As the one who always got the last word, Star wasn’t about to slink away quietly from this fight. “She was very professional,” Geddie said. “She didn’t break down crying or anything like that.” Her hard-edged lawyer training had taught her how to keep up a poker face. However, she was feeling wrecked on the inside. “They wanted me to stay for three months, and initially I was going to be okay with that, until they started the trickle effect,” Star said, about the series of articles that appeared about her departure, which she hadn’t announced yet. “It was hurting me. It was really devastating my psyche. It was just mean.”
She quietly sought outside counsel. Although no one ever found out, her last day on the show was designed by crisis management publicist Judy Smith, later the inspiration for Shonda Rhimes’s TV show Scandal. According to Star, she had a secret meeting with Smith.
“What do you want?” Smith asked her.
“I want this to be over,” Star remembered saying.
“No. What do you want in ten years?”
Star thought about it for several days before settling on an answer. “And then I told her, I want to be able to walk in the rooms of professional women and have them respect me for my choices and be empowered to take control of themselves and their careers.”
With that in mind, Star hatched a scheme. “I did exactly what the plan was. It was not to be nasty to my colleagues. I had no reason to be nasty. You take control of it. Don’t lie to the public. Don’t say I’m going off to do bigger and better things. Just simply look into the camera and say, ‘I’m not going to be here.’”
She contacted People for another interview, under less auspicious circumstances. Star wanted to tell them that she’d been fired from The View. The conversation would be under embargo, meaning that it couldn’t run until after The View had aired on June 27.
At work, Star had agreed that she would make her official announcement about leaving two days later. Yet there were a few clues at The View that morning that something big was about to happen. Star wore a glamorous pink suit. She carried a page of handwritten notes that she didn’t show to anybody. And her pastor was sitting in the audience. She mysteriously asked one of the show’s producers to tell director Mark Gentile to cut to her after the show’s first commercial.
Barbara was in an upbeat mood. It looked as if The View would have longevity despite losing Meredith. Even better, the moderator’s chair was finally hers—at least for a few weeks until Rosie started. Barbara held court with pizzazz, injecting as much sex into Hot Topics as possible. One of the guests that day was a serial sperm donor, and she quizzed the other cohosts if they’d ever let a child conceived from a donor meet the man who was technically the child’s biological father. After that lively discussion, Barbara asked if a wife can press rape charges against her husband, based on a recent plot from the Denis Leary show Rescue Me.
“Oh, absolutely,” said Star, who kept looking down, vaguely distracted. “If a woman says no and you force yourself, it is rape.”
Once the show returned from a commercial, Star took over, interrupting Joy. “Excuse me one minute. Something’s been on my heart for a little bit. After much prayer and counsel, I feel like this is the right time to tell you that the show is moving in another direction for its tenth season and I will not be returning as cohost next year.”
“It’s shocking to me,” Joy mumbled. Barbara looked dazed. Elisabeth, for once, was speechless. They all knew that Star was finished, but they hadn’t been prepared for her to blurt out her departure like that. It was a stop-the-presses moment in pop culture, as The View went off the rails as gripping reality TV. Better yet, Star had one-upped The Real World by blindsiding the executive producer of her own show in front of millions.
Still not knowing what exactly was behind this reveal, Barbara composed herself and asked the crowd to get on their feet for Star. “We have read rumors,” Barbara said. “This is a surprise that this would come about this way.”
Geddie bolted from the studio to try to figure out what to do next. “That was the angriest I’ve ever been in my career,” he said. “I’d gotten a call right before the show from a woman who worked with her, telling me all the things she wanted for her final show. It was fully orchestrated. When you let someone go, you ask, ‘Do you want the easy way or the hard way?’ She chose both, which I think is dishonest.”
On TV, the show went on. ABC News anchor Charlie Gibson dropped by to discuss his final week on GMA, but no one could concentrate—what he had to say didn’t seem to matter. The sperm donor granted an interview with his new wife. Star kept her distance from Barbara between commercials, and there was still confusion about what had prompted her to change the date of her announcement. Just as the show wrapped, the People article went live online, and Barbara realized the full extent of Star’s coordinated attack.
The story portrayed Star as a loyal employee who had been pushed out the door. “What you don’t know is that my contract was not renewed for the tenth season,” Star told People. “I feel like I was fired.” That quote was like throwing a match on gasoline. The story was picked up by every news outlet in America.
“Terrible,” said Barbara, when asked about how she felt that day. “I think she was furious, and she felt she was maligned and she was going to say, ‘Screw you!’ The show became far more provocative as time went on.”
Joy recalled the mood on the set. “We were surprised that day. She pulled that out of her brassiere. What!? That did not go down well with the administration.”
Star slipped away, without saying goodbye to the crew. ABC went into crisis mode. They had to hit back hard, so viewers wouldn’t shun The View and blame Barbara for kicking Star off the show. Barbara’s reputation was on the line. Star had specifically planned her attack to destroy Barbara’s image as a reputable journalist who could be trusted to tell the truth. To deal with the fallout, an emergency meeting was held with Barbara, Cindi Berger, Geddie, and several ABC employees. What the fuck are we going to do?
