Pioneering TV journalist Barbara Walters (1929-2022) was best known for her deep-dive interviews with famous people. In the tip-top The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, biographer Susan Page takes a Walters-esque approach to her subject. As a TV newsmagazine might distill Page's inquiry, "What made Barbara Walters tick?"
The answer is, in large part, unresolved childhood issues. Walters was the daughter of a New York-famous nightclub impresario and a dissatisfied mother, whose life revolved around Walters's developmentally disabled older sister. Walters was a lonely kid and a put-upon adult, tasked with bailing her father out of financial jams and covering up his attempted suicide. A "connoisseur of complicated men," as Page puts it, Walters married and divorced three times while breaking barriers: she was the first woman to co-host a network morning show and the first woman to co-host an evening news show. To the dismay of some of her colleagues, Walters--her father's daughter--thought nothing of fusing serious journalism with showbiz razzle-dazzle.
Throughout The Rulebreaker, Walters comes across as sympathetic if not especially principled; according to Page, "When it came to imperatives about telling the truth, she would have a show business perspective, not a journalistic one." Page, who has also authored biographies of Barbara Bush and Nancy Pelosi, scored more than a hundred interviews for this book, including with Walters's nemesis, fellow TV journalist Diane Sawyer. The chapter devoted to their rivalry is, like a peak-ratings-period Barbara Walters interview, not to be missed. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer