Lifestyle
A New Book Will Reveal Barbara Walters’ Last Words
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It’s been eight months—almost to the day—since broadcast journalism trailblazer Barbara Walters died at age 93. Until today, her final resting place and last words were a closely-kept secret—but her biographer is ready to spill the beans, as part of a tease for an upcoming book on the reporter’s life and times.
USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page started interviewing Walters two years before her death, Axios reports, laying the groundwork for what would become The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. The book is “the definitive biography of the most successful female broadcaster of all time,” someone “whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules,” publisher Simon & Schuster says of the April, 2024 release.
Those demons included an eternal “fear of an impending catastrophe,” the publisher writes, as well as ongoing trauma related to “her mercurial and famous impresario father.” But her life wasn’t lived entirely under a cloud: as she told Vanity Fair in 2014, “I get up, and I do my day, and I do my work, and I see friends. But I don’t sit and think about how I see myself, or what my legacy is.”
That no-nonsense attitude was on full display when Walters departed the daytime show she founded, The View, in 2014. According to TV personality Sherri Shepherd, who was a co-host on The View at the time, she was there as Walters got into the elevator to leave the studio on her last day.
“The doors opened and she stepped into the elevator and I started crying,” Shepherd told the audience of her talk show, Sherri. “Y’all know I’m a crier. I started boohoo-ing. And as the elevator doors close, she [yells back] ‘What are you crying for?'”
But while that question captures one facet of Walters’ personality, it’s unlikely that that’s the phrase she wanted to be remembered for—and according to Page, Walters’ final words were far rosier. “No regrets – I had a great life,” is reportedly the last thing Walters said.
Those words are also written on the unassuming marker to Walters’ final resting place. When Walters died, her gravesite remained unannounced, Axios notes. But according to Page, “Barbara was buried, as she had wished, next to [family members] at Lakeside Memorial Park in Miami,” a 50-year-old funeral home and cemetery in South Florida. Walters’ gravesite is denoted only with a “small black and gold marker” in a “narrow marble frame,” with her name, years of birth and death, and those last words at the bottom.
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Eve Batey
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