“I was so furious,” Geddie said.
A decision had to be made about Star’s fate. On TV, she’d said that she would be on the show through the summer. Barbara, still reeling from the People article, was concerned that banishing Star from The View would appear coldhearted and could do more damage.
“Barbara doesn’t like conflict,” Geddie said. “She doesn’t want to look mean. I don’t care if I look like I’m being mean. I’m a producer.”
Geddie felt strongly that Star could never again return to The View. “Who knows what she’ll say or do? It’s a live show. She’s already made us look like an idiot.” He pointed out that if she continued to play the victim, she’d inflict more harm on the show every day. Berger sided with Bill, and Barbara relented. “We told her not to bother coming back,” Geddie said.
Star didn’t expect to stay on The View after her takedown: “I knew exactly when and how and what I was going to say. I knew that I would never come back again. Barbara was absolutely floored because it exposed the way things are done in television and it had not been done before.” She felt the most betrayed by Geddie. “I resented more than anything that he didn’t tell me the truth.”
Not that Star needed The View for more airtime. Hundreds of reporters were banging down her door for quotes. The news media ran with the story—it was the most epic fight (so far) in the history of daytime TV.
Barbara had to do damage control by getting on the phone that afternoon with journalists to tell her side of the story. In this area she naturally excelled, and she managed to successfully put her own spin on the saga. “They had done a great deal of research, and her negatives were rising,” Barbara dished to The New York Times about Star. “The audience was losing trust in her. They didn’t believe some of the things she said.” When asked why she lied in a previous interview that Star would not be fired, Barbara answered, “I was trying to protect Star.”
Meanwhile, Star appeared on Larry King Live that week, p
eddling the narrative about all the ways she had been mistreated. She followed up The View with a series on Court TV that was canceled after one season, and she and Barbara remained estranged for years. Star doesn’t believe it was wrong to speak her truth, and she understands why people still talk about it: “Somebody took control of their own destiny and blindsided the greatest female broadcaster on television. It was planned completely—by the real Olivia Pope!”
* * *
The View desperately needed Rosie O’Donnell to hurry up and get there because the show was coming undone at the seams. “And then there were three,” Barbara said the next day, as she appeared with a downsized panel of only her, Joy, and Elisabeth.
Star’s exit escalated tensions that had been building on the show. On August 2, just as The View was about to go on hiatus, it almost lost another cohost in a scuffle that registered as a 10 on the Richter scale of meltdowns. The full details never made it in the papers, outside of a few reports about how Elisabeth looked distraught after a fight with Barbara on TV.
On this quiet summer day the singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb—“Stay (I Missed You”)—was the celebrity cohost. Earlier that morning, Rosie O’Donnell, in a burst of excitement behind the scenes, stopped by to sit in as an observer on the Hot Topics meeting. “We could barely keep her off the set today,” Barbara explained on TV. The show was getting a makeover because Barbara wanted to keep up with Meredith on Today, even though The View wasn’t on at the same time. In the makeup room, Rosie couldn’t just sit back and observe. She hijacked the discussions about remodeling the set, which she had started managing right down to the new paint colors for the walls.
Animosity was in the air. As Rosie kept talking, she championed all the other cohosts except Elisabeth. The producers had to get around to the headlines they were going to talk about on TV, including a news story about how the FDA was considering the morning-after pill for over-the-counter consumption. As Elisabeth defended her anti-abortion views, Rosie piled on, fighting her in a debate that Rosie wouldn’t even be participating in. Barbara and Joy took Rosie’s side. Elisabeth got so worked up that she started to bawl because she felt that everybody was ganging up on her.
Rosie hadn’t even started yet, and Barbara’s rule about saving arguments for the camera had already gone out the window. But at least this was only a minor tiff—or so it seemed. Rosie left the building, and it was time to do the show.
“Our audience is all here because we’re air-conditioned,” Barbara said at the top of the program. “It’s hot outside. It’s hot inside.”
“I love the heat,” Elisabeth responded in a bit of unforeseen foreshadowing.
The Hot Topics dug into Mel Gibson’s apology for his anti-Semitic tirade after getting arrested. “He needs to be welcomed into the Jewish community by a public circumcision,” Joy said. “Talk about a lethal weapon!”
Then it was time for the controversial story about the morning-after pill. No sooner had Barbara brought up the subject than Elisabeth got worked up again: “My heart is, like, almost out of my chest right now. I feel very strongly about this. I don’t think I’m alone. I believe that life begins at the moment of conception, and when that egg is fertilized—”
“This prevents the fertilization,” Barbara tried to clarify.
“It’s taking away that environment for that egg to develop, which it would develop most of the time into a baby,” Elisabeth said. “To me, it’s the same thing as birthing a baby and leaving it out in the street.”
“I think that is so extreme,” Loeb said.
Elisabeth wasn’t having any of it, as she started shaking.
“Elisabeth, calm down, dear.” Barbara sounded like a Sunday-school teacher who had to control an unruly student.
“I can’t. This makes me so upset, Barbara.”
