Audition (47 page)

It was a very bad situation, and so my mother made a drastic decision. She had my father admitted to a well-recommended nursing home. Well recommended though it was, with excellent care and a private twenty-four-hour nurse for my father, it was still a nursing home. If there was any silver lining, it was that there were a few men my father could play cards with. Even so, my father, being my father, hated the indignity of it. What a comedown for Lou Walters. But I think he was too weak and depressed to fight it. As for me, I couldn’t fight it either. How could I force my mother to keep my father at home, even if I provided round-the-clock nurses when she herself was elderly and agitated?

My mother made a great effort to visit my father at the nursing home. At least three times a week she got her sister, Lena, to drive her and my sister there, and she would take my father some of his favorite foods—pickled herring or salami. But he was slowly fading away. I visited him several times and religiously called him every Saturday, but he would say very little. I’d do most of the talking, telling him what I was doing, asking him questions, and he’d say, “Yes, darling” or “No, darling.”

My visits were too rare and always upsetting. There wasn’t a time when I saw or spoke to him that I didn’t feel that I should bring him to live with me and little Jackie in New York. He adored Jackie, and maybe she could have brought him out of his depression and back to life. But to my everlasting guilt, I didn’t do it. My apartment was fairly small, just two actual bedrooms, one of which we used as a library. We would be too crowded, I thought. Today, though, I wish I had done it. But in truth I was too busy with too little time as it was for my Jackie. So my father stayed in the nursing home.

I know it’s boring to look back and keep talking about guilt, guilt, guilt, and I know that many families face the same problem today, especially as parents live longer. But I still feel the guilt so strongly that I have to force myself to write about it. I realize how much I cared about my father and how much I admired him. I am much older now. My childhood resentments are gone. I am able to recognize the parts of him that are in me—his love of books, his enjoyment of writing, maybe even his sense of humor. With this comes the realization that I am my father’s daughter—with my mother’s fears.

Life went on. My family in Florida, sad and lonely, I in New York, busier than ever. I was on
Today
every morning, followed by
Not for Women Only.
I was also from time to time a substitute host for Johnny Carson on
The Tonight Show.
It was during this period that I persuaded Hugh Downs to come out of semiretirement and alternate weeks with me hosting
Not for Women Only.
That lightened my load somewhat, but I also was accepting some speaking engagements and writing the occasional magazine article. I continued to share my parents’ concern that this could all be over tomorrow, so I had better do everything I could to earn money for their future and mine.

“Doing everything” meant first and foremost getting interviews that were exclusive and important. But while I was doing my usual letter writing and phone calls—bonanza! I was assigned to go to Cuba with Senator George McGovern and a bunch of other reporters to see Fidel Castro.

Change was in the air in the spring of 1975. Fourteen years had passed since the failure of the U.S.-funded invasion of Cuba by armed Cuban exiles to overthrow Fidel Castro, and thirteen years had passed since Russian shipments of nuclear missiles to Communist Cuba brought the United States and Russia to the brink of war. There was talk now in the United States of normalizing relations with Communist Cuba or at least lifting part of the economic embargo that had been in place since 1962 (and still is).

Senator McGovern was chairman of the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. He was in favor of lifting the trade embargo against Cuba on both humanitarian and diplomatic grounds. McGovern hoped to leverage the positive effects of ending the embargo to eventually help with other conflicts with Cuba, including the release of nine Americans jailed there whom the United States considered political prisoners. McGovern was also advocating a cultural and sports exchange with Cuba in the hope that baseball could help break down the hostility that existed between our two countries.

I was just one of about fifteen reporters traveling with Senator McGovern, but while we were in Cuba, for some unknown reason, Castro singled me out from the rest, and for a change my male colleagues were happy about it.

