Barbara Walters, whose career spanned nearly the entire history of television, was a master at alchemizing news into showbiz, and vice versa. Revisit Nicholas Lemann, from 2008, on how Walters helped invent a part of American culture.
Walters’s personal life has been rough going. In “Audition,” she lets us in on some exciting romances she’s had— with, among others, Alan Greenspan, a French hotel caterer named Claude Philippe, and, in the early seventies, Senator Edward Brooke, who in the retelling was the most exciting of them all, because their affair was a secret , because he was bossy and elusive, and because he was black.
The interviews follow a series of informally codified rules. To break down the resistance of the most alluring subjects, Walters wages an intense, sometimes years-long campaign, evidently conducted mainly through snail mail, even long into the e-mail era, though it usually ripens into direct negotiations with lawyers, agents, press people, and other handlers.
Walters’s method can create jarring transitions—in 1977, she rushed from Dolly Parton to Anwar Sadat, and in 2006 had to skip an interview with Hugo Chávez because she was with the widow of a man eaten by a crocodile—and it consistently generates tut-tutting from colleagues, especially male ones. “Is Barbara a journalist, or is she Cher?” Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, asked when she was made an anchor.