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Posted
Monday, May 12, 2008 10:50 AM
| By
Melinda Henneberger
On the evening of Sept. 23, 1994, I went to the movies with my husband and another couple. As this was a couple of years before the birth of our twins, this in itself did not make it a night to remember. Yes, we were going to see the re-released My Fair Lady at the first possible moment—and at the big, beautiful old Ziegfeld. Still, even Miss Never-Met-a-Show-Tune-She-Couldn't-Belt-Into-Submission is not that big a geek; no, there was more. There we were, all settled in and waiting for the guys to return with popcorn and diet beverages, when we heard a familiar voice shouting, "Right there! Two seats!'' So sorry, we told the overdressed TV icon, but they were already taken. "You can't do that! Saving seats is not allowed!' she yelled and started climbing over people on her way to us. Would I have to throw myself over the chair? Would my husband end up on Baba's lap? Thankfully, John Warner appeared just then, in suit and tie, to rescue his companion from further bad behavior. Tugging at his date's elbow, he led her away as gracefully as possible while apologizing profusely and promising he would find them good seats elsewhere—and as she loudly declared she had no intention of sitting way down in front. For some time, we watched him shuttling up and down the main aisle, trying to relocate singles and salvage the evening. And eventually, he succeeded—yay! This was before reality TV, of course, so it seemed all the more thrilling and inappropriate; if this was how Ms. Walters pursued a good seat for a movie she'd seen before, what must life be like for Diane Sawyer? As spectacle, even the freshly restored Audrey Hepburn could not compete. And as high-maintenance, "you may fetch my slippers now' companions went, well, Henry Higgins had nothing on this dame.
Which is why I hate to see her batted down so easily by Caitlin Flanagan in June's Atlantic Monthly, though in "The Uses of Enrichment," her review of Walters' new memoir, Audition, she does allow that the TV frontierswoman has "elicited more irreducible statements of self from more notable people than have all the giants of New Journalism.'' Nicholas Lemann is more generous in his piece, "I Have to Ask,' in The New Yorker: "Walters knows how to put on a show. Although nothing in Audition comes as a shock—Walters doesn't turn out to be a stamp collector, or to have learned Aramaic—it belongs to a part of American culture that Walters helped invent; it has just the right number of personal but not icky revelations, and they enrich, rather than spoil, a sense of intimacy.'' The show was for us, wasn't it? And aren't her unlovely manners so symptomatic of what the women of her generation—the one before Hillary's—had to sacrifice to get there first? (As for her "accidental'' career, what a lot of nonsense; busting your backside for so long you can't even remember how to take a night off only happens on and with purpose.) Not that her shrieking makes you think, "Ah, now there's a strategy to emulate," but more like, "See what it was like for them?'' Even if my twinge of sisterly compassion did not make me want to jump up and offer her my seat or anything; that would only have confused her.
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