Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  “The journalist in me wanted to go down there,” Meredith said. “The mother in me wanted to get the hell out.” She told her driver to go to her kids’ school. “It was a very telling moment in where I headed,” Meredith said. “I don’t regret my decision, because for me it was the right one. Had I been working at ABC News, I would have been sent down.”

  Lisa was a hysterical wreck. “My boyfriend”—the actor Rick Yune—“had just flown back to LA that morning,” she said. “He was actually supposed to be on one of the planes, but he ended up getting on an earlier flight.” As she recounted it, the memory still gave her chills. “I’m sitting in my makeup chair at work, thinking I may have lost my boyfriend. I could not find him for hours until his plane got grounded in Wisconsin.”

  The show went dark to around-the-clock hard news, just like all other entertainment programming. Six days later, on the morning of September 17, The View returned to TV—before David Letterman, Jay Leno, or any of the nightly talk shows. Nobody could imagine delivering a comedic monologue. The studio was only half-full because producers couldn’t find enough tourists to fill the seats.

  “We want to get back to normal, but it’s very difficult,” said Meredith, who—like all the cohosts—wore a loyalty ribbon as a sign of solidarity.

  Barbara had been reporting all week from Ground Zero, conducting interviews with New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and families looking for their loved ones. “We’re not really calling them victims because we’re still hoping they’ll be found,” Barbara said on TV. “I think we’re all grateful to be alive and realizing that the difference between life and death is seconds.”

  The show’s tone was somber, a reflection of a nation under a cloud of grief. The View’s signature theme song didn’t play over the opening credits. No celebrity guests were at the table. Instead, Geddie invited New Yorkers to tell stories of the relatives and friends they still couldn’t locate.

  “I remember the first time we made a joke and people laughed,” Meredith recalled. “That’s not to pat us on the back, but people needed a reason to feel good again. And because we were in New York, it was really important that the show came back.”

  * * *

  The Bush years brought transformative change to the nation, with US troops invading Iraq under the guise of the war on terrorism. On TV, the biggest hits were still Friends, CSI, and ER, but they were about to be displaced by American Idol and The Apprentice. The View was feeling stale. Three years after Lisa had joined the show, the ratings dipped as large patches of the country couldn’t relate to five liberal women in Manhattan chatting about their privileged lives. Geddie was concerned that The View’s cohosts were too homogeneous.

  Although she helped stabilize The View, Lisa didn’t seem like the right cohost for the long haul. Because of her news background, her arguments were too sensible to provoke outrage. And she wasn’t that invested in pop culture, except for the time NSYNC’s Justin Timberlake gave her dance lessons. “Honestly, I just didn’t enjoy interviewing celebrities,” Lisa said. “If someone was doing something interesting that I connected with, okay. But for the most part, it was really surface conversation about whatever project they were working on—very lackluster. I was just not very good at faking that.”

  During Hot Topics, she tried to offer glimpses of her daily routine as a single woman. “My boyfriend, at the time, I talked about his penis size,” Lisa said. “I was very complimentary, by the way.” Even when she offered something so revealing, it was never enough. “We had one problem with Lisa,” said producer Jessica Stedman Guff. “She never talked about her personal life on the show.” They wanted all the dirt—Ling had privately confided to the other cohosts that Yune had been cheating on her. “Now nothing is more relatable to the women of America than a guy who is fucking around,” Stedman Guff said. “She refused to talk about it. And we would beg her.”

  Lisa didn’t think such requests were fair: “I felt like I was doing as much as I could. But at a certain point, it would upset people in my life when I would talk about them without permission.” She got into a tricky situation when she revealed that her prom date had been gay, outing him to his parents. “I felt so bad,” she said. “I didn’t think twice about it because I have always been a fag hag.”

  It was time for a shake-up. The View needed another firing followed by another contest, to freshen up the cast. In a twist this time, the new cohost would be a conservative. “That was very important to Bill, who was a Republican,” Barbara said. “He used to complain that the show was too liberal, especially Joy. We thought it was important to have a mixture.”

