I Have to Ask

How Barbara Walters got where she is.

By Nicholas Lemann, THE NEW YORKER, Books May 12, 2008 Issue

May 5, 2008

Barack Obama walked onto the set of “The View” a few weeks ago and sat down. It took a moment for the fluttering to die down. When it did, Barbara Walters turned to him and said, “We were just saying before you came out—maybe we shouldn’t say this, but we thought you were very sexy-looking.” Walters then turned her gaze to the cheering audience, as Obama grinned and pretended to fan himself with his hands. There was more fluttering.

Walters, whose career spans nearly the entire history of television, is a master at alchemizing news into showbiz, and vice versa.Illustration by Robert Risko

Then Walters picked up a sheaf of notes on her lap and got down to business. “O.K., so here we go. . . . You’ve condemned the racist comments made by Reverend Wright, but you haven’t disowned him. But when Don Imus made racist remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team you said you thought he should lose his job. You said, and I’m quoting”—here she read from the notes—“ ‘There’s nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like that about anybody of any ethnic group.’ What’s the difference?” Obama gave a careful and practiced answer. And now we were smack in the middle of a standard-issue news interview.

Walters is, along with Mike Wallace, among the few remaining on-air television journalists whose careers encompass almost the entire history of television news. Before broadcast news emerged from the primordial ooze and separated itself from entertainment and commerce and opinion, just about everybody in front of the camera did a little of just about everything. Walters hawked Alpo on the air, assisted by live dogs. She got her big break, a full-time job on NBC’s “Today” show, in 1961, as a writer for a long-forgotten beauty named Anita Colby, who had a five-minute segment on the show that was sponsored by S & H Green Stamps and was devoted to fashion, makeup, and entertaining. Walters, whose first ambition was to be an actress and who had a couple of early jobs in public relations, became a journalist by accident, when NBC moved “Today” from the entertainment to the news division and a sympathetic boss decreed that she could write for all segments of the show. Her transition to on-air personality came by accident, too, when, after a few short, unplanned fill-ins, she got herself assigned to Paris to cover the fashion shows.

It’s that résumé which, in part, explains why Walters has never been hemmed in by the conventions of journalistic conduct. Brian Williams doesn’t have a way to coo at Obama and then segue into a slightly friendlier version of the usual reporter’s tough question without stripping out his gearshift. In 1976, after a long career at “Today”—technically a news show, but with a high component of entertainment—Walters moved to ABC, where she signed on for a dual career, working partly for the news division and partly for the entertainment division. She is newsier than other entertainment reporters, and more showbiz than other news reporters.

As she has gone from being well known to being famous and on to being an inescapable, if easily parodied, national monument, Walters has taken the reporter-source relationship to a strange new place. While Oprah Winfrey, who declared as a contestant in a teen-age pageant that Walters was who she wanted to be like when she grew up, can no longer pull off the act of being in a position inferior to those she interviews, Walters can, somehow. She also gets to offer her own opinions and feelings and to act as a combination of loving but gimlet-eyed mom and one-woman embodiment of American public opinion. Her annual Oscar-season specials—they and “The View” are the cash cows in the Walters empire—are as much about her gown, her choice of people to interview, and the judgments she pronounces on her subjects as they are about the stars themselves. She has interviewed every President since Nixon, and many of America’s most notorious murderers. She is at once a bourgeois, an establishmentarian, and a Hollywood queen transposed to Manhattan. She’s what Marjorie Morningstar would have been like if she hadn’t come to her senses and turned herself back into Marjorie Morgenstern.

Of course, it took more than an unconventional journalistic résumé to become Barbara Walters. It also took a giant personality. Walters’s new memoir, “Audition” (Knopf; $29.95), makes that plain and gives us a sense of “who she really is,” if this concept can apply to someone whose adult life has been lived in front of a camera. “Audition” is, for its genre, an unusually ambitious and successful book. It’s long and suffused with an emotional intensity—mainly about the ups and downs of Walters’s career—that keeps it from being dull even as it covers a lot of ancient ground about network-news executives and the formerly famous. Walters knows how to put on a show. Although nothing in “Audition” comes as a shock—Walters doesn’t turn out to be a stamp collector, or to have learned Aramaic—it belongs to a part of American culture that Walters helped invent; it has just the right number of personal but not icky revelations, and they enrich, rather than spoil, a sense of intimacy.

