Barbara Walters is caught up in the Christmas spirit.
She appeared at her ABC office last week wearing a bright red mohair coat, knee-high black suede boots and, in her impeccably coiffed blond hair – reindeer antlers.
“I think they suit me,” she said. “Not everybody could wear these.”
Seeing the doyenne of TV news in a get-up worthy of a Santa’s helper is a bit surreal. But the spirit moved her. And she’s hoping her new special “Heaven – Where Is It? How Do We Get There?” – moves viewers.
“I hope that it will inspire,” said Walters. “I hope that this will make people talk and think.”
The two-hour documentary, airing today at 9 p.m. on ABC, examines the many interpretations of the afterlife. Walters talks to religious scholars including Washington, D.C.’s Theodore Cardinal McCarrick, Rabbi Neil Gilman of the New York Jewish Theological Seminary, Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, and the Dalai Lama.
“We’re not asking the question, Does heaven exist?” said executive producer Rob Wallace. “We’re giving respect to the fact that people believe in it. What we’re talking about is how powerful a concept it is. And how it changes lives.”
Walters found her time in the Himalayas with the Dalai Lama enlightening.
“I was very moved by the Dalai Lama,” she said. “He talked about happiness being compassion and warm-heartedness. I sort of joked and said for three days after I met him I was a wonderful person.”
People who say they have died and then come back share their experiences. Walters also talks to Mitch Albom, who wrote the best seller “The Five People You Meet in Heaven,” and Maria Shriver, who authored a children’s book about heaven. There is also archival footage of one of Walters’ interviews with Elizabeth Taylor during which the actress talks about her otherworldly meeting with her late husband, Mike Todd.
“I don’t judge,” said Walters, “I just listen.”
The documentary doesn’t avoid perhaps the most controversial manifestation of faith today: the Palestinian suicide bomber. Jihad Jarrer, a failed suicide bomber incarcerated in Israel, informed Walters that, because she wasn’t a Muslim, she would be going to hell.
“One of the most frightening but fascinating was (that) interview,” said Walters. “He was trying to kill himself because he hates Israelis, hates Jews, but also he’s going to go to paradise. Everything he didn’t have on Earth he’s going to have in paradise, including all those virgins made just for him.”
And Walters asks Cardinal McCarrick one of her trademark “delicate” questions: Is there sex in heaven?
“I’m not being cynical, but I try to ask the questions that I think people want to know,” she said. “What will we look like? Will we be meeting Moses and Einstein and Picasso and so forth? Will we have sex?”
Walters won’t offer details about her personal view of heaven.
On hell? Fifty years in broadcast journalism have informed her idea of the place.
“I finish a program where I just thought that we had done the best presentation and I’m very happy with it. And someone says to me, “Did you ask such-and-such?’ And it’s the one question I know I missed.
“At least it’s hell for a day.”
If the road to perdition is paved with blown interviews, maybe the highway to heaven is clogged with Christmas reindeer. Walters isn’t so sure.
“I do not plan to wear (the antlers) in heaven,” she said. “I will not need them because I will have everything in heaven.”
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