Audition (25 page)

Sometimes the whole show traveled.

Al Morgan loved to take
Today
on the road. The expense was huge, involving not only the whole entourage of writers, producers, makeup artists, and the on-air people but all kinds of technical support and equipment. But then, as now, foreign locales boosted the ratings. So, the show would travel almost every year to one country or another.

The most ambitious broadcast, in fact a historical first, took place on May 3, 1965, when
Today
broadcast live from Europe, via Early Bird satellite. This was the inaugural telecast over the satellite, the first time an event taking place in Europe was seen live in the United States. Al ran the show from Brussels, Belgium, and orchestrated the feeds from Hugh Downs in London’s Westminster Abbey, Jack Lescoulie in Amsterdam, Aline Saarinen at the Forum in Rome, Frank Blair on the Capitol steps in Washington, and me in Paris, with the singer and actor Yves Montand on his balcony overlooking the city. My job for this broadcast was to add some glamour by reporting on French cuisine, French couture, and French men. Not a bad assignment.

This first satellite broadcast was so significant that it was introduced by Pope Paul VI speaking from the Vatican. (Morgan said later he’d never forget saying, “Cue the pope.”) A tough act to follow, but it was almost topped by live shots of adorable little girls in their respective countries saying “Good morning,” “Bonjour,” “Buongiorno,” and “Goedemorgen—this is
Today
!” The next cut was to London and live coverage of the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace.

The satellite broadcast was widely celebrated as a breakthrough for the future of television. The print media started to take more notice of television—and of me.

There were at that time only two other significant women in television network news. One was Pauline Frederick, NBC’s veteran United Nations correspondent, who was a highly distinguished reporter of some twenty years’ standing. Pauline truly was a trailblazer, but she was rather stern and unglamorous and got very little media attention. The other was a stylish figure named Nancy Dickerson who had been at CBS before I started appearing regularly on
Today
and was hired away by NBC to be their Washington correspondent. She was a good friend of the Beltway establishment. Lyndon Johnson was particularly fond of her. Nancy sat in for me several summers during my annual vacation and evidently set her sights on my job. She organized a letter-writing campaign suggesting that she would be better at the job than I, which hardly endeared her to me. It also made me quite anxious. I was still very insecure, and Nancy, in truth, was far better known than I. But then she shot herself in the foot.

She was married to a very wealthy man and used to arrive at the NBC studios in a Rolls-Royce, which set some people’s teeth on edge. But it was her tendency, when she didn’t get the assignments she wanted, to go above the producers’ heads and complain directly to David Sarnoff, the chairman of RCA, NBC’s parent company. This practice slowly eroded the support she might have had among the people she worked with. Both the producers of the evening news and the
Today
show began using her less and less and finally closed her out altogether. Her career continued for many years, but she never regained the prominence she had had in her early years at NBC.

So that left me, a new face on the air, and the object of curiosity.

To the delight of the NBC publicity department, one article followed another. “That Barbara Walters is a girl no one can deny,” began a full-page profile of me in the
New York Herald Tribune
on August 22, 1965. The women’s movement had not yet rammed home the substitution of “woman” for “girl,” but no matter, I was happy with the media attention, especially the article’s title—“They Love Her in the Morning.” But not just for my ego. For my status with the brass at NBC.

I’m not sure the top guns at NBC had much confidence in me during my early months on the program until they read the mounting number of articles about me, including one of my favorites, also in 1965, in the
New York Times
, “Nylons in the Newsroom,” by the beautiful and, later in her career, extremely influential feminist leader Gloria Steinem. Gloria nailed the television industry’s long-entrenched assumption that, as one male executive said, “Women didn’t want to watch other women except on girl-type subjects,” and used me, as the most visible, nongirly woman on television, to mark a step forward for womankind. I like my quote in Gloria’s story, which, more than forty years later, seems so prescient. “If I wear anything below the collarbone, the viewers write shocked letters. I’m a kind of well-informed friend. They don’t want me to be a glamour puss and that’s fine. It means I won’t have to quit or have face lifts after 40. I’m in a different category.” (By the way, Gloria and I remain friends to this day. We even performed together at a charity event in Carnegie Hall. Gloria tap-danced and I sang “For Me and My Gal.” We received great applause—but no one has asked us to repeat the performance.)

