Geddie denied that characterization: “I would never take a shot at Barbara. There were some days that stuff happened, I said to myself, ‘This show is so crazy and naughty, I’m glad Barbara wasn’t sitting there.’ She can be tough to be around. You’ve got to stay on your toes. It’s a little more relaxed when she wasn’t there. But in terms of Barbara’s importance to the show, there would be no View without her.”
Barbara was so involved, she even participated in staff negotiations. She blocked an attempt from Rosie O’Donnell to hire their director for her daytime talk show. “I meet with Rosie,” Mark Gentile said. “She offers me more money than I’m making. And so I get this big deal, and I say at the end, ‘I have to go back to The View and give them the dignity of responding.’ Rosie was incensed with that.”
Rosie called Barbara and told her that Gentile had come to her sniffing for a job.
“Well, we love Mark,” Barbara said. “We want him to stay, but if he wants to go, that’s okay.”
She hung up and ordered that ABC raise his salary. “That’s when I signed a contract,” said Gentile, who had been living off his savings for six months because of his promise not to cash a single paycheck until The View had clicked into place. Rosie, who later became one of his biggest adversaries, helped prove his worth.
* * *
Something had to be done about Debbie. The View was a bold experiment, but it also at times felt like a revival of The Odd Couple. If Barbara excelled at facts and substance, Debbie was on the bottom of the Hot Topics totem pole with her vague non sequiturs. By her own admission, Debbie had no idea what she had stumbled into when she walked on the View set. She had no broadcast experience. She lacked a point of view about most subjects, from politics to world affairs. “I was a kid,” Debbie said. “I had no clue.” That wasn’t entirely her fault—she’d grown up in Virginia and had been hired while she was still in college. It had taken years for Barbara to become a skilled interviewer, but Debbie wasn’t afforded any room to fail. Instead, she was tossed into a rowdy vaudeville act, in which she fell into the role of the clown.
“How are you going to have an opinion if you haven’t lived it?” Debbie said. “I didn’t have the experience like the rest of them had. So I chose to really not say too much when they were talking about really heavy things, because I didn’t know what to say.”
Parts of her new job she liked. No wallflower, she was drawn to the spotlight, especially since it meant a steady line of bachelors asking her out on dates. Debbie and Star, the only other single cohost (who wasn’t Barbara Walters), became instant pals. They’d attend movie premieres at the Ziegfeld Theatre and later even vacationed together in the Caribbean and Mexico. “We were thick as thieves,” Debbie said.
“I do partnerships and relationships really well,” Star said, agreeing that they had been close at one time.
But when it came to regular office hours, Debbie didn’t have the chops to keep up with the fast pace of a daytime TV show. That became apparent as she stumbled on basic tasks such as reading from a teleprompter. “They sent me to a coach to learn how to do things on television—blah, blah, blah. That was a waste of money. In hindsight, they needed to sit me down and go, ‘Here’s the deal: you’re too nervous.’”
Part of what made her so jittery was working in the shadow of a trailblazer. With Debbie, Barbara was like an overbearing stage mom. After Debbie had gotten written up in Page Six for taking her top off at Hogs & Heifers, Barbara counseled her on not tarnishing her name as a public figure. It didn’t matter that most twentysomethings in New York had ventured into the beer-soaked dive bar and done the same thing. Barbara was aghast that Debbie had disrobed in public. It was bad enough that she roamed the halls at ABC in a bra, as if The View offices were a college sorority house.
“She had her own Justin Bieber effect,” said Krasnow, who was enlisted to help Debbie find her way because he’d worked for a young Ricki Lake. “All of a sudden she’s famous and people are watching her, and she’s still growing up.”
Other catastrophes also made her bosses at ABC blush. Debbie recalled the time she got in trouble for wearing a skimpy outfit at a photo shoot. Barbara was scandalized when Debbie eagerly dished about her sex life to Howard Stern. Another morning on Stern’s show, Debbie made a surprise cameo when a magician guest bragged about sleeping with her on the first date.
