"Barbara Walters never does succeed at a love affair, at least with another person."That's just one of the notable quips from from Kyle Smith's superbly sardonic review for the Wall Street Journal of Audition, the mindless memoirs from one Barbara Walters Katz Guber Adelson.
Here's a couple more:
Who is Barbara Walters? She is a journalist who cannot write ("Just before the ax fell, lightning struck and my life changed, never to be the same again"). She is the veteran of a major TV network's news division who once wedged a piece on her own apartment into a prime-time broadcast. She is a celebrity who is most famous for her orbital relationship with other celebrities. Immensely rich and familiar to all, she has been around forever without anyone quite knowing why...
Ms. Walters has interviewed many frightening individuals (Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi, Tom Cruise) and every U.S. president from Nixon on. She is an eyewitness to history, but then so was Forrest Gump. In "Audition," world leaders and epochal events are remembered for how they helped Barbara or about how she looked. In many cases Ms. Walters -- who, as a young woman, modeled in Paris and first appeared on morning television in a bathing suit -- admits flirting up her prey. The section on her girlish jaunt through the Bay of Pigs in a boat with a smitten Fidel Castro in 1977 could be broken out for re-publication as a Harlequin paperback.
Behold history according to Barbara. "President Kennedy was lying in state in the rotunda. My job was to report on both the dignitaries and the long lines of everyday people arriving to pay their last respects. I found an old film clip from that day. I'm wearing a black coat. I have long dark hair." On Indira Gandhi: "She and I had the same complaints. I also didn't much like my kitchen." After a couple of dutiful pages on 1973's Yom Kippur War in the Mideast, she segues with: "In 1975 morning television was having its own little war."...
We learn that Ms. Walters periodically went out with lawyer Roy Cohn in the 1960s -- she didn't know he was gay and though she found his role in McCarthyism "despicable," she once considered marrying him (!) because he "bought a large town house," one big enough to accommodate her parents and sister as well. Then she writes that Cohn "had his face lifted several times." A better memoirist might have offered an aside with information about herself that the reader knows well, if only to joke about it...
