Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  Even with such assurances, guests were nervous to appear on The View until they could see the finished product. “It showcased women with minds of their own,” Solomon said. “They confessed a lot of things on the show that women are supposed to feel guilty about, and they said it out loud. There was a sign in the greenroom that said MAKE SPARKS.”

  That became the unofficial mantra backstage as well as on TV. Solomon and Berman bickered (“constantly,” recalled one staffer) like a married couple in nearby offices.

  “That’s my booking,” Berman would bark.

  “That’s my juice!” Solomon would shoot back.

  Geddie sat in the studio audience, where the women occasionally threw the camera to him for a funny line. Fans came to recognize him by the nickname “The Viewmaster,” as the neighborhood grump. “I’m much more comfortable on the floor than the control room,” Geddie said. “I prefer to be hands-on.”

  The show was a work in progress. “In the beginning, the chemistry was not what you know the chemistry to be,” said Mark Gentile, the director. “I remember thinking, ‘We got to find a way to smoke screen this.’” As it creaked along, The View introduced a revolutionary idea—to mix news with opinion as the main attraction. Most talk shows had been shy about politics out of fear of alienating people with different ideologies. “I don’t know too many shows where women are really allowed to express themselves politically the way we do,” Joy said. “There are few repercussions. I could say the most scathing things.”

  * * *

  When you talk to the producers, they point to two major events that gave The View its voice. On August 31, 1997, only three weeks into the show’s start, Princess Diana died in a high-speed car crash in Paris while trying to escape a motorcade of paparazzi on a Saturday night. It was Labor Day weekend, and Geddie debated whether they needed to rush out a show on Monday, scheduled as a day off. “I’ll never forget,” recalled Jessica Stedman Guff, who was on vacation in Nantucket with her kids. “Do we run to the office? Bill made the decision that we do not respond to breaking news.” The View addressed Diana’s death two days later, on September 2, when the ladies gathered to reflect on her legacy.

  “Today, there is only one story on everyone’s mind,” Meredith said somberly.

  Barbara revealed that she’d met Diana several times, over private lunches and dinners, in the pursuit of an interview. She brought in letters and holiday cards that she’d received, showing off Diana’s penmanship, which she called “large girlish handwriting.”

  Debbie remembered waking up in the middle of the night as a young girl to watch the royal wedding. “She didn’t ask for all of this,” Debbie said. “I feel like the media created her and killed her.” As Debbie delivered this indictment, she started to weep. “Some people thought it was odd,” said producer Stuart Krasnow. “Others thought it was fantastic.” Although Debbie wasn’t technically an anchor, women in news never showed emotion on air—this was years before Ann Curry’s sobbing departure from Today.

  By going all in on feelings, The View embodied a moment. Diana’s death represented a milestone for women at the time. It was the dawn of a national conversation about the end of privacy. “We don’t have a right to know everything about everyone,” Star scolded during Hot Topics, after a clip of George Clooney at a press conference where he bashed the National Enquirer for its invasive practices. Many young moms in the nineties had grown up with Diana, and her death at age thirty-six felt intensely personal. “She was my contemporary,” Star said over breakfast, twenty years later. “I couldn’t imagine that this young, vibrant woman who had achieved what every little girl wants, as a princess, was dead. It made me face my mortality for the first time.”

  The other story that catapulted The View into the national spotlight was the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which broke five months later. “That was the gift that kept on giving,” Geddie said. “It was the president of the United States. It was a young girl. There was the vindictive ratting out of a young girl. There was a scarred wife. It was a feminist subject involving a man many women had seen as a feminist. It was a real conflict because I’m sure everybody there voted for Bill Clinton. So it was interesting to deal with that.”

  The View was the lone perch in daytime that consistently took on Clinton, before the proliferation of talking heads on cable news. “You could click over—Regis wasn’t talking about the stain on the dress,” Geddie said with a laugh. “We were the only ones doing it. And we did it day in and day out for a year.”