  The youngest cohost would once again take the fall. But unlike Debbie, who faced a public execution, Lisa’s dismissal would be handled quietly. Geddie called Lisa into his office and told her she was being let go, but that they’d give her time to find a new job. Lisa wasn’t too broken up—she had always seen The View as a stepping-stone, not a life term. “Quite honestly, it was not a hard job,” Lisa said. “Our hours were not that difficult. I was done by one or two o’clock. I did feel unfulfilled.”

  Lisa would announce she wanted to return to what she loved the most—field reporting. “We said she had another job,” Barbara said. “She didn’t. But later on, she did.”

  Lisa told viewers that she was leaving The View to host National Geographic Explorer, a series that allowed her to cover hard-hitting stories from around the world. Her final day on the show was on December 5, 2002, more than a year before her contract expired. When asked about what really happened, she still described the parting as mutual. “I had known there was a conservative voice missing,” Lisa said. “I went out and started talking to people well in advance of them telling me they wanted to find that person.”

  She treasured her three and a half years on a show that made her a household name. “I owe a lot to my time on The View,” said Lisa, who still gets introduced by that credit, even after starring on her own TV series for the Oprah Winfrey Network and CNN. “Not only did I learn about how to be better on television, but I became a much more open person. I would say I’m a lot more liberated.”

  7

  The Republican

  Star Jones always knew how to talk herself out of tricky situations, but no amount of legal expertise could rescue her from her current crisis: she was morbidly obese. She’d tried countless diets, and they’d never worked—she just kept getting larger. To avoid feeling embarrassed, she stopped weighing herself. But she knew her health was in peril, as her size prevented her from getting around the way she used to. On airplanes, she couldn’t buckle the seat belt without asking for an extender—or the strap wouldn’t reach over her waist.

  As The View entered its summer hiatus after Season 6, Star consulted with her doctors and decided to have gastric bypass surgery. It was her only hope of leading a normal life again. Although her TV job required her to dish about all her adventures, she saw this as a private matter, one that she never intended to reveal to strangers. She’d confided in Barbara Walters about the operation before going under the knife. “I had a legal obligation to tell the executive producer,” Star said. “I was going to have life-threatening surgery. With gastric bypass, people die.”

  She also told Barbara that it would not be fodder for The View: “I specifically said, ‘I just can’t talk about it.’”

  On August 19, 2003, Star quietly checked into a hospital. Surgeons cut her stomach into two pouches, which restricted her eating, and reconfigured her small intestine so that it would absorb fewer nutrients. She came home in tremendous pain, with immediate restrictions on her diet. “I was very weak,” she said. “For several weeks, I could not eat anything solid. It was a lot of pressure on my body.”

  When she returned to work in September, she was so frail that the stage manager, Rob Bruce-Baron, had to wrap his arms around her to help her off the set, but she didn’t let any of that show on TV.

  Star says her initial silence came from her fear that the
surgery wouldn’t work: “It was very scary. I had never been successful at any diet my whole life.”

  Other patients experience similar doubts. When Al Roker, the jolly weatherman on Today, underwent the procedure one year earlier, he explained his absence by telling colleagues he needed to have his gallbladder removed. After a few months passed and viewers noticed he’d slimmed down, he shared his whole story, knowing that weight loss was a home-run topic for morning TV. By coming clean, Roker became more relatable—and more famous. However, it may have been easier for him to do that because his career wasn’t so tied to his looks. And he was a man.

  On the day that Star checked into the hospital, she forced herself to step on a scale: it registered 307 pounds. She wasn’t sure if that was the heaviest she’d been, but it was the biggest number she’d ever seen. Her goal was to melt away a third of herself. The other two-thirds would be the foundation for the new Star, who practiced more discipline and avoided fatty foods.

