Full Bio: Barbara Walters | All Of It

Transcript

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is back. It's our monthly book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Today we are discussing The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters by Susan Page. She is the Washington bureau chief for USA Today and the author of books about Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Bush.

During Barbara Walters's career, no one was like her. Walters worked her way up from a 1960s news writer of women's segments to interviewing world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Walters became the first person to make a million dollars as a news anchor, and her famous interviews of hard-to-get subjects like Monica Lewinsky led to praise and scrutiny for her invasive questioning and what she would do to land those gets. Just when most people would consider retiring, at 67, Walters developed a show that would change the face of daytime TV, The View. Today we start with her background.

Barbara Jill Walters was born in Boston, Mass. Her father, Lou, was a nightclub impresario who gambled away their fortune time after time. The family moved from New York to Boston to Miami, and then back to New York. Her mother Dena helped raise the kids. Barbara's brother died of pneumonia as a baby, and her sister, Jacqueline, had developmental disabilities, and Barbara was just trying to figure out where she fit in.

We start off today's full bio with the backstory on the Walters family, which starts with a name change. Here's my conversation with Susan Page, author of The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters.

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Barbara Walters's father's name was Louis Abraham Warmwater, and he was born in London in 1894. How did the Warmwaters arrive in London?

Susan Page: Well, his father had fled the Russian Empire for safer ground in London, and his mother had also had ancestry from the Russian Empire and was the daughter of a pretty successful family in London. They met and of course, they weren't finished moving because then they moved on to New York.

Alison Stewart: Warmwater wasn't the actual name that we know Barbara Walters by. How did they get to Walters?

Susan Page: Well, they started with Warmwater. They, for a short period of time, used the last name of Abraham, and they finally ended up with Walters at the time they moved to the United States, as did so many immigrant families when they came through Ellis Island.

Alison Stewart: It was interesting. Even though they came to the States, the family retained a certain Britishness about them, the grandmother Lillian, especially. What was an example of the Britishness she showed, and how did the Britishness affect a very young Barbara?

Susan Page: This would be Barbara's paternal grandmother, who had certain airs, you might say. They continued to have tea in the afternoon. When King Edward abdicated the throne, it was a traumatic time for her. Barbara Walters remembered her grandmother weeping at the loss there of the British royalty.

Alison Stewart: Louis Walters met Dana Seletsky when he was 25 years old, but some in her family did not approve. Why would a marriage to a nice fella be looked at so closely by her family?

Susan Page: [inaudible 00:03:49] fellow, but his job was booking vaudeville acts, and that struck some as not being perhaps 100% respectable, and it struck all of them as not being a 100% safe occupation. They had a shoe store. Dena was working in a store that sold men's ties, and that seemed to be kind of the stable life that they had in mind for her. Lou Walters was, by all accounts, a real charmer, both in his personal life and in his professional.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Page. We're talking about The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. It's our choice for Full Bio. Lous Walters's business would be a bit of a haunting legacy for Barbara Walters' career. He had highs, he had lows. In the beginning, he founded Lou Walters's booking agency above a drugstore. He turned it into a million-dollar business. We would see this over and over again. That first time, he was a booking agent. Who were the artists that he hired? Was it a legit business?

Susan Page: It was a legit business, but a scrambling one, because there was another agency that had all the big acts, all the famous ones. Lou Walters scrambled to get up and comers, or maybe people who had seen their prime in the past, taking a risk with folks who hadn't proven themselves. He turned out to have a very keen eye for entertainers who would appeal to an audience. I think that was maybe something his daughter inherited.

Alison Stewart: He started a club, the Latin club, and this was pre-1929 depression. What did he tap into? What would have been part of a Lou Walters production at the Latin club?

Susan Page: He had a formula. It was big steaks and skimpy costumes.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Susan Page: He would give people a sense that they were having a wonderful evening out, a very entertaining one, with showgirls and with generous food and with fun for all.

Alison Stewart: During 1929 and The Great Depression, the Walters went from living in a mansion- they'd had all this great success- to living in a tiny apartment. What did the highs and lows teach Barbara?

Susan Page: Not the only time they went from a penthouse to near bankruptcy. That was a repeated pattern in Barbara Walters's childhood because her father could be enormously successful. The Latin Quarter, the nightclub he founded first in Boston and then in Miami and finally in New York, they were enormously successful. Then he would gamble it all away in gin rummy games, or he would invest in a Broadway show, or he would have some other adventure or some other aspiration. He would pour all of this money into it. Over and over again he would bet it all and lose it all and have to build it back up again.

Alison Stewart: Ultimately, her father gambled everything away. They moved to Palm Beach, and started a new nightclub, that became a success. You title a chapter called The Fifth-Grader and the Bootlegger. It's a tale of how a 10-year-old Barbara Walters became friends with William Dwyer, a renowned bootlegger who lived with the family because of some unusual means. We'll let people read and understand that. Why would a shy, slightly bookish girl take up a friendly relationship with a bootlegger?

Susan Page: One of the characteristics of Barbara Walters's life from that time in the fifth grade until the day she died was that she was not put off by men who had a certain past, men who were bootleggers or who had gone to prison or who were mobbed up. These were characters in her life at her father's nightclubs. You know what? She didn't find them alarming, she found them interesting.

This particular bootlegger, I think gave her attention that her parents did not. Her father was consumed with his own business world. Her mother was overwhelmed by the responsibilities of caring for her older sister who was disabled. Here was this nice enough guy who owned a racetrack, who wanted to spend time with her, and who would place her bets at the racetrack. By the way, when he placed her bets, she always won.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned her sister. The family initially consisted of three children; a son who died after birth, a daughter Jacqueline, and then Barbara. On September 25th, 1929, Jacqueline had some developmental difficulties, the kind that kept her back, especially considering the time. What kind of relationship did young Barbara have with her sister Jacqueline?

