Two celebrities publish their memoirs:

Last week I watched Barbara Walters being interviewed by Larry King about her new memoir. I never quite understood her great success and the adulation she receives. She always seems so stiff, smug and haughty. Her smiles are forced. Her starchy good opinions about other people seem postured, not genuinely felt. This interview was no different. She couldn't even compose her facial muscles into a convincing smile when they showed the Saturday Night Live"Baba Wawa" skit, making fun of the way she speaks. She wasn't amused when it was done years ago, and she still finds it difficult to laugh at herself. But she did assure us viewers that she has a sense of humour.

By comparison, there is this week's new memoir by William Shatner.

This great interview with him is worth reading in its entirety.

Here are a few nuggets:

*I chose what some people refer to as the English method, by showing courage and then hoping that I would feel it.

*Well, that’s true, but I tell the truth in the book. I tell the truth that I lied. I wonder what the philosophical implications are of that. I think that I do lie sometimes, but only to save feelings or my own skin.

*...as for Leonard and I, I probably was a little too full of myself and thought maybe I should be getting some of his good publicity.

*A colleague referred to you as the master of self-irony.

Is that like pressing your own shirt? ... I think if you say “I’m the master of self-irony,” you’re no longer it.

* (About the new Star Trek movie) Leonard is in it, and he taunts me about it. ... he was conflicted about whether to taunt me or not. And then the conflict resolved itself pro-taunting. I feel like taunt-o now.

* T.J. Hooker would support McCain, and so would Denny Crane, but he would think McCain was a left-winger. Captain Kirk wouldn’t recognize any of the three.