NEED TO KNOW
Barbara Walters is most widely known for her tell-all interviews with celebrities and politicians, and for later creating the talk show The View, but in the new documentary, Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, friends and colleagues get candid about her rather exciting personal life.
“Barbara had her fill of romance,” her longtime friend, NY Post writer Cindy Adams, says in the film. “She thought a lot of guys were very sexy. She was interested in the possibility of sex. She liked it. She liked men.”
Despite never believing she was pretty, she had a wit and charisma that “should have been studied,” her friend, ABC News producer David Sloan, tells PEOPLE.
In the doc, directed by Jackie Jesko, viewers can see snippets of that charm at work, especially during interviews with former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, Fidel Castro, and Clint Eastwood, with whom she shared a very flirty interview.
“I could have been Mrs. Eastwood,” Walters once said of their chemistry.
Everet
She was also no stranger to marriage.
Walters had three ex-husbands and four divorces. She was married to her first husband, Robert Katz, from 1955 to 1957, before marrying theater producer Lee Guber from 1963 to 1976. The two shared a daughter, Jackie.
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She later married and divorced TV producer Merv Adelson twice between 1981 and 1992.
In the film, she can be heard fretting that she was “bad at marriage,” but her longtime friend, former NBC correspondent Cynthia McFadden, says that she was simply too busy to be able to give much to her personal relationships.
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“She used to give speeches and tell the crowd, ‘Women can have it all—just not all at the same time,'” McFadden says.
However, she did make time for romances with high-profile men like Virginia senator John Warner (after his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor), former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, and Massachusetts senator Edward W. Brooke III.
She and Brooke had to keep their relationship a secret because he was Black (interracial dating wasn’t widely accepted at the time) and married.
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“She was very attracted to power,” says editor and author Peter Gethers, who edited her 2008 autobiography Audition. “She was very attracted to money. She liked people she shouldn’t have liked because they were powerful,” he says.
In the movie, her Cindy Adams concurs: “She didn’t love you if you were nobody. You had to be somebody.”
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, which is produced by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Documentaries for ABC News Studios, begins streaming June 23 on Hulu.
