33 THE BARBARA WALTERS INTERVIEW

Barbara Walters didn’t invent the TV newsmaker interview, the most intimate of portraits on the biggest of platforms. Edward R. Murrow pioneered them, hosting Person to Person on CBS in the 1950s with an eclectic mix of guests from Washington and Hollywood who sat in their living rooms and chatted with him at a studio in New York. But it was Barbara who nurtured, expanded, perfected, promoted, and finally defined the form, the conversation-on-camera with headliners who were trying to make a splash, stage a comeback, promote a movie, or, occasionally, influence a jury.

Everyone understood what “the Barbara Walters interview” meant and the cachet it carried, even her rivals. “Nobody calls it the ‘Peter Jennings interview,’ ” admitted Peter Jennings, the ABC anchor who occasionally viewed Barbara and her work with a certain disdain. When one of her interviews was over, “I always had the sense that she squeezed the sponge dry,” said Chris Wallace, who admired her as “a star and an icon, a legend” when he was a rising journalist at ABC before working at Fox News and CNN. “One could argue about the order of the questions or the framing of the questions, but I always felt that when she was doing one of those big newsmaker or celebrity interviews, she got everything out of them.”

Years later, that would seem like a relic from another era. The advent of social media and online streaming meant politicians like Donald Trump and entertainers like Taylor Swift no longer needed an interlocutor to connect with the audiences they wanted to reach. But in her day, Barbara persuaded the powerful, the celebrated, and the notorious to sit down with her. Then she commanded huge ratings as she subjected them to her distinctive inquisition.

If Mike Wallace at CBS (the father of Chris Wallace) was the generation’s interviewer-as-bad-cop, aggressive and confrontational, Barbara was the interviewer-as-Jewish-mother, sympathetic but probing enough to make you talk about the places where it hurt. “Almost single-handedly, Barbara Walters turned TV interviewing into the weepily empathetic kudzu that has swamped broadcast journalism,” Vanity Fair wrote in 2001, the sort of backhanded compliment often aimed her way. “Weepily empathetic kudzu” doesn’t sound like praise. On the other hand, she did succeed in reshaping some of the broadcast industry’s fundamentals in her image.

At her best, she revealed the core of those she profiled, exposing aspects of them that hadn’t been fully seen or understood before. She cared more about people than policy, more about the feelings and motivations of the powerful than their ten-point plans. “She is a reporter, and she reports what you are like,” said Richard Wald, a broadcast executive who worked with her at NBC and at ABC. Her subjects understood that, he told me. “Nobody ever complained to me in the two networks we worked together in that she drew a false picture of them.”

How did she do it?

This is how.

1. THE “GET”

First, land the guest.

To the dismay of some in the business, Barbara raised the art of the “get” to a contact sport. She was unencumbered by the rules, including those a string of bosses tried to impose. “Barbara didn’t deal with management or channels,” said Robin Sproul, the longtime Washington bureau chief for ABC, who would find herself surprised to learn Barbara was about to sit down with this president or that first lady. “There was no confronting Barbara on anything. She was going to do what she did.”

Barbara wrote letters on her personalized stationery, circulated at cocktail parties, hosted intimate lunches and dinners, and cultivated the parents and friends and lawyers of those she wanted to interview. She was interested not only in political leaders but also in actors and authors and those caught up accidentally in the headlines, as criminals or victims. The combinations could be dizzying. “The Shah blurs into Anwar el-Sadat and then turns into Mr. T,” a New York Times critic teased.

She also played the long game. If someone wouldn’t talk to her now, maybe they would later. Her campaign to interview Mark David Chapman, the man who killed John Lennon, took twelve years.

After Chapman pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to prison, she wrote to him each year in advance of the anniversary of the day, on December 8, 1980, when he stood outside The Dakota, Lennon’s apartment building on the Upper West Side, and shot the iconic musician in the back. He had never explained why he did it. Finally, in 1992, he agreed to talk with her. She met with him in a small room at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York for his first television interview.

