Rosie blamed the media for giving Trump a free pass. “If you’re a kid who grew up in New York and you’re my age, the ridiculousness of his essence is obvious. It’s infuriating to me that when he started to run, the news media didn’t do its due diligence. Everything I said about him in 2006 is factual and true and available on the internet. There’s no reason for the world to be this fooled. And shame on us for not rectifying that.”
* * *
Rosie blamed another person for this debacle. In Rosie’s opinion, Barbara Walters didn’t do enough to protect her. After her feud with Trump got nasty, Barbara and Bill issued an anodyne statement, not siding with either Rosie or Trump. When Barbara returned to work, Rosie was on vacation. Barbara issued another statement, clarifying that Trump hadn’t personally declared bankruptcy and insisting that she had never uttered a bad word about Rosie to Trump. It wasn’t enough for Rosie, whose life had been turned inside out. The paparazzi were camping outside her house. She felt targeted.
On January 8, 2007, her rage exploded. That day will live in infamy at The View. Producers still talk about the dressing-room fight as if they were watching a volcano erupt. “Rosie wanted to be defended,” Joy said.
That day in the Hot Topics meeting, Rosie came in looking deflated and sat down quietly, without talking to anyone. Barbara entered the room and made the mistake of walking up to Rosie, as if nothing had been wrong. That’s when Rosie lost it. She leaped up, and started “to berate her,” according to Geddie. He later called it “the moment she went at Barbara.”
In a tirade, Rosie shouted insults at Walters. Rosie was furious that Barbara hadn’t reached out to her in the last ten days. “I definitely yelled,” Rosie recalled. “I said how disappointed I was and how shocked and hurt I was that she wouldn’t stand up for me. I felt very betrayed about her going behind my back and speaking to Donald Trump in Trumpian language. I said something about her daughter, which I should not have said. But I did.”
Rosie told the creator of The View that she was a bad mother. “No wonder Jackie can’t stand you,” Rosie yelled, referencing Barbara’s strained relationship with her daughter.
“Do not speak about my daughter,” Barbara said.
“Barbara is completely unprepared for this, and also not one of those people that likes a big confrontation,” Geddie said. “And certainly not a confrontation in a room full of senior and junior staff—there were a lot of people in the room. I can’t tell you everything she said, but it was nasty. And she does it for about forty seconds, maybe a minute. I finally said, ‘Enough. You can’t talk to her anymore like this.’ And she turned on me, saying how much she hated me for a variety of reasons.”
Geddie had given up trying to establish a functional relationship with Rosie. “We were the parents,” he said. “One person said to me, ‘You’re the father that raped her, and Barbara Walters is the mother who let it happen.’ Well, what can I do about that? If that’s where we’re starting from, I don’t know how to rectify that.”
What made the fight even more dramatic was the contrast in Rosie’s and Barbara’s physical statures. Geddie said that Rosie towered over Barbara, who was frail and much smaller than her. “I did not tower over anyone,” Rosie told me. “I was sitting in my makeup chair, and she was sitting in her makeup chair. It wasn’t my best moment.” Rosie had initially decided that she wanted to be at The View to act as Barbara’s shield. Now she was tearing her down. Trump had forced the two women to turn on each other.
“Barbara afterward said something to the effect of, ‘It took you long enough to get in there and break that up,’” Geddie said. “I was shocked by it, too. Barbara, at that time, wasn’t a kid. She was well into her seventies. She’s not somebody you scream at. You don’t scream at older ladies like that, regardless of who they are, and you certainly don’t scream at Barbara Walters, the person who hired you.”
Some staff, in retelling the story, said it looked as if Rosie wanted to physically harm Barbara. “I don’t think that Rosie would ever hit Barbara,” Geddie said. “I don’t think that’s what she does. I think she gets furious. I don’t think she’s going to slug you.” But metaphorically, Rosie had taken the gloves off. “We knew we had an issue,” Geddie said. “It was a terrible thing.” Barbara looked shaken as she made her way up to the studio. As Geddie left the room, his shock turned to relief. He thought ABC would have no choice but to fire Rosie. But despite complaints from Barbara herself to top executives, the network didn’t do anything. The message got back to Barbara that Rosie was at The View to stay.
