The “SNL” writers were far from her only critics. Many objected to Mrs. Walters’s gregarious, sometimes poky manner with guests, as well as her apparent determination to bring her interviewees to tears. Mrs. Walters even made General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of Allied Forces in the Persian Gulf War, cry when she asked about his father in 1991.
But the ratings were always on her side.
Night clubs and cheap rentals
Ms. Walters said she inherited both her ambition and her insecurities from her father, Lou Walters, a Boston booking agent and vaudeville impresario who founded the Latin Quarter nightclubs in Boston, New York and Miami and whose fortunes rose and fell and the family dragged. from mansions in Florida and penthouse apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side to shabby rental properties in Miami.
“I was old enough to recognize how other families lived, and they weren’t like mine,” she wrote.
Barbara Walters was born in Boston to Mr. Walters and Dena (Seletsky) Walters on September 25, 1929. In her memoirs, she wrote that her father, while “not especially handsome,” exuded a “certain elegance” because he always ” impeccably dressed” and retaining his English accent – “very attractive then as now.” Her mother – “quite striking,” she wrote – was working in a menswear shop when she met her future husband. The couple – both were children of Jewish immigrants who had fled anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe – remained married for almost 60 years despite a “torturous relationship,” Ms Walters wrote.
Barbara attended private schools in New York and public schools in Miami. There were trips to Europe and Broadway openings; there was celebrity hobnobbing; there were also tax collectors who confiscated the family car, the furniture and even the chandelier in the dining room. Her childhood, she said, was shaped by her complicated relationship with her older sister, Jacqueline, who was mentally retarded. She died in 1985.
When Mrs. Walters graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1951 with a degree in English, her father was broke again and she had to find a job to support her parents and her sister. “I wanted to be normal,” she once told Newsweek. “I wanted to get married and have the kids and be one of the popular girls.”
Like many women of her time and education, she started out as a secretary in a PR agency. That led to a job in CBS’s publicity department and then a job as a writer for “The Morning Show,” where Ms. Walters was occasionally called out of the writers’ room: one time in a bathing suit when a model was late, the next. to interview survivors of the wreck of the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria.
