Barbara Walters told it like it was.
The pioneering journalist, who died in 2022 and is the subject of a new documentary streaming this month, paved the way for other female reporters who followed her, breaking ground with news-making interviews.
But she was also controversial.
Here are six highlights from the new documentary “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything.”
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While interviewing Clint Eastwood at his California ranch in 1982, Walters and the “Dirty Harry” actor discussed how he keeps most of his feelings inside, often not even sharing his worries with romantic partners.
“You would drive me nuts, and I would drive you crazy because I would be saying, ‘But didn’t you? Or haven’t you?’” Walters told Eastwood as they sat facing each other on a picnic bench.
“Well, we could try it and see if it worked out,” he answered dryly with a smirk.
They both then laughed awkwardly, and Walters answered, “We’ll start with this interview and if this is OK, we’ll say, ‘Well, maybe we’ll do another interview… and…”
After a long pause, Walters said to the camera, “I think we’ll stop and reload” as everyone burst out in laughter.
“Barbara had her fill of romance,” gossip columnist Cindy Williams said in the documentary. “She thought a lot of guys were sexy. She was interested in the possibility of sex. She liked it. She liked men.”
“She was never cynical about love, and she was definitely a romantic kind of person,” makeup artist Lori Klein said. “But romance just never worked in her life for long.”
Walters revealed on “The Tonight Show” in 2014 that Eastwood had asked her out to dinner after the interview, but she said no because she had work.
“This is a sad love story,” she told host Jimmy Fallon. “I did this interview with Clint Eastwood something like 30 years ago. He was very flirtatious, and I was very taken (with him). He asked me if I wanted to have dinner… and I said, ‘No, I have to work.’ You know, I don’t mix business with pleasure,” which she said she later regretted.
“I could have been Mrs. Clint Eastwood!” she added.
“She was obsessed with three things: She was obsessed with money, fame and power,” Peter Gethers, the editor of her autobiography, told the documentary. “When I would have conversations with her about her father, her father was a scoundrel. Her father was irresponsible with money, he was not a perfect family man. Scoundrel was the right word. And I think she was both horrified by that and attracted to that.”
He said one of the most difficult things in editing her autobiography was dealing with her close relationship with the late attorney Roy Cohn.
“I said to her, ‘I would put Roy Cohn in my top 10 of horrible people in the 20th century,’” Gethers said. “But she loved him.”
Williams explained that because Cohn was famous, “it was worthwhile for Barbara. Barbara was famous, so it was worthwhile for Roy. They were two people who loved PR.”
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Gethers also claimed that Walters “didn’t have the strongest moral compass. A lot of the relationships she developed were career moves. And she was a pretty transactional person.”
Walters once explained a controversial favor Cohn did for her.
“When my father lost everything, he also had not paid his taxes in New York. And Roy Cohn said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’” Walters was quoted as saying in the documentary. “‘I will take care of it.’ I don’t know how he did it. I don’t know what judges he talked to. I forgot about ethics, and I had been severely criticized by my friends and I can understand because Roy did some terrible things, but this was my father and he saved him.”
Gethers elaborated, “She didn’t see things in that kind of moral light. That stuff was always in the shadows. She could forgive anyone who was really good to her no matter what they did in the other parts of their lives.”
“You can never know about what’s transactional, what’s not, but you can wonder,” David Sloan, ABC News executive producer, said of Walters.
Martin Clancy, a former ABC News producer, said in the documentary, “Barbara watched Diane warily because she was really in the same altitude as Barbara. Other correspondents were not a threat. I think Barbara secretly resented Diane for being younger.”
Reporter Cynthia McFadden explained that Sawyer had booked Katharine Hepburn “fair and square” for an interview once and Walters put “a lot of pressure” on the actress to do an interview with her instead, but Hepburn wouldn’t do it.
“If I showed up on Mars, she would have a note there in the Barbara Walters stationery just requesting an interview with anybody who might happen to show,” Sawyer jokingly said in a clip shared on the documentary.
Reporter Connie Chung said she realized “how stupid” she was to accept a job at ABC working with Sawyer and Walters while they were “in this monstrous spat to win stories and I was caught in the middle.”
McFadden said she spoke with Walters about Sawyer many times, and she was “certainly dogged by Diane’s very existence. She often said Diane was the perfect woman. She used the word ‘blonde goddess.’ This ideal woman. And she, Barbara, couldn’t compete with that. She could work harder, she could know more people, but she couldn’t compete with that. The blonde goddess.”
