Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  Rosie had once again proved her chops as a savvy producer: the stunt was a hit. But what was she doing having dinner with Sweeney? That would become clear later.

  Barbara had hoped to sit down again with Monica Lewinsky for her last interview. “Of course I considered it, because of not only the personal relationship, but because Barbara is so well respected,” Lewinsky told me. “I think really for me, ultimately, the interview we had done in 1999 had been such a seminal moment for me and in some ways for her too. Ultimately, I wanted to move forward and that might have felt like moving backwards. But it had nothing to do with Barbara. I let my first public words in ten years in my 2014 Vanity Fair essay speak for themselves.”

  Even without Barbara’s dream get, it was time for her to take the plunge. Barbara’s final show, which aired on May 16, had ABC executives from both coasts at The View. Sweeney and Ben Sherwood, the president of the news division, surrounded Barbara in her dressing room. Some big guests were lurking in the building, but producers kept them a secret by putting them on the other side of the floor—in the All My Children area.

  As Barbara boarded the elevator for her last trip, she put her hand on Sherri’s face and said, “You’re the one that’s the most improved. I’m proud of you, dear.”

  “And then of course I started bawling,” Sherri recalled.

  On TV, Barbara was eager to get the party started. “And I don’t know who’s on!” Barbara said.

  The first guest, Hillary Clinton, snuck out and hugged Barbara.

  “You know what?” Barbara said. “You look terrific here. Why don’t you just take my place on the show?” Barbara, who hadn’t been prepped with questions, criticized Sherri in the middle of the interview for calling the former secretary of state by her first name. “I don’t call her by her first name,” Barbara said, embarrassing everyone.

  Clinton rushed to Sherri’s defense. “Hillary is fine! I can’t believe this day has come and I can’t believe it’s for real.”

  “Neither can I,” Barbara said.

  Surprise guest number two was Michael Douglas, who shared a birthday with Barbara. “If Hillary runs, I think you’d be a great vice president,” Douglas told Barbara.

  Then Oprah invaded the retirement party. She’d initially turned down the request, thinking that Barbara wasn’t really leaving TV.

  “I want to thank you for being a pioneer,” Oprah said, clutching Barbara’s hand. “And everything that word means. It means being the first in the room to knock down the door, to break down the barriers, to pave the road that we all walk on.”

  “She used to imitate me when she tried out for jobs,” Barbara said gleefully. “I’m responsible for her whole career!”

  Oprah once again told Barbara’s favorite story—the one in which Oprah, growing up as a cub reporter, studied the way Barbara crossed her legs and asked questions. Oprah wasn’t the only student of the Barbara Walters journalism school. As Oprah waved her hands, a parade of women anchors entered the studio one by one to pay their respects, including Diane Sawyer, Savannah Guthrie, Katie Couric, Maria Shriver, Jane Pauley, Deborah Norville, Tamron Hall, Gayle King, Kathie Lee Gifford, Gretchen Carlson, and Connie Chung. There was one terrible oversight. Carole Simpson, the former ABC News anchor who became the first black woman to moderate a presidential debate, later complained that she wasn’t invited. “She was not happy, and she was right,” said producer Alexandra Cohen.

  Barbara beamed like a proud grandmother surrounded by a gaggle of offspring who didn’t call or write. But that hardly mattered. She loved the attention. It almost made her forget how much she was going to hate retirement. “Starting soon, I may be available for supermarket openings and charity auctions,” Barbara joked.

  She read a farewell of career highlights that had been scripted for her on the teleprompter. The bullet points included rising at 4:00 a.m. for Today, navigating talks between the heads of Israel and Egypt in 1977, and flirting with Clint Eastwood. “Maybe it’s time for him,” she offered, on the chance he was watching. She looked at the camera wistfully, forced herself to smile, and bid adieu to five decades of broadcasting—but not before propping the window open a crack, in case she decided to crawl back through.

  “Who knows what the future brings!?” she said with a maniacal smirk.

