BARBARA WALTERS: BARB’S WIRED

SHE IS, LIKE THE AUTUMN CHERRY tree, in full flower. Approaching her 20th anniversary at ABC, Barbara Walters has never seemed more splendid. In the past few months, she has landed interviews with Colin Powell, Christopher Reeve, Robert Packwood, Susan Smith’s ex-husband, Hugh Grant’s girlfriend and, on O.J. Day, the trifecta of Kato Kaelin, Robert Kardashian and a very disgruntled Robert Shapiro. In the next few weeks, she will host two of her patented, popular prime-time hours, The 10 Most Fascinating People of 1995 and her 60th Barbara Walters Special. Her Friday-night showcase, 20/20, is even beating CBS’s 60 Minutes in the ratings this fall, making it the most popular news program on television.

She can also be seen on the Lifetime network, which is reviving some of her more notable interviews twice a week, at various testimonial lunches and birthday dinners–if it’s Monday, this must be Margaret Thatcher–and at an airport near you, shuttling between her sundry news and entertainment assignments. Fidel Castro once asked a group of Western journalists awaiting his arrival, “Donde esta Barbara?” The answer is everywhere. Like the sugar maple.

At this particular crack of dawn, Walters and her crew are at the Vertical Club, a Manhattan fitness center. They have taken over an indoor tennis court to tape an interview with Monica Seles, one of her 10 Most Fascinating People. Walters had to get up at 5 a.m. to have her hair and makeup done in time for the 7 a.m. shoot, but that’s no big deal since she kept much the same hours at NBC’s Today show for 15 years. Seles and her entourage arrive blithely late, but if Walters is annoyed, she hides it well, chatting up the young tennis star and letting the agent from the International Management Group know that if Jennifer Capriati, the troubled young tennis star whom IMG also represents, ever decides to talk…

With Seles, Barbara lobs the first one in: “If you could sum up this year in one word, what would it be?” The interview goes smoothly, with Walters only occasionally referring to her trademark index cards. But because Seles arrived late, some New York City rush-hour-traffic noise creeps onto the tape and forces the crew to repeat one series of questions.

It concerns the knife attack on Seles two years ago by a lunatic at a tournament in Hamburg. The second time around, Walters comes up with a new question, one that’s not on the index cards. Referring to the knife wound on Seles’ back, Walters intently asks her, “Do you ever look at the scar?” Seles, tears welling up, replies, “Never. I’ll never look at it.”

Ace. Bill Geddie, the producer of Walters’ specials, smiles in genuine appreciation and says, “God, she’s good.” Roone Arledge, president of ABC News, comments, “She just keeps getting better and better. She has a way that has matured over the years of getting people to say things on the air that they never thought they were going to say.” Her close friend Mike Wallace also thinks Walters has never been better. “In the last year or two, she has really come into her own,” he says. “I don’t often call somebody immediately after a broadcast, but when she got through with the Colin Powell show, I called her at home to tell her it was superb. For a long time, I think she didn’t fully understand how good she really is. But now I think she’s more satisfied with herself, and that shows in her work. Baba Wawa, and ‘If you were a tree…’–that’s all gone.”

Wallace is referring, of course, to Gilda Radner’s famous Saturday Night Live parodies and to Walters’ most famous, frequently mocked question. Actually, it was a follow-up question she asked Katharine Hepburn in 1981, after the actress said she felt like a tree: “What kind of a tree are you?” (Hepburn said an oak.)

People don’t forget. Two weeks ago, Christopher Reeve made his first public appearance since his riding accident at a dinner for the Creative Coalition, the educational organization he heads, and honoree Robin Williams told the audience he was disappointed that Barbara, who was also in attendance, had not asked the paralyzed actor, “What kind of a bush would you be?” The answer, said Williams, would have been “tumbleweed.” Both Reeve and Walters laughed.

Joking aside, the Reeve interview and feature, which ran the length of 20/20 on Sept. 29 (the newsmagazine’s highest-rated program in more than two years), were one of Walters’ finer hours. Once past the hokey intro (“I think he’s more Superman now than ever before”), she was host of a compelling session in which Reeve, speaking on the exhale through his ventilator, let the viewer feel the despair he felt when he first realized what had happened to him, the panic that hit him the first few times his ventilator stopped functioning, the love of his family that keeps him going. He and his wife chose Walters after being pursued by virtually every interviewer in the business. “Our main goal was to get a message out about what a spinal-cord injury is,” Reeve says. “We wanted to make sure that our story was not trivialized or sensationalized. I felt after watching Barbara Walters for so many years that she would be the best qualified to help us with that.”

