Read Online Audition by Barbara Walters - Free Book Online Page A

popularity and before his legendary comeback, he played the Latin Quarter.
    But the point of all this is that a person, young or old, could go to a movie and watch the stage show and spend the whole day being entertained. And what a treat if you were going with one of the popular girls. To this day I remember the sort of adoring court that formed around those girls. One A-group member was tiny and graceful with little hands and feet. Another, the class beauty, had long, blond hair to her waist and a perfect pompadour—the look back then—hair swept high off the face in a big roll. The really older boys—the fifteen-year-olds—thought she was divine. Years and years later I met her again. She didn’t look as great, and I was already on the Today show. Okay, so I’m bragging, but after all those years of pushing so hard, I’m entitled.
    It isn’t that I was a dog in those days, but I saw myself as too thin, and my pompadour never looked quite right. Slowly, though, I did make good friends and the B-list had some good kids. Also, slowly, I began to like my life in New York.
    My family started off living in a residential hotel called the Buckingham, located at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue (since renamed the Avenue of the Americas, although I’ve never heard a New Yorker refer to it that way). It was in the heart of the city, one block from one of my favorite places, the Automat. The legendary brainchild of Horn & Hardart, the Automat had branches all over New York and was like a big cafeteria, only a lot of the food—the sandwiches, the salads, the pieces of pie—were behind little glass doors. You put your nickels into a slot and the door opened to present you with the dish of your choice. The Automat had a memorable slogan—Less Work for Mother—and was not only great fun but a brilliant forerunner of today’s fast-food chains.
    Some of the Automat’s patrons stayed all day, especially those with little money. They would eat the free saltines and ketchup that were on the tables, get a tea bag and some hot water, and hang around for hours. After a while we recognized these regulars. We would smile at them, and they would smile at us. The Automat was such a part of the New York scene that when Horn & Hardart finally closed its doors (the last one, on Forty-second Street and Third Avenue, closed in 1991) editorials were written and the old-timers actually grieved.
    My problem, as ever, was Jackie. First of all Jackie and I had to share a bedroom, but a larger problem was that she had nothing to do. During the week I went to school, and whatever my mother did or wherever my mother went, Jackie went, too. By now she was a teenager. My mother, her heart aching at the loneliness of my sister, would often look at me pleadingly when I had one of my coveted Saturday afternoon “dates” and ask me to take Jackie along. I can still hear my mother’s voice: “Can’t you take your sister? It would mean so much to her.” My mother probably shouldn’t have done it, but she loved both of her daughters and one of them was so alone.
    Me, I was just ashamed. Intolerant and ashamed. When Jackie stuttered, trying to get a word out, or didn’t seem able to join in the conversation, my friends would look uncomfortable. “What school does she go to?” they would question me. The next day they would ask me, shyly, if Jackie could dress herself. What did it mean to be “slow” or “retarded”? Did that mean she was crazy?
    Today it’s hard to understand how much ignorance there was, but subjects like this were not discussed. If you had a child like my sister, you did what my parents did: protect her and hope no one would notice.
    It must have been so difficult for my sister. She would have great spells of crying, tantrums of frustration, and, especially in later years, scream at my mother, but she never turned her anger on me.
    I can’t say the same for myself. I could be short or angry with her, and to this day I