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Barbara Walters may be known for getting the scoop, but in the summer of 1985, there was some crucial information she could not find out on her own. The seasoned journalist got a call that her daughter Jacqueline had run away from the Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles, and she didn’t know where to look.
“For four frantic days, Barbara had no idea where her teenage daughter had gone,” Susan Page said in her upcoming biography, The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters.
So what did Babs do? The same thing any concerned parent would do. She hired a former Green Beret who specialized in picking up runaways. The teen was found in New Mexico and promptly placed in an intervention high school program in Idaho.
And we just can’t imagine having the resources and connections to hire a former member of the Army Special Forces, much less Walters having a teen who was that rebellious! It’s something Jacqueline totally owned, though.
“I was a runaway,” she told NBC in 2002, per Page Six. “I loved to run. I thought running would solve all my problems.”
According to Page, the late broadcaster had a strained relationship with her daughter for much of her life. And by the time Jacqueline was a teen, they were in a “downward spiral.” It’s something Walters partially attributes to the fact that Jacqueline — who she shared with husband Lee Guber — was adopted as a newborn.
“Barbara concluded that being adopted was an important factor behind her daughter’s travails,” Page alleges. “Still, Barbara never expressed regret about adopting Jackie, whatever their turmoil.”
While that may sound harsh, and while any kid can have “travails,” adopted children may indeed have behavioral issues — such as violent tantrums and/or sensory self-stimulation in times of either stress or excitement, oppositional behaviors, aggression, depression, and anxiety — per the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
“[Jacqueline was] 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,” Page writes.
Years after the runaway, in 2001, the mother and daughter had a relationship that was “no longer so fraught.” It was better enough that the two actually appeared together in an interview for an ABC special about adoption. And we’d say that’s a pretty impressive jump — from calling in Green Berets to agreeing to go before a green screen.
Before you go, check out these celebrities who have opened up about completing their families through adoption.
