"To not sing with an orchestra, to not be able to communicate through my voice, which I've done all my life, and not to be able to phrase lyrics and give people that kind of joy, I think I would be totally devastated." -- Barbara Walters
Barbara Jill Walters (born September 25, 1929) is an American broadcast journalist and author, who has hosted morning television shows (Today and The View), the television newsmagazine (20/20), and co-anchor of the ABC Evening News and correspondent on ABC World News (then ABC Evening News).
Walters was first known as a popular TV morning news anchor for over 10 years on NBC's Today, where she worked with Hugh Downs and later hosts Frank McGee and Jim Hartz. Walters later spent 25 years as co-host of ABC's newsmagazine 20/20. She was the first female co-anchor of network evening news, working with Harry Reasoner on the ABC Evening News and was later a correspondent for ABC World News Tonight with Charles Gibson.
"A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence.""A man cannot be made comfortable without his own approval.""All of the religions - with the exception of Tibetan Buddhism, which doesn't believe in a heaven - teach that heaven is a better place. At the end of the program, I say that heaven is a place where you are happy. All of the religions have that in common.""Although I myself don't go to church or synagogue, I do, whether it's superstition or whatever, pray every time I get on a plane. I just automatically do it. I say the same thing every time.""And I really do believe that the most important thing is the way you live your life on earth. But I think it's enormously comforting to believe that you're going to see your loved ones.""Because there are so many shows on and because I've been so hands-on - I've had a piece on almost every single week - I don't know how to cut back on that. You really can't.""Before we had airplanes and astronauts, we really thought that there was an actual place beyond the clouds, somewhere over the rainbow. There was an actual place, and we could go above the clouds and find it.there.""But for Muslims, everything that they don't have on earth is what they get in heaven. They can drink, they can have sex. All of the forbidden pleasures on earth, you can have in paradise.""Deep breaths are very helpful at shallow parties.""Don't confuse being stimulating with being blunt.""First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish.""I also found that for myself, since I've had no religious education, it was so interesting to see the different versions of heaven and what life on earth means.""I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.""I didn't have a very religious family.""I don't know about you, but I can never get enough David Letterman.""I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code - even though it was a great yawn - also showed people's interest in religion.""If it's a woman, it's caustic; if it's a man, it's authoritative.""It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.""Most of us have trouble juggling. The woman who says she doesn't is someone whom I admire but have never met.""No one could ad lib like Peter. You would think that it was all scripted, he was so poetic, but it wasn't.""One may walk over the highest mountain one step at a time.""Parents of young children should realize that few people, and maybe no one, will find their children as enchanting as they do.""Show me someone who never gossips, and I will show you someone who is not interested in people.""Success can make you go one of two ways. It can make you a prima donna - or it can smooth the edges, take away the insecurities, let the nice things come out.""The sports page records people's accomplishments, the front page usually records nothing, but man's failures.""The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.""To feel valued, to know, even if only once in a while, that you can do a job well is an absolutely marvelous feeling.""Wait for those unguarded moments. Relax the mood and, like the child dropping off to sleep, the subject often reveals his truest self."
Walters was born in Boston, MA to Louis "Lou" Walters and his wife, Dena Seletsky, both of whom were Jewish and descendants of refugees from the former Russian Empire, now Eastern Europe. Walters' paternal grandfather, Isaac Abrahams, was from what is now ?ód?, Poland, and first immigrated to England, changing his name to Abraham Walters. Walters' father was born there c. 1896, and moved to the United States with his family in 1900. Genealogy.com: Ancestry of Barbara Walters In 1937, her father opened the New York version of the Latin Quarter; he also was a Broadway producer (he produced the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943). Walters' brother, Burton, died in 1932 of pneumonia. Walters' elder sister, Jacqueline, was born developmentally disabled and died of ovarian cancer in 1985.
According to Walters, being surrounded by celebrities when she was young kept her from being "in awe" of them. When she was a young woman, Walters' father lost his nightclubs 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." Of her mother, she said, "My mother should have married the way her friends did, to a man who was a doctor or who was in the dress business."
After attending Ethical Culture Fieldston School and Birch Wathen Lenox School Can Barbara Walters's Career Survive Rosie and Donald's War?- New York Magazine private schools in New York City, Walters graduated from Miami Beach High School in 1947. In 1951 she received a B.A. in English from Sarah Lawrence College.
