22 
CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR
1976
She wanted more.
Not only more money, though that was part of it. More credibility, more authority, more respect. After thirteen years at Today, she had risen from “the girl writer” to the co-host of the nation’s most popular morning show. She made The Gallup Poll’s list of the nation’s top ten “most admired women” in the survey taken in 1976, just behind Mamie Eisenhower. Now Barbara wanted to be named anchor of the evening news, then the pinnacle for broadcast journalists. That was the position TV icons like Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor held, making them the faces of their networks. They didn’t have to set two alarm clocks to wake up before dawn five days a week. They weren’t expected to do dog food commercials.
“As the anchor, you are the automatic head,” she said. “You are the one who does inaugurations. You are the one who does space flights. If the president goes on a trip, there’s just no question of who is going to cover it.” Besides, doing both the Today show and Not for Women Only five days a week “was killing me,” she said. “I did ‘Not for Women Only’ because I wanted to prove that I could do my own show, that I didn’t have to have a partner. It seems rather pathetic that I had to go out and prove that. A man wouldn’t have had to.”
By 1976, the women’s movement was gaining momentum. Betty Friedan, author of the landmark Feminine Mystique, had helped found the National Organization for Women a decade earlier. President Richard Nixon in 1972 signed Title IX, banning sex-based discrimination in schools that received federal funding.
On the other hand, years would pass before the first woman was named to the Supreme Court or allowed to become an astronaut. While the Federal Communications Commission in 1971 began requiring local stations to file affirmative action plans for women as a condition for license renewal, no woman had ever been named anchor of a network’s evening news show.
To Barbara’s frustration, negotiations for a new contract with NBC were going nowhere despite the millions of dollars in advertising revenue she was pulling in for the network. She wanted “to move into a different level in her career,” her agent said. Anchoring the evening news and hosting prime-time specials, say, for a million dollars a year. That was more than any other anchor had ever been paid; even Cronkite was making only about $400,000 a year.
The executives who had taken charge of NBC found Barbara Walters difficult to manage—one griped she had gotten “too big for her britches”—and they were offended by her demands for more money and power. (In his memoir, an exasperated Roone Arledge would liken hammering out her contracts to negotiating the Treaty of Ghent.) “They hated her,” said her old ally Richard Wald, now installed as the president of NBC News. The company’s top brass insisted on running the negotiations, not the news division’s chiefs. “I did the wrong thing; I did not fight,” Wald told me a half-century later. “But at the time, I was fighting seven other fires of a similar nature.”
NBC was in upheaval. A few months earlier, RCA, which owned it, had ousted chairman and CEO Robert Sarnoff; the repercussions rippled through the rest of the company. The network was also deadlocked in negotiations with the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, which represented its technical employees, thousands of them. The union called a nationwide strike when its contract ran out on March 31, 1976; those employees wouldn’t return to work until almost two months later.
The negotiations for Barbara’s next contract didn’t seem to be a priority. She was making $700,000 a year. (That translates to more than $3.7 million in 2023 dollars.) She wanted that to increase by $100,000 in each subsequent year, and in a five-year contract, not a three-year one. “Over my dead body,” NBC’s chief negotiator, Al Rush, declared. “Three years. That’s it.” She wanted more say over the interviews she would do. And if there was going to be a new producer or co-host, she wanted a voice about who got hired. The network rejected those demands, too, arguing they represented an unprecedented and inappropriate usurpation of authority for a news show.
She had one more problem: Wald, her long-ago escort to Deep Throat and often her staunch defender, didn’t think she would be particularly good as an evening anchor. He respected her as an indefatigable worker, an outstanding interviewer, a journalist with an instinctive sense of the audience. But he thought that reading a teleprompter of news somebody else had reported spotlighted not her strengths but her weaknesses. She didn’t have the reassuring command and resonant tenor of the most successful anchors—all of them men, of course. “The prevailing thought was that delivering the news about politics, wars, and natural disasters would not be taken seriously if done by a woman,” she said. A generation later, female broadcasters would still be struggling against that stereotype.
Wald told her he didn’t think the anchor chair would be a good fit. “She gave me hell about that,” he told me. Their friendship would survive, but so would her wound. “I liked, trusted, and respected him and thought he liked, trusted, and respected me,” she wrote in her memoir. “But he obviously didn’t.”
