Audition (68 page)

I must digress, now. Please, parents, if you are having an experience like this, I know it may be the most difficult decision of your life to force a child to stay in a place where you can’t be totally assured that it will truly make a difference. Your own heart may be breaking, and the easiest thing is to remove your child from the program. But if you have
any
confidence that it will work, hang in there. It may be your best, and perhaps only, hope.

For the first three weeks after Jackie entered the school, I was not allowed to talk to her. Her adviser-counsellor, who had herself gone to the school, told me Jackie was adjusting. She also said she knew what I was going through and to call her own mother, who would tell me of her experience and perhaps make me feel better. I did so, but I don’t remember feeling any better.

My first phone call to Jackie, three weeks later, was not much more successful. After a few calm minutes, she again began to cry and to tell me that everything was all my fault. “Par for the course,” said her counsellor.

A month after that, along with other mothers and fathers, I went to visit Jackie for the first time. Lee was already suffering from brain cancer and wasn’t well enough to go. Later Merv would come with me on his own plane, and we brought Lee and his wife, Lois, with us.

When I arrived that first time Jackie greeted me with a smile and a hug. I had not seen her in three months. She looked healthy and happy but said she still wanted to come home. I told her that wasn’t possible. Then, over a two-day period, she made her required confession and told me things about herself I never wanted to hear and have tried sometimes to forget. She told me of her unhappiness, of her continued drug use with uppers, downers, and marijuana (even if I couldn’t smell it). She had tried LSD and didn’t like it. She also told me that she had not stopped seeing the head of the Eighty-fourth Street Gang. He made her feel wanted, she said. She stopped seeing the gang only when one of them went to jail.

I was in shock. How could I not have known that all this was going on? How could I not have known how unhappy she was? And yet, finally I was hearing the truth and there was relief in that. I didn’t know what would happen next, but I believed that Jackie was on her way to a brighter, better chapter in her life and my eyes were finally opened, whether I liked it or not. We could proceed with honesty and we have ever since.

While Jackie was at the school, Merv and I married. The school gave Jackie permission to come to our wedding. My memory of my wedding day is all tied up with Jackie.

She stayed at the school until she graduated three years later. When she turned eighteen, she could have legally left. At first she wanted to, but Merv, whom she loved and trusted, wrote her a long letter. Jackie had told us of an experience she’d had when as part of the school’s program, she had climbed a mountain. She said it was very tough but she had felt great when she accomplished it. Merv wrote that if she stayed at the school, it would be another mountain climbed and an even greater accomplishment. She chose to stay.

As for me, the experience at the school was almost as great as it was for Jackie. We had our own parents’ weekends where we listened to the counsellors and the children. I learned how to love my child without being judgmental. I learned what buttons not to push. I never missed a weekend when parents were allowed to visit. I became very close to the other mothers and fathers who knew me as another parent, needing to hear and share experiences. Yes, they knew I was “Barbara Walters,” but most of all, I was “Jackie’s mother.”

During those years I saw Jackie slowly change. She developed self-reliance, especially, she said, during days and nights spent alone on wilderness experiences. She learned that there were other kids whose grief was similar to her own. She could cry and rant and rave about how unfair life was to her and no one was shocked or critical. She learned that some of the other children did not have the support or love from their parents that she had.

In her last year at the school, she was elected vice president. She was also helping some of the new kids adjust, who were as defiant and frightened as she had been. A fairly large number of these children, she told me, were adopted, adding to her theory of their special feelings of inadequacy.

Jackie’s graduation day, when she was eighteen, was glorious. She wore a white dress and big smile, and it was as joyous a day as we could have had. I couldn’t have been happier if she had just graduated Phi Beta Kappa. What a road we had traveled.

Jackie still had a long way to go. Everything wasn’t hunky-dory. But I supported her in every possible way from then on, and our relationship became closer and closer. She never lived in New York again. Jackie feels the city is too big and too cold for her. A great place to visit me, she feels, but not to live in. For a while she lived in Seattle with a girl from the school. She tried marriage, but it didn’t work.

Finally Jackie moved to Maine, because it seemed to have the same climate as Seattle but was closer to me. You will never guess what she did—or maybe you will. With her former counsellor from the school, she opened a small residential outdoor therapy program for girls called “New Horizons for Young Women.” Her partner didn’t want to stay in the East so Jackie eventually bought her out.

With little business experience, Jackie read everything on the subject she could get her hands on. She obtained the proper licenses needed to open such a facility, raised the money to buy the land and build the dormitories, and hired the proper counsellors, psychologists, nurses, guides, on and on. Jackie had her own idea of what she wanted the place to be. Small. All girls. Not a program where you had to walk miles before you were given a glass of water. A place of warmth and affection but with structure and strict rules. All the girls were given clothing to wear. No competition in that regard. No makeup. No iPods. No TV sets. Close supervision. Outdoor activities all year round but also areas for artistic expression, hobbies, interests. It was, in many ways, unique.

Jackie did the advertising and marketing necessary to let schools and counsellors know the place existed. She went to the necessary conferences and did all that was required to make such a difficult project a reality. And it is. New Horizons offers a six-to-nine-week program, and when a child ends those weeks, the counsellors advise the parent on the next steps to take.