“But everybody has strong opinions,” Barbara admonished her. “There are many other arguments that other people could give you. I think the most important thing, which is what we see today, is we’ve got to be able to have these discussions and listen to other people’s opinions and not go so crazy that you don’t listen.”
“I heard everything you said.”
“I barely started,” Walters snapped. “There are many other opinions. We have to have a way of discussing this without exploding, because people have to understand each other.”
Elisabeth tried to interject again.
“Could you stop now?” Barbara was mad. “We have to go on and we have to learn how to discuss these things in some sort of rational way.”
The last adjective felt like a slap to Elisabeth’s face. As the show cut to a commercial, Elisabeth ripped up her note cards and stormed off the stage. Joy went after her. Since all the ladies were still wearing microphones, their conversations were audible in the control room. I reviewed a recording of what happened next.
“Fuck that!” Elisabeth screamed in a narrow corridor behind the stage. “I’m not going to sit there and get reprimanded on the air. It’s not okay to sit there and get reprimanded on the air.”
“I know,” Joy said, trying to soothe her.
“What the fuck! I’m not going back out there.”
“Come into my office here,” Joy said.
“No! I’m not going back out there. You know what? I can take it in the meeting room,” Elisabeth said, referring to the earlier exchange. “I’m not taking it out there on air. I’m not taking it.”
“Okay, honey. I hear what you’re saying.”
“What the fuck! I don’t even swear. She has me swearing. This woman is driving me nuts. I’m not going back. I can’t do the show like this. She just reprimanded me, and she knew exactly what she was doing. Goodbye! I’m off. Read about that in the New York FUCKING Post!”
Elisabeth stomped off, racing down the stairs to her dressing room.
Barbara and Bill were huddling on their own, on another side of the stage. “I think Elisabeth might be furious,” Geddie said. “You just shut her down and told her she was a maniac.”
“I did not!” Barbara protested, as she blamed a producer in the control room for forcing her to stop the conversation. In frustration, she started to mimic the producer: “‘Wrap it up! Wrap it up! Wrap it up! Wrap it up!’”
Another producer ran over to tell them there was an emergency. “Elisabeth has just walked off the show,” Joy calmly announced as they joined her.
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” Barbara said.
“Where is she?” Geddie asked, as it dawned on him that The View would be back from a commercial in three minutes. Barbara tried to follow him down the stairwell, but Geddie wasn’t sure if that would be helpful. “You have to go, Barbara,” he said. “Because you have to start this show if I can’t find her.” Barbara made a U-turn for the stage.
In all this havoc, only one person wasn’t breaking a sweat. As producers were running around wildly, Joy looked at herself in a mirror. “I hate this color,” she said about her lavender blouse. “How am I supposed to get pregnant in a color like this?” It was an inside joke because she’d already revealed on TV during the birth-control debate that she’d entered menopause.
Barbara approached several other staffers, relitigating what had happened and arguing that she wasn’t in the wrong.
Downstairs, Geddie found a hysterical Elisabeth in her dressing room, telling another producer that she was done with The View.
“I quit,” Elisabeth said with tears in her eyes. “I’m quitting. I don’t need to be reprimanded on the air like that by this woman. I will take it in the meeting. I will not take that on air. I’m leaving.” She looked at Geddie. “Barbara just fully reprimanded me live on the show to everybody in America!” she screamed. “Bill, I don’t want to go out there.”
Geddie knew he had only seconds to turn this around, or the entire debacle would be breaking news. Since this was all unraveling live, the show might return with one of its cohosts missing from the stage. It was life-or-death for The View, whi
ch was looking more and more like Survivor.
“I’ve already beat up on her about it,” Geddie said. “You are a professional. You’ve got to go back out there.”
Elisabeth was mortified at the thought. “She reprimanded me like a child! I can’t even breathe right now.”
“I said something to her,” Geddie begged. “Everybody said something to her. You have to go on because you’re a pro, so come with me.” He physically moved her back toward the studio, speaking to her like a small child. “I said, ‘How could you do that? You tried to humiliate her for thinking what she thought.’”
“Not even that, Bill.” Elisabeth was most outraged by Barbara’s tone. “To talk down to me and say, ‘We have to learn how to discuss this.’”
“You were not crazy,” Geddie said, as they quickly sprinted up the stairs. “Everybody feels the way you feel. Every producer weighed in on it. They thought it was horrible.”
“You know she can get someone here who is going to sit there and not be passionate. I don’t even have my cards. I chucked them. I’m sorry, I’ve never done that before.” Only forty-five seconds were left before airtime.
On the stage, Barbara was frantic. She tried to shoo Loeb away, so that viewers wouldn’t wonder why only one cohost had vanished and not the others. Barbara thought they could perhaps pretend that they had evacuated the entire couch for Sally Field, who was waiting in the wings for an interview about her new show, Brothers & Sisters. Just as Loeb had been told to leave, she was ordered to return, because someone announced Elisabeth was coming back. Barbara, always a steady producer, knew that she needed to keep a loose cannon under control, and she commanded that Elisabeth sit next to her.
Ladies Who Punch Page 13
