Audition (42 page)

After Frank’s death NBC immediately embarked on a search for a new male host for
Today.
Many names were flung about, including NBC “outsiders” like Dick Cavett and Bill Moyers and NBC News “insiders” like Tom Brokaw, Tom Snyder, Garrick Utley, and Jim Hartz. NBC decided on Hartz, a pleasant and popular local newscaster. They seemed to want someone easy and uncontroversial. There had been enough drama in the country and on the
Today
show. But just before the announcement was due to be made, Lee Stevens called the top guys at NBC and said, “Oh, fellows, by the way, there’s just one little thing.” He reminded them of the contract he had negotiated with them. “In case Frank McGee leaves the show,” Lee pointed out, “Barbara is going to be a cohost.”

On April 22, 1974, NBC sent out a press release announcing my new position. “Barbara Walters will be cohost of the NBC Television Network’s
Today
program from now on,” read the release from Donald Meaney, vice president of Television News Programming. “This is the first time the program has had a cohost and
Today
is now the only TV network news or public affairs program to have a female cohost.”

And so it was that I became the official cohost of the
Today
show. Two years later I would leave
Today
, but from that moment to the present, every woman on the morning television shows on every network has been a cohost. This is, of course, not noted in the history books, but it was a very big step at the time. And all because Lee Stevens slipped a clause into my contract that no one at NBC thought they would ever have to act on.

Fun and Games in Washington

W
ASHINGTON CAME ALIVE
after the president’s resignation in August 1974. Genial Gerald Ford replaced gloomy Richard Nixon, and the whole city seemed to take a deep breath and relax. As was said then, it was the end of the national nightmare. There was an air of gaiety, of celebration and relief. Unlike today, when foreign nations’ embassies are quite serious places with occasional staid dinners, the embassies in the Ford era seemed to vie with one another to be thought the most popular and exciting place to be.

The parties were invaluable to me in terms of making personal contacts. Nothing is more important to a journalist than a phone book full of home phone numbers and a person on the other end who knows and likes you. So these were working parties for me as well as fun.

The number one embassy when it came to extravagance and just plain enjoyment was the Iranian Embassy, presided over by its flamboyant bachelor ambassador, Ardeshir Zahedi. The shah of Iran, in his early twenties, had entered an arranged marriage that lasted a short time but produced a daughter, Princess Shahnaz Pahlavi. Zahedi had been married to the princess. They, too, had a daughter and then later divorced. But the shah maintained his friendship with his former son-in-law.

The ambassador was an imposing figure, tall and dark with a great head of hair, a prominent nose, a ready smile, and a glad hand for everyone. He was also smart, shrewd, and the shah’s most trusted adviser in the United States. No one knew if the shah approved, but Zahedi believed in large parties with hundreds of guests, flowing champagne, mounds of fresh Iranian caviar, and a bulging buffet with every kind of treat from hummus to hamburgers. You could eat your fill, mingle and mix, or just stand around and watch. There was plenty to watch. There were belly dancers to clap to, musicians to listen to, bands to dance to, politicians to talk to, and movie stars to ogle.

Elizabeth Taylor was a favorite guest. There were rumors that Miss Taylor and the ambassador were having an affair. But he never seemed to have a real girlfriend. As a matter of fact, when Farah Diba, the empress of Iran, paid visits to New York, Zahedi asked me to be his “date.” He usually took over a small, private room at “21” and invited a select group of dignitaries and friends. I had already met the Shahbanou, as she was called, and the ambassador could count on me to mind my manners and follow protocol. The next day I would be the recipient of several pounds of caviar.

NBC would not allow the members of its news department to accept gifts (no network news department allows it to this day), but caviar and candy, being perishable items, were allowed. Zahedi once sent me a Cartier watch for my birthday, which I not only returned to him but wrote a letter explaining why (it was, by the way, a very pretty watch). I also sent a copy to Dick Wald, head of NBC News, and kept a copy for myself. This turned out to have been a very wise thing to do. Shortly after the shah was overthrown in 1979, the new fundamentalist Islamic regime accused American reporters of being on the take. I was one of the reporters they publicly accused, mentioning a Cartier watch they had obviously found a record of in some file or other, but—aha!—I had the letter proving I had never accepted it. But all this was some years away from the swinging parties of the seventies given by the generous ambassador.

