Audition (50 page)

“You needed a place where you could create a brand-new career,” Herb Schlosser told me. “That would not have happened at NBC,” Dick Wald concurred. “You would never have been able to do
Specials
at NBC. They had no plans to do any newsmagazine shows, and you would certainly not have had a chance in hell of being an anchor or coanchor on the evening news.”

Well, what an eye-opener! For thirty years I had wondered, even agonized at times, if I had made the right decision. The parting was so difficult and distressing. Now, finally, I know that I did not make a mistake. I can’t tell you what a relief, even after all this time, it is to know that. Even though what followed was so much worse.

“Don’t let the bastards get you down”

I
T WAS A TERRIBLE
summer. I was convinced that I had made an awful mistake by leaving NBC. Every day reinforced that opinion. I remember thinking I should go to a psychiatrist so that I would have someone sympathetic to talk to. But there was no point. There was nothing anyone could do for me. A nice relaxing nervous breakdown might have helped, but I couldn’t afford that.

Since NBC was holding me to my contract, I couldn’t do any work for ABC. I was put out to pasture for the three summer months, and rather than enjoy the luxury, I hated it. It was not that my work was my life—I did, and do, have friends and interests and, of course, my daughter—but once I left NBC, I was completely cut off from what was professionally familiar, rewarding, and fulfilling. The future looked very bleak.

Harry and I finally met with Bill Sheehan over lunch in Los Angeles. I recall feeling as if I were entering an arranged marriage and meeting my fiancé for the first time under the watchful eye of a chaperone. But while some arranged marriages are happy and successful, this one did not look promising. Harry was sardonic and sour. But the die was cast for him as well as for me. For now, neither of us had a way out. We shook hands at the end of the lunch. As I remember, I said something like, “You won’t be sorry.” Harry smiled a tight little smile, and we went about our day. Poor man, he must have been miserable.

But the misery quickly became mine. We were in Los Angeles for a meeting with the ABC affiliates from all over the country. This was an extremely important meeting. One, I was about to be introduced to the owners and general managers of all the local stations carrying ABC’s programming, many of whom were betting on ABC News to rise in the ratings and help to lift the rest of their programs. Equally important, I was going to tell my new colleagues just why it was so peachy that ABC News was going to expand from its thirty-minute format first to forty-five minutes and eventually to an hour.

Remember, the longer news was one of the major reasons that I had decided to make the move. Remember, too, that I had been told emphatically by all the top ABC executives that they were committed to the expansion of the broadcast so that I could supplement the news of the day with brief newsmaker interviews. I assumed that Bill Sheehan had already delivered this message to their affiliates and I was not to be the messenger but the cheering section. So I was excited before the meeting and sure that this expanded program would be well received. But as it turned out, no ABC executive had even warned the affiliates of what was coming, let alone endorsed it.

Bill Sheehan made a few lame remarks at the meeting about the expanded news show being “inevitable” and that ABC would like to lead. Harry, too, put in his two cents about the expansion, but two cents wasn’t going to do it. Obviously he was leaving it to me to make the case. Now I wonder: Did the news division know all along that the affiliates would fight this move? Had they offered me the extra time just to get me to sign the contract?

To say that the meeting did not go well is to put it mildly. I gave my impassioned speech about the value of being the first network to lengthen the national news and the time it would give me to do headliner interviews. But instead of applause, there was a chilling silence. They were too polite to boo me off the stage, but I felt they wanted to.

Harry, on the other hand, took the podium to thunderous applause. The adoration continued during his off-the-cuff remarks. “We won’t be cutesy, we won’t be catty,” Harry informed the doting audience. “And if we don’t like each other, nobody out there will know it.” “Harry, you’ll get to like me,” I quickly interjected. That, at least, got a laugh from the affiliates, but it was obvious where their affection lay. Because of my strong support for expanding the news, I wasn’t ABC’s newest star, I was ABC’s million-dollar disaster.

