Free Audition by Barbara Walters Page A

the father-next-door. I even refused to pay much attention to the influential Broadway columnists who stopped by our table—Ed Sullivan, Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson, Louis Sobol, sometimes even Walter Winchell. My silence must have hurt my father, who, in turn, hurt me. “Your problem is that you have an inferiority complex,” he told me on one of those evenings. “That’s why you never want to talk to anybody.”
    Jackie, on the other hand, loved the Latin Quarter. It became her home away from home, and she would spend whatever time she was allowed to backstage with the chorus girls. They were wonderfully kind to her as, in years to come, were many of the big stars my father hired, particularly Frank Sinatra, Carol Channing, and the singer Johnnie Ray. Johnnie Ray was famous for his song “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” and Jackie developed a serious crush on him. He, in turn, reciprocated by calling her “Jackie darling” and sending her birthday cards and autographed pictures from wherever he was on tour.
    Perhaps it was because he, too, had a childhood disability—he was partially deaf and wore a hearing aid. Jackie felt that Johnnie Ray was as in love with her as she was with him. Years after her death I read her diary. Jackie could write, not well, but certainly legibly. The diary was laced with references to him, such as: “Johnnie is working in Chicago. Hope he calls me.” “Johnnie is in Dallas. Someday I will marry him.” So touching was that diary that I could barely look through it. Even today reading it for this book brought me to tears.
    When Jackie wasn’t at the Latin Quarter, she was at the movies with my mother. Any movie. Night after night. Just the two of them. The empty days and nights must have seemed endless to both of them. Around this time my parents tried hiring companions for Jackie, but they disagreed about what kind of companion to hire. My father wanted someone more like Jackie, perhaps a bit slow herself. My mother wanted someone who would be more responsible and teach Jackie to read or write better. Neither type worked out.
    If the companion was bright, as several were, the “friend-for-hire” had nothing in common with Jackie, leaving my sister just as isolated. But the few borderline companions were also failures. They were apt to forget about Jackie for their own pleasures. I remember one time Jackie and a companion went to the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. They skated around a bit and then the companion picked up some guy skating alone and left Jackie for hours on her own. When Jackie finally came home, she told my parents, and that was that. So, after a while, my parents gave up this experiment and again kept Jackie to themselves. Only once do I remember my parents ever having a holiday without her. They left Jackie with a chorus girl named Baby Lake, an adorable person whom we all liked, and went off to the Bahamas. But my parents telephoned home three times a day.
    All this naturally put a great strain on their marriage. In Florida the close proximity of the Palm Island Club to our pistachio house afforded them time to be together, but that was not the case in New York.
    After our first few months at the Buckingham, we moved into a magnificent penthouse on Central Park West. We would live in a series of penthouses over the years, but my mother rarely saw my father. He spent his nights at the Latin Quarter, his mornings asleep in the apartment, and his afternoons playing cards at the Friars Club, the renowned hangout for men in show business.
    Money became an issue again between my parents. For all that the New York Latin Quarter was a runaway success, the productions were very expensive—each cost $75,000 to $80,000, a huge amount in those days—and the profit margin slim. My father was very generous—he never put my mother on an allowance as some husbands did—but she was always afraid that something would happen to the club or that my father would lose