Washington had another bachelor ambassador, Alejandro Orfila of Argentina, who had also been married and divorced. He supposedly owned a lot of houses and land back in his home country and he, too, liked to have lavish parties, although not quite in the Zahedi league. Orfila was a serious man, as indeed were all the ambassadors. You didn’t get dispatched as your country’s chief diplomat to the most important post in the world if you were anything but first rate. I went to quite a few parties at the Argentine Embassy and had a very pleasant dalliance with Ambassador Orfila. We went out several times and I was startled when, out of the blue, he asked me to marry him. Was he kidding? I brushed off his proposal, if that’s what it was, and we continued to be friends. Maybe he just wanted an American wife.

Orfila went on to become the twice-elected secretary-general of the prestigious Organization of American States (OAS). We lost touch after he left Washington, but I’ve always remembered him fondly from that period of gaiety in the nation’s capital.

I was also seeing several men in New York. There was Alan Greenberg, known to his friends and colleagues as “Ace,” the brilliant banker who made the investment banking firm Bear Stearns the formidable institution it became. I had known Alan (I always called him Alan) ever since he came to New York from Oklahoma in the 1960s and eventually became “Ace.” He was extremely smart and funny. Today he’s happily married to Kathy, a charming lawyer, and is one of my closest and most trusted friends. Furthermore, he manages whatever money I have. I will always be grateful to have Alan in my life. I don’t know what I would do without him.

There was also a fascinating man named John Diebold, who wrote the visionary book
Automation
, which extended the meaning of automation beyond the car assembly lines in Detroit to business machines. He was a techie genius when it came to automating transactions and records in banks and health care. Don’t ask me more. That’s all I understood. His daughter went to the same school as Jackie, and we were introduced at a parents’ conference. John was one of the most considerate men I’d ever met. Of every man I knew then, John was the warmest and sweetest to Jackie.

He had imaginative taste. Jackie, Zelle, and I had both a pre-Thanksgiving and early Christmas dinner at John’s beautifully furnished apartment on the East River. (Icodel was having dinner with her children.) John had his wonderful cook make everything a little girl would like, from corn pudding and sweet potatoes with marshmallows to yummy banana splits for dessert. One Christmas, John gave Jackie a miniature horse farm with stables and six tiny horses with separate saddles. She was thrilled. Much better than the mouse house.

Why am I going into all this? Because it was a very heady and happy time for me. I had never had those years in my early twenties and thirties when one dated in a lighthearted way. I was too concerned with my family, trying to keep us all afloat, both emotionally and financially. Then, in my beginning years at NBC, it was work, work, work. It still was, but the rewards were greater, my status had grown, and I was no longer that serious girl who rarely smiled. Finally, there had been my marriage to Lee and the birth of our daughter. Now in my early forties, I was experiencing what I had never really known before—fun and romances.

Please understand, too, that all of these men were not in my life exactly at the same time. And some I saw more than others. Before you say, “Enough already,” let me speak of two more.

Just before the Watergate hearings, I had gone to Los Angeles to visit my oldest and dearest friend, then and now, Joyce Ashley. Joyce was married to Ted Ashley (they later divorced), who headed Warner Brothers Pictures. They had a glorious home in Malibu right on the beach, and their neighbors were the actress Jennifer Jones and her hugely wealthy husband, Norton Simon, who had a magnificent art collection. He later gave it to an art museum he built in Pasadena, California, which bears his name. Jennifer was long past her movie career, but she was still a beautiful woman who, however, was so insecure about her looks that she changed clothes at least three times before any party she gave and always made sure the soles of her shoes were wiped clean so that they looked brand new.

