“Because I had to. Getting and keeping my immunity became very important to me. I had to tell the truth about absolutely everything, including the dress, for if they found it, I might be brought up on charges of perjury.
“This dress,” she continued, “is one of the most humiliating things that has ever happened to me. Every man that I have met since this thing has happened eventually says to me, ‘So what is the real story with the dress?’ I wish I had never had it.”
My final question to her was, “What will you tell your children when you have them?” She replied simply, “Mommy made a big mistake.”
On the evening of March 3, I had the producers of the show and a few friends to my apartment to watch the program. It was an inflammatory evening in more ways than one. I had made a fire, but the flue wasn’t open. The room began to fill with smoke and the fire department came. (I was very sad to learn three years later that two of those firemen died in the 9/11 attacks.)
As the show began I couldn’t help but wonder how many people around the country were watching. So many had said, “Oh, I’m not going to watch Monica Lewinsky, that’s beneath me.” I thought that a lot of them would be true to their word, but at one point I went over to the window and looked down at the street below. There wasn’t a car on the avenue. Nothing was moving.
Strangely, the biggest question we got after the interview aired was about the shiny lipstick Monica was wearing. ABC received hundreds of phone calls and e-mails from viewers asking its name. Turned out it was a color called Glaze from a new makeup line by the clothing store Club Monaco. The lipstick quickly sold out around the country.
It is now ten years since the Monica Lewinsky story broke. After her book and interviews, since she couldn’t escape it, Monica tried to capitalize on her fame and took some TV jobs. She became a spokesperson for the Jenny Craig diet and then hosted a reality dating program called Mr. Personality on Fox. Nobody wanted to give her a real job. She eventually decided to try to become a private person again and went back to school. In December 2006 she earned a graduate degree from the highly respected London School of Economics. Her thesis was titled “In Search of the Impartial Juror: An Exploration of the Third Person Effect and Pre-Trial Publicity.”
After Monica’s graduation, the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote this about her:
It does not take a Freudian to appreciate why Lewinsky chose the topic she did. She is the victim of publicity and her life has been a trial—enough to floor almost anyone. She is a branded woman. Yet she did what so many women that age would do. She seduced, or so she thought, an older man. Here was her crime. She was a girl besotted. But now she is a woman with a master’s degree from a prestigious school. She is going to be 34. Where is the guy brave enough, strong enough, admirable enough to take her as his wife, to say to the world that he loves this woman even if she will always be an asterisk in American history? I hope there is such a guy out there. It would be nice. It would be fair.
The last time I spoke to Monica, I told her that I would be writing about her in this book. She was still trying very hard to get a job. Most of all she wants, as she has always wanted, to have a husband and a family. I agree with Richard Cohen. It would be nice. It would be fair.
The View
IN 1997 THE VIEW sneaked up on me. The last thing I was thinking about was daytime television. I knew that Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue, who were on the air during the day, were each very popular. I had even appeared on their programs, but I had little interest in television until early evening when the news came on. I was fully occupied doing 20/20 along with the Barbara Walters Specials. By this time I had been doing four Specials a year for twenty years with great success, and for most of those years, with my producer, Bill Geddie. My plate was full. I had no room for gravy.
Enter gravy. The 11:00 a.m. period on ABC, which was controlled by the network and not by syndicators, was floundering. A lot of pleasant people had attempted to do a show during that time period, but no program lasted for more than a year or two. Unlike the earlier-morning and late-afternoon programs, it was considered a very tough time slot. By 11:00 a.m., it was thought, most nonworking women had sent the kids off to school and had finished their housework. It was time to go out and do the marketing, the errands, and maybe pick up the little ones from nursery school. So, sort of in desperation, the daytime network executives, who had nothing to do with the news department executives for whom I worked, came to me and Bill Geddie and said, “Got any ideas for a daytime program?”
Well, now that they mentioned it, I did have a concept that occasionally drifted through my head, and when the program finally made it to air, here is what I actually said: “I’ve always wanted to do a show with women of different generations, backgrounds, and views.” These women, I imagined, could chat away on all sorts of subjects. Then we could add a celebrity interview or two, perhaps followed by an informative segment on health, fashion, or whatever we deemed of interest to women. It was a relatively simple concept. I had two inspirations. The first came from watching the ABC Sunday-morning news program This Week with David Brinkley. Near the end of each hour-long broadcast, Brinkley moderated a roundtable with three or four other journalists who commented on the latest events in the news. It was informative, free-flowing, and often very amusing. I thought it was the best part of the program.
My other inspiration came from a woman named Virginia Graham, who at one time had a modestly successful daytime program called Girl Talk, on which I occasionally appeared, sometimes along with another guest or two. Again the conversation was unrehearsed, and when it spun off in different directions, it could be a lot of fun. So I wondered, if we took a small and varied group of women and made them a permanent cast, would that work for an informative and entertaining hour? I thought it might.
