Audition (71 page)

Ladies of
The View:
Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Rosie O’Donnell, Joy Behar, 2006

Current ladies of
The View:
Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Whoopi Goldberg, Sherri Shepherd, Joy Behar, 2007

With my Maltese, Pudgy, in front of the pistachio house in Florida, 1940s

Modeling in Paris for Carven, 1954

At Longchamps racetrack for a
Special
on NBC. I love the pictures of the men.

Norman Parkinson took this photograph—my favorite

In front of a painting in my living room

The world’s most perfect dog—Cha Cha Walters

Our divorce was amicable, but even so, a divorce has its confusion and its difficulties, especially if you have depended on your spouse to make the major financial decisions, as I had done. I had never paid much attention to my own affairs and had happily turned them over to Merv when we married. When we split up, I decided to take responsibility for my own financial well-being. I was fortunate to have a wise friend, Linda Wachner, who at that time was the president and CEO of a large public company called the Warnaco Group. Linda took me by the hand and introduced me to an expert accountant and another expert in insurance. She also helped me make some basic investment decisions. I was fortunate, but I empathize with the new divorcée who may have to make such decisions without someone savvy to help her.

I will always be grateful to Merv for his love and support of Jackie throughout her years of difficulty. He later married a much younger woman and they adopted two children. They are now divorced.

Since Merv lives in California and I in New York, our paths did not cross for many years. When they finally did, I found myself pleased to see him, and today we are friends.

I think that is enough about my personal life.

T
HE MOST POPULAR
of my celebrity
Specials
was, and is, the Oscar Night program, which we started in 1981. Since then I’ve interviewed almost every big star who graced a movie screen, from Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Mitchum, and Audrey Hepburn to Denzel Washington, Tom Cruise, and George Clooney, to Helen Mirren and Eddie Murphy.

Most people think I’m actually at the Academy Awards when I’m interviewing the stars, but I’m not. My producer, Bill Geddie, who has been producing the
Barbara Walters Specials
since 1988 (as well as being the co–executive producer of
The View
), always finds some wonderful location for me in which to do the opening and closing. Often, for the sake of a grand look, this involves climbs up and down staircases. (I’m terrified of heights.) I remember once we used the set of the epic musical
Sunset Boulevard
, and I had to walk down this long staircase that was supposedly in the home of the Gloria Swanson character. I was wearing spike heels and some long, billowy gown. I couldn’t cling to the banister and I couldn’t look down because I was talking to the camera. I thought I would never make it.

Another time, in another billowy ball gown, I had to glide down a very long escalator in a movie theater while the cameras recorded my descent. The escalator was so high and steep that what you couldn’t see on camera was a stagehand crouching in front of me so I would feel secure that someone was there to catch me if I fell. We did this descent four times. The stagehand, I think, deserved an Academy Award for valor.

Interviewing celebrities is often harder and much more time consuming than interviewing newsmakers or world leaders. People seem to think I just pick up the phone and get right through to Michael Douglas or Julia Roberts. Not so. Over the years there have been endless back-and-forths with agents, public relations representatives, lawyers, and managers. Sometimes it has taken months to confirm an interview. One of the most elusive stars was, you won’t be surprised, Katharine Hepburn. After pursuing her for months we finally settled on a Tuesday in October for our conversation. And wouldn’t you know it, the weekend before our interview I got a call from the League of Women Voters asking me to be on the panel that same night for the presidential debate between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. I phoned Miss Hepburn in Connecticut. “Would you mind changing our interview from Tuesday to Thursday?” I asked her. She was so thrilled to get out of the interview that it took us ten months to get her back.

The preparation is also much harder for the celebrity interviews. If you read the newspapers every day, which I did, and do, you’re basically up to speed on what a politician or world leader is up to. But there’s much more homework to do when you’re talking with a celebrity. Interviews with politicians and world leaders are about issues, but interviews with celebrities concern their lifestyle and their emotions. I scour every clip written about them, plumb their childhoods, watch the movies they’ve been in, pick up bits and pieces about them wherever I can. If I’ve done my homework well, at some point during the interview the celebrity may be surprised by what I know. Julia Roberts was very startled when I said, “You write poetry.” “How do you know
that
?” she asked. By reading, reading, reading, and then talking to anyone who might have some personal insight into the particular star I am talking to. The conversational format of the celebrity interviews almost demands that I know more about the subjects than they do.

I’ve already told you about writing every question I, and anyone around me, can think of. Working this way means that by the time I am ready to do the interview, I know every question and really don’t need the paper. It is actually just my security blanket. It also means that no matter what my subject says, or in what direction the interview goes, I can be on top of it. For me, however, asking the right questions has always been less important than listening to the answers. “What do you mean by that?” “How did you feel then?”

While I am on the subject, the biggest mistake interviewers make is to be tied to their questions, sometimes, unfortunately, questions they haven’t written themselves. The next biggest mistake is not to listen. And try not to interrupt. Earlier in my career, interrupting was my biggest failure.

Most often a big star wants to do an interview to plug his or her latest movie. Fine. But I try to get that out of the way as soon as possible, often in the introduction. Sometimes the person is trying to clear up a misconception. I make that easy by asking one of my favorite questions, “What is the biggest misconception about you?” These days, there’s a whole new trend—the interview as a confessional. Drive under the influence, cheat on your wife, take too many pills, go into rehab, make an apology—do an interview. You can fill in the names. That seems to be the daily fodder of syndicated entertainment news shows. On the Academy Award programs, however, we make an effort to go for the stars whose careers and personal lives are so interesting that they bear the test of time. We try to have at least one Oscar nominee.

Once we sit down for the actual interview, I try to get the subject to forget the lights and the cameras and just talk to me as if we were alone in the room. I ask everyone to leave the setting except for the camera crew, and, if the celebrity is a comedian, I ask the crew to please not laugh. I don’t want the sound of laughter to go out to the viewers.