10 
THE MOST FORGETTABLE HUSBAND; THE MOST NOTORIOUS FRIEND
1955
When Barbara returned to Miami Beach from Paris in the winter of 1955, she met two men who would figure in her life. “I remained steadfastly loyal to one of them in the face of enormous criticism,” she said decades later. “The other I married.” In retrospect, her connection with the kinetic Roy Cohn is easier to understand than her marriage to the stolid Robert Katz.
Lou Walters introduced his daughter to Cohn, a regular at his nightclubs. The ambitious young lawyer was five feet eight inches tall and trim, a natty dresser with a fighter’s face. They would share the longest friendship Barbara ever had with a man, longer than her three marriages combined, and the most controversial relationship of her life.
Roy Marcus Cohn, then twenty-eight, had already gained a measure of notoriety. He was a Justice Department prosecutor in the celebrated trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage; they were executed in 1953. He had been in the spotlight as the chief counsel for Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954; the televised Senate inquiry helped lead to the red-baiting senator’s eventual censure. Barbara was twenty-five, staying with her parents and sister at the fashionable new Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach after her six-month sojourn in Europe. “I have a daughter who’s a great admirer of yours,” Lou told Roy. “She’d like to meet you.”
Precisely how she responded to the introduction is the subject of subtle dispute, though both Barbara and Roy agreed she wasn’t entirely friendly. He quoted her as correcting her father: “I said I would like to meet him. I didn’t say I admired him.” But she would deny even that limited cordiality, recalling more of a rebuke of her father: “I am your daughter, but I never said I wanted to meet him.”
(Some accounts have said Barbara and Roy dated while she was a student at Sarah Lawrence College, but both said they met in Florida in 1955.)
Undeterred by her tone, Roy called her the next day. Later, in New York, he took her to a Bronx County Democratic dinner for their first date. On their way home, she told him she was engaged to someone else, to Bob Katz. They wouldn’t see one another again for three years.
From that scratchy beginning followed a romance that didn’t last and a friendship that did. There was an undeniable spark of some sort between Roy, a closeted gay man, and Barbara, a connoisseur of complicated men. He would later compare her to Richard Nixon, high praise in his worldview. (“Two of a kind,” he said. “Both have a crisp factuality, a no-glamour approach.”) She said he looked “like a lizard” and called his role in the McCarthy hearings “despicable,” but she also described him as good company. That was high praise in her worldview. She had always been able to compartmentalize her attraction to men who also had a dark side or a deep flaw.
Both Barbara and Roy were sharp and quick and loved to dish. Both appreciated fortune and fame. And both could be transactional. “I think she was his beard,” helping him shield his sexual orientation, said Jessica Stedman Guff, a producer who worked for Barbara at ABC for years. “He was gossipy and smart, super-smart, and he fed her tidbits that she could use on the Today show. And she performed a service for him, so making him more acceptable in society.”
They were closer in private than she acknowledged in public. Her ties to the most toxic lawyer in America—one who defended mobsters and beat federal charges of his own of conspiracy, bribery, and fraud—appalled the establishment in New York and Washington and became one more reason some journalists didn’t accept her as entirely one of their own. “How could you possibly have had Roy Cohn for a friend?” Walter Cronkite once demanded disapprovingly.
She did little to defend Roy to him, but she also didn’t break things off with her old friend. There were reasons for that, ones she didn’t choose to share with Walter Cronkite.
Robert Henry Katz, then in his mid-thirties, worked for his father, Ira, a manufacturer of children’s hats and caps. It was an unexciting business but a stable one. In a way, Barbara was following the course that her mother had so often expressed regret for having rejected herself. He was an eligible bachelor, and she was a young woman at loose ends. They moved in the same social circles. Getting married seemed to be the natural thing to do.
To her friends, Barbara nicknamed her fiancé “Katz Hats,” an affectionate moniker but with a mocking tone. She described Bob as dark and handsome, well-mannered and a good dancer. He had graduated from the prestigious Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania and served in the Navy during World War II. But she also said to friends that he was boring and phlegmatic and passionless. Whatever else he might be, Roy Cohn was never boring.
She called off what she referred to as their “rather dreary engagement,” prompting no protest from Katz, a passivity that somehow made him more appealing. “I could understand perfectly why I didn’t want to marry him… but how could he not want to marry me?” she wondered. “What was wrong with me?” She changed her mind again. The wedding was back on.
“Mr. Katz, Bride Go to Europe,” the Miami Herald headline on the story on their wedding read, her photo identified as “Mrs. Katz.”