IF WALTERS COULD SUM UP THIS year in one word, what would it be? “Busy.” In person, she is as gracious and attentive as she is on the tube. But she is also warier, savvier and funnier than her television persona. “I’ve had a good run,” she says, “but it doesn’t seem like I’m working any harder than usual. Maybe I’m just enjoying myself more. My staff is always kidding me about my ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’. Well, I think there’s been less of that lately.” Does she ever take a vacation? “Yes, last spring I went to France. A walking tour of Provence. Rained the whole time.”

So what makes Barbara run, or at least walk? She has had to prove herself constantly–to her nightclub-impresario father, to the male-dominated hierarchy at NBC and later ABC, to the critics who don’t think news and entertainment should be mixed. “I don’t see why not,” says Walters, who knew Milton Berle when she was a little girl and dated Roy Cohn in college. “Edward R. Murrow interviewed celebrities.” Then there was the cbs producer who told her back in 1957, “You’re a marvelous girl, but stay out of television.” The producer, by the way, was Don Hewitt, now the executive producer of 60 Minutes.

She didn’t listen, and then became famous for listening. It was Hugh Downs, now her 20/20 co-anchor, who suggested that Walters, a Today show writer and reporter, replace actress Maureen O’Sullivan in 1964 as Today’s female personality. Since then Walters has interviewed nearly every President and First Lady–she still hasn’t sat down with the Clintons–world leaders from Yasser Arafat to Jiang Zemin, celebrity icons (Astaire, Garland, Carson) and cons (Mr. T, Suzanne Somers) and, by her own count, seven alleged murderers. This woman, who was caricatured in her Sarah Lawrence yearbook as an ostrich with its head in the sand, has stuck her nose into the conflict in the Middle East, the Iran-contra scandal and the marriage of Mike Tyson and Robin Givens. She is a living, talking, occasionally fawning chronicle of culture and politics in the latter half of the 20th century. She is like a redwood that way.

Says Walters: “Perhaps it’s because I grew up with an older sister who was mentally retarded, but I think I have a real empathy for those who have to overcome tremendous obstacles. My favorite interviews are not with heads of state or celebrities, but with people like [paralyzed policeman] Steven McDonald or the pitcher [and cancer victim] Dave Dravecky. In fact, one of my first interviews for the Today show was with a blind and deaf poet in Brooklyn”

Downs, who has worked with Walters off and on for 33 years, thinks she has endured because of her interviewing technique. “Barbara has operated on the premise that her first allegiance is to the person tuning in. She represents the viewer and does it without hostility.” Others who have worked with her–and against her–credit her fierce competitiveness. Walters’ persistence in cultivating contacts and interview subjects is legendary; she writes notes, sends gifts, makes phone calls and generally puts on a full-court press. “She has the best public manners of anybody I know,” says a colleague. “She knows how to make people loyal to her.” Others are not so enamored of her tactics. Says a network-news producer: “She can be ruthless against anyone who threatens her status as TV’s premier interviewer.”

Yet her co-workers marvel at her drive and her tirelessness. Walters is a terrific editor, say her editors. She is a great writer, say her writers. She is her own best booker, say her producers. She is her own best publicist, say her publicists. She works us hard, but she works harder than we do, they say. (The price Walters has had to pay is an annulment and two divorces and a daughter who once had a difficult time being the daughter of Barbara Walters.)

It’s hard to find people who will say derogatory things about Walters. It’s easy to find people with glowing things to say about her. Too easy. That’s because she keeps introducing you to them and giving you their phone numbers. But they do seem sincere in their affection for her as a boss and a friend. Are there any blemishes? Well, she will not drink coffee from a Styrofoam cup. And oh, yes–she does not like to be photographed from her right side.

While her appearance is very important to Walters–an eye job has helped her look far younger than the 64 she says she is or the 66 others claim for her–so is her work. At a recent taping of 20/20, Walters looked perfectly elegant in a red jacket over a black blouse and gold pendant. Below the desk, though, she had on blue jeans and sneakers. It seems she had to catch a plane to Los Angeles to interview ER’s George Clooney. As stylish as a deciduous. As substantive as a conifer.

So what kind of a tree does Barbara Walters think she is? “That’s a terrible question,” she says.

–With reporting by William Tynan/New York