16 
THE RUNAWAY BRIDE
1962
Barbara had no shortage of suitors throughout her life, among them big names in entertainment, government, and business. “I have been married more than once,” she said, looking back, as though there were so many she couldn’t keep count, “and I never wanted to get married when I did.” For a person who rarely expressed regret, her failure to sustain any of her three marriages or any other romantic relationship became a source of sadness and envy.
She was “always questioning herself,” said ABC colleague Diane Sawyer, who had an enduring marriage to director and producer Mike Nichols. “The sweetness with which she talked about my meeting Mike Nichols in my forties and finding of happiness you never dreamed you could have—she was wistful about that,” she told me. “There is still a yearning there.”
Barbara met Lee Guber on a blind date in 1962, just as she was about to cover Jackie Kennedy’s trip to India and Pakistan, her big break on the Today show. Her best friend, Joyce Ashley, had arranged for them to meet. “He’s nice, but you’ll never marry him,” Joyce predicted, setting expectations low for their dinner at the Friars Club. He had just moved to New York from Philadelphia. He was a jazz aficionado and a gourmet cook, an avid tennis and squash player, a ruggedly handsome man with dark hair and blue eyes. He was forty-one years old; she was thirty-two. He was considered a player and a catch.
His occupation: theatrical producer.
“Oh no. Not another one!” Barbara said later, in feigned horror. “After my experiences with my father, I had sworn to myself that I would never get involved with anyone in show business.”
Growing up, Lee had carried bags for the occasional vaudevillian staying at the succession of small hotels his parents owned in downtown Philadelphia. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Temple University and serving in the Army during World War II, he bought the Senator Hotel in the downtown Center City neighborhood. Its club, the Rendezvous, gained renown for hosting such jazz legends as Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald.
In 1955, he and two partners launched the Valley Forge Music Fair in Devon, an instant success with a production of Guys and Dolls, then of South Pacific. They expanded their tent theater operation along the East Coast, eventually including the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, the Painters Mill Music Fair in suburban Baltimore, and the Shady Grove Music Theater outside Washington, D.C. “I managed to convince myself that Lee wasn’t the same kind of showman as my father,” Barbara said, that he was a realist, not a dreamer. “That’s what I decided he was—a businessman.”
She was the one who pursued him, his friends said. She defied Joyce’s prediction that Lee would never be a match for her. “I knew right away this was a man I could marry,” she said. He said, “I knew right away that the trap was being set for me.” They were engaged a year after they met.
The other man in her life was headed for trouble, again.
After a long recuperation from his attempted suicide, Lou Walters landed contracts to stage shows first at the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach, then at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. He began importing performers to Las Vegas from the Folies Bergère in Paris. “It wasn’t Broadway, but it wasn’t a low floor in a hospital, either,” Barbara said dryly. Four years later, with the show established, the Tropicana let him go. By then, he was sixty-seven years old, but he lacked both the savings and the sentiment to retire.
He managed to get a job back in Miami Beach at the high-rise Carillon Hotel, staging what he labeled the “Oui, Oui Paree” show at an aptly named venue, the Café Le Can-Can. “ALL NEW! SAUCY! PERT!” an ad in The Miami Herald declared, laced with exclamation points as it promoted a “Spectacular Parisienne Revue Produced and Staged by LOU WALTERS.” His name appeared in type as big as that of the featured entertainers, the “fabulous Barry Sisters” and Lynda Gloria of the Folies Bergère. “Delicious Food!” the ad promised. “A Cast of 50! Great Stars! Gorgeous Can-Can Dancers!”
In other words, a classic Lou Walters production.
The reviews were glowing, just like in the old days. “In the lavish costuming and production tradition of Lou Walters, of Latin Quarter fame,” George Bourke wrote in The Miami Herald when the show opened just before Christmas in 1963. It had a healthy run of ten months, then was reprised for final holiday performances in late 1964. The evening’s entertainments “have been compared with the best ever turned out by the veteran producer,” the columnist said.