Down the road, Barbara would become the most unconventional of women, but at this point she married for the most conventional of reasons. “Young women like me graduated from college, got their first jobs, then left to get married,” she said, calling it “the fifties you-must-get-married mentality.” What else could she possibly do? Two days before the ceremony, she had second thoughts again. She went to her mother; her mother sent her to her father; her father said that her concerns would surely be fleeting, and that in any case, they had surfaced too late. Rooms for the ceremony and the reception had been booked at the Plaza Hotel, he noted, and the caterer and the orchestra were lined up. Matchboxes had been printed with their names and the date: June 20, 1955.
It was six months after their first date in Florida.
More than a hundred people attended the black-tie affair in the Plaza’s Terrace Room, a grand space with Gilded Age opulence and crystal chandeliers that replicated those in the Palace of Versailles. The Miami Herald described her elegant dress, one Barbara bragged she had bought on sale at Bergdorf Goodman. “The wedding gown was a white sheath of Italian satin brocade with a silk mousseline-de-sole overdress,” it said. “A long veil of illusion [a soft tulle fabric] was attached to a crown of lilies of the valley and pearl clusters.” But in the accompanying photo of the bride, in full wedding regalia, Barbara looks more sardonic than aglow. The “long veil of illusion” proved to be an apt choice.
Lou Walters, ever the impresario, lined up pop star Johnnie Ray to perform at the reception; comedian Milton Berle was among the guests. Jackie was her sister’s maid of honor and Ira Katz the best man for his son. The bridal couple spent their wedding night across Fifth Avenue at the Hotel Pierre, then left on a three-week honeymoon in Europe. “During many of these days, Bob was busy buying straw and ribbons for the next season’s crop of children’s hats,” Barbara said of the trip. Not that she minded; even then she was just as happy to go sightseeing without him, surely a warning flag for their married life ahead. Engraved matchboxes wouldn’t be enough to save it.
Bored with the life of a stay-at-home wife, Barbara began to work as a writer on The Morning Show, CBS’s year-old effort to challenge NBC’s Today show. It was more a way to get out of the house than it was the deliberate launch of her storied career. Her looks, not her skills, were crucial in landing the job. “I hired Barbara mostly because she had a darling ass, which I never got near,” producer Charlie Andrews said in a 1988 interview with author Jerry Oppenheimer. “I was looking for a guest-getter. Barbara came up for an interview and she was obviously a sharp, aggressive, ambitious girl—and really stunning in those days.”
One of the show’s first hosts had been a thirty-something Cronkite; he chatted on the air about the news with a lion puppet named Charlemagne. By the time Barbara arrived, Cronkite had left and Dick Van Dyke, an aspiring actor and comedian, was one of the co-hosts; he would become an acclaimed performer on TV and in film. The job opening Barbara filled was created when Estelle Parsons moved to Today, the dominant morning show. Parsons, then working as a TV writer and weather girl, would later become an award-winning actor, too.
Most of the show’s staffers were journalists, but her calling card—a background in show business—provoked detractors, as it would throughout her career. The journalists in the room “were either put off by the show biz bullshit or enchanted by it—and refused to admit that—or maybe a combination of both,” recalled producer Robert (Shad) Northshield, a veteran of the Chicago Sun-Times.
With an eye to attracting female viewers, she frequently choreographed fashion shows. The producers used a rotating set of models willing to show up at the studio before dawn. One would be on the air while another was ready to come on the set next and a third was quickly changing outfits backstage.
“She came to me one day very upset,” Av Westin, then the director of The Morning Show, told me. One of the models had canceled from a segment on swimwear. Barbara was upset and worried about the impact of the snafu on her job. “She came to me with hopes of salvaging what could be a total disaster,” he said.
“What can I do?” she asked him.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ ” he recalled.
Through necessity rather than design, Barbara appeared on network television for the first time modeling a gold-lamé swimsuit. A publicity still shows her and four other young women lying on the hard floor in the corner of an unadorned office in a line, each propped up on her elbow, their legs stretched out and artfully arranged. She was sporting a one-piece suit with decorative trim along the top and ruching down the front. With her short dark hair and broad smile, she fit right in. “I don’t look half bad,” she said later.
On The Morning Show, she also was sent out for the first time to do reporting on a breaking news story. In 1956, the Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria had sunk off Nantucket after colliding with the Swedish ship Stockholm, one of the worst maritime disasters in American history. A total of fifty-one people died; many of the passengers and crew members who had been rescued were arriving at the pier aboard the Île de France. “At that point, we probably were sending everybody including the elevator operator” out to try to line up interviews with the survivors, Av Westin told me.
