Oprah Winfrey didn’t need to look further than Barbara Walters’ relationship with her daughter to confirm that she did not want to have kids herself, she says in the new documentary Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything.
In the film, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival Thursday night and streams on Hulu June 23, Winfrey says that Walters once tried to convince her to have kids, even though her own relationship with her daughter had become strained.
“I remember her telling me once that there’s nothing more fulfilling than having children, and ‘You should really think about it,’” Winfrey recalls. “And I was like, ‘OK, but I’m looking at you, so, no.’”
Winfrey describes Walters’ relationship with her own daughters as “charged” and “complex,” adding, “And I can see why. It’s one of the reasons why I never had children.”
Walters, who died of dementia-related problems in December 2022 at the age of 93, adopted her daughter Jacqueline Dena Guber with ex-husband Lee Guber in 1968. Their relationship came apart as Jacqueline grew older, which Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything explores as it chronicles the journalist’s life and career.
The veteran journalist’s ruthless ambition took a toll on Jacqueline, which left her feeling “guilty” for most of her daughter’s life, she says through voiceover in the film. “I didn’t realize how tough it was, because she had a mother who was a celebrity,” Walters explains. “We struggled through schools. And then finally, at one point, when she was 16, I guess, she ran away.”
Walters’ ruthless ambition is discussed throughout the documentary—along with its effects on Jacqueline’s childhood. Her specials and primetime sit-downs made her a legend in the news world, after she’d already made history by become the first female news anchor and eventually the highest paid anchor, but her trailblazing career came at a cost to her only child.
Jacqueline’s teenage years were the hardest, Walters and friends recall in the film. “She’d been running across the country, hitchhiking with guys you didn’t know,” an interviewer tells Walters in a clip, which she confirms and adds that her daughter had also been taking “drugs, almost any pills she could swallow.”
Journalist and Walters’ longtime friend Cynthia McFadden adds, “It’s important to say, Jackie had a father and Jackie had a governess, so it wasn’t that Jackie was left alone on a playpen” while Walters pursued her career. But “Barbara articulated many times that she’d made mistakes as a mother.”
Walters maintained a relationship with Jacqueline that improved into her adulthood, but things never seemed to fully recover between them, McFadden says: “As she got older, 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.”
McFadden interviewed Jacqueline for Walters’ 2001 special on adoption, Born in My Heart: A Love Story. “Jackie was about as different from her mom as it was possible to be,” McFadden says. In a clip from that interview, Jacqueline tells McFadden that “being the child of a famous woman” was harder than having been adopted.
Even so, Jaqueline was “wonderful,” McFadden says, “very loving towards Barbara even though I knew that she and her mother had had a really rough relationship when she was an adolescent.”
Winfrey says that though she understands why Walters didn’t put in the time with Jacqueline that she wished she had in hindsight, she wouldn’t make the same choice.
“You are a pioneer in your field and you are trying to break the mold, for yourself and for women who are going to follow you,” Winfrey says. “Something’s going to have to give for that. And that is why I did not have children. I knew I could not do both well. Both are sacrifices. Sacrifice to do the work and it’s also sacrifice to be the mother and to say, ‘No, let somebody else have that.’”
Like Winfrey, Walters was not the kind of person to make that particular sacrifice. As Winfrey explains, “At no time have I ever heard a story, read a story, and based on what I know of Barbara Walters—at no time has Barbara Walters ever said, ‘No let someone else take that story.’”
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