Along the way, besides creating and running the whole establishment, Jackie became an accomplished business executive. She is not a therapist and does not work directly with the children, although she has told me laughingly that when she is with the girls and one of them says, “What would you know, anyway?” she replies, “Everything.” And tells her why.

Again, it seems that a fairly large number of the girls who come to Jackie’s program are adopted. Jackie thinks this is no accident.

Jackie now has a longtime boyfriend to whom she is very devoted. They share many interests and seem happy together. Jackie doesn’t want children. She feels she already has so many in the program. Once, when I complained and said, “I want grandchildren,” Jackie replied, “Get a dog.” So I did. The world’s most perfect dog, a Havanese named Cha Cha. She isn’t a grandbaby, that is true, but nobody has everything.

I am more proud of my daughter than I can possibly express. She is a beautiful, delightful, funny woman. She marches to her own drummer. It may not be my music, but I guess, in a way, I marched to my own drummer and it wasn’t necessarily Jackie’s music.

A few years ago Jackie felt that it was important for troubled parents, especially mothers, to know what she and I had gone through. I couldn’t tell the story myself on my own program. It would have looked too self-serving. So we asked NBC’s magazine program,
Dateline
, if they were interested in the story. They sure were, and they assigned Jane Pauley. Jane visited New Horizons and spent several days with Jackie and some of her girls, who, with their parents’ permission, agreed to tell their experiences. Jane was sensitive and compassionate. She interviewed Jackie alone and, finally, the two of us together. Jackie and I sat side-by-side and told our own parts of the story. People still talk to Jackie and me about our appearance.

One more thing. I keep reading about children who, as adults, want to find their biological mothers. Jackie has never expressed a desire to learn who her birth mother is. I thought she might be afraid of hurting my feelings, so one day I asked her if she would like to find out. If so, I told her, I would help her.

“Why should I try to find my biological mother?” Jackie said with a grin. “Haven’t I had enough trouble with you?”

Yes, darling. Likewise.

9/11 and Nothing Else Matters

B
Y THE LATE
1980s things had greatly calmed down with Jackie. She was by then living in Seattle and had begun to find her own way in life. We stayed in close contact, and I was so relieved and grateful to have my daughter back.

I was doing just fine professionally as well. There were hardly any major politicians, world leaders, and others in the headlines whom I didn’t interview for
20/20.
Meanwhile the show business celebrity interviews on the
Specials
continued to draw enormous audiences. From 1985 to 1989 the programs were viewed, on average, in more than seventeen million households. And who knows how many people were watching in those households?

If things were going swimmingly in my professional life, I was treading water in my marriage to Merv. Beginning to sound familiar? The bicoastal arrangements were getting more and more difficult and to add to that, Merv’s company, Lorimar, was in disarray. He and his partner, Lee Rich, had split and Merv took on three new partners, one of whom was a very smart young man, Les Moonves, who is today the president and CEO of CBS. Nevertheless the company floundered, and Merv decided to sell it to what is now Time Warner. Although this gave him a great deal of money, it also meant that he felt somewhat lost. All of a sudden he had no real place to go. The beautiful buildings, the lavish offices, the huge staff of producers and writers were gone. So here it was again, my worst fears confirmed. Another show business marriage. Another theatrical empire vanished. Merv then started a mergers-and-acquisitions business and opened an office in Los Angeles and another in New York, although he had little desire to go there. He still felt out of place and unhappy when he came east.

The marriage sputtered along, but by the summer of 1990 we decided it had simply run out of steam. We were profoundly sorry, but we had both known it was inevitable.

Merv and I separated in September of that year. There were no arguments, no bad scenes. To draw from T. S. Eliot, our marriage ended “not with a bang but a whimper.” On my birthday I came to Los Angeles and had dinner with Merv and his three children and their spouses, and, knowing we were separating, they gave me a beautiful gold charm bracelet with their names on it. It was very sweet and touching. I liked my stepchildren a great deal and knew I was about to lose the day-to-day contact with them. The thought of that saddened me. I also knew that Jackie, who loved Merv, would take the divorce very hard.

I didn’t want the news of our separation to dribble out in the press and to read the gossip and speculation, so I wrote out an announcement and gave it to my friend Liz Smith for her nationally syndicated column. The day before she published it I went to a spa with a friend so I wouldn’t have to deal with all the phone calls. This, in part, is what Liz printed.

It is with great sadness that Barbara Walters and Merv Adelson are announcing that they will be having a trial separation. For the past five years, this glamorous and very nice couple has lived a high-intensity, bi-coastal wedlock, with each traveling from coast-to-coast at least once a month. But now, Merv’s business interests require his spending most of his time in Los Angeles and Barbara’s television assignments, instead of lessening, seem to have multiplied so that she is traveling all over the world or operating primarily from New York. The twain meets—but the effort is gigantic.

Our friends were shocked. They thought we’d had the happiest marriage. It is a cliché but true: one never knows what is going on in another’s private life.

Photo Insert 2

John Wayne with me on his boat in 1979