How Barbara Walters went from ‘Today Girl’ to pioneering media star
Long before she became the first woman to co-anchor a network newscast and the foremost prime-time interviewer of heads of state and Hollywood stars, Barbara Walters understood the power of television.
When she was a teenager in New York City, she saw that TV provided an escape for her cognitively disabled sister, who spent hours watching “I Love Lucy” and “Texaco Star Theater.” And it wasn’t lost on her how her father’s nightclub business fell off in part because of television's ability to keep people in their living rooms at night rather than out on the town.
Walters, who died Friday at age 93, had spent more than five decades in front of the camera and had become a titan of the medium: lauded for the subjects she scored, criticized for her coziness with them, even memed for how she presented herself.
But when she started out, the industry was against her. Men did the hiring. Men decided what went on the air. Men delivered the news.
She wrote in her 2008 memoir, “Audition,” that it was her legs, not her skills, that persuaded the head of a small Manhattan advertising agency to give her a job soon after she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1951. She quit when her boss “became overly amorous,” as she described it. She went on to find low-level jobs at NBC and CBS.
In 1961, she joined NBC’s “Today” show as a writer, researcher and occasional correspondent. When she went before the camera, it was in the guise of what was then called a “Today Girl.” She reported on Paris Fashion Week and dressed up in a Playboy Bunny costume — but soon began seeking out grittier topics and more independence.
Gloria Steinem took notice of Walters in a 1965 article for The New York Times (headline: “Nylons in the Newsroom”) on the rise of women in television news, singling her out among a group of pioneering correspondents and producers that also included Nancy Dickerson and Pauline Frederick.
“Miss Walters not only appears on camera but writes her own scripts, and researches, directs and edits her own filmed reports,” Steinem wrote.
In 1971, Walters took over NBC talk show “For Women Only.” She changed the name to “Not for Women Only” and turned it into a syndicated success that prefigured later daytime discussion shows hosted by Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey. The next year, she was among the cadre of TV correspondents, including Dan Rather of CBS and Ted Koppel of ABC, accompanying President Richard M. Nixon on his trip to China.
At the same time, she was working, unofficially, as the “Today” show's first female co-host. The network did not allow her to direct questions at on-set guests until her male co-host had asked three of his own, a restriction she bypassed by seeking out interviews away from the show’s studio at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The constraints were lifted in 1974 when NBC formally gave her the title of co-host.
“People may have loved her or hated her, but they sure as hell watched her,” Stuart Schulberg, a “Today” producer, told the Times in 1977.
ABC lured her from NBC in 1976, making her the first female co-anchor of a network evening news program. She was paid a $1 million annual salary, more than any other newscaster at the time. But her stint on “ABC Evening News” was “a total flop,” she later said.
Her counterpart, Harry Reasoner, “was really awful to me on and off the air,” she told Vogue, although he later said he never disliked her personally. “The studio was cold and I was frozen out,” she once said, describing how she had to rely on her knowledge of the New York Yankees to persuade the stagehands to talk to her. She described being so visibly miserable that actor John Wayne, not known as a staunch feminist, sent her a telegram to cheer her up.
In 1979, Walters joined the prime-time ABC News magazine “20/20,” where she stayed for 25 years and developed a reputation for persuading public figures to speak to her before anyone else. In 1995, she was the first to interview actor Christopher Reeve after he was paralyzed in a horseback riding accident. In 1999, her interview with Monica Lewinsky, another first, drew about 50 million viewers.
Walters also helped create the influential ABC daytime talk show “The View” in 1997, overseeing what the Times called “TV’s most dysfunctional family” with a panel of women that has included Star Jones, Meredith Vieira, Lisa Ling, Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie O’Donnell. She was 67 when it began.
Her career became a guidepost to several generations of journalists, many of them women, including Jane Pauley, Judy Woodruff and Gwen Ifill. Norah O’Donnell, the “CBS Evening News” and “60 Minutes” journalist, said she used to playact as Walters.
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