“What are we going to do?” Geddie gasped, running over to talk to her.
“That’s not what happened,” Debbie calmly responded, as she explained that she didn’t sleep with him until the third date. She didn’t seem to think that a guy discussing her sex life on the radio was that big a deal.
At the morning meetings, Debbie wouldn’t offer much brainstorming for Hot Topics. She took detailed notes in her dressing room, decorated with a half-full water bottle drunk by George Michael that she’d swiped from MTV and a poster of the Bee Gees. But Barbara confiscated Debbie’s crib sheet. “She’d take my cards and rip them up and throw them away,” said Debbie, who received instructions not to sound too rehearsed.
Debbie’s tendency to go way off script made her an easy target for critics. When a debate wasn’t in her comfort zone, she knew she was blowing it, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I was, like, ‘What did I just say?’ There was no taking it back because it was live.”
Her unpolished style was magnified when her errors were being corrected in real time by you know who. When she wasn’t crying about Diana, Debbie wondered out loud how the princess must have felt trapped in the wreckage, awaiting medical help, until Barbara snapped that Diana had been unconscious. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Debbie confessed her lack of knowledge about the civil rights leader. “I feel like I should know more about Martin Luther King,” she rambled, blaming public school systems. Barbara just sat there, her lips tightening, unable to mask her disdain.
During the second-season premiere, Barbara teasingly asked if Debbie, back from a vacation in Greece, had a new boyfriend. “He’s not allowed in the country—he doesn’t have a green card,” she mumbled.
During a lighter conversation about snooping houseguests, she interjected with a ridiculous tip that no housewife would try: “Hide marbles in your medicine cabinet. As soon as they open it—ding, ding, ding—they are looking at your stuff.”
“You know Debbie will come up with something,” Star said, rolling her eyes.
“One day, Debbie said something really stupid,” said Stedman Guff, who watched the show from the control room, where she whispered into the cohosts’ earpieces. “I said, ‘Oh my God, that was so fucking stupid, I want to kill myself.’ I didn’t know the key was open and she could hear me.”
Debbie scowled. “I can hear that, Jessica,” she spoke to nobody in particular on TV.
“I couldn’t believe she said that on air,” Stedman Guff said.
Debbie had no regrets about shaming her. “I would have said it again,” Debbie explained. “Why? It’s probably one of the rudest things any producer has said to me. It probably was a silly thing. But as my superior, it would have been her job to take care of me and protect me, not to disparage me in front of all those people.”
Krasnow tried his best to offer Debbie a crash course in broadcasting. He’d sit with Debbie before the show, carving out smarter takes on issues that she couldn’t care less about. For a story about police brutality—“I don’t relate to this,” Debbie moaned—he suggested she tell a funny story about the time she was pulled over by the cops. “How did the police treat you?” he quizzed her, to get the wheels turning. “Did you get out of it because you were a pretty girl?”
Krasnow said, “One idea that I loved that never came to fruition was her and Barbara having sleepover dates. I remember really pushing for that.” He thought that viewers would eat up the segment, especially if Barbara traded her uptown Manhattan luxury apartment for a tiny downtown studio for a night. Barbara, not willing to suffer that much for ratings, vetoed the suggestion.
Debbie wasn’t shy about defending her honor. The View had a public email—[email protected]—for fans to write in with their thoughts. “Nobody really knew what to do with their emails,” said Krasnow. “Debbie, being a young person who had just graduated from college, was all about emails.” She personally answered each one addressed to her, reveling in the chance to shame any haters.
“She’d write back, ‘I’m twenty-two years old. Why don’t you get on the show tomorrow and see how well you do?’” Krasnow recalled. She’d usually toss in a few expletives, just to get her point across.
“Debbie, you can’t send those,” Krasnow told her.
She did it anyway because she thought it was important for anonymous trolls to know that she was a real person hurt by their nastiness. “That was her therapy,” Krasnow said. “It made her feel better.” He paused. “Now I’m thinking she invented Twitter.”