The daughter of Lou Walters was about to make the biggest gamble of her career.
Lou Weiss, who with Lee Stevens at the William Morris Agency represented her, arranged a Saturday morning game of tennis with his Westchester neighbor Frederick Pierce, the president of ABC Television. “You know, Fred, Barbara Walters is looking for some additional challenges,” Weiss told him. “She’s not too thrilled with staying on the Today show.” Before the two men parted that morning, the outlines of a deal had been sketched. “I don’t know who won the game,” Barbara quipped later, “but I do know that I was part of the score.”
ABC was willing to make the leap, in part because the network had little to lose. Roone Arledge was making a name for ABC Sports and Fred Silverman had been lured from CBS to head the entertainment division, which was boasting hits including Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. Good Morning America was beginning to gain ground on the Today show. But the news programs were a different story. They were running a distant third, the target of derision. “The joke used to be if you wanted to end the Vietnam War, put it on ABC and like all their programs, it would end quickly,” Barbara said. She called ABC “the schlock news network.”
ABC’s executives were struggling to figure out how to boost their ratings. In 1975, the nightly news on CBS had a 28 percent audience share and NBC had a 26 percent share; ABC trailed at 20 percent. William Sheehan, the president of ABC News, shook up the show’s staff, unveiled a graphics display device called Vidifont, and added a new economics correspondent. He also “conceded” to a TV columnist that “a female anchorwoman is not outside the realm of possibility.”
Fred Pierce, Sheehan’s boss, instantly saw the possibilities that would go with hiring Barbara, “a star personality with a lot of journalist credentials.” Her departure would presumably create problems for the rival Today show, too. Not to mention the bragging rights ABC would get for being the first network to name a woman as a co-anchor of the evening news.
On the Monday morning after the tennis game, Pierce called Sheehan, and the two men met that day. Sheehan saw the possibilities, too. He already had been pushing the news division to devote more coverage to celebrities, pop culture, social trends—the sort of lifestyle topics that had always been in Barbara’s wheelhouse. “People are interested in many things that are not intrinsically important,” Sheehan had written in an internal memo that was quickly leaked, raising howls of protest from the industry’s more traditional voices. He had underscored for emphasis his bottom line: “I want more stories dealing with the pop people. The fashionable people. The new fads. Bright ideas. Changing mores and moralities.”
Her million-dollar price tag seemed feasible because only half of it would be paid by the news division, the other half by the entertainment side for four hour-long specials she would host each year. “In truth it was a bargain for ABC,” Barbara insisted. One more thing: She had regretted not claiming an ownership stake in Not for Women Only. In 1969, she formed her own production company, Barwall Productions, something more familiar in the entertainment world than in journalism. She would retain a stake in her ABC specials and, later, in The View, a source of income and power in her dealings with the network. “If you’re going to work this hard, you want skin in the game,” she advised some of her friends. “You want equity.” That was surely a lesson learned from her father’s spectacular successes and setbacks.
Pierce briefed chairman of the board Leonard Goldenson and ABC president Elton Rule. They signed on, too. Within a day or two, all the voices that mattered at ABC were on board. All but one: Harry Reasoner.
Harry had the credentials of the classic anchor. He had been a reporter for The Minneapolis Times, then joined CBS News in New York and became one of the original correspondents on 60 Minutes. In 1970, he moved to ABC to co-anchor the evening news with Howard K. Smith. Harry had the deep voice and mane of graying hair the job was thought to demand; he was wry and adroit. But he also had a reputation for being lazy and a lunchtime drinker. “To tell you the truth, I don’t exactly like working,” he once acknowledged. That said, he had claimed the solo anchor chair once Smith left in 1975, and he had no interest in sharing it again. “He didn’t want to be paired with anybody, whether it was a man, a woman, or a talking duck,” the show’s producer, Robert Siegenthaler, said.
But especially not with a woman. And especially not with Barbara Walters.
