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Barbara Walters forged a path for women in journalism, but not without paying a price

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Barbara Walters forged a path for women in journalism, but not without paying a price
The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, by Susan Page

In 1976, Barbara Walters became the first woman to co-anchor a national news show on prime time television. She was only in that role for two years, but her arrival changed news media.

“She’s such a consequential figure for journalists, not just for women journalists,” biographer Susan Page says. “The path she cut is one that many of us have followed.”

Page is the Washington bureau chief at USA Today and the author of The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. Though they never met, Page says speaking to hundreds of Walters’ friends and colleagues and watching hours of her interview tapes gave her a sense of her subject.

Page describes Walters as a fearless journalist who didn’t shy away from controversy or tough questions. She battled sexism throughout her career — especially from her first co-anchor, Harry Reasoner, who, Page says, scowled at Walters’ presence and tracked how many words she spoke on-air compared to him.

After leaving the nightly news post, Walters became known for her long-form interviews. Her conversations, which blended news and entertainment, featured a wide range of subjects, including Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin, Richard Nixon, Monica Lewinsky, Michael Jackson and Charles Manson. In 1997, she created The View, a daily talk show with an all-women cast of co-hosts.

“One thing that I thought was interesting about Barbara Walters is that she thought all sorts of people were interesting and worth talking to,” Page says. “She really expanded the world of interviews that [national] journalists were doing to include not just presidents, but also notorious murderers.”

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For Page, Walters’ success feels personal: “It never occurred to me when I was looking at a career in journalism that I couldn’t do big interviews with important people because Barbara Walters did. … Even though I’ve been in print journalism, not TV journalism, I benefited from the battles that Barbara Walters fought.”

Interview highlights

On her family life that drove her to work hard

Understanding the source of her drive was hard to understand and I think crucial. And I decided after doing all this reporting about her that, that there was a moment that ignited the drive in Barbara Walters, and that was when her mother called her and told her that her father had attempted suicide. Her mother didn’t call an ambulance. … [Barbara] called the ambulance. [Barbara] rode in the ambulance with her father to the hospital. And she realized almost in an instant that while she was going through her first divorce, she didn’t really have a career that as of that moment, she was going to be responsible for supporting her father, who had just tried to commit suicide, her mother, who was perpetually unhappy, and her special needs sister. And that that was going to require her to get serious, to make some money and to sustain that. She always had the sense that it could all disappear in an instant.

On news co-host Harry Reasoner’s hostility about working with Walters

He was so openly contemptuous of her on the air that the director stopped doing two shots. That is a shot where you could see Harry Reasoner watching Barbara Walters speak because he was always scowling. It was so bad that they got many letters from mostly women viewers complaining about how she was being treated. … It was really an untenable situation and one that took a while to unravel, and it was one that unnerved Barbara Walters. It was the one time in her career when she thought perhaps she had made an error so great that she would not recover. She said that she felt not only like she was drowning, but that there were people trying to hold her head under the water.

On a turning point in her career, when she interviewed Fidel Castro

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So this was in 1977. She was still officially the anchor [of ABC Evening News], but things were not going well. And she landed this interview with Fidel Castro, who had been interviewed only infrequently by Western journalists. And … she got in a boat and crossed the Bay of Pigs with him. He drove his jeep across the mountains with her sitting next to him, holding aloft his gun to keep water from splashing on. It was a great interview. A very tough interview. She asked him about freedom of the press, which didn’t exist in Cuba. She pressed him on whether he was married. This was a question that he had refused to answer. … So he finally gave up and answered it and said formally, no. So it was a great interview and it was a comeback interview for her. It both showed what she could do in an interview, and it made her feel more confident again.

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On her interview with Richard Nixon when she asked him if he wished he burned the Watergate tapes

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That was in a particularly difficult interview, because the only way the Nixon people agreed that she could do it was to do it live. There was no cutting out some extraneous matter to get that last question in, she had to be incredibly alert about controlling the interview so that she would have time to ask that question. And the other thing that we should know about that question is she always wanted to ask the question that everybody wanted to hear, even the toughest question possible, like would you have burned the tapes? She wanted to ask the one that people wanted to hear the answer to. That was one of [her] great gifts. And she figured out that by preparing for hours and hours and writing down proposed questions on small 3×5 cards and shuffling them and revising them, and finally having them typed on 5×7 cards to ask. She would let an interview go where it went. She didn’t always follow the cards, but she always had a plan in mind for how she wanted to get the interview started. What she wanted to do in the middle and the thing that she wanted to do at the close to give it a real kick.