Barbara’s buoyant father had rebounded. Her mother and sister had not. When the family moved back to Miami, they bought a house so far outside the city that Dena and Jackie, neither of whom drove, felt isolated and trapped, dependent on TV for entertainment and company. A “cheerless” home, Barbara said. She didn’t step in to fix their complaints, then felt guilty that she hadn’t. She began to dread her mother’s frequent phone calls, full of grievance.
But Lou was already dreaming big again, no lessons learned from the Café de Paris fiasco five years earlier. The success of “Oui, Oui Paree” wasn’t enough. His new plan: an aquacade. It was, essentially, the splashy extravaganza he had long staged in nightclubs, but on water. It would feature scantily clad women, flamboyant costumes, fireworks—a Latin Quarter revue in an oversized pool, surrounded by an amphitheater. Billy Rose’s Aquacade had been a hit at the New York World’s Fair, he noted, never mind that it had been launched in 1939, a quarter-century in the past. “A show is a show,” he assured his daughter. “You give the people something spectacular and they’ll come.”
All he needed, as always, was money.
Over a family dinner with Barbara and Lee in Florida during the summer of 1963, Lou Walters urged his daughter to invest in his new project. At the time, she had amassed a grand total of $5,000, a stockpile she had rebuilt after giving all her savings to her father the last time he needed a bailout. She was making $500 a week at NBC; the salary bump with her new on-air role a year later would increase that, but initially only to $750. She turned to her fiancé for his advice. Lee asked Lou a question: “What would you do if you had only five thousand dollars to your name?” Lou declared, “I’d invest it in the aquacade.” That was good enough for Lee. He told Barbara, “Give your father the money.” Despite her doubts and their history, she had never been willing or able to deny her father.
The Aqua Wonderland Revue featured trick water skiers and high-diving clowns in the water while singers and dancers performed on an eighty-foot-long floating stage. Walters had leased Miami’s new Marine Stadium for fourteen weeks, projecting net revenue of a half-million dollars and promising the city 25 percent of the profits. The amphitheater could hold 6,500 people, and the operation needed to sell an average of 3,000 tickets per performance to break even. But the biggest audience the show ever commanded was a fraction of that, just 700 people. The aquacade opened in mid-June and closed, abruptly, in mid-July. By then, Lou quietly had sold his interest for $5,000 to a New Zealand promoter named Bruce McCrea, who would file for bankruptcy a month later.
Barbara’s investment? Gone.
No surprise that her father was willing to gamble his daughter’s life savings, as he had when she invested in the Café de Paris in New York. No surprise, either, when another of his grand schemes flopped, once again taking with it every penny she had saved. Yet once again, Barbara didn’t abandon him. She made one more attempt to rescue her father and his pride. She called Sonja Loew, someone she loathed—a “noisy and proprietary” woman who drank too much, she said. By now, Sonja was divorced from E. M. Loew, Lou’s old business partner, but Barbara knew Sonja still had sway.
“I don’t usually do this, Sonja,” Barbara said. “But my father is very sick, he had a heart attack, and it would be such a wonderful thing if Mr. Loew would call him and say, ‘Come on, Lou, come back to the Latin Quarter.’ ”
Barbara had the gift of persuasion. Loew offered Lou a contract as general manager of the club. He would never know that his daughter’s intervention had prompted it. He immediately leaked the offer to columnist Herb Kelly. “Loew made me a flattering proposition when he was in Miami recently,” Lou told Kelly, adding he had made “certain stipulations” about coming back to the club, as though he had a world of options. Then he agreed, telling Leonard Harris of the New York World-Telegram and the Sun, “When Loew said let’s start over, I said okay.”
Heading back to New York, the family rented a two-bedroom apartment at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, a long way from their former penthouse on Central Park West. But the nightclub business was waning, and the Latin Quarter would face a strike by its dwindling lineup of showgirls. Lou’s failure to pay taxes when he had his own club was catching up with him. Roy Cohn had dispensed with the arrest warrant issued when Lou had failed to show up for a court date, but he still owed $100,000 to the Internal Revenue Service and $8,300 to the State of New York. On December 3, 1966, he filed for personal bankruptcy, listing liabilities totaling $164,000 and assets of household goods and personal effects of just $400.
He was seventy years old, and he was broke. Again.