“Well, he’s at it again,” Rosie said two days later, after another attack from Trump.
“That poor pathetic man,” Barbara said, offering a public olive branch to Rosie. She’d finally disavowed Trump.
Yet privately the two women had entered the point of no return. It would be impossible to think that Barbara and Rosie could coexist on the show after that dressing-room fight. “When Rosie came on, she told me she wanted to be a passenger on the bus. She didn’t want to drive it,” Geddie said. “But she didn’t like where the bus is going.”
Barbara had to find a way to stealthily fight back—and somehow eject Rosie from her seat. “This was a power struggle for the heart of the show,” Geddie said. The View wasn’t big enough for the both of them.
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It started to look as if Rosie O’Donnell might emerge as the winner of the tug-of-war for The View. Barbara Walters had created the show and could interview anybody about anything, but Rosie outshone her when it came to connecting with daytime viewers—she had the relatable gene. Barbara also didn’t have the advantage of face time at the studio every day, since she kept a sporadic schedule. As the moderator, Rosie held the keys to the kingdom. She wasn’t shy about dictating editorial decisions, inventing her own segments, suggesting guests, and overriding Bill Geddie. Many of the longtime staff members tripped over themselves to try to impress her.
“A lot of insecure people who were producers—and Elisabeth Hasselbeck—they thought Rosie would be their ticket,” said Alexandra Cohen. “She was Rosie O’Donnell. If you didn’t fall in line, what’s going to happen?” Cohen told Geddie she couldn’t believe how quickly Elisabeth had shifted her allegiances. “Bill always liked Elisabeth,” Cohen said. “I just remember saying to him I was getting so enraged with her. I saw the way she tried to align herself. She was doing what my producers do, asking, ‘Where does my future lie?’”
That strategizing was because of the real possibility that Rosie could inherit The View. Barbara, who was seventy-seven, would need to retire sometime. Even if she wanted to work forever, not many octogenarians were entrusted with the responsibilities of live TV. In conversations with the staff, Rosie reinforced the impression that Barbara’s last day might come sooner rather than later. She compared her boss to an elderly relative who needed help in the kitchen to make a delicious meal because she couldn’t do it on her own. Rosie shared that analogy with me on two occasions: “Just the same way your grandmother at Thanksgiving makes the turkey and stuffing. This year, she’s ninety-two and she can’t. So she stands by the stove and your mother helps her. You go, ‘Nana, this is the greatest stuffing ever.’ But everyone knows Nana didn’t make the stuffing, because she can’t anymore. But Nana still deserves respect at the table.”
Rosie believed that by continuing to let Barbara appear on The View, Geddie was tarnishing her legacy. Rosie would frequently say that Barbara had lost her polish, as evidenced by occasional non sequiturs during Hot Topics and lapses in her memory. Barbara, never one to back down from a fight, engaged in her own smear campaign against Rosie. She’d call up Anne Sweeney or Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, to spread stories about how Rosie had alienated the staff and was driving everybody nuts. And Barbara would bad-mouth Rosie in front of other employees when Rosie wasn’t there.
Since Rosie had signed only a one-year contract, she had to negotiate a new agreement tha
t spring. Despite Barbara’s attempts at sabotage, ABC wanted to keep Rosie, because of the ratings surge. ABC was considering two scenarios. Either Rosie would stay on The View for one or more seasons. Or the network would spin her off into her own daytime talk show. With rumors about Oprah Winfrey ending her daytime run in the near future (she left in 2011), ABC needed insurance and wanted The Rosie O’Donnell Show back on TV.
Regardless of what Rosie decided, Geddie believed his days on The View were numbered. “The reason he would have thought he was being fired is that Rosie was walking around going, ‘I’m going to get you fired,’” said Brian Frons, the head of ABC Daytime. “She wanted everybody fired.”
Rosie made it clear that Geddie was one of her targets. “She didn’t like that she was working for someone,” Geddie said. “And I have to say this, on behalf of Rosie, I understand that. She ran her own show the way she ran it, and it was successful. I think she thought she would be able to transform the show more into something like The Rosie O’Donnell Show. More Broadway. More giveaways. It was my job to stop that, to say, ‘We have a successful show that I need you to fit into.’” Although he’d just bought a high-rise apartment for his family across the street from The View, he started exploring the idea of a new life in Los Angeles. When Geddie left town to produce Walter’s annual Oscars special in February 2007—with guests Ellen DeGeneres, Eddie Murphy, Helen Mirren, and Jennifer Hudson—he stayed on the West Coast for a time, walking off his own show because his relationship with Rosie had turned so toxic. Cohen quietly stepped in as the interim executive producer, holding down the fort as the producers waited for a resolution.
“It was horrible,” Cohen said. “I was running around putting out fires. She was attacking my staff. Everybody was living in fear.” Rosie’s impulsive management style created a chaotic, nervous mood, fueled by widespread panic of getting fired overnight. When Barbara was in charge, although she could be demanding, she never threatened to ruin producers. With Rosie, staffers were flung into last-minute scavenger hunts. One morning, Rosie announced that she wanted a Power Rangers outfit as a surprise present for a young child who was part of a human-interest segment. Several producers went running to the nearest drugstore. When one of them miraculously found the costume, Rosie wasn’t impressed. It was in the wrong color. “Look, I would say that she had a great producing mind for some things,” Cohen said. “But we were a very small staff. We did the best we could.”
Rosie’s personality loomed large over the set. Cohen recalled how Rosie diagnosed herself with so many conditions, it was hard to keep track. “She was bipolar,” said Cohen (which Rosie no longer thinks she is). “She was manic-depressive. She was on the autism spectrum, and she had everything under the sun.” One day, they were all watching TV in the makeup room. “There was an ad for restless leg syndrome, and we started joking about it,” Cohen said. Rosie didn’t laugh. She proclaimed, “I have that.”
Her list of complaints about the show was long. “I’d come in every once in a while,” said Frons, who lived in Los Angeles, “and I’d fucking have to have dinner in Nyack”—close to where Rosie lived—“at America’s worst Mexican restaurant. We’d have two or three hours of her ranting about Bill or Barbara or what wasn’t happening in America at that particular moment. Sometimes she was right. Sometimes she was wrong. Our job was to encourage what was right, and when it was wrong, to try to get it toned down.”
On TV, Rosie had the first half of the show under her control because she could pick how she presented the Hot Topics. But she lost her temper frequently over how the camera operators handled her more creative segments. “She always had a problem when we were doing an arts-and-crafts demo,” said Cohen, an area The View had not explored before. “That’s when she would come down on the directing staff. Some shot wouldn’t happen the way she wanted it. When Bill left, I was really running interference between the producers and Rosie, the other talent and Rosie, and the people coming in and crying. At the same time, people were kissing her ass.”
As the director, Gentile got the brunt of Rosie’s wrath. “She’s clinically insane,” he said. “Not like Bill O’Reilly, he’s crazy. She’s medically insane. The best talent she has is making you believe she’s normal.” He said that her reign over The View resembled a foreign nation under an oppressive regime. “She was like Pol Pot in Cambodia. She was going to go through the country and she was going to kill everybody and have it her way. From day one, she was here to teach these morons how to do a show. Everything we did was wrong, no matter what it was.” If anyone doubted her judgment, Rosie referenced her shelf of Emmys at home as proof that she was right.
Gentile learned that Rosie was trying to get him fired. “She trashed me to the network,” he said. “She convinced them I was the biggest bum on the planet. We were all paralyzed.” He said that his anger reached a tipping point when she came down on him for something so trivial he doesn’t remember what it was. “She started screaming, and some intern came down and said, ‘Rosie wants to see you in her office.’ I said to myself, ‘I can go out with dignity or I can cower in fear like everybody else.’” He took the former route. “I faced the demon myself. I got up and walked down to her office and I had a screaming match, in which I told her, ‘You don’t have anybody here fooled. You’re calling everyone out for their mistakes, but everybody’s got your number. You make as many mistakes if not more. Everybody knows it. You don’t have talent. You don’t have all the skills you claim to have. You are denigrating people that are working under you.’”
The View was consumed by so much turmoil that Gentile’s outburst got lost in all the noise. The network didn’t even reprimand him for yelling at talent. “I went back to my office,” recalled Gentile, “and I said to my stage manager, ‘Here’s what I want you to do. Your job for the rest of the time I’m here—whether they fire me or whether I live out my contract—is to make sure I never see her in person again.’” For the rest of the season, the show’s director wouldn’t walk into the studio unless it had been cleared of Rosie.
A little later, Rosie tried to make amends by telling one of the other stage supervisors to compliment Gentile about a musical performance. He didn’t care. “You tell her no matter what she says to me, it doesn’t matter,” he responded. “She’s dead to me.”
Before their last confrontation, Gentile had enlisted two other employees to join him in a group complaint to human resources about Rosie’s abusive behavior. They filed their grievance with Tanya L. Menton, vice president of litigation and employment practices at ABC. “It didn’t do any good,” Gentile said.
When I asked O’Donnell about it, she had no knowledge of Gentile’s complaint: “I don’t know what he went to HR for. What, that I told people he had a child with one of the other staff members while being married?”
* * *
ABC was determined to keep The View together, even if the show had splintered into dysfunctional tribes. In February, during her visit to Los Angeles for the Oscars, Barbara issued her ultimatum to Frons at Spago, telling him that she and Geddie refused to return to the show unless Rosie was gone.
“Really, Barbara and Bill were going to walk away from the show they created?” Frons said. “I don’t think so. All this is negotiable. It’s about power. Who controls the show? Ultimately, the people I want to control the show are the viewers. I want to give them what they want to see, which is Barbara and Rosie and Bill.”
Rather than relying on a seasoned agent, Rosie was using her brother Ed, who had worked in ad sales at NBC, as her negotiator. “He did the ratings comp and the price of commercials, and he said, ‘This is how much you made the company this year,’” she recalled. “So I said, I wanted five million dollars, which is a lot less than what I was making on my own show, by tens of millions of dollars.” Frons didn’t agree with the math. “If we had known the ratings were going to be that good at upfronts,” he said, referring to the spring period in which networks sell advertising in advanc
e, or “upfront,” then “we would have sold it at a much higher price. But we didn’t.”
As these talks were going on, Geddie decided that he’d cooled off long enough from The View. But more—and different—trouble was brewing. When he returned a month later, Rosie and Elisabeth had finally turned against each other. Rosie kept producing Elisabeth, voicing concerns that she was too stiff and emotionally distant. Elisabeth was mad that Rosie wouldn’t stop asking her questions during Hot Topics, trying to trip her up about George W. Bush’s policies instead of simply debating her. When Elisabeth complained to Geddie about this, he offered her some advice. If Rosie tried to do that, Elisabeth should try the same technique on her—by rattling off questions that would make her stumble.
That led to an unwieldy exchange on the morning of March 29. The ladies were at it with guest cohost Marcia Gay Harden. The Hot Topics focused on how (or if) Bush used the September 11 attacks to go to war in Iraq. As if that weren’t enough to chew on, Rosie was espousing conspiracy theories that secret explosives at 7 World Trade Center caused it to crumble, suggesting that the US government played a role in the nation’s deadliest terrorist attack.
“I hope people across the world don’t think what George Bush is doing represents the American people, because the last election shows it does not,” Rosie said.
“But let me ask you this,” responded Hasselbeck. “What concerns me is there’s this environment now where we’re more apt to trust our enemies than our allies.”
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