The 20⁄20 program caused a furor, enraging some who accused her of exploiting a tragedy and others who said it was unconscionable to give a killer such a platform. But Chapman’s bizarre reverie to her was unquestionably newsworthy. Among other things, their exchange raised questions about whether the judge in the case should have allowed him to withdraw his lawyer’s insanity defense.

Barbara was indefatigable in her pursuit of a big interview.

She was in Jerusalem in March 1979 as President Jimmy Carter was negotiating the final sticking points of the Camp David accords. She had already scheduled an interview with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. That done, she flew to Cairo through Cyprus in hopes of getting Egyptian president Anwar Sadat on the fly, but it was almost 11 p.m. when she finally arrived, unannounced, at his residence on the Giza, overlooking the Nile.

When the security guard on duty declined to convey a message that she was there, Barbara wasn’t deterred. She threw pebbles at Sadat’s window, trying to raise his attention. “Why we weren’t arrested I can’t imagine,” she said later. When another guard finally agreed to take in a note from her, Sadat sent back word that she couldn’t interview him then but that he would sit down with her when he went to Washington soon to sign the final peace treaty—a trip that was news in itself. She immediately stood outside his house and recorded a stand-up reporting it.

Six months later, she was in Cuba to cover the Sixth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, a gathering of ninety-three countries that had proclaimed their interest in keeping distance from both the United States and the Soviet Union. Barbara became increasingly impatient with the lack of action; she began to fret that she was wasting her time in Havana. Then she looked around the huge convention center.

“We were seated in essentially the mezzanine, and down below in the orchestra was the King of Jordan,” said Ellen Rossen Westin, a producer from World News Tonight who was with her. Barbara pulled her stationery from her bag and, in recognition of her generally indecipherable handwriting, dictated a letter to Ellen. Barbara had interviewed King Hussein and the American-born Queen Noor a year earlier at their palace in Jordan.

“Dear Your Majesty,” Barbara began. “I’m seated in the balcony and I have on a red scarf, and I’d like to talk to you. Wave if you can see me.” A few minutes passed as a summit staffer was given the letter to deliver. “Up pops the King of Jordan and suddenly he’s waving to Barbara in the balcony,” Ellen told me. “And of course she got the interview.”

And, of course, she got on the air.

2. THE CARDS

Then, prepare the questions.

She called it her homework. “I do so much homework, I know more about the person than he or she does about himself,” she said, describing the research amassed by her staff. “Then, I write—I can write fifty or a hundred questions, on little three-by-five cards. I put them in order. Then I throw some away. Then I put others in. I can spend hours, days changing the order of questions. But here’s the important thing: You’ve got to know your questions, so you can throw them all away, if you have to.” That is, if the interview took a surprising turn.

She would sit down in her office with her assistant and the producers to brainstorm. She would cast a wider net, too. “Before she’d do an interview, I don’t care if it was Henry Kissinger or Joe, the elevator operator, she would call everybody in New York City” to get ideas for questions, Av Westin, an executive producer at ABC, told me. What were Kissinger’s ideas? What did Joe want to know?

The wording would be revised until the cards were virtually unreadable; her longtime assistant Monica Caulfield would type a clean copy with the latest version to resume the process. Barbara would throw discards on the floor, though staffers would gather those cards for a reject file, just in case. The final versions would be typed on larger, five-by-eight-inch index cards. Before her second interview with Fidel Castro, she had more than two hundred cards in her deck, recalled ABC News president David Westin. “On the plane, we just kept going over it,” he told me. “In the hotel, we kept going over it, winnowing them down. Which ones are we going to ask? Can we combine these two questions?”

Her approach was different from some other top broadcast interviewers. Radio and TV host Larry King bragged that he didn’t prepare before interviews, that he didn’t want to have read the author’s book or to delve into the details of their story before his listeners did. “I never write down a question, ever,” Ted Koppel, the longtime anchor of ABC’s Nightline, told me. “To me, an interview is a conversation, and a conversation gains momentum based on the answers.” Otherwise, the risk is that an interviewer will be focused not on the answer being given but on the next questions they had prepared.

“It clearly works for some people,” he acknowledged. “It works for Barbara.”

