Audition

by Barbara Walters

  We also, as time went on, worried about her increasing weight gain. But none of us had the courage to say anything to her. Star didn’t take to criticism easily and could tell us to mind our business—especially because, on the air, she constantly talked about how much she liked her body. The audience could relate to her, but in retrospect, we should have pushed the matter as she was becoming dangerously obese. I regret that I didn’t confront her, although later Star told me she wouldn’t have listened anyway.

  In the early months of the program, of all the women, I shared the least about my life. I was afraid to let go too much on The View because I was known as a serious interviewer on 20/20. As a result I came across as rather reserved, and sometimes I inhibited the others. I worked on this and knew that I was making progress when, one day, having made a joking remark, my daughter said, “At last, Mom, people know you have a sense of humor.”

  Part of my reticence to talk about myself was that Roone Arledge, still the president of ABC News and my boss, had been against my doing the program at all. He didn’t forbid it, though he could have. Instead he said that he thought my involvement might take away from my authoritative position in news. (This was many years before television journalists were expected to have personalities as well as deliver the news.) I thought about it for a while and decided it was a challenge I wanted to take, but Roone’s admonition stayed in my mind. Fortunately, as it turned out, the viewers knew me so well from all those years on the air that they were able to accept the fact that I wore two hats. Indeed, I think, as my daughter expressed, the fact that I could have fun and laugh made me more likable to the viewer. So everything seemed to be working.

  What wasn’t working, which is why I left discussing her for last, was Debbie Matenopoulos. At first she was sweetly lovable, but it quickly became apparent that her life was more about going out to parties than reading a book or a newspaper. As a result, instead of coming across as young and “with it,” she came across as young and not very well informed.

  Saturday Night Live began to do skits about Debbie, and although that was a sort of compliment and let a lot of people know that The View even existed, it also led a lot of people to feel that we had a scatterbrain on the program. That is how Debbie came across, and it was amusing only up to a point. Our research showed that she was turning off viewers and affecting the ratings of the program. Finally, in the fall of 1998, a little more than a year after the show went on the air, the network told Debbie that they could not renew her contract. We were personally fond of her and allowed her to say that she was leaving The View to study acting, and we gave her a big going-away party. Debbie officially left on January 6, 1999.

  (In 2006, during our ninth year of The View, Debbie came back as a guest host. She had grown up to be a most charming woman. She was married and a cohost of The Daily 10 on E! The View had, after all, helped to launch her career, and that made me happy.)

  After Debbie left the show, we were again deluged with tapes, phone calls, letters, people stopping us on the street, all of whom wanted to fill Debbie’s position. Every time I got a phone call from someone I hadn’t seen in years, I knew it was about the job on The View. Even Michael Eisner, then chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, had a candidate for us. “Please send a tape,” we told him. (And we didn’t hire the young woman.)

  We thought it would be good if we could find a young Hispanic woman, as we didn’t have such a person represented on the program. But we didn’t limit ourselves to Hispanics. For four months we tried out new faces on the panel. Finally, after narrowing the list down to three young women, we chose not a Hispanic, not an African American, not another Caucasian, but an American-born Chinese girl named Lisa Ling. She was lovely to look at, very bright, and, most important, the chemistry seemed right with the rest of the women. We all felt comfortable with her.

  Lisa joined The View in May 1999, but almost from her first days, she told me she really wanted to work on a news program. Her opportunity came after she had been with us for three years or so, when National Geographic offered her an exciting and demanding position as their roving television correspondent. She was so good that Oprah later hired her as a regular on her program. So alas, in December 2002, Lisa left us.

  “Here we go again,” we said. Contest. Tapes. E-mails. Almost a year after Lisa left we finally made our choice, and what a great choice it was. We hired twenty-six-year-old Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a survivor of the hit television show Survivor. If Elisabeth could eat worms and stand up to all of the challenges of that show, she could certainly survive us. Elisabeth was married. (Her husband is a football player, Tim Hasselbeck.) And what’s more, to our joy, a year after she joined us, Elisabeth got pregnant, and when her little girl, Grace, was two, she got pregnant again. In November 2007, her son Taylor Thomas was born. We told Elisabeth that all this was great for our ratings and thanked her for obliging us with babies.

