Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

The stunt paid off. ‘I thought, ‘Wow, you must really want this job,’” Meredith said.

  After that, Barbara called Lisa into her dressing room to officially offer her the cohost seat. “I felt like I was in a dream, and I was pinching myself,” Lisa said. “I said yes right away.” Since the outcome wasn’t public yet, Lisa was forced to pack up her belongings quietly without saying goodbye to her coworkers at Channel One. “I had to move to New York City to start a job on a national talk show in secret,” said Lisa, who left behind the house she’d just bought in Los Angeles. “It was not easy to do.”

  Barbara phoned the runners-up to break the news. Sánchez, who was in a car, had to pull over. “I just remember bawling,” she said. “It was devastating to me.” She wanted to know if she lost the job because of Star, and Barbara insisted that Jones wasn’t the reason. (“In my opinion, there was no competition,” Star said, years later. “It was Lisa Ling’s job.”)

  Campos-Duffy was equally devastated. “Lisa is a great talent; I don’t want to disparage that,” she said. “But I feel like I’d done really well. I think they had their mind set on a single girl, which never made sense to me. I was much more of a viewer when I was at home with my kids.”

  On May 3, it was finally time for the big reveal. “Yes, we have milked this for all it’s worth,” the show’s announcer said.

  Meredith tried out her best Ed McMahon voice—“We have picked our cohost,” she said—as the stage filled with a high school marching band. Although Lisa’s name had leaked early in the press, the show treated it as a full-blown surprise.

  “This has been quite a competition,” Barbara said, as Lisa joined the table with a big smile. “And I must say, as we all know, it was very close.” Barbara assured viewers that the runners-up would have distinguished careers on TV, in case some of their fans were disappointed.

  Meredith said, “Listen, Lisa, we may seem supportive—”

  “But the witches of Eastwick could come out at any moment,” Star howled.

  * * *

  For some time, Lisa kept the drama dialed down. She found a way to relate to all her new colleagues. Joy was like her adopted Jewish aunt—Lisa loved to sprawl on Joy’s dressing-room couch and vent about boy trouble. Lisa gained Star’s trust enough to receive an invitation to Star’s fortieth birthday bonanza in Jamaica. Barbara could see a younger version of herself in Lisa. Barbara would invite her to fancy dinner parties at her home, and Lisa easily impressed foreign dignitaries and ambassadors.

  However, Barbara wasn’t entirely pleased by her new hire’s expansive career goals—she told Lisa not to shrug off her home life. “She felt like she neglected hers because her struggles as a woman in the industry were so challenging,” Lisa said. “I think she had regrets about that.” Lisa paused. “At the time, I kind of rolled my eyes.”

  Lisa was so ambitious, she got to work at around 7:30 a.m., an hour before the other cohosts. She made it clear that she was there to learn. “When we picked Lisa, she was exactly the cure for everything that ailed us,” Geddie said. “She was smart. She had a great vocabulary, and a presence about her that said, ‘I’m only twenty-five, but I have a voice, too. I’m no Debbie Matenopoulos.’ That changed so much for us.”

  Geddie, who credits the contest with saving The View, was worried that viewers would stop watching after it ended. “But that wasn’t the case,” he said. “The numbers went up after that.”

  Lisa still clung to hope that she could play the part of the hard-hitting broadcaster. “The one thing that was hard for me, I don’t think people ever wanted me to show my journalistic credentials,” Lisa said. “Anytime I talked about my reporting overseas, it fell on deaf ears, which was a bummer. I really wanted to prove that young people shouldn’t be cast in this one-dimensional light.”

  The producers were much happier when she dished about movie stars. The View had finally cemented its status as a stage for top guests, including George Clooney, Sheryl Crow, John Travolta, and Tom Cruise, who didn’t leave until he’d signed autographs for every single member of the audience. “You’re what a movie star should be,” producer Alexandra Cohen said, beaming at him. “He gave me a huge Tom Cruise grin.” The sudden burst of star power at The View created backstage tensions of a different kind. Mariah Carey never wanted to sing live. “A lot of lip-synching,” Cohen said. “A lot of stopping and restarting. Then she’d do it and her people would call and want fixes.”

