Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  “Which, of course,” he added, “was the kiss of death.”

  There may have been a reason to fire Elisabeth. But dumping Joy was a kamikaze move. Viewers consistently ranked her as one of their favorite cohosts on the show. For whatever reason, ABC thought they had to scrub clean any trace of politics from The View.

  It’s not exactly clear who pulled the trigger. Some of the network executives blame Barbara, claiming that she had grown tired of Elisabeth and her backstage temper tantrums. They say that she helped expedite Elisabeth’s demise by arguing that she needed to be replaced. When asked about that, Barbara dodged any of the blame. “These are not Barbara and Bill’s decisions,” she said, about what happened to Elisabeth and Joy. “The network is also involved. I think the feeling was, if one went, both had to leave. We needed to shake things up.”

  Geddie tried to save them. “My whole argument was, ‘You can’t tell what the show is going to be until Barbara leaves. Why not let her leave and we can regroup and see how the show feels?’” He reminded the network that what made The View special in the first place was its emphasis on politics.

  “No, the show is hemorrhaging now,” Dummer decided. “We need to change now.”

  “Television is not a very patient business,” Geddie recalled.

  They broke the bad news to both ladies at the same time. One day after the show, Geddie and the network’s vice president of daytime programming, Randall Barone, called a meeting with Elisabeth. They told her that ABC wasn’t renewing her contract for Season 17 of The View, and she’d have until the summer to find a new job. “Did she know it was coming? I don’t think so,” Geddie said, confirming for the first time that Elisabeth was fired from The View. She started crying.

  “She was emotional,” Geddie recalled. “I was emotional. When you do a show like The View, these people are forced to give themselves every day. They walk out relatively unprotected and have to say something that may get them in trouble. So our job as producers is to know they have a soft place to land. We were in the papers almost every day. They were coming after us every day. We got really close.”

  Then Geddie and Barone went to Joy’s dressing room. “I had no clue really,” Joy told me. “I was, like, ‘Hi, guys.’ They were very sheepish because they knew they were making a mistake. They said, ‘We’re not renewing.’ I said, ‘Thank God! I’ve been waiting for this.’” She volunteered to leave that week, but Geddie told her they needed her for a few more months. After sixteen years, Joy was ready to move on.

  “I had been planning to get out of there,” Joy said. “It’s very hard to give up a high-paying job. It’s like leaving a marriage. No one is getting hurt. You’re just bored.”

  Geddie was torn up about it. “I was trying not to cry like a baby. To me, Joy—as much as Barbara and Meredith—was a very important part of the show. It was hard for me to let her go. It was hard for me to let Elisabeth go. It would have been easier for me to go with them.”

  * * *

  On March 7, 2013, Joy Behar announced that she was fleeing The View that August to focus on unspecified projects. As was the case with almost all the fired cohosts that preceded her, she framed it as a decision that she made on her own. No sooner had she bid her farewell than press reports surfaced that Elisabeth would also be getting the boot.

  Yet the show wasn’t ready to reveal that yet. On March 11, Barbara delivered a stern lecture, assuring viewers that Elisabeth had a place at the table for as long as she’d like to stay. “We have no plans for Elisabeth to leave this show,” she lied. Behind the scenes, Barbara was working to help Elisabeth land on her feet. Barbara turned to her friend Roger Ailes at Fox News. It was the least she could do for a colleague. Barbara didn’t want Elisabeth to attack the show on her way out in the same way as Rosie and Star had. Ailes agreed to sign Elisabeth, although he let it be known at Fox News that he only hired her as a favor to Barbara.

  Two months later, in May, Barbara had her own announcement. “So let me say that I have been on television continuously for over fifty years,” she said, as old glamorous head shots popped up on the screen. “But in the summer of 2014, a year from now, I plan to retire from appearing on television at all.” She made it clear that no one was forcing her off her show. “I’m perfectly healthy. This is my decision. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. And this is what I want to do.”

  If anyone was ready to write her off, she issued this warning: “Remember I have another whole year to go. I look forward to the next year, to my last season.”

  She didn’t want to go. But she could at least take comfort in dragging out her farewell tour for as long as humanly possible. For the next twelve months, ABC would be throwing her a never-ending retirement bash.