We had all been in Havana for several days, being dragged from factories to medical facilities to schools, all designed to show off the accomplishments of the Communist system. But no sign of the great Fidel. We were staying in what had been one of the finest hotels in pre-Communist Havana, the Nacional. Along with the formerly grand mansions that dotted the Havana harbor, the hotel was badly in need of a paint job, but it had bigger problems: no air-conditioning and no toilet seats. Still, there were salsa bands playing away in the lobby and you could always get a daiquiri, Ernest Hemingway’s favorite drink when he lived in Havana.

But we were not there for the daiquiris, and we were all getting pretty disgusted when, on the third day, we were ushered into a convoy of cars and driven some distance to a farm we were told was owned by Fidel’s eldest brother, Ramón. We were lying around on the grass when suddenly a half dozen jeeps pulled up. Lo and behold, in the second jeep was the man himself, in full heavy winter khaki uniform.

And here were Fidel Castro’s first words: “Dónde está Barbara?” [Where is Barbara?]

How on earth did he know my name? Probably because the
Today
show reached Havana and Castro, who was known to stay up all night, must have watched it as his lullaby before going to bed.

“Here I am,” I shouted. “Here we all are,” I continued, pointing out my colleagues. “We have been waiting for days, sir, for you to agree to a press conference with us.” Castro spoke very little English, but his translator, a pretty woman named Juanita, expressed our urgency and Castro, with a big smile, agreed. That night he held a press conference in Havana at the Palace of the Revolution. His message: Lift the blockade, at least for medicines and food. Treat Cuba with respect. Stop trying to assassinate him. We are neighbors and in one way or another we ought to live in peace. And no, he had nothing to do with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Pretty much the same words he would be saying for the next thirty years. When, however, we asked him critical questions concerning freedom of the press or the lack thereof, the imprisonment of dissenters, and his role as a dictator who brooked no opposition, Castro’s welcoming demeanor disappeared.

It may not have been the most startling press conference, but we were thankful that we hadn’t come to Havana in vain, for Castro, although long on words—his speeches often ran for hours—was short on granting interviews, and few journalists had gotten to meet him. Since I had been instrumental in bringing about the press conference, my colleagues were appreciative and that night we toasted one another over generous daiquiris. Now we could return home to toilet seats.

The press conference was okay, but every reporter worth his salt (whatever that means) wanted to secure an exclusive interview with Castro. I thought I had landed one. Just before we left his brother’s farm earlier in the day, I had managed a few private minutes with Castro, during which I hurriedly asked if he would do a one-on-one interview with me. He readily agreed and said sometime during the year. But here’s the hitch, and I should have paid more attention—he never said what year.

Actually it would be quite a few years later, and when I finally did get that interview with Castro, it would not run on NBC. It would instead help to keep me from drowning at ABC.

The Million-Dollar Baby

I
T ALL BEGAN
with a tennis game, in March of 1976, on a private court in Westchester, New York. The players were Lou Weiss, who headed the television department at the William Morris Agency, and his neighbor, Fred Pierce, president of the ABC Television Network. I don’t know who won the game, but I do know that I was part of the score.

“Five years?” Pierce wrote on a matchbook cover and handed it to Weiss. “For five million.”

That’s what Fred Pierce was offering to lure me away from NBC to ABC. An offer of $500,000 from ABC’s entertainment division to do four one-hour
Specials
a year and an additional $500,000 from the news division to coanchor the
ABC Evening News
with veteran newsman Harry Reasoner. It was an astonishing and unexpected proposal.

The money didn’t bowl me over. I was already making close to that amount at NBC. It was the historic offer to become the first female coanchor of a network news program. A woman doing the network news was unheard of and certainly not something I had ever considered. The prestigious position had always been a male bastion, and the prevailing thought was that delivering the news about politics, wars, and natural disasters would not be taken seriously if done by a woman.

