Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  Suddenly, despite her aversion to the crack-of-dawn hours, this job didn’t look so bad. “I started to think about, ‘You can have this opportunity at the Today show. It’s the number one show. It’s iconic. It’s been around forever. Will you kick yourself if you don’t do this? Will you always regret it?’”

  It wasn’t as if she would be leaving an ideal work environment, since morale at The View was at an all-time low. Star’s wedding had ended, but it left a permanent stench on the show that couldn’t be scrubbed off. The bad press had taken its toll. In the aftermath, Brian Frons, the president of ABC Daytime, held an all-hands-on-deck meeting, outlining what producers later referred to as “the Star Jones rule”: they were all forbidden under any circumstances from accepting any gifts.

  “I was literally asked to be off ABC,” said David Tutera, who was banished to doing shows on cable TV. The network heads worried that the mere sight of Jones’s wedding planner would give viewers PTSD.

  Another unpleasant situation bubbled up around the time of the wedding. The View had scheduled a home renovation segment for Meredith, who would redo her kitchen on TV, with a national retail chain covering the expenses. But the story got back to the network that she was getting a free kitchen, and ABC wouldn’t allow it. In protest, Meredith’s agent, Glantz, went all the way up the chain of command to Disney’s then-president Bob Iger, who upheld the ruling.

  “Meredith was doing her house. Somebody or another complained,” Barbara said, recalling the tale about the free kitchen years later.

  “I was never going to be given a free kitchen,” Meredith said. “I think they used me as a scapegoat, because I never got anything. It was a really obnoxious period. I had seen somebody take a lot of things, and it was fine. I worked with a producer and that was it. It never happened. It’s also interesting that Barbara perpetuates that story. I don’t think that’s right.”

  One staffer recalled how during the meeting with Frons, all the cohosts had been dressed in costumes for a Halloween episode. Meredith, who was the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, believed she was being unfairly targeted. “She starts crying, with the green face, and she rips off her nose,” the employee recalled. “It was an absolute nightmare.”

  “I felt like I played out The View in my own head,” Meredith said. “The show was evolving. It didn’t feel the same way. If you don’t feel the same way, you should go. The vibe was getting weird. There was just a lot of stuff in the air. I felt it was becoming a little bit more about acting than connecting.”

  Zucker had made Meredith a hefty offer, but he sweetened it by letting her keep Millionaire, resulting in an estimated income of $10 million a year. That way, he knew that ABC wouldn’t be able to come even close to matching her salary.

  “There were conversations about, ‘Does ABC News want to write her a holding check or use her in another way?’” said Frons. The decision came back not to do that. “So it became a no-brainer. It was ‘Okay, she’s going to go.’”

  Barbara still mounted an effort to keep her moderator. “Barbara pulled me aside and said, ‘Do you know how hard it’s going to be? And you have to get up early,’” Meredith said. “In her own way, she was trying to talk me out of it. That’s human nature. Somebody is going to leave, and you say, ‘What are you, nuts!’ I understand what she was doing.”

  When Meredith finally accepted the Today offer, she was a mess: “I was crying. I was scared. But I knew it was the right time to do it. I felt like at The View I wasn’t growing anymore. And that wasn’t a good thing.”

  * * *

  Barbara Walters never thought that The View would outlive the departure of one of its stars. In 2002, after Frons came to ABC Daytime, he remembered a stark prediction at a lunch at Trump Tower in Columbus Circle.

  “Barbara can be very prickly,” Frons said.

  “You know,” she told him, “when Meredith, Star, Joy, or I go, this show is over.”

  Frons pushed back. “I said, ‘No, you’ve actually created something that’s a franchise just like Good Morning America.” If one of the cohosts left, they simply needed to find the right replacement.

  “I’m not sure about that!” Walters responded, as she was prone to do if someone questioned her judgment. Now that theory was about to be tested. The future of The View depended on what happened next.

