Barbara’s Night Out : If it’s Oscar evening, Walters must be zeroing in on some major stars. Demi, Richard and Annette, get your hankies ready.

Richard Dreyfuss is there in half reply, frozen on the video playback; the Iraqi ambassador is in the wings for a late lunch; Christopher A. Darden and Demi Moore are at the other end of the next plane ride; and the lunch for Henry Kissinger, well, that’s just going to have to wait right now.

Barbara Walters’ plate is full and life can’t be sweeter.

“Don’t think I’m too important for lunch with Henry Kissinger, please don’t think that,” Walters said amid her whirlwind preparations for “The Barbara Walters Special,” which airs Monday right after the Academy Awards, an Oscar night tradition for 15 years.

“But this is probably the most contented time of my life. My daughter is terrific. I love the people I work with. Do I wish I had this when I was 35 or 40? Sure.

“But I wouldn’t be me,” she said. “Maybe I wouldn’t be on the air at all.”

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It’s hard to imagine the air without Walters. This Oscar night special adds Dreyfuss, Moore and Annette Bening to the galaxy of celebrities and newsmakers Walters, 64, has “done” in her 20 years at ABC and the previous 13 on NBC’s “Today” and “Not for Women Only.”

The list could hardly be more exhaustive: every president and first lady since the Johnsons; world leaders from Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to Fidel Castro and Moammar Kadafi. She’s interviewed jocks with conflicts like Greg Louganis and Monica Seles; rockers with a story outside their music, like Elton John.

Despite this impressive “get” list, it is the celebrities interviewed at the top of their game, such as with Dreyfuss, Moore and Bening, that most viewers associate with Walters.

It’s Sean Connery admitting he favors slapping women at selected moments; John Derek waffling about whether he’d drop wife Bo if her looks faded; Johnny Carson cringing when Walters asks about his first sexual experience; Katharine Hepburn pondering what kind of tree she might be; Richard Pryor talking openly about his drug problems; Christopher Reeve on a ventilator, optimistically positing a wonderful future.

“As an interviewer, I think she is the best,” said Sharon Stone, a former Walters subject who’s up for an Oscar this year for “Casino.” “She’s intelligent, informed and charismatic. Her own vulnerability and charisma allow you to be vulnerable with her.

“She’s not trying to get some preconceived notion of what she wants in an interview, which is the usual,” Stone said. “She goes into the interview with good questions and informed questions. She’s not interested in burning you, but she relentlessly searches for something new.”

A Walters interview starts with research that would exhaust a lesser reporter one-third her age. Where Larry King revels in being a tabula rasa when he interviews someone, Walters takes just the opposite tack.

“By the time I do an interview, I want to know more about them than they know,” said Walters, in her well-windowed 10th-floor office at the ABC building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The room is peppered with seven Emmys and books written by and about interview subjects. Solid mainstream jazz and popular CDs are piled neatly below the video editing equipment, which is stored in a mirrored, blond-wood closet similar to an armoire.

From her neat stack of notes and other materials she pulls the full-to-overflowing loose-leaf binder marked “Demi Moore.” In it are copies of dozens of Moore print interviews and transcripts of those on video. A few days before her interview with Moore, Walters has seen all but three of Moore’s films and will see at least one of those before meeting the actress.

She then brings forth a fistful of 3-by-5 index cards that would stretch the grip of Shaquille O’Neal, a recent Walters subject himself. These are the proposed questions for her session with Darden.

“These are the ones I think are OK,” she said, holding out an inch-think chunk of neatly typed cards. Then pulling out similar-sized piles: “These are the redundant ones. These are the ones for his childhood. These are the ones we can already throw away.”

“I’ve never known anyone to work harder,” said Mike Wallace, a longtime friend and competitor. “She’s smart as can be. She makes the interviewees feel thoroughly comfortable, yet she doesn’t go easy on the object of her scrutiny.”