By the beginning of the second season, as SNL continued its vicious parodies, the damage to Debbie’s reputation was permanent. Bill and Barbara had chosen her for The View in the hope that she’d bring viewers her age to the show. But according to internal research, Debbie was doing the opposite, scaring young women away.
“The audience just didn’t like Debbie,” Geddie said. “The older people were okay with her. They thought she was an idiot, but it was funny. Younger people didn’t see themselves in Debbie. They thought by picking someone like that, we were talking down to them. It was never my intention for her to be a bad representation of young people. I thought she was a regular gal.”
So Barbara decided that it was time to shuffle the deck. It was The View’s only chance to stay on TV, and Barbara never let sentimentality get in the way of ratings. “The only one who didn’t succeed, although I thought she was adorable, was Debbie,” Barbara reflected, years later. “I wanted someone young and funny. But on the show, it wasn’t working.”
Rumors started to swirl in the press that Debbie was getting axed, which the network kept denying. In late November, Geddie finally summoned her to his office and shut the door.
“We’re going in a different direction,” he told her. “We love you, but we don’t think this is a good fit, so we’re going to try to find someone who is more newsy.”
“I remember sitting there and all the blood rushing out of my head,” Debbie said. “Oh my God. I screwed this up so bad. All I wanted to do was be good for them. Of course I cried. I was so sad. These people were my friends. Here’s the opportunity of a lifetime, and I blew it.”
When Meredith heard about what had happened, she started bawling, too, and she went to Barbara to lobby on Debbie’s behalf. “Debbie was like a kid sister to me,” Meredith said. “I think of her as a puppy or a deer. I always felt bad because it was like they were trying to put words in her mouth. Her opinions were not as respected. I could have never done the show at her age.”
Even though Debbie’s time on The View had ended, ABC kept her on through the holidays, as they auditioned replacement cohosts around her. Then on January 6, 1999, the show abruptly addressed her absence, after the cohosts had squabbled about menopause, the Clinton impeachment trial, and “Is homework evil?” Debbie wasn’t even at the table to say goodbye.
“We are announcing today that Debbie will no longer be a full-time cohost of The View,” Barbara said, reading from a carefully worded statement. “She wants to spread her wings. She wants to pursue some new opportunities. She’s looking into doing a situation comedy. Debbie herself is a situation comedy.”
Barbara made it sound as if Debbie had initiated her exit, and that she could be back on the show whenever she wanted, which only fanned the public’s interest. “When they fired me, the next day was like wildfire,” said Debbie, who was bombarded with interview requests. “I was shell-shocked. I was not interested in talking to anyone.” She made one exception, appearing on SNL, playing herself in a hysterical skit in which Debbie is so clueless, she still shows up to work after she’s been canned.
She forgave Barbara, who sent her flowers as a peace offering. Yet Debbie had a falling-out with another TV pal, which she has never talked about. “Star, who was supposed to be one of my very good friends, didn’t return my phone calls and emails,” said Debbie, who wouldn’t see Star again for seventeen years. “I was really hurt. I felt like she threw me under the bus. I felt super betrayed by Star.”
Debbie would hear Star trash-talk her in other TV interviews. “She didn’t need to use my firing to get press,” Debbie said. “That really upset me.”
When MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch asked Debbie to participate in an episode where cartoon versions of her and Star faced off in a boxing ring, she jumped at the chance. She told the writers to come up with the meanest lines possible. “That was my only way to get back at her for what she did to me,” Debbie said.
Star evidently had her reasons for distancing herself from Debbie. “I became disappointed because she stopped working hard,” Star told me. “She would stay out late and show up looking bedraggled. She gave rise to Debbie the Dummy. She is not a dumb person. It was difficult to see her not be able to right the ship.”
Star believed that Debbie lost her job because she wasn’t trying. “I don’t think she fought hard enough to stay, and she could have done it,” Star said, listing off what Debbie did wrong. “Less cute, more content. Young pretty blond girls quite often don’t get over being young pretty blond girls. That gets you in the door. That doesn’t keep you there. I thought Debbie needed to develop her own niche. She just wouldn’t do it.”
