Oprah Says Barbara Walters’ Struggles With Motherhood Made Her Never Want Kids

Oprah Winfrey is opening up about the many ways her “mentor” Barbara Walters impacted her life, both personally and professionally.

In the documentary “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything,” due out later this month on Hulu, Winfrey recalls witnessing Walters’ “charged, complex relationship” with her daughter, Jacqueline Guber.

“It’s one of the reasons why I never had children,” Winfrey, who has been in a relationship with partner Stedman Graham since 1986, explains in the film. “I remember her telling me once that ‘there’s nothing more fulfilling than having children, and you should really think about it.’ And I was like, ‘OK, but I’m looking at you. So, no.’”

Walters, who died in 2022 at age 93, adopted her daughter with then-husband Lee Guber after several miscarriages. But as “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” shows, Walters had a difficult time balancing parenting with her high-profile career in television.

Growing up, Jacqueline Guber often butted heads with Walters, and experienced drug and alcohol addiction. As a teenager and young adult, her relationship with her famous mother often was strained.

In an interview with People published this week, former NBC correspondent Cynthia McFadden recalls Walters being “very regretful about her family life.”

“She couldn’t understand someone like Jackie, who wasn’t racing to the top. They were just so dispositionally and physically unlike each other,” McFadden explained. “It was a struggle. That’s not to say they didn’t love each other, but it wasn’t what she’d hoped for, and probably not what Jackie had hoped for either.”

In the documentary, Walters acknowledges that “people are more accepting” of working parents these days compared to when she was raising a young child.

“You can bring your kid to the office. In those days, if I had brought Jackie into the studio, it would be as if I had bought a dog who was not housebroken,” she said.

Though Jacqueline Guber mostly avoids the spotlight, she operated New Horizons for Young Women, a Maine-based therapy program for at-risk female teens, from 2001 to 2008.

In 2008, she told Glamour she and Walters “have come to appreciate each other’s quirks.”

“If my mom wasn’t my mom, I would still want to be her friend. That says a lot,” she said. “We believe 100% in each other, and I think that that’s what love is all about.”

Directed by Jackie Jesko, “Barbara Walters Tell Me Everything” premiered Thursday at New York’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Early reviews of the film have been positive. “It’s a documentary a lot like its subject,” Variety wrote, “sharp and inquiring in a playful way, and enthralled by fame, money, and power.”