Susan Page: Barbara said that her relationship with Jackie was the defining relationship of her life, that her life was shaped more by Jackie than by anything else, and that was because she loved Jackie. Jackie was her sister, Jackie could be very kind and loving, but she said she hated Jackie too because Jackie's limitations constrained her own life. It consumed her mother. It meant that she felt she couldn't bring friends home from school because they would be dealing with Jackie. The fact was, I think, especially as a child, Barbara just didn't have the confidence to embrace Jackie publicly, instead, she was ashamed of her and didn't want her friends to see her.

Alison Stewart: As a child, Barbara Walters claimed to have had a terrible stomach ailment. You write about this in the book. It appeared to be fake. She even sat through a surgery all to get attention. What do you make of the idea that she would undergo surgery as a kid?

Susan Page: Think how desperate she must have been to command her mother's attention, that she did this. She complained endlessly about a stomachache, although she didn't, in fact, have a stomachache. Even when the doctors, of course, couldn't find anything wrong because there wasn't anything wrong, one of the doctors finally said, "Well, I guess we should take her appendix out." As you said, Barbara Walters went along with this without any regrets because even though this was at that point, significant surgery, she was in the hospital for days, which meant she had her mother and she had her mother to herself.

The thing that's alarming to me about this story, the thing that made me sad was not that Barbara Walters faked a stomachache to get her mother's attention, it said no adult in her life recognized what was really at work here, how lonely this child was and how much she wanted more attention from her parents.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Page. The book is The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. It's our choice for Full Bio. She winds up at Sarah Lawrence for college. Where did Barbara Walters find herself at Sarah Lawrence? What did she do?

Susan Page: Well, you know, I think that she had some fun. I think she was not an incredibly studious student. She was once elected to Head of her dorm. That was a position of a little bit of a responsibility. She wasn't especially involved in current events, although some of her classmates were very involved in the many things that were going on in the world then. She didn't have any great purpose in life. She had no big theory about what she wanted to do. She watched a lot of her friends graduate, get married, and start having children. She was drifting, I think. She did that for a couple of years. She got married for the first time, a marriage that she would later conveniently forget she had ever had. Three years later, she got divorced. A quick Alabama divorce, by the way. I hadn't known beforehand that existed. Then she found herself a bit at loose ends. Then she had the biggest disaster with her family that they would ever have.

Alison Stewart: Please explain.

Susan Page: She was 28 years old. She had just gotten back from Alabama and getting divorced. She was crashing with a friend at the friend's parents' apartment in New York. Her mother called one morning and said, "Your father has taken all of his pills." Her father, the night before, had come home from his nightclub, which was at that point, failing. He had attempted suicide. It tells you something about the dynamic of the family, that her mother didn't call an ambulance, her mother called Barbara.

Barbara came rushing over to the hotel where they were staying. She called the ambulance. She rode with her father to the hospital, and she said later that she knew almost instantly that her life had just changed, that now, from then on, she was the one who was going to be responsible for holding the family together emotionally and also providing for it financially.

Alison Stewart: This is a very funny story. I'm wearing a gold chain with a golden circle in the bottom, and it says 53051, and it belonged to my mother. My mother went to Sarah Lawrence, and I didn't know what the date meant until I read your book and realized that was the graduation day because my mother was in Barbara Walters's class at Sarah Lawrence.

Susan Page: Oh, that's wonderful. Did your mother know Barbara Walters?

Alison Stewart: She did, and Barbara Walters knew of her because my mother was one of, I think, two black women at the school, so she was like, "Yes, I know your mom." The thing she said that was interesting- my dad knew her too- was it took a lot of chutzpah to enter the communications business because her speech impediment was real.

Susan Page: Yes, but before we leave your mother's experience with Barbara Walters, I'm sure your mother got a mix of treatment from other students at Sarah Lawrence. How did Barbara Walters treat her? Was she friendly? Was she respectful?

Alison Stewart: She was nice enough. She was nice enough. I think at my college my mother's roommate's name was-- oh, I can't remember her name, but she was friendlier with my mother's roommate. I do remember that.

Susan Page: You know, it was quite the time, I think, to be a woman, graduating from college. It was not only before we became sensitized to sexual harassment, it was a time when the expectations for women were so very low. The expectations of having a big career or making a lot of money, it was something that seemed, I think, quite unlikely for women who were growing up becoming young adults at that time. I have so much respect for the women of what we call the Silent Generation because it took a certain chutzpah for them to speak up.

Alison Stewart: When we come back, we'll hear about Barbara Walters's early years and how she became the million dollar woman in her deal with ABC, but risks becoming a failure in the process. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It from WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. We continue this edition of Full Bio. We are discussing The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters by Susan Page. We pick back up with Barbara Walters's trajectory from NBC to ABC, a move that made her the first person to be paid $1 million, this is in 1976. That would be about $5 million today. It also set Walters up for a tussle with male co-anchors and female rivals. Let's get back into our conversation with Susan Page, the author of The Rulebreaker.

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Prior to her first gig on The Today Show as a writer and producer, what were Barbara's earliest TV aspirations?