The network was not overly impressed but said they would consider it enough to have us make a pilot. Furthermore, they insisted that I would have to be one of the women on the panel. Otherwise they didn’t think they could sell the program to advertisers. I told them that if I could appear on the show just two or three times a week and not have to be the daily moderator, I would give it a try.
The key, of course, was to choose the right women with the right chemistry. Just a simple thing: find four smart women of different ages and different personalities who could disagree without killing one another and, better still, might actually like each other.
First step: we rented a large hotel suite, outfitted it with comfortable sofas and chairs, brought in cameras, put a mini control center in an adjacent room, where, on a television monitor, we could then watch the various applicants talk and see how they related to one another. We would give them a list of subjects from the newspapers that day and let them just go at it.
We had talked to dozens of talent agents, and the word got around that we were planning a gabfest with a bunch of women. The result of this was that we were deluged with résumés, phone calls, and tapes. Everybody and her aunt knew the perfect person. All you have to do is talk, the various applicants thought. So why not me?
The very first group of four looked promising but who knew? As a possible moderator, we were considering an attractive woman named Meredith Vieira. Meredith had, at one time, been a correspondent on 60 Minutes on CBS, but because at the time she had one young child and was pregnant with a second, she didn’t want to travel. Don Hewitt, the program’s executive producer, felt that all his reporters had to travel to do stories and he couldn’t, in all fairness, make an exception for Meredith, so they came to a rather unhappy parting of the ways. More recently I knew Meredith from ABC, where she was working on a newsmagazine the network was trying out, called Turning Point. Unfortunately the program didn’t make it. Meredith’s contract at ABC was not renewed, and she was at loose ends. I checked and heard from her producers that she was not just smart but, almost more important to me, possessed a wicked sense of humor.
At first Meredith wasn’t reall
y interested in appearing on a daytime program. Her whole professional life had been on news broadcasts. Why should she take the risk of going on an untried daytime talk show? But her husband, Richard Cohen, who had himself been a news producer at CBS, persuaded her to consider it. “It could be fun,” he said, “and you won’t have to travel.” She could also be back from the studio before the kids got home from school. What did she have to lose?
Score one for our possible moderator.
Sitting on the couch next to Meredith was Star Jones, an African American woman who had been a prosecuting attorney in Brooklyn and distinguished herself first reporting for Court TV and, later, covering the O. J. Simpson trial for Inside Edition. Star was large in every way, from her résumé to her weight to her personality. She was funny and knowledgeable, especially on subjects relating to the law. Her favorite word was “allegedly.” She was single, in her thirties, and looking for a husband. The reports that Bill and I got were that she was sometimes difficult to work with, but we thought, as part of an ensemble, she would be okay.
Then there was the woman we agreed might provide real humor. Her name was Joy Behar. A comedian, she had worked small clubs around town but was almost unknown to the wider public, including me. One night I went to a benefit honoring Milton Berle, an old family friend whom I have mentioned before. I was sitting next to Regis Philbin when the entertainment began and onstage came a good-looking redhead who told a joke about the author Salman Rushdie. Rushdie had written a book which some Muslims found blasphemous, and a directive had been issued that he should be killed. As a result Rushdie was in deep hiding, protected by Scotland Yard. “I’ll tell you the difference between men and women,” said Behar. “Rushdie has been in solitary confinement for five years with no visitors at all allowed…and in that time he’s been married twice.” Well, it loses something when I tell it, but I thought, “This woman is perfect for us.”
Finally we auditioned a lively young girl in her twenties who told us that she was appearing occasionally on MTV. Her name was Debbie Matenopoulos. She was kind of ditsy and likable, and we thought she might be just right for the youngest member of the panel.
Here is what was so amazing. This group of four was the first panel we tried out in two full days of auditions. We thought they were great but we didn’t think we should just go with the first group, so we tried out something like fifty women and mixed them up in different groups of four. Finally, toward the end of the second day, Bill and I looked at each other and said, “You know, the first group was the best. Let’s go with Meredith as the moderator and Star, Joy, and Debbie on the panel.” I would join the group twice a week on the days I could fit it in among my other assignments.
As for the name, we liked The View from Here, but we were told that name was being used by a program in Canada so we shortened it to The View, and that was that.
Bill and I were co–executive producers. Together we worked out a format based on my original idea. The basis of the program would be the unrehearsed and spontaneous chat sessions among the women. We would call this segment, “hot topics.” Essentially the program still follows that early format.
Bill was and is indispensable. He hired a director and a bunch of bright young producers, gave them marching orders, and whipped the show into shape. The producers, most of whom are still with us, start with Alexandra “Dusty” Cohen, who, as supervising producer, is Bill’s right arm. Then there are two coordinating producers, Matthew Strauss and Patrick Ignozzi; Donald Berman and Sue Solomon are responsible for booking the guests. We also have had, from day one, the talented and creative director, Mark Gentile, and a wondrous young woman, Fran Taylor, who has managed, no matter what their size or shape, to dress all the cast members. Linda Finson supervises production and the budget of the show. These are just some of the staff who, then and now, helped to make The View a success. We have had very little turnover throughout the years.