  The story leaked on the Drudge Report on a Saturday in January, but because all the networks distrusted online reporting, The View didn’t pick it up right away. The next Monday, the ladies spent Hot Topics yammering about the Golden Globes, where Titanic had won big, Christine Lahti was caught “in the potty” during her category, and Ving Rhames gave away his trophy to Jack Lemmon.

  But once the mainstream press reported on the allegations, it was fair game. The View suddenly had its raison d’être. The show could offer sultry counterprogramming to the soaps, with the biggest sex scandal in US history unraveling in the White House. The ladies each picked their own heroes and villains. “I don’t believe any of that,” Debbie said on January 21, 1998, the first Hot Topics debate about the affair. She couldn’t envision a scenario in which an intern named Monica—“What’s her last name?”—bragged to her friends about sex with the president. Star reminded viewers that Clinton was innocent until proven guilty, while Meredith wondered if he could be impeached for obstruction of justice.

  On January 27, all the cohosts were glued to an interview Hillary gave to Today, during which she tried to brush off the charges against her husband as a Republican witch hunt. “You got to hand it to her,” Barbara said. “She looks wonderful.”

  While the story dominated TV, most news personalities weren’t reporting on the first lady’s fashion choices. What made The View’s commentary groundbreaking was that it took a major news event and dissected it through a female point of view. “The truth is that every woman in this whole scandal looks better now than she did in the beginning,” Meredith observed the following summer.

  “They all want Clinton to expose himself to them so they can get a makeover,” chuckled Joy, who had nicknamed Linda Tripp “Mrs. Ronald McDonald.” “It’s just not that important,” Joy huffed on TV. “The Europeans are laughing at us. You cannot bring a country down to its knees because a girl is on her knees.”

  * * *

  Despite soft ratings, The View coasted into its second season, primarily because nobody from the daytime TV team had the chutzpah to cancel Barbara. Then in November 1997, The View became infamous, thanks to a recurring skit on Saturday Night Live. Writers Tina Fey, Lori Nasso, and Paula Pell were amused with Barbara trying to pass herself off as a regular gal, with a group of girlfriends.

  When Fey first arrived at SNL that year, she had made it her mission to write sketches for women. “And then I thought, ‘Oh, this thing is new. We could do this,’” Fey recalled. “And there were parts for almost everybody.” Cheri Oteri played Walters at a faux Hot Topics table, alongside Molly Shannon as Meredith and Ana Gasteyer as Joy. The celebrity hosts, from Claire Danes to Sarah Michelle Gellar to Cameron Diaz, took on Debbie. “Tracy Morgan was in drag”—as Star—“because there were no African-American women on the show,” Fey said, with a sigh.

  The first time they did the skit, “we were the only ones who had seen The View,” Fey said. “The more dudely members of the staff were, like, ‘What is this!?’” They thought the entire conceit had been made up. “No, this is a real thing,” Fey told them. “I remember going to the wardrobe room after we had done it in dress rehearsal. And someone in costumes being, like, ‘You’re a feminist. Well, I hope you’re happy making fun of women.’” Fey was surprised: “Oh, no. I’m trying to give these actresses parts,” she recalled thinking. “When Chevy Chase plays Gerald Ford, he’s goofing on him. I was, like, ‘We have to be able to goof on women,
or we’ll never get the women on.’”

  Oteri agreed that The View was ripe for parody. “My take on Barbara was really funny,” Oteri told me. “She would always ask a question and then bring it back to herself—like, ‘I was at a make-your-own-sundae party with Madeleine Albright and a young Vladimir Putin.’”

  The satirical portraits elevated the cohosts’ fame. SNL’s Star was a talkative lawyer who doled out legal advice in situations that didn’t call for it. Joy sputtered out jokes. Meredith came across as the straight one, who sometimes went overboard with personal secrets—such as her distaste for wearing underwear. “She just seemed like somebody who loved being a woman,” Shannon said. “I said to her once, ‘You seem like you like coffee and sex. You’re sultry. You’re Meredith!’”

