Born: September 25th, 1929
Died: December 30th, 2022
The award-winning journalist Barbara Walters had to break through lots of glass ceilings to become one of the best-known faces in US television news. Walters, who has died aged 93, began her career in the 1960s when the prevailing attitude among television executives was that viewers would not take seriously women delivering news about politics, war or other weighty subjects.
Through a combination of talent and drive, Walters went on to make television history in 1974 as the first woman co-host of NBC’s Today morning news show. Two years later, she switched to ABC to an even more prestigious job: the first woman co-anchor of evening news on any network.
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At the time, the three networks – ABC, CBS and NBC – were a prime source of information for many Americans. Her success opened the way for the generations of woman television journalists who followed.
As well as this pioneering role, her reputation rests on the hundreds of high-profile interviews she conducted over five decades. They included every US president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama (she interviewed Donald Trump, but just before he became president). The interviewees were an eclectic mix, ranging from world leaders to Hollywood stars, from sports celebrities to murderers.
Walters was very much an establishment insider, close to the elites in Washington and New York, and faced criticism throughout her career of being too cosy with some of her interviewees, too fawning.
Other American journalists accused her of blurring the line between journalism and entertainment. Her trademark became finding an interviewee’s vulnerable spot and making them cry, which she argued made for great television.
She merited a profile in the New York Times in 1965, a sympathetic piece by Gloria Steinem. The casual sexism of the time was reflected in the headline: ‘Nylons in the Newsroom’
She was criticised, too, for allowing her own views to intrude, as she did when talking in 1999 to Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern with whom Bill Clinton said he had had a relationship “that was not appropriate”. It was one of the most watched news interviews in US television history.
Walters asked: “What will you tell your children when you have them?”
Lewinsky: “Mommy made a big mistake.”
Walters: “And that is the understatement of the year.”
Theatre major
Walters was born in Boston in 1929 (though she occasionally claimed to be two years younger) to Louis Walters, a theatrical promoter who was born and brought up in London before emigrating to the US, and Dena Seletsky, who was born in Lithuania before also emigrating to the US, where she worked in a men’s clothing shop.
Barbara was brought up initially in Boston but moved with her family to Miami and then New York, where her father ran nightclubs.
With that background, she chose theatre as her major at the Sarah Lawrence college in New York state. She got her start in television as a publicity assistant at an NBC affiliate in New York City, and made her first appearance on screen when she was producing a children’s programme, Ask the Camera. Short of a question, she dispensed with ethical considerations and wrote her own – “I’ve always wondered: how does a hippopotamus eat?” – and answered it.
She briefly left television and the US for Europe, where she worked as a model in Paris.
Back in the US, she became a writer in 1961 for NBC Today and three years later became a regular on screen as a reporter. Such was the paucity of women in high-profile television reporting jobs that she merited a profile in the New York Times in 1965, a sympathetic piece by Gloria Steinem. The casual sexism of the time was reflected in the headline: “Nylons in the Newsroom”.
Sexism was evident, too, when out on jobs with the press pack, such as Nixon’s historic trip in 1972 to China, where she was largely shunned by male journalists who regarded her as a lightweight. But viewers liked her and television executives, in turn, liked the ratings. Two years later, she was named co-host of Today, making official a role she had been doing informally for years.
When she switched to ABC in 1976, she made news not only because she became the first woman co-anchor of a network evening news programme but because of the size of her salary, $1 million a year.
The move was initially a disaster. Her male co-host, the veteran Harry Reasoner, failed to hide his disdain at working with a woman he viewed as frivolous. She resolved the problem by keeping out of the studio as much as possible, doing her own interviews, her Specials. The first, in 1976, included the president-elect, Jimmy Carter, and Barbra Streisand.
Symbolic moment
She recalled those years in the second half of the 1970s as the high point of her career. She secured a rare interview with Fidel Castro in 1977. Later that year, she did the first joint interview with the leaders of Egypt and Israel, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, a hugely symbolic moment in the Middle East. “From that time on, I was more or less accepted as a member of the old boys’ club,” she wrote in her autobiography, Audition, published in 2009.
She was creator of The View, which began in 1997, a popular chatshow covering politics and other issues. The co-hosts were all women, from different generations and backgrounds. She was one of the co-hosts from 1997 until 2014.
She was ridiculed for off-the-wall questions, such as asking Katharine Hepburn: ‘What kind of a tree are you? If you think you are a tree?’
At the end of Audition, she devoted eight pages to listing some of the hundreds of interviews she had done. Among them were Margaret Thatcher, Michael Jackson, Muammar Gadafy, David Beckham, Truman Capote, Judy Garland, Bashar al-Assad, Prince Charles and Vladimir Putin. Her favourite interviewees included Cher and Tom Hanks; her worst was Warren Beatty – and she told him so on air.
She was ridiculed for off-the-wall questions, such as asking Katharine Hepburn: “What kind of a tree are you? If you think you are a tree?” She was lampooned in the mid-1970s on Saturday Night Live, portrayed as pronouncing “r” and “l” as “w”: across the US, she overnight became “Baba Wawa”.
She won several Emmys and other awards and in 2007 was given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Her first two marriages ended in divorce. The third, to a television executive, Merv Adelson, in 1981, ended in divorce in 1984. She remarried him in 1986, only to divorce again in 1992. Walters is survived by her daughter, Jacqueline, from her second marriage, to Lee Guber.