Alex Arger
Barbara Walters was a cultural fixture, TV icon
Barbara Walters was a heroic presence on TV, leading the way for women in news and placing the world's most prominent people in front of her audience.
LEARN MOREPosted: 8:28 p.m. EDT Sep 1, 2023
The last words Barbara Walters ever spoke have now been revealed, eight months after the legendary broadcast journalist's death.
She said, "No regrets — I had a great life," and the sentiment lives forever etched into her gravestone, according to author and journalist Susan Page, who spoke with Axios.
Page had been working on "The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters" for two years before the icon passed away in December at 93 years old. Set to come out next April, the biography reveals previously unknown details about the legend and her passing.
Those details include where she was buried. Per Axios, Page's book reveals the former ABC News interviewer rests next to family members at Lakeside Memorial Park in Miami, with a black-and-gold headstone in a marble frame forever memorializing her final words.
This "definitive biography," as described by publisher Simon & Schuster, was suggested as a project for Page by her agent and ABC's former longtime D.C. bureau chief, Robin Sproul. They described Walters "as a consequential, complicated figure."
The sentiment is shared by the publisher, which calls Walters "a woman whose personal demons fueled an ambition that broke all the rules and finally gave women a permanent place on the air."
Walters joined ABC News in 1976 as the first female network news anchor for an evening news program. A few years later, she became co-host of "20/20" and gained further notoriety for her interviewing skills and broadcast presence. Then in 1997 at the age of 67, she launched "The View," which she appeared on until her retirement eight years before her death.
"By the end of her career, she had interviewed more of the famous and infamous, from presidents to movie stars to criminals to despots, than any other journalist in history," said Simon & Schuster.
"The Rulebreaker" is the result of 150 interviews and research into what drove Walters to keep pushing for success amid family tragedy and a "fear of an impending catastrophe," the publisher said. It calls Page's work "the eye-opening account of the woman who knew she had to break all the rules so she could break all the rules about what viewers deserved to know."
