Barbara Walters Biography
Barbara Walters ( born Barbara Jill Walters) is an American retired broadcast journalist, author, and television personality. She is best known for being the first female co-anchor of a network evening news program and for being an 11-year star of the ‘Today’ Show. Her interviewing ability and popularity are also acknowledged by viewers. Walters hosted a number of television shows, including Today, The View, 20/20, and the ABC Evening News, among others. From 1951 to 2015, Walters worked as a journalist.
Barbara Walters Age
Barbara Jill Walters was born on September 25, 1929, in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. She is 92 years old as of 2021.
Barbara Walters Height
Walters Jill stands at a height of 5ft 5in (1.65m).
Barbara Walters Family
Barbara Walters was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Jewish parents Dena (née Seletsky) and Louis “Lou” Walters, who were descendants of Russian Empire refugees. Abraham Isaac Warmwater, Walters’ paternal grandfather, was born in ód, Poland, and emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he changed his name to Abraham Walters (the original family surname was Waremwasser). Lou Walters, Walters’ father, was born in London in 1898 and moved to New York in 1909 with his father and two brothers. In 1910, his mother and four sisters arrived. Her father ran the Latin Quarter nightclub when she was a kid. This club was originally located in Boston, Massachusetts, and was owned in partnership with E.M. Loew.
Her father established the Latin Quarter in New York in 1949. He also worked on Broadway as a producer, directing the Ziegfeld Follies in 1943. He was also the Entertainment Director at the Tropicana Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, where he brought the “Folies Bergère” stage show from Paris to the resort’s main showroom. Burton Walters, Walters’ brother, died of pneumonia in 1944. Jacqueline Walters, Walters’ older sister, was born mentally handicapped and died of ovarian cancer in 1985.
According to Walters, her father made and lost a lot of money in show business throughout his life. He worked as a booking agent, and unlike her uncles in the shoe and dress business, he didn’t have a secure job. Walters recalls her father taking her to the rehearsals of the nightclub shows he directed and produced during the good times. The actresses and dancers fawned over her and twirled her around until she became dizzy.
Barbara Walters Husband
Walters has married three different men four times. Robert Henry Katz, a business executive, and former Navy lieutenant was her first husband. On June 20, 1955, they married at The Plaza Hotel in New York City. After 11 months, in 1957, they ended their marriage.
Lee Guber, a theatrical producer and theater owner, was her second husband. On December 8, 1963, they married and divorced in 1976. Jacqueline Dena Guber is their only child (born 1968, adopted the same year).
Merv Adelson, the CEO of Lorimar Television, was her third husband. In 1981, they married and divorced in 1984. They divorced for the second time in 1992 after remarrying in 1986. In college, she dated lawyer Roy Cohn, who claimed that he proposed to Walters the night before her wedding to Lee Guber, but she denied it.
In the 1970s, Walters dated future US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and in the 1990s, she was romantically linked to US Senator John Warner. Walters claimed in her autobiography Audition that she had an affair with Edward Brooke, a married United States Senator from Massachusetts, in the 1970s. It’s unclear if Walters was also married at the time. Walters claimed they ended the affair to avoid embarrassment to their careers. She dated Robert Neil Butler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning gerontologist, in 2007.
Barbara Walters Children
Barbara Walters, a retired journalist, has only one daughter, Jacqueline Dena Guber, whom she adopted during her second marriage. Jackie had a difficult childhood.
Barbara Walters Salary
She has an estimated salary of $12 million.
Barbara Walters Net Worth
Walters has an estimated net worth of $170 Million which she has earned through her successful career as an actress.
Barbara Walters Education
Walters attended Lawrence School, a public elementary school in Brookline, Massachusetts, until the middle of fifth grade, when her father relocated the family to Miami Beach in 1939, where she continued to attend public school. Her father relocated the family to New York City, where she attended Ethical Culture Fieldston School until the family returned to Miami Beach. She then returned to New York City, where she attended the Birch Wathen School, graduating in 1947. Sarah Lawrence College awarded her a B.A. in English in 1951.
Barbara Walters Career
She began working at the NBC network affiliate in New York City, WNBT-TV (now WNBC), doing publicity and writing press releases after about a year at a small advertising agency. In 1953, she began producing Ask the Camera, a 15-minute children’s program directed by Roone Arledge. She began her career as a producer for TV host Igor Cassini (Cholly Knickerbocker). She left the network, however, after her boss pressed her to marry him and she got into a fistfight with a man she preferred to date. She then moved to WPIX to produce the Eloise McElhone Show, which was canceled in 1954. In 1955, she was hired as a writer for CBS’s The Morning Show. Walters joined NBC’s The Today Show as a writer and researcher in 1961, after working as a publicist for Tex McCrary Inc. and as a writer for Redbook magazine.
She rose through the ranks to become the show’s regular “Today Girl,” handling lighter duties and the weather. In her autobiography, she describes the period preceding the Women’s Movement as one in which it was believed that no one would take a woman reporting “hard news” seriously. Florence Henderson, Helen O’Connell, Estelle Parsons, and Lee Meriwether were previous “Today Girls” (who Walters referred to as “tea pourers”). Within a year, she had advanced to the position of reporter-at-large, developing, writing, and editing her own reports and interviews. One very well-received film segment was “A Day in the Life of a Novice Nun,” edited by then-first assistant film editor Donald Swerdlow (now Don Canaan), who was subsequently promoted to become a full film editor at NBC News.
Walters is also well-known for her time on the ABC newsmagazine 20/20, where she re-joined former Today Show host Hugh Downs in 1979. Walters has appeared as a commentator on ABC news specials throughout her career, including presidential inaugurations and 9/11 coverage. During the 1976 presidential election, she was also chosen to moderate the third and final debate between candidates Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, which was held on the campus of the College of William and Mary at Phi Beta Kappa Memorial Hall in Williamsburg, Virginia. In 1984, she moderated a Presidential debate at Saint Anselm College’s Dana Center for the Humanities in Goffstown.
Barbara Walters Retirement
Walters announced her retirement from television journalism in May 2013. She announced that she will leave the show in 2014, but that she will continue to be an executive producer on her hit talk show The View. Walters, according to the Los Angeles Times, stated that “I’m not interested in appearing on another show or climbing another mountain. Instead, I’d rather sit in a sunny field and admire the extremely talented women — and, yes, some men — who will be taking my place.
Barbara Walters Health
Walters announced in May 2010 that she would undergo open-heart surgery to replace a faulty aortic valve. Even though she was symptom-free, she had known for a long time that she had aortic valve stenosis. Four days later, Walters’ spokeswoman, Cindi Berger, said the procedure to repair the faulty heart valve “went well, and the doctors are very pleased with the outcome.” Walters announced her return to The View and her Sirius XM satellite show, Here’s Barbara, in September 2010 on July 9, 2010. Walters left both shows permanently four years later.
Barbara Walters House
Barbara Walters has four-bedroom residence is the picture of pre-war elegance, with soaring coffered ceilings, custom millwork, and dark parquet floors throughout. Located in one of the most prestigious corners of the Upper East Side at 555 Park Avenue, the property is listed at $10,350,000 but is also available for rent at $37,500 a month.