Susan Page: I think that Barbara Walters always wanted to be on the air, but that realistically, she started out trying to become a writer, a gopher, or a support staffer of any kind at television. She got an early job as a writer at CBS, and then she got a slightly better job as the girl writer for NBC's Today Show because God knows, first of all, you'd only have one girl writer, you would never have two. You have the girl writer write for the girls on the air, not for the men because God knows, women couldn't possibly write for the men on the air. That's something in which she got started.

Once she got her foot in the door, there was just no stopping her. She worked harder than anybody else. She networked more than anyone you could imagine. That was a characteristic of her whole life. She managed to first get herself on the air occasionally and finally to get herself on the air more regularly on NBC's Today Show.

Alison Stewart: When she got her job writing on The Today Show in the early '60s, she was producing a five-minute women's segment, and she said she was there to do the job. Others felt she was, "pushy." Was she a young woman in a hurry, or was she being victimized for having ambition? What do you think?

Susan Page: Well, or both. Even when she was very successful, she thought that people often looked askance at women who seemed to have too much ambition. There was some of that. She was not just pushy, she called herself a pushy cookie. She was a pushy cookie like most of these people had never seen before, including the woman who was the host of that five-minute segment that Barbara was writing for. She said that Barbara would stand off camera to the side of the set and mouth along with her, the words that Barbara had written for the host to say. That was when it became pretty apparent that Barbara wanted to get on the other side of the TV camera.

Alison Stewart: How did she get to the other side?

Susan Page: She started by volunteering to do features, many of them about women, that could get her on the air. She did a story about nuns. She did a story about women ecologists. She did, famously, a story about going undercover as a playboy bunny. Now, this was about the same time that Gloria Steinem made a big splash with what was essentially an exposé about going undercover as a playboy bunny. That was not the tone Barbara Walters took, it was one of how much fun is this, and how hard they work, and how much they're trained, and by the way, here's how you do the distinctive angling so that you can get a drink on the table without revealing too much of yourself.

Alison Stewart: One of her first TV gigs, she had to travel abroad, and she thought she could get Jacqueline Kennedy to speak with her. That didn't exactly work out.

Susan Page: She got herself onto Jackie Kennedy's trip to India and elsewhere. Jackie Kennedy went with her sister, who had also gone to Sarah Lawrence briefly. This was an enormous story. She was one of the very few women and very few women in broadcasting to get on this trip. She did it in part by saying she had these connections that she could play, which turned out not to be true. It was really a valuable experience for her in that she was on the road, traveling in foreign places. She was the number three correspondent from the network who was on this trip so she had to really be smart and hard-working to figure out how to worm her way on the air.

The men who were directing the show at that time said later that she hadn't really done a great job, but that when she came back, they explained what she had done wrong and that she would never make the same mistakes again.

Alison Stewart: She got the job on The Today Show, but after being passed over, if you can go through the list of people that they were including, that they were looking at to take the place of the anchor on the show, who was on that list?

Susan Page: The Today Show went through an endless list, it seemed like, before they finally thought, "Oh, yes, this woman who just is desperate to do it and is right in front of our faces wants to do it." There was Robbin Bain, who won a beauty contest sponsored by a New York beer company. Then there was an actress named Louise King, and they gave it to a very famous actress, Maureen O'Sullivan, who turned out to be quite ill-suited for it. Then they offered it to Betty White. They offered to Betty White, who was then living on the West Coast. They would fly her back every week. She could stay in a really nice hotel in New York. She turned them down. It was only then that they turned to Barbara Walters.

Alison Stewart: My guest, Susan Page. We're talking about The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. It's our choice for Full Bio. So she gets to The Today Show desk and she has to deal with Frank McGee and McGee's law. Let's say he's taken over for Hugh Downs. Can I just say that he seemed like there was no need for a Barbara Walters?

Susan Page: Frank McGee had no enthusiasm for sharing the set with Barbara Walters, that was pretty clear. He was a serious newsman. He didn't think that Barbara Walters was a real journalist, and he found her annoying. He went to the head of the network, and set a rule that Barbara Walters could not speak during an interview until Frank had asked the first three questions. Now, can you imagine Barbara Walters sitting there patiently, silently, as Frank McGee asks the first three questions? How insulting is that? Yet it was something that she accepted because she didn't have a real choice.

You know, there is a way, Alison, in which this turned out to be the best possible thing that could have happened to Barbara Walters because the only way she was going to get interviews that were her own was to land them herself and to conduct them outside the studio where Frank McGee would not be. That really launched her to do the kind of interviews, the kind of big gets and spontaneous interviews that had people telling you their vulnerabilities and sometimes crying that became the signature of Barbara Walters.

Alison Stewart: Yes, her big break came when Dean Rusk, Secretary of State in the '60s, wanted to be interviewed by her. First of all, why did he want to be interviewed by her, and how did that change things for Barbara Walters?

Susan Page: Well, I think he wanted to be interviewed by her because she had worked so hard to get it. She had networked. She would go to co*cktail parties and dinners. She would meet newsmakers and then follow up with handwritten notes saying how much she had enjoyed meeting them. He chose her. He was a very big name. There was a lot of unhappiness with the Washington press corps, mostly male, that this person with a morning show in New York had landed this big interview. It was groundbreaking for her. It stamped her as a serious journalist to be worthy of some consideration.

Alison Stewart: It seemed that Barbara Walters had an odd relationship with NBC. She was appreciated, but not that much. It seemed that NBC didn't care whether she decided to entertain an offer from ABC. It really gave ABC the ability to swoop in and make an offer. Why do you think NBC sort of gave up on her, or did she give up on them?