On her friendship with Donald Trump

They were transactional friends. She went to his wedding. He went to the celebration of her third marriage. He was often a guest on The View when The View started in 1997. He was then a real estate developer in New York. And if they were short a guest, they could call up Donald Trump and he would come over and be on the show or even do a cameo skit. … And, in fact, one ABC executive told me, when Donald Trump got involved in politics, that there was a feeling, some discomfort, that she had given him a platform and a legitimacy that maybe he wouldn’t have had otherwise.

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On her preparation for her infamous Monica Lewinksy interview

Barbara Walters was working on asking the questions, but at the same time, Monica Lewinsky was working with her team on how to answer the questions. The question that gave the Monica Lewinsky team the most trouble was that question, “Do you still love him?” Because at the beginning of their practice sessions, she said yes. And then she said she couldn’t say no because she did love him. And she loved him some of the time. And, they warned that that was not an effective answer to have. So you hear her, in this interview giving the answer they had worked out, which was no. But then in her follow up, she does acknowledge that sometimes she does still have warm feelings for him. On the Barbara Walters side, they worked a long time on what the closing question would be, because that’s a powerful position in an interview like this, that last question. And they settled on, “What will you tell your children?”

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On Gilda Radner’s impression of her as “Baba Wawa,” mocking the way she spoke

She was wounded when she heard this. For one thing, even though there was this exaggerated lisp that Gilda Radner used, nobody had any doubt who she was parodying. And, Barbara Walters had this speech anomaly. She called it a bastard Boston accent. Other people called it a lisp. Whatever it was she had tried, she’d gone to voice coaches early in her career to try to fix it, and it failed. So her feelings were hurt when the skit was done on Saturday Night Live. Now, it also made her famous. She came to terms with it, but I think she always found it kind of hurtful. … When Gilda Radner died … Barbara Walters wrote a sympathy note to her widower, Gene Wilder, expressing sympathy on her death, and signed it, “Baba Wawa.”

On her reluctant retirement

She worked into her 80s. … When she was in her 70s, she was working at a time when most women had been involuntarily retired. So she worked as long as they would keep her on the air. But as she started to sometimes miss a step, there was concern that she would embarrass herself or undermine some of the professional work she had done. … The people at ABC convinced her it was time to retire. And then CNN came in with a secret offer to put her on the air at CNN, which she was considering when her friends came back and said, no, it’s time. … There was a grand finale on The View, where two dozen women prominent in journalism came and paid tribute to her. And on her last, big show on The View. And when she was backstage afterwards, one of them came up and said … “What do you want to do in your retirement?” And Barbara said, “I want more time.” Meaning I want more time on the air.

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On if she was happy

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I asked 100 people who knew her that question: Was she happy? And a few people said yes. Joy Behar of The View said “happy-ish,” which is not a bad answer, but most people said while she was proud of what she had done and that she loved the money and the prominence that she had won, that she paid this huge price on the personal side — she had three failed marriages. She was estranged for a time from her only daughter. She never lost that feeling that she was always competing and could never stop and be content. So she had the most successful possible professional life, but I think she had kind of a sad, personal one.

Thea Chaloner and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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The best spots to see 58,000 jacaranda trees in L.A., O.C.

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The best spots to see 58,000 jacaranda trees in L.A., O.C.

What would Los Angeles be like without the nearly 30,000 jacaranda trees on city streets?

It depends on who you ask.

“The tree stands for California at its worst: all flash, no substance, a pain left for others to clean up, inspiration for a thousand delusions and a million excuses,” The Times’ Gustavo Arellano wrote in a 2022 column titled “Why I hate jacarandas.” Evan Meyer, executive director of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants, noted last year that trees like jacaranda, native to Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia, are not beneficial to Los Angeles’s wildlife.

Despite its non-native status and exasperating tendency to blanket cars and sidewalks with slippery, aphid-attracting flowers, jacaranda trees have their fans, especially right now when streets, freeways and medians are saturated with bluish-purple flowers. There are more than 58,000 of them across Los Angeles and Orange counties.