  * * *

  The next surprise associated with Barbara’s farewell wouldn’t be met with as many cheers. Before she’d decided to retire, Barbara’s lawyer had convinced her to sell her 50 percent ownership of The View back to ABC. He told her it would be foolish to hold on to a talk show for nostalgic reasons, and if it got canceled, her share would be worth nothing. Barbara agreed, collecting tens of millions (“that she didn’t need,” one producer observed), but she quickly regretted the decision. Even though she was still listed as an executive producer in the show’s credits, ABC could sideline her from all their decision making. The sale was the reason she couldn’t insist on staying on TV after she got cold feet about retiring.

  “She sold her stake,” Geddie said. “By the way, none of us knew this. The moment she no longer had a say, the show, as it was, was essentially over. I don’t think any of us realized that. I think we found out too late that she wasn’t one of the bosses anymore.”

  Throughout the summer, Geddie and his team had brainstormed ideas to jump-start a new era of The View, meeting periodically with the network to solicit feedback. They toyed with hiring a man (or two) as permanent cohost. The View started testing C-list celebrities, to see how Bill Rancic or Mario Cantone would do in the mix. “It had a fun energy,” Jenny said. “It was a little bit more my temperature.”

  Lisa Hackner, ABC’s head of daytime, was in a hurry to push the ratings back up. She told Geddie that they had to fire Mark Gentile to bring in a new director. “She did something in her ignorance,” Gentile said. “That’s the old Telepictures way—you fire the director. She didn’t realize what a favor she had done for me. I would have stayed there until they fucking carried me out.”

  On June 26, The View staff was supposed to have a meeting with Hackner to discuss the new season. She mysteriously canceled at the last minute. “All of a sudden, everyone”—minus Whoopi—“gets a phone call that says, ‘Go to this address,’” recalled Jenny. “Bill is, like, ‘I’m getting fired.’”

  “No way you’re getting fired,” Jenny told him. “We’ve been having meetings with them.”

  Geddie left to see what they wanted. The network told Geddie that they were going to bring in another executive producer to share the job with him, and he instructed his agent to get him out of there. “Bill came back, walked into his office, shut the door, spent thirty minutes in there, and never came back,” Jenny said. “And then Sherri called her agent and said, ‘I’m not going to that fucking building.’”

  Cohen, Bill’s second-in-command, was the next to get the ax. Then, through their agents, both Jenny and Sherri learned that they’d been dumped, too. “I was with Jenny when she got the phone call,” Sherri said. “She was really upset. She had specifically asked Lisa Hackner, ‘If you are not renewing my contract, let me know.’” According to Sherri, Hackner assured her that they were, and Jenny had moved Evan from Chicago to join her in New York.

  “I’m comforting her and my phone is blowing up,” Sherri said. “My manager called me and said, ‘They aren’t renewing your contract.’” As part of her renegotiation, Sherri had signaled to ABC that she wanted a significant raise. But she was stunned that they had dropped her without even engaging in talks. She’d seen the way the show dragged Elisabeth’s name in the mud after they fired her, so she drew up a statement that she was leaving. Jenny followed with her own statement on Twitter (“If Sherri goes … I go too”). They all headed to Geddie’s apartment to get drunk.

  The lone remaining cohost was Whoopi, who had a year left on her contract.

  Rumors started to swirl that The View was in talks with a certain former moderator for the ultimate comeback. Th
e next day, on June 27, I wrote a column for Variety called “Why The View Should Bring Back Rosie O’Donnell.” That night, Rosie direct messaged me on Twitter: Thank u. Was it true that she was interested in The View again? Rosie confirmed that she was. Over a series of messages to me, she explained how she’d vetoed the plan to hire a male cohost and had gotten rid of Geddie because she hated him. Rosie’s takeover had begun.

