1
Everybody’s a Critic
For a long time, nobody had any clue why Barbara Walters—who symbolized the gold standard of the TV news business—would dip her feet in the murky waters of daytime. This was the genre that gave rise to paternity tests, plastic surgery, and “too fat to wear.” In 1983, a serious broadcaster named Sally Jessy Raphael started a talk show with the goal of tackling lofty societal issues. But a few years in, she caved and went the tabloid route. All her competitors were doing the same. Geraldo Rivera staged so many fights he ended up with a broken nose during an episode called “Teen Hatemongers.” Maury Povich made a cottage industry out of unfaithful boyfriends. Jenny Jones was on a constant search for guests who didn’t know their real daddies. Jerry Springer presided over a circus of angry misfits who threw chairs and fists. The nuclear arms race for smut TV was the complete opposite of Barbara’s brand, as an erudite ambassador of world news—with access to everybody from Barbra Streisand to Mu‘ammar Gaddafi.
Most daytime talk had evolved from Phil Donahue, who in 1967 launched his eponymous show that changed the culture. Donahue had no fear of boundaries or taboos—he tackled homosexuality decades before Will & Grace, once invited a Nazi to speak to an audience of Jews, and challenged a young Donald Trump about his real estate dealings. “We can’t continue to give you guys these big tax breaks,” Donahue scolded. Just as important, he taped his show in front of a live audience, taking their questions and concerns into living rooms across the country.
His no-holds-barred approach cleared the way for Oprah Winfrey, who duplicated the template. Winfrey started on local TV news as a reporter who studied Walters on NBC’s Today, imitating her interviewing techniques and style. When Winfrey landed her own nationally syndicated talk show in 1986, she gravitated toward education and information, emulating a best friend you can trust with your deepest secrets. By the midnineties, Oprah ruled the cult of stay-at-home moms with “remember your spirit” segments and book club recommendations. The inspirational programming made Winfrey the mightiest woman on TV, with up to 20 million daily viewers.
But in 1996, she finally got some competition. Rosie O’Donnell, a comedic actress from movies (Sleepless in Seattle, A League of Their Own, and The Flintstones), wanted to take a shot at her own talk show. She modeled her venture on a staple from her childhood: 1961’s Mike Douglas Show, on which the squeaky-clean host chatted playfully with rising celebrities such as Aretha Franklin and Mel Brooks. Douglas was an early adopter of celebrity gab, an afternoon counterpart to The Tonight Show, which had started seven years before. In Rosie’s reboot, the format stayed the same, but she revved up the pace with Broadway musical numbers, audience giveaways, and lengthy discussions about her crush—back when she was closeted—on Tom Cruise. As two of TV’s biggest moguls, O and Ro built up their kingdoms, shaping pop culture and raking in fortunes.
Unlike soap operas, most talk shows are cobbled together quickly and inexpensively. There’s no need for actors or too many writers toiling on scripts. The biggest expense is usually the host’s salary, assuming he or she is a marquee name. Many of the giants in the industry started out small, such as Regis Philbin, who climbed into his seat on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee in 1988 after years as a local morning emcee in New York and LA. The measure of a successful host is genuine connection, imitating a BFF with jokes, self-help tips, and makeovers. It’s not so easy, though. The daytime audience is impatient and fickle, with an appetite for sauce. Since Oprah’s rise, an army of A- and B-list personalities have tried to mimic her—Katie Couric, Anderson Cooper, and Megyn Kelly (anchors); Queen Latifah and Harry Connick Jr. (singers); Roseanne Barr, Tony Danza, Megan Mullally, and Fran Drescher (sitcom actors); Kris Jenner and Bethenny Frankel (reality stars)—only to fall flat on their coiffed heads.
But if you make it, the job is lucrative. Advertisers embrace successful daytime talk shows because they reach stay-at-home moms, who typically control their family budgets and watch the programs live, even the ads. As a result, Ellen DeGeneres, Dr. Phil, and Kelly Ripa earn multimillion-dollar salaries, in the same range as movie stars such as Jennifer Lawrence and Brad Pitt. Above them, there’s that short-tempered brunette with a gavel, Judith Sheindlin, who cashes a check for $47 million a year. Her courtroom series, Judge Judy, which started in 1996, isn’t really a talk show, but it plays like Jerry Springer meets Matlock, with wounded plaintiffs battling over unpaid dues and broken promises. “I would have been so happy if we had done three years, and I had enough money to buy a condo two blocks off the beach of Miami,” Sheindlin told me. “That was my dream.”
Sheindlin’s perch in daytime is so towering and profitable that she scoffed when she heard that Trump had been considering her for a vacancy to the US Supreme Court. “It must have been one of those moments when he wasn’t thinking,” Sheindlin said. “I have too good of a day job.”
