Audition (46 page)

So this was my plan. Assuming I got the interview with President Sadat, I then intended to fly to Israel to pose the same questions to the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. I was going to run both interviews on the same program. Not only would people now perhaps understand the differences between the two countries and their leaders, but the two men might even discover some areas of agreement. So what if I didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize; it would make good television.

It didn’t happen.

I sat in my Cairo hotel room for several days, staring at the phone, willing it to ring. I’d already cleared my plan with Prime Minister Rabin, who was a very savvy politician, but there was silence from the Egyptians. To pass the time I talked travel plans on the phone with my producer, who was staying in the same hotel. There were no flights from Egypt to that “country that doesn’t exist,” so we would have to go via Cyprus or Athens. But it would be well worth it to secure the two interviews and run them back-to-back. Immediately after we hung up, the phone rang.

“It cannot be done,” said the Egyptian government official on the line. “If you intend to use an interview with President Sadat on the same hour or even on the same day as Rabin, you will not be allowed to speak with our president.”

How could the Egyptians have known my plans? Obviously they had tapped my line. So much for Barbara Walters, peacemaker. I gave the official my word that I would not combine my interview with Sadat with any other interview. But I still wasn’t cleared to see him. I would be interviewed the next day by one of his aides, the official told me. Then they would see.

I played it safe. Trying to be sensitive to Muslim conservative taste, I dressed in a black jacket and an ankle-length black skirt that I had bought for the occasion. I had no idea who or what to expect when I arrived at the president’s house in Giza. I was taken to a marble-floored reception room and served
chai
—delicious spiced tea—when the door opened and a beautiful woman walked in. She was dressed in a chic green pants suit.

“I am Jehan Sadat,” she said.

We talked for an hour, and I discovered what a remarkable woman Mrs. Anwar Sadat was—and is. She was wearing the same pants suit she had worn to the front lines to encourage the Egyptian troops during the 1973 war. No other wife of an Egyptian leader had ever done that, either wear pants or go to see the male troops. She had also enrolled at Cairo University, hoping to encourage other women to seek higher education, and was planning to take her exams on live television. In spite of fierce religious opposition, she was championing birth control to curb Egypt’s runaway population crush. She was also spearheading the building of homes for the disabled and for orphans and advocating rights for women going through divorce.

Sadat himself had been divorced, with children, when he met the fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who was soon to be his wife. To Jehan, born of an English mother and an Egyptian father, Sadat was a hero. An Egyptian nationalist and revolutionary, he had been imprisoned for his efforts to rid the country of its British colonialists and their puppet, the corrupt King Farouk. Jehan’s family did not approve of their daughter’s choice. Sadat was many years older than she, divorced, and penniless. But the couple married anyway, and from what I could see, it was a marriage of respect and affection.

Over the years and over many more cups of
chai
, Jehan and I became lifelong friends. I admired her then and now, and I was cleared for the interview with her husband. Her approval was the one that he needed.

There is an image that has stuck in my mind for more than thirty years. When I arrived for the interview, I noticed a slight, bemused man sitting on one of the empty boxes our television equipment had come in, puffing on a pipe and watching his sitting room being transformed by the crew setting up the cameras and microphones, monitors and lights. There were no security guards, aides, or secretaries around him. The president of Egypt was simply taking in the scene.

Our interview, the first of many over the years, went well. Sadat repeated over and over that he wanted peace with Israel, the conditions being Israel’s return of the land it had occupied since 1967 and the formation of a legitimate Palestinian state. “The core of the problem is Palestinian,” he said. Most important, he answered the one question everyone wanted to know: Would he consider meeting with Prime Minister Rabin?

“It is impossible now. Impossible. After twenty-six years of hard feelings, violence, wars, hatred, bitterness—suddenly we meet? This is not logical at all.”

The answer, however, did not sound entirely final but rather as somewhat hopeful because he had said impossible “now.” We parted on a warm note. Bar-ba-ra, he called me. Always those three syllables, with emphasis on the middle syllable.
Bar-BA-ra.
I can hear his voice now as I write this. (Years later, after her husband’s death, Mrs. Sadat told me that what she remembered best about her husband was his deep booming voice.)

