Afrigather Barbara Walters had such a tumultuous relationship together with her adopted daughter Jacqueline that, at one level, the legendary journalist employed a former Inexperienced Beret to trace down the lady after she ran away in highschool.
“Barbara concluded that being adopted was an essential issue behind her daughter’s travails,” writes Susan Web page in her upcoming biography, “The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters.” “Nonetheless, Barbara by no means expressed remorse about adopting Jackie, no matter their turmoil.”
In 1968, the “At this time” present alum was married to her second husband Lee Guber and was desperate to have a baby after struggling a few miscarriages.
Walters’s longtime pal, notorious legal professional Roy Cohn, discovered a child lady for them to undertake they usually had been over the moon, accumulating her 4 days after her beginning. However, the bold newswoman didn’t let motherhood maintain her from the job.
“I took her house on a Friday, and I went to the workplace on Monday,” Walters later mentioned.
Walters and Guber break up after 9 years of marriage when Jackie was simply three.
Strings had been pulled to get Jacqueline into Dalton, the elite non-public faculty on the Higher East Aspect. However, as Jackie grew older, Walters “could be perplexed and dissatisfied that she didn’t share her passions for town, for society and trend, for no matter information was breaking and no matter newsmaker was breaking it,” Web page writes.
And, Dalton was tough for the teen.
Jacqueline was an “detached pupil” and “had few mates” in line with the brand new guide.
“She towered over the opposite children in her class, pushing six toes tall when she was twelve years outdated, making her really feel much more like a misfit,” writes Web page. “She would host sleepovers at her residence however hardly ever be invited again to different women’ properties.”
Jane Pauley as soon as remarked that: “If Barbara is couture, Jackie is fleece.”
By the point Jacqueline was a teen, she and her mom “had been at odds for years, their relationship was in a downward spiral,” Pages writes.
Jacqueline was performing out, “ingesting booze, popping Quaaludes, and smoking pot … At 13, she would sneak out of the residence in fishnet stockings and a miniskirt to get together at Studio 54 and return house at 4 within the morning.”
She left or was compelled out of Dalton after which dispatched to boarding faculties for troubled teenagers from rich households. She acquired expelled from a faculty in Connecticut for being off-campus.
Then, in the summertime of 1985, Walters enrolled her daughter in a residential program for highschool college students on the Parsons College of Design in Los Angeles.
Two weeks later, Walters acquired a name that Jacqueline had disappeared. She had run away with a good friend she had made in Connecticut.
“For 4 frantic days, Barbara had no concept the place her teenage daughter had gone,” Web page writes.
“I used to be a runaway,” Jacqueline informed NBC in 2002. “I beloved to run. I believed working would resolve all my issues.”
Ultimately, somebody contacted Walters to inform her Jacqueline was secure in New Mexico. They spoke and the “20/20” star despatched a former Inexperienced Beret, who specialised in choosing up runways, to gather her daughter, who was then positioned in an intervention program in Idaho.
Jacqueline, who didn’t reply to a request for remark, finally earned her highschool diploma within the Idaho program. She then moved to Portland, Oregon, and enrolled at a neighborhood school however by no means ended up taking any courses.
Ultimately, she moved to Maine, and, in 2001 with Walters’ assist, purchased 308 acres of fields in a rural space. There, she opened a small residential program for “at-risk women, women with challenges like those who she had confronted.”
By that point, she and her mother had smoothed issues over sufficient that the 2 of them appeared in a joint interview for an ABC particular about adoption.
“The connection was not so fraught,” writes Web page.
Jaqueline’s program enrolled greater than 300 women earlier than closing in 2008.
She married and divorced twice, and, in 2013, was charged with driving below the affect in Florida.
Since her mom’s passing in 2022, Jacqueline has stayed out of the highlight, which, seemingly is what she needed all alongside.
“Jackie has discovered it tough all her life as a result of she desires to be nameless, she simply doesn’t wish to be a celeb,” Walters mentioned in her 2014 retirement particular. “She will be the just one on the planet who doesn’t wish to be a celeb.”
