Before her tragic passing in December 2022, Barbara Walters was known to many as a trailblazer in the broadcasting industry. Prior to retreating from the limelight in the early 2010s, Walters had built an illustrious career marked by multiple major milestones, including becoming the first woman to anchor a network evening news program, host a late-night talk show, and receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
However, to her 54-year-old adopted daughter, Jacqueline Guber, the famed media icon was just a mother. As with all parent-child relationships, Guber and Walters went through their fair share of ups and downs, particularly during the former’s teenage years. Here’s everything we know about Walters’ rather tumultuous, yet wholesome relationship with her daughter.
8 Jacqueline Guber Is Barbara Walters’ Only Child
Born in June 1968, Jacqueline Guber is Barbara Walters’ first and only child. Jacqueline was barely a year old when Walters and her second husband, Lee Guber, adopted her.
While the adoption was undoubtedly a momentous occasion for the couple, it received little to no publicity. In fact, Walters, who was a rising star on ABC's Today at the time, didn’t even take maternity leave. "I really didn’t want the biological mother to know that Jackie had been adopted by us,” she later explained to NBC News. “I just kept right on working.”
7 Juggling A Broadcasting Career And Parenting Proved An Arduous Task For Barbara Walters
At the time of Jacqueline’s adoption, Walter’s had just joined ABC’s Today, and was well on her way to becoming a preeminent newswoman. Unsurprisingly, juggling such a demanding career with parenting proved an incredibly arduous task.
“There was no having it all,” Walters would later admit to NBC News. “And there was not really a career for women. I never thought about it. I didn’t think, ‘Can I juggle both?’ I probably should have.”
6 Jacqueline Guber Had Trouble Fitting Into Her Mother’s World
Though not completely bereft of her mother’s affection, Jacqueline found herself struggling to fit into her mother’s world as she got older.
“I never felt like I fit into her world,” she told NBC News in 2002. “Because everybody else around me at that time when I was growing up wanted to get ahead and achieve and get ahead.”
5 Barbara Walters Had No Idea Her Daughter Had Started Slipping Away
Astoundingly, Barbara Walters remained oblivious of her daughter’s struggles for many years. The broadcasting icon would later admit to NBC News that Jacqueline’s decline was far less obvious that one would expect.
“I’m not saying that I shouldn’t have known. I should have known,” she said. “But I was much more innocent. This was my little girl. She seemed happy. ‘How’s everything?’ ‘Fine, Mommy.’”
4 Things Turned Dire When Jacqueline Guber Started Experimenting With Drugs And Running Away
Things took a potentially deadly turn when Jacqueline, then in her early teens, started experimenting with drugs and running away from home.
“I did marijuana. It was called crank then, but it’s now methamphetamine. Quaaludes were all over the place. Valium. And the drugs numbed all the other feelings,” she would later tell NBC News. “But it didn’t take away the issues that I had. They got bigger and bigger. I was more and more isolated from my mom’s world. I thought running would solve all my problems.”
3 Barbara Walters Enrolled Jacqueline In An Intervention Program
Things reached their ultimate boiling point one fateful summer, when Jacqueline ran away from home, hitchhiking 800 miles across the Southwest. After one agonizing month, Barbara Walters decided to take drastic action; forcefully enrolling Jacqueline in an intervention program in Idaho.
Although Jacqueline initially resented her mother’s action, she would later admit that she’d “have been dead” were it not for the timely intervention. Years after this ordeal, Jacqueline would establish her own intervention program, which offered much-needed support to troubled teenage girls before it closed down in 2008.
2 Barbara Walters Wished She’d Spent More Time With Jacqueline
During her 2014 special, Barbara Walters: Her Story TV, Walters admitted that her demanding career might have interfered with her parenting, and wished she’d spent more time with Jacqueline.
“On your deathbed, are you going to say, ‘I wish I spent more time in the office?’ No. You’ll say, ‘I wish I spent more time with my family,’ and I do feel that way,” she said. “I wish I had spent more time with my Jackie.”
1 What Is Jacqueline Guber Doing Now?
Unlike her mother, who seemed to carry an innate proclivity for the limelight, Jacqueline favors a more reclusive lifestyle. As such, not much is known about the 54-year-old’s private life.
"Jackie has found it difficult, all her life, because she wants to be anonymous, she just doesn’t like to be a celebrity,” Barbara Walters disclosed during her 2014 special. “She may be the only one in the world who doesn’t like to be a celebrity.”
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