“Barbara sometimes asked questions that revealed a lot about herself,” Katie Couric says in “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything.”
The new documentary, now streaming on Hulu, features many of the late broadcaster’s iconic interviews, from Lucille Ball and Judy Garland to Gloria Steinem, that ultimately reveal so much about Walters herself, a trailblazing woman who started her career working on women’s interest stories and climbing up to become the first female co-host of the “Today” show and the first female co-anchor of ABC News. She made history with her interviews of world leaders and celebrities alike, paving the way for generations of women news anchors. Later in life, she still managed to revolutionize TV with “The View,” a show she created in 1997 that still makes headlines to this day.
The documentary, directed by Jackie Jesko, is worth watching to take in just how much Walters, who died in 2022 at the age of 93, accomplished throughout her life and storied career. And while it doesn’t mention that Walters came from a Jewish family, Jewish viewers will likely sense the undercurrent of how that aspect of her identity often left her feeling othered despite her success.
This feels especially clear watching the news maven interview fellow Jewish woman Bette Midler, who effusively compliments Walters on her beauty, even calling her “sexy,” to which Walters responds incredulously.
“She was very beautiful, except that I would say that she didn’t feel beautiful. With her upbringing, she didn’t feel like she belonged,” Midler, who considered herself a friend of Walters’, says in the documentary. It’s clear, at least to this Jewish viewer, that Walters did not think of herself as attractive because of her classic Ashkenazi features, and how those differed from the beauty standards of the time. Couric, too, whose mother was Jewish, was once told by Walters that she saw in her a kindred spirit because they both were not beautiful. On the flip side, her biggest rival, the blonde, blue-eyed Diane Sawyer, held that ideal of beauty that eluded her.
It feels silly to belabor looks when talking about a history-making woman such as Barbara Walters. Couric herself says that she took from that statement the fact that nobody tuned in to their shows for their looks. It is also charmingly clear from the documentary that Walters enchanted many of the attractive high-profile men that she interviewed. Yet her insecurity about appearance was certainly part of what made her a complex character, and what makes her such a compelling subject for this magnetic documentary.
The film paints a bittersweet picture of Walters’ personal life. She was a woman who sacrificed family and love for work — or maybe not exactly sacrificed, but was simply made for the latter and not the former. She would never prioritize her personal life over an interview “get.” Her relationship with her daughter, Jacqueline, is a particularly touchy subject, and Couric shares that she thinks Walters may have regretted that the two were not closer.
She is seen as shaped by her childhood with a disabled sister and a fiscally irresponsible father that forced her to be the family breadwinner. Her Jewish father, Lou Walters, looms large. The owner of nightclubs known for some unscrupulous business practices, Walters first rubbed elbows with the rich and famous — like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Sophie Tucker and Milton Berle — at her father’s clubs, where she learned to never idolize them. It’s clear that Walters took after her father in some ways, when trying to book high-profile guests but especially when it came to helping him with his business, leaning on notorious prosecutor Roy Cohn, much to the consternation of her colleagues and friends.
Ultimately, what made her such a success was her chutzpah. “I didn’t just nag, I nudged,” Walters said about getting the likes of Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson and Muammar Khaddafi to talk to her. The first interview that cemented her status as one of the nation’s most powerful newsmakers was a 1977 interview with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. It proved to everyone, even to the skeptical king of news, Walter Cronkite, that she had the chops — and yes, the chutzpah — that nobody had.
At no point does the documentary paint a more sympathetic picture of Walters than when it goes in depth about her historic interview with Monica Lewinsky in 1999, one that made both American and ratings history. Lewinsky talks about the lengths that Walters went through to prep her for their interview, building rapport with Lewinsky’s father, sharing acerbic jokes, encouraging her when she was feeling insecure. Lewinsky, all these decades later, tells the camera that no matter how tough the interview was, at the end of the day, she felt seen by Walters.
“Hers was one of the biggest lives that had been lived until that time,” Bette Midler says in the documentary. It is quite incredible to dive into that big, paradigm-changing life in this worthwhile film.
