Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  Star dropped Guillen off at her hotel and that was the end—for the time being—of a dream night out in Manhattan. “The next thing I know, they are engaged,” Guillen said. “I couldn’t believe her. She moved quick.”

  Reynolds impressed Star with his charm, good manners, and career as an investment banker. The two found themselves in a whirlwind courtship, filled with dinners, lengthy phone conversations until 4:00 a.m., and tickets to Broadway plays, such as The Boy from Oz, a musical about a closeted songwriter named Peter Allen who marries the fabulous diva Liza Minnelli.

  Star talked up Al to the View staff, telling them about how quickly they’d bonded. The View team got their first glimpse of Reynolds at the Christmas party. Several staffers snickered that something was off.

  “He’s totally gay,” they whispered. (In November 2017, Reynolds came out as bisexual.)

  The gossip eventually got to Star. But she was focused on a prize. Just three months after meeting Reynolds, Star was flashing a sparkling engagement ring. “I wanted the parade” is how Star put it. She didn’t believe the rumors, anyway. Since they were both religious, they decided to take a celibacy vow before they got married.

  Her wedding hoopla started to eclipse the other cohosts. Meredith and Joy protested to Barbara that they didn’t like how Star’s bridal planning—which would last for the next nine months—was holding The View hostage. “There were some issues,” Joy recalled. “It became a lot about the wedding, which really changed the format of the show. I guess we were not thrilled with that.”

  Instead of siding with them, Barbara issued a surprising mandate. She told them to shut their mouths and go along with it.

  “You’re paid to be actors!” she snapped. “Act!”

  Barbara’s defense of Star didn’t mean Barbara approved of what was happening. She’d agreed to this circus, and it was too late to put the lion back in the cage. Meredith felt that Star’s wedding had irreparably tainted the show. The Hot Topics were no longer the show’s selling point with the public. Instead, The View was all about her cohost’s endless march down the aisle. “I certainly didn’t like the idea of the show revolving around one person,” Meredith said. “I thought that was dangerous territory. But the show let that happen. I can’t fault Star.”

  In retrospect, Star agreed with Meredith’s assessment. “She is right. It did become about one person.” In an interview with me before the 2016 election, Star compared the nonstop press about her wedding to the way the networks were covering Trump during the presidential campaign. “It’s ratings gold, but it’s ticking a lot of people off.”

  * * *

  The former leader of the free world was on the phone for Star Jones. “Hi,” purred a familiar voice. Bill Clinton may not have regularly watched The View, but even he knew about the wedding. Clinton wanted to let Star know that he’d received the details about her special day (the box with the pearls must have done the trick), and that he would have loved to be there. But, unfortunately, he’d just had heart surgery and was under strict orders from doctors to stay in bed.

  “He called me to tell me he couldn’t attend my wedding, which cracked me up,” Star recalled. “I was at the dentist. I said, ‘Mr. President, you need to take care of yourself! You don’t need to worry about this.’ And he said, ‘Hillary is going to be there.’”

  Star’s guest list was a checklist of Manhattan’s rich and fabulous for 2004. The crowd of 450 felt like a cross between the Oscars and the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, with celebrities galore—among them, Chris Rock, Kim Cattrall, Angela Bassett, Samuel L. Jackson, Spike Lee, Lorraine Bracco, and Kelly Ripa. The rehearsal dinner was a meal of chicken, ribs, and sweet potato pie prepared by P. Diddy’s mother, Janice Combs. Even some of Star’s twelve bridesmaids emitted wattage, such as Natalie Cole, Vivica A. Fox, and Holly Robinson Peete. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a true New York event without Donald Trump, who knew Star through The View. He brought along his fiancée, Melania, as his date.

  The National Enquirer called it “the biggest celebrity wedding fiasco of the year,” but it was more than that. Star had blabbed about her day so much that she’d turned the event into an over-the-top extravaganza, earning the name “bridezilla” in the tabloids. Even among the jaded East Coast set, the impression was that to be at Star’s wedding meant having a cocktail story that you could tell for years. “You could barely walk,” Meredith said. “That’s what I remember. Her parents were nice. It was like a showbiz wedding. I don’t think I’d ever been to anything quite like that.”

