EXCLUSIVE:
Oprah Winfrey REVEALS The DEEP Personal REASON Behind Her Decision Not to Have Children – And It Involves Barbara Walters’ PAINFUL History With Her Daughter

Barbara Walters had a profound professional impact on Oprah Winfrey, who calls the interviewing legend her “mentor” in the new documentary “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything.”

As it turns out, Walters had a profound impact on Winfrey’s personal life, too. Winfrey reveals in the documentary that Walters played a part in her decision not to have children.

Walters was a trailblazing journalist who entered the news business at a time when few women were a part of it. She got her start on TODAY in the 1960s, but eventually landed a long-term spot on ABC’s news team, becoming a celebrity herself thanks to her insightful, often pointed, interviews.

Walters, who earned multiple Daytime Emmys for her work on TODAY and “The View,” married three different men over the course of her life. In 1968, she and her second husband, Lee Guber, adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, with whom she had a tempestuous relationship. Walters died in 2022 at the age of 93.

Walters’ life story in the ABC News Studios documentary, which is sprinkled throughout with new interviews from prominent news figures like Winfrey, Katie Couric, Connie Chung and Cynthia McFadden, is mainly told in her own words through old clips.

“I was in my 30s when Jackie was born,” Walters says. “My daughter’s a blessing. My world came together. I mean, I was already on the TODAY show, and I’d had three miscarriages, and now I had everything.”

“She was a mentor for me before she knew that she was a mentor,” Winfrey says in the film while describing watching Walters on television growing up.

Walters’ interviewing style inspired Winfrey, who explains she would look down at her question cards, and then up again at her subject to ask the next question, just like Walters.

Winfrey later reflects on Walters’ “charged, complex relationship” with Jacqueline and its influence on her.

“It’s one of the reasons why I never had children,” Winfrey says. “I remember her telling me once that ‘there’s nothing more fulfilling than having children, and you should really think about it.’ And I was like, ‘OK, but I’m looking at you. So, no.’”

Jacqueline struggled with her mother’s fame and ran away at one point when she was about 16. In old interview footage, Walters recalls having someone else pick up her daughter after learning where she ended up, and taking Jacqueline to an “emotional growth school,” where she remained for three years. She also says Jacqueline had a problem with pills.

“It’s important to say Jackie had a father, and Jackie had a governess,” McFadden, who is also adopted and conducted an interview in 2001 with Jacqueline at Walters’ request, says. “So it wasn’t that Jackie was left alone in a playpen. Barbara articulated many times that she had made mistakes as a mother. She had made choices for herself, for her work.”

Despite the struggle with work-life balance, Walters embraced being a mother from the beginning.

Footage from an interview she did in the 1970s with Dolly Parton, who also does not have kids, shows the singer asking during a break if Walters only has one child. Walters responds that her daughter is adopted and says, “For me, it was the best thing I ever did.”

Later in the documentary, Winfrey goes into greater depth about how focusing on her career was also a stumbling block to having a family, much like Walters.

“You are a pioneer in your field, and you are trying to break the mold for yourself and for women who are going to follow you, then something is going to have to give for that,” she explains. “And that is why I did not have children. I knew I could not do both well. Both are sacrifices: Sacrifice to do the work, and it’s also a sacrifice to be the mother and to say, ‘No, let somebody else have that.’

“And at no time have I ever heard a story, read a story, and based on what I know of Barbara Walters, at no time, has Barbara Walters ever said, ‘No, let someone else take that story.’ No.”

In fact, Walters took a big interview from Winfrey in the late 1990s.

Winfrey recalls having an agreement with Monica Lewinsky’s team for an interview after Lewinsky and President Bill Clinton’s scandal.

“And then Barbara swooped in,” Winfrey says, describing the various ABC platforms Walters could offer Lewinsky to share her story, whereas Winfrey just had her talk show.

“So, I didn’t like that,” Winfrey says.

“Because Barbara had been No. 1, she had been it, she had been the madam for so long that she saw that as her rightful place in the space,” she explains.

“And if there was something that deserved a special one-on-one interview, I think she felt that she was the one that was supposed to have it. And 9.9 times out of 10 she got it.”

SOUCE: TODAY