On the same page in Barbara Walters' big, bean-spilling memoir there are photographs of Walters, the undisputed queen of the television interview, and Cha Cha Walters, her dog. One of them looks businesslike. She wears glasses and sits perched at a computer keyboard. The other is perfectly groomed, coifed and fluffed. She looks ready for her blue ribbon as best in show.

Who's who? Well, Cha Cha is the one who risks eyestrain. And the glamorously posed, taffeta-draped Walters is displaying what "Audition," this legitimately star-studded autobiography, has identified as her most useful professional qualities. She has spent more than five decades shattering glass ceilings in the world of television news, using social skills and ladylike persistence just as handily as she has used on-the-air reportorial acumen. From her first shot at doing a big news report on "Today" (the sinking of the ocean liner Andrea Doria), she has unstoppably combined the soft touch and the hard sell.

"What a horrible experience you've been through," she recalls saying to survivors of that 1956 disaster. "You must be feeling terrible. But could you come into our studio tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. to tell us about it?" Ever since then Walters has gone big-game hunting for the major interviews of her day and been amazingly dependable in bagging her prey.

To give some sense of just how much terrain "Audition" covers, these are some of its many index entries on the subject of interviewing: "with celebrities," "with difficult people," "with foreign heads of state," "impossible-to-get," "with murderers and alleged murderers," "with presidents," "with royalty" and "with people Walters could talk to again and again."

While she acknowledges that even her own eyes glaze over at the prospect of revisiting all that material, she has managed (with some collaboration from Linda Bird Francke) to fit much of it into "Audition" without too much awkward shoehorning. And this book is very much about her private life too.

When she recalls her work, Walters presents herself as someone who thrives on competition. She is happy to point out that when she went mano a mano with Walter Cronkite to bag both Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin in 1977 (after a behind-the-scenes feat of personal diplomacy that is described here in prideful detail), her ABC story got onto the air seconds before CBS showed its version.

As "Audition" makes clear, Walters is careful to keep in touch with many of a staggering number of friends and acquaintances, even if they have, say, killed their parents. She will be right there if Lyle Menendez can give her an interview from prison or if O.J. Simpson confesses. Tone-deaf to the implications of doing such stories, she points out, about her heavily protested interview with John Lennon's killer, that the interview didn't do Mark David Chapman any good.

If any single thing keeps "Audition" from achieving the stature of Katharine Graham's "Personal History," the book that set the high-water mark for memoirs of the politically and socially well-connected, it is the excess decorousness built into Walters' conversation. That is not to say that she lacks sharp elbows or that she is shy about remembering grievances or settling scores. Woe to the men who underestimated her, even in the days when she was the only woman writing for "Today" and wrote for the show's only female on-the-air personality. A little more barbed frankness would have gone rather far in a book that uses "rather" as its favorite modifier.

The family connections

But Walters' story is greatly humanized by the family memoir that colors her long litany of professional successes. She writes about her father, Lou Walters, the nightclub impresario as an overwhelmingly important influence, first for his great success and then for reversals of fortune. Watching her father, she developed what she says was an ease around celebrities that would serve her well in her own professional life.

Incidentally, although Walters is not specific about her age (or about the youth-preserving surgery of anyone other than Roy Cohn, the young Walters' weirdest suitor), she will acknowledge this: She's old enough to have had the daughter of one of the Three Stooges as a childhood friend.

Walters' father also left her with a Daddy thing: a susceptibility to older, sometimes married men. (Her story of a long, secret affair with Edward W. Brooke, the former U.S. senator from Massachusetts, is the first such "Audition" revelation to hit the tabloids.) Her troubled histories with her sister and daughter, both named Jacqueline, are also confessional parts of this story.

What emerges is the portrait of a deftly calculating woman with an impeccable sense of timing, which is why she has largely retreated from the battle for big-name interviews. When ABC had to decide whether Walters' last piece on "20/20" would be with President Bush or with a teacher who went to prison for her sexual relationship with an underage boy, the child molester won out. "I rest my case," Walters writes.