Audition (51 page)

No matter who got top billing, Harry and I were being promoted as “television’s most dynamic and informative news team,” which was pretty dramatic if nerve-racking. I felt my career was on the line. “If the show doesn’t make it, I’m finished,” I told
Newsweek
the week before the broadcast began. “But if it does make it…my God, how fantastic.”

Our first broadcast was scheduled for Monday, October 4. What I hadn’t realized until it was too late was that October 4 that year fell on the holiest of Jewish holidays, Yom Kippur. Most Jewish people do not work that day. They fast until sundown, then usually go to temple, and afterward break the fast with a big dinner. Even though my family did not celebrate the holiday (we never went to temple or fasted), out of respect for my religion, I never went on the air on that holiday. I still don’t.

I was bothered that the Jewish people in our audience would know that I had, indeed, been working during the day when no Jew was supposed to work. I really did wonder if God would forgive me, but there was little I could do about it. October was already late to be starting with a new program but we hadn’t been able to begin until my NBC contract had expired, and ABC did not want to wait any longer.

My career hung in the balance. After all the hype and press about my move to ABC, millions of people all over the country would be watching to see if I succeeded or fell on my face. On a much smaller scale the top ABC executives would be watching in an adjacent studio. Their reputations, too, were on the line.

I had taped two major interviews by satellite earlier in the day for the first broadcasts—one with Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, the other with Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt. I was happy to be getting interviews with the two world leaders and thought they would be the perfect way to show viewers what I had to contribute to the program. Each interview, to run on successive nights, was newsworthy. Golda Meir because the debut of the program coincided with the third anniversary of the 1973 war. Then it was Israelis against Arabs. I wanted Anwar Sadat because now it was Christians against Muslims in a bloody civil war in Lebanon. He would give his insights into the latest threat to peace in the Middle East.

At the last minute, however, the interviews threatened the peace at ABC. I had promised Golda Meir that her interview would appear on our first broadcast so that she could give a special Yom Kippur greeting. She also wanted to appear on the program the day before Israel’s enemy, Anwar Sadat. But after Bill Sheehan viewed both interviews, he decided that Sadat’s interview would run first. I told him about my promise to Golda Meir and argued vehemently against the change, but he was adamant and as this was my first broadcast, I had to go by his decision. Predictably Golda Meir was furious when she was informed of the change. She said she would never do another interview with me, and she never did.

On our opening night, the top ABC executives were full of smiles, all too hearty. I was strangely calm. I knew I could read from the teleprompter. I’d been doing that for years. I just prayed that tonight I wouldn’t stumble over a word. And 5–4–3–2–1: We were on.

“Good evening,” Harry said, before outlining the major story of the evening—the resignation of Earl Butz, the secretary of agriculture, for telling an obscene racial joke on a commercial airline. And then, he introduced me. “Closer to home, I have a new colleague to welcome. Barbara?”

“Thank you, Harry,” I said. “Well, tonight has finally come for me, and I’m very pleased to be with you, Harry, and with ABC News.” And then I introduced the other stories we would be covering, including the Supreme Court decision allowing the death penalty to go ahead in at least three states, the status of the strike at Ford, and my newsmaker interview with Anwar Sadat.

The rest of the broadcast proceeded smoothly—until the end. I signed off with an explanation to the viewers of what they could expect from me, including a closer look at the people shaping the news; an explanation of how the news impacts the viewers’ lives (for example, “Why every television news program gives the Dow Jones Industrial Average and what it means to you, even if you don’t own any stock”); the airing of issues of particular concern to women, which, I noted, “have been neglected.”

And then it was Harry’s turn. He admitted he had a “little trouble” in thinking what to say to welcome me that didn’t sound sexist or patronizing. Well, that didn’t sound very encouraging. And then he topped it off by saying, “I’ve kept time on your stories and mine tonight. You owe me four minutes.” I hoped he was kidding. He wasn’t.

