Barbara Walters
Barbara Jill Walters (September 25, 1929 – December 30, 2022) was an American broadcast journalist and television personality.[1][2] Known for her interviewing ability and popularity with viewers, she appeared as a host of numerous television programs, including Today, the ABC Evening News, 20/20, and The View. Walters was a working journalist from 1951 until her retirement in 2015.[3][4][5] Walters was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1989, received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the NATAS in 2000 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007.
Barbara Walters
December 30, 2022 (aged 93)
Lakeside Memorial Park, Doral, Florida, U.S.
Journalist
1951–2016
- Today (1962–1976)
- ABC Evening News (1976–1978)
- 20/20 (1979–2004)
- The View (1997–2014)
1
Walters began her career at WNBT-TV (NBC's flagship station in New York) in 1953 as writer-producer of a news-and-information program aimed at the juvenile audience, Ask the Camera, hosted by Sandy Becker. She joined the staff of the network's Today show in the early 1960s as a writer and segment producer of women's-interest stories. Her popularity with viewers led to her receiving more airtime, and in 1974 she became co-host of the program, the first woman to hold such a position on an American news program.[6][7][8] During 1976 she continued to be a pioneer for women in broadcasting while becoming the first U.S. female co-anchor of a network evening news program, alongside Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News. Walters was a correspondent, producer and co-host on the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 from 1979 to 2004. She became known for an annual special aired on ABC, Barbara Walters' 10 Most Fascinating People.
During her career, Walters interviewed every sitting U.S. president and first lady from Richard and Pat Nixon to Barack and Michelle Obama.[9][10] She also interviewed both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, though not when each was president. She also gained acclaim and notoriety for interviewing subjects such as Fidel Castro, Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, Katharine Hepburn, Sean Connery, Monica Lewinsky, Hugo Chávez, Vladimir Putin,[11] Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Jiang Zemin, and Bashar al-Assad.[12]
Walters created, produced, and co-hosted the ABC daytime talk show The View; she appeared on the program from 1997 until she retired in 2014.[13] Later she continued to host several special reports for 20/20 as well as documentary series for Investigation Discovery. Her final on-air appearance for ABC News was in 2015.[14][15][16][17][18] Walters last publicly appeared in 2016.
Early life[edit]
Barbara Jill Walters was born in Boston on September 25, 1929,[19][a] the daughter of Dena (née Seletsky) and Lou Walters (born Louis Abraham Warmwater);[21][22] her parents were children of Russian Jewish immigrants.[23][24] Her paternal grandfather, Abraham Isaac Waremwasser, was born in the Polish city of Łódź and emigrated to England where he changed his surname to Warmwater.[25] Walters' father was born in London in 1898 and moved to New York City with his father and two brothers on August 28, 1909. His mother and four sisters arrived there the following year.[26]
During Walters' childhood her father managed the Latin Quarter nightclub in Boston, which was owned in partnership with E. M. Loew. In 1942, her father opened the club's now-famous New York location. He also worked as a Broadway producer and produced the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943;[27][28] he was also the entertainment director for the Tropicana Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. He imported the Folies Bergère stage show from Paris to the resort's main showroom.[29] Walters' older brother, Burton, was 14 months old when he died of pneumonia.[30][31] Her elder sister, Jacqueline, was born with mental disabilities and died of ovarian cancer in 1985.[32]
According to Walters, her father made and lost several fortunes throughout his life in show business. He was a booking agent, and (unlike her uncles in the shoe and dress businesses) his job was not very stable. During the good times she recalled her father taking her to the rehearsals of the nightclub shows he directed and produced. The actresses and dancers would make a huge fuss over her and twirl her around until she was dizzy, after which she said her father would take her out to get hot dogs.[33]
Walters said that being surrounded by celebrities when she was young kept her from being "in awe" of them.[34] When she was a young woman, her father lost his night clubs and the family's penthouse on Central Park West. As Walters recalled, "He had a breakdown. He went down to live in our house in Florida, and then the government took the house, and they took the car, and they took the furniture. [...] My mother should have married the way her friends did, to a man who was a doctor or who was in the dress business."[35] During her childhood in Miami Beach, she briefly lived with the mobster Bill Dwyer.[36]