In the beginning my job was to do the outside work, which was primarily to deal with the network, the advertisers, the publicity people, and the press. In short I had to keep us afloat.
The View was launched on August 11, 1997. We deliberately put it on when the viewing audiences were at their summer low. This, we felt, would give us a chance to work out the kinks and get used to one another. We felt fresh and new. The set, however, was neither fresh nor new. The network didn’t have enough faith in our budding program to invest in a new set. What we inherited was left over from an unsuccessful ABC soap opera called The City. It was located on West Sixty-sixth Street, next to the Hudson River. A few more steps to your right and you’d be in the river.
One more thing: we were a network program, not syndicated. In syndication the programs are sold to individual stations all over the country. They can appear on any network or station at any time. For example, Oprah airs at 9:00 a.m. in Chicago but at 4:00 p.m. in New York. Because we are a network program, we are on the air every day during the same time period, 11:00 a.m. in the East and 10:00 a.m. everywhere else. When we made our debut, all of the ABC-owned and-operated stations were obliged to carry us. (There are ten of them.) But at that time of day, stations not owned by ABC but affiliated with the network had the choice of carrying the show or not. What we did not know was that more than 20 percent of the country would not be carrying the show in the morning time period. Sometimes, the affiliates would run it in overnight hours. This included quite a few big cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., as well as many smaller markets. Other cities, like Miami, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee, didn’t carry the show at all. Week after week, part of my job was to phone the heads of these various stations (many of whom I knew personally) or their station managers, to try to persuade them to carry The View.
It was like the riddle of the chicken and the egg. If we wanted to get big guests to come on the program, we needed ratings to entice them. Therefore we had to have as many stations carrying us as possible. On the other hand, if we didn’t have those big-name guests and the big ratings, the affiliates wouldn’t carry us. They would instead stick to their own programs, which they felt would do better than The View. But little by little the viewers got a taste of our program and liked the taste. Over time our ratings began to rise, and gradually the stations climbed aboard. Today we have almost 100 percent coverage.
My being involved with the program had other ramifications. I could help book the big-name celebrities. For example, I had interviewed Tom Selleck for one of our Specials. He, like the very nice man he is, agreed to be our first celebrity guest. In the first week we had Michael J. Fox and Sylvester Stallone visiting us, both good pals doing me a favor. In the beginning the big-name guests only wanted to come on the show when I was on. This occasionally still happens, and I try to be on the program if it is someone I know really well, like Tom Cruise or Michael Douglas. But as the program became more popular, it became easier to book guests whether I was on or not.
Our panel knew none of our early concerns. What they knew was that The View was a great opportunity for them. Our first few weeks went surprisingly well. We five women would then, and still do, arrive in the large makeup room at 9:00 a.m., a full two hours before the program goes on the air live. We then receive a sheaf of papers from a researcher, with the news stories of the day. Talking and laughing, we decide which subjects we want to tackle. If it starts a discussion or better still, an argument, we know we are onto something, but we are careful not to leave the argument in the dressing room. We save it for the broadcast so we can let the chips fall where they may. Then as now we loved stories that concerned sex. Surefire winners. I often cringed because I thought they went too far, but Meredith and Joy both had raunchy senses of humor, so vaginas and penises became part of our almost daily vocabulary. I sometimes said, “Enough with the penises,” but the conversations were lively and just shocking enough. Besides, I rather liked my position as the panel prude.
Star often had the most to say, and her views were almost always int
eresting and provocative. She soon became the audience’s favorite member of the panel. She was also the one viewers remembered the most, being the only African American of the group. An extra plus was that, as a lawyer, her habit of saying “allegedly” kept us out of trouble.
Joy was truly funny. She was also opinionated and very smart. We had made the right choice.
Meredith made a terrific moderator. While her hair and makeup were being done, she sat with an assistant, and together they wrote all the introductions to whatever the hot topics would be. Her introductions were on the teleprompter. The rest of the hot topics were ad-libbed.
However, as charming and funny as Meredith could be, it took the audience a while to identify with her. At first, she came across as just another pretty lady. In time, though, the audiences came to realize that she was probably the most outrageous of all of us. One day she would tell us that she didn’t wear underwear, the next day she would tease about her three children and tell stories about her cat who peed all over the house.
Meredith could get away with almost anything, but she also had her serious side. Her husband, Richard, has multiple sclerosis and had colon cancer. Meredith talked of this from time to time, although never in a maudlin way. We all talked about personal aspects of our lives. We were a kind of family sharing our good times and bad.
Joy, the viewers learned, was divorced, had a daughter, Eve, and had been living with Steve, a former teacher, for almost twenty years. He was often the butt of her good-natured jokes.
Star’s dream, she told us, was to marry an African American Christian man with a good job. She was not, she told us, about to support any man. In the meantime she discussed her dates. Most of them didn’t seem to last, and we secretly prayed that she would meet some real nice guy real soon.
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