  “I loved it,” said Meredith. “Being on the show meant that you had arrived.”

  One of the caricatures stung. On SNL, Debbie was portrayed as the village idiot who had to be put in a cage. The label didn’t bother her. “They clearly picked up on the way I was being treated,” she said. But her fish-out-of-water standing soon became so unavoidable, she took on the name Debbie the Dummy in the press.

  Barbara knew the value of this kind of publicity. Rather than get mad, she cashed in. On April Fools’ Day, The View invited the SNL cast to walk out onstage before the real ladies kicked them out of the chairs. The View had entered the zeitgeist, and awareness skyrocketed. There was just the question of what to do with the show’s weakest link.

  4

  Death Becomes Her

  One spring afternoon, Barbara raced into The View’s offices with a stop-the-presses scoop. She gathered the staff around her, informing them about an “important” discovery, which she’d just learned about at ABC News. “It’s a big story,” she declared. “It’s going to change the world.” She wanted it to lead the next day’s show, telling everybody they’d forever remember where they were when they heard about this shattering breakthrough.

  What the hell was it? “Viagra!”

  “And then she went on to explain that erectile dysfunction would be treated with this drug,” recalled producer Stuart Krasnow. “There was a lot of discomfort in the room. Here’s this iconic newswoman who we’d all been so reverent to, just going on about erections.” The memory still cracked him up. “What Barbara brought to The View was knowledge.”

  The View was located only three blocks west of ABC headquarters, but it was far enough so that none of the staff felt that they had to adhere to stuffy office culture. The producers at the mother ship had traditionally been gruff men. In the seventies and eighties, the network’s news division had been rife with sexism, as some women tried to follow Barbara’s example and entered the news business, which at the time resembled Mad Men. If the executives weren’t ogling the new hires or barking at them after a three-martini lunch, they were dismissing them. Barbara liked to tell a story of how, when anchoring the evening news, the crew refused to talk to her because they saw Harry Reasoner as one of them and her as an intruder.

  By the postfeminist nineties, the gender schism had balanced out. Shelley Ross, a tenacious producer at Primetime Live, had been climbing the ranks. “Diane Sawyer and I won an Emmy in 1990, for the first story we did together on the Menendez brothers,” Ross told me. “It was sort of scandalous that we won for a murder story. Nobody called In Cold Blood a murder story, and that’s what Diane and I had set out to do—to redefine it.” In late 1998, Ross wrote an eight-page memo that earned her the job of executive producer at Good Morning America. She asked Sawyer to come with her to rebrand the morning show, which had been sinking in the ratings.

  “I think you’ll find that my time to do a morning show has come and gone,” Sawyer, who was fifty-three, told Ross. “And I said, ‘Don’t believe it!’ I felt like she was ageless, and she is.” The president of ABC News, David Westin, took some convincing. “In a game of chess, you never expose the queen,” Westin told a colleague about Sawyer. Ross didn’t back down. “We would never expose Diane Sawyer,” Ross said. “We’ll make this great.” Sawyer’s move to GMA in 1999 eventually added more than one million viewers, as she followed Barbara to morning TV, with an expanded portfolio of crack-of-dawn scoops.

  Over at The View, the cohosts could sleep in later and all bets were off when it came to decorum. There was no question that women, who made up at least half the staff, were treated as equals, a rare occurrence in the television business. But as daytime’s stepchild, the office vibe sometimes felt like a college radio show, especially on the days when Barbara wasn’t there.

  For years, a married man carried on a public affair with one of the female staff and nobody blinked. A writer liked to flash his cock in the offices, as part of a running gag that made Joy laugh. The show’s publicist, Karl Nilsson, would camp out on the premises, yet he seemed most interested in stirring up gossip.

