“Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” is a documentary a lot like its subject. It’s sharp and inquiring in a playful way. It asks friendly questions but knows just when to toss in a tough one. It sizes up important people with clear-eyed worldly perception, but it’s also enthralled by the seductions of fame and money and power.
“Tell Me Everything” delivers the Barbara Walters story, in all its tasty fascination and significance (for the first 15 years of her television career, she was smashing glass ceilings with every new role she took), and it captures a great deal about Walters as a person because it refuses to be intimidated by how elusive she could be. On TV, she presented herself as a fighting mensch, someone who could disarm you with that sympathetic twinkle in her eye. Yet off camera she could be ruthless. She burned through romantic relationships as if they were seasonal shopping sprees, and one of her closest friends was the dreaded Roy Cohn. She was complicated. And so was the place she occupied in journalism.
For a while, the film is telling two stories at once: the chronicle of Walters’ rise in TV news, and the larger meaning it exerted because she was a woman. In 1961, when she joined NBC’s “Today Show,” she was brought on to cover “women’s stories” (we see her in one clip in a Playboy bunny outfit). While that in itself was historic, it was up to her to bust out of the leftover-1950s mentality.
In 1971, her big break came, ironically, when the new host of the “Today Show,” Frank McGee, insisted to the network that he be allowed to ask the first three questions of any guest. This outraged Walters, so she began to pursue the idea of doing interviews outside the studio. What no one, even Walters, could have guessed is that she would be creating her own journalistic art form.
As an interviewer, she was personal, relatable, honest, accessible, and penetrating. In her decorous way, she was revolutionary, because she went to places on a human level that the sternly responsible male TV interviewers, even the good ones, were trained not to. So though she was fighting a dozen sexist preconceptions, her gender sensibility actually gave her a huge advantage. She helped goose the ratings. And then something fluky happened. In 1974, Frank McGee succumbed to cancer at 52. It was in Walters’ contract that if McGee ever left the show, she would become co-host. She became the “Today Show’s” first female co-host on April 22, 1974.
But the male antipathy she ran into was extraordinary. McGee had tried to box her out, and when she was hired away by ABC to be America’s first female network news anchor, co-hosting the “ABC Evening News” with a headline salary of $1 million a year, her co-host, Harry Reasoner, treated her with chilly contempt. During tapings of the show, she was shunned by Reasoner and the crew. She called taking the job a “mistake.” But then Roone Arledge, who had turned ABC Sports into a one-network entertainment complex, was given the opportunity to do the same thing with the news division. Arledge rescued Walters. Her one-hour interview specials were about to become news of their own.
“Tell Her Everything” opens with a montage in which we see Walters pose one of her inimitable essential awkward interview questions to a variety of subjects: to Richard Nixon (“Are you sorry you didn’t burn the tapes?”), to Barbra Streisand (“Why didn’t you have your nose fixed?”), to Vladimir Putin (“Did you ever order anyone killed?”), to Fidel Castro (“Will you ever shave off that beard?” — a genius question since it’s really about what a bullshit artist he is), and to Courtney Love (“Ever do drugs in front of your child?” Love’s reply: “My God, what a question!”).
“Sitting down with Barbara Walters,” says Cynthia McFadden, “no one ever got out totally unscathed.” Andy Cohen describes how as an interview subject, you would be surrounded by flowers and delicate lighting, only to have Barbara hit you with that hardball question — which, in a way, was the question everyone had gathered around the TV to see. Oprah Winfrey, Connie Chung, and Bette Midler offer telling recollections of the subtle ways that Walters wielded her power. She produced great television, and you could argue that there was a moral dimension to it — that using highly strategic “Gotcha!” questions to reveal the human side of political and artistic figures colored in an essential dimension of our celebrity power culture. After watching Barbara Walters interview someone, whether they co-operated or pushed back or cried, you walked away with a more profound sense of who that person was. (Just seeing Castro laugh was an education.) So what could be wrong with that?
Walters received a lot of criticism, along the lines that she was trivializing the news, and “Tell Me Everything” tends to regard that criticism as one more behind-the-curve example of a sexist journalistic culture. But there’s a larger picture that the documentary never quite confronts. Something was happening that was bigger than Barbara Walters, though she (unwittingly) helped pave the way for it. And that was the metaphysical American transformation of news into entertainment.
In 1977, Walters arrived in the Middle East for the summit meeting of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minster Menachem Begin, and the documentary shows us how unhappy Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor were that she was there. Begin flirts with her in a one-on-one interview, and then we see Sadat, in a joint interview, rejecting the idea that Arab leaders would ever give up an inch of “occupied” territory — and Walters’ answer to that is not to challenge him, but to act like it’s all going to be fine. In the documentary, Katie Couric looks back at that moment and says, “Walter Cronkite later interviewed the two of them, but honestly if you’re not first, you’re not anything.” But is that really the case? Only if you’ve become part of the Peace Process as Entertainment.
“Tell Me Everything” gets into the corporate back alleys of Walters’ career, which heated up after Diane Sawyer was brought into ABC to co-host “Primetime.” The show was a direct challenge to Walters on “20/20,” and she reacted to her new rival by becoming obsessed with her. Walters thought of Sawyer as a “blonde goddess” and as the “perfect woman,” and her insecurities were massive. Their parallel careers became a contest of “gets.” Who could nail the hottest interview first? Walters won more than she lost, and the apotheosis of her journalism-as-ratings-competition mentality was her exclusive interview with Monica Lewinsky, which became the highest rated TV news interview of all time (70 million people watched). Walters threw a party in her Fifth Avenue apartment the night it aired. But this just sealed the way that our public life was becoming a circus of scandalous diversion.
The movie devotes its final 15 minutes to “The View,” a show that Walters largely created and that was, in its way, as pioneering as anything she’d ever done. The show brought the intimacy of women’s voices directly into America’s living rooms. It was gossipy, and irresistible, and revelatory. It extended Walters’ career (probably by 10 years), but more than that it was the fulfillment of her journalistic credo: to reveal how the personal and the political were hopelessly, eternally entwined. (That’s what Time magazine meant when it chose “The View” as the most important political show of its moment.) But “The View” worked as brilliantly as it did because it took place in a world that was post-transformation. Politics and entertainment were now one. They were conjoined. Our entertainer-in-chief hadn’t been elected yet, but the stage was set.
No responses yet