Barbara Walters

Barbara Walters will retire in May of next year, a source familiar with her plans told Reuters on Thursday . (Deadline Hollywood broke the story; Read it here .) The 83-year-old executive producer and co-host of "The View" has struggled with health issues in recent months. A slip and fall sent her to the hospital earlier this year. That was followed by a bout with chicken pox. "The View," one of the most successful daytime talk shows on television, is in the process of a radical overhaul with several of the original co-hosts gone or about to go. Walters was the first female co-anchor of a network morning show at NBC's "Today" in 1974.

Barbara Walters will retire in May of next year, a source familiar with her plans told Reuters on Thursday . (Deadline Hollywood broke the story; Read it here .) The 83-year-old executive producer and co-host of "The View" has struggled with health issues in recent months. A slip and fall sent her to the hospital earlier this year. That was followed by a bout with chicken pox. "The View," one of the most successful daytime talk shows on television, is in the process of a radical overhaul with several of the original co-hosts gone or about to go. Walters was the first female co-anchor of a network morning show at NBC's "Today" in 1974.

THE WHOLE thing started over Barbara Walters, which is a silly damn thing to fight over, but there you have it.What happened was, Nancy was reading a magazine profile on Barbara Walters, one of those long-winded puff jobs wherein the subject is portrayed as the logical successor to St. Francis of Assisi in terms of warmth, compassion and contributions to humanity.Just to get the conversation rolling, I said: "A Barbara Walters piece. Boy, there's a lot of trees that died for nothing."Well.

I am feeling better about Barbara Walters since her interview last week with President-elect Barack Obama and future first lady Michelle Obama. She asked solid, informed questions during the session and waited until the very end to inject a moment of fun in the conversation by holding up a picture of her dog and doing some lobbying for the breed as the next White House canine. In fact, I am feeling so good about her, that I will definitely watch Barbara Walters' 10 Most Fascinating People of 2008 tonight - and not just because Baltimore's Olympic champion Michael Phelps is one of the people she will be interviewing.

ON AND OFF THE AIR:* Everybody talks to Barbara -- ABC's Barbara Walters, that is, who offers another of her celebrity interview specials tonight (at 9, WJZ-Channel 13) featuring a couple guests who are not often in the talk spotlight.We all know from his daily show where Phil Donahue stands on things, but spouse Marlo Thomas is much more reclusive. Both chat with Walters about their marriage, which has lasted 11 years.And while also seen daily in his late-night NBC show, David Letterman in the past has allowed little light into his off-screen life.

HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE: Sinai Hospital is celebrating its 125th birthday with Barbara Walters on April 14. I'm told she accepts very few speaking engagements, so this is a real coup for the hospital's auxiliary, which is sponsoring a multitude of birthday festivities. And to sweeten the pie, so to speak, one of Baltimore's wealthiest and best-known bachelors, Ed Hale, has agreed to have his private jet fly Ms. Walters to and from Baltimore.The Grant-A-Wish Foundation is having a fund-raiser on April 18 and has landed John Holliman of CNN as its star attraction.

Your choice: On ABC, you can watch the blatherings of the year's allegedly most interesting people; on VH-1, you can watch performances by better than a dozen of the most talented musicians of 1968 (not to mention ever)."Disney's Beauty and the Beast: A Concert On Ice" (9 p.m.-10 p.m., WJZ, Channel 13) -- Russian skaters Ekaterina Gordeeva and Victor Petrenko portray Belle and her Beast in this ice-bound adaptation of Disney's Broadway adaptation of its movie adaptation of the classic children's tale.

In the long run, surviving can be its own sweet reward.And Barbara Walters knows a little something about surviving.She survived the mistreatment of persistent sexism in the working world of the "Today" show at NBC, where testosterone ruled the airwaves during the 1960s and early 1970s.She survived the mean-spirited backbiting of jealous male colleagues after becoming a million-dollar anchorwoman for ABC News in 1976.And she survived blistering pop culture parody -- being roasted to sarcastic perfection by Gilda Radner on "Saturday Night Live."

Barbara Walters played the adult, while Monica Lewinsky alternated between boastful and chastened child. And, boy, did it get old fast despite the so-called "startling revelation" that Lewinsky became pregnant by another man and had an abortion during a lull in her relationship with Bill Clinton.With two hours of Walters acting shocked while she simultaneously pressed for more salacious details of the physical relationship and Lewinsky doing her best to oblige the hectoring interviewer, ABC last night became the undisputed leader in the mad dash of network news to debase our culture.

