Barbara Walters Knows Imus Well Enough to Ignore His Wicked Ways
Barbara Walters has known Imus for a long time, and puts up with his shenanigans in order to talk about important things, like her latest television special A Matter of Life and Death, which focuses on heart disease and airs tomorrow night on ABC at 10pm.
“A year ago, I was told I had a faulty valve,” Walters, a lifelong journalist and the creator of The View, said today. “I didn’t know what a valve was, but I had an aortic valve that was narrow. I thought, okay, I can push this off, I can forget, so what? It turned out I couldn’t push it off.”
Last May, Walters, like countless others before her, underwent open heart surgery, a procedure that tends to frighten people. “They hear it’s the most painful thing, they hear you get depressed, they hear awful things,” she said. “And almost everybody knows somebody who has had it.”
Heart disease is far and away the biggest killer in America, and kills more women than all of the cancers put together. “I thought, I’d like to do something on this so people are not terrified,” Walters said. “But at the same time, to tell people what they can do to prevent it.”
She enlisted well known heart disease survivors like David Letterman, Regis Philbin, Robin Williams, Charlie Rose, and President Bill Clinton to tell their own stories of hardship and recovery. “I said, ‘Tell me your experience,’ which they do,” she said. “Some humorously, some touchingly.”
As with every single special she has ever done, Walters speculated that this is the best one yet. “Because it will save lives,” she added. “It’s called ‘A Matter of Life and Death’ because in each of our cases, had we not had this operation, we would have been dead, probably within two years.”
That the special is devoid of famous women plagued by heart disease, aside from Walters, is not lost on her. “Maybe they didn’t come forward,” she guessed about fellow female sufferers, and admitted she had considered saying nothing, or lying.
“I was just going to say ‘I’m having women problems,’” Walters recalled. “Men get scared if you say you’re having a woman problem. Then I thought, they’ll think its cancer, and why don’t I just say, ‘This is what I had?’ And I think people were so amazed, because people don’t come forward and talk about it.”
Today, Walters feels great, and is still not having sex with married U.S. senators, as Imus suggested, alluding to one of the more salacious revelations Walters made in her memoir, Audition. “You are wicked,” Walters told him.
To which Imus replied, “Is the answer no, then?”
Oh, and make sure to tell Rosie, Whoopi, and everybody else at The View that the I-Man sends his best.
-Julie Kanfer
Reader Comments (1)
The funniest line on Imus in the last week or so is Fred's line on watching Obama's speech " Well I watched for around a minute and when I found out he wasn't resigning I shut it off. I tell that to people and they howl with laughter. I almost drove off the road.... and Get an affiliate in Boston.... the Rhode Island station doesn't come in clear enough!
Walter