My initial reviews were pretty good. The next day the
New York Times
called me a “thorough professional, a remarkable woman who has risen to the top in what was once almost exclusively a man’s world,” and pointed out that I hadn’t “faltered or fumbled embarrassingly on the new job.”
Time
magazine’s review was also positive, at the beginning, anyway. “Walters’ debut was as crisp as a new $100 bill,” it began. The rest I could have done without, like the magazine’s description of the broadcast “as personalized as Walters’ ‘weadily wecognizable delivewy,’” and the additional note that I made one hundred dollars for every minute of the newscast. That smarted a bit, but basically so far so good.

Then came the complaints from some critics about my interviews with Anwar Sadat and Golda Meir. Instead of being considered newsworthy figures, which I thought the president of Egypt and the former prime minister of Israel to be, these critics dismissed them as “celebrity guests.” That, of course, cast me as a celebrity interviewer and not as a serious journalist. President Sadat didn’t help. At the very end when I thanked him for being with us, he thanked me, then said: “How do you like a million-dollar job? I must tell you very frankly, you know the salary of my job. It is twelve thousand dollars only, and I am working night and day.”

I laughed and said, “But you know, Mr. President, one does not work for money, one works for love.”

Today this small human interchange would probably be welcomed. But back then it was criticized. My attempt to liven up the news and make it more interesting was pronounced a gimmick more worthy of a talk show than the straight-up delivery of the news. The traditional models of a news anchor remained Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, and Harry Reasoner, who did not hide his displeasure at my exchange with Sadat.

When I turned to him and said, “But what I should have said to President Sadat is that he has better fringe benefits than we do, Harry,” he did not respond. “Reasoner looked less tickled than crazed,” wrote one critic. Wrote another: “Harry Reasoner looked pained and rightly so.”

Nonetheless, the ABC executives were delighted with the kickoff of the new broadcast and brought out champagne to toast Harry and me. They needn’t have uncorked the bottle. Though we drew a huge audience the first night, almost twice as large as NBC and CBS combined, most of the viewers turned out to be curiosity seekers. On Tuesday, the second night of the broadcast, David Brinkley opened NBC’s newscast with the words: “Welcome back.” And back they stayed. Well, most of them, anyway. ABC was pleased that the broadcast gained more than 700,000 new viewers during my first seven weeks on the air—a jump to 10.5 in the Nielsen ratings from 9.9 during the same time period the year before—so I wasn’t a complete disaster. But in the horserace between the networks, Harry and I stayed close to where Harry had been before I’d joined him: in third place.

If the broadcast had been a huge success, Harry might have felt differently about me. But the ongoing gap in the ratings seemed to stoke his resentment further. Day after day I would walk into the studio at 3:00 p.m. to shoot a promo for the evening newscast, and no one would talk to me. The crew, cameramen, and stagehands had been working with Harry for the past six years, and if he didn’t approve of me, neither would they. Harry would crack jokes with the crew and they with him. I was invisible. Then he would go across the street to the bar at the nearby hangout, Café des Artistes, to have a few drinks with the guys before the broadcast. They’d have a fine time bad-mouthing me to everyone within hearing. Some of those people with big ears thought they were doing me a favor by telling me the disparaging things Harry and his gang were saying about me, that I was a disaster, that I was dragging the program down. Repeating these remarks was no favor.

The only way I could hold my own was the New York Yankees. I was a big Yankee fan. Still am. In desperation I would come into the studio and make bets on the Yankees with Harry or the guys on the crew, and very often I won. For five minutes or so I could be one of the guys. But there were very few of those five minutes. And the baseball season is short.

I also tried cracking jokes at my own expense. I remember one such attempt during the moments before the broadcast. We were doing a segment on the search for Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey. All those
r
’s. So I quipped to the crew, “Mount Ararat? Why couldn’t this have happened on Mount Kisco?” The crew laughed. Harry didn’t.

