Audition (72 page)

This worked fine until I was interviewing Jerry Seinfeld in 1992, and he got going on some riff about a laundry detergent that had ads boasting it could remove bloodstains. “If you’ve got bloodstains, you know, laundry should not be your biggest concern,” he said. “There should be something else you’re doing if you’re bleeding, besides the wash.” The crew and I were almost bursting keeping it in and I finally said, “Okay, you can laugh.” We just about exploded, whereupon Seinfeld shouted, “You’re all fired. All of you. Clean out your desks.” So there went that rule—and our jobs—until we all rehired ourselves.

Over the years I amassed so many interviews that we started putting together compilation
Specials
that drew on segments from my earlier interviews. The first,
The 50th Barbara Walters Special
, ran in 1988 and was a huge deal at the time—two hours of excerpts from seventy interviews. Bill Geddie did a terrific job putting it all together, with me peering over his shoulder the whole time. Bill loves to tell the story of the “rule” I laid down when we first met. “If I feel strongly about something and you don’t, I win. If you feel strongly and I don’t, then you win. But if I feel strongly and you feel strongly, I win.” We have been together for almost twenty years. And sometimes I really am right.

The old interviews turned out to be gold mines. The original, uncut interviews were at least an hour if not two, but what we’d run on air was only eight or ten minutes long. So we had all sorts of unused material to merge into theme compilations, like love and humor and fame. The one I particularly liked was called
The Price of Fame
. Here we plucked whatever the star had said about being a celebrity, the up- and the downsides. The line I remember best came from Paul Newman, who told me when he had stopped signing autographs. “I was standing at a urinal…,” he said.

I did more serious theme programs for
20/20
. In 1985, for example, we devoted an hour to a program about the transmission of AIDS. There was a general feeling of panic at the time following the AIDS-related death of actor Rock Hudson. To give light, rather than heat, we aired a
Special
the night after Hudson died titled
AIDS—Facts Over Fear.
To prove that AIDS could not be transmitted through perspiration or tears, which was a widely held myth at the time, I held and kissed a two-year-old child with AIDS, who was clearly perspiring. Many viewers were horrified. But that was just the point. The doctor we had on the show assured us that he had been in close physical contact with more than six hundred AIDS patients over the years and never contracted the disease. I was very proud of that
Special
because I think it had an impact and helped to dispel some of the myths.

Perhaps my personal favorite was a one-hour
Special
on adoption in April 2001 called
Born in My Heart
. (You may remember that’s what I told my daughter, Jackie, when she was a little girl.) The idea for the
Special
came to me because there were so many of us at ABC, and especially on
20/20
, who had adopted children. Our hope was that sharing our stories might make a difference in someone else’s life as it had in ours.

The
Special
touched many people’s hearts. It was a lesson of love told by people who were expressing their most intimate thoughts, often with humor. Connie Chung, who is Chinese-American and was then a correspondent on
20/20
, and her Jewish husband, Maury Povich, told the story of their original request for a half-Chinese, half-Jewish baby and the adoption agency’s response: “By the time we find such a child, you will both be dead.” They ended up adopting a beautiful Caucasian boy they named Matthew.

Dr. Tim Johnson, our medical adviser, appeared with his grown son, Nolden, whom he and his wife, Nancy, had found abandoned years before in Indonesia. One of our producers who had done heartbreaking stories on the thousands of neglected orphans in Romania introduced us to the two Romanian little girls she had adopted. Sherrie Rollins Westin, the wife of ABC News president David Westin, appeared with her then six-year-old Chinese daughter, the enchanting Lily.

To me, however, the highlight of the program was my own daughter, Jackie, then thirty-three, who had agreed to be interviewed by ABC correspondent Cynthia McFadden, herself adopted.

Jackie told Cynthia how much she’d always resented being referred to as my adopted daughter. “I mean it’s like here you have a parent who loves you to death and you feel so close to. Yet everybody else is saying, ‘Don’t you want to find your
real
parents?’ Or ‘What if your
real
parents find you?’”