  Nobody on staff will ever forget the day an Oscar-winning actress visited, with a list of outrageous demands. “Did anybody tell you about Faye Dunaway?” said senior producer Mark Lipinski, laughing. “She wanted a gym and a bed. We actually didn’t have that. We moved an office and we made a bedroom and an exercise room for one appearance. She was only there for a couple of hours. The funniest thing was, her assistant’s name was Christina. And you could hear her yelling down the hall, ‘Christina! Christina!’ It was just like the movie,” he said, referencing 1981’s camp classic Mommie Dearest, starring Dunaway as a formidable stage mom with a daughter also named Christina.

  Outside of all the celebrities, The View needed to bank on other daytime staples. Lisa scored points when she took up challenges, such as agreeing to a haircut on TV. “That was a big regret, because I hated it,” said Lisa, who started to choke up. “After it was cut, I was, like, ‘What the fuck did I just do?’”

  On the whole, the show’s makeover—with Lisa at the table—was a success. With the addition of its newest cast member, the SNL parodies stopped, as the show claimed its place as the Mensa of daytime TV. Lisa can only remember one time where she put her foot in her mouth. “Did I ever get in trouble?” she asked musingly. “I think I may have said tits on the air once.” She didn’t know the word wasn’t allowed on TV. “I got a little hand slap.”

  6

  The Star Diaries

  Before she was a household name, Star Jones used to talk about herself as if she were already famous. She dished that she had two mentors in her life: Johnnie Cochran, from her time covering the O. J. Simpson trial, and Barbara Walters. But as Star actually achieved stardom, she could feel an odd vibe from the leader of The View. Star first noticed tension when she showed up to a dinner party on the Upper East Side. Barbara was there, too. When she tried to present Star to the guest of honor, Prince Andrew, he brushed off the introduction. The Duke of York already knew Star through his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, and he bypassed Barbara to give Star a hug.

  “Star’s favorite song is the ‘Thong Song,’” Prince Andrew quipped, referring to the raunchy R&B hit. He’d picked up this tidbit from a previous exchange.

  “I can’t believe you’re saying that!” Star laughed.

  Not only was this unladylike, but Barbara had become the third wheel in a conversation with the royal family. “Barbara looked like she was going to die,” Star recalled. “She was mortified. Maybe I didn’t appreciate boundaries enough: I’ll take responsibility for that. But I was having a good time. What I should have seen was, I penetrated her world in a way that she never would have. She’s Barbara Walters. She’s not going to have these conversations.”

  Throughout her career, Barbara had perfected the art of knocking down women—and men—who tried to upstage her. Now she had to worry about a homegrown rival. If Barbara expressed early concerns about fending off an All About Eve situation on her talk show, she wasn’t entirely wrong. Only one cohost had the guts (and the moxie) to play a modern-day Anne Baxter. It shouldn’t have been a total surprise: Star’s name practically called out for its own marquee. After The View finally took off, Star became the second-most-popular black woman on TV, after Oprah Winfrey. And Star lived for the applause.

  Star was smart enough to leverage her fame into a series of businesses—all under the umbrella of Star Inc. She signed a deal with Payless shoes as a spokeswoman to hawk their affordable footwear in TV commercials, created her own line of wigs, and traveled around the country giving speeches, collecting substantial fe
es. When Newsweek featured Star on its cover in a roundtable about issues facing African-American women, the other participants were Beyoncé Knowles, the rapper Foxy Brown, and the ABC journalist Deborah Roberts. Star was the most outspoken in the group—and probably the most recognizable, too, at the time.

  She admitted that it went to her head: “I think I got too big for my britches. My ego started to take over, and I didn’t know how to pull back. I didn’t know how not to be larger-than-life.”

  On TV, Star was widely adored. “We got to our first focus groups,” Bill Geddie said. “They would say, ‘I like the fat black lady.’ She was extremely important in getting people interested in the show. Daytime audiences found their way in through Star Jones.”