At the end of the month, Barbara was in Los Angeles for the Academy Awards; ABC had just taken over broadcast rights from NBC. (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest swept the major categories that year.) Her agent, Lee Stevens, arranged a secret meeting for her in a private dining room at ABC’s Century City complex. In a sign of their seriousness and their respect, the network’s corporate heavyweights showed up: Goldenson and Rule and Pierce and Sheehan. The contrast could not have been starker with the lack of attention that the distracted NBC executives were showing her. NBC president Herbert Schlosser “never once took the time to meet with me,” she complained.
The ABC executives put on a full-court press, expressing none of the reservations NBC had about her ambitions. They were looking to expand the half-hour evening news to forty-five minutes or a full hour, they told her, which would give the program the space to include some of the longer interviews she favored. Once a month, she would moderate ABC’s Sunday morning interview show, Issues and Answers, a stodgy program but one that the old guard respected. She would host four specials a year and be featured in the network’s coverage of election night and other big news events.
She was flattered by the attention and the offer, especially as NBC dithered, but she wasn’t persuaded, not yet. NBC executives heard about the talks and scrambled, belatedly, to keep her. They offered to match the money and to sign a five-year contract, but they still wouldn’t give her the anchor’s job she wanted.
There was turmoil in her personal life, too. After a four-year separation from second husband Lee Guber, their divorce had just become final, on March 22, 1976. “Barbara Walters Sheds Mate No. 2” was the headline in the Los Angeles Times. One gossip columnist said “the television prima donna summarily dismissed him from their 13-year marriage.” More quietly, her two-year affair with Senator Edward Brooke had ended, too.
Barbara had a casual romance with John Diebold, a pioneering business executive, and a more serious one with Alan Greenspan. Then the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President Ford, the forty-nine-year-old bespectacled Greenspan had introduced himself by asking her to dance at a party in 1975 hosted by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. The very social New York media celebrity and the professorial Washington economist were an unlikely pair. “I escorted Barbara to lots of parties where I met people I otherwise would never have encountered,” recalled Greenspan, who began a nineteen-year tenure as chair of the Federal Reserve in 1987. “I usually thought the food was good but the conversation dull. They probably thought the same of me.”
At the time, she was also seeing Alan “Ace” Greenberg, an executive at The Bear Stearns Companies, Inc., who would become chairman and CEO of the investment bank. That led to some confusion at her apartment when one Alan or the other would call and leave a message with her housekeeper. Barbara would ask if “Alan” had spoken almost in a whisper (that would be Greenspan) or in a louder, jovial way (that would be Greenberg).
It was Greenspan who provided some reassurance she sought. After making back-of-the-envelope calculations, he told her that ABC could afford to pay the money they were promising.
Still, with the financial upheavals of her childhood never forgotten, she agonized over the decision, torn between the appeal of being a groundbreaker and the fear of being a flop. Was she repeating the mistakes of her father, risking a comfortable success for the draw of claiming even more? Then news of the negotiations leaked, tagging her with a label she would never lose, and one at odds with her desire to command more respect: million-dollar baby.
“ABC News Offers Barbara Walters $1 Million a Year,” the headline on the front page of The New York Times read. The story explained why it mattered. “The contest between ABC and NBC for Miss Walters’s services is significant in that it extends to the news realm of television the spectacular financial terms usually associated with entertainment stars.” Among journalists, the concern was that adopting the financial rewards of the entertainment world inevitably would mean adopting its values.
There was also this red flag: Reasoner acknowledged he initially threatened to quit when he heard about the proposal to team him with her. “Nothing personal about Barbara,” he said. “It’s just that I’d rather continue to do the newscast by myself.” He dismissed her credentials. “I was with her on Nixon’s China trip, but I never actually saw her work,” he told Newsweek. “All I know about her from that trip is that she rides a bus well.”
The next morning, once the Today show had gone off the air at 9 a.m., she called Lee Stevens with her decision. She was ready to jump.
NBC said she had been pushed.
“NBC valued Barbara’s service highly,” John Chancellor intoned that night on the Nightly News, using the past tense, “but the negotiations for a renewal of her contract involved a million dollars and other privileges, and this afternoon NBC pulled out of the negotiations, leaving her a clear path to ABC. We wish her luck in her new job.” His comments were a sign of the network’s pique. Had such sensitive information about the salary demands and job negotiations of a network colleague been revealed on an evening newscast before?