  Elisabeth also had something else that Bill and I felt was very important to the program. Meredith, and most certainly Star and Joy, were outspoken liberals, especially where politics were concerned. It made the program, in many discussions, lopsided. Elisabeth, perhaps surprising in a young woman just in her twenties, was very conservative and a supporter of George W. Bush, which helped to promote good and lively discussions. In the beginning Elisabeth had trouble speaking up, but as time went on, she more than held her own, especially when it came to defending Bush’s actions in Iraq.

  So we made it through the first nine years of the program, and who ever thought the program would last nine years? Certainly not me.

  If imitation is considered the sincerest form of flattery, then we certainly should have been flattered. The more successful The View became, the more the program was copied. In the fall of 1999 NBC News put on a program immediately following the Today show which featured three women, the best-known being Florence Henderson, chitchatting about the news of the day, followed by interviews. Called Later Today, the program never caught on and lasted only a year. Then, in 2001, Dick Clark Productions introduced The Other Half, with Clark himself at the helm, I guess more or less assuming my role. The show had different men, again chitchatting away, followed by interviews. It was aimed at women and for a while, given the male point of view, it was mildly amusing. In some cities the program went on opposite The View, but it did us no harm. The Other Half sputtered along for two years and then it, too, folded. What the producers didn’t realize was how vitally important the right chemistry between the cohosts was. We were either very smart with our choice of cast, or very lucky. In addition our program was well produced. We worked for years to get the right balance of talk and guests.

  Since we were a bunch of women, our approach, our questions, our whole attitude toward celebrities was different. We were looser and more fun, and the guests, male or female, along with plugging their books or movies, enjoyed weighing in on the hot topics they had just heard us discussing. We also made certain that at least one of us had read the book or seen the movie or TV show, and our guests appreciated that. We got the biggest stars to come on. ( Just plop yourself on our couch and discuss your film and your sex life.)

  It wasn’t just show business celebrities who joined us. Over the years we’ve had many major political figures sit down on the couch. Here are some: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, John McCain, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Ron Paul, Al Sharpton, and Nancy Pelosi. General Colin Powell was with us this year on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and soon after her election, Chile’s first female president, Dr. Michelle Bachelet, came on the program. In 2003 I even “married” New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Well, not exactly. Just for the fun of it, one day, each of us had to pick our dream husband. I chose the mayor, saying he was rich, brilliant, and, besides, I thought he was cute. We had a cardboard cutout of him when suddenly, to my surprise, he walked onstage, threw aside the cutout, and we were a couple. The marriage, however, has never been consummated.
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br />   We had a scare or two. In the spring of 2002, CBS News came after Meredith offering her a lot more money to join a new early-morning lineup that was planning yet another View-like panel. Meredith was tempted. But she didn’t really want to chance her future on a brand-new show, and she was very happy on The View. In the end we found a solution. The quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was starting a syndicated daytime version. I talked to ABC about having Meredith host the program, and they thought it was a great idea. Meredith then got additional income and began another aspect of her career as the host of a quiz show. We breathed a sigh of relief when she turned down the CBS offer.

  Things began to change in the summer of 2003, however. Star, whose weight was becoming more and more of an issue, decided to take drastic measures. She had reached the point where her heavy breathing was noticeable on the air, and she could barely walk. After consulting her doctors she decided to have gastric bypass surgery that would shrink her stomach and make overeating uncomfortable if not dangerous.

