Here's Barbara Walters, who died just yesterday at age 93, with Manhattan socialite Cheray Duchin at a 1976 New Year's Eve party at Tavern on the Green in the aforementioned Manhattan. I make no great claims for Walters as a journalist, and the above pictures illustrates why. Hobnobbing with the elite can get in the way of reporting on the elite. Yet I can't totally dismiss her either. For one thing, she was fun to watch. Walters' idiosyncratic personality guaranteed, if not a particularly incisive, at least an idiosyncratic line of questioning. You never knew what to expect in a Barbara Walters interview. Except for tears from the interviewee's eyes, and even that was probably unexpected the first time it happened. The more it happened, the more it seemed it was preplanned on the interviewees part--after all, these were actors used to crying on cue--and even Walters herself seemed suspicious of it. The Boston native handled that, and other criticisms as well as occasional mockery from the likes of Gilda Radner for Elmer Fuddishly rounding off her "Rs" when speaking (as did Marlene Dietrich, putting her in good company) with good humor, probably because she was laughing all the way to the Federal Reserve. For many a December there was a TV special titled Barbara Walters 10 Most Fascinating People. She never did, but Walters very well could have interviewed herself.