  21

  She’s Back

  Every time Rosie O’Donnell took a new job, she vowed she was a changed woman. In 2014, she had a legitimate case to make. Two years prior, she’d suffered a near-fatal cardiac arrest. “When you have a heart attack and almost die, it kind of puts things in perspective instantly,” she told me over a lunch at Sarabeth’s. “And it did for me.” As part of her rehabilitation, her doctor told her that she had to lose some weight. “Although I’d thought about having a gastric bypass, which is what Al Roker and Star Jones had, a side effect is you have very poor control of pooping. If you eat sugar, your body will empty what’s in it. I have such anxiety over the concept of going to the bathroom in public. I don’t ever pee in public. I don’t ever poo in public.” She didn’t care that she was oversharing. “That’s the reason I would never do that surgery.”

  Instead, she had a vertical sleeve gastrectomy, where a surgeon removed the side of her stomach without cutting her intestines. “I was probably 241 pounds when I had it,” she told me in 2014. “Now I’m 190. You’re not really hungry because it affects the hunger hormones, which has a weird name like a gremlin.” (It’s called ghrelin.) “And you can’t eat as much because you’re full. I never knew what the feeling of full or hungry was. If it was there, I’d eat it.”

  She said that she used to feast on burgers at McDonald’s or Johnny Rockets and she’d stop at 7-Eleven for junk food. “I’d get three packs of Yodels, some bubble gum, chocolate-covered pretzels.” The new Rosie walked into the convenience store one day to cheer herself up. “I looked all around,” she said, but she couldn’t find anything. “It’s like your mind shifts. If I have a burger, it’s without the bun and it’s at a restaurant that has real meat, like sirloin.”

  In her family life, Rosie had remarried to Michelle Rounds, a woman that she’d met at a Starbucks. Together, they had a two-year-old daughter named Dakota, a welcome addition to Rosie’s growing brood. She would spend her days watching Frozen on a continuous loop with the baby. To stay Zen, she’d committed to a daily ritual of meditation, during which she’d sit in the reclining chair of her bedroom for twenty minutes with her feet up, not speaking to anybody. “They give you an actual mantra, and you’re not allowed to tell anyone,” she said, about her two secret words that she’d repeat in her head. “For me, that’s been the hardest part of meditating because I want to tell everyone. I want to go, ‘Is yours the same as mine?’”

  Before she signed another one-year contract with The View, Rosie visited Whoopi Goldberg. Rosie wanted to make sure that they could get along and that the show wouldn’t interrupt her new serenity. “We talked it over,” Rosie said. “We thought about what we would want to do for the show and what would work creatively. We were both totally on the same page.” It wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  In July 2014, Rosie announced that she was officially replacing Barbara Walters on Season 18 of The View, starting in September. But in a few weeks, after more meetings with ABC, Rosie told everyone that she’d made a huge mistake—if she could have quit before she started, she would have.

  Rosie and Whoopi had gone to see Lisa Hackner, who tried to tell them that they weren’t running the show: they were talent, not the bosses. This didn’t sit well with either woman. When Barbara and Bill Geddie were in charge of The View, the network didn’t dare interfere. Now, a lot of cooks were in the kitchen, and they were all contradicting one another in passive-aggressive ways. ABC News executives were trying to wrangle control of The View away from the daytime team since Anne Sweeney was supposed to leave her post that fall. Her soon-to-be replacement, Ben Sherwood, wanted the news division to swallow The View, putting the executives behind Good Morning America in charge.

  Everyone agreed on one thing: The View needed to be political again in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election. After firing nearly all the cohosts, ABC had the summer to hire two more replacements to fill out the table. Rosie and Whoopi both strongly advocated for Meghan McCain, the millennial daughter of Arizona senator John McCain, as the show’s next Republican. She’d been a regular guest, and they thought she was more grounded than Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Hackner balked, saying that McCain wasn’t good TV. “It’s fine,” Meghan remembered thinking. “I’m going to move on with my life.”

  Who was going to actually make the call on the new hires wasn’t clear. Sherwood had brought over his friend Bill Wolff, from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, as the new executive producer of The View. But as soon as he got there, the stuffy Harvard man looked as if he were lost in a foreign country without a map. Wolff confessed to his staff that he’d never seen a full episode of The View and that he had been surprised when offered the job.

