Free Audition by Barbara Walters Page B

too heavily at cards, and they’d wind up broke again.
    This fear was communicated to me from an early age. I became consumed with the same worry. What would we do when the money ran out? I can remember my parents arguing about putting some money into savings, about buying insurance, about making secure investments. My father’s response? He went off and produced a series of very expensive musical revues on Broadway. He wanted to be an even bigger success.
    His first Broadway extravaganza at the Winter Garden Theater was the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943 , a revival of the hugely successful musical revues that the great showman Florenz Ziegfeld had produced annually from 1907 to 1931. My father’s version was very similar to the show at the Latin Quarter, except even more extravagant. I went with my parents on opening night, and the next morning we held our breath, hoping the reviews would be good. They weren’t, but the wartime audiences loved it and kept it running for an impressive 523 performances.
    That experience convinced my father to go after more projects on the Great White Way. In short order he wrote, produced, and directed Artists and Models , an updated vaudeville revue from the 1920s. The show opened at the Broadway Theater on November 5, 1943, and starred a then-famous singer named Jane Froman, who had lost the use of her legs in a plane accident. She was wheeled onto the stage in a specially built wheelchair. Artists and Models also starred a young comedian named Jackie Gleason. But despite the best efforts of its stars, and a very funny Gleason, it closed three weeks later. My father lost a lot of money, but that didn’t deter him. Less than three months later he revived and produced another early revue, Take a Bow. Even its star, Chico Marx of the famed Marx Brothers, couldn’t save it. The show closed after fourteen performances. Thousands more dollars of my father’s money were lost.
    So here is how we were: my father, a gambler and a dreamer. My mother, a realist whom my father considered a pessimist. Me? I was a worrier whom both parents considered to be too serious for a very young girl.
    It all came to a head one afternoon when I returned from school to find my mother in tears. “Daddy has left us,” she told me. “You go talk to him. Tell him to come back.” Being their go-between was not an unfamiliar role for me. My mother often used me to convey whatever grievance she had. “You talk to Daddy,” she would say, and I would try to get to him on those Friday nights when he was home. Most often everything turned out all right, but this seemed far more serious than usual. My mother asked me to take my sister, perhaps to create more sympathy. So I took Jackie’s hand and off we went to the Latin Quarter.
    I remember very clearly sitting with my father at his table in that darkened, empty nightclub, crying and begging him not to leave us. Jackie, too, was crying, although she was not completely sure what was going on. I learned many years later that my father was said to be having an affair with one of his showgirls. If true, I certainly can’t judge him too harshly. Let’s face it, it would have made sense. Most people in show business were, and are, romantically involved with other people in show business. My father was surrounded by the most beautiful young women, and he was married to an ordinary, middle-aged woman. For her part my mother would probably have been happier married to a man who worked in the dress business, who brought home a paycheck every week and lived a stable life. But we didn’t know anything about a showgirl then.
    My father didn’t say anything during my plea. He kissed Jackie and me and simply said he had to go back to work. I didn’t know what to do. I definitely didn’t know what to tell my mother. So I took Jackie to a movie with a stage show playing nearby. I dreaded returning home, and we sat in the theater for hours. But when we did go home, my mother was