  On The View, Meredith had done a lot of heavy lifting. As a young girl growing up in Rhode Island with three older brothers, she had learned from an early age how to navigate a big family. It was a tricky tightrope that she had to balance on TV. She was in charge, yet she also had to defer to Barbara at the drop of a hat. Viewers loved that she could be equally serious and irreverent—her shticks included dressing up like Bette Davis or Johnny Depp for Halloween episodes, tap-dancing in a hot-dog costume during baseball season, and making out with her cohosts as pretend lesbians. “We just did it to piss off Barbara,” Meredith said, laughing.

  After she decided to go, Meredith said that Geddie apologized to her for his earlier comment. “I have no recollection of making any issue with her age,” Geddie told me. “If she said I said it, maybe I thought it was a ploy. I was trying to get her to stay. I certainly wanted her to stay.” He’d been worried that Meredith would get poached: “I warned Barbara early on that Meredith was going to be scooped up by the Today show. If you looked at the landscape, there was nobody else for it. She was perfect for it.”

  The crew members were all devastated to hear that Meredith would be leaving. For many of them, she was their favorite cohost. She told them, in a sob session backstage, that she’d be taking all of them to NBC with her in her heart.

  “When Meredith left, I cried,” Joy said. “I loved Meredith. We got along really well on the show.”

  It was time to bite the bullet and announce to viewers that The View’s beloved moderator was out. ABC wouldn’t release Meredith from her contract early, so she had a few months left on the show through the summer. On April 6, 2006, Meredith’s departure became a Hot Topic, just hours before NBC had scheduled a press conference to show off their latest star.

  But, quite strangely, it didn’t open the show. “Hello, everybody, and welcome to The View,” Meredith said. “Big news. Big news. That always feels so good, doesn’t it? After months of speculation, Katie Couric made it official yesterday. She is leaving the Today show to become the first female solo anchor for a network evening newscast.”

  That was Barbara’s cue to take over: “I called Katie last night to congratulate her and to tell her I thought she did the right thing. In part, I had to go back to my own feelings. Because, I can’t believe it was that long ago, but many years ago I left NBC to come to ABC to be the first female coanchor.”

  “How many years ago, Barb?” Star asked devilishly.

  An awkward pause hung in the air.

  “It was 1976,” Barbara continued. Then, improbably, she showed a series of vintage clips of herself doing the news, as if she were the one about to make a giant leap forward in her career. As she cut to a commercial, Barbara dangled some intrigue. “And when we come back,” she said, with a twinkle in her eye, “we have some news of our own to make.”

  Seven minutes into the show, it was finally time for Meredith to take center stage: “I sat down last night to write what I was going to say to you all today. I couldn’t do it. And I realized it is because I’m having trouble finding the right words to express how I feel right now.… I’ve reached a point where I have to veer off my path. I’m very honored that NBC has asked me to cohost the Today show.’”

  The audience showered her with a standing ovation. “I’m miserable that you are leaving,” Joy said. “I have to say, I feel as though I’m losing a sister. I’m an only child. This has been an experience of siblings for me.”

  Barbara, annoyed, said, “Joy always has to be first. And everything you said, we welcome and echo.”

  “Well, Joy is a dear friend,” Meredith replied, trying to protect he
r.

  “It’s all right. I’m not picking on you,” Barbara said to Joy.

  “Yes, you are,” Joy said.

  “We promise that we will be new and fresh,” Barbara said a little later, as she tried to reassure viewers that nothing would change.

  “As opposed to old and worn-out!” Meredith grinned, pointing to herself. “Speaking about new, Melania Trump has a new baby, and we’ll be right back.”

  Sure enough, every time something big happened on The View, a member of a certain family seemed to be in proximity. Only seventeen days after giving birth, the future first lady granted her first interview about her son, Barron Trump. The segment promoted her website and ongoing modeling career.

  “Everybody is fantastic,” cooed Melania. “We have a great time, to have somebody at home, somebody very mini.”

  Barbara, always the journalist, lobbed an important question. “Are you breast-feeding?”

  “Yes.”