The aquacade fiasco didn’t change Barbara’s view of her father; she had a lifetime of watching his grand ambitions fail. But her fiancé’s willingness to risk her nest egg raised questions about her rosy conclusion that he was a pragmatic businessman, not another risk-taking showman. “What I refused to acknowledge was that my father and Lee were more alike than they were different,” she said. “Both of them lived for the next show.” She grew increasingly uneasy about their engagement. Soon after their trip to Miami, she broke it off.
Three months later, they suddenly reconciled. A few days after President Kennedy’s assassination that November, Barbara answered the doorbell at her apartment, a towel wrapped around her wet hair. Lee was standing there. “Life is too short,” he said. “Let’s get married right now.”
“Yes,” she replied. “Let’s get married.” For all her concerns about Lee being like her father, Barbara had inherited Lou Walters’s impulsive streak when it came to her marriages. Marriage Number Two began as impetuously as Marriage Number One.
Barbara didn’t see it that way, at least not in the moment. The national trauma after JFK’s shooting made their differences seem petty and human connections precious. “We wanted to cling together stormily for two years,” Barbara said later. “Neither of us really wanted to get married.” But there wouldn’t be time for them to have second thoughts, not until after the wedding was over.
Their turnaround was the lead item in Jack O’Brian’s “On the Air” column in the Journal-American. “Pretty, perky, popular Barbara Walters called off the calling-off of her marriage to tent show tycoon Lee Gruber,” the Hearst columnist wrote, a misspelling of Lee’s last name that would recur elsewhere through the years. It was surely unintentional but still a sting to his ego.
Barbara had gotten one last-minute appeal to rethink things. The night before the wedding, Roy Cohn called and begged her to marry him instead. He had asked her before. “There I was at Chez Vito’s, talking to her on the telephone for an hour,” he said. “She said she couldn’t marry me, because she and Guber had already given a [thank-you] present to the judge.”
Two weeks after the assassination, on December 8, 1963, Lee and Barbara were married in the Fifth Avenue apartment of her high school friend Marilyn Landsberger Herskovitz. The wedding was so hurriedly arranged that there were few guests. Only her father flew up from Florida to attend; Dena and Jackie didn’t make it. The New York Times notice gave Guber top billing and described his new wife as a writer and reporter for the National Broadcasting Company.
The wedding had gotten off to a fast start. The marriage didn’t.
The weather was predictably cold and gray during their December honeymoon at a borrowed house in East Hampton. “I felt trapped and restless,” Barbara recalled. “I remember when Lee produced our marriage license and told me he had to mail it to state officials for everything to be legal, I had an immediate urge to grab it, tear it up, and tell him to forget the whole thing.” They continued to live in separate apartments for months, finally settling in a six-room, rent-controlled apartment on West 57th Street, across from Carnegie Hall.
“The hardest part was moving in together,” she said. “It was so definite. And marriage is terribly tough.” They didn’t combine their bank accounts—more unusual for a married couple in that day than later. There was friction, too, over her desire to have a baby, and as soon as possible. She could hear her biological clock ticking; she was thirty-four years old when they wed. In keeping with the expectations of the time, she may have felt that a woman’s life couldn’t be counted as complete without children. Perhaps she hoped having a child would be an opportunity for her to give someone the comfort and unconditional love she had never really felt herself—and to get it back. But while having a child was an urgent priority for her, it wasn’t for Lee, who had a son and daughter from his first marriage.
She was devastated when she suffered a miscarriage during the first months of their marriage. The couple consulted doctors. Following their advice, she began to track her menstrual periods and monitor her temperature to schedule sex at optimum times—not always an aphrodisiac in a marriage that had other strains. In vitro fertilization and surrogate mothers weren’t yet options.
She suffered a second miscarriage and six months later, a third. “You’re ecstatic at the high point, then you all but fall apart when you drop to the low,” she would recall. She never slowed her work schedule, then worried that the stress and the travel had contributed to the miscarriages. But she wondered if it might be a good thing that she never carried a child to term. “I think of my sister,” she said, who was developmentally disabled. “Was her condition hereditary? Was nature sparing a child of mine the fate that befell Jackie?”
Barbara’s determination to be a mother never waned. Eventually, she would get her wish, if not in the way she had planned.