  Star was quite sick for several weeks after the procedure and missed some time on the program. We expected her, when she felt well, to talk about the procedure on the air as it was such an important aspect of her life and could hardly be kept secret—or so we thought. Star had even told me that she would discuss the whole operation and its aftermath with me on 20/20. But after the operation Star said she didn’t want to become what she called a “poster child” for the procedure and have to answer a lot of questions. I understood that, but it put us all in a terrible position. It meant we virtually had to lie for Star, especially when she said again and again on the air that her weight loss was due primarily to portion control and Pilates. But she was also our colleague, and we felt we couldn’t “out” her. It became more and more difficult to keep up the charade, especially since the program consistently featured segments on diet and weight loss. Joy, in particular, resented having to go along with a lie that implied that all one needed to do was sit-ups and ingest one cookie instead of two.

  Star, however, had other news that did make us happy. In November, four months after her procedure, she was introduced to an attractive, single, African American bachelor named Al Scales Reynolds. Just what she was looking for. We rejoiced for her, and when we met Al at The View’s annual Christmas party, we liked him very much. Before long, Star told us that she and Al were to be married the following autumn. Al proposed in front of cameras by getting down on one knee at an all-star NBA basketball game. He gave her a large diamond ring. All the tabloid television programs aired the proposal, and almost every day someone in our studio audience would shout for Star to show off the ring. These were happy times.

  Then a shadow fell. Star came to Bill and me and said that she wanted a very big wedding. It was the one time in her life, she said, that she wanted to feel like a princess. Being royal, however, costs a lot of money, and Star’s solution was to try to get what she could for free, like possibly the invitations and flowers and her wedding cake and bridesmaids’ dresses, in return for promoting these items on the air. She hoped to do that on The View, but if that was not possible, she said, she would find other programs that would agree. We then did a few segments on her wedding, focusing on the invitations and the wedding gowns, thinking the audience would like it. And they did.

  But I think we made a great mistake. We should have told her that these free “gifts” in return for promotion were unacceptable, and that she could not barter them away. We soon stopped the promotions on The View, but we couldn’t prevent Star from doing them on other programs as her contract allowed her to make limited appearances on shows other than The View. But she was beginning to attract bad publicity. As she made more requests or demands, suppliers, or some who were not asked to supply, leaked to the tabloids what she was doing. The New York Post began to call her “Bridezilla.” It was not a compliment, and it became a national story. We were very distressed about this. Such publicity was not helping our show, and it sure wasn’t helping Star. Instead of being the lovable, romantic bride, she was now being seen as the greedy bride.

  The lavish wedding took place in November 2004, a year after she and Al had met. The over-the-top celebration became even more fodder for the tabloids. Star, who had begun by being the most popular member of our panel, was now rapidly becoming the least popular. Viewers were saying they didn’t recognize her anymore. She was beginning to appear false, and Star’s popularity had been built on the audience being able to relate to her.

  At this time the ABC daytime executives once more conducted focus groups and found that Star was losing us viewers. They warned her agents that they were thinking of not renewing her contract, which would be up in August 2006. They then evidently firmed up their position, because just before Christmas of 2005, they came to Bill and me and told us that they had decided to replace Star on the program. They also wanted us to tell her right away. We hesitated. Not only was it just before Christmas, but Star had written a book called Shine!, which was about to be published. In the book she told readers how she had achieved “physical, emotional and spiritual happiness.” She was a changed person, she said. (She did not mention the gastric bypass.) Star told us that she was going on a multicity tour for the book. Bill and I felt then that we could not possibly give her bad news at the start of what she hoped would make her book a best seller. Beyond this, we were genuinely fond of Star. She had been so terrific for so many years on the program, and we were fervently hoping she would turn her image around. Though my opinion mattered, it was the network that did the actual hiring and firing of the talent. We asked the network to hold off on their decision.

  Finally, in April, ABC told Star’s agents that her contract would definitely not be renewed. Bill and I told Star we would protect her career and not let anyone know that she was being fired. She could say she was writing another book, that she wanted to start a new chapter in her life, whatever she wanted to say. We felt we owed her this, and she agreed that this was what should be done.

