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by Liz Smith Barbara Walters Retired? Uhhhh ... I Don't Think So! ... Vanity Fair Picks The Winners! “I GAVE them hope!” remarked Barbara Walters, accepting an important award and speaking of the old days when she used to rise at 4 a.m. on West 57th Street to go work on the "Today Show." She has told this story before — of how she appeared without a speck of makeup, her hair a mess, an armful of clothes over her arm, to inevitably find herself emerging into a crowd of what she describes as “ladies of the evening,” who didn’t have a clue who she was or why she was in their bailiwick. |
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| But, Barbara was at her most charming in telling this little anecdote and all I can say is that this phenomenon of broadcasting is about as “retired” as an Olympic athlete on a good day! Much of the ABC hierarchy was there in the Metropolitan Club to salute her, as well as stars from the other networks — Gayle King, Bill O’Reilly, and Charlie Gibson from the recent past — I won’t bother with listing them all. |
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| The most important soul I talked with was the other person present who has received this same award — the one and only Floyd Abrams. He is our living expert on free speech, constitutional law and especially, the First Amendment. |
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| IF I had my “druthers” and had been a reporter in a specialty of importance (which I don’t pretend I am) — Wow — this is the award to have! It is the 21st First Amendment Award given by Quinnipiac University in the name of the late Fred Friendly. (If you don’t know who this man was, well, you maybe saw all about him and his influence on Edward R. Murrow and all the other TV pioneers in the movie George Clooney made, titled “Good Night, and Good Luck.”) When real news really mattered and wasn’t just the guess work of political and social media, it was Fred Friendly who made a difference and served PBS with his series on Ethics in Journalism (and "Everything Else That Mattered” as I used to refer to it.) |
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| So this time they gave a Lifetime Achievement to Barbara with a fabulous introduction by Fred’s widow, Ruth, and it was delightful. Barbara said she’d told her anecdotes so often, that she’d just touch on three that had affected her the most. |
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| The first was with Margaret Thatcher who had been ousted from office. She said Mrs. Thatcher gulped with pain as she told Barbara she simply didn’t know what to do with herself when she passed the turn to 10 Downing Street ... then Barbara told of her many talks with actor Christopher Reeve after “Superman” had been paralyzed in a horse riding accident. She admired his stoic refusal to feel sorry for himself as he tried to rehabilitate to walk again. He never did but Barbara believes he would have eventually and quoted his saying "you take your chances and whatever will be, will be!" |
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| And she ended with stories of the great Kate Hepburn that I had never heard before, explaining the infamous “what kind of tree would you be?” nonsense and giving us once again, Ms. Hepburn’s independent female philosophies, which made even Barbara laugh as she told them. |
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| When she is not being driven crazy by fans who want to hug and kiss her on the street and tell her that she was their mother or grandmother’s favorite, Barbara has a great sense of humor. In the car taking her back to her office at ABC, she talked a bit about visiting for four days in Berlin — seeing the museums and famous places she’d never had time to go to as a tourist. Her only complaint seemed to be that dinner in Berlin takes a lot of time. “You begin at 7:30 and at 9:45 you are still waiting for the cheesecake to come for dessert. When we asked the waiter about the delay, he said that there were eight tables waiting ahead of us.” |
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| This caused me to burst out with a witless — “You had to wait and wait for cheesecake because they had killed all the Jewish people who knew how to make it!” Barbara gave me an A for this ridiculous remark. And then, she got out of the car, was kissed and hugged by an unknown woman on 66th Street, and went back to work! Retirement! What’s that? |
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But as Joan goes back to work covering who is who I had to guess the names of her handsome cover couple, on for June. Charles and Clo Cohen dabble in real estate, movies, French cinema.) I’ll bet they are art and food mavens too. These are the hot professions now! I think I should hang up my gloves. No, I am going to go on dealing with the vagaries of social media (even when I think it leads to revolution and chaos.) The Hollywood Reporter says reality showmanship is on the wane. I certainly hope so. |
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Timing is everything. Shailene played George Clooney’s daughter in “The Descendants” in 2011 to nice reviews. Now she is a red-hot star in the amazingly successful tearjerker “The Fault in Our Stars.” (Probably somebody smart at VF saw an advance screening of “The Fault in Our Stars” and then saw the handwriting on the box-office tallies.) This is the movie that has teenage girls and young women weeping unashamedly at Cineplex’s across the country. Some guys, too. But being guys they try not to show it. |
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Contact Liz Smith here. | Click here for NYSD contents. |