For the broadcast, she wanted every interview to have a strong beginning, a tantalizing bit to use in promotion, and a memorable end. “A hooker, a teaser and a conclusion,” as she put it. Rick Klein, an ABC political director who helped her prepare for some interviews late in her career, likened her to the best point guards in professional basketball, the ones who seemed to have eyes in the back of their head and an ability to see the whole court. “She knew this question is going to be part of Act One; this question is going to be part of Act Two,” he told me. “She was moving these things around in her head, looking to upgrade, looking to make sure that they all fit.”

When the interview ended, she already had a sense of what she wanted the final edit to be—the result of her early training behind the scenes on the mechanics of television. “It was like bang, bang, bang through the whole thing,” said Rob Wallace, one of her senior producers. She would mark what to cut and what to feature with a clarity she lacked in her personal affairs. “She once joked to me… that this is what she knows how to do better than anything,” he recalled. She told him, “ ‘Not life, not how to handle life. I don’t know how to do that. This I know how to do.’ ”

In 2009, she was getting ready to interview Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor who had been John McCain’s running mate on the Republican ticket in 2008 and was now promoting her book about the experience. “She had a question in there that was, just, ‘Are you going to run for president?’ ” Klein said. “I was, like, look, she’s already said she’s not. You know how she’s going to answer.”

“That’s for the promo,” she replied—that is, for a clip released beforehand that would show Barbara asking the question but not Palin answering it. It would be a teaser. Indeed it was. “Here’s the big question,” Barbara was shown asking in an ad that teased the segment. “Do you ever want to be president of the United States?”

Only later, on the show, was Palin’s response shown. “That certainly isn’t on my radar screen right now,” she said, though she added that she couldn’t predict what might happen down the road. Palin’s answer wasn’t particularly newsworthy, but Barbara had succeeded in creating an expectant moment that just might draw in viewers.

Michael J. Satin, a white-collar defense lawyer in Washington, once dissected Barbara’s interview with Monica Lewinsky in the American Bar Association Journal as a case study in effective questioning, with lessons for attorneys in the courtroom. “It is this interview that lawyers should watch to learn how to conduct an effective direct examination,” he wrote. “[I]t is how Ms. Walters plans, structures, and executes the interview that merits attention.”

Barbara managed to be both empathetic and skeptical, he wrote—just like many of those who would be watching. When Monica said testifying before the grand jury about intimate details of her relationship with Clinton was “very, very violating,” Barbara shot back, “There is the question of why you offered so many intimate details to the prosecutor. I mean, why, for example, tell them about the cigar business?” Monica replied that the grand jury already knew that salacious anecdote from prior testimony by her friends, an explanation that enhanced her credibility. Their exchanges had “the appearance of a private conversation between two people,” Satin wrote, while the audience “is like a fly on the wall, observing the interaction.”

There was a less scholarly description of her technique that Barbara liked. Early on, Newsweek described her questions as “dumdum bullets swaddled in angora.” That is, seemingly cozy questions that hit their mark, then expanded on impact.

3. THE BIG QUESTION

Ask the question everyone wants answered.

“Why did you kill John Lennon?” she asked Mark David Chapman at the start.

“John Lennon fell into a very deep hole, a hole so deep inside of me that I thought by killing him I would acquire his fame,” he replied. He recalled “turning to Satan for the strength” to pull the trigger; once he had, the “movie stopped.”

“And with Satan, you exorcized Satan yourself?” she followed up, as matter-of-factly as if she was asking him to spell his middle name. It was not a question typed on one of her cards. “Tell me about that.”

Sitting face-to-face with someone and posing a question that has the potential to embarrass or enrage is harder than it looks. Barbara would agonize beforehand over the wording—typically making the question shorter and simpler and thus harder to dodge—and over its placement in the interview. She often asked it at the end, as the climax of the conversation, and sometimes at the start, as the ignition.

Her manner may have been soft—swaddled in angora, say—but she rarely shied from going where no one else would dare.

Barbara asked former first lady Mamie Eisenhower, in a roundabout way, about rumors that she drank too much. (The problem, Mamie replied, was that inner ear problems meant she “couldn’t walk a straight line and everybody thought I was inebriated.”) She posed the same question, more directly, to Russian president Boris Yeltsin; he denied the reports, too. She asked Chinese leader Jiang Zemin what had happened to the Tiananmen Square demonstrator known as “tank man.” “I think never killed,” he replied, though he didn’t deny the young protester, an icon of bravery and defiance, had been arrested.