  To add to our difficulties, we had an even bigger departure to contemplate. After nine years as the moderator on The View, Meredith had decided to accept a dazzling offer of much more money from NBC to replace Katie Couric on the Today show. I talked with Meredith about the offer. The View had brought her fame and we were proud of that, but we could not match NBC’s salary. I was and am very fond of Meredith, and this, I agreed, was an opportunity she couldn’t possibly turn down. With tears and cheers, we said good-bye to Meredith in June 2006. Now we would not only be losing Star but Meredith as well. We needed a big, new, bold attraction.

  That’s when Rosie O’Donnell entered the picture. I had been an admirer of Rosie for years. I had often appeared on her own very popular television show and had even substituted for her when she was ill. Rosie had left that show in 2002, she said, to spend more time with her life partner, Kelli, and their growing family, which, by 2006, numbered four children. I was fond of both Rosie and Kelli.

  Rosie and Kelli had made a beautiful and touching documentary of a cruise for gay families that they had arranged and been on. On March 28, 2006, I went to see the premiere screening of the documentary. It made me laugh and cry. I knew that Rosie had spent most of the past four years since she had left her own program painting pictures. I even own one of the paintings. But now, with this documentary, it seemed that Rosie might be returning to public life. Could it be, I wondered that night, that Rosie might agree to become our new moderator? So I asked her and then and there she said yes. The next day I told Bill. He, too, thought it was a great idea. I called Rosie to make sure she hadn’t changed her mind. She hadn’t.

  The ABC executives were a bit hesitant initially. Since Rosie had left television, she had been in a nasty legal dispute with the publishers of a magazine that bore her name, had produced a Broadway show starring Boy George that was a flop and didn’t exactly add to her reputation, and, most important, had revealed to all that she was a lesbian, something she had not public
ly discussed during her own show. The network, at first, was afraid that Rosie might be too volatile a personality and too controversial. But I vouched for her and told them that I thought she had mellowed with the years. Also, I thought, times had changed and gays and lesbians were pretty much accepted all over the country. After we put Rosie in touch with the heads of the network, they, too, agreed that it would be a great coup to have her on The View. Rosie would start on the show in the fall, agreeing to sign for only one year. I had nothing to do with the contractual arrangements, which turned out later on to be a blessing.

  Of course we told Star, who, I point out again, already knew that her contract was not going to be renewed. The trouble was that there was very bad blood between Star and Rosie. Rosie had from time to time been a guest on The View, and she and Star had tangled on a variety of issues both on and off the air. When Rosie was interviewed on other programs, before she began on The View, she had accused Star of being dishonest about her weight loss. As a guest on The View, Rosie had said to her face, “It’s like Twinkle Twinkle Shrinking Star.” Had Star continued to be on the program, we probably would not have reached out to Rosie. But because Star was not going to remain on The View, our decision about Rosie was not going to affect Star’s departure one way or another.

  We reassured Star once more that we would never say that the network had dismissed her. I reiterated that she could give any reason she wanted for leaving and could also choose the date to depart the program. We would dedicate a full-hour retrospective tribute to her and give her a farewell party on the air. Again Star agreed to this.

  Star told us she wanted to leave after Meredith, and chose Thursday, June 29, to make her own announcement. But on Tuesday, June 27, while we were live on the air, Star suddenly grasped my hand and Joy’s and said that after much “prayer and counsel,” she had decided to leave the program. Her announcement took us totally by surprise. Thinking she had just decided to move up her announcement date, I asked the audience to rise and give her a standing ovation. But, as it turned out to our astonishment, Star had, over the previous weekend, given an interview to People magazine. In the magazine, which was about to hit the newsstands, she announced that she had been fired. It was not the drop in her popularity among viewers that had caused her dismissal, Star insisted, but the “new direction” the show wanted to take—that is, Rosie. She said that unlike the rest of us—that is, Bill and especially me—she was going to tell the truth. Here Bill and I were risking our own reputations for honesty to protect her. Instead she was damaging our credibility. We were very hurt.