The Rulebreaker
The Life and Times of Barbara Walters
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- £15.99
Publisher Description
A “smart, juicy, deeply reported” (Katie Couric) biography of the most successful female broadcaster of all time—Barbara Walters—a woman whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules and finally gave women a permanent place on the air, written by bestselling author Susan Page.
Barbara Walters was a force from the time TV was exploding on the American scene in the 1960s to its waning dominance in a new world of competition from streaming services and social media half a century later. She was not just a groundbreaker for women (Oprah announced when she was seventeen that she wanted to be Barbara Walters), but also expanded the big TV interview and then dominated the genre. By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history. Then at sixty-seven, past the age of many female broadcasters found themselves involuntarily retired, she pioneered a new form of talk TV called The View. She is on the short list of those who have left the biggest imprints on television news and on our culture, male or female. So, who was the woman behind the legacy?
In The Rulebreaker, Susan Page conducts 150 interviews and extensive archival research to discover that Walters was driven to keep herself and her family afloat after her mercurial and famous impresario father attempted suicide. But she never lost the fear of an impending catastrophe, which is what led her to ask for things no woman had ever asked for before, to ignore the rules of misogynistic culture, to outcompete her most ferocious competitors, and to protect her complicated marriages and love life from scrutiny.
Page breaks news on every front—from the daring things Walters did to become the woman who reinvented the TV interview to the secrets she kept until her heath. This is the “stunning” (Norah O’Donnell), “brilliantly written” (Andrea Mitchell) account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
When Barbara Walters became the first TV journalist to be paid a million-dollar salary, that triumph came tainted with sexism—the issue at the heart of this eye-opening biography. Veteran political journalist Susan Page chronicles Walters’ career at the forefront of American journalism, from a childhood overshadowed by death to her struggles with media boys’ clubs to her landmark interviews with everyone from Monica Lewinsky to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Page is careful to give a balanced look at Walters that celebrates her achievements without glossing over her problematic moments (like an interview that focused on Brooke Shields’ body when the actress was just 15). Page’s meticulous research takes her beyond simply recounting Walters’ life; through more than 100 interviews with everyone from Walters’ family to her workplace rivals, she also manages to capture Walters’ take on everything from feminism to Fidel Castro. If you want to know the story of a woman who smashed the media industry’s glass ceiling, The Rulebreaker’s unvarnished account is the real deal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Page (Madam Speaker), the Washington Bureau chief of USA Today, presents an authoritative biography of the broadcast news legend, who died in 2022. Offering astute psychological insight into Walters, Page credits the nonstop hustle her father displayed as a booking agent with stoking his daughter's ambition but contends his frequent business failures left her with the sense that success is fleeting. Page pays careful attention to the relentless sexism Walters endured throughout her career, noting that her boss at CBS's The Morning Show hired her as a writer in 1955 because, in his words, "she had a darling ass," and that journalist Frank McGee only agreed to join Walters as cohost of NBC's Today show in 1971 under the condition that he always speak first when interviewing guests. While Page rightly lauds Walters's trailblazing accomplishments, she's clear-eyed about her subject's shortcomings, arguing that Walters sometimes asked inappropriate questions (as when she tried to out Ricky Martin as gay during a 2000 interview) and regarded women colleagues with ambivalence (Page suggests Walters was "resentful and dismissive of some of the women who followed her" and appeared to side with Donald Trump during his public spat with Walters's View cohost Rosie O'Donnell in 2008). Incisive and evenhanded, this is a triumph.
