Names drop like flies in hefty memoir from Walters

I'VE NEVER MET Barbara Walters, though I once stumbled into her reflected light on a red carpet for a charity gala as she swept ahead of me in a swish of satin.

In "Audition," her memoir, Walters, now 78, describes how hard it was to grab the spotlight in an era when serious news could only be delivered in the measured tones of the male anchor.

Beginning in Boston, where Walters was born, and concluding in New York, where she continues to work on her ABC specials and "The View," since her retirement from "20-20," she looks back on an extraordinary life in this nicely illustrated 624-page memoir, which could possibly have been a bit shorter.

Walters' narrative of her family life is tender: There's her father, Lou Walters, the mercurial nightclub impresario who fell in and out of fortune; her long-suffering mother; her mentally handicapped sister, Jackie. Walters devotes an entire chapter to the troubled teen years of her adopted daughter, Jackie (named in her sister's honor), who got hooked on amphetamines.

Getting her first job as a secretary in an ad agency because of her nice legs, Walters' big break comes at NBC in the 1960s, where she moves from writing press releases for the publicity department to doing Alpo dog food commercials as a "Today Girl." She breaks the mold and rises to fame as a reporter at "Today," working happily with host Hugh Downs. She clashes off-screen with his successor, Frank McGee, and later faces derision when she becomes ABC's "million-dollar

baby," the first female co-anchor of the evening news.

The book's name-dropping is endless and forgivable. Walters did know and often interview many of the world's most famous folk -- from Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin and the Shah of Iran to Henry Fonda, John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn. In between, she rounded up offbeat criminals, such as diet-doc-shooting Jean Harris, Martha Stewart and Patty Hearst.

More than once, she crossed the murky line between fly-on-the-wall reporter and participant in the news, as in her decision to deliver a secret message from the arms dealer Ghorbanifar to President Reagan during the Iran hostage crisis -- beseeching him to keep talking to Iran and to send more arms if he wanted the remaining hostages to be released.

"I knew the rules: a reporter is not supposed to become personally involved in a story and certainly not be allowed to act as a messenger. But like it or not, I was involved," Walters writes.

I had to look hard to find something truly newsy, until Page 254 in the chapter entitled, "Special Men in My Life." In 1973, unbeknown to all but her closest friends, the then-twice-divorced Walters began an affair with then-U.S. Sen. Edward W. Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, and an African-American.

"Oh. Yes," Walters adds coyly. "He was married."

"Ed Brooke was simply the most attractive, sexiest, funniest, charming, and impossible man. I was excited, fascinated, intrigued and infatuated."

This revelation had the media all atwitter, though I was more intrigued by Walters' humorous account of simultaneously dating the outgoing investment banker Alan "Ace" Greenberg, then a partner in Bear Stearns and later its chairman and chief executive; and the "soft-spoken" Alan Greenspan, then President Ford's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

Even when the men left their last names, her household staff was baffled, Walters writes:

"Greenberg. Greenspan. They sounded so much alike that both ladies were in despair. When they gave me the message I could only ask: Which one talked louder?"

We also learn that Greenspan, whom she recalls was a "nice dancer," gave Walters bad real estate advice in 1977, counseling her not to buy a four-bedroom Fifth Avenue co-op for $250,000 during New York's fiscal crisis. "So I didn't buy it. Today that apartment is worth at least $30 million," she writes. Walters' prose is best when she paints the pictures we can't see: On a 1975 trip to Cuba with "20-20," Fidel Castro hops into the driver's seat of his Jeep and takes Barbara on a wild ride through the Sierra Maestra mountains.

"As we splashed through rain-swollen streams, Castro handed me the tin of hard candies he kept on the dashboard to give to the children who swarmed around him at every stop. He also handed me his revolver. My job was to hold the candy and the gun over my head to keep them dry."

In case you're wondering, they didn't pull off the road, nor did they have a tryst two years later when he came to New York. "Castro and I were most definitely not lovers. No romance. Not even a pass. Nada," writes Walters.

Monica Lewinsky gets a chapter all her own. Most of the material is familiar, but Walters offers one priceless exchange the TV cameras missed: In the fall of 1998, Walters, intent on snagging Lewinsky for a "20-20" interview, entertains her twice at her own home. During lunch with her production staff, Lewinsky rattles on excitedly about the "infamous'" blue dress.

"To save money, she usually didn't pay to dry-clean her clothes until just before she was going to wear them. When she finally decided to wear the dress again, she showed it to Linda Tripp," writes Walters. "Then she noticed the stain and told Linda (and I will never forget these words) she figured it was either from Bill Clinton or it was spinach dip, for heaven's sake! Had it been spinach dip, Clinton would never have been impeached."