They used to call me Barbara Walters back in high school. It was when the 1970s was turning into the 1980s, and Ms. Walters was as famous as the celebrities she interviewed on TV. I was just a reporter on the high school newspaper staff and my senior year features editor. That same year I also wrote freelance for my hometown newspaper. So I guess my name was ‘out there’ on a regular basis. I didn’t know if I should be flattered being dubbed so often ‘Barbara Walters’ because she was a broadcast journalist and not a journalism writer—although she did pen books, one about how to talk to anybody about anything. I didn’t know if the general public understood how hard I worked on writing (and then typing) my feature stories, usually voluminous, using every quote, and covering way too much information. Ah, I guess I see the comparison now.
Barbara Walters was a TV broadcast news reporter who manned national newscasts when women were not used to being seen in the ‘chair.’ Too, though somewhat attractive, she spoke with a noticeable lisp and was satirized on a new late-night comedy show called Saturday Night Live with a routine character named ‘Bahbah Wahwah.’ Ms. Walters was not amused, but she was always way too busy to give a damn. She was indeed on to the next interview. And there again, we were alike.
As features editor, I had a good nose for news but often had to write stories assigned by the newspaper sponsor. Most assignments were about students who were from other countries. At the annual newspaper staff awards ceremony, I was jokingly presented the Foreign Correspondent Award. I handled the assignments with aplomb and enjoyed talking to students who were born and raised in other parts of the world such as Asia and the Middle East. They were indeed refugees. Before an interview, I wrote up at least 20 questions if not more. And as a young student reporter, I felt everything we discussed in our interviews needed to be included in the articles.
That was probably the only problem people had with Barbara Walters and her interview specials that aired every few months. Some celebs maintained she pushed too hard and did not respect interviewees who were uncomfortable discussing some aspects of their private lives. One was the actress Angela Lansbury who did not want to talk about her son’s former drug addiction. Another that I recall while watching was the interview with Ringo Starr shortly after the death of John Lennon. He started to break emotionally and asked for cameras to stop, but Ms. Walters insisted on air they keep rolling. Starr looked at her shocked and had to keep on talking about his feelings. So she had a reputation as being pushy. I doubt her male peers were deemed pushy, as in the term pushy broad. Hope that wasn’t how I was known on campus as a reporter. Yet I pursued stories and people—kept doing it in college and then in my first career as a reporter at several daily newspapers.
I don’t know if Ms. Walters, who interviewed some of the era’s most famous and infamous political leaders like Cuba’s Fidel Castro and PLO leader and reported terrorist Yasser Arafat, received death threats. But I suppose she did, time and again.
Like millions of Americans into pop culture, I watched every Barbara Walters interview. She seemed sincere friends with so many: Barbara Streisand, Goldie Hawn, Paul Newman, Burt Reynolds (always Burt Reynolds), Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Cher, Roseanne Barr, The Osbournes, Monica Lewinsky, on and on and on. And we the adoring and scrutinizing public learned a lot about them, too, and I mean important facets of their lives and attitudes toward varied subjects from show business to previous jobs and religious beliefs and practices. I remember Goldie Hawn’s father had died shortly before her interview with Ms. Walters. They sat by a living room window that overlooked the Pacific Ocean, and Ms. Hawn relayed her father telling her when she first started making it as an actress if she ever got the big head to just look at the ocean. She started to weep, and Ms. Walters said something like: “How wonderful to love someone so much.” Isn’t that a comforting and original sentiment to help someone grieving the loss of a loved one?
The one thing Barbara Walters was known for was: making people cry on camera. I don’t think she did it intentionally, but nevertheless it happened almost with everyone she interviewed, maybe the actors more than the politicians. Perhaps it was her format, the order of well-crafted questions that get to the point to save time (the final televised interview would only be 15 – 20 minutes), and then when her subject was recalling a time happy or sad, there they’d go crying. Ms. Walters was like a wise mother or grandmother, moved yet not to tears herself, and always, always with a beautiful sentiment—a turn of phrase she could not have worded prior to the unexpected tearing. More importantly, she knew exactly why her subject was in tears and therefore would articulate for them. That was the Barbara Walters touch: empathy that comes from face to face, human to human open and honest communication.
Several years ago as Ms. Walters saw how the internet, podcasts and social media have created mass confusion over what’s real news and what’s fake, she said her style of celebrity interviews could not compete for viewers anymore. Wonder why. Is it the divisiveness of our nation? That we’re all jaded and wouldn’t believe the very words that are spoken by the famous in a broadcast interview nowadays? Would we wonder if the subjects really believe what they said or were edited somehow? Have we grown so cynical and bitter and jealous of highly successful (and yes fascinating) actors, entertainers, business owners and politicians that we can’t stand to look at their privileged lifestyles and listen to their smiling faces tell us how hard they worked and how lucky they have been to get where they are? Ms. Walters and I know one thing about talking to people: We all put our pants on the same way. We’re just human beings down here. Listening is what Barbara Walters did so well—and she shared the art of listening to the generations of us who watched her memorable and poignant interviews.