I had certainly not found Sadat to be the feared ogre so many expected. He was personable, candid, and totally charismatic. So much so that I was concerned he would overshadow Prime Minister Rabin, who, though brilliant, often came over in interviews as taciturn and humorless.

But in our interview in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Rabin turned out to be extremely talkative. He answered my questions and afterward asked many of his own. Rabin was extremely curious about Sadat, a man he had never met and indeed might never meet. “What is he like?” “What did he say?” “What did you think of him?” I was not presumptuous enough to think of myself as an official intermediary, but I couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that as a reporter, I could speak to both men and, in effect, deliver the messages they could not relay in person. So I described Sadat’s personality to Rabin and told him my impression that Sadat was a thoughtful and reasonable man. I also told him my feeling that Sadat was not ruling out a meeting but was waiting until the time was right.

Back in New York the two interviews aired on
Today
on two successive days. Large portions of the interviews also ran on the evening news programs. It was the beginning of the fall television season in September, and they were very well received, especially the segments with Sadat. This was his introduction to the American people and they were fascinated by the man who would later become an American hero for being the first Muslim leader to make peace with Israel. I was there for that, too, which I’ll tell you about later. Sadly, I would also be in Cairo again for Sadat’s funeral, after he was assassinated in 1981, for making that peace.

In 1975 morning television was having its own little war.
Good Morning America
made its debut on ABC in November. It was our first serious challenge at
Today
, but hardly a surprise. Some months before the kickoff of the program, I had been approached by an ABC board member to see if I might be interested in coming to ABC. It was my first contact with ABC, and, at the time, seemed very unusual to me.

The ABC board member was a friend, an older, very nice, and successful businessman named Jack Hausman. He and his wife, Ethel, had a daughter with cerebral palsy, and in the past they had tried to be helpful with my sister. They thought she might have enjoyed visiting and perhaps working in one of the sheltered workshops they ran for people with the neurological disorder. Jackie did visit but felt it was not a place for her. Still, I appreciated their interest and every year, volunteered to host their telethon, which raised money to fund research for cerebral palsy.

Leonard Goldenson, the founder and chairman of ABC, Inc., also had a child, a daughter, with cerebral palsy. I knew him only slightly, but he and Jack Hausman, because of their mutual concern, were close friends and had cofounded the United Cerebral Palsy Association. Hausman was on the board of ABC. The two of them must have talked because one day, out of the blue, Hausman called and asked if he could see me. It was during that meeting that he inquired if I had any interest in leaving NBC and coming to ABC, which was considering doing its own morning show. He told me that ABC would be willing to pay me a great deal of money.

I gave my answer immediately. “Thank you, but no,” I said. Why would I want to leave a successful morning program, where I was happy, for an unproven morning program at a rival network? So
Good Morning America
did not debut with me, but instead with its cohosts (note the “co”) David Hartman and Nancy Dussault. (She would be replaced a year later by Joan Lunden.) Though
GMA
’s cohosts were a very attractive team, they never came close to beating us. I didn’t give ABC another thought.

I was in my happiest place in years. The
Today
show was bringing in ten million dollars a year in profits, making it NBC’s most lucrative daytime program and the envy of other networks. Furthermore, my contribution was being recognized. In 1975 the International Radio and Television Society named me “Broadcaster of the Year,” a very prestigious honor. This award meant a good deal to me because it came from my colleagues in the television industry. I also won the Emmy for the “best host or hostess of a talk, service, or variety series.” This award, too, meant a great deal to me, but there was a little hitch. Emmy nominations are made by the individual programs, and Stuart Schulberg,
Today
’s producer, also entered Jim Hartz for the award. Jim might have felt insulted, Stu explained to me, if he’d entered my name alone.

That smarted a bit. For all that I was the cohost, on some level I was obviously still thought of as “the woman” and not as important as “the man.” I wondered if Stuart would have worried about
my
feelings if he’d only nominated Hartz. Somehow it was acceptable to nominate the man without the woman, as had been done so many times before, but not the reverse.