  “It certainly looks like it,” Joy quipped, as she eyed Melania’s abundant cleavage.

  “I wake up every three hours.”

  “Tell Donald to stop waking you up!” Joy said mockingly.

  The interview closed with Barbara. “We are very happy,” she said about her guest’s milestone. “As you gathered, this is a very special and emotional day for us.”

  “I know,” Melania said, turning to Meredith. “We will miss you here at The View. But we will watch you on Today.”

  * * *

  Barbara Walters didn’t want just anybody to take over for Meredith at The View. In the same way she had chased after the biggest subjects for an interview, she was obsessed with landing a huge name—she wanted to make a massive splash with her announcement. The new cohost had to be a game changer. Inspiration struck one night when she went to a screening of an HBO documentary called All Aboard! Rosie’s Family Cruise. The movie chronicled Rosie O’Donnell’s life outside of fame, as the retired talk show host had started a first-of-its-kind cruise ship for gay parents.

  Boy, if I could get Rosie back to daytime, that would be great, Barbara thought.

  A few weeks after that, Barbara invited Rosie to a dinner party at her home. In the midst of the crowd of newsmakers, Rosie won over the group by belting out show tunes behind a piano. Barbara was beyond charmed—and also desperate. She cornered Rosie after and offered her the View job.

  “Come try it,” Barbara said.

  Rosie accepted on the spot. She was feeling restless, and she’d even filled in several times as a guest cohost on The View. She had nothing else to do, outside of spending her days holed up in a crafts room of her house in upstate New York. That spring, a New York profile titled “Rosie O’Donnell Lets Her Freak Flag Fly” captured her years in seclusion. “Six years of megastardom, that was intense,” she told the magazine. “I needed to refuel myself with real life.”

  The way Rosie saw it, she couldn’t turn down this offer. She had too much respect for Barbara as a trailblazer for all women on television. “Ro’s reaction was, when Barbara asks, you say yes,” said Cindi Berger, the power publicist who counts both Barbara and Rosie as her clients.

  As Meredith packed up her office, Barbara revealed in a small meeting with a few key staff members that Rosie was coming to The View as the new moderator. Star was offended. In the New York interview, Rosie had painted Star as a phony for not owning up to her gastric bypass (which Star still hadn’t publicly admitted). Star’s protests fell on deaf ears. A plan was in motion that she didn’t know about: ABC was getting ready to cut her so they could clear the stage for a reboot in Season 10.

  Star’s firing had been in the works for some time. “We started to get feedback in focus groups that was sort of mind-bending,” Frons said. “We actually had people in Atlanta”—regular viewers that were meant to measure impressions of the show—“come in and say, ‘Why is she lying and saying she lost all that weight with Pilates? She obviously had a tummy tuck.’ And then someone else goes, ‘Yeah, and her fiancé is gay! What the hell is going on with her?’”

  Barbara tried at first to shield Star because she had been such an important factor in The View’s early success. But once Meredith decided to abandon ship, and ABC turned over the binders of negative research, Barbara caved. If they pooled both Meredith’s and Star’s salaries, they could afford Rosie, who only agreed to a one-year contract for reasons that would later become clear.

  Nobody at ABC had the courage to tell Star to her face that she was getting fired. Instead, an ABC executive called her agent that spring after the Meredith news, during a few days when Star was away at a women’s conference in Phoenix. Her agent then played a game of telephone with Al Reynolds, who flew to Arizona to break the grim decision.

  Star recalled returning to her hotel room in Phoenix and seeing her husband’s suitcase in the hall. Her heart stopped. Why is he here? “Then my assistant, who had traveled with me, came to the door of the suite, closed the door, and went back to her room,” Star said. “I saw my then husband come out.” Her mind imagined a dark tragedy: “I started to cry because I thought my mother had died. He came and he took my hand. That’s when he told me they weren’t renewing my contract. And I remember going, ‘Oh!’”

