It’s the night before New Year’s Eve 2022, and my phone is blasting with sad emojis. “Destroyed?“”very sorry. “”Oh no, Barbara! “
Oh no, that’s right. If Barbara Walters — who died at the age of 93 after a career that transformed television and journalism in a way no one else has or will ever — were still with us, she would have promptly requested a different date for the announcement of her death. Perhaps on a weekday morning, so that all living presidents can issue snap statements, praising her colossal accomplishments. Wouldn’t that be better for the ratings? There are must-have breaking news banners on every network, along with a video of their greatest interview successes, from Fidel Castro to Monica Lewinsky to Barack Obama. she was asking (well, the demand) special “20/20” hosted by Oprah Winfrey, and tears from the co-hosts of “The View,” her TV surrogate daughters.
Barbara Walters loved many things – but mostly she loved being on TV and being on TV. And perhaps as much as she was on TV, she loved winning. And I did: over and over, through all the shattered glass ceilings.
It is known by anyone who has seen her in action—because she has repeated it so often—that Barbara served as the first host of “Today” in 1974 and then expanded to become the first co-anchor of the evening news in 1976 (a job that paid her $1 million a year but almost ended). her career, as it was such a ratings flop with her forced partner, Harry Reasoner). She gained popularity and fame with her own performances, which included rough meetings with heads of state and actors. We don’t have royalty in the States, but Barbara was basically the queen of journalism. (She even wore a tiara once in a skit she did after retiring in 2014.)
I had the tremendous fortune to get to know Barbara, my idol, when I wrote my book The Ladies of Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View. We talked several times before we sat down in 2015 about what would be the last interview Barbara ever gave. She was on a roll. In good spirits that morning, you met me at a hotel restaurant on the Upper East Side, near where you live, and had just had lunch with an old college friend.
Our conversation began, when every conversation began, and she asked me for some good gossip. We talked about Donald Trump, who – Can you believe it? – Candidacy for the presidency. But it also wasn’t as clear as the other times I’ve seen it. Some of her stories will turn into a haze. She mixes up names and then suddenly drops a bombshell — did you know she almost hired Gayle King in 2007 to be a moderator on “The View” instead of Whoopi Goldberg? In fact, I didn’t.
Barbara was conscious enough to acknowledge her legacy. She liked to say that she helped pave the way for other women on television, from Katie Couric to Meredith Vieira to Hoda Kotb to nemesis Diane Sawyer. “What makes me happy,” she told me, “is when a young woman—it’s mostly a woman—says, ‘You influenced me and you’re the reason I became a journalist.’” They watched, and said, ‘If she can do it, I can do it.'” ‘
But because of the many barriers she broke through on TV news, much of her legacy is now tied to a TV show she created on a whim — almost quitting before it even started. “And what about this?” Its executive producer Bill Geddy once told me. “How ironic that whenever someone talks about Barbara Walters in articles, it’s not Barbara Walters the first lady of the press, the Barbara Walters specials, Barbara Walters from ABC News, or Barbara Walters the first female anchor. It’s always Barbara Walters, Creator of “The View. You hear it all the time. It just makes me laugh. It’s not that I didn’t think it was important. I just didn’t think it would be as important, given everything else she’s done.”
When Barbara launched “The View” in 1997, it was a quiet program where four anonymous women—you only need to know their first names: Meredith, Starr, Joy, and Debbie—joined her to discuss the day’s headlines. And it didn’t make much noise for a year, until Barbara Debbie was fired on national television, impersonated on “Saturday Night Live” and suddenly found herself in the zeitgeist in a very different way. Before “The View,” Barbara wasn’t making jokes about sex or giving a glimpse into her personal life. “The View” made it acceptable, in a pre-Twitter world, for news anchors to express their opinions. But more importantly, it brought politics to daytime, to stay at home moms who were underestimated by television executives when it came to their wits.
Unwittingly, Barbara also created what can accurately be described as a reality TV show before “Survivor” even got on the air. For whatever reason, “The View” quickly became a hotbed of tabloid intrigue, reporting on bizarre behind-the-scenes “cat fights” and constant drama. Some of this was encouraged by Barbara, who spilled with the best of them — especially when she had to banish one of her TV daughters (like Star or, later, Rosie). When Barbara hired Elisabeth Hasselbeck, in 2003, as the show’s first Republican, straight from a stint on “Survivor,” she made one thing clear: “The View” wasn’t afraid of controversy, as co-hosts began wrestling on live TV covering it all. From working moms to whether or not George W. Bush was a tyrant for invading Iraq.
This is now the form for the board presentations. And she became Barbara Martha Washington in our current cultural moment where opinion matters more than news, and it’s not about what you know, but what you think – expressing your feelings as a form of journalism
Barbara used to say that part of the secret to her success was that she never sweated or had to take bathroom breaks. But interviewing her was terrifying. Not because she wasn’t nice, but because she is You are Try to gather information from the best interlocutors on the planet. It is not easily charmed nor is it opened quickly. The presence of a space heater raging in her office at ABC News didn’t help either. Yes, I can tell you with scientific certainty that Barbara didn’t sweat, which made me start to sweat even more when we revisited the highs and lows of the afternoon surrounded by her rack of Emmys and a hand-drawn portrait of her beloved Havanese dog, Cha-Cha.
Like most legends, Barbara had her share of flaws. Because she felt she had to fight for every opportunity, she was not someone who understood or committed to the idea of teamwork. She sabotaged a colleague to get the scoop because she had no real friends among the other reporters in the newsroom. She didn’t get involved when “The View” became a hot mess behind the scenes — as long as the ratings were good, she was fine with co-hosts who acted like bullies.
She can be very insecure and never stops second-guessing herself. Not surprisingly, she saw the world revolve around Barbara Walters. She talked constantly about how she struggled to get close to her adult daughter, Jackie, to the point that Joy Behar once refused to sit next to her on a plane on a business trip, because she couldn’t handle those swirling monologues.
Barbara would never have retired from television if she could have stayed forever. But as she reached her late 80s, her health deteriorated. In the last years of her life, she suffered from dementia, which is why we haven’t heard or seen her for a few years. After all, nothing short of a cruel illness could silence Barbara Walters. She was always worried that she would be forgotten once she left TV. But this will never happen. Barbara has earned her place in both the history books and the gossip pages, which is something no one can say about the male anchors she runs up to for her exclusives.
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