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Lora Hall, an urban forester for the city of San Marino, which has about 270 jacaranda trees with two new ones recently planted, says residents generally love them. So much so that when she requests feedback when replacing dead or damaged trees, residents often pick jacaranda. “Our population prefers flowering trees to nonflowering trees,” she says. Jacaranda are “second only to our ginkgo displays, which turn gold in the fall.”

Michael King, forestry program coordinator for the city of Pasadena, which has nearly 2,000 jacaranda, or Jacaranda mimosifolia, says the tree’s popularity likely spread throughout Southern California, including Pasadena, “as other horticulturalists and landowners took a liking to the purple flowers and the tree’s ability to thrive in our local climate.” According to the city’s Official Street Tree List published in 1940 by the City’s Park Department, the jacaranda tree is listed as the official street tree for Del Monte and Paloma streets.

While jacaranda trees inspire a love-hate relationship, their benefits include their resiliency compared to most tree species, says Lisa Smith, a board-certified master arborist and trees instructor for the UCLA Extension Landscape Architecture program.

“The city of L.A. would be pretty lacking in tree canopy without many non-natives,” she says. “Although it’s always great to plant natives, to grow our urban canopy, we need a greater diversity of species, which we can accomplish by utilizing climate-resilient species.”

Regarding density, Smith believes that some parts of Southern California like Pasadena have greater concentrations because the trees thrive in hot conditions. “You’ll find this species more commonly in the city’s warmer and more inland areas,” she says.

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To illustrate, Smith points to the jacaranda planted on the median along Wilshire Boulevard near the West Los Angeles VA Medical Center. “They were installed for the Democratic convention over a decade ago,” she says. Today, they are “rocking and thriving, even in that windy, harsh, heat island of a location.”

The flowering trees, which grow 25 to 40 feet tall and can be just as wide, became popular in Los Angeles during the 1920s and ‘30s thanks to the efforts of botanist Kate Sessions, who introduced more than 100 species in San Diego in 1892.

Jacaranda trees usually bloom by June, but they may flower at any time of year depending on conditions such as light, heat, rain or pruning.

If you are wondering where you can see jacarandas around Los Angeles and Orange counties, The Times gathered all the publicly available tree data we could find. Jacaranda-rich areas include Santa Ana (nearly 4,200), Anaheim (2,000), Pasadena, Santa Monica (1,050), and the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood (940). Areas with the most jacaranda trees per square mile include West Hollywood (1,400), West Los Angeles (639) and Beverly Grove (720).

And here are some specific streets where you can find jacarandas. In Pasadena, forester King recommends East Del Mar Boulevard (from Arroyo Parkway to Lake Avenue); Del Monte Street (North Arroyo Boulevard to Lincoln Avenue); and Paloma Street (from Allen Avenue to Altadena Drive). In San Marino, Hall recommends Monterey Road (from Garfield Avenue to Old Mill Road).

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According to the mapping data, other jacaranda-lined streets include Oakhurst and Palm drives (from Burton Way to Santa Monica Boulevard) in Beverly Grove; Palm and Alta drives (from Santa Monica Boulevard to Sunset Avenue) in Beverly Hills; Poinsettia Place and the intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in West Hollywood; Whittier Drive along Holmby Park just outside Westwood; and South Garnsey Street (from West McFadden to West Wilshire avenues) in Santa Ana.

— Brittany Levine Beckman contributed to this report

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Michelle Williams turns Millennium Park into a gospel choir : Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!

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Michelle Williams turns Millennium Park into a gospel choir : Wait Wait… Don't Tell Me!
On this week’s episode, actor and singer Michelle Williams talks growing up in the church, auditioning for Destiny’s Child, and how to get an NPR audience to sing a hymn. Plus, panelists Alonzo Bodden, Helen Hong, and Paula Poundstone talk flags.
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Judge upholds Austin's weed decriminalization measure over state challenge

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Judge upholds Austin's weed decriminalization measure over state challenge
Austin stoners can breathe a smoky sigh of relief. A Travis County judge this week dismissed a lawsuit from Attorney General Ken Paxton challenging Austin’s voter referendum to decriminalize marijuana in small amounts. The ruling marks a temporary win for local rule and emboldens weed activists looking to pass similar measures in other Texas cities, although Paxton will likely appeal the lower court’s decision. In 2022, Austin voters…
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