The fairy dust of insecurity

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Barbara Walters' memoir "Audition," in which the legendary TV newswoman admits to a lifetime of chronically low self-esteem, hit bookstores Tuesday. That was the same day the results of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries made Hillary Rodham Clinton's indefatigability look more like Bush-level delusion than admirable perseverance.

I'm not sure if it's a testament to Walters' breezy writing style or to the way election coverage has taken on the white-noise quality of a humming refrigerator, but I managed to skim most of "Audition" on Tuesday night while watching CNN (with the volume on, mind you). It was there, in a thunderstorm of opposing female sensibilities -- Clinton defiantly vowing to head "full speed on to the White House"; Walters warily describing her life as "one long audition" -- that I found myself wondering something post feminist-era women are never supposed to wonder: Is self-confidence really all it's cracked up to be?

Specifically, I found myself wishing that Walters would take some of her feelings of inadequacy and sprinkle them like fairy dust on Clinton.

By all appearances, Walters has self-doubt to burn. Though she and her publisher are promoting her book largely by hinting at various gossip-worthy revelations -- a long, clandestine affair with Edward W. Brooke, the African American (and married) former U.S. senator from Massachusetts chief among them -- its real theme is rampant insecurity. The daughter of a nightclub owner whose erratic fortunes suffered from a merciless gambling habit (and led to a suicide attempt), Walters' most formative relationship was with her developmentally disabled older sister, Jackie. "Her condition altered my life. ... I was embarrassed by her, ashamed of her, guilty that I had so much and she had so little," Walters writes.

Not that Walters had everything. She was wait-listed at her dream college, Wellesley, and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence because "I didn't have the confidence to wait to see if Wellesley might take me or the courage to call the school and try to convince them I would be a perfect candidate."

Though it's unfair to compare the assertiveness skills of a woman of Walters' generation (she's 78, though she won't give her age in the book) with the manifest striving of a boomer like Clinton, it is, in this age of self-esteem-as-religion, rather refreshing to hear from someone who, at least as a youngster, bought so thoroughly into her own mediocrity.

Compare Walters' blighted tale to the triumphant path of Hillary Rodham, who presumably sailed through Wellesley's admission gates in 1965 as a National Merit finalist, a member of the National Honor Society, a Girl Scout, a swimmer and a canvasser against electoral fraud for Richard Nixon. Whereas the preteen Walters (who couldn't join the Girl Scouts because she had to look after her sister) agonized over her relegation to the "B or C-plus" social cliques at her prep school, Rodham, at age 14, famously wrote a letter to NASA asking how she could become an astronaut.

Walters, upon graduating from Sarah Lawrence, "took the path of least resistance and headed home to New York" because "there was nothing that I really wanted to do and nothing that I thought I was particularly good at"; Rodham's historic Wellesley commencement speech in 1969 landed her in Life magazine. (Incidentally, the commencement's keynote speaker? Then-U.S. senator from Massachusetts Brooke.)

Of course, Walters appears to have shed many of her insecurities by the time of her affair with Brooke, which she says began in 1973 (she doesn't specify an end date, though by 1975, she was involved with Fed chief Alan Greenspan, with whom she shared a telling fondness for Ayn Rand). As with her feelings about her sibling, whose troubling presence was so profound that Walters almost named the memoir "Sister," Walters wrestles with guilt over the affair but never apologizes for it.

Still, for all of her proto-Carrie Bradshaw verve, there's a nagging sense in "Audition" that Walters wants to apologize for her ambition, or at least chalk up some of her success to luck, circumstance or, most palpably, a chronic terror of losing it all.

That's why the stereo effect of reading "Audition" while listening to Clinton bluster though her barely-a-victory speech on Tuesday evening offered up some discomfiting truths about the limitations of self-confidence. Sure, it's a crucial part of anyone's psychological arsenal, but so are humility, good sportsmanship and being able to recognize the point at which staying the course becomes an exercise in self-sabotage.

Walters may have been tireless in pursuing interview subjects, but she was never too stubborn to stay in a job or a relationship that was no longer working. As she knows instinctively, and as Clinton seems to have yet to learn, ambition is bit like election coverage: When we cannot or will not turn it off, it practically begs to be ignored.

mdaum@latimescolumnists.com