Happy Birthday, Rona Barrett

Well, I’ve written about many of the classic, old time gossip columnists here (Walter Winchell, Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Earl Wilson, Dorothy Kilgallen, etc) so why stop at the later ones? So today we celebrate the fondly remembered Rona Barrett (Rona Burstein, b. 1936). She is still very much with us incidentally; we only “remember” her becase she retired over 30 years ago.

Younger people surely must not even know what a gossip columnist is, now that the entire universe is a tsunami of 24/7 rumor and self-promotion. Prior to the advent of cable news, the internet and social media, there had originally been just daily newspaper columns with all of the major dish crammed into a few paragraphs, usually broked down into “items”. X was seen at a restaurant with Y….Y punched Z in the face…C has filed for bankruptcy…D is being considered for a certain movie role. And like that. Rona Barrett was of the transitional period: network television. She started out reporting such sensational factoids on local Los Angeles television in 1967. She came onto the the radar of most of us in 1975 when she began to present daily segments on Good Morning, America, switching to NBC’s Today Show in 1980, then Entertainment Tonight (1983-86) and a brief return to NBC with her own show in 1989. She also had her own TV specials, such as Rona Looks at Raquel,Liza, Cher and Ann-Margret(1975), and Rona Barrett Looks at Today’s $uperRich (1981).

During those years, Barrett became sort of synonymous with gossip, the standard bearer. Because of the audio-visual properties of television, her New York accent and admittedly adorable personality where part of the package. It was like she was whispering dirt to you across the breakfast table. I’m sure I didn’t fully appreciate her at the time. I was pretty scornful of her field of endeavor. (“I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”). And she was in her forties when she went national. As a young person I didn’t think of her as attractive, though with the full measure of time you must admit she was ground-breaking in her field by not being a scary old battle-axe like Hedda or Louella (a trait she shares withCindy Adams, though the latter mostly plied her trade in print). She clearly tried to promote herself as a sex symbol, however, as evidenced by her books The Love-omaniacs (1972) and How You Can Look Rich and Achieve Sexual Ecstasy (1978), and her memoir Miss Rona (1974), the very first sentence of which makes mention of a penis.

Inevitably she became a celebrity herself, appearing in movies like The Phynx (1970) and Mae West’s Sextette (1978), and TV shows such as The Joey Bishop Show, Merv, David Frost, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, Dinah, The Sonny and Cher Show, The Odd Couple, Don Adams Screen Test, Tattle Tales, Match Game, Mannix,The Tonight Show, Letterman, Regis Philbin, Moonlighting and the notorious 1976 Bob Hope special Joys.

One of her last gigs during the main part of her career was as an interviewer on Wrestlemania in 1990, and that, readers, one has to imagine, is a wake-up call. Since then, though technically retired, she has made frequent appearances as a talking head in documentaries about celebrities, and has done so as recently as 2023.

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, And please stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.