBC’s local daytime program
For Women Only
.

At the beginning of my new job as a five-day-a-week full-timer on
Today
, I made the unbelievable-to-me salary of $750 a week. It was union scale, but I was thrilled. Maureen O’Sullivan might have been paid a far heftier salary, but it was more money than I had ever made.

NBC gave me a thirteen-week contract.

I stayed for thirteen years.

Becoming Barbara Walters

I
WAS EXHAUSTED
most of the time I was on the
Today
show. I learned how to go to sleep anywhere, anytime I had a few minutes. That sometimes included three-minute naps on the set during a commercial or while someone else was doing an interview. I was often so tired that if someone touched me, it felt almost like pain. To this day I can nap anytime, almost anyplace, and if for some ungodly reason I receive a phone call at 5:00 a.m., I am instantly wide awake and make perfect sense.

There were some things about waking before dawn that I liked. I really enjoyed drinking my morning coffee at the kitchen table when everything was still and quiet. It was the calmest time of my whole day. I liked the short drive from my apartment to the NBC studio. There was no traffic at 5:00 a.m. The light was just breaking. It was, in its way, so peaceful. Within ten minutes, though, I would be in my dressing room, everyone hovering over me. The peace was over.