And so died the dream of the hour-long news broadcast I’d been promised and with it, my hope of presenting regular interviews that would set us apart from the other news broadcasts. (By the way, the hour-long news program still hasn’t happened. The local affiliates then and now have no intention of giving up one second of their lucrative local newscasts.)

One blow followed another during that desultory summer. At some point, after we returned to New York, I went over to ABC News on Sixty-sixth Street and Columbus Avenue to see where I would be working in the fall. I didn’t dare go inside because of the NBC directive that I not set foot in an ABC newsroom while I was still under contract. Looking at the outside of the place was just as disheartening. I found a small, ordinary-looking building in the middle of a bunch of west side apartment houses. Years later ABC would build a huge complex, but now there was just this small building with, from what I could see through the revolving door, only a single elevator. How could I have left one of the world’s greatest news divisions and my sunny office overlooking the famous skating rink at Rockefeller Center, and at Christmastime, the giant tree, to come to this third-rate, nothing building? I walked by the place a few times, then left quickly for fear of being seen.

I felt even more lost as the summer continued. The Bicentennial celebrations were in full swing all over the country—without me. My last broadcast on the
Today
show had included a taped piece I’d done on the Bicentennial in my home state of Massachusetts. But after that, because I wasn’t allowed to work, nothing. Over the Fourth of July weekend there was a parade in New York Harbor of hundreds of nineteenth-century “tall ships” from all over the world. I would have loved to have covered it, but instead, as I got dressed in the morning, I watched Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley describe the celebration. Later, as the guest of Alan Greenspan, I went to the ship where the ceremonies were taking place. My sometime date, John Warner, as head of the Bicentennial Committee, officiated. I tried to have a good time and forced a lot of smiles, but my heart was heavy.

That summer the presidential conventions were also being held. The Democratic convention, which nominated Jimmy Carter, began in New York a week after the Bicentennial celebration; the Republican convention, which nominated incumbent Gerald Ford, took place in August, in Kansas City, Missouri. ABC thought I should attend. After all, I would be reporting on election night. But I had no official position. I had worked at every convention since 1964, and there I was, twelve years later, wandering around with no real purpose and no place to go.

One night, feeling so outside things, I ventured into the NBC control room and saw many of my old friends. I felt such a pang. They were pleasant and polite, but they were also very busy, so I wandered back out into no-man’s-land. I went into the ABC control room. I knew no one there and they, too, were busy. It was not a time for introductions or pleasantries. I wandered off again.

Between conventions Bill Sheehan offered to set up a tour of ABC’s bureaus for me, and meetings with the correspondents. If I wanted, he said, I could go to a few of their European bureaus. But after I talked to a couple of their correspondents in Washington, the trip didn’t have much appeal.

The Washington correspondents were totally disgruntled. Bill Sheehan had no power, they told me. ABC News was disorganized and cheap. The cameras were old and outdated. There was no money. They had no suggestions for me other than that ABC should start spending some money on better equipment. I wondered if they resented my getting paid so much when that money could have purchased newer cameras. After I heard their complaints, there seemed no point in going to the London bureau or the Paris bureau to hear more of how awful everything was. So I repaired for a few weeks to a summerhouse I’d rented in Westhampton Beach on Long Island. Jackie was going to a little day camp, and I picked her up every day and took her for ice cream. I smiled for Jackie. I was cheerful for Jackie. But it was an act. My malaise was not helped by our summer neighbor, Howard Cosell. Howard was a very well-known ABC sportscaster but a melancholy and somewhat bitter man. For some reason he took to visiting me almost daily to complain: ABC didn’t appreciate him…. ABC certainly wouldn’t appreciate me…. Harry Reasoner paid no attention to him and wouldn’t to me…. I finally had to ask Howard to please not tell me any more.

The comedian Gilda Radner chose that summer to present her caricature of me—Baba Wawa—on
Saturday Night Live
. Audiences found her mimicry of my pronunciation of
l
and
r
as
w
hysterically funny. I found it extremely upsetting. I was feeling so down that I probably wouldn’t have found anything funny. But everyone else loved Gilda’s impersonation.