When she interviewed ex-president Richard Nixon in 1980, she sparked headlines with the question she had saved for the end: Did he regret not burning the White House tapes that had sealed his fate, his resignation? Yes, he responded. “They were private conversations, subject to misinterpretation, as we have seen.” She asked Robin Givens if she was physically afraid of her husband, heavyweight champion Mike Tyson; she said was “very, very much afraid.” She asked actress Katharine Hepburn why her head visibly shook. The actress denied it was Parkinson’s disease, as many had assumed. She said it was instead a trait she inherited from her paternal grandfather, treatable by drinking enough whiskey.

In late 2001, Barbara sat down in the Kremlin with Vladimir Putin for his first interview with an American journalist since the September 11 terror attacks on the United States. The big question she wanted to ask the former KGB agent was so sensitive that she didn’t write it down for fear his spies might somehow manage to see her cards beforehand.

She waited until the end of the allotted time in case he took such offense that he walked out.

“Did you ever order anyone killed?” she asked him, through a translator.

“Nyet,” he replied, his face impassive, betraying neither offense nor any other emotion.

4. THE TEARS

Make them cry.

That was not her goal, she insisted, especially after it happened so often it became a cliché. There would be a moment in many of her interviews when tears would well in the eyes of the person she was interviewing, sometimes streaming down the cheeks. Some guests declared at the start she was not going to make them cry. That provided no guarantee that they wouldn’t eventually succumb.

The fact was that whatever prompted them to be newsworthy enough to be interviewed meant it was probably an emotional time. “She interviewed everyone at that moment, whatever that moment was for them, whether it was a success or a failure or a screwup,” said Betsy Shuller, who worked for Barbara’s production company, Barwall, which produced the Barbara Walters specials for ABC. “She had everyone at that moment.” They had agreed to an interview aware of “the intensity of talking to her.” They knew she would be asking personal questions.

What would most often prompt people to cry?

“I would ask questions about their childhood, relationship with their parents,” Barbara said. “I’d very often ask people about their father and get a more emotional answer than I do if I ask about mothers.” She could have been talking about herself; memories of her father struck the strongest emotional chord in her.

Patrick Swayze cried in a 1988 interview when he said he hoped he would have made his late father proud. “He thought crying was weak—Texas mentality,” the actor said as he brushed tears from his cheeks. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., the commander of forces in the First Gulf War, began to cry when talking about his father. Generals weep, too, he said. “Frankly, any man that doesn’t cry scares me a little bit,” he said. Goldie Hawn’s eyes filled with tears when she recalled advice from her father. “My dad used to say, ‘You start feeling too big for your britches, Goldie, just go stand out there and look at that ocean, and you won’t feel so big.’ ”

The personal question and the watery response became such a trope that it was used, to her surprise and delight, in an “interview” with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in 1991. The actors portraying the comic superheroes, clad in green plastic heads and bodysuits, were promoting the series’ second movie, The Secret of the Ooze, a commercial success though not a critical one. In their backstory, the Turtles had been taken in and reared by Master Splinter, a mutant rat who taught them martial arts.

“Do you know who your parents were?” she asked Donatello, purportedly the smartest of the turtles, named after the Italian sculptor and identifiable by his purple bandanna. She hadn’t been warned beforehand about what would happen next. He gasped, apparently overcome by emotion. Then a cascade of water began to spurt from his eyes, soaking her skirt and the set.

When she retired in 2014, she joked about her propensity to draw tears.

She joined a send-off on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, which through the years had parodied her voice, her name-dropping, her sappiest questions. On the “Weekend Update” segment, she offered faux anchor Cecily Strong some tips on interviewing celebrities. “It is fine to make people smile, but the real money is in making them cry!” she advised. “Nothing brings in the viewers like seeing a celebrity reduced to tears. You may think, ‘Aww, I’m feeling really bad for them,’ but all I’m thinking is, ‘Ka-ching!’ ”

5. THE MISSTEPS

Like every human enterprise, it didn’t always work.

