Audition (56 page)

One of many notes from Princess Diana

Rubbing noses with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in 2005

Interview with Truman Capote, December 1967

My mother, Bing Crosby, and I, May 1977

Having a chat with John Warner and Elizabeth Taylor at their farm in 1977

To this day I don’t know what possessed me to say that. Why didn’t I just ask him to read us a story each night when he tucked us into bed? Now, in my faltering defense, if Walter Cronkite had said the same thing in his baronial Uncle Walter tones, people might have said, “What a nice ending.” But if I was in trouble before, you can imagine what the reaction to that exchange was. I was killed by the critics. How dare I say something so corny, so stupid, so personal, and, of course, so female?

Here’s an example from Morley Safer, of
60 Minutes
fame, who was also doing radio commentary. I think of it even today as kicking a colleague when she is down.

“The interview with Governor Carter is really what ended Ms. Walters’ brief career as a journalist and placed her firmly in the ranks of…what? The Merv Griffins and Johnny Carsons? What right does any reporter have to issue such a benediction?…It is as if Mr. Carter had just become Louis XIV and, without Pope Barbara’s admonition, he might be dumb with us and mean to us.”

Here’s another: “She’s bad at it,” wrote Sander Vanocur, in the
Washington Post
. “Does she ever let anyone finish a thought?” (Ah, sweet revenge. I can’t help but mention that years later Sandy, as he was called, came to work as a correspondent at ABC, and not a top one at that. At that time I was on
20/20
, and Sandy would come by and ask me if the program had any assignments for him. I even helped him when I could. ABC later let him go.)

But what provoked the most wrath was a segment we sandwiched in between the Streisand interview and the Carters: a brief tour I conducted of my own apartment in New York. I really hadn’t wanted to, but we were short a third guest. I hadn’t been able to get another celebrity to agree to an interview, so against my better judgment—and it really
was
against my better judgment—we filled four minutes of the program with a view of my living room.

We rationalized this by saying that we had shown Streisand’s home and Jimmy Carter’s home, so why not mine? In came the cameras to my apartment to shoot me among the gray walls and drapes and the red furniture and the fake fireplace. As it turned out, it was a good precedent to set. Most of the
Specials
I would do in the next twenty years or so would take place in the celebrities’ homes, and become a trademark of the programs. (Now celebrities are more concerned about their privacy, and want to be interviewed in hotel rooms.) As for my apartment, it didn’t make great television, but I thought it was hardly the worst piece of television on the air.

Oh, yeah? More swell stuff from Morley Safer: “Sandwiched between the white bread of the Carters and the pumpernickel of Streisand, we were treated to the pastrami of Ms. Walters herself.” And this again from Sandy Vanocur. “She was interviewing herself,” he wrote. “That way, at least, the only person she can interrupt is herself.”

Well, you know what? That first
Special
was a runaway smash hit. It significantly beat out both CBS and NBC. More than fifteen million people watched. “It was unlike anything viewers had seen and they loved it,” ran an article in
Entertainment Weekly
, written, incidentally, by a woman. “Barbara Walters had to prove she was worth a million dollars, and on the night of December 14, 1976, she did.”

I may have been dying on the news, but in spite of the critics I was soaring on the
Specials.
They became the tail that wagged the dog. No matter what happened to me on the news, I continued to do the
Specials
that year and the next and the next and on and on until this very year. I’ve been doing them now for more than thirty years.

As a matter of fact, in the winter of 2006, we did a tongue-in-cheek
Special
called
30 Mistakes in 30 Years
, which ran for two hours over two nights. It was fun to look back on all the things I said and did I should not have said and done—like the “be wise” admonition to Jimmy Carter. By 2006 I could afford to make fun of myself. But thirty years earlier the
Barbara Walters Specials
were what kept me from being considered a total disaster.

After the first
Special
it became easier and easier to secure famous guests. I continued to mix celebrity guests with newsmakers and recruited a new staff. We lined up a wonderful mix for my next
Special
, which would air in April, just four months later.