“Hewwo! This is Baba Wawa hewe to say fawewell,” Gilda said one Saturday night. “This is my wast moment on NBC and I want to wemind you to wook fow me awong with Hawwy Weasoneh weeknights at seven o’cwock.

“I want to take this oppohtunity to apowogize to NBC,” she continued. “I don’t wike weaving. Pwease twust me, it’s not sowuh gwapes, but, rathaw, that anotheh netwohk wecongizes in me a gweat tawent for dewivering wewevant news stowies with cwystal cwahity to miwwions of Americans. It’s the onwy weason I’m weaving.”

(By the way, I never had trouble with my
l
’s, only my
r
’s, but it made it funnier.)

People started calling me Baba Wawa behind my back, and even to my face. Sometimes they still do. But because I was so depressed at the time, I felt they were laughing
at
me rather than laughing at Gilda’s characterization
of
me.

My daughter, Jackie, set me straight. I was walking by her room one Saturday night when I heard her laughing. “Watch this,” she said. I watched. Gilda was doing Baba Wawa, and my young daughter thought it was really funny. I mumbled something about not thinking it was so clever, and Jackie said to me, “Oh, Mom. Lighten up.” Hearing that from Jackie made me realize that I was losing all perspective. Where was my sense of humor?

So I was pleased when I ran into Gilda sometime later in New York at an exhibition at the Canadian Mission to the United Nations. She must have been nervous when she saw me walking toward her. “I guess you know who I am,” I said to her, pronouncing my words very carefully and leaving out any
r
’s.

She nodded. And waited.

“Well, do me a favor,” I said. “Do me. Please go ahead and do me.”

We went into a corner, and she sat down and became Barbara Walters. She sat the way I sit, with one ankle tucked behind the other, leaned forward just as I do when I’m interviewing someone, and then she started talking.

It was right on. She was brilliant, and I told her so. She told me that she and I had the same makeup artist, Bobbie Armstrong, who had told her how I sit. Gilda also told me she had studied my way of speaking by watching tapes of
Not for Women Only.
We parted friends and I, along with most of America, was truly sad when she died of ovarian cancer in 1989 at the age of forty-two. I sent a note to her husband, Gene Wilder, which said simply: “She made me laugh. I will miss her. Baba Wawa.”

There sure wasn’t much else to laugh about during my summer in limbo. The negative stories about me continued unabated, and Harry’s attitude toward me began to harden. The not-so-subtle implication in the media was that I had been brought in by ABC to save his job. That put him in a lose-lose position. If the ratings improved, it would be seen as evidence that he needed my help. If they went down, we would both be considered failures.

The countdown began for our debut in early October. We rehearsed for two weeks as soon as my NBC contract expired in September, during which time Harry was civil but hardly friendly. The biggest challenge for me was being handed late-breaking news that had to be instantly incorporated into the broadcast while other stories were just as instantly killed.

This was by far my toughest audition, and the pressure was intense. ABC had invested a lot of money in the new broadcast. The set was new. The executive producer was new. The writers were new. Additional correspondents were being hired, several of them, I was happy to see, women. All in all the national news budget had been boosted by 25 percent.

The broadcast was being promoted and advertised in major newspapers all over the country. The picture of me was ghastly. There was Harry looking straight into the camera as any anchorman would. And there was I, looking off into the distance with big, wide eyes, like some sort of starlet. Hardly the image of a coanchor.

The program was called
ABC Evening News with Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters.
It didn’t occur to anyone, including me, to have my name before Harry’s. In fact, my name would always be second to a male partner’s. For the fifteen years Hugh and I cohosted
20/20
, the sequence would always be Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters. But some people considered that an advantage. Years later, when I was interviewing Bing Crosby for one of my
Specials
, he told me that he always asked for second billing whenever he could, and never wanted his name above the title of a movie. That way, he said, if the film was a success, everyone would realize it was, in great part, because of him. But if the film failed, it would not be regarded as his failure. I thought that was very smart. (Remember this the next time you see an old Bing Crosby film on television.)