NEW YORK -Mind you, Barbara Walters is not retiring.
But she is about to do something almost as notable: Relinquish her role as co-host of 20/20 after a quarter-century with that ABC newsmagazine. Walters, who has interviewed almost every big shot worth interviewing and whose own celebrity matches many of her subjects, is ready to retreat from the spotlight -a little.
But first: At 9 p.m. EDT Friday, Walters will preside over a two-hour retrospective of many of the 740 interviews (but who's counting?) she has done for 20/20.
Then on Sept. 24, she will air one more: a conversation with Mary Kay Letourneau, the former sixth-grade schoolteacher who went to prison for having sex with a student.
After that, she plans to spend a whole week with her daughter Jackie at a spa in Southern California.
I don't know when I've gotten away for a week
she says, without getting called on something.
Time to take the phone off the hook!
I know that everybody said `She'll never stop working. They'll carry her out feet first ' says Walters, looking relaxed and stylish in a mint pantsuit at her desk a few days ago. But I wanted to get out of the week-in-week-out grind. And I wanted to leave at the top. I didn't want to leave and have people say
`Is she still there?'
Walters, who marks her 73rd birthday next week, has been reliably there on the nation's TV screens since the 1960s, as the first female co-host of NBC's Today.
She became a 20/20 fixture in 1979, joining forces with its then-host Hugh Downs following the disastrous experiment that had brought her to ABC three years before: co-anchoring the evening newscast with Harry Reasoner, who quickly made it clear he wanted no one alongside him, especially a woman.
Very difficult
very painful
Walters calls that misadventure. But at 20/20 she flourished, and, in 1984, became its co-host.
Now replacing her at the anchor desk next to John Stossel will be Elizabeth Vargas.
But I'm not retiring
Walters says. I'll be doing specials that I can pick and choose. We're already working on `The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2004
' for December. I'll continue to do `The View' (the morning chat and interview hour she started in 1997 whose panel of women she joins a couple of days each week). I might even do an interview for `20/20' from time to time.