  And there would be one more change. On July 10, Elisabeth made her final headline on The View by dropping the bombshell that it was her last day. There was no reason to worry—she had another job lined up, although she didn’t tell viewers how she got it or why she had to leave. In the fall, she’d begin as the coanchor of the morning show Fox & Friends.

  Elisabeth, who never talked about getting fired from The View, thanked everyone who worked on the show, heaping praise on Barbara for teaching her everything about journalism. Elisabeth told producers she didn’t want a party on her way out. She made a hurried exit as soon she stepped off the set.

  “Bye, Elisabeth,” the director Mark Gentile said to her backstage. She wouldn’t respond. “I was a little hurt,” he said. “I understood the emotions.”

  But she’d get the last laugh. After Elisabeth and Joy were gone, the ratings for The View fell off a cliff.

  19

  Mommie Dearest

  As the eleventh cohost on The View, Jenny McCarthy found herself in a horror movie. She took the job expecting to bring some humor to Hot Topics, but that wasn’t possible given the atmosphere on the set. Barbara Walters was in despair that she was retiring, and she made it clear that she didn’t want to go quietly. Whoopi Goldberg had no patience for Barbara’s clinging to whatever power she had left. And ABC bosses soon realized that they had accidentally dumped what had made The View successful—the panel’s fire and ice.

  Jenny, who had been a guest on The View in the past, had already survived a traumatic encounter backstage. “You know the movie Mommie Dearest?” Jenny asked me one afternoon over lunch. “I remember as a child watching that movie and going, ‘Holy cow!’” She paused for effect. “I’ve never seen a woman yell like that before until I worked with Barbara Walters.”

  In 2007, Jenny was promoting her book Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing Autism, in which she argued that vaccines weakened her son’s immune system and triggered his autism. She claimed that she had improved Evan’s health through a gluten-free diet of cod-liver oil and vitamins along with behavioral therapy. Even though this treatment wasn’t supported by any medical research, her fame as a former Playboy model, MTV host, and actress provided her with a big megaphone. “I was on Oprah,” Jenny recalled. “Everyone was coming out of the woodwork. I was mainly getting, ‘Thank you for speaking up.’”

  Her publicity tour took her all the way to The View. Before the interview, a producer told Jenny that Barbara wanted to speak to her.

  “I walked into her dressing room and she blew up at me,” Jenny said. “She was screaming, ‘How dare you say this! That autism can be cured?’ My knees were shaking. I remember my whole body was shaking.”

  Jenny responded that she never used the word cured to describe Evan’s condition. That didn’t matter. “You’re such a liar!” Barbara screamed.

  “This lasted for about seven minutes,” Jenny said. “Finally, someone pulled me out of the room. I went back to my dressing room, not knowing what the fuck to do. One of my heroes just chewed me a new asshole, and I’m going on live TV. I’m freaking the fuck out.” The producer told her that Barbara didn’t want Jenny to walk onto the set as a guest because that would prompt the audience to c
lap. Instead, the interview began with Jenny on the couch, wedged between the ladies, with the camera on Barbara for an introduction.

  “As they pull out from her face, I’m sitting there, terrified.” Jenny wasn’t worried about what she had to say; she thought Barbara wouldn’t let her speak. “It was not like I was trying to prove a scientific fact. It’s my story. I knew she couldn’t outsmart me in this interview, because she can’t tell me what happened with my child. I was able to calm myself down.”

  The conversation played out more peacefully than it had in the dressing room. Barbara challenged Jenny—as any journalist would—about the idea that autism could be cured. Only later did Jenny wonder if Barbara had lost her temper because of her sister, Jackie, who had died in 1985. Barbara often said that she thought Jackie might have been autistic. “Back then, there really wasn’t anything you could do about it,” Jenny said. “She didn’t want to hear that there was maybe a possibility that her sister could have gotten better.”

  When Jenny finished the interview, she made a promise to herself. “I said, ‘I’m never going on the fucking View again. Ever.’ Cut to a few years later, I have more books to sell.”