  Part of her appeal was that she was a churchgoing woman of faith who talked about God. She spoke to audiences in an informative yet down-to-earth way—with the Oprah touch. When Senator Hillary Clinton finally visited The View for the first time in 2003, to promote her memoir Living History, Star asked whether she’d run for president in five years. “I’ve told the audience I’m going to do a leave of absence and join your campaign, but I need to plan,” Star said with a twinkle in her eye.

  “Well, that doesn’t put pressure on me,” Clinton said, laughing. “I’ve got a Senate campaign coming up in ’06. You don’t have to quit your job for that.” She clutched Star’s hand. “But I will need your help.”

  Star grew up in New Jersey, as the older of two girls to a single mom from a modest family. In her self-help book, Shine: A Physical, Emotional & Spiritual Journey to Finding Love, Star writes about how she decided to pursue law at eight, after watching the soap opera Another World—her grandmother Muriel told her that a lawyer could have helped a character who was always in trouble. At nineteen, just after high school, Star underwent a complicated surgery to remove a tumor from her thymus gland. “I never really thought I would die, even though the doctors said it was a possibility,” Star told me. “They had to crack my chest to get it out.”

  After law school, Star worked her way up to assistant district attorney in the Brooklyn homicide bureau. Between crime scenes, she popped up as a legal expert on NBC’s Today, on the same stage that had launched Barbara. The trial of the century put her on every producer’s radar—she was a constant presence on Inside Edition. When The View rang, Star was making a run for her own talk show at NBC. “I learned something there,” Star said. “The news division shouldn’t be doing entertainment shows.”

  Star lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, which she referred to as “the penthouse,” even though it wasn’t on the top floor, nor was it bigger than the other units in the building. Something grandiose was inside, though: a humongous portrait of Star that hung in the foyer. “Her bedroom had three television screens,” said celebrity event planner David Tutera, who later organized her wedding. “I had no idea what it was for. I think, in her head, she was watching different programs for the next day. But it wasn’t like she was Brian Williams.”

  Once The View exploded, there was no turning back from the dueling-divas narrative between Star and the rest of the cohosts. “The bigger we got, the more the show started to change,” Star said. “It was almost like a reality show: the first season always starts out, you’re fascinated because you don’t know these people. Then the next season, they think they’re stars and it goes to pot.”

  The irony is that Barbara wanted The View to represent empowerment, not to reinforce the traditional clichés about women attacking each other over petty arguments. “It’s funny,” Geddie said. “When we started out, we were trying to show that women could work together. And we were going to be this beacon of light against the stereotypes of women, backbiting and vanity. And in the end, we proved all of that. But I think it’s really not so much about being women. It’s about being famous.”

  The View suddenly started to feel like Mean Girls. Many of the problems backstage revolved around Star versus members of the staff. When the show went to Disney World to shoot a week of episodes, Star called up publicist Karl Nilsson with a complaint. She wanted to know why her hotel suite didn’t overlook the ocean. Nilsson had to gently explain to her that Orlando was surrounded by land in all directions.

  There were two versions of Star. She could act like the woman you saw on TV, the curious and sarcastic girlfriend with no shortage of useful advice. “Star was nice when she wanted something,” Tutera said. During the Season 2 cohost contest, she took Campos-Duffy under her wing, inviting her to a posh Bible study. “Star Jones was always extremely kind to me,” Campos-Duffy said. “Those stories mean nothing to me.”

  Her other persona came across as daytime’s own Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada. After the morning meeting, producers would drop off the final Hot Topics to all the cohosts. They weren’t allowed to make eye contact with or speak to Star; they’d been told to deliver the note cards on a bookshelf by the door and run. “She was the nastiest,” said one employee, who recalled how Star had made a producer cry on her first day of work as a way of showing the woman who was boss.

  Another day, a producer had his family visiting. “Star, this is my wife and son,” he said, passing her in the hall.

  “Pleasure,” she mouthed, without stopping.

