Barbara Walters: What Kind Of Tree Is She?

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LE Newsletter - March 11, 2010

Barbara Walters: What Kind Of Tree Is She?

Source: www.thestar.com - Richard Ouzounian

(March 06, 2010) Twenty-nine years, 93 interviews, one regret.

That's Barbara Walters' personal scorecard when it comes to ranking her internationally famous Oscar-night interviews that come to a close Sunday evening in a program featuring Mo'Nique and Sandra Bullock.

For nearly three decades, the interviews made up one of the most sought-after, eagerly watched, highest-rated programs on television, but now, Walters has decided to stop doing them.

It's not a retirement, because she admits that she's going to continue delving into the private lives of the world's big names, but the showbiz-specific package she puts together at Oscar time each year will be a thing of the past.

"Until very recently, to see one of these movie stars on this program was a big deal for them and for me. But now, with all these cable programs giving people sound bites of every star, I would have to come up with a show that was special, special, special!"

Walters is on the phone from her Manhattan office and – to be totally honest – it's an intimidating experience. I've profiled some of the biggest stars today without blinking an eye, but now I'm talking to the woman who is arguably the most famous and most successful interviewer of our time.

But Walters is not only gracious, she's amazingly relaxed, anxious to swap stories about interviewing a certain Jonas Brother ("Oh my God," she laughs, "you wanted to keep finishing his sentences for him!"), or George Clooney ("Isn't he the best? Always new and fresh and wonderful!").

Today's agenda, however, is about the Oscar broadcasts, and although it's sad to hear, she sounds tired of them and glad to be rid of the burden.

"Every year I say, `This is going to be the last one,' but finally this year, before I even did it, I said, `This is enough.' Why? I'm sick of walking down the stairs at the start of each episode. I was always scared of heights. I'm sick of trying to come up with a winning list of special people when the people just aren't that special anymore."

I run the risk of asking her if it's like what deluded, fading silent screen star Norma Desmond said in Sunset Boulevard: "I'm still big, it's the pictures that got smaller."

In other words, has Walters become too famous for the kind of celebrities she gets to interview?

There's the kind of dangerous pause that could end an interview, then Walters says, "Well, I don't really like to think of myself as Norma Desmond," but she grasps the bigger point of the metaphor and moves on, admitting "a lot of times today, I'm talking to people who have just made their first movie. They may be wonderful actors, but most of the country doesn't know them and it's hard to do an in-depth interview with someone who's only done one picture."

Indeed, over the years, commercial pressures have forced Walters to conduct several interviews that she'd sooner forget.

"I absolutely hated the year I had to sit down with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don't want to go down in history for doing that one. And the year I talked to Shrek? Please. Let me forget that."

Walters' personal interview hall of fame is full of more glamorous names: Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn, Bob Mitchum. When asked why she loved talking to them so much, she sighs as though it were obvious.

"Those are the old greats, my friend. And they bring oh so much to the table. A lifetime of art, experience, triumph, tragedy. When I talk to someone like Miley Cyrus, for example, I still respect her, but I treat her differently, because she has so much less of a story to tell."

That doesn't mean that even today's stars aren't capable of commanding Walters' respect and interest. She shares a couple of scoops in advance from this year's broadcast: "I don't think I'll ever forget Mo'Nique telling me about how her brother sexually abused her, or Sandra Bullock talking about how her marriage has made her so secure that she doesn't worry about her career for the first time in her life. No, there are still wonderful stories to be told. There just aren't that many of them."

Over the years, Walters became known for several telling features. One of them was the way she could get people to admit things they had no intention of revealing.

She laughs when she tells me her personal trick for doing that: "I'd look at them and say, `What's the biggest misconception about you?' Then they'd say, `That I'm an alcoholic,' and I'd reply, `Well, are you?'"

We share a laugh about that, before I turn it around on her, asking, "What's the biggest misconception about Barbara Walters?"

Instead of crying "Foul!" she answers honestly.

"I think it used to be that I was too tough, stern and humourless. That's one of the reasons I started to do The View. My daughter said, `Come on, Mom, at least they won't know you're always serious.'"

But Walters has always carried around a lot of baggage. It may have been by Louis Vuitton, but it was baggage nonetheless.

The first female news anchor on prime time, the first woman in broadcast history with a million-dollar-a-year contract, the first woman to talk to presidents and prime ministers and kings the way that only men had done before.

"But I didn't do it to make breakthroughs for my gender," says Walters. "I was just Lou Walters' kid, trying to do the best she could."

Her reference is to her showbiz agent father, whose incredible rise and rapid decline during his daughter's childhood gave her an insider's view of the highs and lows of celebrity that she would never forget.

For a long time, Walters was known as the interviewer who made her subjects cry.

"I never set out to get tears," she reveals. "I just kept asking them about their childhood years and a lot of people are very emotional about those.

"But I remember the day I finished interviewing Halle Berry, and as soon as we said `cut,' she shouted out, `No tears, no tears, hooray!' and I knew I could never make anyone cry again."

The worst interview of her life?

"Warren Beatty. It was like pulling teeth. I'd ask him `How are you?' and he'd say, `That's a very hard question.'"

And what about that one regret?

"In 2000, I pushed Ricky Martin very hard to admit if he was gay or not, and the way he refused to do it made everyone decide that he was. A lot of people say that destroyed his career, and when I think back on it now I feel it was an inappropriate question."

Then there's the famous Walters trope that people love to mock: "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"

She's anxious to set the record straight.

"I was interviewing Katharine Hepburn, and she said, `Oh, sometimes I think I'm just an old tree,' so I said, `What kind of a tree?'"

We laugh at that, then I pose the question: "What kind of a tree is Barbara Walters?"

"Oh, Richard," she chuckles, "Sandra Bullock asks me that on the show, so you'll just have to tune in to find out."