  On her next appearance—in 2012—Barbara couldn’t have been more welcoming to Jenny, who was promoting a memoir titled Bad Habits: Confessions of a Recovering Catholic. “She fully read my book cover to cover,” Jenny said. “She came to my dressing room and quoted dirty stories from it, asked me to autograph it for her, and she had no recollection that I had been there before. She was hugging me, loving on me. I was, like, ‘This is the craziest fucking shit I’ve ever experienced in my life.’”

  Jenny saw an opening for herself. After two decades as a goofball on TV—she’d channeled a bawdier Vanna White on the 1995 MTV dating series Singled Out—Jenny wanted to graduate to more substance. “I remember thinking to myself, ‘I want to do something that has a little more class to it. And spread my wings a little bit.’” In 2013, she hosted a cable talk show on Friday nights, where C-list stars guzzled down martinis. “My VH1 show was a little too raunchy. I wanted something in the middle.”

  Then she heard about Joy Behar’s departure. “I thought to myself, ‘That’s where I’m going next.’” Bill Geddie invited her to audition for Season 17. “I went on and it went great, and I went on again. They said, ‘You’re in the top consideration to be a cohost.’”

  As she waited for an offer, she pursued an opportunity with CBS for her own daytime show. It would be filmed in Chicago, where she lived with Evan, but Jenny didn’t want to become another celebrity with a flop in the afternoon. She believed, perhaps naïvely, that there would be more job security on The View. “I would rather be on a show that’s established,” she told herself.

  That summer, in 2013, CBS tried to get her to sign with them. Jenny called Geddie on the July 4 weekend to let him know that she was about to accept the deal.

  “Shit,” he said. “Give me an hour.”

  Geddie had been trying to find the perfect cohost to replace Joy and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, to bring more pop culture expertise to The View. Since the network wanted the show to steer clear of politics, the new hire would need to be fluent in celebrity gossip and reality TV, such as The Bachelor and Dancing with the Stars. That was the winning formula on The Talk, which still trailed The View in the ratings. Geddie had tested Brooke Shields for the new seat, but market research revealed that viewers found her too stiff. “I liked her,” Geddie said. “For some reason, our audience never warmed to her.” Another option: the comedian Ali Wentworth, from In Living Color, who was married to GMA coanchor George Stephanopoulos.

  Since Barbara didn’t feel strongly about any of the options, she let Geddie choose his favorite. “I always thought early on, if we could have gotten Jenny McCarthy, we would have,” he told me. “She was too big of a name then.” He made the case to ABC, and they drafted a contract. “I thought that for the show they wanted to do, she was a good choice.”

  One red flag that no one seemed to worry about was Jenny’s views about autism. It hadn’t come up as a problem in any of the trial shows, and Geddie didn’t think it would define her on The View. He’d told her they wanted her to riff on movie stars. “How Bill sold it to me is that they actually let go of Joy and Elisabeth because they wanted to get rid of politics,” Jenny said. “It was polarizing. That’s the word he kept using: it was very polarizing to the audience.”

  He told her, “We want pop culture, irreverent, fun, sassy.”

  “I checked all those boxes for him.”

  On July 15, Barbara cheerfully introduced Jenny as the latest cohost on The View, an announcement that was met with an avalanche of negative press. Many critics thought that by hiring Jenny the show was giving her a platform to spread wrong information to parents about not vaccinating their children. Media outlets that didn’t normally cover daytime TV, such as the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation, voiced their disapproval.

  Time’s TV critic, James Poniewozik, wrote a post with the headline “Why ABC Shouldn’t Have Hired Jenny McCarthy.” He expressed concerns about Jenny’s becoming the new Elisabeth, with quackery instead of political controversy. “Discussing the news, even at 11 in the morning, comes with responsibility,” he wrote. “And for a show even remotely about news—and a career newswoman like Walters—to legitimize McCarthy’s dangerous anti-science because she will probably get crazy attention and ratings is irresponsible and shameful.”

  Jenny believed that the hostility toward her originated from a lobbying group that wanted to silence her. “I had to deal with a hurricane, a tornado. I consider myself to be pro-vaccine, but pro–safe vaccine. There’s another group, they go out and try to get me fired from every job I’ve ever done. They are invisible but powerful.”

