The late Barbara Walters and her daughter Jackie had a sometimes rocky relationship. Things seemed to have smooth out as Jackie grew up. Jackie did not like having to live her life in the spotlight. She preferred to remain anonymous.
This is hard to do when your mom is a famous journalist. At one point in high school she ran away from home. Barbara Walters had to hire a Green Beret to help bring her home. Susan Page reveals this in her new book The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters. Barbara died on December 30, 2022.
Even though motherhood wasn’t always easy for Barbara, she was grateful for her daughter. “Barbara concluded that being adopted was an important factor behind her daughter’s travails,” Susan wrote in her biography. “Still, Barbara never expressed regret about adopting Jackie, whatever their turmoil.”
Barbara was married to Robert Henry Katz from 1955 to 1957. She married Lee Guber in 1963 and wanted to start a family. She suffered a couple of miscarriages. By 1968 she was exploring the possibility of adoption.
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Lawyer Roy Cohn, one of Barbara’s ex-boyfriends, helped her find a baby girl. Lee and Barbara got to take her home four days after she was born. They named her Jacqueline Dena Guber.
Barbara was a career-focused mother. “I took her home on a Friday, and I went to the office on Monday,” she stated. Barbara and Lee divorced in 1967, when Jackie was 3 years old.
Barbara and Jackie struggled to connect. Barbara “would be perplexed and disappointed that she didn’t share her passions for the city, for society and fashion, for whatever news was breaking and whatever newsmaker was breaking it,” Susan explained. Jackie attended The Dalton School in New York, but was always an outsider at the elite prep school.
Things didn’t get better when Jackie became a teen. The mom and daughter pair “had been at odds for years, their relationship was in a downward spiral,” Susan recalled. Jackie had gotten into some bad habits “drinking booze, popping Quaaludes, and smoking pot. At thirteen, she would sneak out of the apartment in fishnet stockings and a miniskirt to party at Studio 54 and return home at four in the morning.”
Things came to a head in 1985 when Jackie was a high school student studying in Los Angeles at Parsons School of Design. She ran away with a friend. “For four frantic days, Barbara had no idea where her teenage daughter had gone,” Susan explained.
Barbara finally got word her daughter was in New Mexico. She sent a former Green Beret to pick her up. She then got Jackie into a special program for troubled teens in Idaho. Jackie went on to graduate high school with the program’s help.
“I was a runaway,” Jackie stated in an interview with NBC in 2002. “I loved to run. I thought running would solve all my problems.”
Thankfully, Jackie and Barbara were able to come to a better understanding of each other as Jackie got older. These days Jackie lives outside of the spotlight, which is how she always wanted things to be.
“Jackie has found it difficult all her life because she wants to be anonymous, she just doesn’t like to be a celebrity,” Barbara stated in 2014. “She may be the only one in the world who doesn’t like to be a celebrity.”
