“a compelling look at a dynamic trailblazer who broke into a field that was male dominated and leading the way for other women . . .”
“When Dana Walters found her husband ashen-faced and unconscious in their hotel bed, his bottle of sleeping pills emptied, she didn’t call an ambulance,” writes author Susan Page in The Rulebreaker, her biography of Barbara Walters. “She called their daughter.
“‘I can’t wake your father up,’ her mother said, her voice frantic. ‘He just won’t wake up!!’
“Barbara ran to the street and hailed a cab for the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South, a mile away where her parents were staying. When she got there, she tried to shake her unconscious father awake—Daddy, Daddy—she shouted—as her mother and sister watched. Jackie, who as always was living with her parents, didn’t fully understand what was happening, but she knew it was a crisis. Lou didn’t respond. Barbara was the one who called the ambulance.”
Walters was the daughter of a nightclub owner who at times was extremely successful and at other times was broke, his family caught up in a cycle of living high and barely scraping throughout Barbara Walters’s childhood. And though she was a journalist, her father’s showmanship was also part of her genetic make-up; and so when Lou Walters, after having his stomach pumped, was out of danger, she went into public relations mode.
“No one had to warn the daughter of Lou Waters about the perils of bad press. At the hospital once her father’s stomach had been pumped, she recognized the risk to his reputation in his future prospects if word got out he had tried to take his own life. . . . Sometimes bad news required a shiny finish.”
This brief description of a major family emergency succinctly highlights the aspects of Walters ‘s personality, a summation of all the components of what led her to be such an outstanding success. She was the one people turned to in crisis. And even though she was devastated and fearful of losing her father, she kept her cool, she evaluated, and then made her decisions about what was the course of action. But underneath it all, her formative years had instilled a sense of impending doom, an understanding that life could change in a nanosecond. But that anxiety didn’t stop her from breaking through the barriers that had kept women out of the coterie of male reporters who were seen as the only ones capable of relaying news with the gravity and seriousness required.
She was a “rulebreaker,” a woman who managed a somewhat complicated private life (divorces, affairs, and the like) while working toward her goals. Walters is famous for many things and among them are the number of big “gets,” interviews with famous people such as Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, John Wayne, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Fidel Castro, the Shah of Iran, Monica Lewinsky, Ted Turner, and Betty White.
Not only a rule breaker but a groundbreaker, when Walters was 67—retirement age for many—she created a new television show with The View, the first in what is now known as talk TV.
Page, the author of the New York Times bestselling Madame Chair and the award-winning Washington bureau chief of USA Today, interviewed more than 150 people for her book and did a deep dive in archival research. The result is a compelling look at a dynamic trailblazer who broke into a field that was male dominated and leading the way for other women including Oprah, who announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters.
This article previously appeared in the New York Journal of Books.
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