  Unlike the other cohosts, Star stayed in touch with the actors who appeared on The View. She turned many of them into personal friends, a trick out of the Barbara Walters playbook, as she vacationed in the Hamptons with Vivica A. Fox and Kim Cattrall. If a celebrity was in distress, Star always came to the rescue. Take Michael Douglas (“my favorite guest, because he’s the first man on television that made me feel sexy and pretty,” Star said). Just before his wedding to Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2000, Douglas rang up Star in a panic.

  “I know you’re a lawyer, but are you a judge, too?”

  “Michael, what are you talking about?”

  “I had one assignment from Catherine. It was to get a judge to marry us, and I didn’t do it.”

  “She’s going to kill you!” Star cracked. She told Douglas that she had someone who could help, hung up, and dialed her pal Judith Kaye, a celebrated judge on the New York Court of Appeals. “So Judge Kaye performed the ceremony,” said Star, who attended the glitzy affair at the Plaza Hotel in November. “It was really wonderful.”

  As she quietly struggled with body-image issues, Star put on a brave face. She masked her insecurities by talking about her fabulous wardrobe and career. Even though she was single, she liked to imagine the kind of wife she’d be. “Star and I had different points of view about being female,” Joy said. “For someone who is a lawyer and so educated, to hear her say something like ‘I like to come home to my man and let him be the boss’ … It’s so antifeminist. We used to spar about that.”

  For all Star’s old-fashioned ways, she wasn’t exactly neat. Her dressing room looked as if it were out of a Hoarders episode. It was stacked with clothes and shoes. That made it the perfect hideout for vermin. One night, the janitor complained to Joy that he’d just swept up the carcass of a crushed mouse from the floor of Star’s dressing room and that Star must have stepped on it and killed it without knowing. Joy had grown to detest Star so much, she gleefully spread the story to some of her friends on the show. “Can you believe it?” Joy would ask, thrilled. (“Who told you this?” Joy said, when asked about it, with a guilty expression on her face.)

  On her summer vacations, Star loved to visit outlet malls—she kept a comprehensive list of the best around the world. “I went to Florence with her on a cruise,” Joy said. “The boats dock. Instead of going to the Uffizi Gallery, she goes outside of the city to the outlet center.” However, nothing could beat the best deal imaginable: freebies. Many producers never forgot the day her sister was visiting the show for a baby shower segment. They said that the two of them raided the studio early, clearing out the rest of the products that were supposed to be sent back to the manufacturers and that Star then had a van pull u
p to the loading dock, and they made away with all the merchandise. Star denied that she did such a thing. “Not true,” she said. “Every cohost took the leftover merchandise.”

  For all her bravado, Star was suffering on the inside. She couldn’t stop overeating. Despite all her career achievements, she felt a void—an inescapable loneliness. “I was unhealthy,” Star said. “I can’t emphasize that enough. I had put up so many beautifully built walls to mask a problem, an addiction. I gained the most weight on my most financially successful year. I couldn’t accept that the success was mine.”

  She’d lose her breath just walking out to the studio set and wheezed between sentences. Since viewers at home could hear it, the crew had to lower her microphone so that it wasn’t too close to her mouth. Star had so focused all her energy on becoming famous that it was destroying her. She’d absorbed a pearl of wisdom from one of her first meetings with Barbara, who gave all the ladies advice for career longevity: “Don’t let anyone sit in your seat.” As a result, Star never took her eye off the pedestal. “I remembered that,” Star said. “Half of being successful is showing up. Unless I’m deathly ill, I’m going to be here every day.”

  * * *

  By the time George W. Bush was elected president by 537 ballots in Florida, The View had become a legitimate force in daytime TV. Yet it wasn’t such a political vehicle yet. Meredith wouldn’t reveal whom she voted for in the 2000 election, only saying that she picked the candidate who she thought would keep the country the safest.

  On September 11, 2001, the four cohosts (minus Barbara, who was off that day) were chatting in their daily Hot Topics meeting when they heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Geddie thought it must have been an accident. “We kept talking, and the second plane hit, and it was clear something terrible happened,” Meredith said. They all evacuated the studio, trying to locate family or friends.