After trying to write a TV comedy series loosely based on The View, which she never finished, Debbie went on to hold twenty other jobs, ranging from red carpet coverage on E! to hosting CBS’s The Insider. But no matter where she went, her notoriety from The View followed along. In the days before reality TV made public firings vogue, Debbie was a trendsetter.
“I was like the original ‘Survivor’ to be voted off the island,” she said.
5
It’s a Hit
It was 1999, and American Idol had yet to democratize fame with the irresistible pitch that anybody could be a pop star. Nor had reality TV competition series such as The Bachelor or America’s Next Top Model popularized the notion of chronicling the girl next door as she morphed into a pseudo-celebrity. In another three or four years, these shows and their copycats would dominate television, changing culture so that it looked a little bit more like Andy Warhol’s vision for the future.
Barbara had always been ahead of the times as a journalist, but she had never received due credit for her eye as a pioneering producer. After dumping Debbie, she didn’t let The View stay in the media’s bad graces for long. Instead, she tactfully changed the narrative about her troubled talk show by unveiling a unique contest: a nationwide search for the next cohost.
“Back then, nobody did that,” recalled Geddie. “I wish I made more shows out of it.”
The View marked the first time that a TV series introduced a job interview that unfolded in real time. The lone prototype was the 1980s talent show Star Search, an incubator for discovering under-the-radar singers and comedians, including Rosie O’Donnell. Since nothing like this had existed, established TV personalities were scared about throwing their hats in the ring—they didn’t want to look desperate. “It was tough, because once you said you were searching for a person on air, a lot of people said, ‘I’m not sitting in that seat!’” Geddie said. “You were basically working with unknowns.”
As American Idol later proved, that could be an asset. The anonymity of the competitors allowed viewers to see a version of themselves on TV. Almost overnight, The View morphed from an earnest coffee klatch into America’s Next Top Anchor. The charade turned the show’s reputation inside out. The novelist Jennifer Weiner, writing for The Philadelphia Inquirer, compared the cutthroat jockeying to rush week in a sorority. “Basically, what The View has done is give us a glimpse of something few viewers are ever privy to—the po
wer shift,” Weiner wrote. “Most TV successions happen behind the scenes: Leno replaces Carson … and if you, the viewer, want to figure out the hows and the whys, you’re stuck combing the tabloids and trades for clues. Which might be why The View feels so compelling, in the same way watching the lions eat the Christians must have been compelling. The veil of secrecy has been shucked, the offstage shuffle has been shoved onstage.”
By extending an invitation to smart career women, the Hot Topics table suddenly felt as approachable as Oprah’s couch. Before the holidays, Geddie had gotten the word out to the major agencies that the show was testing new cohosts, so the young applicants arrived in droves. Viewers were encouraged to vote on The View’s website for their favorites. Yet the only opinions that truly mattered were Barbara’s and Bill’s, who personally vetted the contestants. Some had to pass a chemistry test, while others were allowed a shortcut. The rules were never spelled out because Geddie made them up as they went along. Adding racially diverse candidates helped, as did previous broadcasting experience, since the Debbie debacle had soured Barbara on total inexperience. The only other prerequisite, later adopted by Idol, too, was an age limit—you had to be younger than thirty to submit a tape.
The initial trial lasted two days for each applicant to give her time at the table with Barbara and without her. If the young woman shined during both attempts, she’d be invited back for more rounds. It was like speed dating—only with the understanding that you couldn’t turn down a marriage proposal. All contestants were forced to sign a prenegotiated contract, tying them to The View, so that the winner couldn’t trade on her newfound fame for a better offer. The starting salary was meager for TV, just north of $100,000. “The truth is, people would have done this job for free,” recalled Amy Kean, one of the finalists, yanked from her desk as a columnist for the New York Post. “I think The View was the most important show in daytime television. It stinks that they didn’t choose me.”
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