Walters attended Lawrence School, a public school in Brookline, Massachusetts; she left halfway through fifth grade when her father moved the family to Miami Beach in 1939.[37] She continued attending public school in Miami Beach.[38] After her father moved the family to New York City, she spent eighth grade at the private Ethical Culture Fieldston School,[39] after which the family moved back to Miami Beach.[40] She then went back to New York City after tenth grade, where she attended Birch Wathen School, another private school.[41][42][43] In 1951, she earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York.[44]
Career[edit]
Early career[edit]
Walters was employed for about a year at a small advertising agency in New York City and began working at the NBC network's flagship station WNBT-TV (now WNBC), doing publicity and writing press releases. In 1953 she produced a 15-minute children's program, Ask the Camera, which was directed by Roone Arledge. She also started producing for TV host Igor Cassini (Cholly Knickerbocker), but left the network after Cassini pressured her to marry him and started a fistfight with the man she was interested in. She went to WPIX to produce the Eloise McElhone Show, which was canceled in 1954.[45] She became a writer on The Morning Show at CBS in 1955.[46]
Personal life[edit]
Walters was married four times to three different men. Her first husband was Robert Henry Katz, a business executive and former Navy lieutenant. They married on June 20, 1955, at the Plaza Hotel in New York City.[1][114] The marriage was reportedly annulled after eleven months,[115] in 1957.[116] Her second husband was Lee Guber, a theatrical producer and theater owner. They married on December 8, 1963, and divorced in 1976. After Walters had three miscarriages, the couple adopted a baby girl named Jacqueline Dena Guber (born in 1968 and adopted the same year; she was named for Walters' sister).[117] Walters' third husband was Merv Adelson who at the time was the CEO of Lorimar Television. They married in 1981 and divorced in 1984. They remarried in 1986 and divorced for the second time in 1992.[118]
Walters dated lawyer[119][120] Roy Cohn in college; he said that he proposed marriage to Walters the night before her wedding to Lee Guber, but Walters denied this happened.[30] She explained her lifelong devotion to Cohn as gratitude for his help in her adoption of her daughter, Jacqueline.[121] In her autobiography, Walters says she also felt grateful to Cohn because of legal assistance he had provided to her father. According to Walters, her father was the subject of an arrest warrant for "failure to appear" after he failed to show up for a New York court date because the family was in Las Vegas; Cohn was able to have the charge dismissed.[122] Walters testified as a character witness at Cohn's 1986 disbarment trial.[123]
Walters dated future U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan in the 1970s[124] and was linked romantically to United States Senator John Warner in the 1990s.[125]
In Walters's autobiography Audition, she wrote that she had an affair in the 1970s with Edward Brooke, then a married United States Senator from Massachusetts. It is not clear whether Walters also was married at the time. Walters said they ended the affair to protect their careers from scandal.[126] In 2007, she dated Pulitzer Prize–winning gerontologist Robert Neil Butler.[127]
Walters was a close friend of Tom Brokaw, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, and Fox News head Roger Ailes.[128]
In 2013, Walters said she regretted not having more children.[129][130]
Health issues and death[edit]
In May 2010, Walters said she would be having an open-heart operation to replace a faulty aortic valve. She had known that she was suffering from aortic stenosis, even though she was symptom-free. Four days after the operation, Walters' spokeswoman, Cindi Berger, said that the procedure to fix the faulty heart valve "went well, and the doctors are very pleased with the outcome".[131] Walters returned to The View and her Sirius XM satellite show, Here's Barbara, in September 2010.[132][133] Walters retired permanently from both shows four years later.[134]
Walters died at her home in Manhattan, on December 30, 2022, at age 93. She had been suffering from dementia in her later years.[135][9][136] Her last words were, "No regrets – I had a great life." Those words were etched into her gravestone at Lakeside Memorial Park in Doral, Florida.[137]
Bibliography[edit]
In the late 1960s, Walters wrote a magazine article, "How to Talk to Practically Anyone About Practically Anything", which drew upon the kinds of things people said to her, which were often mistakes.[161] Shortly after the article appeared, she received a letter from Doubleday expressing interest in expanding it into a book. Walters felt that it would help "tongue-tied, socially awkward people—the many people who worry that they can't think of the right thing to say to start a conversation."[161]
Walters published the book How to Talk with Practically Anybody About Practically Anything in 1970, with the assistance of ghostwriter June Callwood.[162] To Walters's great surprise, the book was a success. As of 2008, it had gone through eight printings, sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, and had been translated into at least six languages.[161]
Walters published her autobiography, Audition: A Memoir, in 2008.[163]