Susan Page: NBC had some things going on, on the business side that were distracting. The fundamental problem was that they did not think Barbara Walters would be a good anchor of the Evening News. That was the prize she wanted more than anything. At this point, she had some good friends like Dick Wald, who were in very senior positions, and they wouldn't give it to her because they didn't think that dealt to her strengths. You know what, Allison? I think they turned out to be right, but it gave ABC the opportunity to come in and offer her a million-dollar contract, more than any news person had made before, and to make her the co-anchor of the ABC Evening News, the first woman ever to be the co-anchor of a network evening show.

Alison Stewart: She goes to ABC and we get the Evening News with Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters. This is in your book under the chapter heading Failure. They kind of had the opposite of good chemistry. We're going to listen to a little bit of that broadcast.

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Barbara Walters: Most of you watching tonight are loyal viewers of Harry's and of ABC News. I hope, too, that some of you are friends from my early morning days at NBC. I've missed you. There may be others of you tuning in for the first time out of curiosity, drawn by the rather too much attention and overblown publicity given to my new duties and my hourly wage. It is to you that I'd like to take a moment for a personal note.

Harry and I are going to bring you the essential information you need to cope with the world today. We are going to do a news program. I hope, too, to give you a closer look at the people who are the shapers of these new events. I find interviews a way to do this, and I will do them in this program when they're relevant. Also, I'd like to pause from time to time as we shower news items on you to say, "Wait a minute, what does this mean to my life and to yours?" Whether it's understanding why every television news program gives the Dow Jones Industrial Averages and what it means to you, even if you don't own any stock, or trying to understand the difference between the problems of Rhodesia and South Africa, whether it's tying the national and international news more closely to its impact on your life, or the quality of life that we all hope to enjoy.

If some of the issues that are of particular concern to women have been neglected, I'll try to deal with those, which reminds me, people have asked if I want to be called an anchorman or anchorwoman or anchor person, or even, as our producer refers to us, anchor human. Titles aren't important. What is important is that Harry and I will try to bring you the best darn news program on the air. We hope if you've watched tonight out of curiosity, you'll return to watch us tomorrow out of conviction. Mr. Reasoner?

Harry Reasoner: Thank you. Barbara. I had a little trouble in thinking of what to say to welcome you. Not to sound sexist, as in that you brighten up the place, or patronizing, as in, "That wasn't a bad interview," or sycophantic, as in, "How in the world do you do it?" The decision was to welcome you, as I would any respected and competent colleague of any sex, by noting that I've kept time on your stories and mine tonight. You owe me four minutes. Now from Barbara Walters and I, good night.

Alison Stewart: If you could give me a reason why it was a failure because of Harry Reasoner, why it was a failure because of Barbara Walters, and why it was a failure because of ABC. Let's start with Harry Reasoner first.

Susan Page: Well, Harry Reasoner didn't want Barbara there. In fact, when he first heard they wanted to hire her, he said he would quit. Then they threw some more money his way and he decided he would stay. Number one, he liked being the solo anchor. He didn't want to share the desk. He especially didn't want to share the desk with a woman. He was a sexist, a misogynist, and he said and did things that today would get him fired.

Alison Stewart: What about Barbara Walters? What was her role in it being a failure?

Susan Page: Barbara Walters was great at landing and delivering big interviews. She was not great at sitting behind a desk and reading from a teleprompter the news that had been written by someone else. In a way, it put a spotlight on her greatest weakness, which was the fact that she had what amounted to a speech defect. She had this weird speech anomaly that she would call a Boston accent, although it's not like an accent I've heard from anyone else in Boston. It was a kind of a lisp. It was part of her persona. She went to speech coaches. She never got rid of it. Being an anchor just was not what Barbara Walters did best, even though that was the job she wanted most.

Alison Stewart: Then where would you put ABC's responsibility for its failing?

Susan Page: Well, ABC didn't, I think, do due diligence before setting up this duo, given that it was so disastrous. They were hoping for a smart repartee. Instead, what they got was a situation where the director had to stop using two shots, which is a camera shot that might show Harry Reasoner listening to Barbara Walters as she spoke. They had to cut those out because he would always be scowling.

Alison Stewart: How awful. So Roone Arledge became the head of ABC News from the sports division, and he really saw Barbara Walters as an extension of himself, an outsider kind of looking in. What did he know he could accomplish with Barbara Walters and her talents that others didn't have?

Susan Page: Roone Arledge didn't mind that some people thought Barbara was off-putting. He thought that could be a good thing in somebody. On the air, I could be a reason people would tune in to see her. He saw Harry Reasoner as somebody who had tried and failed to bring the ABC Evening News out of third place in the ratings and as someone who could be easily-- There are other Harry Reasoners, he said, there's not another Barbara Walters.

He was invested in Barbara Walters, whom he had known since they were both in their 20s. He recognized that the Evening News was the wrong place for her and so he engineered a sort of change in assignment so that she went back to doing the interviews that she did so well, without ever actually acknowledging that she had gotten fired from the anchor chair.

Alison Stewart: You wrote that Barbara was determined to win the game, not change its rules at this point. Now that she's able to go and do the interview she wants to do, what was a time when she sort of broke the rules and won for it maybe?

Susan Page: One of my favorite stories is in 1976, I think it was, when the Camp David summit was being held with the leaders of Egypt and Israel trying to hammer out a landmark agreement between Egypt and Israel. 50 reporters who were covering this were left to cool their heels in Thurmont, Maryland, which was a short distance from Camp David but might as well have been a million miles away because the newsmakers weren't there and the news wasn't happening there.

