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LOS ANGELES - For 30 years, Barbara Walters has been an immovable fixture on the American media landscape, a spiky, self-assured, seemingly ageless television interviewer and news show host who likes to think of herself as a trailblazer for women journalists everywhere.
Really, though, she epitomises the rise of personality journalism and the cult of the reporter as a celebrity in herself.
In her career, Walters has not shied away from expressing outrage at the expensive furnishings the Duvaliers of Haiti lavished on themselves, or the number of shoes purchased by Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, when she herself was never exactly stingy when it came to her clothes, her hair or her finely appointed Manhattan lifestyle.
And now she has brought her strong opinions and personality to a memoir - a book called Audition which isn't quite a tell-all but certainly dishes some interesting dirt, particularly about her penchant for conducting affairs with married Republican congressmen in the 1970s.
Whether talking to Boris Yeltsin, or Michael Jackson, or Monica Lewinsky (her highest-rated interview ever), she never left any doubt that the show was ultimately about her.
As Alexander Cockburn once memorably wrote: "When a deposed dictator flees into retirement, can Barbara Walters be far behind?"
One has to wonder - several reviewers already have - quite what the broader significance is of her suicidal nightclub-owning father, her long-suffering mother, her mentally disabled sister, her drug-addicted adopted daughter, or many of the other episodes in her life on which she dwells at great length.
Clearly, it is all still about her - and her appearances on a chat-show circuit of her own, including a lengthy stint with Oprah Winfrey last week.
Still, some of the romantic dirt is alluring enough in itself, particularly the revelation that she conducted a clandestine affair with Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black Republican senator, for several years.
"He had a bad marriage, but in those days, you didn't get divorced," she told Oprah.
"He was one of the most fantastic, attractive, intelligent, difficult [men] - fascinating! And I put him in the book...perhaps because it was such a different time, and I wanted people to understand how different it was then."
Walters has been married three times herself, each union ending in divorce, and conducted affairs with all sorts of high-profile politicians and public figures including John Warner, the Virginia senator who was married at one stage to Elizabeth Taylor.
Strangely, she writes at length about her paramours but has almost nothing to say about her husbands.
"We went out a great deal," she says of John Warner, "then he married Elizabeth Taylor, and I did an interview with both of them - that was bizarre."
The affair with Senator Warner started in the 1970s, then stopped, then resumed again in the 1990s, after Walters' third divorce.
"I watched John emerge into one of the most effective senators. We are still friends," she said.
"It was not a platonic relationship then. It certainly is today."
One of her more controversial professional moves, at least in the US, was to allow herself to be charmed by Fidel Castro during a visit to Cuba, giving a more sympathetic rendition than most of the aims of the Cuban revolution.
She lays to rest any suggestion, however, that the attraction was anything other than professional.
"Castro and I were most definitely not lovers. No romance. Not even a pass. Nada," she writes.
She admits she crossed professional boundaries in other ways, never more so than when she agreed to act as a go-between for the Iranian government and Ronald Reagan during the final days of the Iran hostage crisis in 1981.
She, in fact, helped set in motion the arms deal that secured the hostages' release and became the start of the Iran-Contra scandal.
"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," she writes.
"But like it or not, I was involved."
- INDEPENDENT
