Audition by Barbara Walters

was a whole new challenge. I entered three months into the school year. The curriculum was entirely foreign to me. I had teachers who didn’t know me from Adam, let alone Eve. They not only had to cope with me and what I knew or didn’t know, but with a whole bunch of other kids whose parents had come to Miami Beach just for the winter months.
    It was a public school, not too big, and coed, but I was a shy, introverted child and I felt I had to audition for a new role I didn’t know how to play. I coped by doing more homework than was probably necessary and hoping that this would be a day when Phyllis and I could play together.
    The dress code also bothered me. It was, after all, Florida, sunny and warm, and many of the girls in my class wore shorts. (We were in the dark ages before the universal wearing of jeans.) But I thought my legs were too skinny to be displayed, so shorts were not for me. I wore blouses and skirts. My mother and I went to Lincoln Road, the chic shopping street in Miami Beach, and we bought a whole new wardrobe. We packed away the heavy sweaters and mostly plaid wool skirts I had worn in Brookline, but we didn’t buy one pair of shorts.
    I don’t remember any sporting activities. You would think we would go to the beach and swim now and then, but we never did. It was okay with me not to have sports. I have never been particularly athletic. Overall the school was an all-right experience for me. Not great, not bad, not memorable.
    I adjusted pretty well. After doing my homework when I got home from school, I played with my dolls. I absolutely loved my doll’s house and could play for hours in happy solitude. I was also, then as now, a voracious reader and could easily get lost for hours in a book. Then, too, the island was one of the attractions on the sightseeing boat tours around Biscayne Bay, and I would often wander down to the dock and sit there, alone, waving at the passing tourists.
    A bigger adventure was to ride my bike past Al Capone’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of the infamous Public Enemy Number One, though I never did. Having spent the last eight years in jail for tax evasion, Capone had arrived back at his house on Palm Island in 1939 at about the same time we did. He was much more of a gangster than Mr. Dwyer. Al Capone had been a massive bootlegger, alleged murderer, and the Chicago gang leader who is thought to have masterminded the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which seven rival gang members were gunned down. By the time he returned to Palm Island, he was sick with late-stage syphilis and suffering from dementia, but I didn’t know anything about that. Nor, apparently, did my father, who wrote that Al Capone was an occasional visitor to the Latin Quarter, where he sat at the bar, sipped a club soda, and paid with a twenty-dollar bill out of the wad of new bills in his pocket. “He never interfered with anyone and believe me, no one wanted to interfere with him,” my father wrote. When Al Capone died in 1947 as peacefully as if he were “a buttonhole maker,” my father recalled, there was “just a bartender to mourn his passing.”
    As I write about my young life on Palm Island, it sounds rather like Eloise at the Plaza, except that Palm Island was no chic hotel. Nor did Eloise spend days at a racetrack and weekend evenings in a nightclub lighting booth.
    Unlike the Latin Quarter in Boston and later in New York, the club in Florida was not a place for family celebrations. The shows were sophisticated and not for children, so I hid away in the small lighting booth high above the dance floor, where the main electrician controlled the onstage lights. Crouched next to the technician, I watched the shows weekend after weekend until I could do practically all the numbers. My sister’s escape, when she finally came home, was to go backstage and sit in the dressing room with the chorus girls, who were very kind to her. I was uncomfortable doing that and preferred the