Barbara Walters' success was fueled by personal struggles, documentary director says

By Katie Kindelan

Barbara Walters had a legendary 50-year broadcast career fueled in large part by the private struggles she faced behind the scenes, according to the director of a new documentary on her life.

In the documentary, "Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything," the late journalist herself describes the struggles her family faced, particularly her father, Lou Walters, a nightclub impresario who owned the Latin Quarter, a club in New York City's Times Square.

"My mother had no means of having a livelihood and my nightmare was that my father was going to lose it all," Barbara Walters, who died in 2022 at the age of 93, says in archival footage shown in the documentary. "He was a gambler by nature. He gambled on cards, and eventually he gambled on the Latin Quarter. And after years of success, he had nothing, nothing."

She continued, "My father was in great despair, and he attempted suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills. I was in my 20s, and I had to support my whole family. I had to work at a time when many women of my generation were not working."

Barbara Walters' forced responsibility of having to provide for her family -- which included an older sister with a disability -- was a pressure that led her to great professional success, according to Jackie Jesko, who directed "Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything."

"Her dad goes riches to rags story, and then Barbara -- and this is at a time few women worked at all -- she becomes the breadwinner for the family, and I think that pressure really propels her for the rest of her life," Jesko said Wednesday on "Good Morning America."

Jesko said she had 50 years of archival footage of Barbara Walters to draw from for the documentary, which begins streaming June 23 on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+.

To begin to tell the story of the life of the trailblazing journalist, Jesko said she looked to Barbara Walters' own memoir, "Audition," as a blueprint.

"Her own book, 'Audition,' was kind of our guide. I wanted to know what was important to her. What were the career highlights that really stood out to her?" Jesko said. "That was really, really helpful."

Barbara Walters joined ABC News in 1976, becoming the first female anchor on an evening news program. Three years later, she became a co-host of "20/20," and in 1997, she launched "The View."

In a career that spanned five decades, Walters won 12 Emmy Awards, 11 of those while at ABC News.

She made her final appearance as a co-host of "The View" in 2014, but remained an executive producer of the show and continued to do some interviews and specials for ABC News.

The Walt Disney Co. is the parent company of ABC News and Hulu.