Finally, they brought two buses up with the journalists to do a kind of photo op at Camp David where they could see Anwar Sadat, the leader of Egypt, and Menachem Begin, the leader of Israel, and President Carter, just briefly, not to interview them, but basically to take their picture and to get some footage of Camp David before they were sent back down the hill. When the buses loaded up, there were only 49 reporters on the buses, and that's because Barbara Walters was missing.

One of the Carter aides came on the bus and said to Sam Donaldson, the White House correspondent working for ABC, "Where is Barbara Walters?" He said, "Am I my sister's keeper?" Of course, Sam actually had no idea where Barbara Walters was. They searched Camp David. Camp David, one of the most secure places on earth, one of the most closely guarded places on earth, the presidential retreat in the mountains. They found Barbara Walters hiding in a stall in a bathroom. Her plan apparently was when the buses had gone and all the other reporters were away, she would emerge and find some of these newsmakers, all of whom she knew, and get a scoop. Can you imagine?

They march her back to the bus. She gets on the bus and is carted away. You know, Alison, what she didn't do? She didn't apologize because she thought it was worth the risk in the hopes of getting a big prize.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Page. The book The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters is our choice for Full Bio. You write about Diane Sawyer. If someone had to bill to order the woman most likely to set off Barbara Walters, she would have looked a lot like Diane Sawyer. First of all, what would that woman look like? What would set off Barbara Walters?

Susan Page: Well, Diane Sawyer was beautiful. Diane Sawyer did not have a speech anomaly. Diane Sawyer also had had a much easier time than Barbara Walters had in rising through the ranks of broadcast journalism. She was 16 years younger, so some time had passed, and things were a little easier for women. In Barbara Walters's eyes, Diane Sawyer always had it easy. The other thing that I think really set off Barbara, Roon Arledge was enchanted by Diane Sawyer. Roon Arledge had been Barbara's defender, Barbara's rabbi. She saw Diane Sawyer as a rival and a risk for her career.

Alison Stewart: When they were all there, they called them anchor monsters at ABC because there was s no central booking, they just went for it.

Susan Page: The Roon Arledge style of management was to hire ambitious, skilled people and set them against one another. He did that with the men that he hired as well. No one had the kind of edge, the fierceness that the rivalry did, the rivalry between Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters. It was just on an entirely different level.

Alison Stewart: You know that Barbara was the kind of woman who could be your best friend, she could also be your worst friend. Sometimes she would hold a grudge, as she did against a news anchor who made a joke about her having plastic surgery. What did she see as the, and this will sound weird, but the purpose of friendship?

Susan Page: I think that's a really good question, because Barbara Walters had some friends from high school and college that would be friends through her whole life, and she had some friends in New York society. When she looked at women in her career, other women who worked in TV broadcasting, especially those who were on the air, she did not see potential friends or potential allies, she saw rivals. She saw people who were going to compete with her for the things that she wanted. I don't think she saw any great purpose for friendship.

I think today women in the workplace often think about sisterhood, think about helping one another, being supportive of one another, not all the time, but it's certainly more of a thing now than it ever was during Barbara Walters's day, especially when Barbara Walters was starting out, it was a zero-sum game for women. If some other woman got an anchor job, there wasn't going to be another woman at that anchor desk or some other woman got on the morning show, you weren't going to get on the morning show. That was an approach that Barbara Walters never really lost, even after she was, by every measure, the most successful of them all.

Alison Stewart: Tomorrow on Full Bio, we hear about Barbara Walters's personal life, her marriages, her estranged daughter, and how she perfected the long-form interview.

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This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Full Bio is our monthly book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. Today we're discussing The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters by Susan Page. She is the Washington bureau chief for USA Today and the author of books about Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Bush.

Barbara Walters made a lane for herself as an interviewer. She was merciless about landing a big get, sometimes devoting months to the process. She could offer the fact that she was Barbara Walters and important as the interviewee. She was a celebrity. Five women on SNL played Walters. Perhaps the famous, most famous one was Gilda Radner.

[soundbite of TV show]

[applause]

Gilda Radner (as Barbara Walters): Hello. I'm Baba Wawa (ph).

[laughter[

And welcome to "Baba Wawa At Warge (ph). We are indeed wucky (ph) to have as our guest tonight the gweatly wespected (ph) and world-wenowned (ph) cweator (ph) of shuttle diplomacy - sometimes controversial, but to my mind, a weally (ph) wegular (ph) guy,-

[laughter]

-Secretawy (ph) of State, Dr. Henwy (ph) Kissinger.

Alison Stewart: That imitation could make her angry, according to Page, she could be thin-skinned. Barbara Walters told anyone with aspirations to be like her, they had to, "Take the whole package." As Susan Page writes, "For her, the whole package included a dysfunctional childhood − a father she couldn’t remember ever hugging as a girl; a distracted and disgruntled mother; a disabled sister she both loved and hated. It encompassed three failed marriages and a daughter who was estranged before reconciling. While she savored her success and all it brought her, contentment was forever elusive."

Here's my conversation with Susan Page, author of The Rulebreaker.

[music]

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the personal life of Barbara Walters. There were three marriages. Marriage number one to Robert Henry Katz, her first husband. He seemed like a decent man. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with him in Barbara's eyes?

Susan Page: Well, he was handsome and well-educated and came from an affluent family that manufactured baby bonnets. That was the field that he was going into. I think it is hard to picture Barbara Walters successfully married to the manufacturer of baby bonnets. It just seems wrong. I think that after three years, it seemed wrong to her, too. That was a marriage she would conveniently forget.

