Barbara Walters Regales Women of Jewish Fund

“You’re not going to find out I had an abortion of a baby by Frank Sinatra,” Barbara Walters says of two unauthorized biographies coming out later this year, including one by Jerry Oppenheimer, co-author of an unauthorized book about Rock Hudson in 1986. “In a strange way I’m curious,” Walters said of Oppenheimer. “I’m thinking, what can he write to make it juicy?”

A chatty Walters regaled a luncheon gathering of 62 women who belong to the elite Chai Committee of the Women’s Division of the United Jewish Fund in Los Angeles. The event kicked off the organization’s annual fund-raising effort, which Walters noted was impressive. Last year, members of the Chai Committee donated a total of $2.5 million to the UJF, supporting social service agencies in Los Angeles, Israel and throughout the world.

“Barbara Walters, without question in my mind, is the most prestigious Jewish woman in the country and probably the world, and certainly the most recognizable,” said Harriet Hochman, campaign chair of the Greater Los Angeles Women’s Division, adding that the newswoman “practically moved mountains to be with us.” On Saturday, Walters departs for Czechoslovakia to interview president Vaclav Havel.

Lunch took place in and around a recently built Chinese-style Beverly Hills mansion said to be an exact reproduction of a Suchow province country estate, save, of course, for the two tennis courts.

When guests, including event chairman Beverly Mitchell, Sylvia Hirschfield, Dorothy Corwin, Diane Glazer, Dorothy Goren, Annette Shapiro, Elaine Goldsmith, Sally Kurtzman, Marion Smooke, Edna Weiss and Dorothy Lyon, weren’t marveling over the mansion’s contents they were marveling over Walters. Recounting her meetings with world leaders, Walters divulged that the most charismatic was the late Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. “Even if I were speaking to another group, I’d still say the same thing.”