About the time Gilda Radner spoofed Barbara Walters on Saturday Night Live, the best-paid and most famous woman in broadcast television was making an unprecedented $1 million annual salary, a fraction of the reported $12 million a year she would eventually earn co-hosting 20/20. Walters, whose first big assignment was to accompany then-first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to India and Pakistan, has had, to say the least, a colorful life in television. She has been hostess for more than ten years at The View, where she reportedly had run-ins with former hosts Star Jones and Rosie O’ Donnell. She has interviewed every U.S. president since Richard Nixon, and she has made many of her guests cry, even when she hasn’t asked them if they were a tree, what kind of tree they’d be. Known for her trademark, probing-yet-casual interviewing style with the famous and powerful, Walters’ own private life off camera has come in and out of view until now. We are hoping that in her memoir Audition, to be published May 6, she finally gives us her unfiltered view. If it’s a tell-all, will we learn how she felt when the public and even her co-anchor Harry Reasoner were skeptical about a woman anchoring the evening news? (Sound familiar, Katie Couric?) How did she manage to get an exclusive in 1999 with former White House intern and Bill Clinton paramour Monica Lewinsky, which became a two–hour special that made broadcasting history as the highest-rated news program ever broadcast on a single network? Her other notable interviews range from controversial figure Jack Kevorkian to political leader Fidel Castro. The table of contents and this excerpt suggest the book will deliver. It will be juicy. It may become our favorite summer dish. If nothing else, it k will be a welcome addition to the outrageously small number of quality memoirs by or biographies of female broadcast news personalities.