At ABC, Walters began her signature prime-time specials, featuring lengthy interviews with heads of state and major celebrities, generally within intimate settings. (Steve Martin spoofed this strategy when he showed her a shack that he pretended was his home.)
Walters might break the ice with a question like, “What is the biggest misconception about you?” Or — and this did happen — “What kind of tree are you?” This question was posed during an interview with Katharine Hepburn, and Walters later got mocked for asking. But she did so in response to Hepburn’s remark that she did, in fact, feel like a tree. The first of her specials, in 1976, featured President-elect Jimmy Carter and Barbra Streisand. Eventually, the programs became less political and more celebrity-driven. These high-profile conversations spawned multiple spinoffs, including nearly 30 years of highly rated Oscar-night programs, starting in 1981; the annual “10 Most Fascinating People” specials, starting in 1993; and a series of intermittent one-off interviews, such as with Patrick Swayze.
The interviews were often playful and enlivened by gimmicks — Walters rode a motorcycle with Sylvester Stallone, an elephant with Jimmy Stewart — but she also used her soft touch to ask hard questions. She confronted the shah of Iran about women’s ability to rule as his wife, the Western-educated empress Farah Pahlavi, sat next to him. She asked Robin Givens if her husband Mike Tyson, who sat next to her, had ever hit her. (Givens filed for divorce soon after the interview.) Walters also pressed Sean Connery to explain his justification for slapping women.
Walters extended her focus to more accidental celebrities, including accused and convicted criminals like Patricia Hearst, Claus Von Bülow and Erik and Lyle Menendez. (Some of these interviews were repackaged for her “American Scandals” crime series on Hulu.) Her most-watched interview, in terms of ratings, was her 1999 sit-down for the newsmagazine series “20/20” with Monica Lewinsky and had all the classic Walters ingredients: sex, scandal, politics, power, a pretty face and tears.
Some critics felt she had no sense of humor. But she was willing to poke fun at her reputation in appearances on “Saturday Night Live” and “The View.” As she once said on “Weekend Update,” “It is fine to make people smile, but the real money is in making them cry.”
Newsmagazine innovator