ROCKVILLE -- Ruthann Aron will do on network television what she refused to do during her two murder-for-hire trials: tell her story.A Montgomery County Circuit judge refused yesterday to block a jail house interview between Aron and Barbara Walters for the ABC news magazine "20/20."Lawyers for Aron's estranged husband, Dr. Barry Aron, asked Judge D. Warren Donohue for a gag order, saying the publicity would taint the jury pool in the couple's civil lawsuits against each other.But after an hourlong hearing, Donohue said he was denying the request because "a gag order would have a substantial effect on Ms. Aron's First Amendment rights and perhaps the rights of the press."

OH, SO you missed hearing Bette Midler and Katie Couric sing together and dance at the '60s Flower Power event celebrating the 35th anniversary of the community garden in NYC? Well, you have today, tomorrow and Thursday to go on charitybuzz.com and bid on some spectacular tickets in a very special auction. Whoopi Goldberg, Glenn Close, David Beckham, Sarah Silverman, Wayne Newton, Meredith Vieira, Tony Bennett, Michael Kors, Rachael Ray and the divine Miss M. herself are offering tickets for you to be up-close and personal with this and that.

No wows. Audition, the memoir of the most celebrated female television journalist in history, is on bookstands this morning (Knopf). But those in search of singular shocks or rocking revelations will be disappointed. Barbara Walters has written an intelligent, thoughtful, often kind and even revealing autobiography. But with few exceptions (like the affair with former Sen. Edward Brooke, discussed today on The Oprah Win- frey Show), hers is a long career played before the public eye. We already know the narrative well.

EVER SINCE Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie made a not-so-secret appearance at the opening night of the new off-Broadway show, Jump, tickets have been selling with a bounce. The couple, now living in New York, took their children to see the martial arts comedy-spectacle from Korea. They sat quietly in the back two rows with a group of kids who were laughing through the entire performance. When they tried to make a discreet exit from the Union Square Theater, the customary swarm of cameras caught them.

Critic's Pick -- Barbara Walters couldn't get an interview with God, but she talks to other luminaries about heaven on 20/20 (9 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2).

Things got messy this week with the girlfriends on The View. What was supposed to be a carefully choreographed series of lies, told to save face, spare feelings and protect careers, devolved into a nasty catfight, leaving a veteran newswoman, Barbara Walters, in the position not only of having admitted lying, but of accusing her now-former co-host, Star Jones Reynolds, of lacking dignity for failing to lie about why she was leaving the show. Jones Reynolds, for her part, had already been slammed for (allegedly)

After a quarter century as co-host, Barbara Walters, the alpha female of broadcast news, is leaving 20 / 20, the ABC program on which she has interviewed Fidel Castro, Christopher Reeve, Hillary Rodham Clinton and -- before 48.5 million viewers in 1999 -- Monica Lewinsky. Nearly 75, Walters has made it clear that she's not leaving television news, the form that she, as America's first female anchor, helped define. She will continue to produce a half-dozen interview specials a year for ABC, including her signature Oscar-night specials, and she'll also appear twice weekly on The View, the daytime talk show she created.

After a quarter century as co-host, Barbara Walters, the alpha female of broadcast news, is leaving 20 / 20, the ABC program on which she has interviewed Fidel Castro, Christopher Reeve, Hillary Rodham Clinton and -- before 48.5 million viewers in 1999 -- Monica Lewinsky. Nearly 75, Walters has made it clear that she's not leaving television news, the form that she, as America's first female anchor, helped define. She will continue to produce a half-dozen interview specials a year for ABC, including her signature Oscar-night specials, and she'll also appear twice weekly on The View, the daytime talk show she created.

Barbara Walters (above) chats with and talks up the 10 Most Fascinating People of 2005 (10 p.m.-11 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2).

When CBS veteran anchor Dan Rather met last week with Iraq's Saddam Hussein at an Iraqi palace for a rare interview, each man sat in a padded throne-like chair with gilt backing. An Iraqi flag stood to Hussein's right, and a hand- woven silk tapestry covered the wall behind him. It was as though the heads of two very different kinds of states were meeting -- and, in a sense, they were. The interview, which aired Wednesday night for the full episode of 60 Minutes II, drew the ire of the White House, attracted 17 million viewers and was widely quoted, including by such disparate media outlets as the Biloxi, Miss.