Barbara Walters speaks with a neighbor during a luncheon in New York in April.

AP / Seth Wenig

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, coiffed 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 (Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95), this legitimately star-studded autobiography, has identified as her most useful professional qualities.

Barbara Walters 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.

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. And “at the end of his interview Cronkite is clearly heard saying: ‘Did Barbara get anything I didn’t get?’ ”

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. Still, a little more barbed frankness would have gone rather far in a book that uses “rather” as its favorite modifier.

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 whose stage shows featured what were called “petite mamzelles,” 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. 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.