E-mail a friendBarbara Walters
airdate May 16, 2008
Barbara Walters' career is marked by choices that helped break through the male bastion in U.S. network news. She was the first official female co-host of NBC's Today and, at ABC, the first woman ever to co-anchor a network news program. The ten-time Emmy winner rose from writing for local stations to conducting headline-making interviews and hosting top-rated TV specials. Walters is creator, co-host and co-exec producer of ABC's The View and author of a revealing memoir, Audition, which covers her five decades in television news.
Broadcast journalist talks about her career highlights. (2:08)
Full Interview. (12:55)
Barbara Walters
Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Barbara Walters to this program. Her trail-blazing career in journalism and television has included so many high-profile assignments including, of course, the "Today" show, "20/20" and now some show called "The View."
Barbara Walters: Oh, that (laughter).
Tavis: Oh, that show, yeah. The best-selling new book about her career, as if you didn't know, is called "Audition: A Memoir." Barbara Walters, what a delight to have you on our show.
Walters: I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for having me on.
Tavis: It's my pleasure. Let me start by asking, now that you've had a chance to do the rounds, any regrets yet that you did this?
Walters: Well, you know, when I was going to do it, I said in the beginning that a lot of young people come up to me, especially young women, and say, "Oh, you've had such a career" and so forth, "I'd like to be you." I said, "Well, then, you have to have the whole package." And the package has ups and downs and I think a lot of people thought of me as being very austere and, you know, sort of a one dimension.
I think they see, from this good, bad or indifferent, that there are other dimensions. So, you know, there are things that are very personal in the book about my family, about relations. Also, a lot of it, I hope, that is historic and that is informative. So I either did the book and told the truth or what was the point of doing it? You know, I did this interview and that interview. You know, that's not that interesting.
Tavis: Why the need, and if not the need, the desire? If that's not the right word, you unpack it for me.
Walters: Okay.
Tavis: But why whatever to tell this story, to tell it now, with regard to people seeing those other dimensions of you? If you've survived or succeeded this long, and really you have, why even show those other dimensions of you? You have no pressure to do that.
Walters: Well, I think that's true. There was no pressure to do this book at all and I certainly had never wanted to. Other people have written unauthorized books about me and I never reacted to it. It was at a particular place in my life. I had left "20/20" after twenty-five years.
I thought, well, I've got this time and I really wanted to write about my sister, my relationship with my sister, who was considered mentally retarded then or developmentally disabled, and her effect in my life and my father's ups and downs in his show business life. It was going to be a little book. I wanted people to be able to relate to it and I thought I had all this time.
Well, then, as it turns out, ABC came to me and said, "No, no, no. Four specials a year. We don't want to lose you" and suddenly I was so busy. Then the publisher said, "But you've got to write about the president and you've got to write about the murderers and you've got to write about the heads of state and you've got to write about Monica Lewinsky."
Suddenly - not suddenly because it took me three years - it was six hundred pages. I can write it now because, Tavis, I'm in a very good place in my life and I hope that it will be inspirational, that it will help especially young people, both men and women, and that they understand a little bit more about my life and the career.
Tavis: Does it trouble you - you've been in this business for so long and so good at it - does it trouble you that, when you want to tell a particular story, that others parts of the story - to your point about the whole package - overshadow the stuff that you really want to talk about?
Walters: Well, you know, that happened for a strange reason because Oprah, whom I adore, did an interview with me ten days before the book came out. The book was embargoed. It's only been out a week, so nobody read it. Her people put the statement out about Senator Brooke because I think they thought it would drive viewers to the program and it did. It's four pages out of the entire book, but it's all people had read.
I put it in because it was a part of my life because I'm not perfect. A lot of people aren't. But also, I felt that it was historic and I've tried to do that in the book. The idea then - this is thirty-one years ago. I mean, you know, he's been remarried for twenty-six years very happily and he knew that this was going to be in the book. I wrote to him.
Tavis: Very classy, the way you handled that, by the way.
Walters: It was not only an important part of my life at the time, but also thirty-one years ago, an African American man and a white woman, it would have been the end of my career. Now we have an African American running for president. I was trying to say look how things had changed. Look at the way it was then and look at the way it is now.
Now if you just take that out, you think that it's a kiss-and-tell book. I was joking with somebody and I said that - let me show you something. When you open the book, all of these pages are all of the interviews front and back that I had done, you know.
Tavis: I love that, yes.
Walters: So I was joking and I said, "You see, everybody thinks that these are all the interviews that I've done, thousands of them, but, no, they're really all the men I had relationship with." It's been a little bigger, and your name is not here.
Tavis: (Laughter) No. I was about to add that. Mine is not here. I'm not cheering that. I'm just saying it's not there.
Walters: Well, I'm deploring that I have not interviewed you. My day will come with you (laughter).
Tavis: Let me ask what has been the cost of your private life of being such an iconic figure? On the one hand, I mean, people celebrate you and I know we all love to be appreciated for what we do, so there's got to be a part of you that loves the fact that your work has been regarded as iconic, but there's a cost to your private life as well.
Walters: You know, I don't know whether any of us who are in this business, especially if you're in the news business where you don't have, you know, bodyguards and press agents, you don't feel like this big iconic figure at all.
But there is a refrain that goes through this book and that is trying to balance your life, whether you're a man or a woman. It's more with women. How do you combine a career and marriage and children and what price, if any, do you pay?
There's a chapter that I call the hardest chapter of all to write, which is about my daughter who read it and said, "Mommy, put this in. It's important." If people know that we could make it after the kind of rebellious, difficult childhood that she had and it was agony for both of us.
