The ladies of The View had a lengthy meta-conversation all about the "very beautiful!" and "sexy!" photos of their own Barbara Walters in this month's Vanity Fair. And while they do point out the photo spread's accompanying excerpt from Walters' new memoir Auditions, and Babs does allude to tales of past "lovahs," she fails to mention (until Oprah makes her next week) just how tantalizing some of those pages are. As today's preview in the NY Daily News reveals, Walters was involved in a long-term affair with an African-American senator back in the swingin' 70s. And from the sound of it, the affair was far spicier than all those Adrian Lyne movies about adultery:

When selecting a mate, Barbara Walters did not limit herself to utterly reprehensible closet cases. She also liked Senators! Walters revealed on Oprah today that she carried on a torrid affair with Edward Brooke, the first black man elected to the Senate after Reconstruction (no one ever remembers Hiram Rhodes Revels!), "for several years in the 1970's." It was never revealed publicly because Brooke was in the process of divorce and a re-election campaign (he lost the latter). Brooke is still alive. Fun fact: he had breast cancer! Well, maybe that's not very fun. Still. We certainly are learning a lot about the love lives of our elder ladies of journalism, aren't we? It was just last month that Liz Smith revealed that she's slept with 20 people (divided more or less evenly among ladies and gentlemen) in her 2,000 years on Earth. She didn't reveal if any of them were Senators, though. [AP]