Officially, Walters plays by the rules of the genre by eventually achieving inner peace, closure, and so on, but “Audition,” refreshingly if perhaps unwittingly, presents its heroine as a figure who stands at the doorstep of old age consumed with regrets, resentments, and unresolved conflicts. Walters’s father, Lou Walters, was a booking agent turned night-club owner whose great triumph was inventing the Latin Quarter, an American version of the type of Parisian night club that had elaborate floor shows with dozens of expensively costumed chorus girls. Lou Walters was dead broke and living in Boston when, in 1937, he opened the first Latin Quarter there. It took off, and within a few years there were much bigger branches in Miami Beach and New York. These were a forerunner of the big Las Vegas casino shows today: sexy but not smutty, “classy” but populist in their taste and pricing, excessive in every detail from fabric choices to the size of the meals. Though he operated in the realm of commerce rather than that of art, he was so committed to realizing his costly vision for the Latin Quarter that he was never an entirely successful businessman. For a while, the Walters family occupied an entire floor of a Central Park West apartment building. But, in the late fifties, profligacy, a mean partner, and changing public tastes brought harsh reversals. He spent his later decades in serious economic and emotional distress. (“Audition” reveals that when an arrest warrant was issued for Lou, who had missed a court date in connection with nonpayment of taxes, Barbara talked to her friend Roy Cohn and got him to make the problem go away.)

Lou Walters and his wife, Dena, had a son, who died at the age of fourteen months, then a daughter, Jackie, who was mentally impaired and never able to live on her own, and, finally, Barbara. Lou Walters, in Barbara’s telling, was hardly ever home, and Dena Walters was hardly ever out, because she was taking care of Jackie and worrying about the next disaster that Lou’s imprudence might bring. It’s abundantly clear that Walters craved more attention from each parent than she got, and that her relations with the three members of her immediate family were complicated. She resented Jackie (in one excruciating scene, she holds an all-important high-school sorority party outside the family home while her mother obligingly spends the evening inside making sure that Jackie doesn’t accidentally present herself), but also felt guilty about being resentful. Her ill will toward her father was such that only when she was in her late twenties and he attempted suicide was she able to experience a surge of “love and compassion for him.” Walters remembers that as a young girl she used to tell the “soft and loving” Dena Walters “that when I grew up, I would buy her a beautiful house right next to mine.” In her memoir, she regrets that she declined, when her mother was elderly and widowed and living in Miami Beach, to ask her to live with her in New York, though she did suggest that Dena improve her social life by inviting other old ladies over to her apartment to watch her daughter on television.

It makes sense that the privately undernourished Walters would turn to the public world of achievement, display, and acclaim for emotional sustenance. She set off on this course early in life, with a ferocious determination, perhaps heightened by what she describes as her unconquerable insecurity. Walters is wildly competitive and thin-skinned; she seems never to forget or forgive a slight. Wellesley wait-listed her. The popular girls at Fieldston made her feel insecure about her shoes. A dashing Italian bachelor once stood her up for a date. She got into only the second-best high-school sorority in Miami. Frank Sinatra, an old Latin Quarter patron, “took a hate to me,” because Walters, in her days as co-host of “Today,” called to ask him whether it was true that he was engaged to Pamela Hayward (later Pamela Harriman). Truman Capote didn’t invite her to his Black and White Ball. Time seated her in Siberia at its seventy-fifth-anniversary gala. Gilda Radner’s famous Walters impersonation on “Saturday Night Live” was “extremely upsetting.” Roone Arledge, her boss at ABC News, never fully appreciated her. Her agent didn’t fly back from a family vacation in Israel so that he could discuss a job offer from CBS in person. NBC gave Katie Couric a much bigger sendoff when she left “Today” than it gave Walters when she left, three decades earlier.

“What don’t you understand? When my clients fly their guests over your farm on the way to Vegas, they’d like to see the words ‘Mazel tov, Josh’ spelled out in your cornfield.”

Walters’s personal life has been rough going. In “Audition,” she lets us in on some exciting romances she’s had— with, among others, Alan Greenspan, a French hotel caterer named Claude Philippe, and, in the early seventies, Senator Edward Brooke, who in the retelling was the most exciting of them all, because their affair was a secret (he was married), because he was bossy and elusive, and because he was black. But she has been married, and divorced, three times, each time to a man she seems to have experienced as a version of her father (two were in show business)—charming but not up to her sky-high requirements for male power. Her one child, a daughter she named Jackie, after her sister, had a nightmarish adolescence, culminating in her running away from home and being tracked down and taken to a special school by a burly man who specialized in the “transport” of teen-agers with big problems. (Jackie now lives in Maine and operates a program to help teen-age girls like her younger self; she and her mother have shared their story on national television.) But work always worked; television could have been invented just to suit her.