* * *
By the midnineties, Barbara Walters was at the head of her class at ABC, carrying a hefty workload as the number one star of TV news. She served as the coanchor of 20/20, then a place for meaty investigations, cranked out Oscars specials, aired her 10 Most Fascinating People (which began in 1993 with Hillary Clinton at the top), and constantly outhustled her peers for exclusives. In 1995, she scored the first interview with a paralyzed Christopher Reeve, making headlines around the world. A year later, after the O. J. Simpson verdict, prosecutor Christopher Darden sat down with Barbara before anyone else.
Barbara grew up in New York and Florida, where she lived in a pistachio-colored house. Her father, Lou, ran a string of nightclubs, packed with showgirls and hit singers, which gave her early brushes with famous people—he was constantly socializing with the likes of Milton Berle, Johnnie Ray, and Frank Sinatra. “It made me the way I am,” Barbara told me one day. “I’m not in awe of any celebrity.” Her mother, Dena, stayed at home with Barbara’s older sister, Jacqueline, who was mentally disabled. “My childhood was totally influenced by my sister,” Barbara said. “It gave me a childhood that was sad and kind of lonely because there were things I couldn’t do, like have friends over.”
Barbara had a few false starts to her career. She wanted to be an actress, but she was too scared of rejection. “You can’t be an actress if you’re afraid of being turned down,” she recalled. After a stint as a publicist (during which she learned how to manipulate the press, a skill that came in handy later), Barbara joined the staff of Today in 1961 as a writer. Because of her gender, this was groundbreaking for the time. “There were six male writers and one female,” Barbara said. “And you didn’t get to be the female writer unless she got married or died.”
Through sheer determination, Barbara migrated in front of the camera, reporting segments about fashion or a night out with a Playboy Bunny. “I was not the natural choice when I began,” Barbara said. “I was not beautiful. I had a speech impediment. That didn’t help.” She said the standards were different back then. “Most of the women in television now are very lovely, but they are also talented. In my time, they were maybe not as talented.” Her secret to success was perseverance. “What I had was this creative curiosity and ability to ask questions,” she said.
Her agent slipped a clause in her contract that if the current host left, she’d assume the title. Nobody thought he’d go anywhere, but when Frank McGee suddenly died of bone cancer in 1974, Barbara took over as the first female cohost, opposite Jim Hartz. “Since then, a woman is the cohost on the Today show,” Barbara said. “That’s my legacy.” (In fact, now there are two women: Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb.) Barbara drew in viewers with her tenacity as she interrogated powerful men such as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger with her prickly questions. Because of Walters’s success, TV executives started to let more women cover hard news, enter war zones, and tackle politics.
In 1976, she shattered another glass ceiling, when she left NBC for ABC to be the first woman coanchor of a nightly newscast. Her new employer shelled out a record $1 million a year to nab their new star—a deal that, forty years later, created a culture where Megyn Kelly could demand $25 million from Fox News, before ultimately fleeing to NBC. The hysteria over Barbara’s move to ABC was followed by questions of whether she could cut it. The press ran sexist stories about how she owned a pink typewriter. Her coanchor, Harry Reasoner, hated her, and the tension was awkward. “We were terrible together,” Barbara said. “From the beginning, viewers were angry with me for doing this to poor Harry.”
She survived by leaving the news desk and reinventing herself through her trademark specials. Barbara would convene three newsmakers—a celebrity, a world leader, and a miscellaneous person in the news—for an hour of prime time. She wanted to capture her subjects in intimate settings, so she devised the novel conceit of visiting their habitats. Barbara popularized the idea of bringing cameras into celebrity homes, long before audiences were used to MTV’s Cribs or the Kardashians. She became just as famous as the people she interviewed, as she rode a wave of success for the next two decades.
But in her own home, Barbara’s personal life was fraught. In the fifties, her father gambled away her family’s fortune on a series of bad investments, putting pressure on Barbara to support her parents and her sister with her money. This was an especially odd arrangement for a woman of her generation, who would normally rely on a husband’s paycheck for security. It meant that Barbara had to stay employed—in spite of Lou Walters’s concerns about her longevity on TV. “He was afraid I was going to get fired,” Barbara said about her father. His doubts instilled two traits in her that followed her for the rest of her career: a boundless desire for success and a lurking, irrational fear that her savings could vanish overnight. “I had to support them for so long,” Barbara said of her family. “I knew I had to work, and I just worked harder.”
Copyright © 2019 by Ramin Setoodeh. Epilogue. Copyright © 2020 by Ramin Setoodeh