  Rosie thought that none of these executives had any idea how to rescue a daytime talk show. She started watching The View that summer, taking notes in her head on what needed to change. Rosie complained that Whoopi sounded “too angry” on TV, especially when she cut off the other cohosts after they disagreed with her. On Rosie’s last outing on The View, she’d been the moderator. This time around, she’d need to defer to Whoopi on the direction of Hot Topics, which wasn’t Rosie’s style. The more veteran members of the staff, many of whom couldn’t believe that ABC was letting Rosie back into the building, were already bracing for the worst.

  In August, with no clear answers about whom to hire, ABC decided to hold an audition for the remaining chairs. The network invited Republicans S. E. Cupp, Ana Navarro, and Nicolle Wallace to a studio to practice with Whoopi and Rosie in front of an audience. Sunny Hostin, a legal pundit on CNN who had frequently filled in on The View, was another contender. (Rosie had already told everyone that Sunny was getting hired.) The network also threw in two ESPN personalities, Jemele Hill and Sage Steele. Stephanie Ruhle from Bloomberg TV made the cut. So did Lauren Sánchez, the former Extra host whose last application for The View had been sabotaged by Star. Sánchez wasn’t aware that her ex-boyfriend’s wife, October Gonzalez (married to former NFL player Tony Gonzalez), had been invited to try out, too. Even weirder, October hadn’t done much TV, but ABC was desperate for a Latina cohost.

  “It was like The Hunger Games,” Rosie told me a few days after. “I think Whoopi and I were a little bit shocked at having to do a chemistry test, because I don’t know if those things really work.” Rosie thought bringing in an audience to watch them debate made it awkward. “It felt negative and competitive. I think maybe they should have taken us to dinner with the top candidates to see how we got along.”

  The auditioning women entered the studio in pairs, after they had gone through a packet of sample Hot Topics, choosing the ones that they wanted to discuss. Cupp was teamed with Hostin, and they picked a story with an abortion angle. “I thought, ‘Great!’” said Cupp, who was pregnant at the time and hosting a revamped Crossfire for CNN. “I’m really passionate about that.”

  As soon as Cupp tried to offer her anti-abortion beliefs, “Rosie goes kind of ballistic,” she recalled.

  “Have you ever had an abortion?” Rosie asked Cupp.

  “I don’t know why that’s relevant.”

  “That’s lazy!” Rosie yelled. “If you want to do this show, you have to be able to tell your stories.” Then she started to vent angrily, to no one in particular, “I can’t have another Elisabeth.”

  “It got so personal,” Cupp recalled. “It went from zero to one hundred in two seconds. It’s just not my style to run into a crazy argument. She was simultaneously having a debate with me, which was live to tape, but also talking to producers who were not there. I’m, like, ‘Is this p
art of the debate? Should I start debating whether you should have another Elisabeth?’”

  Cupp was not prepared for Rosie’s hostility. “I remember selective things. I remember a woman in the audience yelled, ‘S.E. is right!’ I blacked out after that. There’s no recovering. Rosie was on a crusade against pro-life people like me. She didn’t know who I was, but she knew she didn’t like me.” Cupp lost track of how long she sat there. “That’s like asking how long was the car crash. All she saw was a cartoon conservative.” Cupp isn’t religious and supports LGBTQ rights. “Whatever conception she had about Elisabeth, she projected onto me.”

  After she left the stage, Cupp was so confused that she had no idea if she had succeeded or failed. “Was that good or bad?” she thought. “Do they want this kind of craziness or not? If not, she’s the problem, not me.” Wolff apologized to Cupp backstage, which she took as his way of telling her she was out of the running.

  Cupp went to collect her stuff in another area of the building, not realizing that she was being followed. “So I’m picking up my things, and all of a sudden there’s this woman right here next to me. It’s Rosie. She’s, like, ‘Look, I’m going to be brutally honest. If you want to do this job, you’re going to have to tell your secrets.’”

  After chewing Cupp out, Rosie was now trying to be her career coach. “What do you do for a living, for example?”

  “I talk about politics on CNN.”

  “Oh, really! So you don’t need this?”