What we know about Barbara Walters, from her notorious pal to the 'SNL' nickname she hated
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Barbara Walters broke through every barrier and had the scars to show it, cutting a path that Connie Chung, Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Norah O'Donnell and other remarkable women in broadcasting would follow.
She was the first to prove that a woman could co-host a network's morning show, and co-anchor a network's evening news, and demand a million-dollar salary − and stay on the air as she aged. She created a groundbreaking form of talk TV, ABC's "The View", a program that is still going strong more than a quarter-century later.
She reveled in her fame and fortune. But it wasn't easy, and it wasn't free. She paid with three failed marriages, a sometimes-troubled relationship with her only child, and a poignant isolation at the end.
Here are five things we learn about her in my new book, "The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters" (464 pp., Simon and Schuster, April 23).
Barbara Walters thought her career was over in 1976
Walters was thoroughly ensconced as co-host of NBC's Today show, the nation's highest-rated morning show. But she wanted more. She wanted the respect and authority commanded by those who anchored the evening news, then the pinnacle for broadcast journalists.
The executives at NBC wouldn't give her that prize, so she jumped to ABC. For the unprecedented salary of $1 million, she would co-anchor the evening news and produce four hourlong specials a year. Critics immediately dubbed her the "million-dollar baby," derision with a sexist edge.
Harry Reasoner, then the solo anchor of the show, was less than welcoming. Indeed, he fueled what today would be called a hostile workplace. His contempt for her was so undisguised that the director began to avoid "two-shots" − that is, camera angles that would show him scowling at her as she spoke.
"I was drowning," she would recall. "I was not only drowning, I was reading every day about people who were happy to put my head under the water."
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She worried she had repeated the mistakes of her father, never satisfied with what he had achieved and losing it all in an effort to reach a higher prize. "I told myself that I should never have taken the chance. Was it ego? Was it too much ambition?" She wasn't sure her career would survive.
Fidel Castro fueled Barbara Walters' comeback
She survived and then thrived by delivering the sort of big interviews that were her signature.
Starting with Fidel Castro.
She had been pursuing the Cuban leader for two years. Now, thanks to a behind-the-scenes effort to improve U.S.-Cuban relations, he suddenly agreed. He drove a jeep with her through the Sierra Maestra mountains. She was entrusted with a tin of hard candies and his revolver, holding them high to avoid getting splashed by rain-swollen streams.
They rode a Cuban patrol boat across the Bay of Pigs − the first crossing by Americans since the infamous CIA-backed plot to overthrow him.
"I like this place," he told her. "It is quiet, and there are good places for underwater fishing."
In the interview, she pressed him on whether he was a Communist (yes), why there was no freedom of the press ("We are very satisfied about that"), and if he was married. "Formally, no," he finally replied in Spanish.
The interview drew strong ratings, and the spark between them led to decades of speculation about whether they were ever more than friends.
One of her closest friends was a notorious lawyer and Trump confidante
When she was 25 and visiting her parents in Miami, her father introduced her to Roy Cohn.
He was 28 and already notorious. He had been chief counsel for Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the red-baiting Army-McCarthy hearings. He would become the well-connected lawyer and adviser for rich and famous people in trouble, from mobsters to a New York real estate developer named Donald Trump.
Though Cohn was a closeted gay man, he and Barbara dated for a time and he proposed to her more than once, including on the eve of her second marriage. He called her the great love of his life. She relied on him as one of her closest confidantes.
When a warrant was issued for her father's arrest because he had missed a court hearing in a tax case, Cohn somehow made it disappear. When she wanted to adopt a child, he facilitated the private arrangements. When her affair with Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke was at risk of becoming public, Cohn warned her it would threaten her career and advised her to cut it off. She did.
And near the end of his life, as he was dying of HIV/AIDS and mired in scandal, she was one of only a handful of friends willing to testify as character witnesses at his legal disbarment hearings. Trump was another.
Barbara Walters flinched at her 'SNL' moniker, 'Baba Wawa'
On April 24, 1976, comedian Gilda Radner first introduced herself in a "Saturday Night Live" skit as "Baba Wawa," speaking with a lisp so exaggerated that it was hard to understand her words. The audience had no trouble recognizing whom she was parodying, though. They roared.
The Baba Wawa character would appear dozens of times on NBC's "SNL" over the four decades − four decades − that followed. Barbara was portrayed by Radner and Rachel Dratch and Cheri Oteri and others, the only constant being an oversize wig and an inability to articulate "r's."
In public, Barbara laughed off the caricature, but in private she felt exposed and ridiculed over a speech impediment she had tried unsuccessful to remedy. Others saw it as an affirmation that she had entered the zeitgeist, though. "Diane Sawyer hasn't been parodied by 'SNL' that many times, in case anyone's keeping score," media analyst Brian Stelter told me.
When Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer at 42, Barbara sent a sympathy note to her widower, Gene Wilder.
She signed it "Baba Wawa."
Barbara Walters chose a distinctive headstone for her grave
There was no grand memorial service in New York when she died in December 2022, nothing like the Carnegie Hall extravaganza for her departed ABC colleague Peter Jennings. Her remains were cremated and given to her daughter, and she was buried without public notice at Lakeside Memorial Park in Miami, next to her parents and sister.
Their small black and gold markers sit in narrow marble frames, flat to the ground alongside a quiet path. Jackie Walters' marker remembers her as "beloved daughter and sister." Dena Walters' as "beloved wife and mother." Lou Walters' as "beloved husband and father."
Unlike the others, Barbara's marker doesn't call her "beloved," and it doesn't mention her role as a daughter or a wife or a mother. She chose a brief and distinctive parting message of her own, reported for the first time in The Rulebreaker.
"No regrets," it reads. "I had a great life."
Susan Page is the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 5 takeaways from 'The Rulebreaker,' biography of Barbara Walters
