Trailblazing journalist for all women
TV news icon later created ‘The View’ during long career
NEW YORK — Barbara Walters, the intrepid interviewer, anchor and program host who blazed the way as the first woman to become a TV news superstar during a career remarkable for its duration and variety, has died. She was 93.
ABC broke into its broadcast to announce Walters’ death on air Friday night.
“She lived her life with no regrets. She was a trailblazer not only for female journalists, but for all women,” her publicist Cindi Berger said in a statement, adding Walters died peacefully at her New York home.
During nearly four decades at ABC, and before that at NBC, Walters’ exclusive interviews with rulers, royalty and entertainers brought her celebrity status that ranked with theirs, while placing her at the forefront of the trend that made stars of TV reporters.
Late in her career, she gave infotainment a new twist with “The View,” a live ABC weekday kaffeeklatsch with an all-female panel for whom any topic was on the table and who welcomed guests ranging from world leaders to teen idols. With that side venture and unexpected hit, Walters considered “The View” the “dessert” of her career.
Walters made headlines in 1976 as the first female network news anchor, with an unprecedented $1 million salary that drew gasps. Her drive was legendary as she competed — not just with rival networks, but with colleagues at her own network — for each big “get” in a world jammed with more and more interviewers, including female journalists following in her trail.
“I never expected this!” Walters said in 2004, taking stock of her success. “I always thought I’d be a writer for television. I never even thought I’d be in front of a camera.”
But she was a natural on camera, especially when plying notables with searing questions. In a voice that never lost its trace of her native Boston accent or its substitution of Ws-for-Rs, Walters lobbed blunt and sometimes giddy questions, often sugarcoated with a hushed, reverential delivery.
“Off-screen, do you like you?” she once asked actor John Wayne, while Lady Bird Johnson was asked whether she was jealous of her late husband’s reputation as a ladies’ man.
In May 2014, she taped her final episode of “The View” amid much ceremony to end a five-decade career in television (although she continued to make occasional TV appearances ). During a commercial break, a throng of TV newswomen she had paved the way for — including Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Robin Roberts and Connie Chung — posed for a group portrait.
“I have to remember this on the bad days,” Walters said quietly, “because this is the best.”
Her career began with no such inklings of majesty.
Walters graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1943 and eventually landed a “temporary,” behindthe-scenes assignment at “Today” in 1961. Shortly afterward, what was seen as the token woman’s slot among the staff ’s eight writers opened. Walters got the job and began to make occasional on-air appearances with offbeat stories such as “A Day in the Life of a Nun” or the tribulations of a Playboy bunny. But she had to pay her dues, sometimes sprinting between interviews to do dog food commercials.
She had the first interview with Rose Kennedy after the assassination of her son, Robert, as well as with Princess Grace of Monaco and President Richard Nixon. She traveled to India with Jacqueline Kennedy and to China with Nixon. By 1976, she had been granted the title of “Today” co-host and was earning $700,000 a year. But when ABC signed her to a $5 million, five-year contract, she was branded “the million-dollar baby.”
Reports failed to note her job duties would be split between the network’s entertainment division and ABC News, then mired in third place. Meanwhile, Harry Reasoner, her seasoned “ABC Evening News” co-anchor, was said to resent her salary and celebrity orientation.
It wasn’t just the shaky relationship with her coanchor that brought Walters problems. Comedian Gilda Radner satirized her on “Saturday Night Live” as a rhotacistic commentator named “Baba Wawa.” And after her interview with a newly elected President Jimmy Carter in which Walters told Carter “be wise with us,” CBS correspondent Morley Safer publicly derided her as “the first female pope blessing the new cardinal.”
A new boss, ABC News president Roone Arledge, moved her out of the coanchor slot and into special projects. She found success with her quarterly primetime interview specials.
She became a frequent contributor to newsmagazine “20/20,” and later co-host. A perennial favorite was her review of the year’s “10 Most Fascinating People.” By 2004, when she stepped down from “20/20,” she had logged more than 700 interviews, ranging from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Moammar Gadhafi, to Michael Jackson, Erik and Lyle Menendez and Elton John.
Walters did pronounce herself guilty of being “dreadfully sentimental” at times and was famous for making her subjects cry, with Oprah Winfrey and Ringo Starr among the more famous shedders. But her work also received high praise. She won a Peabody Award for her interview with Christopher Reeve shortly after the 1995 horseback-riding accident that left him paralyzed.
Walters’ first marriage to businessman Bob Katz was annulled after a year. Her 1963 marriage to theater owner Lee Guber, with whom she adopted a daughter, ended in divorce after 13 years. Her five-year marriage to producer Merv Adelson ended in divorce in 1990. Walters wrote a bestselling 2008 memoir, “Audition,” which caught readers by surprise with her disclosure of a “long and rocky affair” in the 1970s with married U.S. Sen. Edward Brooke.
Walters is survived by her daughter, Jacqueline Danforth.