I was tempted by the prospect, but only tempted. It was not in my nature to be courageous, to be the first. I was the same person who chose the so-called lesser sorority in high school rather than take a chance on not being chosen at all. I was the same person who was afraid to remain on the waiting list at Wellesley College, my first choice, and to choose Sarah Lawrence because it was a sure thing. I had had enough drama and ups and downs in my life to want to veer toward the safe, sure side. Safe was NBC and the
Today
show. I had always thought I would stay until they no longer wanted me. Then they would give me a gold watch and I would go on to do, well, I wasn’t sure what—but that was a long time away.

Still, Lou Weiss and Lee Stevens persisted. Why not take a meeting with the ABC folks? What could I lose? It could be interesting to hear their views and might influence what I wanted for my own future at NBC.

So Lee arranged a secret meeting for me in a private dining room at ABC’s Century City complex in Los Angeles. I was in LA for the Academy Awards that March, and the feeling was that a meeting there would not be noticed as much as if it were held in New York.

I was flattered that the biggest guns at ABC were present—Leonard Goldenson, the chairman of the board (whom I’ve already told you I knew slightly); Elton Rule, the president of ABC Inc., the aforementioned Fred Pierce; and Bill Sheehan, the president of ABC News. They sweetened the proposal. They promised to expand the half-hour news broadcast to an hour, an unheard-of first on any network. Were I to become the first woman to coanchor the news, the additional half hour would give me the opportunity to use my strength—interviews. Not only would I be delivering the news along with Harry Reasoner, I would also be able to supplement it in a more personal, in-depth way and in prime time, which had never been done before.

As appealing and flattering as this was, I still did not take very seriously their proposal (which also included serving once a month as the moderator of ABC’s Sunday morning public affairs show
Issues and Answers
, and coanchoring or appearing on special news programming such as election-night coverage). I had no desire to leave
Today
. Lee was negotiating my new contract with NBC, and I was sure it would all work out. I certainly wanted it to. I thought NBC wanted it to as well.

Why, then, was Lee having such a difficult time? He had started talking to NBC back in December 1975, so everything would be in place by September 1976 when the new contract would take effect. The men he was talking to were Herb Schlosser, the president of NBC, Dick Wald, the president of NBC News, and its chief negotiator, Al Rush, vice president of NBC’s program and talent acquisitions. But the men were balking.

They couldn’t really argue with the money Lee was asking for. William Morris had figured out the gross profits the
Today
show and
Not for Women Only
were making from their thirty-second commercial advertisers and calculated what my contribution was worth on those terms. Lee also argued that I was entitled to the same compensation given to the stars of successful network “entertainment” series, like Johnny Carson, especially since, unlike them, I didn’t receive residuals for reruns.

The figures Lee proposed were not that meteoric: a gradual annual increase starting at $800,000 a year for 1976 (I was already making $700,000), then an increase of $100,000 a year for the duration of the contract. It was the duration that proved to be the first inflammatory point. Lee and I wanted to extend the three-year contract to a five-year contract. I was unmarried. I had a child and my family to support. I didn’t know how long all this was going to last, and I wanted, and needed, some degree of security. But Al Rush would have none of it.

“Over my dead body,” was his response Lee told me later. “Three years. That’s it.”

Perhaps Lee, who was well used to the nasty art of negotiating, did me a disservice by reporting this to me. But he did. As a result, for the first time, it began to erode my loyalty toward NBC.

It eroded further when Lee and I asked to have some control over what interviews and features I would do on the show; perhaps over who the new producer would be, should there be one; and who, in the future, my cohost might be. As things stood, I had no say in anything. Stuart Schulberg assigned me the pieces I did and though he was very flexible, there was no guarantee that he would be on the program forever. Furthermore, although I liked Jim Hartz, the program had already had five male hosts, and who knew what or whom the future would bring. I couldn’t bear the thought of another Frank McGee.

The hackles went up again. The very notion that I, as a newsperson, considered “talent” and not an executive, would have the right to say what features or interviews I wanted to do or whom I wanted as a producer or cohost was totally out of the question. What sort of precedent would that set?