  Many people weren’t even allowed through the door. “No, I wasn’t invited to the wedding,” said Anne Sweeney, laughing, despite her position as the highest-ranking executive overseeing The View. A lot of the producers at the show, who had helped Star plan for her big day, didn’t make the cut either, and they were all outraged. “We were not included,” said one person who worked at the show. At the eleventh hour, an email was sent out, telling some of them they could come to the church service, but not the party at the Waldorf Astoria. This move was particularly offensive because Star had made a big deal of asking the other cohosts on air if it was okay not to invite everybody from her inner circle to the wedding. Barbara, who’d survived three marriages, told Star she could only get away with that if she had a small gathering.

  “She invited me to the shower,” said producer Jessica Stedman Guff. “I got her this suede wedding album from Tiffany. And then she didn’t invite me to the wedding. It was very rude.”

  Star managed to ruffle more feathers at The View by making good on her initial threat to Barbara. Because she didn’t feel that the show was promoting her wedding enough—short of turning over the entire hour to her every day, nothing would have sufficed—she booked a series of segments on Access Hollywood. It was the quickest way to squeeze in plugs for her bachelorette-party gift bags. “This irritated me to no end,” Geddie said. “That Star, who was only a star because of The View, would be on another show.”

  As the wedding day approached, the press seized on Star’s freebie crusade, peddling the narrative that she was using The View as her own cash register. Saturday Night Live brought out a sketch that took place on Star’s last night as a single woman. (“Our wedding is going to be off the hook,” the Star caricature said to a fake Al, whose vows included mock shout-outs to Lady Speed Stick, Continental Airlines, and Quiznos.) The New York Post published a scathing story that Star, in addition to stockpiling merchandise, was searching for corporate sponsors to help finance a wedding-day spa.

  Yet, contrary to what the public read in the gossip pages, Star paid for most of her wedding herself. “The reality is, she honestly didn’t get that much for free,” Tutera said. “I know what she spent. But the assumption was she was getting everything for free. I think people believed she was asking for more than she deserved. I personally think she was unfairly handled.”

  Tutera provided some specifics. He said that Star covered her own flowers, food, and bar tab. “Did her friend Natalie Cole’s uncle Freddy sing at her wedding for free? Yes. That makes sense. There might have been other small things. But let me tell you. It was far from what was portrayed.”

  Even if she kept a tight RSVP list, Star made sure that her new friend made the cut. She phoned Guillen to tell her to get back on a plane. “You were there when we met,” Star told her. “You’ve got to come.” Star even covered—probably via her corporate connections—travel and lodging. “Star is a very gracious woman,” Guillen said. “I was not anticipating attending something like that.”

  * * *

  On November 13, 2004, Star Jones finally found true happiness—as Manhattan’s own Cinderella. On that morning, the entrance to St. Bartholomew’s Church was swarmed by gawkers and paparazzi. Part of this had been Star’s own fault. She told everybody on TV exactly when and where her wedding would be, which caused a mob scene: an immovable line of chauffeured cars and photographers clogged the streets. To keep the area secure
, the New York City Police Department, working with two private security firms, had to shut down a stretch of Park Avenue, which for Star gave the procession an aura of even more exclusivity.

  The gown, from celebrity designer Reem Acra, came with a train twenty-seven feet long. That number wasn’t chosen at random. “It was two feet longer than Princess Diana’s train,” Tutera explained. Before the service, as the crowds gathered in an unruly mess, Tutera made a suggestion. He asked Star to go into the doorway of the church and wave at them. Even the royal family would have acknowledged the little people. “A great photo opportunity,” Tutera said. “It makes her connected to her fans. She wouldn’t do it, which I think bit her in the ass.”

  Star had laid out specific instructions for how the day would proceed. The highlight of the ceremony (beyond the kiss) was supposed to be Patti LaBelle belting out a rendition of “My Love, Sweet Love” at a perfectly scripted moment. “As a gay guy who is obsessed with Patti LaBelle, I was already freaking nervous,” Tutera said. Then he couldn’t locate her. “She got lost in traffic.” Those street closures had claimed their first celebrity victim.