Both Jim and I made it through the initial vote of the Emmy committee and were on the final list of four nominees. I ended up winning the award, but because Jim and I had been put in competition with each other, I couldn’t really savor the moment. “I’m sorry that my partner didn’t get this award because he really deserved it,” I said in my remarks. “So I accept it for both of us.”

That slight aside, the atmosphere on the program was more upbeat than it had been in years. Jim was an easygoing presence. Since the Bicentennial was coming up, his main assignment was to broadcast from every state in the country, so he was often on the program just to do special reports. This seemed to be fine with him, and I was holding the fort in the studio, conducting the major interviews. For the first time I was also reading the news headlines at the top of the program, a task that had in the past gone only to the male host.

I was exercising another first as well in 1975. Besides inserting the cohost clause into my contract, Lee Stevens had added the provision that NBC would allow me to develop and host a pilot for a new program: my own
Special.
The ratings had been so high for Prince Charles’s investiture, Princess Anne’s wedding, and the shah’s gala at Persepolis that I thought the viewers might want to see more glamour and royalty. NBC agreed, so off I went to Paris with a producer named Lucy Jarvis to pursue additional glitz for the viewers. It was a disaster.

What I know now is that European royalty, unless you’re talking about the queen of England and her immediate family, doesn’t really sell, because what you’re getting are little-known royals. But we clung to hope back then and lined up the duke and duchess of Orleans, pretenders to the French throne. They were a perfectly nice couple who fell under the heading of “Who cares?” We filmed my dinner with them at Maxim’s and then went off to see the duke’s racehorses running at Longchamps. We did another segment at Versailles, which was also a giant yawn. The curator, who had been there for years, opened Marie Antoinette’s private rooms for us. Marie Antoinette, as you know, was the queen of France until her head was chopped off during the French Revolution in 1793, and I almost envied her as the curator showed us every single bauble and bijou in her apartments. It was agony. I mean, how many satin-appliquéd butterflies can you ooh and ahh over? But we had to kowtow to him. It took days and was a royal bore.

In the midst of all this I got an emergency phone call from my mother in Florida. My father was in the hospital, about to have abdominal surgery. I flew home immediately and made sure he was all right. It seemed to be a not-too-serious procedure. Then, as soon as I could, I flew right back to Europe. I had to help my mother, who was frightened, while at the same time, I couldn’t leave my film crew and producer in Europe in the lurch. I was exhausted.

At least when I returned, we had real royalty to film—Queen Margrethe of Denmark and her husband, Prince Henrik, a former French diplomat. Her story was more interesting. She was the first woman to sit on the throne of Denmark. The royal couple had two adorable little princes, one of whom fell off a horse while we were filming and was summarily placed right back in the saddle by his parents. That was kind of nice and interesting. Less so was the tour Queen Margrethe gave us of her unprepossessing palace, but at least there weren’t any satin-appliquéd butterflies.

We came home without much. The resulting pilot program, which was supposed to morph into a series titled
Barbara Walters Visits
, this first visit being “Royal Lovers,” did not do well. NBC chose to run it at 1:30 in the afternoon, hardly prime time. Most of the viewers at that hour were women who were more apt to be putting their children down for a nap than fantasizing about being married to a prince. It got no ratings. I certainly didn’t think then that doing celebrity
Specials
of any nature was a good idea. No twenty-twenty foresight for me.

What concerned me more than the ratings flop was the news from Florida. Although my father’s operation had been a success, he was quite fragile and needed help walking, dressing, and going to the bathroom. It was suggested that he have a male nurse when he went home from the hospital. But the Miami apartment was very small—two bedrooms, a living room, and a tiny kitchen. My mother shared a bedroom with my sister. A nurse sitting in my father’s room or in the living room all day seemed like a very bad idea to my mother. She also worried that my father wouldn’t get the care he needed. She was nervous and afraid, and that meant that my sister was nervous and afraid, too.