Barbara Walters would go to extreme lengths to get the interviews she wanted, Oprah Winfrey, Cynthia McFadden, and more of the late TV legends’ colleagues, friends, and competition say in the new documentary Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival Thursday night and streams on Hulu June 23.
Winfrey says that in 1999, at the height of the Bill Clinton sex scandal, “We had an agreement with Monica Lewinsky’s team,” for her first television interview. “And then Barbara swooped in and said to Monica Lewinsky, ‘I can give you a better deal. I can not only do a Barbara Walters primetime special, but I can offer you Nightline, I can offer you Good Morning America’… I just had The Oprah Show. So I didn’t like that.”
Walters, who died in Dec. 2022 at 93, won the Lewinsky interview after a “full year” of edging her way into the then-25-year-old’s orbit, she says via voiceover in the documentary. She had no regrets about “swooping in” on Winfrey, as she tooted her own horn, “It was the highest rated news interview of all time. Nothing has surpassed it.”
The trailblazing journalist changed the TV interview format forever by centering celebrity subjects, asking deeply personal questions, and leaning on her unique ability to get sought after people to open up in front of millions of viewers.
She was notorious for getting her subjects cry on air. Winfrey experienced that phenomenon firsthand in her own 1988 sit-down with Walters, during which Winfrey opened up for the first time about sexual abuse she’d suffered as a child.
“I think many people went into every Barbara Walters interview saying ‘I’m not going to cry, I’m not going to cry,’ and then bam—you end up doing the thing you thought you most didn’t want to do,” Winfrey marvels.
Walters’ specials and primetime sit-downs made her a juggernaut in the news world, after already having become the first female news anchor and eventually the highest paid anchor of either gender.
“I just worked and I didn’t whine,” Walters says in the film, as the documentary deep dives into her impact. But her legendary career meant she had to make a habit of stepping on some toes.
Winfrey says at another point in the documentary, “Because Barbara had been number one, she had been ‘it,’ she had been ‘The Madame’ for so long, she saw that as her rightful place in the space. And if there was something that deserved a special one-on-one interview, I think she felt that she was the one that was supposed to have it. And nine point nine times out of 10, she got it.”
Martin Clancy, former ABC News producer adds, “I think Barbara would be friends with the devil if we’d get the interview.”
Winfrey wasn’t the only fellow TV journalist Walters burned during her trailblazing career. Cynthia McFadden, former NBC News journalist and longtime friend of Walters, tells the story of how Walters tried to get Katharine Hepburn to cancel her interview with Diane Sawyer when the two were decades-long rivals at ABC.
“Diane had booked, fair and square, Katharine Hepburn,” McFadden says. “Barbara, who knew Katharine Hepburn, put a lot of pressure on Kate to unbook and go with her.”
“Kate said ‘No, no, I promised Diane, and I will do it with her,’” McFadden recalls. “How’s that for a statement? And she did.”
Walters’ ruthless ambition is discussed throughout the documentary, as well as its effects on the tumultuous childhood of her only daughter, Jacqueline Dena Guber, her friendships, and her love life.
Peter Gethers, with whom Walters worked on her 2008 memoir Audition, concludes in the film, “I never got the sense from talking to her that there was one absolute love of her life. Her job was the love of her life.”
“I felt like she neglected her personal life and poured so much into her work life that I’m not sure she was a truly happy person,” another Walters disciple, Katie Couric, says in the documentary. “I remember thinking, I want to make sure that I have a family, that I don’t just have a big job. And I always got the sense that Barbara wishes she had paid more attention to that.”
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