Barbara Walters' memoir "Audition," in which the legendary TV newswoman admits to a lifetime of chronically low self-esteem, hit bookstores Tuesday. That was the same day the results of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries made Hillary Rodham Clinton's indefatigability look more like Bush-level delusion than admirable perseverance.
I'm not sure if it's a testament to Walters' breezy writing style or to the way election coverage has taken on the white-noise quality of a humming refrigerator, but I managed to skim most of "Audition" on Tuesday night while watching CNN (with the volume on, mind you). It was there, in a thunderstorm of opposing female sensibilities -- Clinton defiantly vowing to head "full speed on to the White House"; Walters warily describing her life as "one long audition" -- that I found myself wondering something post feminist-era women are never supposed to wonder: Is self-confidence really all it's cracked up to be?
Specifically, I found myself wishing that Walters would take some of her feelings of inadequacy and sprinkle them like fairy dust on Clinton.
By all appearances, Walters has self-doubt to burn. Though she and her publisher are promoting her book largely by hinting at various gossip-worthy revelations -- a long, clandestine affair with Edward W. Brooke, the African American (and married) former U.S. senator from Massachusetts chief among them -- its real theme is rampant insecurity. The daughter of a nightclub owner whose erratic fortunes suffered from a merciless gambling habit (and led to a suicide attempt), Walters' most formative relationship was with her developmentally disabled older sister, Jackie. "Her condition altered my life. ... I was embarrassed by her, ashamed of her, guilty that I had so much and she had so little," Walters writes.
Not that Walters had everything. She was wait-listed at her dream college, Wellesley, and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence because "I didn't have the confidence to wait to see if Wellesley might take me or the courage to call the school and try to convince them I would be a perfect candidate."
Though it's unfair to compare the assertiveness skills of a woman of Walters' generation (she's 78, though she won't give her age in the book) with the manifest striving of a boomer like Clinton, it is, in this age of self-esteem-as-religion, rather refreshing to hear from someone who, at least as a youngster, bought so thoroughly into her own mediocrity.