Anyway, in spite of all this, or maybe because of all this, I liked Jennifer a lot. She was fey and funny, generous and thoughtful. One night she invited Joyce, Ted, and me to dinner and introduced us to an extremely attractive man named Matthew Byrne, who was a federal judge. Matt was about as appealing a person as I have ever met. A gregarious bachelor, he seemed to have a million friends and was one of the most sought-after men in Los Angeles. However, coming from a very close family (he supported his mother, sister, and nephew) he had never shown any signs of wanting to marry.

At first Matt wasn’t too crazy about me. He had become rather well-known because he was the judge assigned to the famous 1973 trial of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg had been accused of espionage, theft, and conspiracy by the government for leaking the secret Pentagon Papers to the
New York Times
. For the first half hour we met, I badgered Byrne with questions about Ellsberg and the trial, when all he wanted to do was have a scotch and relax. He told me later he almost walked out. But I must have calmed down and done something right, because after that we went out almost every night that I was in Los Angeles.

We had a lovely little romance but never quite made it to the point of being deeply serious. I may have been had Matt wanted it, but I can’t recall his ever saying he loved me. Did he ever love anyone? Even after his mother died, he never married.

He could have had an even more prestigious career, but he made one big mistake. During the Ellsberg trial, Matt had a supposedly secret meeting with one of Nixon’s top aides, John Ehrlichman, to discuss the possibility of him being named head of the FBI. The meeting could have been construed as a bribe at worst and, at best, improper. When it was leaked, it destroyed all chances of the appointment. I discussed this meeting only once with Matt, who swore that the meeting was not about the FBI job, but he wouldn’t say what it
was
about, so I don’t really know what happened. But Matt remained on the bench for the next thirty years as a very well thought-of federal judge.

We stayed loosely in touch over the years, and I was very touched when in the winter of 2006, I received a phone call from Matt’s grown nephew informing me that his uncle was dying of lung disease and would love to hear from me. I called Matt, who was very weak, and we joked about past moments in our lives. Before I hung up, I said, “I love you, dear friend.” Matt answered, “I love you too, dear friend.” That’s as close as we got to the
l
word. He died two weeks later.

Now just one more “gentleman caller,” as playwright Tennessee Williams would call him. Toward the end of the Watergate impeachment hearings in 1974, I was in New York for a few days when some mutual friends introduced me to a man I had sure heard a lot about. His name was Charles Revson and he was the multimillionaire founder and owner of Revlon cosmetics, which at that time was the most successful cosmetic company on the planet. Revson had just divorced his third wife by having her brought to his office on her birthday. The story goes that she thought she was going to be given a big share of Revlon stock as a present. Instead, Revson’s lawyers handed her a letter advising her that her husband was filing suit for divorce. It was in all the papers and just added to his reputation as a brilliant but hardly sentimental tycoon.

Revson was in his late sixties when I met him, divorced and rumored to be dating Lee Radziwill. So I was very surprised when friends who were in the perfume business and worked with Revson said he wanted to meet me. The things one remembers. It was summer. I was wearing a brand-new yellow silk pants suit. Pants suits were rather avant-garde at that time and I thought I looked pretty snazzy. However, over dinner, Revson told me he didn’t like the outfit, yellow was not my best color, and he would be happy to take me shopping. I thought he was out of his mind and told him so. Obviously that didn’t bother him one bit because he asked me out the next night, told me his yacht was going to the South of France, and he would like me to join his friends on a cruise. I told him I was going to Washington the next day to cover the impeachment hearings and so could not have dinner. As for the cruise, thanks but no thanks, for in my mind I was planning to go back to Los Angeles to be with my friend Joyce and see more of Matt Byrne. I just wasn’t interested in Charles Revson, millionaire or not. The next day, just as I was leaving my apartment for the plane to Washington, an enormous bouquet of roses arrived from him. There must have been six dozen long-stemmed roses, all wrapped in tissue paper. What to do? Nobody was home in my apartment. Dump them? All those roses? Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. So, like a fool, I carried them, along with my suitcase, on the airplane, balancing them on my lap, jabbing the person in the seat next to mine, and schlepping them all the way to my hotel in Washington.