“What people don’t see and don’t appreciate is the work that goes into what appears on the screen, which results in what appears like charm or chemistry. It is all that, but it is much more preparation and research,” said Victor Neufeld, Walters’ executive producer on “20/20,” the inveterate Friday newsmagazine she co-hosts with Hugh Downs. “So when the person gives an unbelievable answer to an unbelievably cogent question, that is not personality or charm. It’s knowing all there is to know about the person and doing all the research and analysis to know that question to ask.”

Walters likes the praise but doesn’t pay all that much mind to it. If that is so, it is because she heard too much derision 20 years ago when she joined ABC with the first million-dollar contract given a network newsperson.

ABC lured her from NBC, where she had been with “Today” for 13 years, making her co-anchor with Harry Reasoner on the nightly newscast and having her do interview specials in prime time. Reasoner hated the deal, as did many vocal critics.

“The first few years when I was here was the worst professional time of my life. I was drowning,” Walters said. “I had come over from ‘Today,’ where I was very happy. My daughter was 7 and I was supporting my whole family at that point. I couldn’t do like a Connie Chung and say I would stay home with my baby for a year.”

Part of the problem, Downs said, was that the world of network journalism was an old boys’ club.

“She got unwarranted bad press I think solely because she was offered $1 million to anchor,” said Downs, who was instrumental in moving Walters from writer to on-air when he was anchor of “Today” in the 1960s. “I think a lot of insecure males were jarred by that contract and they began to snipe at her.”

“It wasn’t all the money,” Walters said, since half of her original ABC salary, the part for the specials, was actually paid by the entertainment division. “Because I didn’t have the print or radio background that the generation just before me did--the John Chancellors, the Walter Cronkites--I was severely criticized.”

Walters’ father, Lew, was the part-owner and manager of a small chain of popular clubs called the Latin Quarter, the most visible of which was in Manhattan’s Broadway district. Walters grew up watching performers such as Milton Berle and Sophie Tucker from backstage. She thought she wanted to be an actress, except she was, and says she still remains, terribly shy about performing.

“Everybody who would turn me down, I would have taken it personally,” she said. “And I wouldn’t have been able to audition for television either. If it hadn’t happened the way it happened, well, I don’t know.”

After graduating with a degree in English from Sarah Lawrence College in 1953, Walters learned to type and took a series of low-level jobs in advertising, public relations and local New York television.

“That’s why I tell college kids to do everything you can to get in the door,” she said. “If you have to get a cup of coffee, so what? Get your foot in there--but just work longer and harder than anyone else.”

By her early 30s, Walters got her dream job: writing for a network show, in this case, “Today.”

“I was never going to be in front of the cameras. I wasn’t good-looking enough. I didn’t speak perfectly. All they had on ‘Today’ was wonderful-looking models and actresses,” she said.

But one of those actresses (they were called “Today Girls”), Maureen O’Sullivan, found she couldn’t cut it as an interviewer at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. NBC was in a panic. Downs suggested Walters as a replacement.

“They said, ‘But she’s a writer,’ ” Downs said. “I said, ‘I know she’s a writer, but she’s intelligent and good-looking and I think she would do well on the air.’ ”

“So they put me on for 13 weeks and I stayed on for 13 years,” Walters said.

But even after getting her first $750-per-week, union minimum check, she still had an uphill woman’s struggle. Her most memorable stories were more sexist than substantive: a day as a Playboy Bunny; a night dancing the frug with disco dandy Killer Joe Piro; a day in the life of a nun. Worse, when Downs left in 1971 and was replaced by Frank McGee, McGee had it written into his contract that he was to ask the first three questions of any important interview before Walters got to chime in.

McGee died in 1974, to be replaced by Jim Hartz. Walters finally got “co-host” appended to her name after a decade in the job. Two years later, she became the million-dollar newswoman.

By this point, her father’s nightclub empire had collapsed and her second of three marriages had ended in divorce (a brief early marriage had been annulled). Even her first interview specials, while memorable in some ways, were ratings busts. Her first special had President-elect Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and Barbra Streisand. She followed that with three more spotlighting newsmakers such as the shah of Iran, King Hussein of Jordan, Vice President Walter Mondale and U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan.

