MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: For decades, viewers counted on this TV journalist to bag the biggest interviews.
(SOUNDBITE OF MONTAGE)
BARBARA WALTERS: Good morning. This is "Today" in Hawaii.
This is "20/20."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: The Barbara Walters special.
WALTERS: Good evening, I'm Barbara Walters.
MARTIN: And if you were sitting across from her, you pretty much knew you were going to cry. Celebrities, world leaders - Barbara Walters always seemed to find the right question to crack the facade. It all started in the 1950s when she became one of the few women in television news, off screen or on. And she fought one bully after another to get that screen time. Walters retired in 2015 and died seven years later. Now she's the subject of a new documentary streaming on Hulu. It's called "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything." Jackie Jesko directed the film. She's a former ABC News producer.
JACKIE JESKO: She started out as a writer on NBC's "Today" show. And then slowly, I think just through persistence, which is sort of the name of her game, she eventually got the chance to appear on air in these little segments - as she would call them, fluffy women's pieces. But she had aspirations to do more serious things. So she kind of slowly but surely made her way on air more and more until the day when a man named Frank McGee came to anchor the "Today" show, and he was unhappy having her at the desk with him.
And so what he did was tell the boss of NBC News, you know, Barbara can't ask a question until I've asked three questions of whoever was being interviewed that day. And so Barbara, instead of, you know, throwing a tantrum about it, she decides she's going to pivot. And she starts going outside of the studio to people's homes, going to their turf and doing these in-depth interviews that actually became her brand.
MARTIN: You know, I think many people might be surprised to hear that because women, as television presenters, is kind of the norm now. I think people may forget just what a big deal it was. The network always paired her with a man, and the men never wanted her there.
JESKO: I mean, she was really, really ostracized. She describes coming over to ABC News, 1976. She gets a very historic opportunity to be the co-anchor of the evening news. And she was paired with a man named Harry Reasoner, who had no interest in being her co-anchor. I think he was very offended by that.
MARTIN: Well, he didn't want any co-anchor, to be fair.
JESKO: He didn't, but he had a lot of contempt for her (laughter).
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HARRY REASONER: The decision was to welcome you as I would any respected and competent colleague of any sex by noting that I've kept time on your stories and mine tonight. You owe me four minutes.
JESKO: He was particularly annoyed about her and not terribly nice to her, and their chemistry was awful on screen. And she describes that as the low point in her career. You know, she had made this big jump, and everybody was talking about how bad the show was, and she felt like her career might be over. And there is an alternate timeline in which maybe that would've been the end of her career, except that, you know, never underestimate Barbara's ability to turn something around.
MARTIN: One of the other things that was really fun about the film is that you have outtakes.
JESKO: Yes.
MARTIN: Meaning what came before the edited part and what came after the edited part.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BARBARA WALTERS: TELL ME EVERYTHING")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: What do I call you during this interview?
WALTERS: Barbara.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Barbara? Is that all right?
WALTERS: I hope so.
JESKO: ABC News studios gave us almost unfettered access to 50 years of television.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BARBARA WALTERS: TELL ME EVERYTHING")
WALTERS: Is everybody in position? You ready to be interrogated?
JESKO: In those thousands of hours were these little gems.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BARBARA WALTERS: TELL ME EVERYTHING")
WALTERS: Don't cut again unless you must.
JESKO: Just sort of these unguarded moments where she let it drop for a second, stopped being on TV Barbara Walters. And you can kind of get a glimpse of what she might've been like to be around.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BARBARA WALTERS: TELL ME EVERYTHING")
WALTERS: No, please, do not interrupt me. I don't care if I'm shiny. I care more about this interview.
MARTIN: What I think you show with these outtakes is that she knew how to control the moment, like, for example, with Gadhafi, when she's interviewing the former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BARBARA WALTERS: TELL ME EVERYTHING")
WALTERS: So I will ask questions political and about your life.
MARTIN: This is radio, so you can't see this. But she's wearing this, like, pink, Chanel-like suit. And some people thought, oh, my gosh, what is she wearing?
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BARBARA WALTERS: TELL ME EVERYTHING")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: And then the producer said, no, she knows exactly what she's doing. That was her battle armor. That was saying, I'm sophisticated, I'm culturally important. And when the cameras go on, I'm in charge in this tent, not you.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BARBARA WALTERS: TELL ME EVERYTHING")
WALTERS: In our country, we read that you are unstable. We read that you are mad.
MOAMMAR GADHAFI: (Laughter).
WALTERS: You know that those things have been printed. What do you say to that?
MARTIN: And I was wondering, because you're a producer yourself, like, when you saw that, what did you think?
JESKO: I mean, it was amazing. I can't imagine that she wasn't frightened on some level. You know, at that point in time, Moammar Gadhafi was pretty much the most feared man in the world, right? But I think she knew that she had to project power and confidence to get a man like that to engage with her.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "BARBARA WALTERS: TELL ME EVERYTHING")
WALTERS: Can you tell us about your childhood - what you hoped to be when you were a little boy?
JESKO: You can always see her holding this, like, thick stack of index cards in every one of her interviews. And these were questions that she herself meticulously prepared. I swear, every producer that worked for her has PTSD about these index cards and how many hundreds of them that she would write for every single interview and then shuffle them and change the order. Like, she was a perfectionist, for sure.
MARTIN: So full disclosure - I worked at ABC News. I never worked with her directly because we worked on different shows - those magazine shows that famously - where people didn't speak to each other in the elevator. But one of the things about it that I remember is that people were always passing along words of wisdom from Barbara, things like - you know, my hair was dark at the time, and I had a dark background for one of my standups. And one of the producers said to me, Barbara would never let that happen. Don't do that. People were basically passing on words of wisdom from her. And I found that fascinating. And one of the things that was interesting to me is, nobody ever passed on words of wisdom from any other anchor to me.
JESKO: (Laughter) I mean, that kind of makes sense to me. I feel like everybody sort of at ABC - like, she held a special status that I don't know if has been matched. But, you know, a lot of it maybe is just that she was a person who openly expressed her opinion. That's what a lot of people say about her. And I think that, you know, she just was funny. And so there would be things that she would say and that would really stick with people.
MARTIN: You've interviewed a lot of famous television anchors, especially women, for this. Did you think she was a girl's girl in the sense of - you know how we mean, like, a girl's girl, like somebody who really champions other women - wants other women to succeed?
JESKO: You know, it's interesting because she herself is pretty clear. She's like, you know, I wasn't waving a flag. I wasn't bursting through all of these glass ceilings for all women. She was doing it because she wanted it. But at the same time, I definitely think near the end of her life especially, she was just so immensely proud of the fact that, you know, she had blazed this trail and so many others had been able to follow her.
MARTIN: That's Jackie Jesko. She's directed the new documentary "Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything." It's streaming now on Hulu.
Jackie Jesko, thanks so much for talking with us.
JESKO: Thanks. It's been a pleasure.
(SOUNDBITE OF TYLER, THE CREATOR AND PHARRELL SONG, "IFHY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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