Alison Stewart: Marriage number two, Lee Guber. In December of 1963, she and Lee decided they would adopt a child, a young baby that they named after her sister Jacqueline. I'm going to say this is my observation, my observation only, is that Barbara Walters, while she said she loved her daughter, she didn't show a lot of interest in the minutiae of parenting.

Susan Page: I think she loved the idea of being a mother. I think she was less crazy about the reality of being a mother because that involves at times being your child above yourself, I think, to be a successful mother. That was not something that Barbara felt her parents had done with her, and it was not something she was really prepared to do for her own daughter. If there was a conflict between seeing her daughter or flying to Paris for a big interview, she would fly to Paris. If there was a family commitment she had made and there was some big work opportunity, work always came first.

Alison Stewart: How did her daughter deal with having a famous mother?

Susan Page: Her daughter hated being known as Barbara Walters's child. Part of that was because then you never knew whether people liked you or were just being nice to you because of your famous mother. Her daughter had a long struggle, starting when she was a teenager with substance abuse and just had a difficult time. They were so different. Barbara loved New York and the news and high fashion, and her daughter, especially as she got older, loved being in the woods, camping. They just were quite different people. While they reconciled later in life, I think both of them had a very tough time.

Alison Stewart: Marriage number three, Merv Adelson. It was like marrying her father over and over. He was in charge of Lorimar. He was also associated with organized crime, allegedly. She did seem ambivalent about the marriage. Why did she want to marry this man?

Susan Page: I think it's like being a parent. She loved the idea of being married. She loved the idea of being in a great romance. The reality of maintaining a relationship required things she just wasn't willing to give. It was the source of one of her jealousies of Diane Sawyer. Diane Sawyer married Mike Nichols in a marriage that seemed to be very successful, highly loving. Diane Sawyer told me when I was working on this book, that Barbara would be wistful with her about the fact that she had this very successful marriage and relationship, which was something Barbara had never managed to do.

Alison Stewart: The actual love of her life, perhaps, was Roy Cohn, as in the McCarthy hearings and Donald Trump's confidant and a character in Angels in America. He and Barbara Walters were as thick as thieves before, of course, he died of AIDS-related diseases in the '80s. What did Barbara Walters see in Roy Cohn? Why would she be his escort all the time?

Susan Page: I think it was the closest friendship of her life. It was the longest relationship she had with a man, longer than all three marriages put together. She met Roy Cohn when she was 25. Her father introduced them. The things that put other people off about Roy Cohn, like the fact that he, a notorious lawyer, known as a fixer and defended the mob, these were things that either didn't bother her or that she found sort of intriguing. They were close friends. He repeatedly proposed marriage to her. At least once, she seriously considered the idea.

Even though they didn't get married, the advice that Rory Cohn gave her was the advice she was most likely to take. If she needed help, it was Roy Cohn she turned to for help. When her father had an arrest warrant issued against him in New York, Roy Cohn made it disappear. When she and Lee Guber wanted to adopt a child, Roy Cohn facilitated the private adoption of a newborn. Later in life, when Barbara Walters had what she called the love of her life with Senator Edward Brooke, it was Roy Cohn who told her she would put her career at risk if this became known and she broke it off.

Alison Stewart: Do you think a news anchor of today could have a relationship with a lawyer like Roy Cohn?

Susan Page: No. I think it would be hard. I think it would be hard.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Susan Page: Because he was a figure, even then, of incredible controversy and was seen as not a respectable figure. I think that would have been hard. Barbara Walters didn't always have very close girlfriends, but she was close to Roy Cohn. At the end of his life, when he was dying of AIDS, he faced disbarment proceedings in New York. There were only a handful of his friends who were willing to go testify on his behalf before the bar association. One of them was Rudy Giuliani, and one of them was Donald Trump, and one of them was Barbara Walters.

Alison Stewart: As you mentioned, Barbara Walters had an affair with Senator Ed Brooke from Massachusetts, a Republican, a Black Republican. Why didn't they make it? Why did he decide, "You know what? I'm going to leave my wife"? Why didn't she just come clean with it?

Susan Page: He was a senator, he was married, and he was a Black man. This was a time when the idea of an extramarital affair would have been damaging. The idea of an affair between a white woman and a Black man would have been enormously controversial in a way it would not be today. Yet Edward Brooke offered to leave his wife to get a divorce and to marry Barbara Walters. She thought quite seriously about this but when word began to circulate that this might be in the works, that was when several of her close friends warned her about the career risk of that, including Pete Peterson, who was a cabinet member for Nixon, including, most importantly, Roy Cohn, saying, "If this comes out, you cannot count on ABC to stick with you."

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Page. The name of the book is The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. It's our choice for Full Bio. We've come to Barbara's process for her interviews, what she became well known for. The first part you notice is called the get. The get; that's the pursuit of the guest that everybody wants. What was Barbara Walters's biggest argument for why she was the one?

Susan Page: As she became more famous, the argument became, "I will give you more credibility than anyone else who can interview you. You have a story to tell. Maybe you're involved in a big trial and maybe you're involved in a big campaign, the person who we trusted most to interview you give you the most credibility in the interview is if you were interviewed by me."

This was a time when there were any number of times when Barbara Walters was more famous than the people she was interviewing. That was part of her appeal. That was, in fact, the pitch she made to what by some measures, is the biggest interview she ever got, which was the interview she did with Monica Lewinsky. Monica Lewinsky could have chosen anybody to interview her, but Barbara Walters argued that she would be taken more seriously, have more credibility if Barbara Walters was the one to get the interview.

Susan Page: We actually have a little bit of that interview with Monica Lewinsky, let's listen.