After a brief period as a publicist with Tex McCrary Inc. and a job as a writer at CBS News, Walters joined NBC's The Today Show as a writer and researcher in 1961. She moved up to become that show's regular "Today Girl," handling lighter assignments and the weather. In her autobiography, she describes this era before the Women's Movement as a time when it was believed that nobody would take a woman seriously reporting "hard news". Previous "Today Girls" (whom Walters called "tea pourers") included Florence Henderson, Helen O'Connell, Estelle Parsons and Lee Meriwether. Within a year she had become a reporter-at-large developing, writing, and editing her own reports and interviews. When Frank McGee was named host, he refused to do joint interviews with Walters unless he was given the first question. She was not named co-host of the show until McGee's death in 1974, when NBC officially designated Walters as the program's first female co-host.
Walters has seldom minced words when describing the visible, on-the-air disdain her co-anchor, Harry Reasoner, displayed for her when she was teamed up with him on the ABC Evening News in 1976-78. Reasoner had a difficult relationship with Walters because he disliked having a co-anchor, even though he worked with former CBS colleague Howard K. Smith nightly on ABC for several years. In 1981, five years after the start of their short-lived ABC partnership and well after Reasoner returned to CBS News, Walters and her former co-anchor had a memorable (and cordial) 20/20 interview on the occasion of Reasoner's new book release.
Walters is also known for her years on the ABC newsmagazine 20/20 where she joined host Hugh Downs in 1979. Throughout her career at ABC, Walters has appeared on ABC news specials as a commentator, including presidential inaugurations and the coverage of 9/11. She was also chosen to be the moderator for the third and final debate between candidates Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, held at Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall in Williamsburg, Virginia, during the 1976 Presidential Election. In 1984, she moderated a Presidential debate held at the Dana Center for the Humanities at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Many of her regular and special programs are syndicated around the world. As of 2004, she is in semi-retirement as a broadcast journalist, but remains a correspondent for ABC News as well as a host of ABC's special programs.
On June 14, 2007, Walters received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She has won Daytime and Prime Time Emmy Awards, a Women in Film Lucy Award, and a GLAAD Excellence in Media award. Her impact on the popular culture is illustrated by Gilda Radner's "Baba Wawa" impersonation of her on Saturday Night Live, featuring her idiosyncratic speech with its rounded "R."
In the fall of 2008, she was honored with the Disney Legends award, an award given to those who made an outstanding contribution to The Walt Disney Company, which owns the network ABC. That same year, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the New York Women's Agenda.
On September 21, 2009, Barbara was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 30th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards at New York City's Lincoln Center.
Interviews
Walters started to gain a reputation for her interview skills while at The Today Show. Not all of her interviewees remain dry-eyed, and critics accuse Walters of pumping for the ratings by generating public tears. Critics have also accused Walters of not posing enough tough questions to her subjects, relying mainly on so-called "softball" questions to elicit sometimes unexpected answers. Her Barbara Walters Specials are top-rated and, since 1993, offer a review of the year's most prominent newsmakers. Prior to the move of the Academy Awards to an early Sunday evening time slot, a Walters interview show — usually featuring one or more of the top nominees — was a regular feature. Walters' celebrity interviews at ABC came as part of her $1 million contract to join ABC, with half of it coming from the news department and half from doing celebrity specials.
On March 7, 2010, Barbara Walters announced she would no longer hold Oscar interviews, but will still be working with ABC and on her show, The View.
Walters is known for "personality journalism" and her "scoop" interviews. In November 1977 she achieved a joint interview with Egypt's President Anwar Al Sadat and Israel's Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Her interviews with world leaders from all walks of life are a chronicle of the latter part of the 20th century. They include the Shah of Iran Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife the Empress Farah Pahlavi; Russia's Boris Yeltsin; China's Jiang Zemin; the UK's Margaret Thatcher; Cuba's Fidel Castro, as well as India's Indira Gandhi, Václav Havel, Muammar al-Gaddafi, King Hussein of Jordan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez among many others. Other interviews with influential people include pop icon Michael Jackson, Katharine Hepburn, Anna Wintour and in 1980 Lord Olivier. Walters considered Dr. Robert Smithdas, a deaf-blind man who spent his life improving the life of other individuals who are deaf-blind, as her most inspirational interview.
Walters was widely lampooned in 1981 (and often since) for having posed the question, during an interview with actress Katharine Hepburn: "If you were a tree, what kind would you be?" But as she has often pointed out (and the video clips confirm) Hepburn initiated the discussion by saying that she would like to be a tree, and Walters merely followed up with the question, "What kind of a tree?"