For Barbara, it was her first lesson in the delicate process of convincing people in the midst of chaos and tragedy to tell their story to the world on television. She would need both doggedness and a display of empathy. “What a horrible experience you’ve been through,” she said to one victim after another. “You must be feeling terrible. But could you come into our studio tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. to tell us about it?” To her surprise, some of them did.
“We scooped everybody,” producer Jim Fleming said, crediting Barbara. “Anything you gave her to do she delivered. You could say get Herbert Hoover and she would.”
Though CBS was dominating prime time—the most popular shows in 1955 were I Love Lucy, The Ed Sullivan Show, and The $64,000 Question, all airing on the network—those in charge still hadn’t figured out morning TV. The show floundered and then folded, even after being renamed Good Morning! and installing a new host, Will Rogers Jr., son of the famous humorist, to replace Dick Van Dyke. Fleming briefly hired Barbara as a researcher on a proposed CBS show called The Day That…. The pilots for the series were “The Day That FDR Died” and “The Day That a Plane Crashed into the Empire State Building.” (A B-25 bomber, lost in a dense fog, flew into the seventy-ninth floor of what was then the world’s tallest building and killed fourteen people.) But neither documentary made it on the air, and a few months later she was out of a job again.
The show ended. So did her marriage.
After three years of halfhearted efforts to stay together, the couple agreed to get a quickie divorce in Alabama, a state that required no official waiting period. Barbara traveled to Hamilton, a remote town of a few thousand people along the Buttahatchee River. She was required to swear that she was a legal resident of Alabama, where she hadn’t lived a day in her life. On May 21, 1958, Circuit Court Judge Bob Moore Jr. signed the papers ending the marriage.
On the final decree, Barbara Walters Katz is listed simply as a resident of Alabama, the lines to name the city and county left empty. Neither she nor Robert H. Katz filled out the other parts of the official form with information including their date and place of birth, race, and “usual occupation.” She sued for the divorce, citing legal grounds of “cruelty,” a justification often given in states that didn’t yet permit no-fault divorces.
In their separation agreement, Katz agreed to pay a single lump sum of $1,600 to his ex-wife as well as weekly alimony of $115 unless and until she remarried. He ended up remarrying himself in 1960, to Rita Kupsick, who coincidentally had attended the Fieldston School at the same time Barbara did. The Katzes’ marriage would last for the rest of their lives. When he died in 2005, at age eighty-five, his family’s paid death notice didn’t mention his first wife.
Perhaps he and Barbara shared the same instinct—to erase the memory of the marriage as a youthful mistake.
“She never talked about it,” Bill Geddie, her longtime producer, told me. “When you said, ‘How many times were you married?’ she always said ‘two.’ I said, ‘But what about…’ She would reply, ‘No, that doesn’t count.’ ” (Her denial of the incontrovertible truth was reminiscent of her grandmother’s insistence on her deathbed that she was a virgin, despite having given birth to seven children.) For years, Barbara succeeded in making her first husband effectively disappear, no small trick after a society wedding held at the Plaza and reported in newspapers in New York and Miami. When she married entertainment executive Merv Adelson in 1986, the wire services called it her second marriage, after Lee Guber, not her third. A fan paperback titled Barbara Walters: TV’s SuperLady, published in 1976, was promoted as “revealing” her wedding to Katz. “She regards him as a taboo subject,” the book reported.
Later, in a lavish spread in Newsweek, Barbara acknowledged that she had been married, briefly and “sadly,” to a businessman whose name she declined to disclose. “The marriage was annulled after eleven months,” the newsmagazine reported. That wasn’t accurate. The marriage lasted three years, from 1955 to 1958, and ended in divorce.
She would recognize her unhappiness more than a decade later when she saw Diary of a Mad Housewife, a movie released in 1970 during the awakening of the women’s movement about an educated woman trapped in a loveless marriage. Barbara herself found keeping house stultifying, even after her husband agreed to move from his Greenwich Village apartment to her preferred neighborhood on the Upper East Side. She saw a psychiatrist to discuss her frustrations; she decided the therapist, “a young man with a placid face,” had nothing helpful to offer.
Apparently, though, there were no hard feelings. A quarter-century after her quick trip to Alabama, Barbara was entering a building in New York to go to a dinner party when a man who looked vaguely familiar was leaving. He said hello; she said hello. That was all. “My God,” she exclaimed to her escort. “That was my first husband!”