Walters first encountered TV as a kind of electronic companion that a friend recommended for her sister, and then as the main force that brought the night-club era, and thus her father’s glorious period, to an end. Make of that what you will; Walters’s almost unbelievable staying power indicates the perfect match of a person’s talents to a medium’s imperatives. The period in which she found herself as a TV star was one that began with a setback. In 1971, Frank McGee, whom she didn’t like at all, was made the male co-host of “Today.” Walters, despite having persuaded NBC to stop using the title that had gone with her job as “Today”’s female co-host—“the Today Girl”—had to live under a humiliating deal that McGee had extracted from the NBC News brass: when a “powerful person” came into the studio to be interviewed, Walters couldn’t join in until the fourth question. But no such restrictions applied if Walters did an interview on the road, outside McGee’s ambit. This encouraged her to go off in pursuit of the journalistic form that has primarily defined her career, the “get,” in which Walters somehow persuades an elusive news celebrity to accept an on-camera visit from her. ABC lured Walters away from NBC partly by making her co-anchor (with Harry Reasoner) of its evening news program, traditionally the pinnacle job in TV journalism. That was a disaster—Reasoner and Walters visibly hated each other—but in “Audition” Walters hardly seems to notice her removal from the anchor’s chair after just a few years, because by then her career was all about the interviews.

The interviews follow a series of informally codified rules. To break down the resistance of the most alluring subjects, Walters wages an intense, sometimes years-long campaign, evidently conducted mainly through snail mail, even long into the e-mail era, though it usually ripens into direct negotiations with lawyers, agents, press people, and other handlers. Her chief selling point is that she will provide a forum in which the celebrity can offer his version of his story, to an audience of millions of people, before an interlocutor who is journalistically respectable but essentially sympathetic. (Tough questions from Walters often take a distanced form: “I have to ask . . .” or “What do you say to those who criticize you for . . .”) During the interview, she seamlessly blends journalistic touches, like the long list of prepared questions that she holds on her lap, with a palpable sense that she is feeling the power of the interviewee’s fame and glamour, just as we do—though in her case the subject’s stardom enhances her own. She dresses modestly and respectfully. She leans forward, establishes meaningful eye contact, tucks her fingers under her chin to denote close attention, and offers an old-fashioned “take,” not just a nod, in reaction when her subject says something noteworthy. Substantively, Walters tends to accept completely her subject’s basic frame of reference—often a sin-confession-redemption progression, leading up to an about-to-be-released book or film—but she retains the right to disapprove, literally with raised eyebrows, of specific aspects of the subject’s conduct and personal grooming. “Why the self-destructiveness? Do you know where it came from?” she implored Angelina Jolie in 2004. Jolie did not, but she did confess that adopting a Cambodian toddler had given her life purpose and that she missed having sex (in which respect the interview was soon dated).

The rules permit Walters to interview her subjects in the role of a sympathetic friend, though not a pushover. (Her friendship with Martha Stewart was strained when NBC put “The Martha Stewart Show” into the same time slot as “The View,” but Stewart’s show moved to a different slot and now, Walters says, “Martha and I are happy to be easy friends again.”) She may flirt with male subjects. Once, she tells us, she “got all flustered and goofy and told the cameraman to stop tape” when Clint Eastwood said something in an interview that she took as a come-on; conversely, she found it disappointing that Bill Clinton “never sparkled with me.” She can be girlish with female subjects, even if they are future heads of state. The young Indira Gandhi became “very human to me,” Walters recalls, when, during their first meeting, she complained about the shortage of closet space in the Indian Prime Minister’s residence.

