The Rulebreaker

The Life and Times of Barbara Walters

Susan Page

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781982197940
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

A “smart, juicy, deeply reported” (Katie Couric) biography of the most successful female broadcaster of all time—Barbara Walters—a woman whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules and finally gave women a permanent place on the air, written by bestselling author Susan Page.

Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age of many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy?

In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.

Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her heath. This is the “stunning” (Norah O’Donnell), “brilliantly written” (Andrea Mitchell) account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction: Million-Dollar Baby
• Chapter 1: A Glass Eye and a British Accent
• Chapter 2: Roots
• Chapter 3: Lou and Dena
• Chapter 4: Never Young
• Chapter 5: “The Strongest Influence in My Life”
• Chapter 6: The Fifth-Grader and the Bootlegger
• Chapter 7: Another Opening, Another Show
• Chapter 8: The Ostrich
• Chapter 9: The Speedwriting Secretarial School
• Chapter 10: The Most Forgettable Husband; The Most Notorious Friend
• Chapter 11: Catastrophe
• Chapter 12: “A Halo of Fear”
• Chapter 13: Sunrise
• Chapter 14: A Godfather of the Mafia Sort
• Chapter 15: Becoming Barbara Walters
• Chapter 16: The Runaway Bride
• Chapter 17: The “Pushy Cookie”
• Chapter 18: “It’s a Girl!”
• Chapter 19: A Melody Played in a Penny Arcade
• Chapter 20: McGee’s Law
• Chapter 21: When Love Is Not Enough
• Chapter 22: Careful What You Wish For
• Chapter 23: Failure
• Chapter 24: Fidel
• Chapter 25: Comeback
• Chapter 26: The Man She Married (But Only Once)
• Chapter 27: The Runaway Daughter
• Chapter 28: The Honeymoon and the Arms Dealer
• Chapter 29: Loss
• Chapter 30: Diane
• Chapter 31: You Can’t Have It All
• Chapter 32: The Yin and the Yang
• Chapter 33: The Barbara Walters Interview
• Chapter 34: Bette Davis and the Dalai Lama
• Chapter 35: ‘The View’
• Chapter 36: Monica
• Chapter 37: Trump
• Chapter 38: One More Time
• Chapter 39: The Fall
• Chapter 40: The End
• Epilogue: The Rulebreaker
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Source Notes
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright