Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  But Rosie and Barbara had different ways of looking at the world. Barbara characterized their relationship with more hesitation. “Rosie O’Donnell is a great talent,” she told me. “She also has, shall we say, emotional problems.”

  Rosie’s arrival at The View was marked by turbulence from the start. And not only because producers learned that she was the new moderator while they were in the air, flying from New York to Los Angeles for the Daytime Emmys in April 2006. The idea was that Rosie would appear with Barbara onstage at the awards show as presenters, where they’d make the surprise casting reveal about The View’s fall season. But the story got leaked a few days early. As the View staff reclined in their seats, teetering above the earth, they saw a breaking report on Fox News. “This is how we find out?” they gasped, scurrying back and forth in the aisle to discuss the latest development.

  After they landed, Geddie called an emergency meeting at the hotel. Since they couldn’t go to the bar, for fear of eavesdroppers, he assembled his team in a vacant parking lot for a pep talk. Geddie acknowledged that Rosie was notorious for being difficult (“We had all heard horror stories,” one staffer recalled), but he tried to reassure them that she’d turned a corner.

  He’d taken a long meeting at her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, where he’d been up-front about his concerns. “I had friends who worked for you,” he told her. “They said terrible things.” She responded convincingly that she had changed: “I was a different person then. I am on different meds now.”

  “And I believed her,” Geddie said.

  Only a small group of people knew about Barbara’s plan; the cohosts were in the circle, but they had all been sworn to secrecy. In Los Angeles for the Daytime Emmys, Joy stopped at a gifting suite in the Renaissance Hotel, where she inadvertently confirmed the news. “I was told, ‘Don’t tell anyone Rosie O’Donnell is coming on the show!’ They said it a hundred times. But when I’m shopping, I lose consciousness,” Joy confessed. A camera crew from Entertainment Tonight ambushed her, and Joy said she was thrilled to be Rosie’s coworker. “Five minutes later, Barbara came over—she’s shopping also—and says, ‘Don’t say a word about Rosie O’Donnell!’ Oh my God, what did I do?” Joy begged View publicist Karl Nilsson to get the clip killed.

  “What’s going to happen?” Joy asked him.

  “We’re all going to die,” Nilsson replied.

  “I go back to my room, practically saying the rosary, even though I don’t believe it,” Joy said. “I get a call from Barbara.”

  Entertainment Tonight had already reached out to tell Barbara that they knew that Rosie was the new cohost. “And guess who told them?” Barbara hissed.

  “Meredith Vieira?” Joy said with a lump in her throat.

  “No, Joy! I want you to know I’m not renewing your contract.” Barbara hung up.

  “I was, like, ‘Okay,’” Joy recalled. “‘I’ll get another job.’ But then she changed her mind ten minutes later.”

  By the time Barbara and Rosie appeared onstage on the night of April 28, their announcement was the worst-kept secret in Hollywood. They were TV’s newest power couple. Barbara, acting maternal for a split second, helped Rosie pick out her outfit—a black suit with scarf-length golden-striped lapels that looked like something the students at Hogwarts would wear. Later on, Joy, Meredith (who was about to leave for Today), and some producers met in a hotel room for drinks. “What is Rosie going to be like?” they asked, with fear and curiosity in their voices.

  It was a fair question. In her four-year break from show business, Rosie had become an enigma. True to her word, she’d shunned the spotlight and kept a low profile. “I was drinking a lot of beer,” Rosie said. “I was smoking joints in Miami when I was down there; going on my boat, looking at dolphins. It was a fucking perfect existence. It was glorious. And everybody in my world got to enjoy it.” Her only interaction with the public was through her blog. Before Twitter, Rosie kept in touch with her fans by posting photos and answering their questions in late-night insomniac sessions.

  Rosie was so under the radar, ABC was initially cold to the idea of hiring her. “I don’t know,” said Brian Frons, the president of the network’s daytime division. She’d done a few stints as a guest cohost. “We had her on,” he recalled. “She seemed a little flat.” He asked to talk to her on the phone. “I was blown away,” Frons said. “What was so amazing about her is that she was a host, but she talked like an executive producer. She said, ‘When I sit on that stage, I’m going to make every one of these people better.’ And then she proceeded to say how.”

  Rosie decided that Joy looked too disconnected and bored. She wanted her to dive headfirst into the Hot Topics discussions instead of simply delivering punch lines. Rosie was determined to find a way for Elisabeth Hasselbeck to grow. “It can’t just be opinion,” Rosie told Frons. “It can’t just be arguing. I’ll make her better. I’ll be her friend,” which wasn’t expected, given their differing political views. Above anything else, Rosie wanted to shield Barbara.

  Something had gotten lost in translation during the negotiations. Barbara and Bill thought they were hiring a new moderator, who’d be part of the group. Rosie, who agreed to a single-year contract, had a different vision. She thought Barbara needed to be rescued. Or, to use another metaphor, Rosie was the guest you invite for cocktails who decides she’s going to renovate your entire kitchen.

  “You should never really go into someone else’s house and tell them how to rearrange their furniture,” Rosie said. “And that’s something that was very hard for me to learn because I had been an actor in an ensemble, and I knew how to do that. I’ve never had a negative word about me on the set of any single show involving acting. But when I’m in charge, as I was in my household as a little child with a dead mother, I try to get it done. I knew how to fix the show. And part of it was getting Bill Geddie to shut up and take a step back.”

  Despite their earlier chat, Rosie quickly turned on Geddie. She thought he was riding on Barbara’s coattails for fame and a paycheck. “He was an idiot,” Rosie said. “He was this guy who had got on this legend and had never done anything on his own that was in any way notable. He was this misogynistic alpha male who thought he was better than the women. That’s my feeling. He never fired anyone and bought their loyalty, like they were cult members. And the show never got to progress artistically.”

  Rosie’s biggest clashes were with the director. Just as she viciously argued with whoever held that job on her own show, she and Mark Gentile quickly took opposite sides. On a quiet morning in August, Gentile was making preparations for Season 10 when he got an unexpected visitor. “The door opens on the side, and in walks Rosie with one of her little lieutenants,” Gentile said. “She barks out her first words—not hello, not hi.”

  “Who said it should look like a house?” Rosie berated him about the set. “It shouldn’t look like a house. It’s a TV studio.” With that, she left.

  Gentile was shocked. “We all sat there. I was, like, ‘What the hell was that?’”

  Rosie was now managing every detail of the latest makeover by herself. “It looked like a nanny’s living room,” Rosie said about the beige paint on the walls. “So we had a set designer come in and they made it blue, and I thought it looked beautiful.” She rearranged the chairs in the audience in a U-shape, which made the View stage seem more intimate. She insisted on regular giveaways for the audience, and she had a machine installed to drop confetti on the stage.

  In her last daytime venture, Telepictures had urged her to stay away from politics. But on The View, the out and proud Rosie wouldn’t be holding back. The country was divided at the time, after George W. Bush had invaded Iraq under the false pretense of weapons of mass destruction. “I had a little kid I was picking up at school every day, and every mother was talking about what was happening with Bush,” Rosie said. She was determined to bring those conversations to daytime TV.

  * * *

  On September 5, 200
6, Rosie O’Donnell reinvigorated The View as the show’s next moderator. “Like it or not, here I come,” she declared in a prerecorded clip before the opening credits. She walked out onstage, her arms locked with Barbara’s, as if they were long-lost girlfriends. In the weeks ahead, the gap between them during their entrances would grow wider apart.

  In the minutes before the show, Rosie paced backstage. She’d secured Jessica Simpson as the first guest, a big celebrity in 2006. But Gentile had reshuffled the audience so the teenage groupies were all seated near the stage to watch the musical performance by Simpson. Rosie was worried the crowd was too young to root for her. “Where are my people?” she asked Gentile. “Where are the fatties?” He didn’t know what to say. “Of course, I never even thought of that,” he said, remembering the exchange.

  There was no need for alarm. As soon as she walked out, Rosie was met with rock-star applause. “I ask you, for heaven’s sake, what is all the fuss about?” Barbara said, already looking uncertain about her new hire.

  “Well, it’s about our new set,” Rosie said, quickly channeling her lovable daytime-TV persona. “What do you think?” This led to more clapping.

  “Do you think we should introduce you?” Barbara said, not able to repress her controlling nature. “Or is that unnecessary?”

  “Okay. My name is Meredith Vieira, and welcome to The View.” Rosie chatted about how she was wearing heels to fit in and why she let her hair grow out, after a bad buzz cut scared all of America. Rosie then pointed to a big bouquet of flowers displayed on the stage, which had been sent to her by her old crush.

  “We have so much to talk about today, so we should put Tom for tomorrow,” Barbara awkwardly interrupted.

  Rosie stayed true to her word about what she’d accomplish on The View. She coaxed out stories from Elisabeth about potty training her kids and from Joy about her daughter’s engagement, all the while cracking jokes. Rosie then enthusiastically talked about her own gay family. (“It was a vivid contrast to Ellen DeGeneres, who never alludes to her sexuality on her talk show,” the New York Times’s TV critic at the time, Alessandra Stanley, wrote in a glowing review.) Rosie’s then wife Kelli was in the audience, and Rosie had her four kids to rely on for endless anecdotes. The ladies even addressed a tabloid report that Barbara had spotted a mean haiku on Rosie’s blog and they were already feuding.

  “I have never read a blog,” said Barbara.

  “I was saying that I felt powerless and that I was a little scared to come on The View,” Rosie confessed. “I was just being dramatic and emotional.”

  Barbara asked how Rosie felt four minutes into her new gig.

  “Really excited to be here and kind of ecstatic!” Rosie blushed. “I’m just happy that we’re all here together.”

  So was the rest of the country. That premiere for Season 10 of The View landed 4.2 million viewers, the most-watched episode in the show’s history (a considerable jump from the 2.7 million viewers it attracted the previous season). In the months ahead, Rosie would bring a 17 percent increase in viewership. With numbers like that, Barbara and Bill had their hands tied. Regardless of their personal feelings for Rosie, ABC wasn’t about to let its new star slip away.

  Rosie’s edition of The View was appointment TV. She continually opposed Bush’s policies, defended LGBTQ rights, and advocated for feminism, more than a decade before #MeToo and Time’s Up. Other TV outlets from Access Hollywood to Fox News started covering The View nightly. “I went in there being me,” Rosie said. “Like, the Michael Jordan of daytime is going to come in and help this team. I tried to fix the show, and many would say I did.”

  Politics aside, Rosie still relied on many of her old producing tricks, which worked like a charm. She had the cast of Broadway’s Beauty and the Beast make a secret appearance for Barbara’s birthday, wheeling out a humongous cake to the tune of “Be Our Guest.” On another day, Rosie featured a twelve-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis and asked her to mouth along to a song from Rent, her favorite musical. After the first lyric, Rosie had the cast magically appear behind the girl. The segment was such a feel-good tearjerker that ABC put it in their press kit to show to advertisers. “Rosie had a lot of heart,” Frons said. “This is great TV. It’s not Game of Thrones, but it’s great.”

  Behind the scenes, the mood actually resembled that HBO saga. Two teams had emerged: those who were with Rosie, including her writer Janette Barber, who had come over from The Rosie O’Donnell Show, and those who were against Rosie. Producers brainstormed about how to get on her good side. Since she had a soft spot for single moms and gay men, those who qualified tried to play up their personal stories with her. One straight male producer even joked that he would pretend to convert so that he could keep his job. But the biggest mystery of all was how Rosie and Elisabeth had become such fast friends. Elisabeth attended her first Broadway show with Rosie and was invited to Rosie’s house for playdates with their kids. They got so close that Joy speculated that Rosie must have a crush on Elisabeth.

  “It was a completely different show,” Joy said. “It became a lot about Rosie O’Donnell. She’s a very dominant personality. She basically came in like Hurricane Katrina and she did change the show a lot. I wasn’t crazy about it.”

  Joy pointed to all the tensions: “There was a lot of difficulty backstage. There was acrimony between her and the director. Her and the executive producer weren’t getting along. Suddenly, she comes in and tells people, ‘You have to do this.’ And all of a sudden, I have to do something that I was not prepared to do—like sing and dance. That makes me anxious. I feel as though I’m being bullied.”

  Barbara, who came and went as her schedule permitted, saw her grip on the show loosening. The other cohosts no longer needed her to bail them out of tricky situations—since Rosie’s star power arguably eclipsed Barbara’s. At other times, Rosie was the rebellious daughter that couldn’t be reined in. On mornings when Barbara did work at The View, she would shuffle in her robe from her dressing room to Rosie’s across the hall, pounding on the door. Rosie liked to blast music on her laptop as she got her hair done. “Turn it down!” Barbara would mutter.

  Geddie’s influence also lessened. Rosie didn’t trust his judgment on a number of things, starting with the selection of Hot Topics. “There would be a school shooting and he’d want to do lipsticks,” she said. Rosie characterized those interactions by saying, “What the fuck do you know what women like? You don’t know.”

  She refused to wear an earpiece, which the producers used to communicate with the talent during the live show. Rosie thought it destroyed their ability to spontaneously interact, and she urged the other cohosts to join her boycott. Rosie would tell most of the staff how frustrated she was with Gentile, for whom she’d falsely made up a diagnosis of autism. (She loved to play doctor, despite her lack of qualifications.) She knew that he stayed up all night to create sets for the musical acts, which were beautiful. But she was critical about most of his other decisions, especially his screen cuts. Gentile always thought Rosie held a grudge because he’d turned down her offer to join The Rosie O’Donnell Show. He once overheard Rosie complaining to Joy about that.

  Rosie has a different reason for why they didn’t get along. She recalled coming to a meeting and seeing a baby in a producer’s arms. “Is this Mark’s baby?” she asked the woman who had been having an affair with him. Suddenly, the room went silent, and the whole staff looked at Rosie with disgust. Although Barbara knew about the relationship, along with everyone else, the unspoken rule was to never mention it. “Listen, can my style be abrasive in a community where secrets are paramount and reality is distorted and you don’t know the rules of the cult? And you would never join one?” Rosie asked rhetorically. She nodded. (“That’s not the reason we hated Rosie,” one producer said. “We hated Rosie because she’s a terrible person.”)

  During her first three months, Rosie made a huge impact in the daytime-TV landscape. She ignited a series of controversies, wh
ich only fanned interest in The View. She upset conservatives by saying “radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam in a country like America where we have separation of church and state.” She attempted a tone-deaf imitation of Chinese people, which many viewers found offensive. And she objected to how Kelly Ripa had spoken to American Idol finalist Clay Aiken. He was filling in for Regis Philbin on Live with Regis and Kelly when, in the middle of an interview, he covered Ripa’s mouth to quiet her down. “I don’t know where that hand’s been, honey,” Ripa told him.

  While the clip had generated some attention, Rosie made it go viral with her own interpretation. On November 21, she went on The View and called Ripa’s remark homophobic. “If that was a straight man, if that was a cute man, if that was a guy that she didn’t question his sexuality, she would have said a different thing,” Rosie lectured. “I was offended by that.” Making the situation even more complicated, Aiken hadn’t publicly come out of the closet yet.

  Rosie had her say. The episode had moved on, with Rosie offering all members of the audience signed programs from the opening night of Mary Poppins. But Ripa’s stern voice came crackling into the studio over a speaker. Ripa had called producer Alexandra Cohen, whose phone number Ripa had from their years of taking cigarette breaks together. Without asking for Rosie’s approval, Geddie decided to patch Ripa through.

  “Listen, I’m watching the show,” Ripa said. “Rosie, I love you dearly. I have to strongly disagree. I think what you said is downright outrageous.”

  “Well, Kel,” Rosie said, looking annoyed, “I come from my perspective. You talk on your show. I talk on mine.”

  Ripa wasn’t having it. “You know better. You should be more responsible.”

  “I’m just saying from where I sit as a gay person in the world, I have to tell you, that’s how it came off to me,” Rosie said with a frown.