For one thing, she could be too cozy with her subjects, and she occasionally pulled her punches. In 1976, First Lady Betty Ford seemed inebriated during a tour of the White House and a joint interview with her husband; Barbara deliberately didn’t air the audio that showed her slurring her words—journalistically, not a defensible decision. “If she had a drinking problem, I wasn’t going to be the one to expose her,” she said later, although of course that sort of revelation was the basis for her reputation and the underpinnings of journalism. Eventually Barbara conceded she had made a mistake. “If I were interviewing a first lady today, and she was obviously inebriated, I would certainly air it,” she said.

Sometimes the people she was interviewing refused to engage, despite her best efforts and the most carefully prepared questions. Warren Beatty was her least favorite interview; his responses were close to monosyllabic. She cited Al Gore, too; he resisted any efforts to talk about the disputed presidential election he had won-but-lost, the reason she was interested in interviewing him. Others who seemed tantalizing in advance turned out not to have much to say. “It gets harder and harder to interview the twenty-one-year-old star whose most meaningful experience was winning a surfing contest,” she said.

Then there was the tree question.

In fairness, it wasn’t one she had planned to ask, written on her cards. It was a follow-up to a comment Katharine Hepburn made. Asked how she had become a legend, the actress said, “I’m like a tree.” Barbara followed up with a question she came to regret: “What kind of tree are you?” The answer would be forgotten (an oak, Hepburn said) but the question would be forever remembered, and ridiculed.

Barbara had only herself to blame for another comment that became ammunition for hecklers. A month after the 1976 election, she went to Plains, Georgia, to interview President-elect Jimmy Carter and Rosalynn Carter in their hometown. During the interview, she asked, “Do you sleep in a double bed or twin beds?” an odd query that might have attracted more commentary if she hadn’t closed the interview with an earnest, out-of-nowhere plea that prompted even more derision. (For the record, Carter said a double bed.)

“Be wise with us, Governor,” she intoned solemnly. “Be good to us.”

“I’ll try,” he responded.

The criticism from her journalistic colleagues was brutal. “It is as if Mr. Carter had just become Louis XIV and, without Pope Barbara’s admonition, he might be dumb with us and mean to us,” Morley Safer of CBS raged in his radio commentary. Later, she admitted it had been an inexplicable lapse of judgment. “How dare I say something so corny, so personal, and, of course, so female?” she said.

Sometimes the misstep wasn’t that her questions were too soft but that they were too intrusive, especially when she was interviewing young people. Under the standards of a later era, some would have created more furor than they did at the time.

When she was fifteen years old, actress Brooke Shields starred in a Calvin Klein TV commercial with a sultry slogan: “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.” Years later, as an adult, she said she had been so naive at the time that she hadn’t understood the erotic innuendo behind the ad. But in her interview Barbara underscored the sexual tease with questions surely inappropriate to ask a teenage girl. “Brooke, what are your measurements?” she said. Looking perplexed, Brooke replied, “Um, I’m five-ten and 120.” Then Barbara urged her to stand up and stood up next to her, comparing their heights and pivoting as if to compare their figures.

“And I thought, ‘This isn’t right. I don’t understand what this is,’ ” Brooke said years later. “But I just behaved and just smiled and felt, like, so taken advantage of in so many ways.” She called the exchange “practically criminal” and added, “It’s not journalism.”

When Barbara interviewed pop star Ricky Martin in 2000, his sexual orientation was the subject of speculation, although he wouldn’t come out of the closet for another decade. “You could stop these rumors,” she said. “You could say, ‘Yes, I am gay or no, I’m not.’ ” Martin looked stunned. “I just don’t feel like it,” he finally replied. Two decades later, the memory of that moment still made him uncomfortable. “When she dropped the question, I felt violated because I was just not ready to come out,” he said. “There’s a little PTSD with that.”

His refusal to answer the question prompted some to assume he was gay, and it hurt his career, Barbara said later. “When I think back on it now I feel it was an inappropriate question.” What she didn’t say: It was, however, the big question viewers wanted to hear.