Off the air, the quotes NBC officials were dishing were even less friendly. “It appeared yesterday that Miss Walters’s departure from NBC might be effected on something less than amicable terms,” The New York Times noted in yet another front-page story, quoting an NBC spokesman as decrying the “circus atmosphere” around the negotiations and her various demands. Those were presumably the ones Chancellor alluded to as “other privileges” beyond a million-dollar salary.
“There were things that one would associate with a movie queen, not a journalist, and we had second thoughts,” the anonymous spokesman said.
Barbara fired back, saying the comments from “an uninformed, unidentified spokesman for NBC” were untrue. The decision to end negotiations had been hers, she said. The unnamed spokesman then retreated to higher ground. “It’s a new day,” he said. “We don’t want to get into it any more. We wish her luck.”
The million-dollar salary drew news stories, heated commentary, and the world’s attention.
“The line between the news business and show business has been erased forever,” wrote Charles B. Seib, the ombudsman at The Washington Post. “That’s entertainment money—up there with the likes of Johnny Carson and Catfish Hunter and the rock star of your choice. Tune in on the thrilling new soap opera, ‘Barbara Walters, Barbara Walters,’ soon to be seen on your local ABC outlet.” That was a riff on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a satirical soap opera of the day.
“Kobieta za 5 mlm dolarow” was the headline in Poland. There were stories in newspapers in Germany, France, Japan, and India. In an interview that aired on her second night on the evening news, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat teased her about it. “How do you like a million-dollars job?” he said as she smiled. “I must tell you quite frankly, you know the salary of my job. It is twelve thousand only—and I’m working day and night, Barbara!”
Reasoner also got a $100,000-a-year raise to match his new partner’s $500,000 salary from the news division. He acknowledged his concerns on the ABC Evening News. “Some of you may have seen speculation about this in the papers,” he said. “It’s had more attention than Catfish Hunter, and Barbara can’t even throw left-handed. [Actually, Catfish Hunter threw right-handed.] Many of the stories said that I had some reservations when the idea came up. If I did, they’ve been taken care of, and I welcome Barbara with no reservation.” He said that having a woman as co-anchor “may well be an idea whose time has come.”
His words sounded welcoming, but they had a double edge. Having a woman co-anchor “may” be an idea whose time has come, he had said, leaving open the possibility that maybe it hasn’t. His reference to Catfish Hunter, the major league pitcher who had been baseball’s first big-money free agent, was sly. The ballplayer’s name was a joke in a new hit movie, The Bad News Bears, released two weeks earlier. When a Little League coach, played by Walter Matthau, tried to recruit a pitching prospect played by Tatum O’Neal, the imperious girl made ridiculous demands—imported jeans, modeling school, ballet lessons—before she would agree to play. The coach demanded, “Who do you think you are, Catfish Hunter?”
Besides the moniker of “Million-Dollar Baby,” Barbara would soon gain another one of lasting fame.
On NBC’s Saturday Night Live, comedian Gilda Radner introduced herself as “Baba Wawa,” onstage to say farewell to NBC. “I don’t wike weaving. Please trust me; it’s not sowuh grapes, but wather that another network wecognizes in me a gweat talent for dewivewing wewevant news stories with crwstal cwarity to miwwions of Americans,” she declared, the speech quirk so exaggerated that the words were hard to understand. “It’s the onwy weason I’m weaving,” she said to laughter. “Weally.”
That comedic bit was introduced on April 24, 1976. The Baba Wawa character would appear dozens of times more on SNL over the four decades—four decades—that followed. Barbara was portrayed by Gilda Radner and Rachel Dratch and Cheri Oteri and others, the only consistency being an oversized wig and an inability to articulate “r’s.”
In public, Barbara laughed off the caricature, but in private she felt exposed and ridiculed over a speech impediment she had tried unsuccessfully to remedy. Others saw it as affirmation that she had entered the zeitgeist, though. “It’s an incredible compliment about her career to be parodied that many times, and by that many actors,” media analyst Brian Stelter told me. “Diane Sawyer hasn’t been parodied by SNL that many times, in case anyone’s keeping score.”
When Radner died of ovarian cancer at age forty-two, Barbara sent a sympathy note to her widower, Gene Wilder. She signed it “Baba Wawa.”