This time the celebrity guests were Elizabeth Taylor and her new husband, my old friend John Warner (soon to be elected senator); the newsmaker guests were His Imperial Majesty the shah of Iran and his wife, Empress Farah, and for good measure, Barbara Jordan of Texas, the first black congresswoman from a Southern state and a brilliant orator. Jordan had burst into the national consciousness during the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings of President Nixon in the summer of 1974, where she won national acclaim for her eloquent reaffirmation of faith in the Constitution. I can still hear the way she said, “the Con-sti-tu-tion,” before she voted for all five articles of impeachment. The congresswoman herself was much admired but also criticized for being blunt and aloof. I thought she was terrific.

The interview with Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner, which you read about earlier, was strange for me. Even though I was asking the questions, I felt like a third wheel. They were the couple. I was the ex-girlfriend and Elizabeth knew it. The viewers loved it, though, and that’s what counted.

It was the interview with the shah of Iran and his shahbanou in Tehran, however, that caused a sensation. First we interviewed the thirty-eight-year-old empress in her own private library with its suede couches, walls of books, priceless Persian manuscripts, sculptures and paintings by Miró, Calder, Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and even an Andy Warhol portrait of Mick Jagger, which she had chosen herself. This was her retreat. I liked the empress very much. In spite of the priceless artifacts, paintings, and her twenty-four-carat lifestyle, I found her down-to-earth and easy to talk to.

We then interviewed the shah in another part of the palace. He was nineteen years older than his wife and had an opulent office with a gilded desk, golden telephones, and windows surrounded by gold-embossed frames. The windows were of bulletproof glass. He seemed arrogant and coldly superior, yet he answered all of my questions honestly, so honestly that there were times when I wanted to say to him, “Don’t you realize what you are saying?”

When I asked if he felt that it was God’s will that he was born to be king, he said it was, that “it was the whole meaning of my life.” (Bear in mind that he came to the Peacock Throne only because his father, a military officer and eventually prime minister, had overthrown the former shah.) When I later asked the shah if a newspaper in his country could criticize him, he said plainly, “No.”

“Why not?” I asked, and he replied, “You cannot insult the king.”

This attitude contributed to his growing reputation as an autocratic dictator untouched by the needs of his people. Although the shah had made many important reforms in his country—he requisitioned some huge private estates and redistributed them to small farmers, spear-headed the training of teachers and doctors, and gave women more rights—his regime was in great danger. He and his family were said to be corrupt, and the secret security service he’d formed, SAVAK, was undeniably cruel. Indeed it was just two years after this interview that the Islamic revolution took place in Iran and the shah and empress were forced to flee their country.

At the time of our interview, however, the shah did not feel threatened. In private life he was hardly autocratic or fierce. For example, talking about his four children, he said that he still regretted throwing sand in the eyes of his son, the crown prince, when they were on the beach and his son was annoying him. He said he sometimes cried over films with animals or children. But he never cried over himself. He said a king didn’t have that right.

Okay. Nice personal stuff about an emperor, but hardly controversial. Then we had a joint conversation with the shah and his wife, the first time they had ever been interviewed together on American television.

In doing my homework, I’d read in a magazine some pretty strong statements about women attributed to the shah. I couldn’t quite believe he would be so foolish as to have made them, so I decided to ask him. “Your Majesty, I want to talk a bit with you about women. I quote you: ‘You have never produced a Michelangelo or Bach or even a great cook.’ So you don’t feel that women are in the same sense equal, that they have the same intelligence or ability?”

Now remember, the shah had introduced many reforms for women in his country, including their right to be fully educated and to leave their heads uncovered (which infuriated the mullahs). Many of the growing number of medical students in Iran were young women. But in spite of this he reinforced my question about women not having the same intelligence or ability as men by answering, “Not so far. Maybe you will become in the future.”