During a story about Cuban leader Fidel Castro, Walters claimed that "for Castro, freedom begins with education." Some critics point to her characterization of Castro as freedom-loving and argue that it painted an inaccurate picture of his government.
On March 3, 1999, her interview of Monica Lewinsky was seen by a record 74 million viewers, the highest rating ever for a journalist's interview. Walters asked Lewinsky, "What will you tell your children about this matter?" and Lewinsky replied, "I guess Mommy made some mistakes," at which point Walters brought the program to a dramatic conclusion, turning to the viewers, saying, "And that is the understatement of the century."
The View
Walters is a part-time host of the daytime talk show The View, of which she is also co-creator and co-executive producer with her business partner Bill Geddie. Walters described the show in its original opening credits as a forum for women of "different generations, backgrounds, and views". The show's current co-hosts are Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar, Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Sherri Shepherd. Previous co-hosts include Meredith Vieira, Lisa Ling, Rosie O'Donnell, Star Jones, and Debbie Matenopoulos.In 2007 Barbara defended co-host Rosie O' Donnell after she made slanderous remarks against Donald Trump and the winner of the miss USA pageant. Donald firmly responded by saying, "Barbara is off the list"
Walters has been married three times. She told The New York Times in 1996: "I'm convinced that you stay married when the days are bad, only because you really want to be. But I always had an out. I had this job, and this life and enough money. I didn't have to fight the bad days." Her husbands were:
Robert Henry Katz, a business executive and former Navy lieutenant. They married on June 20, 1955, at The Plaza Hotel in New York City. The marriage was reportedly annulled in 1958.
Lee Guber, theatrical producer and theater owner. They married on December 8, 1963, and divorced in 1976. They have one daughter, Jacqueline Dena Guber (born 1968, adopted the same year).
Merv Adelson, the CEO of Lorimar Television. They married on May 10, 1986, and divorced in 1992.
She dated lawyer Roy Cohn in college, and the lawyer said that he proposed marriage to Walters the night before her wedding to Lee Guber, but Walters has denied this claim. She explained her lifelong devotion to Cohn as gratitude for his help in her adoption of her daughter, Jacqueline. In her autobiography, Walters says that Cohn got her father's warrant for "failure to appear" dismissed..
Walters, who dated former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in the 1970s, was linked romantically to United States Senator John Warner in the 1990s.
In Walters's autobiography Audition she claimed 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 that the affair ended to protect their careers from scandal.
She announced on the May 10, 2010 episode of her show The View, that she will be undergoing open heart surgery to replace a faulty heart valve; the aortic valve, which pumps blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Walters added that she knew for quite a while that she was suffering from aortic valve stenosis, though symptom free.
The procedure to fix the faulty heart valve "went well, and the doctors are very pleased with the outcome," Walters' spokeswoman, Cindi Berger, said in a statement on May 14, 2010.
On July 9, 2010, it was announced that Barbara Walters will return to The View and her Sirius XM satellite show Here's Barbara in September 2010.
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. 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." She published the book in 1970, with the assistance of ghostwriter June Callwood. To Walters' great surprise, the book was a phenomenon. As of 2008, it had gone through eight printings, sold thousands of copies worldwide, and had been translated into at least 6 different languages.
In 2008, she published her autobiography, A Memoir.
Reaction to Gilda Radner's Caricature of Hermoreless
In her memoir, Walters wrote that although audiences found Gilda Radner's caricature of her as "Baba Wawa" on Saturday Night Live "hysterically funny", Walters at first found the spoof "extremely upsetting". Radner exaggerated Walters' speech impediment (not a geographical accent) wherein she pronounced l and r like w. She remembered seeing a sketch during the time she was leaving NBC to join ABC News with Harry Reasoner, and Radner as "Baba Wawa" said: "This is my wast moment on NBC and I want to wemind you to wook fow me awong with Hawwy Weasoneh weeknights at seven o'cwock ... anotheh netwohk wecognizes in me a gweat tawent for dewivering wewevant news stowies with cwystal cwahity".
One time Walters' daughter Jackie was watching the characterization and laughing, much to Walters' dismay. She said her daughter "set her straight" by saying "Oh, Mom. Lighten up." Walters wrote in her memoir: "Hearing that from Jackie made me realize that I was losing all perspective. Where was my sense of humor?" Walters later met Gilda Radner and told her that she thought the caricature was funny. When Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer at age forty-two, Walters sent a simple note to her husband, Gene Wilder, and said: "She made me laugh. I will miss her. Baba Wawa."
