by Susan Page
Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy?
In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.
Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her death. This is the eye-opening account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.
Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy?
In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.
Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her death. This is the eye-opening account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.
Reviews-
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Starred review from February 12, 2024
Page (Madam Speaker), the Washington Bureau chief of USA Today, presents an authoritative biography of the broadcast news legend, who died in 2022. Offering astute psychological insight into Walters, Page credits the nonstop hustle her father displayed as a booking agent with stoking his daughter’s ambition but contends his frequent business failures left her with the sense that success is fleeting. Page pays careful attention to the relentless sexism Walters endured throughout her career, noting that her boss at CBS’s The Morning Show hired her as a writer in 1955 because, in his words, “she had a darling ass,” and that journalist Frank McGee only agreed to join Walters as cohost of NBC’s Today show in 1971 under the condition that he always speak first when interviewing guests. While Page rightly lauds Walters’s trailblazing accomplishments, she’s clear-eyed about her subject’s shortcomings, arguing that Walters sometimes asked inappropriate questions (as when she tried to out Ricky Martin as gay during a 2000 interview) and regarded women colleagues with ambivalence (Page suggests Walters was “resentful and dismissive of some of the women who followed her” and appeared to side with Donald Trump during his public spat with Walters’s View cohost Rosie O’Donnell in 2008). Incisive and evenhanded, this is a triumph. Agent: Matt Latimer, Javelin Literary. -
February 1, 2024
Barbara Walters was an icon of broadcast journalism, interviewing presidents and celebrities on prime-time news and cohosting on the daytime talk show The View. Award-winning journalist Page, the best-selling author of Madam Speaker, pens a definitive biography of the groundbreaking and incredibly successful Walters, delving into her life via interviews and extensive archival research. Prepub Alert.
Copyright 2023 Library Journal
Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from February 15, 2024
In the annals of broadcast journalism, Barbara Walters is legendary. Acclaimed for her monumental "gets," Walters interviewed a veritable who's who of twentieth-century politicians and celebrities, amassing a master class trove of spirited and probing interrogatories that famously reduced her subjects to tears. In an era when the business of broadcast news was a firmly established old boys club, Walters took a battering ram to those clubhouse doors when, in 1976, she became coanchor of ABC Nightly News. Not only was her position unprecedented, her million-dollar annual salary was record-shattering. Walters had toiled for decades in the trenches as a PR operative, low-level news writer, and participant in puff pieces on morning television; peers questioned her worthiness. Her career was forged during the days of second-wave feminism, and Walters was a highly visible target for the industry's and the nation's entrenched misogyny. Beyond the professional battles, her personal life suffered as well, through multiple marriages and a fractured relationship with her adopted daughter. Page, the Washington bureau chief for USA Today, presents an impeccably researched and deeply sourced biography and a respectful and balanced portrait of this groundbreaking icon of American journalism.COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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March 15, 2024
A biography of a woman of rare achievement. Page, Washington bureau chief of USA Today, biographer of Barbara Bush and Nancy Pelosi, draws on abundant sources and hundreds of interviews to create a brisk, evenhanded biography of Barbara Walters (1929-2022). Beset by an abiding sense of insecurity, Walters grew up seeing that success could swiftly turn into failure. Her father, a nightclub owner, had been "a mercurial breadwinner." When he made money, the family lived extravagantly, "but always with the risk that he might gamble it all away." Walters began her rise in TV news as a researcher and writer on NBC's Today show. Once she took her place on the air, Page writes, "she honed her ability to ask a hard question in a soft way and to make news, and her increasingly prominent profile made it easier for her to snare big names." Those big names included celebrities of all stripes; world leaders such as Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat; and even criminals. Page breaks down the elements that made a Walters interview so successful. Getting her subject to cry was a bonus. She attained coveted positions and huge salaries, rarely acknowledging the women who went before her, "as though that might somehow diminish her own achievements." Women were competitors, rather than allies. Obsessed with her work, her personal life suffered: Three marriages failed; her adopted daughter, neglected by a mother who never was home, struggled with substance abuse. Page recounts Walters' many affairs, including with Sen. Edward Brooke and Alan Greenspan; her bitter rivalry with Diane Sawyer; and her founding of The View at the age of 67. A former president of ABC News described Walters as "hard-charging and driving and relentless and insatiable and unquenchable and indestructible"--and, as Page reveals, restless, lonely, and only fleetingly happy. A perceptive biography.COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