  Within six months, she’d shed seventy-five pounds because of the surgery. “It was just a jump start,” Star said. To keep up the progress, she needed to stick to a structured diet. She swore off her favorite sweets and decreased how much she consumed at each meal using portion control. (The first time I had breakfast with her, in July 2007, she ordered a single scrambled egg with cheese. When the waiter brought her two by mistake, she squealed, “That’s too much,” before shoveling half of the entrée to the side of her plate, where it remained untouched.) Her sedentary routine had changed, too. “I was under an intense physical regimen,” said Star, who began to enjoy regular exercises such as Pilates and tennis. “I would work out every day.” Eventually, she pulled off a miracle transformation, as she thinned down from a size 26 to a size 8. Yet she never once discussed how she got there on The View, only saying that there had been “a medical intervention.”

  The tabloids started to write snarky articles about how Star had gotten a gastric bypass, and that the show’s producers were furious that she wouldn’t address it. Behind the scenes, Barbara, Joy, and Meredith resented her for making them act as if she’d lost the weight on her own, which created an impenetrable wall between Star and them. They believed she was forcing them to lie. “I think that bothered me the most,” Star said. “Each one of us had something that we were not comfortable talking about. Barbara had surgeries that we were not talking about on air”—cosmetic procedures. “Meredith’s husband had MS. We knew it from day one. We did multiple stories about MS, and she did not want to talk about it, and we respected that until she was ready. I always felt it was our obligation to protect each other. And I don’t think they did the same for me.”

  Barbara, who liked to dissect all hardships under the antiseptic light of the cameras, couldn’t bear the silence. She thought that Star was coming across as out of touch. But Star felt that something else was going on. From her vantage point, part of the reason her relationships with the other women had turned bitter was because she was no longer the token fat girl. “Bill Geddie said something to me after my weight-loss surgery that I didn’t hear at first,” Star explained. “He said, ‘The things you were able to say and do when you were the big girl at the table, you won’t be able to do now. You’re now competition.’”

  In hindsight, she understood the backlash over her refusal to share her secret: “I admit years later, having lost the weight, having kept it off, I wish I had been strong enough to handle it a different way. I wish I had been able to say, ‘I’m going through a health issue, I can’t talk about it yet. But please trust me and let me get through it.’ But I couldn’t.”

  For a long time after, when she looked in a mirror, she still saw the old Star—the one entrapped by 307 pounds. “I needed to actually lose the weight in my head as well as on my body,” Star said. “I had to sit down with the therapist and analyze what was going on, and why I was so closed.”

  She remembered having a breakthrough: “I would go to therapy in full makeup and lashes.” Her therapist asked her, “Why do you come in here as the full Star Jones?”

  “This is who I am,” Star insisted. That explanation didn’t cut it with the therapist. “She asked me to strip it down and come in a tracksuit and no lashes and see how I felt about it. I remember walking down the street, and people would smile. They just saw me. I realized I got far too much satisfaction in what others thought. That’s why I was so scared to bring people into my process. But it was bullshit, because I was unhealthy. I can’t emphasize that enough. It was an addiction.”

  Two years later, in 2005, as she was working on Shine, her entire team—including her lawyer and publicist—tried to convince Star to finally disclose the details about her gastric bypass. The book, positioned as a self-help guide for women, would have been the perfect platform to open up about a lifesaving medical procedure. Even then, Star couldn’t imagine doing that. She still wasn’t ready. “No way,” she said. “If you ever bring it up again, you’re all fired.”

  If Star had been more forthcoming, she would have kept her fans. She told me an endearing story about how, after her surgery, she donated fifty boxes of oversize clothes to a charity—including the red suit that she wore to her View audition. “I sort of fantasize all the time that there’s a woman starting out in a new career and she walked into her destiny because she was wearing my suit,” Star said. “It was a magical suit.” She even left a note in the pocket: I hope it’s as good luck for you as it was for me.

  * * *

  The next View cohost wasn’t going to be a shrinking violet. With Lisa Ling gone at the end of 2002, Geddie was free to execute his vision, to scout out a conservative to join the Hot Topics table. Throughout 2003, as celebrities filled in, producers vetted more than a thousand tapes, searching for female Republicans eager to back George W. Bush’s policies—a group that was invisible on TV outside of Fox News—in yet another competition. This time, The View narrowed down the finalists to Rachel Campos-Duffy, who had just missed out on the Debbie Matenopoulos seat; Erin Hershey Presley, an actress from the ABC soap opera Port Charles; and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, a shoe designer from Rhode Island.