  Instead of enjoying the festivities, Tutera found himself pacing at the front of the church. Through a set of headphones, he instructed his staff to reshuffle the entire program, without telling Star. “Patti finally shows up,” Tutera said. “The ceremony has started. At the foot of the steps was every news outlet you could possibly think of. Patti gets out with a big cape, as she normally would, and instead of running up the steps, she decides to take interviews with all the news outlets.”

  What did Tutera do? “I said, ‘Patti, this is not the time for interviews! I need you to run up the stairs, get on the altar, and sing.’” And she did. “Star never knew this,” Tutera said. “I flipped the order of her ceremony.”

  Barbara and Bill took their reserved seats near the front. Meredith and Elisabeth sat in the back. Joy snuck into the balcony of the church for an aerial view. “If I get married, will you come to my wedding, too?” Joy quizzed Hillary Clinton later on. As the priest asked the guests if anybody objected to the blissful union, Chris Rock scuffed his feet against the floor, and the entire room erupted into laughter.

  Star had devised a special exit from the church. A tunnel of fabric was built outside a back door, so that when she got into her car, her dress still remained a mystery to the public at large. For the second time, Tutera broached the idea of waving to the minions camped outside. “She didn’t want anyone to see her,” he remembered. She’d sold the first images of her gown to People.

  The Star Jones wedding was ahead of its time. It capitalized on the illusion of the celebrity dream nuptials, just as glossy magazines had started to fork over millions for portraits of famous brides and grooms. At the Waldorf, Star banned all cell phones—a rule that wouldn’t seem surprising now, but it was unheard of in a pre-iPhone age. Star wanted to keep all the rights to all the pictures from her party. Just try to tell that to Barbara Walters. When an assistant asked her to check her phone, she declined and walked right in. “Let’s just say it didn’t happen,” Tutera remembered.

  The dinner at the Waldorf took place in a ballroom at the hotel. After three courses, the guests were escorted to another sprawling space for an all-night dance party. The dress code had been described as white-tie. “She didn’t want anybody in pants,” said Guillen, who had bought an expensive dress to fit in. “I remember looking at Joy, and she came in a black pantsuit. I was taken by that. I don’t know if anybody else noticed or if it was just me.”

  Joy later admitted to this fashion violation. “I wore a dressy black suit, and Star didn’t like that,” Joy told me. “She wanted us to wear dresses only. I wore pants. I don’t understand rules like that at a wedding. I guess I’m just a rebellious kind of gal.”

  Guillen saw something else that bothered her. When the minister blessed the food, Joy was snickering and whispering jokes to her longtime boyfriend, Steve. “That’s not what you do during prayer,” Guillen said. “I was offended by that, and I was disappointed in meeting Joy. I thought she was kind of rude.”

  Star and Al had their honeymoon trip planned to Dubai for a later date. She couldn’t leave the country until she finished her press obligations, sitting down with People in a sparkling sweater embroidered with the words Mrs. Reynolds. She resumed work on Monday to share all the memories from her magical weekend.

  At least one of her famous guests was moved by the procession. In the days after the wedding, Tutera got a call from Trump requesting a bid on his upcoming ceremony, set for January 2005. He wanted a carbon copy of what he’d seen, and long before Melania plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s Democratic National Convention speech, she borrowed something from the View bride. “Melania and Donald copied my design and hired someone else,” Tutera said. “That’s the God’s honest truth. Look at the photos of their wedding versus Star’s. It’s the exact same thing! The way the flowers were set up, the layout, the whole thing.”

  Star had accomplished what she’d set out to do. She had staged her own royal wedding—complete with all the dysfunction that would haunt Charles and Diana. “I had a fabulous wedding and a horrible marriage,” Star said. “It just didn’t work. Sometimes, it doesn’t.”

  9

  Meredith’s Great Escape

  For almost a decade, Meredith Vieira played the nice and normal one on The View. This wasn’t simply an act for the TV cameras. Of all the ladies, she was the one who changed the least after the show became a phenomenon, never letting fame get to her head. She didn’t raise her voice, create any unnecessary obstacles, rock the boat, or make life hell for any of the staff.

