A typical abridged audio book runs about six hours. That may sound like an eternity, but it's actually an abbreviation: books take a long time to read aloud, so the audio versions rarely squeeze in more than a third or so of the unabridged book. In many cases, if the edit is skillful, you might not even know what's been left out. In the case of Barbara Walters' heavily hyped Audition, however, it's hard not to notice at least one thing that's missing: the sex.
The five-CD, six-hour audio version of Audition, read with breathless earnestness by Walters herself, does a fast-paced jog through the high points of her hefty, 580-page memoir: her travails as a woman trying to break into the largely male preserve of TV news; her strained behind-the-scenes relations with male co-anchors like Frank McGee and Harry Reasoner; her failed marriages and troubled relationship with her daughter Jackie. But when it comes to Walters' love life, the audio book is strangely chaste. None of her romantic relationships outside of her three marriages -- not even the most-publicized revelation from the book, her secret romance with former Massachusetts Senator (and then married) Edward Brooke -- are anywhere to be found.
Walters' mid-career love life is detailed largely in two chapters in the middle of the book, "Fun and Games in Washington" and "Special Men in My Life." Not all that special, or all that fun, apparently, because the audio book skips the two chapters entirely. Missing is any note of her affair with Brooke, not to mention her flings with future Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Virginia Senator John Warner and several more.