  Wasn’t Star mad? “Not initially, when you thought your mother had died,” Star said. “I breathed. I really exhaled. And then later, I was like ‘What???’ For about thirty seconds, I was grateful it was just that. I can handle business setbacks.”

  She was about to prove that in a way that would eternally wound Barbara Walters.

  * * *

  Meredith wasn’t going to vacate her home at ABC without a proper send-off, so she asked for a comedic roast on her last day, June 9, 2006. It was one of the stranger episodes The View had ever staged, with the set reshuffled and a theme song reminiscent of The Price Is Right. Meredith sat side by side with her cohosts and guest comedians, who included Mario Cantone, Kelsey Grammer, Gilbert Gottfried, and Joan Rivers. Her first choice, George Clooney, wasn’t available.

  “Meredith, you are a wonderful and also highly emotional person who can break into tears at the drop of a hat,” Barbara said as the master of ceremonies. “But I can tell you from personal experience that once the alarm clock goes off at four in the morning, you’ll really have something to cry about.”

  Rivers prompted the most uncomfortable moment. “I love the whole panel,” she said. “It’s going to be very hard to do The View without you and without Joy … oh, I’m sorry. That’s next week.”

  Barbara followed suit: “I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” she said to Joy.

  Everybody chuckled, including the cohost—Star—who had actually been secretly fired. She had continued to show up to work as if nothing were wrong.

  The singer Michael Feinstein belted out the tune “Rhode Island Is Famous for You,” which Meredith had said she’d been listening to when she felt anxiety about her decision to leave. Meredith’s husband, Richard, and their three young children were in the audience, although maybe they needed earplugs: most of the routine sounded like a racy nightclub act, not a family-friendly show that aired at lunchtime.

  With the hour winding down, Joy had to show her undying love for her television soul mate. “I just don’t know how to express it. I thought to myself, ‘What would Rosie O’Donnell do?’” And with that line, Joy started to passionately make out with Meredith.

  “Here’s your gum back,” Meredith said. “My poor daughter is sitting there thinking Mommy is a lesbian.” Meredith looked up. “This is it. This is my farewell tribute. I did two thousand shows with these bitches in nine years.”

  10

  Scandal

  Star Jones would depart The View with a tasteful farewell scheduled for later that summer. Her goodbye episode had been choreographed with all sides signing off on it. She’d announce in late June 2006 that she was exiting, in euphemistic language that she felt comfortable with, to pursue other opportunities. A few weeks after
that, producers would throw her a divine going-away party, and everybody would separate without any hard feelings. It would be, to the relief of Barbara Walters and the staff at ABC, a clean and amicable breakup.

  But Star had a different idea. She wanted to draw blood. Contrary to public perception, The View cohosts weren’t perpetually at one another’s throats—at least, not according to Star. “Everybody thought it was catty,” she told me. “It really wasn’t. Nobody plotted on Debbie, that’s the honest to God’s truth. Nobody plotted on Lisa. I think the first real time there was a plot was against me.”

  Star saw her firing as something more sinister than losing a job. “In reality, they could have just said that with Meredith leaving, we are going to change the direction of the show. I would not have been happy with that, but I would have respected it. People get fired all the time. I get it.”

  Star was enraged by the character assassination of her in the press, and she blamed Barbara for all the nasty gossip items about her gastric bypass. Star believed the show was leaking these stories to ruin her. “You don’t get to hurt my career when you know damn well that I helped make the show,” Star said. “That’s not fair. What I did not like was a concerted effort to destroy me professionally—Bill and Barbara, specifically. And Joy helped.

  “They all fed stories to the media,” Star insisted. “I’ve learned all of this subsequently. They were attacking my marriage, but more importantly, they were feeding stories about me not wanting to talk about my weight-loss surgery.” She cited an unlikely ally as one of her sources. “They actually fed Rosie things about me that were private. She told me, so I absolutely know it happened.” (Asked about it later, Rosie told me, “What I knew was this: She dug herself a hole, but they gave her a shovel. They allowed things and then called foul afterwards.”)