Save for Streisand, the ratings were only middling.

“We realized they didn’t want the political people. More and more, we made it celebrities,” Walters said. Pols, national and world, were saved for the newscasts and “20/20,” which she joined in 1981.

Though Walters says she loves her celebrity interviewing gig, she finds it harder than ever before.

“There are so many programs that have done these same movie stars,” she said. “Mine’s got to have something: the moment when it goes, ‘Ping!’ It’s got to have a little bit more. You can’t watch for an hour and say, ‘So what? That was boring! I certainly heard that last week.’ ”

Still, stars keep coming to her, at least discerning ones do.

“I would recommend anybody reasonably intelligent doing it with her,” Stone said. “She doesn’t suffer fools very well. She is so intelligent, so perceptive and so well prepared, she is ready for people to come in and play the game with her.”

“I don’t think many people avoid her. They know if they talk to Barbara Walters, they will face a tough questioner, but a fair questioner,” said Christopher Harper, the director of graduate studies in the New York University department of journalism and a former “20/20” producer. “She may get you in a corner, but allow you a way to explain, as best you can, why you did something. It’s not rat-a-tat-tat, why did you beat your wife? It’s well thought-out, substantive questions that may make you feel uncomfortable, but do let you state your case.”

“I’m not a hit-and-run driver,” Walters said. “If I come in and do a terrible, mean interview and then go away, it may get all sorts of headlines. But then the next person isn’t going to do it. I mean, 20 years of doing these interviews of the most temperamental stars. All one has to do is come back and say, ‘Don’t do that with her. She is the biggest bitch.’ Then it dries up. But at the same time, you have to make it interesting.”

Walters herself is edgy about being the subject of a piece.

“I rarely give interviews,” she said. “I don’t like doing print interviews. I think you have a much better chance with television.

“[In print], you can say, ‘She said with a smile. She said with a grin. She said with a grimace. She said with a scowl.’ And it’s all the same face,” she said without expression. “On television, you can see it yourself.”

Walters is guarded mostly about her home life. She mentions how her relationship with her 27-year-old daughter has improved but won’t elaborate on the bad times.

“I think you can talk as much or as little as you want [in an interview],” she said. “There are areas of my private life that I’ve spoken about, but that doesn’t mean I have to talk about everything.

“There was a time I couldn’t talk about my sister,” Walters said of her retarded older sister, Jackie, for whom her daughter is named. “I don’t discuss my daughter. She deserves a private life. I don’t discuss my former husbands.”

But she will allow a tidbit. Whenever possible, she wants herself photographed from the left side because she doesn’t like a line near her eyes and nose on the right.

“I wouldn’t die if they shot me on the right. I’m not the Phantom of the Opera,” she said. “And just let’s say that if an actor has the same good side as I have, theirs is the one that gets on.”

And, at an admitted 64--though some bios have her at 66--with a contract coming up this year, Walters said she will know when it’s time to stop.

“I do, but I won’t tell you when,” she said. “I used to say that if I got an interview with Greta Garbo, I would retire. Then I was afraid she would call me.

“I don’t always want to do this,” she said. “I don’t want it to be that I have to be so lit or so scrimmed. I don’t want to keep traveling all over the world. So I think a great deal about when I would retire and it’s OK.

“I have a friend who is a magazine editor who is older than I am who worries, ‘If I retire, no one will ever call. My life will come to an end,’ ” she said. “My life will not come to an end.

“So I won’t be invited to screenings. I’ll have more time for other things,” she said. “But don’t worry, it’s not there yet and it’s not going to be there for a while.”

CBS’ Wallace, who is a dozen years her senior and still working, claimed there will be no Walters II.

“Don’t you dare say ‘successor’ to Barbara,” he said. “She has simply been at the top of her game for this last year or two. She is an institution now. She has become the celebrity saint.”