Terry Prone: When Barbara Walters interviewed me I thought she was dumb... I couldn't have been more wrong

Barbara Walters addressing an audience at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Massachusetts, in 2014. Ms Walters, the intrepid interviewer, anchor, and programme host who led the way as the first woman to become a TV news superstar during a network career remarkable for its duration and variety,  died on Friday, aged 93. Picture: AP/Steven Senne

Everything in America was astonishing to me, as the guest of Seventeen magazine which dubbed me “Ireland’s outstanding teenager”. I got taken off the Aer Lingus flight on arrival by the FBI, who wanted to know my politics (none) and my view of what Bernadette Devlin had said a day earlier (I didn’t know what she’d said). 

Once the FBI established me as politically clueless and no threat to homeland security, they let me go and the magazine trekked me all over the East Coast, through one press conference after another, one radio or TV studio after another. Ireland was big news at the time, so an Irish teenager was more news than would otherwise have been the case.

The biggest gig was being interviewed live by Barbara Walters, the doyenne of US television at the time. Walters died on Friday at 93, having had an unequalled career in American television, interviewing more presidents, kings, despots, and democrats than any other woman of her era, and possibly more than any male broadcaster of the time. 

In those early days, she was famous for being female, rather than for being equal. Women’s liberation and its assertion of gender equality was only beginning to take shape. Feminism was not yet a force. So when Walters was first hired by NBC, it wasn’t as a programme anchor. She wasn’t even supposed to be on camera. 

She was recruited as a segment producer to turn out 'women’s interest stories' and snuck on screen in the first example of a resolute self-confidence that would turn her into a national icon.

I figure the Irish teenager I then was came under the heading of “women’s interest”, didn’t know about the stereotyping. I did know the rules, though. Bunny Carr and his producers had taught me, from first appearance at 13 on a show called TeenTalk, that you didn’t have to be beautiful or highly educated or wise for the TV camera to like you. You just had to have something to say and say it forcefully. The only mortal sin was to leave “dead air”: time on a live show when nobody was speaking and the compere was praying that somebody would come through with some opinion, preferably contentious.

Hillary Clinton poses with ABC News' Barbara Walters at the Clinton home in Chappaqua, New York. Ms Walters interviewed Ms Clinton for a special edition of '20/20' in 2003. Picture: ABC News/AP, Virginia Sherwood

So a dawn appearance on the Today Show with Walters was welcome because the IDA and a bunch of Irish fashion companies wanted to be mentioned on national TV, but after I plugged them, I could do whatever I wanted. Which is what I did, because the minute I was put in the chair next to Walters, she asked me, one after the relentless other, the researcher-crafted questions on the list in front of her. Obvious questions that deserved monosyllabic answers. Had I been in the US before? Where had I been so far? Who had I met?

Nothing was asked about the swinging sixties in Ireland. Nothing about how my country was beginning the long shucking of the carapace of church control. Nothing about our education system or track record in foreign direct investment. Nothing about the Troubles.

Walters’ fidelity to the questions in front of her was astonishing to someone who had seen Gay Byrne interview someone for 40 minutes without a note in front of him. The list, and her attention to it, meant that she couldn’t listen to my responses and so the interview was as internally connected as the Smarties in a box. I thought she was dumb as a post.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Sure, she was responsible for OMG moments such as asking Katharine Hepburn what kind of tree she’d like to be if she had to be a tree. But she clawed and scraped her way to the top and stayed there for decades. 

One of the skills she had learned at home from her showbiz father was the importance, the absolute primacy, of guest booking. 

Her autobiography is terrifying in the stories it tells of the lengths to which she would, and did, go to book people who, because they were victims of a disaster, refugees from a war, or celebs who had done something outrageous, were top of the news lists. She would do everything short of kill to get the right guest.

Barbara Walters with David Beckham and his wife Victoria, who were spotlighted on 'Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2007'. Picture: AP/ABC, Donna Svennevik

And she had survival instincts second to none. In the nineties, she developed and starred in the first of those women-talking-rot-around-a-table shows that spread across the Western world like a bad rash. She could see where TV was going and got there before it arrived.

Her story is one of contempt shown to her by men, frequently on the air, and of her determination not to be deflected from her progress to the top. She was not deflected by sexism, religion, politics, or age.

Her timing was pretty good, too. Her career end coincided with the arrival of social media, where women can become rich and famous by peddling jeans, rather than by interviewing heads of state.