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Barbara Walters Has Been Married 4 Times to 3 Different Men — What to Know About Her Ex-Husbands
Barbara Walters has had a stellar career as a journalist and as a television host, with her career spanning her work as a 20/20 anchor all the way to creating and becoming a cohost of The View.
However, one shortcoming she has expressed was finding a lasting marriage. “I don’t think that I was very good at marriage,” Barbara told ABC News in 2014. “It may be that my career was just too important. It may have been that I was a difficult person to be married to, and I just seem to be better alone. I’m not lonely, I’m alone.”
The award-winning journalist first tied the knot in 1955 to Navy veteran and business executive Robert Henry Katz. So, what happened to Barbara Walters’ first marriage? Following their wedding at the Plaza Hotel when Barbara was just 22, the pair called it quits two years later in 1957.
Later in 1963, Barbara married for a second time, walking down the aisle with Broadway producer Lee Guber. Together, they adopted their daughter Jackie in 1968.
In a 2002 joint interview with Barbara and Jackie, Jackie, who has sought a life of privacy, told NBC News of the sweet way her mom framed her adoption: “She used to say that some mothers have babies from their tummies, and some have it from their heart. And you came from my heart.”
While Jackie struggled with addiction and even ran away from home for a month, she eventually sought treatment through an “intervention program” in Idaho.
As for Barbara and Lee, the former couple split up and divorced in 1976 and Lee later died in 1988.
Barbara’s last husband she was legally married to walked down the aisle with her not once, but twice. Lorimar CEO Merv Adelson and Barbara were wed from 1981 to 1984 and then again from 1986 to 1992.
Adelson eventually saw 90 percent of his enormous wealth evaporate and by his later years, was living in a 500-square-foot apartment in Santa Monica.
“He was a kind, funny, thoughtful man,” Barbara, who divorced him in 1992, told Vanity Fair in 2013, two years before his death. “Would things have worked out differently for Merv if we had stayed together? I don’t know. Probably not … I have no regrets.”
In addition to her four marriages, Barbara dated Alan Greenspan and John Warner and claimed to have had an affair with Senator Edward Brooke, who died in 2015, in the ’70s.