  Geddie tried to assure her that it didn’t matter, that there was no such thing as bad publicity. Jenny wasn’t so sure: “I knew way up on the totem pole, it would bother somebody, because big pharma is pretty powerful. If they told ABC they were going to pull some of their advertising, I could very well lose my job. I was a nervous wreck. I just let go of my own talk show in Chicago. I had signed a one-year contract with The View. Now I’m dealing with all this bad publicity and I have to feed my baby.”

  * * *

  When Jenny started at The View, she wondered which version of Barbara she’d see every day at the studio. “Hopefully, I get the Barbara Walters who is nice,” she told herself. The timing of her arrival made that unlikely. For Barbara, Jenny represented that the end was near. At eighty-three, Barbara still had plenty of energy, but she found herself facing a mixture of complicated emotions, from aggravation to fear about being forgotten. Her memory was cloudy, and she’d been known to make odd outbursts in private conversations. “Imagine a woman like Barbara Walters,” Jenny explained. “It’s her last year and she doesn’t want to leave. Think about that. And I’m the new bitch there.”

  One day in Hot Topics, Jenny sounded off about Katy Perry dating the bad-boy musician John Mayer. “I saw Barbara’s face with her big saucer eyes look at me,” Jenny said. “Then we went to a commercial. She said, ‘Who is it that you’re talking about and why are you bringing her up?’”

  “I’m, like, ‘That’s Katy Perry. You interviewed her last week!’”

  Jenny recalled, “That wasn’t the right thing to say. I felt everyone kicking me under the table.” The other cohosts had devised a method to send signals to one another about how to deal with Barbara. “You either had the knee hold or the kick under the table.”

  During another show, Jenny referred to herself in the third person, telling a story about meeting a fan. “Who is Jenny McCarthy?” Barbara asked on TV.

  Jenny played it off as a joke. “I totally brushed it off. That’s where Barbara’s head was. She was spacing out. She was checking out.”

  Within days, The View had new instructions for Jenny. “I was told, ‘We cannot do pop culture anymore because she doesn’t know who t
he people are.’” The View instructed Jenny to tackle politics. “I panicked, because I don’t consider myself a political person. My controversy is in vaccines. I know I’m not talking about that every day. Now I had to figure out, ‘Am I coming out as a Republican or a Democrat? Where do I stand on all the social issues and political issues?’”

  At the start of the season, Jenny had visited Whoopi’s house, thinking they could maybe be friends. “I loved her in Ghost,” Jenny said. “I’m a fan. I thought I was going to work with the Whoopi that people thought they might know—fun and funny.” But Whoopi didn’t warm to Jenny. “The table is an interesting dynamic because it reminds me a little bit of Survivor. There were allies, and there weren’t many people to choose from. Do I side with Barbara, who is royalty, but she’s leaving? Or do I take Whoopi, who is a force to be reckoned with?” Jenny aligned with Sherri, knowing that they had similar personalities as moms with young boys. Jenny didn’t want to build a friendship out of a power grab.

  That left Barbara and Whoopi to face off, each with a grip on her own corner of The View. “There was a war between Barbara and Whoopi about Barbara wanting to moderate,” Jenny said. “This is one of the reasons I decided not to ally with Whoopi. It broke my heart when Barbara would shuffle to Whoopi and say, ‘Can I moderate, please?’ And Whoopi would say no. How can you do this to a woman who paved the way for so many female journalists? The reason we’re doing this job is because of Barbara Walters.”

  Barbara’s fixation on the moderator’s chair turned into an unhealthy obsession. In conversations with the staff, Barbara loved to complain about all the different ways Whoopi had botched an introduction or mixed up facts. Whoopi resented that Barbara was trying to run her over. “Whoopi was very angry,” said Jenny. “She was angry that she wasn’t being paid what she was worth, rightfully so.” Whoopi had always tried to be a team player, but she felt that ABC wasn’t treating her like a valued employee. One idea she had, to do a live version of Sister Act as a prime-time musical (like NBC’s Sound of Music Live!, starring Carrie Underwood), was turned down by Paul Lee, the president of ABC Entertainment Group. The network hadn’t even offered Whoopi a raise for keeping The View afloat.