A “real” parent, she continued, had little to do with giving birth. “It’s the one who wipes your butt; it’s the one who takes a tissue and cleans up your tears; the one who is there for the good times and the bad.”

“Who is your real mother?” Cynthia asked.

“Barbara,” Jackie replied.

Interestingly Jackie insisted that it was much harder being the child of a famous woman—“hands down,” she put it—than being adopted. As a child, she said, she had skirted the issue of my celebrity by first telling her friends that I was a teacher, and then eased closer to the truth by telling them that I was on TV and “kind of famous.” When one friend responded, “Wow! Your mom is Oprah Winfrey!!!” Jackie said, “I about lost it. And I thought, Well, she could be.”

I’d always felt that Jackie was born to be mine and, at the end of the interview, it was lovely to hear that Jackie felt the same way. “I was supposed to be in her life,” Jackie said. “I can’t imagine myself with anybody else.”

F
IVE MONTHS
after the adoption
Special
aired, the World Trade Center was attacked. I was at home on the morning of September 11, 2001, and saw the planes crashing into the towers on television. I raced to the office, where Peter Jennings was already on the air. I was a huge fan of Peter’s on the air but not always a fan out of the studio. I thought he was one of the best journalists in all of television but inside the company he had the reputation of being short-tempered and rude to correspondents, including me. He could also be dismissive and abrupt while broadcasting and pretty much hog the airtime. When this was brought to his attention, especially in my case because we often worked together on special events, he would write notes to me apologizing. Then it would happen again. He almost couldn’t help himself. But he will always have my deepest respect for the magnificent job he did on 9/11 and the days after. They would be his finest hours, his finest days. He never left the studio, bringing in interviews and reports from all over the country and indeed from all over the world.

To this day I remember the acrid smell of smoke that drifted the five miles north from the destroyed World Trade Center to ABC on Sixty-sixth Street. I was too busy to be frightened. Jackie kept trying to call from Maine but all the circuits were busy, and she couldn’t get through. When she finally reached me, I told her I was fine, and that was the last personal call I could have for two weeks. The news department gave out assignments. Mine was to try to interview any survivors, a very difficult task because they were in such a terrible state of shock. I did manage to interview the owners and the chef of Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower; more than seventy staff members and close to ninety guests were missing. The owners were crying, so was the chef. Nobody knew at that point who had died or who might have lived. Over the next days I was deluged with phone calls and pictures from the relatives and friends of the people who had been in the restaurant, hoping against hope that someone might have seen them alive. I, along with a great many other correspondents, went into the studio with Peter and presented our reports. But tragically, in my case, it soon became apparent that everyone at the restaurant that morning had been killed.

Six days after the attack I sat down with one of the heroes of 9/11, the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani. It was late at night and he was exhausted, having spent his days and nights post–9/11 visiting firehouses, police stations, the morgue, the first responders at the hellish site, comforting the families of the fallen, updating the death toll at a daily press conference.

The mayor was determined to return the city to normalcy, to rally New Yorkers to go about their everyday lives while trying to cope with his own anguish. “You feel terrible and you cry, or you want to cry and then you say to yourself, ‘I can’t. I’ve got to figure out how we encourage people to figure out some way to get beyond this,’” he said. If he was comforting millions of New Yorkers and, indeed, people all over the country, who, I asked, was comforting him? This was not an idle question. I had noticed Judith Nathan, his then so-called companion and now his wife, standing in the shadows. (Giuliani was in the midst of a bitter divorce.) “Judith Nathan, who I care for very much and who cares for me and understands me, is an enormous source of strength,” he said. It was the first time he had identified her in such terms.

Giuliani went on to draw lessons from the Battle of Britain and how the people of London had taken “terrible casualties, terrible losses,” but never given up. He quoted Winston Churchill: “Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

A year after 9/11, we aired a special memorial program,
Grief Hour
, with a group of widows and children of men who had died in the attack. We taped it over the year at a counseling center on Long Island where therapists were helping family members, some of whom were very young, to rebuild their lives. One could not help but feel great pain listening to them. Some of the youngest children still refused to believe that their fathers were gone. After a year of denial, several of the widows were just now experiencing the pain of reality. As one young widow put it: “A friend of mine said, ‘Oh, we miss you.’ I said, ‘I miss me, too. Don’t be looking for me anytime soon.’”