ABC did everything possible to placate him. In addition to giving him that raise, they had made sure our offices were the same size and the same distance from the office of the executive producer, Bob Siegenthaler. We each had our own assistants, hair person, and makeup person. Neither of us had a limousine to get to the office. The hours were more reasonable for the nightly news—we weren’t due in the office until 10:00 a.m.—so we took cabs or walked. Once the broadcast began we were to have equal time on the air.

The blood was so bad between us, however, that his cronies on the crew took to using a stopwatch to note my airtime. If I did a segment that ran three minutes and twenty-five seconds, Harry would demand that he do a piece three minutes and twenty-five seconds long. To keep things equal he did a long piece on real estate values in Los Angeles, another on the Dallas Cowboys football team. Nobody accused him of being a nonjournalist.

Harry’s hostility soon began to show on the air. Frank McGee had managed at least to keep his aversion to me off camera, but not Harry. I remember reaching toward him at the end of one broadcast, in a friendly manner, just to touch him on the arm. He recoiled, physically recoiled, in front of millions of people. The media, of course, picked up on the bad chemistry. “Harry Reasoner…seems as comfortable on camera with Walters as a governor under indictment,” wrote Roger Rosenblatt in the
New Republic
.

Harry began taking swipes at me on the air. One night we did a profile on Henry Kissinger, then President Gerald Ford’s secretary of state. We were talking about his negotiating ability and his popularity with women. At the end of the piece, we had a few seconds to ad-lib, and I said to Harry, “You know, Henry Kissinger may not look the type but he is considered to be rather a sex symbol in Washington.”

“Well,” Harry responded coldly. “You’d know more about that than I would.”

During those long weeks I don’t know what I would have done without my assistant, Mary, and Bobbie, my makeup person. They were my confidantes and my daily supporters. But, equally as important, I began to get letters, hundreds of them, from women all over the country who had seen Harry’s antagonism with their own eyes. They related their experiences of harassment and discrimination, their own inability to climb the ladder to success in their all-male environments. “Hang in there,” they wrote. “If you can make it, we can make it.”

I was very moved by these letters and tried to answer as many as I could. We finally made up a form letter and then I would add a personal postscript. When I had a really bad day, Mary would insist that I read the latest batch of supportive letters, and I would keep going.

Bob Siegenthaler seemed paralyzed by Harry’s hostility. I’m not sure what he could have done. He didn’t want to take Harry on, but it got so bad that Bob began directing the cameramen not to show us side-by-side in what is known as a two-shot. This format would continue when Av Westin replaced Siegenthaler in 1977. The camera was either on me or on Harry.

In the midst of all this tension, the League of Women Voters asked me to moderate the third and final presidential debate between the incumbent president, Gerald Ford, and his challenger from Georgia, Jimmy Carter. (Unlike today, there were very few debates among the candidates.) I don’t know whether the league chose me out of pity or because they thought I would do a good job, but boy, did I need that vote of confidence. It also meant a lot of homework. True, the moderator was mostly a timekeeper and the person who made certain that the three questioners kept to the point, but occasionally the moderator could also ask a follow-up question, so I had to be informed on the major issues. All three television networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC, plus public broadcasting, would be carrying the debate.

It was held at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, on October 22, less than three weeks after I’d started on the news. Afterward a poll declared that Carter came out ahead of Ford, but as far as I was concerned, I came out ahead of both of them. The debate went smoothly. I did not make a flub or misstep. I slept soundly that night for the first time in a long time and flew back to New York refreshed and ready for new battles.

Well, almost ready. The debates were just ten days before the presidential election. I would be joining Harry as coanchor on the biggest political night of the year, indeed of the past four years, and I had never anchored an election night before. ABC had prepared election books for Harry and me. I sat up every night studying which Senate and House races were the most important, which states were possibly up for grabs, which issues were commanding the most attention, which candidate might be expected to win which state, and what was the past history of those candidates and those states. I memorized the names of the senators and the representatives and what their battles were all about. It was a massive assignment. Then there were the anecdotes we were supposed to come up with, preferably based on real political knowledge, to fill the time waiting for the election results to come in. If I had been calm before my first night on the news, I was now terrified.