18 “IT’S A GIRL!”

1968

If Roy Cohn couldn’t be Barbara Walters’s husband, he would be her guardian angel.

In 1968, Lee Guber and Barbara participated in the oddest of private adoptions, an arrangement facilitated by Roy. A wealthy couple had adopted a baby girl a few years earlier and now wanted to adopt a baby boy—specifically, a tall, blond, fair-skinned boy whose birth parents had no known hereditary diseases. The couple’s lawyers were investigating the backgrounds and interviewing mothers-to-be. They had chosen a pregnant, nineteen-year-old woman who had decided to put her baby up for adoption. But the gender was nonnegotiable.

If the newborn was a boy, they would take him. If the newborn was a girl, would Barbara and Lee be interested in adopting her? Of course, they said. On the morning of June 14, 1968, soon after Barbara got off the air of the Today show, Lee called. “It’s a girl!” he told her. “She’s ours!”

Carol Kramer, a reporter with the Chicago Tribune, happened to be interviewing Barbara in her office at the time. “Congratulate me, I just became a mother,” she told her, “bubbling with joy” and fielding celebratory phone calls. With a new baby, she acknowledged she would have to agree to “fewer speaking engagements and lunch appointments,” but insisted it wouldn’t have any impact on her hard-won role on Today. “After all, it’s not a nine-to-five job,” she said of her TV responsibilities. “It’s a five-to-nine job.”

Four days later, the expectant couple flew to pick up the newborn at the hospital. They paid the lawyer’s fee and the birth mother’s medical expenses. Barbara’s cousin, Lorraine Katz, who owned a children’s store in Asbury Park, New Jersey, sent a layette of bibs, undershirts, onesies, and towels. A friend loaned them a bassinet. The set designer for Today made oversized pastel butterflies to soften the look of the dark brown, faux leather walls in the library-turned-nursery at their apartment.

Barbara already had decided to name their daughter Jacqueline Dena Guber—Jacqueline after her sister, who would never have children herself, Dena after her mother. (For years, Barbara would call her sister “Jackie” and her daughter “Jacqueline,” to distinguish them.) She named her after the two women with whom she had the most complicated relationships of love and guilt, of obligation and resentment—a sister whose disability had constrained Barbara’s childhood, and a mother who had confided in her young daughter the grievances of her life.

In some ways, Barbara had raised herself, her father often absent and her mother preoccupied. It was a model she seemed comfortable following now as a parent. Others would provide the constant attention a baby demands. She and Lee employed a full-time baby nurse for the first year, then another for the second year. When Jacqueline was three, they hired a live-in French nanny, Thérèse de la Chapelle, and a live-out Jamaican housekeeper, Icodel Tomlinson. Icodel and the woman known to everyone as Zelle, short for “mademoiselle,” would stay on the job for more than thirty years, long after Jacqueline had grown up and left.

“Jackie was never with an unfamiliar babysitter,” Barbara would boast, as though that was enough. “Between the two of them, especially since Zelle was always there, I could travel anywhere in the world and know that Jackie would be all right, no matter what the circumstances.”

Barbara didn’t miss a step at work. She didn’t take maternity leave. “I took her home on a Friday, and I went to the office on Monday,” she said. She didn’t mention her daughter on the air for months. It never occurred to her to bring her to the studio. “It would be like bringing in a puppy that wasn’t housebroken,” she said. But Barbara was not a completely absentee mother in those early years. On the nurse’s day off, she would hurry home when Today went off the air at 9 a.m. to spend the day with Jacqueline. During the summer, they would rent a vacation house on Long Island, and Barbara’s parents and sister would visit from Florida. She kept a baby book, recording when her daughter first smiled (at one month) and began to crawl (at eight months).

As Jacqueline’s first birthday approached, Barbara told a reporter during an interview that she had limited her traveling to devote time to the baby. That said, those limits didn’t seem particularly limiting. That interview promoted a speech Barbara was delivering in St. Louis in April. She would spend the first week of June in Germany with Today and the first week of July in Wales to cover the investiture of Prince Charles.

“We spent every weekend I was home together,” she said, a commitment with a hedge: every weekend I was home. Lee would grumble that his wife declared her devotion to their child while not actually spending much time with her. He called her a “surrogate mother.” After her daughter had grown up, Barbara argued that children would inevitably leave, while a career would be forever—the reverse of the standard perception of what in life endures. “I have often said that if you don’t work and you stay home with your child, there comes that day when the child is fifteen or sixteen and says, ‘So long, Mommy,’ ” she said. “And you say: ‘For this? For this brat who’s walked out on me?’ ”

While relinquishing even a bit of her professional ambition was never on the table, Barbara did anguish over whether she was doing the right thing. Unlike male anchors, she was judged by others, and judged herself, by a different standard. No one worried about how much time Hugh Downs spent at home with his two children. She had yearned for a child, and she doted on Jacqueline. But the reality of rearing a daughter, the imperative for a parent to be present, was something she never seemed to understand or accept, not even after her own lonely childhood—or perhaps as a result of it.

Jacqueline could not have missed that hard lesson. It was one thing for a string of husbands to know that their wife’s career would always be her top priority, no matter what. It was another for a child to understand that of her mother. “Sure, she’ll say to me she wishes I didn’t have a job; there are times when the job interferes,” Barbara said when Jacqueline was eleven years old. Then she waved the worry away. “But I think children say that to mothers just when they [want to] go shopping.”

When Jacqueline wasn’t admitted to the elite Dalton School, her famous mother pulled strings. “Getting a child into private school in New York is notoriously horrendous, so I was very happy that I had good contacts at the Dalton School,” Barbara said. For Jackie’s seventh birthday, in 1975, Barbara sent Winnie-the-Pooh invitations to the children in her class, inviting them to Old-Fashioned Mr. Jennings Ice Cream Parlor on the ninth floor at Bonwit Teller, followed by a visit to the Alex & Walter Gym. “Come in leotard or play-clothes,” it said.

But as her daughter got a little older, Barbara would be perplexed and disappointed that she didn’t share her passions for the city, for society and fashion, for whatever news was breaking and whatever newsmaker was breaking it. Jackie preferred the outdoors to the indoors; she preferred camping to a Central Park view. She wasn’t much for books; she would never graduate from college. When a paparazzo snapped them walking down a New York City street as adults, Barbara was wearing a coat with a sumptuous fur collar and lining; Jacqueline, a head taller, was in jeans and a black cap with flaps against the cold. “If Barbara is couture,” Jane Pauley once said, “Jackie is fleece.”