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She had, the world now knows, a "long and rocky affair" with a married United States senator.

She had her own daughter kidnapped (sort of).

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Barbara Walters' 576-page tome reads like an extended, enjoyably informative episode of 'The View.'
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And wait 'til you hear about her White House tete-a-tete with a certain president from Georgia.

Juicy revelations abound in "Audition," the new memoir that only Barbara Walters could have written (and clearly did write herself). The 576-page tome — not counting the from "ABC" to "Ziegfield Follies" index that almost perfectly summarizes her life's arc — reads like an extended, enjoyably informative episode of "The View."

"The View" works best when creator/mother hen Walters shows up to impose a modicum of journalistic order and context on things. And to shamelessly (but legitimately) name-drop.

So it is with "Audition," where Walters tells a well-organized, conversational tale of growing up with a nightclub impresario father whose career was much more mercurial than anyone might had imagined. If Lou Walters' daughter wound up going further than any woman previously had in TV journalism and becoming a celebrity herself, it didn't come easily or by accident.

When Frank McGee arrived as "Today" host in 1971, Walters was in her seventh year as the grueling morning show's co-host in all but name only (no woman had ever been given the title). In a meeting with NBC's president, newcomer McGee asked for — and was given — the right to ask every question during all "important" interviews. Walters pushed back and won the right to ask the fourth question. But only if time permitted.

Walters covers her already well-covered move to ABC in 1976 as the first female co-anchor of a nightly news broadcast. We also learn she dated future Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and had a passionate, clandestine affair with married, black Republican Sen. Edward W. Brooke. That finally ended when she and the Massachusetts senator decided disclosure could ruin their respective careers.

But that wasn't enough to stop her from starting up with "simply the most attractive, sexiest, funniest, charming and impossible man" in 1973.

"Though racial tolerance was on the rise — interracial marriages more than doubled in the 1970s — having a romance with a married black senator would have raised more than eyebrows," Walters writes. "I had a daughter to think about and a network that would be less than thrilled to see me involved in any kind of scandal. None of that seemed to matter to me."

After two years, Brooke asked his wife for a divorce. She reacted furiously, hiring detectives. Around this time, Walters writes, she received a phone call from a good friend, former Commerce Secretary Pete Peterson, warning that news of the relationship would soon become public.

Years later, Brooke, who'd divorced and remarried, developed breast cancer and went public with the news to alert other men to the possibility.

"I thought of writing to him to say how courageous he was, but I decided not to," Walters writes. "Our relationship seemed so long ago. For a time, however, it was a very important one in my life. That is why I am writing about it now."

As of Friday, Brooke had declined comment on Walters or the book.

Other notable aspects of "Audition":

• When her rebellious teen daughter, Jackie, ran away and ended up at a rundown house of stoners in the Midwest, Walters and the head of Phoenix House arranged for a "transport person" to extract Jackie and take her to a school for troubled adolescents, where she turned her life around.

• Panamanian dictator Gen. Omar Torrijos kept Walters close to him in April 1978 while the U.S. Senate debated turning over control of the Panama Canal. Had the vote not gone his way, Torrijos told her later, he'd planned to have her witness the Panamanian army destroying the canal's locks.

• Eleven years of "The View" soap opera gets covered in 19 pages. Walters believes the mercurial Rosie O'Donnell saw her as a mother figure, despairing of the Rosie-Donald Trump feud: "Will she ever get over him?" Also: "The premise of 'The View' is that of a team working together, but for Rosie it was more like Diana Ross and the Supremes." In other words, don't mess with Mom.

• Jackie, then 10, got to spend a day at the White House with 11-year-old Amy Carter in 1978. When Walters arrived to pick up her daughter, she and Walter Cronkite (who was there for another reason) were invited to have coffee with Jimmy Carter. They hoped to hear something newsworthy. "Instead, the president took the opportunity to tell us about his hemorrhoids," Walters writes. "'Very uncomfortable and painful,' he said."

And that's the way it was ...