Book Review | Love and Fear Drove a Dogged TV Pioneer

The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters 
by Susan Page
Simon and Schuster, 422 pp.

What are we to make of Barbara Walters? She was the first woman to break through the glass ceiling that governed TV news broadcasting, the first woman to cohost a network evening news program and a feminist icon—without ever taking part in the feminist movement. She was driven not by ideology, but by her mother Dena’s fearfulness and by her early experience of the financial insecurity created by her reckless father, Lou Walters. Both parents were children of immigrants who had fled antisemitism in Russia and Poland. A charming impresario, Lou made and lost several fortunes during and after her childhood. Barbara herself viewed her own obsessive ambition primarily as a consequence of the love and resentment (in her autobiography, she called it love and hate) that she felt for her mentally challenged sister, Jackie, whom she felt obliged to support financially.

As dogged as Walters herself, author Susan Page has, in this fascinating, dense and lengthy volume, set Walters’s life in context with detailed descriptions of the world in which she maneuvered and the contradiction between her public and private personas. The rampant sexism of the TV news industry demanded incredible strength. She confronted and overcame the rage with which male colleagues reacted to her success, but had less success in her personal life, with four failed marriages (twice to the same man, real estate developer and TV producer Merv Adelson) and a devastatingly troubled relationship with her adopted daughter. After her retirement in 2014 and death in 2022, she seemed to have slipped from our collective memory.

Rulebreaker helps restore the visibility she deserves. Walters was intelligent, hardworking, good-looking and highly competitive. Her determination to support her family became an obsession when her father attempted suicide in 1958. She was 29 at that point and had taken a job in television with no particular goal in mind. The feminist revolution was in its infancy: In the late 1950s, women who worked in the TV news industry were invisible, employed behind the scenes as uncredited writers, secretaries or researchers. When they did appear on screen, they reported only on “female” issues such as homemaking and fashion. Hired with the expectation that most would leave to marry and have children, they were treated as highly disposable.

As Page tells it, Walters realized immediately that she could achieve financial security only if she could join the well-paid men who broadcast the news. She was good at her work, bold and fearless, and she pushed for advancement, refusing to take no for an answer. Her employers recognized her ability to draw viewers and her talent as an interviewer. Soon she gained the right to cohost nightly broadcasts and, shortly afterward, the right to deliver the news. As cohost of ABC’s Evening News, she fought publicly with her male colleagues, particularly Harry Reasoner, and persisted despite constant attempts to undermine her. Cohosts interrupted her, and cameramen had to be careful to avoid showing Reasoner when she was speaking because of his constant on-air scowls.

While Walters and ABC colleague Diane Sawyer were fierce competitors, especially when it came to landing high-profile interviews, the press reveled in their “catfights.” The competition among the men was just as fierce, but rarely mentioned by media watchers who condemned her publicly for the same behavior. No matter how successful she became or how many milestones she logged—the first woman to coanchor a morning show (Today on NBC); the first person to demand and get a million-dollar salary (from ABC in 1976) for coanchoring the evening news; the first woman to be taken seriously as an interviewer; the first woman who remained on TV as she aged—she was always afraid that it could all be taken away from her.

Her public life seemed incredibly glamorous. She hobnobbed with senators and had affairs with two of them, John Warner of Virginia and Edward Brooks of Massachusetts (the latter was not just an illicit but an interracial affair). She numbered Nora Ephron, Gloria Steinem, Bette Midler and columnist Liz Smith among her close friends. Photos in the book show her with Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, Elizabeth Taylor and dozens of other rich and famous people, including designers Yves Saint Laurent and Oscar de la Renta. Her more unsavory friends and acquaintances included arms dealers, members of the mafia and, most notoriously, lawyer Roy Cohn, to whom she remained fiercely loyal to the end of his life because he had once killed a tax action against her father. She had a long-standing acquaintance with Donald Trump and, memorably, interviewed him in 1990. Her many interviews brought her renown, particularly one with Fidel Castro in 1977; she interviewed every sitting president, and first lady, from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. (Even such triumphs often came with a cost to her reputation, as media critics accused her of using her femininity to get interviews.)

To add to her problems, Walters had a speech defect that affected her pronunciation of the letter “r.” This defect seems not to have bothered her in childhood or in her early career, but having it parodied by Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live embarrassed and upset her. Later, her sense of humor asserted itself and she embraced the caricature, even referring to herself as “Baba Wawa” on occasion. And for viewers—or at least for me—it was an asset, making her appear slightly vulnerable and all the more authentic.

Walters retired from The View in 2014 as the result of bad health, cognitive decline and a fall. She died in 2022 at the age of 93. Although her own internal demons may have driven her to pursue her career to its pinnacle, by doing so she paved the way for women such as Oprah Winfrey, Katie Couric, Connie Chung and even, despite their well-known rivalry, Diane Sawyer. The inscription on her tombstone, which she composed herself, reads, “No regrets—I had a great life.” She had achieved what she wanted: She supported her family, became rich and famous, enjoyed exciting work and had a number of dear friends who surrounded and tried to protect her to the end. To some, her affairs, failed marriages and fraught relationship with her daughter might suggest a less sunny verdict, but who are we to judge? Read this compelling book and decide for yourself.

Walters once remarked that women wanted to have it all, but that she thought this impossible. She settled for what she had and left a legacy for other women to follow. For that we owe her our thanks, and maybe a degree of compassion that she apparently rarely experienced during her glamorous and troubled life.

Gloria Levitas is a cultural anthropologist and the author of five books.

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