The reaction of NBC’s executives to all this media coverage was predictable. Suddenly I was their “baby celebrity,” as
TV Guide
put it back then. Before the media onslaught I’d been working in a windowless office. After a feature in
Life
magazine quoted me as saying, “There are days when I don’t see daylight”—which was true, given the studio, which was also windowless, and the literal dawn-to-dusk hours I worked—I was given an office with a window. I was also given a secretary, Mary Hornickel, whom I didn’t have to share. Wonderful Mary stayed with me for the next twelve years. My picture even went up on the corridor leading to the
Today
office, and NBC executives, including the CEO, actually said hello to me in the elevator.

The network had two radio programs,
Monitor
and
Emphasis
, and I was asked to start contributing to both, which I did, five days a week until I had to cut back my workload to three. Meanwhile the media continued to feed off one another and the brass fed on the media, and there I was, if not the toast of the town, at least a good bite.

In actuality my life didn’t change very much. I never asked for and was not offered a raise. I had the same rent-controlled apartment and the same friends. Unlike people in the entertainment division, newspeople did not have a retinue of agents, publicists, personal managers, and hangers-on. I was happy just to have a secretary. I did get invited to premieres and opening nights of plays that I was usually too tired to attend and there was the occasional glamorous party I went to, but basically my life stayed the same. My friends didn’t envy me because they knew how hard I worked and how tough the hours were. Unlike Hollywood, where an actor can make one smash film and his or her career can take off overnight, working in television news was, and is, a long and, if you’re lucky, steady climb. I had begun that climb.

The ripple effect grew beyond NBC. Within a year or two of my debut, I was asked to write a monthly column for the
Ladies’ Home Journal, Vogue
asked me for “twenty-five beauty secrets” (“Get enough sleep” probably headed the list),
Cosmopolitan
asked me to model Pucci towels, and my name started to crop up in the columns. I got offers to lecture, to write a book—nobody much cared what the subject was—to contribute personal items for charity auctions. Then came an invitation that really excited me: to appear as a guest on
The Tonight Show
with host Johnny Carson. If
Today
owned the beginning of the day, Johnny Carson owned the end of it. Nobody touched his ratings for thirty years. I was a nervous wreck before I walked out on the set, and I can’t remember a word I said, but I must have done all right because he asked me back and, a few years later, even asked me to be a guest host while he was away. (I don’t smoke, but just before I was about to walk on Johnny’s set, I used to bum a cigarette and take one puff. It made me slightly dizzy but relaxed.) The night I guest-hosted I started with a monologue, as Johnny did every night. I talked about the difference between being a morning person and a night person like Johnny—how I had three breakfasts by noon and lived mostly on bagels. I had a vitamin deficiency, I said, for lack of vegetables. If it wasn’t hilarious, it had the benefit of being true. Then I launched into my own tap-dancing routine. I wasn’t as good as Gloria Steinem, but I must have been passable. After all, I’d taken tap as a kid, remember? And this time, at least, the audience didn’t boo.

I even got invited to the White House. Not to an intimate dinner with the Johnsons, who were then in residence, or even to a state dinner. But I was invited, nonetheless, to a celebration of the Head Start program. I wish I still had the invitation telegram from Lady Bird’s secretary, the savvy Liz Carpenter, instructing me to present the telegram at the southwest gate of the White House. Was I ever pleased!

