7 
ANOTHER OPENING, ANOTHER SHOW
1941
Barbara was ready to enter the eighth grade when her father announced they were moving out of the pistachio-green house on Palm Island.
The Latin Quarter was doing so well that Lou and his show had been featured in The Saturday Evening Post. “A spectacular and magnificent night club venture,” The Miami Herald proclaimed. “One of the outstanding clubs in the country,” the Miami Daily News agreed. He took his “Midnight in Paris” revue to Nassau for a benefit for the British Red Cross sponsored by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. A photo from that night shows Lou and Dena chatting with the Duchess, all of them in evening clothes.
Lou was eager to expand to other cities. On the first day of 1941, the morning after raucous New Year’s Eve celebrations had rung in the new year, he was sitting alone in the Palm Island club. Irving Zussman, a PR man from New York, called with an offer too good to resist.
“How’d you like to run a nightclub on Broadway?” he asked. “In Times Square. The best location in the world. And you won’t have to put up a cent.”
Elias Moses (E. M.) Loew, an Austrian émigré who had amassed a fortune in movie theaters and real estate, wanted to get into the nightclub business. The two men already knew one another. Back in the day, Lou had booked vaudeville acts into some of Loew’s theaters. Now, Loew had found a prime location for a club with a ten-year lease. He would provide the capital; Lou would stage the show in exchange for a salary, some equity, and his name on the marquee—an offer, Loew’s widow would explain, “to boost Lou’s ego and make him work harder.”
Lou was thrilled to be heading back to New York, the town he had left as a teenager, fueled by nothing more than hustle and hope. To Times Square, the neighborhood where he had searched so desperately for his first job three decades earlier.
The vacant building on a triangular-shaped lot at Broadway and 48th Street had a cautionary history. A string of nightclubs already had failed on the site: the Cotton Club, George White’s Gay White Way, the Palais Royal. But when Lou’s Latin Quarter opened on April 22, 1942, five months after the United States entered World War II, it was packed with an audience drawn by his classic prescription: steaks, showgirls, and a touch of Paris for anyone who could afford the $2 minimum. He titled the first show “Folies des Femmes.” The Broadway correspondent for United Press called it “as lavish a show as a night club has brought to town in well over a year.”
In New York, the Walters family moved to the Buckingham, a residential hotel with an arch of stained glass over double doors at the entrance. At the corner of 57th Street and Sixth Avenue, it was in the middle of the city, across the street from Carnegie Hall and a block from the Automat. Barbara enrolled at Fieldston, a private school with a leafy high school campus in Riverdale, in the Bronx. Affiliated with the Ethical Culture Society, the school gained renown over the years for its prestigious alumni, from physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to composer Stephen Sondheim to power broker Robert Moses. Notorious lawyer Roy Cohn attended for a year, too.
Barbara was miserable, especially at first. “It was coed and full of cliques,” she said. When she arrived, she realized with horror that her shoes, bought in Florida, were a mistake—white open-toed “Cuban heels” rather than the requisite black-and-white saddle shoes—and that she wasn’t wearing the right socks with them. Every single thing about her seemed wrong, she worried. Her clothes made her look like a hick and her unusual speech pattern, what she tried to explain away as just a Boston accent, made her sound affected. In the beginning, she would take her lunch tray and walk slowly around the cafeteria, hoping that one of the popular girls would invite her to sit down.
She made mostly As and Bs in her academic classes, though she confessed to flunking home economics and gym. She would never be particularly good at or interested in cooking or sports; she would never be an early choice when teams were picked. The only recognition she recalled winning during those days was at sleepaway camp that summer in the Poconos. She was voted “most improved athlete,” a compliment with a backhand.
Her social life got better through the year, but she never felt fully at ease. “I never really made the A group,” she recalled. Years later, she spied the class beauty whose cascade of blond hair had helped make her the object of desire for upperclassmen. By then, the woman’s youthful good looks had faded, Barbara noted with a bit of spite, while she had become the famous co-host of Today. “Okay, so I’m bragging,” she wrote in her memoir, “but after all those years of pushing so hard, I’m entitled.”
The Latin Quarter in Times Square, which opened in 1942, was a hit, a glamorous respite for soldiers and tourists as World War II raged. Within months, Lou had moved the family from the Buckingham to a penthouse on Central Park West.
Their home was fancier, but their family dynamic was no more stable.
Barbara came home from school one day to find her mother in tears. “Daddy has left us,” Dena told her. The breach sounded more serious than their usual squabbles. “You go talk to him,” Dena instructed her fourteen-year-old daughter. “Tell him to come back.” She told Barbara to take Jackie with her, a play for sympathy.
The two girls went to the Latin Quarter, not yet open for that night’s business. “I remember very clearly sitting with my father at his table in that darkened, empty nightclub, crying and begging him not to leave us,” Barbara recalled. Jackie was crying, too, though she didn’t understand what was happening, only that something was wrong.
“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 smiling. She told me my father had changed his mind and decided not to leave.”
Barbara had rescued her family, and not for the last time.
Lou Walters, never really satisfied, wanted to expand his ambitions.
