On Barbara Walters' cloth-covered bedside table in her West 57th Street Manhattan apartment—next to the lacquered box she brought back from Jackie Kennedy's 1962 trip to India, the hand-carved backscratcher from Gerald Ford's visit to China last December, and all the other gewgaws gathered in her hectic travels—there sit two alarm clocks. For years Walters, the co-host queen bee of NBC's early morning Today show and the most influential woman on television, has been indentured to those tyrannical timepieces. They are set permanently to go off at 5 a.m. Says she: "I always told people that if I ever had a million dollars my dream was to stay up every night reading trashy novels and sleep until noon."
Last week that dream became reality. In the biggest talent raid since CBS grabbed Jack Benny from NBC, ABC won Walters with an offer of $1 million a year for five years and a job that will let her sleep until, well, at least 7:30 a.m. Some time between now and next fall, Walters will join an at first sulfurously reluctant Harry Reasoner in anchoring ABC's lagging Evening News. She will be the first woman ever to fill a regular network anchor slot, the most prestigious job in television journalism. She will also become history's highest-paid journalist.
Hard Work. Walters, who now earns around $400,000 a year from the Today show and her own Not for Women Only syndicated talk show, will have to hustle for her million. The ABC contract calls for at least four specials and eight to twelve stints as host of the Sunday interview show Issues and Answers, in addition to service on the Evening News. That program will be expanded from 30 minutes a night to 45 when Walters comes aboard, and ABC affiliates will also expand their lead-in local news shows to 45 minutes. Yet no matter how her salary is apportioned, Walters will still outearn CBS's Walter Cronkite, NBC's John Chancellor and ABC's Reasoner. Each earns about $400,000 a year. She will also be hauling in more cash than many of the megastars of the entertainment side of the medium.
That thought troubles quite a few TV news executives. "A good journalist is worth more than a baseball player or a rock star, but I'm worried about where it's going," says CBS News President Richard Salant. "A million dollars is a grotesque amount of money." Frets a top NBC executive: "We're going to have a contagion of on-camera personalities asking for more money."
First in line may have been Harry Reasoner, who reportedly threatened to walk out rather than share the air with Walters. Reasoner, who has been ABC'S solo anchor since Howard K. Smith was sidelined to nightly commentaries five months ago, later softened his opposition, probably after ABC promised him more money. "It was my pride reacting," Reasoner said of his original temper tantrum. "My feeling was, 'Please, mother, I'd rather do it myself.' But that was only temporary and irrelevant. The money is the least of my worries. I make more now than I'm worth."