She's so wonderful now and she runs a therapeutic wilderness program for adolescent girls in crisis. I wrote about it because we thought that there are so many parents now who are suffering with their children. I mean, it's awfully hard to bring up teenage children.
Tavis: Did you blame yourself for any of this difficulty?
Walters: Oh, yes. But what I try to say now to women and to men because men are much more involved with their children than they perhaps were when I was a little girl, you're gonna feel guilt, but there is no answer.
You know, so many women have to work, and men. Then you always have the feeling of, "Should I have been home more, should I have done this more?" Or you stay home and then the child goes off to college and you say, "Now what do I do with the rest of my life?" I put it in because I thought that it would be helpful, and also my daughter is very funny.
One of the things that she said that I loved and I quoted there, my daughter is adopted and people, I think, know that by now and I adore her. At one point, I said, "Do you want to find your biological mother?" because she had never asked about it. I said, "I'll help you, darling, if you want to. Don't worry. We're okay. It won't hurt me."
She looked at me and said, "I've had so much trouble with you. Why would I want another one?" (Laughter) I said, "Well, I thought you might" and she said, "What? Another Christmas card?" You know, there are very personal stories in there that go beyond that one small chapter in my life.
Tavis: The conclusion that you draw, if my reading of the text is right and I think it is, the conclusion that you draw particularly where women are concerned is that you can have it all, but not at one time.
Walters: That's what I think, but, you know, I talk particularly about two women, Katherine Hepburn, who said, "I never want children. If little Johnny or little Jimmy, I had an opening night, I'd say 'Out of my way.'" Very bad impersonation, by the way. And Audrey Hepburn who gave up her career for her children and Bette Davis who writes about the price that she paid.
I think it's easier to have it all now, Tavis, than it was in the earlier days for me because men, one hopes, are participating. I mean, fathers now are much more involved, but we also have many more single mothers and single fathers. There is that constant trying to find the balance and I think the constant guilt. I mean, guilt is my second name in this book, I think.
Tavis: That word comes up a few times (laughter)
Walters: Yeah, too much maybe (laughter).
Tavis: You lay out this journey for us and, as I got through the book, I wondered and thought to ask you what it feels like for a woman because so many women even today still don't get to feel this in this way, but what does it feel like to be a woman who is regarded - ABC didn't want you to go. Networks have fought over you, over your work.
What does it feel like to be in your profession at a place in it where people regard you as a woman in this patriarchal, this sexist world you're regarded? That feels like what?
Walters: Well, remember that there was a time when ABC didn't want me when I came to ABC from NBC to do the news and was a failure and my career was, I thought, over. And there are a lot of people who are losing jobs and feel that they're a failure, so it hasn't all been, you know, wonderful, wonderful.
I think it's why I could write this book and talk about myself with such frankness. If indeed I made even a little difference for women, and there are so many women now in front of or behind the cameras, that's a great feeling for me to know that something in your life has made a difference, that it isn't all just, you know, just being on camera.
When you work for a news department, you're not catered to. You don't have the bodyguards and the press agents and the managers and so forth, so I still worked very hard. "The View," for me, is dessert. I mean, I love those women.
But because I am in a very good place in my life, I can maybe almost for the first time enjoy my life. I've worked very hard and I talked about this with Oprah. I said this to her too. "You know, let's enjoy. It's about time we enjoyed it" and that's the way I feel. I could not have done this otherwise.
Tavis: Was it worth having to travel all of that terrain to get to this point to enjoy it?
Walters: Oh, who knows, Tavis. You just do it. You do it. I mean, part of it was that I had to work. At one point, my father who was in show business and was very famous, he had nightclubs all over America, Lou Walters Latin Quarter, lost everything, everything.
I had to support my mother, my father, my sister who was my responsibility, and my daughter. I had to work. I mean, who had time to think what was it worth it? I didn't have time to make those decisions or have those kind of philosophical discussions with myself.
Tavis: Let me offer this as an exit question. I know you've been asked this in some form or fashion before by somebody, but not by me, so indulge me. I was literally looking at a list the other day. We're nowhere near Barbara Walters, but we're celebrating our five years now on PBS and - I know this is a joke to Barbara Walters - but we have our 1000th show coming up.
Walters: Terrific.
Tavis: So I'm sitting with Neal Kendall, our producer, the other day looking at a list of clips that we think we're gonna include in our 1000th anniversary show. So I'm looking at these potential clips for that show. I got your book off to the edge of my desk and I'm glancing over at it and I'm thinking, "How in the world would Barbara Walters choose what goes on her career highlight reel?"
So just indulge me. If there are three things that could not be excluded from your highlight reel, what might they be? I know there's so much to choose from that you'd have to have in your highlight reel.
Walters: Probably the interview that I thought was the most historic, which was an interview between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. When people say to me, "Of all the interviews, which is the most important?", I would say Anwar Sadat because he changed history and because I was a small part of that. In whole life? Not just my career, but everything?
Tavis: However you want to define it.
Walters: My sister.
Tavis: Your sister.
Walters: My older sister, my relationship with her, the fact that people made fun of her and made fun of me, and the love I felt for her, but also the resentment which I think a lot of people understand. One of the greatest influences in my life, that would have to be in, and my daughter.
Tavis: And your daughter.
Walters: Yep.
Tavis: I'll take that. Barbara Walters. Her new book, again, as if you didn't know, "Audition." We are delighted to have her on the program. All the best to you, Barbara Walters.
Walters: I thank you for having me on.
Tavis: The pleasure is mine. Thank you.
Back to May 16, 2008