She had, the world now knows, a “long and rocky affair” with a married United States senator. She had her own daughter kidnapped (sort of). And wait till you hear about her White House tete-a-tete with a certain president from Georgia. Juicy revelations abound in “Audition,” the new memoir that only Barbara Walters could have written (and clearly did write herself). The 576-page tome - not counting the from “ABC” to “Ziegfeld Follies” index that almost perfectly summarizes her life's arc - reads like an extended, enjoyably informative episode of “The View.” “The View” works best when creator/mother hen Walters shows up to impose a modicum of journalistic order and context on things. And to shamelessly (but legitimately) name-drop. So it is with “Audition,” where Walters tells a well-organized, conversational tale of growing up with an impresario father whose career was much more mercurial than anyone might have imagined. When Frank McGee arrived as “Today” host in 1971, Walters was in her seventh year as the grueling morning show's co-host in all but name only (no woman had ever been given the title). In a meeting with NBC's president, newcomer McGee asked for - and was given - the right to ask every question during all “important” interviews. Walters pushed back and won the right to ask the fourth question. But only if time permitted. Walters covers her already well-covered move to ABC in 1976 as the first female co-anchor of a nightly news broadcast. We also learn she dated future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and had a passionate, clandestine affair with married, black Republican Sen. Edward W. Brooke. That finally ended when she and the Massachusetts senator decided disclosure could ruin their respective careers. But that wasn't enough to stop her from starting up with “simply the most attractive, sexiest, funniest, charming and impossible man” in 1973. “Though racial tolerance was on the rise - interracial marriages more than doubled in the 1970s - having a romance with a married black senator would have raised more than eyebrows,” Walters writes. “I had a daughter to think about and a network that would be less than thrilled to see me involved in any kind of scandal. None of that seemed to matter to me.” Years later, Brooke, who had divorced and remarried, developed breast cancer. He went public to alert other men to the possibility. “I thought of writing to him to say how courageous he was, but I decided not to,” Walters writes. “Our relationship seemed so long ago. For a time, however, it was a very important one in my life.” As of Friday, Brooke had declined comment on Walters or the book. Other notable aspects of “Audition” include Barbara's accounts of controversial stories and incidents that were not revealed in her shows. When her rebellious teen daughter Jackie ran away and ended up at a house of stoners in the Midwest, Walters and the head of Phoenix House arranged for a “transport person” to extract Jackie and take her to a school for troubled adolescents, where she turned around her life. When she was 10, Jackie got to spend a day at the White House with 11-year-old Amy Carter in 1978. When Walters arrived to pick up her daughter, she and Walter Cronkite (who was there for another reason) were invited to have coffee with Jimmy Carter. They hoped to hear something newsworthy. “Instead, the president took the opportunity to tell us about his hemorrhoids,” Walters writes. Another exciting moment in Barbara's career was when Panamanian dictator Gen. Omar Torrijos kept her close to him in April 1978 while the US Senate debated turning over control of the Panama Canal. Had the vote not gone his way, Torrijos told her later, he'd planned to have her eyewitness the Panamanian army destroying the canal's locks. - Cox News Service __