[soundbite]

Barbara Walters: One juror at the grand jury asked you why you kept having affairs with married men. Why did you? Why do you?

Monica Lewinsky: I have to say that was the most difficult question to answer in my entire experience with the grand jury. It was the most pointed question. First, I hope I never will have-- I know I never will have an affair with a married man again. I have to pray about that. But clearly to me, what I've come to see is that that happened because I didn't have enough feelings of self-worth, I didn't feel that I was worthy of being number one to a man.

Barbara Walters: So you had to take whatever you could get?

Alison Stewart: There's been a recent revisiting of women who were treated unfairly in the media in the 1990s, people like Britney Spears, people like Monica Lewinsky. It took Barbara Walters a long time to get Lewinsky to say yes. Was she fair with Monica?

Alison Stewart: I think so. I think that interview stands up pretty well, because, as you say, we look at this episode a little differently now than we did at the time, with a greater sense of the power imbalance in relationships like the one between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. You listen to her interview, and it lets Monica explain herself, and it treats Monica with-- not as some weird figure, but as somebody with a story to tell, worthy of respect.

The other thing that Barbara did in this interview was asked some of the really hard questions and asked them in a way that invited Monica to answer them. Questions about the sexual nature of their relationship and questions about why it was that Monica allowed herself to be in this situation.

Alison Stewart: ABC walked right up to the line of checkbook journalism. They gave Monica the money to cover her legal fees and said that she could keep the international rights to her story.

Susan Page: They did. It was somewhat controversial at the time. They paid the legal fees of the lawyers who filed the suit which made it possible for Monica to be interviewed. That was the way the network justified doing that. The money didn't go to Monica, it went to enable the legal action that made it possible for them to interview her. The giving up of the international rights was a little more controversial because that was something-- ABC was giving up money by agreeing only to air the Barbara Walters interview in North America. That was important in making the interview happen because Monica Lewinsky really wanted to get some money out of doing this interview because she had all these lawyers to pay and she had gone through all this, she didn't know what her professional life or career possibilities might be like going forward. They made a deal that they defended, but it was one that was definitely unconventional.

Alison Stewart: Barbara Walters was a big fan of homework. She had her famous cards. What did her research look like with her cards?

Susan Page: She would read everything about somebody if she was going to interview them. Then she would take these 3x5 cards and write a question on each card. Then she would sit down and brainstorm with her staff about, "What questions should I ask? How should I ask them? What order should they go in?" They would thumb through these cards, they would write new cards, they would reorder them, and there would be cards thrown on the ground because they were rejected.

It was only at the very end that her secretary would then type 5x7 cards with the questions that she had determined to do. One of the strengths of her as an interviewer, though, is there were times when she followed the cards and there were times when she did not. The interview might go in an unexpected direction, she was prepared to do that, but with her cards, she had the interview that she knew she-- She wanted to do an interview that had a beginning that would grab people, that had a middle, that would pique their interest, hold them there, and some kind of strong close. It was very much like a nightclub act, right?

Her father's imprint here, too. There was something organic about a big interview, an hour-long interview, or even a shorter interview, a 20-minute interview that you wanted to grab people at the start, hold them in the middle, and give them kind of a punch at the end.

Alison Stewart: The big question; she was a fan of asking the big question. Did she ever decide if the big question was either too personal or too simple to ask?

Susan Page: I don't think that she ever thought a question was too personal to ask, as evidenced by the fact she would ask such very, very personal questions. She would try to ask them in a way that didn't seem offensive or ask it in a way that might actually get an answer. I think she knew that if she embarrassed someone, you wouldn't get an answer. For Monica Lewinsky, the question she asked at the end is, "What will you tell your children?" I think the big question in that interview was, "Do you still love him?" "Do you still love Bill Clinton?" The fact is, Monica Lewinsky was practicing answering questions just as Barbara Walters was trying to figure out what questions to ask. Monica Lewinsky's team had also identified that as an important question they worked on before the interview took place.

Alison Stewart: What's with the tears?

Susan Page: The tears.

Alison Stewart: The tears. Everybody seemed to cry in front of Barbara Walters.

Susan Page: Norman Schwarzkopf cried.

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Susan Page: Often people were being interviewed by her at a big moment, a big emotional moment, so maybe they were already feeling kind of vulnerable. There was something about the connection that she could get with somebody she was interviewing that made them feel free to cry. She said that if you wanted to get someone to cry, ask about their father, that is the question most likely to get someone to cry. It was one that got Goldie Hawn to cry and got Norman Schwarzkopf to cry. I wonder, Alison, if she identified that question, because if you wanted to make Barbara Walters cry, maybe the question you would have asked is, "Tell me about your father."

Alison Stewart: My guest is Susan Page. The name of the book is The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. It's our choice for Full Bio. Before we leave her process, we should acknowledge that she had missteps. What would you describe as her biggest misstep?

Susan Page: I think maybe her biggest misstep was she would be interviewing a young person and she would not treat them in the way we now think young people should be treated. One of several examples would be Brooke Shields. Brooke Shields was a model, she was 15 years old, she had just done these Calvin Klein commercials. Barbara Walters did an interview with her as though she was in her 20s, had her stand up and turn around on stage, stood up with her as though to compare their bodies. Brooke Shields said later, as an adult, years later, that she was confused and embarrassed by this. She still remembers it even now. To this day, Brooke Shields will talk about how hurtful that could be. I think that may have been the biggest misstep.

Alison Stewart: You get to the bottom of the question, "What kind of tree are you?" Would you please explain that?