Victor Neufeld, a former ABC executive producer, said Walters would tell him, “Diane is married to Mike Nichols. I’m not married to Mike Nichols. I would say, ‘Barbara, you can marry anybody you want.’ Her insecurities were really nightmarish.”
McFadden added, “This has been interpreted, I think, by a lot of people to say that Barbara was not good to other women. And I think that is a canard. Not at all. She couldn’t tolerate having Diane Sawyer rise in what she saw as a direct challenge to what she had accomplished. What a sadness. Talk about the death of joy.”
Walters is quoted in the documentary as saying that she was 23 years old when she first got married and went straight from her parents’ house to her first home with her husband. “And it was a marriage that never should have been,” she said.
She also adopted her only child, Jackie, when she was in her 30s during her second marriage.
“This idea of a working mother seemed like an oxymoron. People didn’t think you could take care of a child or take care of a husband and have a full-time job,” Katie Couric said of Walters’ struggle to balance motherhood and her career.
Walters explained once that she only took two days off after she adopted her daughter.
Walters once said she was disappointed when her second marriage ended because, at that time, their daughter was 4. “I don’t think I was very good at marriage. It may be that my career was just too important. It may have been that I was a difficult person to be married to, and I wasn’t willing perhaps to give that much. But through it all there was this career I felt I needed to have, and I loved it.”
She added, “When I was in my 20s and 30s, when I should have been dating, I was working day and night. I didn’t have those kinds of years. I didn’t have those years until I was in my 30s and 40s. Mine was a very delayed romantic period.”
Walters said in an interview she didn’t realize how much Jackie struggled with having a mother who was a celebrity, revealing that she ran away when she was 16.
“She had a charged, complex relationship with her daughter,” Oprah Winfrey said. “I remember her telling me once it’s really fulfilling having children, and you should really think about it, and I was like ‘OK, but I’m looking at you, so no,’” Winfrey said, adding that she knew she could only do one thing well and being a mother and a career woman are both sacrifices.
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McFadden said Walters told her “many times that she’d made mistakes as a mother, she’d made choices for herself, for her work.”
“The View” co-host Joy Behar said she didn’t think anything was ever enough for Walters.
“But that was her secret to keep getting better and striving all the time. I think that her personal life suffered because of that.”
Walters was quoted as saying that young people would come up to her and say they wanted to be her.
“And I say, ‘You have to take the whole package.’”
She also once said on “The View,” “To this day I feel guilty” about not being there for her daughter enough.
McFadden, who interviewed Jackie as an adult about her relationship with her mother, said she felt Walters worried their relationship was “shaky” and thought she and her daughter might have “fallen out again.”
Walters said once, “Look, are there times when I look at people, I’ve got a friend, for example, who’s got four children and 11 grandchildren, and she says, ‘Look at your life,’ and I say, ‘Look at your life. I mean, how rich you are. Four children, 11 grandchildren. That’s richness.’ But I don’t have that. I didn’t take that path.”
Couric added, “I felt like she neglected her personal life and poured so much into her work life that I’m not sure she was a truly happy person. And I remember thinking I want to make sure that I have a family, that I don’t just have a big job, and I always got the sense that Barbara wished she had paid more attention to that.”
Gethers said, “I never got the sense from talking to her that there was one love of her life. Her job was the love of her life. I mean, when she would glow, she wouldn’t glow talking about the men in her life, she would glow talking about creating ‘The View.’ She was as driven a person as I’ve ever met.”
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Before Walters did Monica Lewinsky’s first sit-down interview in 1999 that was watched by 70 million people, Winfrey suggested she was set to talk to the infamous former intern.
“We had an agreement with Monica Lewinsky’s team, and then Barbara swooped in,” Winfrey said, “and said to Lewinsky, I can give you a better deal. I can not only do a primetime Barbara Walters special, but I can offer you ‘Nightline,’ I can offer you ‘Good Morning America,’ I can offer you…’ And I just had ‘The Oprah Show,’ so, I didn’t like that.”
Walter said it took her a year to get the interview, which started by getting Lewinsky’s lawyer on her side.
Lewinsky, who was interviewed for the documentary, said Walters made her feel “put at ease quite quickly.”
Winfrey added, “Because Barbara had been number one, she had been it, she had been the madam, she saw that as her rightful place in the space, and if there was something that deserved a special one-on-one interview, I think she felt that she was the one who was supposed to have it. And 9.9 times out of 10 she got it.”
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“Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” will premiere on Hulu on June 23.
