Although I have let it simmer for a while now, I still don’t know how I feel about the recent revelations of an affair between famed journalist Barbara Walters and former Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke.
Walters has said she wanted to reveal the whole package of her life in her memoirs, not leaving anything out, not the bitter or the sweet, not the clean or the unclean.
That’s admirable. None of us is entirely one thing. We have bits and pieces of a lot of flaws within our makeup.
But I’m still not sure why it was necessary to write about all her affairs. She wrote more about her affairs than about the three men she married and divorced. I guess it is a sign of the times, but I just don’t get it.
If it is worth keeping a secret for 30 years, what’s wrong with covering it up for a few more? Walters is 78 and Brooke is 88. How much longer do either of them have on this Earth?
Although it wasn’t a secret, the affair between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn could be a model of how to sin in a good way. Tracy never allowed himself to be photographed with Hepburn, his live-in lover of more than two decades, unless it was for a movie. Raised a strict Catholic, Tracy wouldn’t divorce his wife or have their two children embarrassed publicly by his antics.
And after his death in 1967, Hepburn refused to comment on their affair until after Tracy’s wife had died.
It was a convoluted way of showing the wife a modicum of respect.
With Walters, I don’t see the respect. Brooke’s first wife, the one he was married to while having a lengthy affair with the TV journalist, has died. But his children are still alive and well. What about respecting them?
Of course we can argue that Brooke should have shown more respect by remaining faithful to their mother in the first place.
Kissing and telling, though, just doesn’t sit well with me.
What was the urgency in pointing out her affair with him, or, for that matter, with former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan or former Virginia Sen. John Warner?
She has repeatedly said she wrote the tell-all because she has reached “a good place in her life.”
That’s nice.
I would just have preferred she reach that place more privately.
I am a native Kentuckian, and I have worked at the Lexington Herald-Leader for nearly a quarter of a century. I've been a columnist for almost 20 of those years, dispensing my opinions about anything and everything. Born in Owensboro, Ky., I'm old enough to have lived through racial segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, protests against the Vietnam War, and the break-up of the Beatles. That means I am "old school," and my thoughts emanate from that perspective.
3 Comments
May 14, 2008 at 9:51 am
I agree that she should have kept silent, considering the affair had not be revealed. I think it was rather rude to him, also.
May 21, 2008 at 12:03 am
What about the woman from Louisville that got elected to congress in Kentucky after making it public she was with Martin Luther King in Menphis when he was shot.
Still wonder if it was really a jealous husband from the ville?????
May 21, 2008 at 2:02 am
Hi Merlene!
I often disagree with things you write about. I’m often disappointed about that since, as far as I can tell, if you and met on the street, we’d get along just fine.
But I wholeheartedly agree with this piece about Barbara Walters revealing details of her salacious and adulterous lovelife. She should have kept a lid on parts of all that, or at least changed some of the names. I’m currently writing a memoir and I intend to change a couple of names so as to not directly embarrass anyone. Perhaps I should leave out some of those things, but they are central to the story I am trying to tell – and my perspective of it.
Keep up the good work.