That first invitation to the White House felt like one kind of award. Others were not quite so august. The Fragrance Foundation honored me at their annual “Give Thanks for Women” luncheon.
Harper’s Bazaar
included me in its list of “100 Women of Accomplishment,” Brandeis University gave me an award for achievement, and the National Father’s Day Committee named me “Woman of the Year.” All these awards sound like big deals, but the truth is, as we know, that organizations use celebrities, even minor ones as I was, to sell tickets. It didn’t matter too much what you had accomplished. Still, it beat being “Miss French Club” or “Most Improved Athlete.”

In the meantime there was another and welcome shift in the cast of the
Today
show. Sportscaster Jack Lescoulie, who had gotten rather sour, left the show in 1967 and the upbeat and witty Joe “Tell It Like It Is” Garagiola arrived. Joe had been a professional baseball player and a sportscaster for the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Yankees before he came to
Today.
Everyone was crazy about him, including Hugh and me. Joe stayed on the program until 1973 and, in retrospect, those four years with Hugh and Joe were among the happiest years of my forty-years-and-counting tenure on television. The three of us appreciated one another’s respective talents, and rather than compete, we made one another look good. This would not always be the case for me with other partners in the future, which is why I remember those years with such fondness.

Over all this harmony on
Today
, however, loomed the shadow of my family. When I look back now at my father’s life from the safe distance of so many years, I am filled with admiration as well as compassion for him. His highs were so high, his lows so touchingly sad.

While I was enjoying a brand-new success, my father was suffering through what must have been such humiliation. Las Vegas was over and behind him. The aquacade venture was a total failure, another reminder of his talent and imagination gone awry. He had almost nowhere to turn professionally, so he agreed to something that would have seemed beyond reason just a few years back. In 1965 he returned to the New York Latin Quarter, but this time he was neither an owner nor a partner. He was an employee. Not only that, he was working for the man he detested. Hat in hand, pride diminished, he accepted E. M. Loew’s offer to produce and direct the Latin Quarter shows. My mother packed their belongings and began the search for a new apartment in New York.

How hard it must have been for my father. The program of the Latin Quarter now, which a customer could buy, was all about E. M. Loew. It told how Loew, who was described as “soft-spoken” ( you could hear him from one end of the nightclub to the other),
founded
the club in Florida, and then, with a minor mention of my father,
founded
the New York club. But the dancers and staff knew better. When my father returned to the Latin Quarter and began rehearsals, the chorus girls cheered. Even the waiters had tears in their eyes as they set up the tables for the evening and saw Lou Walters back in what had been his home.

This time, however, it was a very different situation. Loew wasn’t overly generous as an employer, and even though I was making more money than I had thought imaginable, I could only help so much. I took my mother and sister shopping for clothes and bought my father the new, warmer suits he would need for New York. The days of the penthouses were long gone. Instead, my mother rented a two-bedroom apartment on Eighth Avenue and Fiftieth Street, a decidedly unfashionable neighborhood. But the apartment was close to the Latin Quarter and was in a relatively new and clean building. Most of all, the rent was low. My mother moved whatever furniture she could from Florida, once again unpacked the dishes, glasses, pots, pans, and clothes, and settled in.

Having my parents and my sister in New York was a mixed blessing. I got to see a lot more of them, which pleased us all. And they were very fond of Lee, which made our get-togethers easy and relaxed. But they didn’t exactly bask in my success because they were always nervous that I would lose my job. They were proud and happy that I was doing so well, but it was pride tinged with the fear that my success might end as it had for my father. Their fears often made me fearful, too.

I remember there was also a dog. My mother felt that my sister needed something of her own to love and care for, so she and Jackie went to an animal shelter and brought home a small, sad mutt named Angel. Angel was a sweet animal but scared of everything: thunder, lightning, even traffic noises. Because my mother was usually the one to feed her, Angel became more attached to her than to Jackie. It was my mother who walked Angel because my mother didn’t want Jackie to go out alone, and saw no reason for Jackie to have to go out with her, especially on cold and rainy nights. I still have a vision of my mother, wearing her heavy coat, walking up and down that dismal street with that poor scared animal. It was not a happy existence for my mother, my father, or my sister—or even for poor Angel. I found it all so sad.