A year after the Latin Quarter opened in New York, he ventured into Broadway musicals, producing the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943 in association with the Schuberts at the Winter Garden Theatre. The show, a revival of Flo Ziegfeld’s celebrated series from 1907 to 1931, starred comedian Milton Berle. The reviews were mixed but the wartime audiences loved the extravaganza; the show would run for 523 performances and was still going strong years later on tour. An ad for the show at the Oklahoma Semi-Centennial Exposition in 1957 billed stars Mickey Rooney and Dorothy Lamour, along with “30 OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRLS IN THE WORLD.” A local newspaper enthused, “Walters is bringing 360 different costumes of the kind that has earned him volumes of praise for daring, originality and elegance.”
But Walters’s other Broadway shows were flops, and expensive ones. Artists and Models was an updated vaudeville revue from the 1920s that featured a young comedian named Jackie Gleason. “Walters has conceived some cute notions,” a reviewer wrote in Billboard, then added sarcastically, “which is possibly the chief ailment.” It opened on November 5, 1943, and closed three weeks later. Three months after that, he revived and produced another show, Take a Bow, starring Chico Marx, the oldest of the Marx Brothers and a self-taught pianist. The show folded even faster, after fourteen performances.
In September 1944, Lou launched another Latin Quarter, this time in Detroit. Comic and singer Martha Raye was one of the headliners—at a premium $17,000 for two weeks—but the club was troubled from the start; $7,500 in receipts went missing in its opening days. “When Lou was out of town, the waiters robbed him blind,” a local columnist later wrote. A year after the grand opening, with fewer patrons in the club and no profits in sight, Lou and partner E. M. Loew sold it to a Detroit syndicate.
Lou would even lose his original Latin Quarter nightclub in a gin rummy game, a longtime friend named Ben (Ford) Abrams told author Jerry Oppenheimer. Caught in an all-night losing streak at the Friars Club in New York, Lou called a business acquaintance in Boston and landed a quick line of credit, using the Boston Latin Quarter as collateral. By dawn, he was broke and the club was gone. Just what happened to the Boston club isn’t clear. Years later, The Boston Globe reported that Walters had sold the club in 1943 for $350,000 to Michael (Mickey) Redstone, a notable local figure of his own. Redstone, a high school dropout, had established first a trucking business and then a family entertainment empire that would become ViacomCBS.
Regulars at the Friars Club talked for years about another epic streak, the day Lou lost $30,000 in cash to showman Mike Todd in a gin rummy game. Broadway columnist Dorothy Kilgallen rated Walters and Todd as the “keenest gin rummy players” in town. One of them was, anyway.
Lou decided he would focus on the New York nightclub and new enterprises in Florida. He signed leases to open a gambling casino at the Colonial Inn, just north of Miami, and to take over a club called the Dunes in Palm Beach County.
With that, they moved back to Florida. “I was furious,” Barbara said. “I had finally made friends. I had a life.” Looking back, she said those years reminded her of the show tune “Another Op’nin’, Another Show,” from the Cole Porter musical Kiss Me, Kate, that would open on Broadway a few years later.
Another job that you hope, at last,
Will make your future forget your past,
Another pain where the ulcers grow,
Another op’nin’ of another show.
“For me,” she said, “another audition.”
She would attend four schools in five years. In each of them, “she had to start cold,” her mother recalled. “She’d come home at night and cry.” What Barbara remembers is “being always on the outside.” That she had to audition, again and again.
Barbara enrolled at Miami Beach Junior High for the ninth grade, then at Miami Beach Senior High for the tenth grade. She knew some classmates from elementary school in Florida, and the academic and social pressures were lower than at Fieldston. She pledged one of the sororities that ruled the students’ social life—not the most exclusive one, Kappa Pi, but the second-ranking one, Lambda Pi. She went on dates and to dances.
But Lou was struggling, again. Being able to open a casino at the Dunes depended on defeating a resistant county sheriff who opposed the proposal to legalize gambling. At a time of gas rationing during wartime, it was hard to convince people to drive from Miami to the Colonial Inn in Hallandale, on the outskirts of the city.
Dena nagged her husband and confided in her teenage daughter. “She was always afraid that something would happen to the club or that my father would lose too heavily at cards, and they’d wind up broke again,” Barbara said. After all, it had happened before. “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?” Not if. When.
She described her family this way: “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.”
The Florida clubs were failing. To Barbara’s dismay, they were moving again, back to New York.
Fieldston authorities had informed Barbara that she wouldn’t be welcomed back to the school. They complained that her attendance had been too irregular, she said. The morning after shows opened at the Latin Quarter, her parents would let her sleep in and skip her classes. She and her mother and sister would have been up all night, first at the club and then at Lindy’s, the deli where the comedians and other showbiz folks would hang out after the club closed.
It was 1945, and World War II had finally ended. Americans were ready to celebrate. The Latin Quarter grossed $10 million in its first decade and was visited by more than five million people, ranking second only to Radio City Music Hall as a New York City destination for tourists. The biggest stars played there. “I knew Lou Walters before he could speak Latin and didn’t have a quarter,” Milton Berle would joke at the beginning of his routine.
