The late Barbara Walters reflects on her secret romance with U.S. Senator Edward Brooke in archival footage featured in the ABC documentary Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, out today.
The legendary TV host had a brief relationship in the 1970s with Brooke, who was the first Black person voted into the U.S. Senate.
During that romance, the Republican senator, who represented Massachusetts, was still married to his wife, Remigia Ferrari-Scacco.
However, according to Walters, Brooke was in an unhappy marriage and he had to keep their affair private, for the sake of his and the TV host’s careers.
“It was a very different time. Had this become public, it would have been something that a lot of people would not have understood,” she said in the unaired interview taken from ABC’s extensive archives. “It had to be kept secret.”
“He had a bad marriage but I felt that when it began to become public, it hurt his chances for reelection, and he was a very good senator,” Walters added.
In the documentary, Walters’s friend, Cindy Adams, expressed how the broadcast journalist’s peers reacted to the relationship.
“We all said, ‘Barbara, what are you doing? This is not quite right,’” he recalls. “She goes, ‘I know, but he’s so exciting and he’s so great.’”
The affair came after Walters had separated from her second husband, Lee Guber, who was the father of her only child, Jacqueline. Although it’s unclear how long the relationship went on for, Walters and Brooke split in 1978, right before the politician lost the bid for his third term as Senator.
Brooke got divorced in 1979 and later remarried.
Walters publicly discussed the affair in 2008, which she wrote about in her memoir, Audition. She also appeared for an interview with Oprah Winfrey leading up to the release of the book, and was asked if she was in love with the former senator, who died in 2015.
“I was certainly — I don't know — I was certainly infatuated,” she told Winfrey. “I was certainly involved. He was exciting. He was brilliant. It was exciting times in Washington.”
Walters was married four times, first to Robert Henry Katz from 1955 to 1957. She finalized her divorce from Guber in 1976, after 13 years of marriage. She split from her third husband, Merv Adelson, in 1984, after three years of marriage.
While Walters and Adelson reconciled and got remarried in 1986, they divorced again in 1992.
In other archival footage in Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything, Walters confessed how difficult marriage was for her amid her busy career.
“I don’t think that I was very good at marriage. It may be that my career was just too important,” the former 20/20 anchor said. “I may have been that I was a difficult person to be married to and I wasn’t willing, perhaps, to give that much.”
She also acknowledged that she was someone who put her career first and wasn’t necessarily focused on finding her match.
“When I was in my 20s and 30s, when I should have been dating, I was working day and night,” she said. “I didn’t have those kinds of years. I didn’t have those years until I was in my 30s and 40s. Mine was a very delayed romantic period.
Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything includes audio from Walters’s early interviews. She passed away in 2022 at the age of 93. The documentary is out now on Hulu.
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