A Good Run.(Barbara Walters )(Interview)

Byline: Photographed by Norman Jean Roy.

With her memoir, Audition, set to appear, Barbara Walters talks to Joan Juliet Buck about how she became a pioneering icon for women in television.

In an airless editing room on West End Avenue, Barbara Walters briskly cuts to the essence of The Ten Most Fascinating People, her year-end special. Snippets of the Young Actress, the President, the Ex-President, the Football Couple, the Boy Singer, the Girl Singer, the Radio Show Host, the Founders of the Web Site, and footage of the Reclusive Novelist will all be edited together, aired in two weeks, and get huge ratings. She sits inches from the faces on the screen, a paper transcript on her lap, her producers fanned out around and behind her, monitoring what's important and what's not with a sure ear. "Boring. Too long. Don't need that; can we move the other up?" It's a Saturday afternoon, and work is not over. Hundreds of pages of her autobiography, just back from the Knopf copy department, flagged and full of queries, await her at home on the hall table, right next to the Christmas card from George and Laura Bush.

The preeminent icon of female power on television, Walters is a star, a pioneer, a workhorse with monumental focus. Her voice--a distinctive Boston bleat at once flat, hoarse, and nasal--has been co-opted by female broadcasters all over the country. Her way of listening to people, like it or not, long ago set the standard for public empathy.

"I don't love everybody," she says, "but I put my personal feelings aside when I'm working."

For Lesley Stahl, "she created a whole new broadcast genre for women. Liz Trotta, who covered politics and the military before her, was like a guy. Barbara gave us an arena, made it possible to cover every kind of story, to be brainy and girly. She has an authenticity that allows her to present a complete human being on TV, who can flirt and laugh and be tough."

"I'm different on camera," says Walters. "I have guts; I have no doubts; I have no fear when I'm working." Her friend Joyce Ashley says, "She has enormous courage, and part of that is her curiosity."