Audition by Barbara Walters Page B

glamorous onstage, but I saw them offstage without their costumes and makeup, and they had problems, just like everyone else. I knew that Sophie Tucker had a son she rarely saw, that Sally Rand was sick of her fan dance even though it had made her famous, that many of the chorus girls had families they were supporting. This gave me an understanding of celebrities that I never would have had. As a result I was not in awe, years and years later, when I began doing interviews with big-name stars.
    Those early years at the Latin Quarter also affected the way I later asked questions and listened to answers. I knew that the childhood years of most celebrities were their most poignant and could often explain their future choices as, of course, it has mine. I learned when to be quiet and just listen. And I knew what could bring tears. (Now, I have been so often accused of making celebrities cry that I go out of my way not to bring on the tears. “You cry on this program and I won’t run any of it!” I once warned Robin Williams as he pretended to weep.)
    You may think it odd that I am writing so much about my father and the Latin Quarter when this is my memoir, but that nightclub controlled our lives. Everything we did revolved around it. Everything we owned, every meal we ate, the shirts on our backs, so to speak, stemmed from the Latin Quarter. The Walters and the Latin Quarter were inseparable. The rest of the family, too, gravitated toward Palm Island. Aunt Lena often came to visit us. Uncle Max, my mother’s brother, was already working for my father so he was there, too. So, for six months, was another of her brothers, Uncle Dan Seletsky. He had had an operation just before the Latin Quarter’s second season, and my father not only gave him an apartment on the property to recuperate in, but gave his wife, Aunt Ann, a job: She became my father’s office manager.
    The success of the Palm Island Latin Quarter continued to grow, and with it my father’s reputation as a brilliant showman. He became such a darling of the local papers that nationally syndicated columnists started mentioning the Latin Quarter in their columns. One such all-important columnist and radio broadcaster was Walter Winchell, who practically invented the gossip column. The more my father appeared in print, the greater his reputation grew. The combination of the two led to a new offer.
    The way my father tells the story in his memoir, he was sitting alone in the Palm Island Latin Quarter on New Year’s Day 1941, when a press agent named Irving Zussman approached him. “How’d you like to run a nightclub on Broadway? In Times Square. The best location in the world. And you won’t have to put up a cent.” The space was available for a ten-year lease, Zussman told him. And there was a backer who wanted to get into the nightclub business, a millionaire named E. M. Loew, who owned a circuit of movie houses. My father had known Loew for twenty-five years. (He had booked vaudeville acts into some of Loew’s theaters.) Loew would put up all the money; my father would produce the shows. They would be partners.
    My mother was skeptical—another risk. Why not let well enough alone? But my father’s eyes were dancing. He had seen the building which had been a fancy Chinese restaurant called the Palais d’Or, then the post-Harlem Cotton Club, then the Gay White Way. None of those nightclubs succeeded, but it could seat between six and seven hundred people, and my optimistic father felt he had the magic touch. So, without further thought, my father made a deal with the tightfisted E. M. Loew, whom he would later deem “as fine a gentleman as ever hated to pay a bill.”
    So, for better or worse, we were on the move again. It was time to audition in a new city, at a new school, for new friends. This time we were off to New York.

New York, New York
    I THINK THE PROBLEM was my “Cuban heels.” My entrée into New York did not go well as I started the eighth