Barbara Walters … that damned widow’s peak

The matter of Pamela Courson and Barbara Walters has been festering within me, and I think I might finally be able to resolve it here … to a degree. The idea that triggered the solution was something I noticed back when I first dove in, that Barbara Walters has a slight widow’s peak.

First, we need to set the stage. The photo below is said to be Walters, and is taken from a 1961 video of the Today Show.

I suggest that whoever this woman is, she is also the woman seen below.

Also interesting that the 1961 video, seen in the previous post, is somehow overdubbed so that the voice we hear is that of the woman we know as Walters. This woman, whose name perhaps really was Barbara Walters,  enjoyed brief tenure, but for unknown reasons was replaced.

Since that time there has been a massive project to remove all remnants of this woman from public view, so that even going back in time we see photos that bear no resemblance to her, and are in fact the woman we know as Barbara Walters. Take a look at the photos below:

By use of face-splitting, a somewhat reliable technique, I was able to determine that these woman are NOT the 1961 Barbara Walters. They all bear a close resemblance to the person we know today. Either these photos have been doctored, always a possibility, or we are dealing with doppelgängers. The best answer I can give is “I don’t know.”

Some photos below appear to me to be doctored.

It is obvious in the photo on the right. With the other two, it is simply the time period when the original Walters was appearing on TV, but the face belongs to the new Walters. But golly, they look real, don’t they? Here’s a couple more:

The doctoring is obvious there. Given that some were doctored, I think it logical to conclude that most, if not all older photos of Walters from the 1960s and early 70s are products of forgery of some kind. The other bit of evidence that supports this is that today’s Walters is said to be 88 years old, and yet appears younger, more vital and alert than a woman of that age would be.  She is either a remarkable specimen, or someone other than the original. I originally concluded that the new Barbara Walters was Pamela Courson, who would be 71 if her given birth date is accurate. I still think this to be the case, with a curve ball coming our way.

In support of the Courson alternative, I offer this: She was seen to be the companion of Jim Morrison, lead singer for the Doors. It is likely that Morrison, who does not appear to be of the Morrison family, was a highly charismatic man brought in as  a minor part of a much larger project, the music scene of the 1960s. That project changed our culture, and had a role in feminizing men and bringing recreational drugs into the mainstream. Where “Morrison”  is now, or if he is even still alive, is speculative and  not important. What is important to understand is that many of the actors in that project faked their deaths. They were either reassigned or disappeared into the corn field.

Pamela Courson also faked her death. Why? As I view it, she was used as Jim Morrison’s “beard” in much the same manner as Jane Asher with the McCartney’s. Maybe it was to hide the fact that he was either gay or asexual, but with the McCartney’s the appearance of the same girlfriend with the two men cemented the impression that they were only one person. So too did it appear that Morrison, prior to his fake death, was someone else. That face chop is not conclusive, camera angles and all, but is as much so as I care to make of it, as it is too much trouble for too little reward. If there were more than one Morrison in Paris at the time of the fake death, Courson was used to disguise this fact.

After her role has Morrison’s girlfriend, Courson could have retired and faded into the background, just as Patty Hearst did after her Symbionese Liberation gig. Instead, she faked her death. To me, this speaks of reassignment. For that reason, I assert the fake death as further evidence that she became Barbara Walters.

But there is more going on here, more than I saw, and so I have to step back and also admit that now know less than I did before. Check out the following:

Oh, hi Matt. I think someday you might end up on Mount Rushmore, one of you anyway.

I wish I could explain why the same face keeps turning up on different people. We’ve been down this road before, and all we can do is speculate. I use the term “Bokanovsky Brats,” after the process described in Huxley’s Brave New World.

There must be more to it, however. The Superbowl is coming up, and Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is a Brat. I have watched him play, looking for signs that he is being propped up by scripted games and kid-glove handling. There is indeed some scripting going on, but defensive players appear to me to want his blood. (The victory over the Jaguars last week looked scripted, kept close to late in the fourth quarter with the Jags phoning it in after that, allowing the Pats that final drive. But Brady played well.) (As a resident of Denver, Colorado, I easily recognize bad quarterbacks.)

Brady is a talented quarterback. Other members of the Brats are also talented, Matt Damon aside. Leonardo DiCaprio is a very good actor, and Jimmy Kimmel a charming TV host. Barbara Walters is a gifted interviewer who can also sing.

 

Thanks to Tyrone, who spotted that video. It is less than a minute, so give it a look. He has also struggled with the phenomena we observe:

Let’s look at the BW question from this angle (By no means definitive): Ringo’s nose-

I have a mild fetish for multiple Ringo’s. Because his look is so distinctive, all Ringo’s have passed muster. First and foremost, there’s the shnozz, and then the bangs and the wide grin, plus the clown act. Getting through all that and noticing differences is very difficult. (Who back then would even have considered looking closely?) The only reason I got any hook into the funny one was a huge height discrepancy displayed in an early photo. Then, as shown on The Beatles Never Existed, the nose, like the height, does fluctuate. But, he sits to play the drums, so that helps hide height differences on stage. …

B Dub’s ‘shnozz’ is her voice. The helmet hair is secondary (along with the slight widow’s peak when a sub isn’t wearing an obvious wig – and is the peak a marker so that each actor can have a wig properly calibrated?) And there’s the calm, bedside manner that looked timid in the early versions.

What if the voice belonged to one actor that simply dubbed BW from the start, and then the voice went to another actor to keep it young enough through the years? BW’s voice is affected, to say the least, and when Radner’s Ba Ba Wa Wa came along, her broad comic version was designed to make the ‘real’ voice seem so by comparison. (As BW was transitioning to evening programming and a much different demographic than morning housewife programming) …

She’s not Batch Baked. Not for just one persona. I think the Bokanovsky Brats are used for general coverage of the stage, not to mix and match for a single character. … Scrubbed is one thing but what about fake insertions to make a fictional character like BW or Cooper appear to have genuine roots? Oik! This is painful fun…

Well, that is where I leave it … painful fun. It seems as though much of the two-dimensional world is contrived, and at the same time that a process is at work that produces wonders of nature like Brady. He is a very good quarterback.

The same process also gives us crappy actors like Matt Damon, who reprised his role as Jason Bourne recently by walking slump-shouldered to a pounding drum beat. Man, that guy can’t act.

I give it up for now. I have no answers.