I stayed in touch with some of the widows, a few of whom remarried. The children, too, over time, recovered, at least to some degree. Children are often more resilient than one feels possible. Gradually I lost contact with them, but when you become involved in people’s lives, even for a short time, you can’t help but be affected. I feel this way whenever I do an interview with people who have suffered through a tragedy. It affects you, it stays with you. You don’t remember it every day, but it is part of what makes you appreciative of your own life and sensitive to the enormous difficulties that others face.

I
T WAS THE CELEBRITY
Specials
, however, that continued to make the network happiest. People just couldn’t get enough of the stars. They were also a huge financial engine for ABC. The
New York Times
suggested that between
20/20
and the
Specials
, I was bringing in more profits than any other broadcast journalist. Yet I can’t forget that, in 1991, fifteen years after I had come to ABC and long after I’d begun creating those profits, my contract came up for renewal, and when ABC failed to act within its exclusive renegotiation period, I seriously considered leaving the company.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I couldn’t get Roone Arledge’s attention. Roone had a reputation of never answering phone calls and letting matters just drift until the person either gave up or agreed to whatever negotiation Roone wanted. My concern wasn’t money. It was personal. I felt that, even though I was supposedly a huge success, Roone didn’t care whether I stayed or not. At least that is how it seemed to me. Roone loved the courtship of adding a new personality to the ABC roster. Though I knew that if you asked him, he would tell you that he and I were great friends, I simply wasn’t on his radar. He was busy catching other fish. In the meantime I was on another network’s hook. I had an astounding offer from CBS.

I had been approached by Howard Stringer, then president of the CBS Broadcast Group (now Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and CEO of Sony Corporation), and Laurence Tisch, the CEO and president of CBS. We had a secret meeting, which I realize now I should not have kept secret. I should have met with them in the most popular restaurant in town so that it would come to Roone’s attention. But I didn’t, so only I knew the tempting offer they made to me: my own newsmagazine program in a great prime-time period—10:00 p.m. on Mondays—with the best possible producers (one of whom, Andrew Heyward, would later become the president of CBS News). And the salary? A staggering $10 million a year!

I discussed all this in confidence with my very close friend Suzanne Goodson, during our regular weekend walks around the Reservoir in Central Park. Suzanne is one of the least judgmental people I know, and the only criterion in her advice was whether or not I would be happy. My wise and most trusted adviser, Lee Stevens, had died, and my new agent, Marvin Josephson, had been in Israel for weeks because his daughters were there learning Hebrew. I called him about the CBS offer, but he was reluctant to return. I should have insisted that he come back. I didn’t. (I have never been as aggressive in real life as I can be in trying to get interviews.) So Suzanne was my sounding board and let me talk things out.

“Do I want to climb another mountain?” I mused to her aloud. “Just think of the furor over the $10 million salary. Do I want to go through the same scrutiny by the press and have my ratings put under a microscope every week?” I’d been anxious about anchoring
20/20
by myself and turned down that offer, so did I really want to take a chance on anchoring a brand-new newsmagazine at a new network with new producers, no matter how good they were? I joked, “I don’t even know where the ladies’ room is.” And I said to Suzanne and myself, “The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t.”

I cannot figure out to this day why I didn’t tell Roone about the CBS discussion. (I didn’t even ask my faraway agent to see if Roone would match the offer.) Roone continued to be very remote, but he must have known something was up because he asked his closest aide, Joanna Bistany, to take me to dinner and discuss the matter. By that time, I had all but made my decision. I would stay in the place with the ladies’ room I knew. Then and there, I told Joanne I was staying. She spilled her wine. Just like that, with no further negotiation, I turned down CBS. The very next morning, practically at dawn, a new letter of intent arrived at my home from ABC and I signed it, agreeing to stay for another five years.