Alfred A. Knopf. 612 pp. $30

Barbara Walters paved the way and shattered the ceiling, the first woman to cohost a morning news program, coanchor an evening newscast, interview world leaders and be remunerated with movie-star money.

Her success is all the more amazing given that Walters - though attractive - is no beauty-pageant sylph, the irony being that a platoon of pancake-makeuped Barbies followed in her slipstream. Walters is the first and the only. No one in television is like her, though Larry King comes close. Walters appears at the Free Library's Philadelphia Book Festival at 5 p.m. Sunday.

Nothing presaged the way for her success when she first appeared before the camera in 1961. Walters has, to Gilda Radner's delight many years ago, a thick accent and a pesky problem with her "r's." She glows hot in a medium that trends cool. And, at age 78, Walters is still kicking in an industry that prefers its women ripe.

Audition begins auspiciously and candidly, with the drama of Walters' childhood, something straight out of a Judy Garland movie. Lou Walters ran Manhattan's Latin Quarter nightclub, among many enterprises, making and losing several fortunes. "The rise of television was the beginning of the end of my father's success," she writes, a statement that Freudians might feast on for years.

The marriage was bad, netting two daughters. Jackie Walters, her older sister, was mentally retarded, spending a lifetime in the shadows. Barbara's legacy was a mountain of guilt, a need for approval, and a drive to thwart financial uncertainty.

If this isn't enough baggage, the thrice-divorced Walters names her only child Jackie. "I wanted the grown Jackie to feel that she, too, had a child, because I knew that she never would." Oh, my. Do not doubt for a minute that there will be repercussions to come.

"My life has been one long audition - an attempt to make a difference and be accepted." She does not forget a slight, even from the dead. When Walters notes "ultimately, we became friends," don't believe her. The book would be half its length if this coda were deleted. It's like a load of icing spead over a bad cake to hide the damage. Walters says this about everyone - not her ABC Evening News co-host Harry Reasoner or Today partner Frank McGee (even trashing his mistress' looks) - but everyone else, even The View's Star Jones.

This culminates in an addict-like need to court power and celebrity. In Audition, names are not so much dropped as hurled, ad infinitum, at Johan Santana-speed. Chapters are titled "Garland, Capote, Rose Kennedy and Princess Grace." They read like state dinner guest lists, too.

It is not enough for Walters to interview potentates. She tries to seduce and charm. She wants to befriend them and rise among their ranks, dating Alan Greenspan (Cheap! "He rarely remembered to pick up a check or buy a Christmas or birthday gift"), Sen. John Warner, the married Sen. Edward Brooke. She even served as a beard for the closeted Roy Cohn. She loathes Cohn's behavior and politics - her socially liberal tendencies appear between the lines - but keeps his company just the same.

Loyalty is her long suit and her weakness. She vacations with the rich and lives like them. She's honest but hardly objective.

On Nixon's historic 1972 trip to China, the print journalists spurned her. Walters imagined it was because she was a woman on morning television. The true reason may have been her lack of detachment, an utter disregard for journalistic standards. On the trip, she picked up geegaws for Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser. Oh, yuck.

If Walters paved the way for other women, she also launched the trend of celebrity journalist, with so many tele-heads arriving after her yearning to be as famous as the people they interview. World leaders quickly gave way to Oscar specials, murderers and Monicas. In Walters' world, all names are bold-faced.

It's a big mistake. It's a bad precedent. And it isn't journalism.

As a woman given to candor, as open with readers as she trusts her subjects will be to the camera, Walters is slow on the uptake. She's been used time and again, by people wise to her well-worn tricks. Walters preps for interviews like they were orals, but her aim is always the same.

She wants to be liked. She's looking for a gotcha quote, tears, a confession, a dance or a motorcyle ride. Most subjects are happy to oblige for that Walterized, Vaseline-lens treatment. Walters forgets that these people are actors, on screen or the public stage, that criminals are liars, and they're used to doing the using, giving people what they want to hear.

Audition is a monumental waste of an opportunity. Walters and her editors at Knopf made a foolish decision to have the book "talked" rather than written, despite the assistance of literary midwife Linda Bird Francke. Consequently, the book is studded with such gaggable lines as, "And now that you know about my late-blooming, delayed love life, it's time to get back to work." Or: "When you finish this book, and I hope you will, do read Alan's."

This isn't writing. It's cocktail chatter.

It demeans the book, even the abused memoir, which didn't seem capable of sinking lower. Despite its length and candor, Audition has all the grace of a View transcript.