It’s the night before New Year’s Eve 2022 and my phone is exploding with sad emojis. “Devastated?” “I am sorry.” “Oh no, Barbara!”
Oh no, right. If Barbara Walters – who died at the age of 93 after a career that transformed television and journalism in ways no one else has or ever will – were still with us, she would have immediately asked for another time slot to announce her death. Perhaps on a weekday morning so all living presidents can promptly make statements and praise their tremendous accomplishments. Wouldn’t that be better for the reviews? Each network should have breaking news banners, along with a clip reel of their biggest interview hits, from Fidel Castro to Monica Lewinsky to Barack Obama. She would request (OK, request) a 20/20 special with host Oprah Winfrey and tears from the co-hosts of The View, her surrogate TV daughters.
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Barbara Walters loved many things — but most of all, she loved being on TV, being on TV, and being on TV. And maybe as much as she did on TV, she loved to win. And she did: over and over again, through all the glass ceilings she shattered.
It’s well known to anyone who’s seen her in action — because she’s repeated it so many times — that Barbara served as the first female host of “Today” in 1974, and then rose to become the first female co-anchor on The Evening News in 1976 (a job that gave her brought in $1 million a year but almost ended her career for being such a ratings sycophant with her forced partner Harry Reasoner). She gained fame and recognition for her specials, which featured tough sit-downs with heads of state and actors. We don’t have royalties in the United States, but Barbara was basically the queen of journalism. (She even once wore a crown in a skit she did after retiring in 2014.)
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I was very fortunate to meet Barbara, my idol, while writing my book Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of ‘The View’ which would be the last interview Barbara ever gave. She was in a good mood that morning when she met me at a hotel restaurant on the Upper East Side near where she lived, having just had lunch with an old college friend.
Our conversation began, as she begins every chat, by asking me for some good gossip. We talked about Donald Trump, who was – can you believe it? – Presidential candidacy. But it wasn’t as clear as the other times I’d seen it, either. Some of their stories dissolved in the fog. She mixed up names and then suddenly dropped a bombshell — did I know she almost hired Gayle King to host The View instead of Whoopi Goldberg in 2007? In fact I haven’t.
Barbara was confident enough to acknowledge her legacy. She loved saying she helped pave the way for other women on TV, from Katie Couric to Meredith Vieira and Hoda Kotb to her nemesis Diane Sawyer. “What makes me feel good is when a young woman — it’s almost always a woman — says, ‘You influenced me and you’re the reason I became a journalist,'” she told me. “They looked and said, ‘If she could do it, I could do it.'”
But as many barriers she broke on TV news, a big part of her legacy is now tied to a TV show she created on a whim — one she almost finished before she began. “How would it be with?” Your executive producer, Bill Geddie, once told me about it. “How ironic it is that whenever someone talks about Barbara Walters in articles, it’s never Barbara Walters as the first lady of journalism, or the Barbara Walters specials, or the Barbara Walters of ABC News, or Barbara Walters, the first female host , is. It’s always Barbara Walters, creator of The View. you hear it all the time It only makes me laugh. It’s not that I don’t think it’s important. I just didn’t think it was that important given all the other stuff she’s been up to.”
When Barbara started The View in 1997, it was a sleepy show that four anonymous women — you only had to know their first names: Meredith, Star, Joy and Debbie — joined her to discuss the day’s headlines. And it didn’t make much of a splash for a year, until Barbara fired Debbie on national television, got spoofed on Saturday Night Live, and suddenly found herself in the zeitgeist in a completely different way. Before The View, Barbara didn’t joke about sex or offer any insight into her personal life. The View made it acceptable for news anchors in a pre-Twitter world to speak their mind. But more important than that, it brought out the politics of stay-at-home moms who were underestimated by television executives when it came to their intelligence.
Inadvertently, Barbara also created what could be aptly described as a reality TV show before “Survivor” aired. For some reason, “The View” quickly became a hotbed of intrigue for tabloids, which reported offbeat behind-the-scenes “cat fights” and constant drama. Some of that was encouraged by Barbara, who transpired with the best of them — especially when she had to smack one of her TV daughters (like Star, or later Rosie). When Barbara hired Elisabeth Hasselbeck as the show’s first Republican in 2003, straight from a stint on “Survivor,” she made one thing clear: “The View” wasn’t afraid of controversy when the co-hosts began wrestling live television about everything, from working mothers to whether or not George W. Bush was a despot for the invasion of Iraq.
This is now the model for panel shows. And Barbara became the Martha Washington of our current cultural moment, when opinions matter more than news, and it’s not about what you know, it’s about what you think — expressing your feelings as a genre of journalism
Barbara used to say that part of her secret to success was that she never sweated or had to go to the bathroom. But interviewing her was terrifying. Not because she wasn’t nice, but because you’re trying to get information from the very best interviewer in the world. She wasn’t easily charmed and didn’t open up easily. It didn’t help that she had a raging heater in her office at ABC News. Yes, I can tell you with scientific certainty that Barbara wasn’t sweating, which made me sweat even more as we reviewed the ups and downs of her career one afternoon, surrounded by her shelves of Emmys and a hand-drawn portrait of her beloved Havanese dog Cha Cha.
Like most legends, Barbara had her share of flaws. Feeling like she had to fight for every opportunity, she wasn’t someone who understood or stuck to the notion of teamwork. She would sabotage a colleague for a blockbuster because she had no real friends among the other moderators on the editorial board. She didn’t intervene when “The View” became a hot mess backstage — as long as the ratings were good, she had no problem with co-hosts acting like bullies.
She could be extremely insecure and never stopped questioning herself. And unsurprisingly, she saw the world revolve around Barbara Walters. She talked so constantly about struggling to be closer to her adult daughter, Jackie, that Joy Behar once refused to sit next to her on a plane on a business trip because she couldn’t handle those spinning monologues.
Barbara would never have retired from television if she could have stayed forever. But as she entered her late 80s, her health began to deteriorate. In the last years of her life she suffered from dementia, which is why we have not heard or seen anything from her for several years. After all, nothing less than a cruel illness could have silenced Barbara Walters. She was always worried that once she left television, she would forget. But it would never come to that. Barbara has earned her place in both the history books and the gossip pages, and that’s something no one could ever say about the male anchors she ran over to get her exclusive articles.
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