Barbara Walters‘ personal life is at the center of a tell-all documentary — from family estrangement to controversial exes.
Hulu’s Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday, June 12, examined her pivotal role in the history of journalism and how Walters paved the way for other women in the industry.
“This is my legacy. These [women] are my legacy,” Walters said in footage from her last day on The View in 2014. “When women say, ‘Oh, you pave the way,’ I didn’t do it deliberately. I wasn’t waving a flag. I wasn’t stomping my feet.'”
Archive audio of Walters was used to narrate the film, in which she explained, “Mostly, I just worked and didn’t whine. But what a reward that is to look at all of the women now on TV in front of the cameras, behind the cameras — not just on television. Maybe I made a difference. That’s my ending, folks. I don’t need anything else.”
Walter set a precedent during her time an anchor for the Today show, the ABC Evening News and 20/20. She scored her own 20/20 spinoff, The Barbara Walters Special, and went on to cohost The View for more than two decades before retiring.
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything didn’t just pull back the curtain on the obstacles she faced in her professional life. Walters also made headlines for her love life after being married and divorced three times. Walters died in December 2022 at age 93.
Keep scrolling for the biggest revelations about Walters’ life from the tell-all doc:
Her Complicated Childhood
“My father said I had an inferiority complex. He probably was right. I guess the word that comes to my mind is lonely,” Walters, who was raised in Boston, shared in the voiceover for the documentary. “My sister was three-and-a-half years older. But from the time she was born, they knew there was something wrong. Today, they will talk about it as a disability — and it may even be that my sister was autistic and we didn’t know it.”
She continued: “My first memory is of our going outside the street and a bunch of little boys chasing us and ridiculing her. We ran into the house in tears. I loved her — she was my sister — but I hated her.”
Walters also opened up about her parents over the years, saying, “My mother was never enraptured by show business. She was a very lonely woman. I don’t know that she loved my father. My mother had no means of having a livelihood, and my nightmare was that my father was going to lose it all.”
Walters’ dad was “a gambler by nature” and he eventually lost his earnings.
“My father was in great despair — and he attempted suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills,” she recalled about how that changed the trajectory of her life. “I was in my 20s and I had to support my whole family. I had to work at a time when many women of my generation were not working.”
Delayed Love Life
Walters became a mom in 1968 when she adopted her daughter, Jackie, with her second husband, Lee Guber, after suffering three miscarriages. (She was previously married to Robert Henry Katz.)
“Marriage was very difficult for me because by that time we had a four year old child. I don’t think that I was very good at marriage. It may be that my career was just too important,” Walters explained in a past interview. “It may have been that I was a difficult person to be married to and I wasn’t willing — perhaps — to give that much.”
Walters admitted that finding The One wasn’t her biggest priority.
“When I was in my 20s and 30s — when I should have been dating — I was working day and night,” she shared. “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’ friend Cindy Adams weighed in on her personal life, saying, “Barbara had her fill of romance. She thought a lot of guys were very sexy. She was interested in the possibility. She liked it and she liked men.”
Thoughts on Marriage“I was single more than I was married,” Walters recalled. “I think I always felt trapped. I didn’t have a very good example of marriage from my mother and father. As soon as I got in it, I wanted to get out of it.”
Controversial Romances
According to Peter Gethers, who edited Walters’ autobiography, she was “obsessed with three things.”
“She was obsessed with money, fame and power. When I would have conversations with her about her father, he was a scoundrel. He was irresponsible with money, he was not a perfect family man,” he noted. “The scoundrel is actually the right word — and I think she was both horrified by that and attracted to that.”
Gethers recalled having the “most trouble dealing” with Walters’ romance with Roy Cohn.
“A lot of the relationships she developed were career moves,” another acquaintance mentioned. She was a pretty transactional person. … 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.”
In a narration, Walters credited Cohen for helping her father with his debt, saying, “I don’t know how we did it. I don’t know what judges he talked to. I forgot about ethics — and I have 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.”
The doc also mentioned Walters’ affair with Senator Edward Brooke.
“It was a very different time. Had this become public, it would have been something that a lot of people would not have understood. It had to be kept secret,” Walters said in a voiceover. “That was very hard for me. He had a bad marriage but I felt that when it began to become public, it hurt his chances for reelection, and he was a very good senator.”
When Walters’ daughter was a child, she struggled with drugs, which resulted in a mother-daughter rift.
“We struggled through schools. Then finally at one point, when she was 16 she ran away. Finally when I found out where she was, I had someone pick her up and take her to an emotional growth school, which is what it was called,” Walters mentioned in a voiceover. “She was there for three years.”
Walters’ friend said she had “a charged complex relationship with” Jackie that extended into adulthood, adding, “I think Barbara felt that the relationship was shaky. She didn’t tell me enough of the facts to make me understand why she felt that way but it seemed to me that she felt that she and Jackie had fallen out again.”
The ABC News Days With Harry Reasoner
The documentary featured an interview with now-CEO of Disney Bob Iger as he broke down the offscreen issues between Walters and Reasoner when they were coanchors.
“In 1976, I was a production assistant at ABC. There was absolutely no chemistry either on air or on set,” he noted. “Everybody was aware of that. It was and we all felt kind of uncomfortable about it.”
Walters spoke about being on the outs as the only woman at the news stations.
“I would walk into that studio and Harry would be sitting with the stagehands. They’d all crack jokes and ignore me. And no one would talk to me. There was not a woman on the staff,” she revealed. “It was awkward. I thought it was the end of my professional career after all these years of working. It was the most painful period in my life.”
A friend of Walters recounted a specific instance when she was affected by the division, saying, “No one said anything to her. She got up and I escorted her back. This memory was like yesterday. We’re walking back, her head was down and her fists were clenched by her side. She was looking down and her fist was so tight. I felt it. She was hurt.”
