Barbara Walters: What She Learned About Celebrities at an Early Age That Shaped Her Interview Style
The View creator and iconic journalist Barbra Walters has died. Walters passed at the age of 93 on Dec. 30. She was a trailblazer in the broadcast journalism world, becoming the first female co-anchor of the Today show. Though she would become world-renowned for her interview style, being on television wasn’t her dream. Walters only wanted to be a writer. But her childhood experiences would shape the way she conducted her interviews in the future.
Barbra Walters grew up in her father’s nightclubs
Walters’ father worked in show business. Unlike her friends’ parents, who had 9-5 jobs, Walters’ father mixed and mingled with the Hollywood elite as a night club owner, and he gambled, sometimes the family’s fortune, before earning it back. Because of her father’s gambling issues, former ABC News Senior Producer Rob Wallace said during a recent special that Walters always knew failure was an option.
The name of the club was called Latin Quarter. He had locations across the country, causing Walters to move three times in her four-year high school career. She sometimes resented her father’s career choice, preferring that he come home at night instead of work. But she spent lots of time at the nightclub, visiting him often after school.
It was there that Walters got a firsthand look at show business. She also noticed what the women’s roles in the clubs were, and they were typically as showgirls or in service roles.
She learned about the downside of fame from celebrities in her father’s nightclub, which shaped her interview style
The one advantage to her eventual career that Walters had access to were celebrities. Many famous faces frequented her father’s clubs, and were regulars. “She would spend her nights backstage watching the celebrities, and she would see the performances, and it was really part of her development that she grew up to be around these people and knew how to be comfortable with them and how to relate to them,” one said in the special of Walters’ upbringing.
“I knew Sophie Tucker…I knew Milton Brele [comedian and actor], I could do Milon Brele’s act. I really could. Frank Sinatra worked at the Latin Quarter,” Walters once explained in a clip that aired in the special. Walters said the time spent in her father’s clubs in close proximity to celebrities gave her a different perspective of their lives.
“I learned from celebrities that they could bleed, that they had a dark side, that they had children they didn’t see or divorces or lack of relationship. I learned that celebrities were human beings. It has made my life in terms of interviewing celebrities very different,” she explained.
Her sister’s condition also helped her to learn empathy
Another interview quirk that set Walters apart was her empathic attitude. As it turns out, she learned that trait from her close relationship with her sister, Jackie, who Walters says had special needs.
“I had a sister who was 3 ½ years older than I. At the time, she was called retarded, she was slow. I resented her, yet I loved her. She made my parents, who adored her, very unhappy because they looked at this child and saw how lonely she was,” Walters explained. “If I were going out with a girlfriend, my parents used to say to me, ‘Take your sister. Can you take your sister?’ I felt so bad for her.”