Walters’s method can create jarring transitions—in 1977, she rushed from Dolly Parton to Anwar Sadat, and in 2006 had to skip an interview with Hugo Chávez because she was with the widow of a man eaten by a crocodile—and it consistently generates tut-tutting from colleagues, especially male ones. “Is Barbara a journalist, or is she Cher?” Richard Salant, the president of CBS News, asked when she was made an anchor. (Answer: she’s a journalist who finds Cher a “delight to talk to.”) Such doubts were not dispelled when, in 1976, ABC aired her first special, in which she led viewers on a tour of her fabulous apartment, and concluded an interview with President-elect Jimmy Carter by saying, “Be wise with us, Governor. Be good to us.” In later years, she occasionally got into trouble for stepping over the invisible line that separates her ordinarily unusual code of conduct from what is truly unacceptable in network news. In 1987, for instance, she acted as a go-between, carrying a message from Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms dealer, to President Ronald Reagan (via Nancy Reagan), without telling her bosses at ABC. But then Walters has always been oriented toward audiences rather than toward colleagues. To judge from “Audition,” she pays very close attention to the ratings of every show; her specials gird her in commercial armor that protects her from the fate of, say, Ted Koppel. Each interview is on some level a commercial transaction; Walters wouldn’t pursue it if the subject weren’t huge, and the subject wouldn’t speak to Walters if she weren’t huge. But she gets the ratings she does because she is so adept at cloaking the transaction in what comes across as genuine, if schmaltzy, emotion.

The narrative arc of Walters’s career has her triumphing over the doubters and sneerers, outlasting two or three generations of executives and on-air talent, and winding up as the queen of television news. Yet there’s a more complicated story in “Audition,” too. As Walters becomes a star, she begins leading the life of a star, in ways pleasant and unpleasant. She has a substantial entourage of bookers, producers, makeup people, lighting people, hair people, agents, drivers, housekeepers, and cameramen. She worries about the press coming after her. She spends vacations and holidays with other famous people—the Rohatyns, Judge Judy, Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones—rather than with family. Her life is so busy that she didn’t get a chance to say a proper goodbye to either of her parents or her sister. She tells us that she learned of her sister’s death, in 1985, while waiting in the wings before an out-of-town speaking engagement, and went onstage anyway—although she recalls being so rattled that she “gave a terrible speech and was criticized for it.” Walters encounters Patty Hearst, the kidnapped heiress, many years after her time in the spotlight, and seems surprised to find her living quietly and contentedly with her family in Connecticut. A little disapprovingly, Walters notes, “She did not take her experience and say, ‘I’m going to spend my life doing something important.’ ”

In television, Walters’s way of being has spread beyond what she could ever have dreamed. In her journalistic heyday, the late seventies, she was prone to view the world solely through interviews with famous, powerful, and charismatic people. In 1971, when she went to Persepolis to cover the lavish twenty-five-hundredth anniversary of the Persian monarchy (the Shah of Iran and Empress Farah were occasional subjects, and Farah became a friend), she noted that “we reporters didn’t know that the Persepolis indulgences would become a major milestone in the Shah’s eventual downfall and bring us the fundamentalist Islamic regime that exists in Iran today. We were there to cover a party.” Well, exactly. But, as time went on, even the most glamorous heads of state stopped pulling high ratings, and Walters spent more of her time interviewing entertainers and criminals. The difficulties of getting access became ever greater and the competition ever broader and more intense—it wasn’t just the other networks, it wasn’t just cable, it wasn’t just “E.T.” and “Access Hollywood”; it was, most upsettingly, Diane Sawyer at ABC News, who had been hired to play a starring role very hard to distinguish from Walters’s and who fought for the same interviews Walters was trying to get. Sawyer, a former beauty queen and (as Walters notes) aide to Richard Nixon, doesn’t have a conventional journalistic résumé, either, but she plays as cooler, less emotionally involved, less desperately eager to connect to her subject and to us. Walters is, by blood relation, one degree of separation from vaudeville, and it shows; Sawyer is a television person.

The argument that Walters used to clinch the monster get of all time, Monica Lewinsky, was “I can give you the forum and the opportunity to present yourself with the greatest dignity.” But not too many years later Walters was feeling the indignities of the ever-escalating booking wars so keenly that she left her major showcase, “20/20.” Hers was a vanishing art form: the interview perched between vulgarity and social uplift. For her last show, in 2004, her bosses chose to have her pursue an interview with Mary Kay Letourneau, the middle-school teacher who went to prison for seducing one of her students, rather than one with President Bush. The unlikely balancing act that Walters’s triumphant career represents may turn out to be an artifact of a particular set of talents and of a particular moment in history—rather like the Latin Quarter. ♦

Published in the print edition of the May 12, 2008, issue.

Nicholas Lemann is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. His most recent book is “Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream.”