In 1976, Barbara Walters became the first woman to co-host a national news show on prime-time television. She only held the position for two years, but her arrival changed the media.
“She is a very important figure for journalists, not just women journalists,” says biographer Susan Page. “The path she blazed is one that many of us have followed.”
Page is the Washington bureau chief at USA today and the author of The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. Although they never met, Page says that talking to hundreds of Walters’ friends and colleagues and watching hours of tapes of his interviews gave him an idea of his subject.
Page describes Walters as a fearless journalist who did not shy away from controversy or difficult questions. She battled sexism throughout her career — particularly from her first co-anchor, Harry Reasoner, who, Page says, scowled at Walters’ presence and tracked the number of words she had said on air in relation to him.
After leaving the evening news, Walters became known for her lengthy interviews. His conversations, mixing news and entertainment, covered a wide range of topics, including Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin, Richard Nixon, Monica Lewinsky, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson. In 1997, she created Viewa daily talk show with an all-female cast of co-hosts.
“One thing I found interesting about Barbara Walters was that she thought all kinds of people were interesting and worth talking to,” Page said. “She really expanded the world of interviews that (national) journalists were doing to include not only presidents, but also notorious murderers.”
For Page, Walters’ success seems personal: “When I was considering a career in journalism, I never realized that I couldn’t do big interviews with important people because Barbara Walters was doing it. In the written press, not in television, I benefited from the fights led by Barbara Walters.”
Interview Highlights
On her family life which pushed her to work hard
Understanding the source of his motivation was difficult to understand and I think it’s crucial. And I decided, after doing all this reporting on her, that there was a moment that sparked the impulse in Barbara Walters, and that’s when her mother called her and he said his father attempted suicide. His mother didn’t call an ambulance. … (Barbara) called the ambulance. (Barbara) rode in the ambulance with her father to the hospital. And she realized almost in an instant that while she was going through her first divorce, she didn’t really have a career and from that point on she was going to be responsible for providing for her father, who had just attempted suicide, his mother, perpetually unhappy, and his sister with special needs. And that was going to require him to get serious and make money and maintain that. She always felt like it could all disappear in an instant.
On co-host Harry Reasoner’s hostility toward working with Walters
He so openly despised her on air that the director stopped filming two shots. This is a photo where Harry Reasoner could be seen watching Barbara Walters speak because he was always scowling. It was so bad that they received numerous letters from viewers, mainly female, complaining about the way she was treated. … It was truly an untenable situation, which took a long time to resolve and which irritated Barbara Walters. It was the only time in her career she thought she had made a mistake so bad she wouldn’t recover from it. She said she not only felt like she was drowning, but that people were trying to hold her head underwater.
On a turning point in her career, when she interviews Fidel Castro
So it was 1977. She was still officially the anchor (of ABC Evening newspaper), but things were not going well. And she landed this interview with Fidel Castro, who had rarely been interviewed by Western journalists. And… she got on a boat and crossed the Bay of Pigs with him. He drove his jeep through the mountains with her sitting next to him, raising his gun to stop the water from splashing. It was a great interview. A very difficult interview. She asked him about freedom of the press, which does not exist in Cuba. She asked him if he was married. It was a question he refused to answer. …So he finally gave up, answered and formally said no. So it was a great interview and it was a comeback interview for her. It showed both what she could do in an interview and it made her feel more confident again.
Youtube
During her interview with Richard Nixon when she asked him if he would have liked him to burn the Watergate tapes
This was during a particularly difficult interview, because the only way Nixon’s people could accept that she could do it was to do it live. There was no way to cut out anything superfluous to ask that last question, she had to be incredibly vigilant about controlling the interview in order to have time to ask that question. And the other thing we should know about this question is that she always wanted to ask the question that everyone wanted to hear, even the hardest question possible, like would you have burned the tapes? She wanted to ask the question people wanted to hear the answer to. It was one of (his) great gifts. And she figured this out by preparing for hours and hours and writing the proposed questions on little 3×5 cards, shuffling them and revising them, and finally having them tap them onto 5×7 cards to ask. She would let an interview go where it was going. She didn’t always follow the cards, but she always had a plan in mind for how she wanted to start the interview. What she wanted to do in the middle and what she wanted to do at the end to really give it a kick.
On his friendship with Donald Trump
They were transactional friends. She went to her wedding. He went to the celebration of his third marriage. He was often invited on View When View started in 1997. He was then a real estate developer in New York. And if they were missing a guest, they could call Donald Trump and he would come on the show or even do a sketch. …And in fact, an ABC executive told me that when Donald Trump got involved in politics, there was a feeling, a certain unease, that she had given him a platform and a legitimacy that ‘he might not have had it otherwise. .
Youtube
On preparing for her infamous interview with Monica Lewinksy
Barbara Walters was working to ask the questions, but at the same time, Monica Lewinsky was working with her team on how to answer them. The question that caused Monica Lewinsky’s team the most trouble was: “Do you still love him?” Because at the start of their training sessions, she said yes. And then she said she couldn’t say no because she loved him. And she loved him from time to time. And they warned that it was not an effective response. So you hear him, in this interview, give the answer that they had worked out, which was no. But then, in her follow-up, she acknowledges that sometimes she still has warm feelings for him. On Barbara Walters’ side, they worked for a long time on what the final question would be, because it’s a powerful position in an interview like this, this last question. And they asked themselves the question: “What would you say to your children?”
Youtube
On Gilda Radner’s impression of her as ‘Baba Wawa,’ making fun of the way she speaks
She was hurt hearing this. On the one hand, even though Gilda Radner was using this exaggerated lisp, no one had any doubt who she was parodying. And Barbara Walters had this speech abnormality. She said it was a bastard Boston accent. Other people called it a lisp. Whatever she tried, she turned to vocal coaches early in her career to try to fix the problem, and it failed. So his feelings were hurt when the sketch was filmed Saturday Night Live. Now this also made her famous. She accepted it, but I think she always found it rather hurtful. …When Gilda Radner died…Barbara Walters wrote a sympathy note to her widower, Gene Wilder, expressing sympathy for his death, and signed it “Baba Wawa.”
On his reluctant retirement
She worked until she was 80. …When she was 70, she was working at a time when most women were involuntarily retired. So she worked as long as they kept her on the air. But as she sometimes began to miss a step, there was concern that she might embarrass herself or compromise some of the professional work she had accomplished. …The people at ABC convinced her it was time to retire. And then CNN secretly offered to put her on the air on CNN, which she was considering when her friends came back and said, no, it’s time. …There was a grand finale on View, where two dozen prominent women in journalism came to pay their respects. And during his last big show on View. And while she was backstage afterward, one of them came up and said… “What do you want to do in your retirement?” And Barbara said, “I want more time.” Which means I want more air time.
If she was happy
I asked 100 people who knew her this question: was she happy? And a few people said yes. Joy Behar View said “happy”, which isn’t a bad answer, but most people said, even though she was proud of what she had done and loved the money and fame she had won, which she had paid an enormous price on a personal level. side – she had three failed marriages. She was separated from her only daughter for a while. She never lost that feeling that she was always competing and could never stop and be satisfied. So she had the most successful professional life possible, but I think she had a rather sad and personal life.
Thea Chaloner and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the Web.
Entertainment
