SIGN OFF: After 52 years on TV, Barbara Walters’ final year on “The View” will be a look back at her storied career. (
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Barbara Walters is calling it a day.
The most famous TV interviewer of all time is retiring next year, according to reports — ending a career that began when having more than one TV in the house was a sign of unheard-of wealth.
“Lots of rumors today,” Walters told The Post in an e-mail yesterday. “We are not addressing any of them.”
Asked if she planned to talk about retiring when the show returns Monday from its spring break, she replied: “No.”
But officials at the network who did not want to be identified confirmed that she was leaving “The View” in May 2014 — and that the rest of the season would be used to say goodbye.
Walters, now 83, has had significant health problems in recent years, including a heart-valve replacement operation in 2011 and a concussion when she fell on the marble steps of the British ambassador’s home the night before President Obama’s inauguration last January.
Complicated by a case of the chicken pox, the illness kept her out for six weeks.
Still, she came back to TV from both health crises and people who work with her said they doubted anything less than incapacity or death would keep her off the air.
“I don’t think anyone believed she would ever retire,” said one ABC insider. “I won’t believe it until she turns in her ABC ID and walks out the door.”
There was little doubt yesterday that, as one colleague put it, “it was totally her decision and her call.”
Walters has a lifetime contract with ABC, and likes to remind her bosses of that during contentious meetings.
And she shares 50-50 ownership of “The View” with ABC — a rare arrangement for a daytime TV show.
Walters did not hide her disappointment a few years ago — after Oprah Winfrey announced she was ending her daytime show — when ABC decided against moving “The View” into Winfrey’s old 4 p.m. timeslot.
It would have meant a huge payday for Walters and her partners because, like “Oprah” and “Dr. Phil,” “The View” would have gone into syndication. But the network kept her ground-breaking show at 11 a.m. and, some said, she really never got over it.
Her prime-time specials — like her 1999 Monica Lewinsky interview, which drew 74 million viewers — made a small fortune for ABC.
But because Walters is technically an employee of the news division, she was not able to share in the windfall.
Also, “The View” itself is under pressure to refresh the coffee-klatch format that has been copied elsewhere on TV.
Joy Behar, the last of the original cast, is leaving in August, and even the show’s youngest member, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, is being pushed out — at age 35 — for a younger, as-yet-unnamed replacement.