  But in the middle of Season 9, which ran from 2005 to 2006, Barbara Walters sensed that something might be wrong. It was time to renegotiate Meredith’s contract, yet her agent, Michael Glantz, hadn’t moved forward with a new deal.

  One morning, Bill Geddie approached her to see if he could figure it out. “Why haven’t you signed your contract?”

  Meredith shrugged off his question. She had a window to meet with other suitors, but she didn’t bring that up.

  Geddie tried to convince her to stay. “He sort of referenced the fact that at my age”—she was fifty-two—“it might be hard to get work,” Meredith recalled. “The implication was it wasn’t easy to get another job. And I’m thinking, ‘Yeah it is!’”

  Meredith had been harboring a big secret, as a game of high-stakes dominoes was about to commence. It all started with Dan Rather’s forced resignation from the CBS Evening News in November 2004, after running a story believed to be factually inaccurate about George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service on 60 Minutes. Bob Schieffer filled in as the temporary anchor until the network could find a true star. And we all know who CBS CEO Leslie Moonves wanted. Hiring Katie Couric would be a glass-ceiling-breaking moment, since no woman had ever held solo duties behind the desk of a nightly news broadcast.

  Over at NBC, the prospect of losing Couric made executives panic. At that time, Today—a cash machine—had successfully fended off GMA in the ratings for more than ten years, despite Diane Sawyer’s attempts to chip away at their lead. Couric, who had been appointed coanchor in 1991, was a big factor behind the popularity of Today. She’d built a crisp and peppy chemistry with Matt Lauer, who acquiesced to whatever Katie wanted. If she decided to bolt, it wasn’t clear that Today could keep winning.

  That’s when Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC’s Television Group, where he oversaw the news division, made a risky bet. Instead of promoting from within the Today family (following Couric’s and Lauer’s trajectory) and elevating Ann Curry, he wanted to steal from next door. This would be a first. Every modern anchor of Today had climbed up the news ladder. Although Meredith was an experienced journalist, having spent twenty years doing news stories, that hadn’t been what turned her into a star. Instead, she’d carved an unconventional path through The View, on which she effortlessly juggled the latest n
ational tragedies, self-help trends, and celebrity fads on Hot Topics. (Moonves’s backup plan for the nightly news, if Couric turned him down, was also Meredith, a sign of The View’s reach.)

  Meredith had toyed with the idea of leaving The View once before. When her initial contract was up in 2002, she pondered an offer from CBS to do a morning news show. Yet a concern held her back. “I’m not really a morning news person,” she told me. “The more we talked, the more I thought, ‘I don’t think this is really for me.’”

  At the time, Barbara helped Meredith land a bigger paycheck at ABC so she’d stay. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the quiz show that Regis Philbin had built into a prime-time smash, was about to be spun off for syndication. The first choice to host it, Rosie O’Donnell, turned them down, expressing a desire to retire from the limelight after ending her talk show in May 2002. “Meredith wanted more money,” Barbara said. “In order to get her to stay, I talked to ABC and gave her Millionaire. I was responsible for that happening.” The second job on Millionaire roughly doubled Meredith’s salary.

  Flash forward to the end of 2005. Zucker, who had started his career at NBC as the savant news producer who had morphed Today into a ratings juggernaut with big news stories, live concerts, and snappy celebrity interviews, knew how to play hardball. His reputation for always getting what he wanted meant that he wasn’t timid about prying talent from Barbara’s tight grip. He arranged a private meeting with Meredith. There were no witnesses because he picked her up in a chauffeured car one October afternoon from The View, and they drove in circles on the way to Millionaire, which taped later in the day.

  People don’t know this yet, but Katie is going to leave and I’d like for you to be her replacement, he told her.

  “I remember saying, ‘You’re skewing a little old,’” Meredith said. “It was the weirdest conversation.” Rather than offer her the job, Zucker asked her to meet with Lauer because she wouldn’t want to do it unless they got along. It was a smart way to keep her engaged, so that she’d at least entertain the idea. Meredith had dinner with Lauer at his apartment. “They knew I’d like Matt,” she said. (This interview was conducted before NBC News fired Lauer in November 2017 for alleged sexual misconduct with colleagues.)