Read Online Audition by Barbara Walters - Free Book Online

grade at Fieldston, my third school in as many years. Cuban heels had nothing to do with Havana or Miami. Mine were open-toed shoes with one-inch-high square heels that were the rage for young girls and were meant to be worn on dress-up evenings, with silk stockings with seams down the back. The shoes were usually brown or black. During the day one wore either brown loafers or laced-up saddle shoes. Saddle shoes were white with brown sides and with them, you wore ankle socks.
    Now, this digression about footwear is to tell you that I had the whole deal messed up. I guess I had heard about the Cuban heels, but coming from Miami, my mother and I bought the shoes in white. The Miami stores didn’t carry them in black. To make matters worse, I wore the open-toed shoes not with the prescribed silk stockings but with white ankle socks. So I arrived that first day particularly dressed up, not knowing a soul in the school and looking like some hick, which of course I was. I also, in those days, had a strong Boston accent. It was long before the Kennedys made the accent fashionable, and to the New Yorkers I sounded affected saying “cahn’t” and “auhnt” instead of “can’t” and “aunt.”
    Fieldston was then, and is now, a highly respected and difficult-to-get-into private school. I am amazed that my mother even knew about it and sent in an application. The main school is located in Riverdale, on the outskirts of the city. It also has an elementary school in Manhattan, and most of the kids had been going to the school since kindergarten or first grade. It was coed and full of cliques. This girl was best friends with that girl. This was the girl all the boys liked. This was the A group. This group didn’t matter. I was most definitely in the latter group.
    In the beginning the toughest part of the day was lunch in the school cafeteria. I would take my tray and slowly walk around the room hoping that one of the A group would look up and ask me to sit down. Whomever you sat with for lunch defined your social standing. But even after I dumped the white Cuban heels for saddle shoes, I never really made the A group. I was more or less a B or C-plus. But we social underlings could occasionally ask one of the A girls for a “date” on a Saturday afternoon. We actually made dates, real dates. You would ask a girl if she wanted to spend Saturday with you, and then, if she said yes, you would have lunch and usually go to the movies. In those days, New York had dozens of movie theaters all around Broadway with great big stage shows. Broadway was very safe. And there were so many other places a teenager could go.
    There was Radio City Music Hall, with its famed chorus line of high-kicking Rockettes. There were all the theaters hosting the big bands: Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman. Singing with Dorsey’s band was a skinny, hollow-cheeked, bow-tied fellow named Frank Sinatra, who looked as if a strong wind would blow him away, but he sang love songs like no one else and the young girls went wild. Sinatra’s adolescent fans, including me, were dubbed “bobby-sockers,” from obviously our short socks. When Sinatra appeared solo at the Paramount Theater in 1942, my mother, Jackie, and I stood in line to get tickets to see him. His appearance created such hysteria among young girls, including fits of swooning, that newspapers turned to psychiatrists for explanations. I didn’t swoon, but I loved his voice then and always.
    Two years later his return to the Paramount caused what became known as the “Columbus Day Riot.” On his opening day in October 1944, ten thousand bobby-sockers, jammed the ticket line and an estimated twenty thousand others piled into Times Square, breaking windows in the crush. Sinatra burst into the nation’s awareness in a way that would not be matched until the arrival of Elvis Presley in the fifties and then the Beatles in the sixties. By the way, several years later, when Sinatra had lost his