You can practically trace the progress of American working women through Barbara Walters.
Walters, who died at 93, ABC News announced Friday, began her onscreen TV career in 1961 on "The Today Show" as a glorified morning model called, without a trace of irony, "The Today Girl." She ended it more than 50 years later as one of television’s most influential and powerful people, male or female.
It wasn’t an easy road; there were bumps and detours aplenty. But each step she took made that road smoother for the women who followed.
You don’t make it to the end of that kind of trail without benefit of sizable amounts of ambition, tenacity, drive and competitive fire – this is, after all, the woman who practically invented the “big get” interview. Nor do you make it without creating a few rivals, friendly and decidedly otherwise, along the way.
But you also don’t make it without talent, skill and smarts, enough to overcome social strictures and your own liabilities. She was never a conventional TV beauty, and, with her multiple marriages, she seldom conformed to the conventional norms.
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She had a vocal quirk famously skewered by Gilda Radner on "Saturday Night Live" in her “Baba Wawa” sketches, a name that stuck, to Walters’ everlasting dismay.
Yet for years, almost every celebrity and many a head of state saw a sitdown interview with Walters as both a confirmation of their arrival and a requirement of their jobs.
If you sometimes sensed disdain from Walters from those who acquired their fame too easily, or squandered it too recklessly, it’s easy to see why. Walters fought to establish her career every step of the way, often against entrenched male opposition — executives and co-workers who thought a woman’s place on TV was leading cooking segments or speaking to the head of the local gardening club.
Walters always wanted more, and always got it.
When she was a news writer behind the scenes, first at CBS’ "Morning Show" then at NBC’s "Today," she wanted to be on camera. When she made it on screen as that “Today Girl” in 1961, she wanted to be seen as a real reporter — and earned a precedent-setting assignment accompanying first lady Jackie Kennedy to India and Pakistan.
When she was a reporter, she wanted to be the co-host. And being a de facto co-host, forced to wait to ask her questions until the men were finished, wasn’t good enough. She wanted the official title at "Today," and in 1974, she became the first woman to win it.
She left that post in 1976 to moved to ABC as co-anchor of the "ABC Evening News," the first woman to ever anchor a network evening newscast. It turned out to be a step too far, at least for the times: Her co-anchor, Harry Reasoner, didn’t want her there and made no effort to hide his displeasure. Two years later, she was fired — a blow that might have stopped a less determined person.
Instead, Walters thrived. She had what seemed to be an enormous, innate confidence that she could talk to anyone about anything (a belief expressed in her first, best-selling book), and she put that belief into practice with a landmark series of interviews, on "20/20" and on her own specials.
Name a big personality from the time, and odds are he or she talked to Walters, whose “gets” ranged from the first American network television interview with President Nixon after his resignation to the most-watched interview of all time, a sitdown with Monica Lewinsky that drew more than 48 million viewers in the U.S.
Why did they all speak to Walters? In part, perhaps, because she was a famously adept negotiator, but also in part because they could tell they would be on a fair and level playing field. Walters probed and prodded, often in search of some emotional hotspot.
But she knew her subject backward and forward, a show of interest and preparation interview subjects tended to appreciate. And if she could be manipulative (that drive to make every subject cry), she was never devious. You seldom left a Walters interview feeling an important question had been left unasked, or that the person on the other side had been tricked into some revelation or gaffe; she led the conversation, but they willingly followed.
No one, of course, treads new ground without stepping on a few toes, or making a few missteps. There was the famous “What kind of tree would you be” question to actress Katharine Hepburn — yes, it was a follow-up to Hepburn’s statement that she was like a tree, but it was still a dumb follow-up.
Her treatment of her co-stars on "The View," the daytime talk show she created in 1997, sometimes came across as callous, and her refusal to be honest about her age seemed like a leftover relic from the "Today Girl" era she helped shatter.
But perhaps that’s a barrier the next great newswoman can break.
You can’t have expected Walters to do everything. What she did was more than remarkable enough.
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