Susan Page: She's interviewing Katharine Hepburn, and Katherine Hepburn says that she thinks of herself as a tree. This was not a question that Barbara Walters had written down on one of her cards but she asked it. She said, "Well, if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" Of course, it became the source of just enormous ridicule because it did seem to be a ridiculous question. To her dying day, Barbara Walters would point out that it was Katharine Hepburn who opened the door to this question.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about The View. What was the original intention of the show The View?

Susan Page: Women of different generations and different points of view sitting around a table, gabbing. It sounds ordinary now because we see a lot of these shows, but at the time, it was a new kind of talk TV.

Alison Stewart: What did she look for in the hosts?

Susan Page: For a while, Barbara Walters thought maybe she wanted to be the host. Roon Arledge was not enthusiastic about The View. He thought it was not serious enough and that Barbara would squander some of the professional sheen that she had gotten over the years. Barbara agreed not to be the host, and she was never the main host. She wanted a host who could keep the conversation going, who could have a little spark of humor now and then. She wanted the mix of women on the show to work, too. That's something that they sometimes struggle with. There have been a lot of women who have had those chairs around the table at The View. When it works well, especially in those early years, you can have a really great conversation, and when it doesn't, not so much.

Alison Stewart: Did she see The View as the last chapter in her career?

Susan Page: She was 67 years old when she and Bill Geddie, her longtime producer, proposed The View to ABC Daytime. That's a time when very few women are still working in TV journalism, at 67. More now, but none then. It was another rule that Barbara was trying to break. She was trying to keep herself on the air at a time when, once again, maybe the TV suits would not be so enthusiastic about her being there. How better to stay on the air than to start your own show?

Alison Stewart: In her later years, she probably should not have been on the air sometimes. There were gaffes that she made, she was known to say some questionable thoughts about gender and race. Who finally convinced her to let go?

Susan Page: It took those who she trusted most, the producers and directors who had worked with her for a long time, people like Bill Geddie, to say, "You've done everything. You've climbed every mountain, you've won the Super Bowl. It's time to step back." It was hard for her. They finally convinced her to do it, and they had this big goodbye show on The View with two dozen of the leading women in broadcasting from all sorts of networks coming on to pay tribute to her. One of them talked to her backstage afterwards, and she said to Barbara Walters, "What do you want?" Meaning do you want to go to the beach? Do you want to go to Paris? Do you want to write a book or learn to play the piano? Barbara said, "I want more time," meaning I want more time on the air.

Alison Stewart: Was Barbara Walters a feminist?

Susan Page: She was a feminist in the way she behaved, in that she just pushed through and did things no woman had done before, but she was not much of a feminist in her rhetoric, and she was not a feminist for most of her career to the women who came behind her.

Alison Stewart: Say more about that.

Susan Page: Barbara Walters wanted to cut a path because she wanted to get to these big jobs, the biggest jobs in TV journalism. She was not cutting a path because she wanted to clear it for women generally. Yet, by doing it for herself, she did it for everybody behind her. She made things easier for people like Katie Couric and Connie Chung because of some of the scars she had. When she looked back at them, she was sometimes resentful that they'd had an easier time than she had and that that just didn't seem fair.

There were times very late in her career when she would say, "Yes, these other women, they're part of my legacy" In her heart, I think she felt like her real legacy was what she did, not what they did.

Alison Stewart: Thanks again to Susan Page, author of the book The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. Full Bio's engineer is Jason Isaac. Post-production by Jordan Lauf, and it was written by me. Up next month for Full Bio, a biography of Keith Haring.

Susan Page: A lot of these shows, but at the time, it was a new kind of talk TV.

Alison Stewart: What did she look for in the hosts?

Susan Page: For a while, Barbara thought maybe she wanted to be the host. Roone Arledge was not enthusiastic about The View. He thought it was not serious enough and that Barbara would squander some of the professional sheen that she had gotten over the years, so Barbara agreed not to be the host. She was never the main host, but she wanted a host that could keep the conversation going, who could have a little spark of humor now and then.

She thought she wanted the mix of women on the show to work too, and that's something that they sometimes struggle with. There have been a lot of women who have had those chairs around the table at The View, and when it works well, especially in those early years, you can have a really great conversation. When it doesn't, not so much.

Alison Stewart: Did she see The View as the last chapter in her career?

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] In her later years, she probably should not have been on the air sometimes. There were gaffes that she made. She was known to say some questionable thoughts about gender and race. Who finally convinced her to let go?

One of them talked to her backstage afterwards, and she said to Barbara Walters, "What do you want?" Meaning, "Do you want to go to the beach? Do you want to go to Paris? Do you want to write a book or learn to play the piano?" Barbara said, "I want more time." Meaning, "I want more time on the air."

Alison Stewart: Was Barbara Walters a feminist?

Susan Page: She was a feminist in the way she behaved, in that she just pushed through and did things no woman had done before, but she was not much of a feminist in her rhetoric. She was not a feminist for most of her career to the women who came behind her.

Alison Stewart: Say more about that.

When she looked back at them, she was sometimes resentful that they'd had an easier time than she had, and that just didn't seem fair. There were times very late in her career where she would say, "Yes, these other women, they're part of my legacy," but in her heart, I think she felt like her real legacy was what she did, not what they did.

Alison Stewart: Thanks again to Susan Page, author of the book The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. Full Bio's engineer is Jason Isaac, post production by Jordan Lauf, and it was written by me. Up next month for Full Bio, a biography of Keith Haring.

[01:03:30] [END OF AUDIO]

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.

Full Bio: Barbara Walters | All Of It | WNYC Studios (2024)

References