  “I always likened it to the book Flowers in the Attic, where the kids live in the attic and nobody grows because they don’t get sunlight,” said Alexandra Cohen, who became the second-in-command to Geddie around 1999. The only difference was all of The View’s producers lived in the basement. “There were no windows. You had to call up to security and go, ‘Is it raining? Is it snowing?’ You never knew,” said Cohen.

  The first floor of the Costco-like building housed the lobby, where tourists lined up outside for hours to nab a seat at the live tapings. The second floor held the dressing rooms for the hosts and the guests, as well as hair and makeup. The third floor was the studio, which included a greenroom (with watermelon and juice), where Geddie paced around if he wasn’t in his seat. Finally, the control room sat on the fourth floor. A slow-moving elevator served as the artery, which had to be cleared out by security so the hosts didn’t get trapped with camera-wielding fans.

  For many of The View’s employees the main interaction with other human beings came through All My Children, the daytime soap opera that shared the building—it was split in half, with identical floor plans on each side. Sometimes, because Barbara was bad with directions, she’d accidentally roam down their halls, looking for her dressing room amid all the buff and tan bodies. Up-and-coming daytime actors such as Josh Duhamel would come over to sneak a look at the famous guests. Kelly Ripa, who started her career on the soap, took cigarette breaks on the loading dock shared by The View, wearing a coat over lingerie, in between shooting sex scenes.

  Inside The View, there was order when Barbara came to work. She could be like a drill sergeant, pounding the pavement to make sure that the show adhered to her ethical and competitive standards. “I remember we wanted to book a psychic on the show,” said Valerie Schaer, one of the ABC Daytime executives who worked on the show. “Barbara was very opposed to that. She didn’t believe it. We’d say things like, ‘Barbara, it really rates.’” So Barbara tested out the guest for herself in a private meeting. She was skeptical, until the psychic held up a hand over her eye, saying that Lou Walters wanted to say hello. “Barbara freaked out,” Schaer said. “No one knew this, but her father had a glass eye.”

  Even if the ratings were still modest, Barbara had never looked better on The View. Roone Arledge, the ABC News boss, lodged one more complaint against the show because Barbara’s appearances on other programs didn’t have the same glow. “Bob Iger said to me, ‘Roone feels Barbara is feeling tired on 20/20 because you’re working her too hard,’” recalled Pat Fili-Krushel. “I go, ‘That’s not true!’ I had brought in a theatrical lighting director to teach the television directors how to light. And we had theatrical hair and makeup. So then they tried to steal our people, and they didn’t want to go to news.”

  Barbara only raised her voice if she felt that someone was trying to pull a fast one over her. For instance, she once turned on her TV to The Wayne Brady Show, the short-lived series that aired on ABC before The View. Barbara went apoplectic when she saw the guest was the same man waiting in their studio: celebrity event planner David Tutera, who had pretaped
the episode in Los Angeles, thinking it would air later.

  A voice on the underground speaker system, an artifact from the talk show set, paged him to report to Barbara’s dressing room immediately. “I might have pissed my pants a little bit,” Tutera said. “She starts going at me, ‘How dare you do this?! You’re not going on the show today. I want you to leave.’” She eventually cooled down and let him tape a segment on how to entertain at the Oscars.

  The cohosts cut loose on the days when Barbara was gone. During a Question of the Day in 1998 with Kenneth Branagh—“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done for love?”—Meredith made up a story about how she got hitched to an Elvis impersonator in Las Vegas after a night of partying in her twenties. “This is a bit of a shocker,” she said. Without Barbara there to force an immediate correction, the tall tale landed in the papers. Finally, days later, Meredith had to clarify she had been joking, an example of just how unruly The View got without its creator. “They hated when Barbara was on,” Stedman Guff said. “She rained on their parade. It was like a bunch of sixth graders throwing shit around the room, and then the teacher walks in.”

  Even Bill seemed more at ease without someone looking over his shoulder. “Bill resented Barbara like nobody’s business,” Star said. “All I know is that he was happiest when she wasn’t there. He made that pretty clear.”