Lou had more than a quarter in his pocket now. He was flush again. They moved into a penthouse at 91 Central Park West, an apartment that was said to have once been occupied by the Hearst family. (In 2019, the four-bedroom penthouse sold for an eye-popping $17.5 million.) Huge terraces encircled it on all four sides. The living room had elaborately carved wood panels; the library was filled with the first editions Lou Walters collected; the music room featured a piano that was rarely played. The kitchen had a butler’s pantry. For a time, the family also had a butler, albeit one who turned out to be an alcoholic, stashing his empty bottles in a secondary kitchen off the playroom that was rarely used.
Dena decorated the library with red-leather couches and the living room with yellow-and-lavender brocade upholstery. Overstuffed pillows with tassels were scattered around. “The whole thing looked like a huge Easter egg,” Barbara said.
Her father took his family to the openings of the biggest shows on Broadway—to Oklahoma! and Carousel and Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific. They spent the summers at rambling resort hotels on Long Island and upstate in the Adirondacks and in Connecticut. She enrolled at Birch Wathen, another exclusive private school, this time on the West Side.
By now, she had an easier time making new friends, and she was getting good grades. She was teased about her father’s occupation in the Birch Peel, a student parody of the school newspaper, Birch Bark. An article described her as “the present owner of that successful club, ‘The Arabian One Third,’ ” a wordplay on “Latin Quarter.”
In the yearbook, though, she still has the look of someone who was not quite sure she belonged. A photo of the staff for the Birch Leaves, the school’s literary magazine, shows four smiling students clustered around the faculty adviser while Barbara stands apart, an uncertain expression on her face.
During these years, it is hard to see signs of the formidable figure Barbara would become. She showed little interest in world affairs. She wasn’t elected “most likely to succeed.” The biggest academic award she received was when she was chosen “Miss French Club” during the tenth grade at the Miami Beach Senior High. She seemed to have no idea what career she might pursue, or even that she would necessarily pursue any career. When she graduated from Birch Wathen in 1947, young ladies of her ilk generally weren’t encouraged to have any ambitions beyond landing a presentable husband and rearing well-behaved children.
It would be a decade before a crisis in her family would ignite her ambition and define her way.
With no particular direction in mind, Barbara did the same thing as most of her high school classmates at graduation. She went to college.
She applied to three of them, all women-only at the time and none of them far from home. Wellesley, in Massachusetts and one of the Seven Sister schools, was the most prestigious. Pembroke College in Rhode Island was her safety school. Sarah Lawrence was in Bronxville, just north of the city in Westchester County. It was relatively new, founded in 1926, with a progressive curriculum that particularly appealed to artsy and intellectual types. The biggest draw for Barbara was that her best friend was applying there.
The application form for Sarah Lawrence included essay questions, which Barbara answered with something less than honesty. She would later describe it as full of “barefaced lies,” deceptions for which she offered no defense. They reflected more of a flair for PR hype that might be used to promote a nightclub than the thoughts of a high school senior, serious about her future, much less of a journalist’s commitment to the truth. If TV interviewer Barbara Walters had uncovered such fabrications by a subject, she might well have cross-examined him or her about them, and what they revealed. What insecurities did they reflect? What fears that the truth would not be good enough to be accepted?
“What has meant the most to you in your education outside of school?” one question asked. Barbara’s family was Jewish by heritage but not observant in practice, and she had never attended religious training of any sort. Still, she replied, “Sunday school, which helped me appreciate the force of God and enabled me to increase my faith and understanding in His power.”
What experience had she had in the arts? She wrote that she was “particularly fond of dramatics”—that was true—and that she had gained “so much valuable technical experience” by working in a summer stock company in Connecticut. That wasn’t true. She seemed to be appropriating for herself the experiences of a friend at Fieldston, Enid Kraeler Reiman, who had told her about the summer she spent working as a gofer at the Greenwich Playhouse in Connecticut.
When a teacher at Birch Wathen had assigned students to write an autobiographical essay, Barbara cautioned a friend, Joan Gilbert, later Joan Gilbert Peyser, about the perils of revealing too much. “Barbara, even at the young age of sixteen, saw the value of secrecy,” Peyser, who became a prominent musicologist, said years later. “She was astute enough to know that indiscriminate self-revelation is not a skillful way to go through life.”
No one would ever accuse Barbara Walters of indiscriminate self-revelation. Even then, she had secrets and scars.
In her photo in the high school yearbook, she is unsmiling. The quotation under her picture is appropriate enough, from a seventeenth-century English poet, Francis Quarles: “The glory of a firm, capacious mind.” But at the senior assembly, which featured the reading of favorite poems, Barbara chose a melancholy verse by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, “The Stone,” about a woman’s devastation over the accidental death of her lover. A fictional short story she wrote for the literary magazine, Birch Leaves, depicted a dystopian world of icy loneliness, without warmth or shelter. It was titled “Beyond.”
By the time Barbara graduated from high school, Pembroke, her safety school, had rejected her application. Wellesley had put her on the waiting list. But Sarah Lawrence accepted her, the applicant who had touted her deep religious faith and experience in summer stock theater.
Sarah Lawrence it would be.