Before the Me to Movement and the Feminine Mystique: Part 6

Career Growth, and Wayward Daughters…

Barbara Walters in her office, as photographed by Lynn Gilbert in 1979, New York. Image is free to use…

1977:

In 1977, Barbara Walters interviewed Fidel Castro, which he signed and hung in her fifth avenue apartment, on what she called her wall of radicals.

Barbara experienced professional stress and personal loss during this time. She lost her father, Lou Walters, a few months earlier, in August 1977, at age eighty-one, to a heart attack. Her sad call from Miami came while she was having lunch with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner in New York. “I was heartsick but not surprised,” she said. After marrying a bon vivant in a Boston banquet hall fifty-seven years earlier, Dena was “emotionally prepared” for the death of her husband.

Following Lou’s death, Barbara interviewed Lucille Ball, an encounter that proved to be piercing for both of them. She ignored Gary Morton’s attempts to steer the conversation into less sensitive territory as she spoke about her celebrated marriage with Desi Arnaz. Then sixty-six, Lucy described her ex-husband as a high-stakes gambler, “a loser,” who “constantly sabotaged his success.” This description could be applied to Lou Walters as well.

Over the course of seven months, she has sat down with a string of world leaders, including Fidel Castro, Yasir Arafat, and now Begin and…