  The last applicant’s résumé included unconventional TV experience, as a contestant on the second season of Survivor. On the Australian outback, Elisabeth (who went by the last name Filarski) was a spitfire who took on the mantle of the fan favorite. She couldn’t be broken by the harsh outdoor conditions, although she did cry after reading emails from her Catholic parents. She exuded plenty of charisma—think Sandra Bullock on the prairie—even as she lost patches of her hair due to a vitamin deficiency. Through her alliance with a schoolteacher named Rodger Bingham, Elisabeth finished fourth on the show. Her edition of Survivor was the most popular TV series of 2001, drawing an average of 30 million viewers a week.

  Elisabeth kept up the girl-next-door act during her post-Survivor press tour. Late-night talk show host Craig Kilborn called her “America’s new sweetheart.”

  “I don’t know why they say cute, you’re beautiful,” he said, as he flirted with her.

  David Letterman asked her if she’d had any secret flings on the show. “That’s why your hair is falling out,” he told her, after she confessed that she hadn’t.

  Elisabeth’s addition to The View would be groundbreaking for several reasons. “The controversial part about Elisabeth was not that she was conservative,” said Brian Frons, who headed ABC Daytime. “In the US, we were not used to really taking people off reality shows yet.” Elisabeth was the first reality star to extend her fifteen minutes of fame into a real occupation. She became a shining beacon for a generation of wannabe celebrities who wanted to stay famous after a few episodes of The Amazing Race or Big Brother.

  Reality TV had become so pervasive by then that The View introduced their new cohost with some help from the genre. On November 24, 2003, Joy Behar started the episode with a pretaped skit with the guest of the day, Bachelor star Bob Guiney, fresh off his final rose ceremony. Joy joked that The V
iew’s contest had different ground rules than the dating orgy that he’d just escaped from. “Listen, we didn’t have to tongue kiss any of them,” she said. “We don’t do group sex on this show. Well, I can’t speak for Barbara.”

  That prompted Barbara to perk up as the cameras flickered on her. She stressed the great pains involved—again—in choosing a single winner. “We decided to take a vote,” she said. “Before we reveal who our new cohost is, let us set the mood.” As the Survivor theme song filled the studio, the cohosts all raised sheets of parchment with the same name on it. By a vote of four to zero, this tribal council elected Elisabeth onto their island.

  Wearing a big grin, the twenty-six-year-old took her spot at the table. The daughter of liberal parents, she’d been a nomad (“I’m kind of living on United Airlines right now”), hosting a little-seen show from Los Angeles on the Style Network called The Look for Less. Her husband of just over a year, Tim Hasselbeck, couldn’t be in the audience because of his new contract as a quarterback for the Washington Redskins. (In one of the trial episodes, Behar had switched into initiation mode, asking Elisabeth if she ever worried he’d cheat on her with a cheerleader. “No,” Elisabeth stammered. “He’s such an honorable man.”)

  Elisabeth instantly made herself comfortable at the table, like the cousin who had no trouble interjecting her opinions at Thanksgiving dinner. Her first episode ended in a group toast, but not all the viewers felt like celebrating. The second rejection stung even harder for Campos-Duffy. “Elisabeth was conservative but not necessarily an activist,” she told me, listing off her accomplishments as a college Republican. “I thought I was going to get it. I was pretty depressed for a couple of days.”

  The View had invited Campos-Duffy back after she stayed in touch with Barbara by sending holiday cards with pictures of her growing brood, yet producers never saw her as a front-runner for the seat. Initially, Geddie liked Presley, based on her upbeat personality and faith-based values. But Elisabeth overtook her as the favorite. “I think we just found Elisabeth the least polarizing of everybody,” Meredith said. The other applicants were too focused on espousing their conservatism and couldn’t keep up with the show’s interest in pop culture and casual girl talk. “There was a bit of showboating,” Meredith said. “Elisabeth seemed to listen.”