Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

With mere seconds left, Elisabeth took her seat.

  “This is why we shouldn’t have done it,” Barbara whispered to her. “Because you’re so emotional.”

  “I don’t want to be scolded for being emotional,” Elisabeth sniffled.

  “You weren’t scolded,” Barbara shot back.

  There isn’t a faster remedy for a broken friendship than TV cameras. When the lens focused, a tearful Elisabeth and Barbara were sitting with their arms around each other, acknowledging that they loved each other despite the squabble viewers had just seen.

  One of the questions for Field had been about the new morning-after pill, but Barbara quickly cut it, and the interview had an almost meditative vibe. No one would have guessed that Elisabeth had almost ended her View career that morning. But in many ways, this was just a preview of the hysteria that was about to engulf The View.

  As Joy stood in front of the mirror during that insane commercial break, she muttered to a few producers, “She gets excited. The other one is going to get just as excited,” Joy said, referring to Rosie. “I’ve got news for you. This is the beginning.”

  Part Two

  Rosie’s View

  11

  The Queen of Nice

  From the beginning of The View, Barbara Walters had leaned on Rosie O’Donnell for support. Even though they headlined competing talk shows, there was never a hint of jealousy between the two TV superstars. How could there be, when Rosie was so nice to Barbara? On September 12, 1997, Rosie played the Motown classic “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)” to bring out Barbara as a guest on The Rosie O’Donnell Show. Barbara had interviewed Rosie before, but on this morning, they switched roles. Barbara answered questions about attending Princess Diana’s funeral in London, an eventful trip that had included a night in Paris with Michael Jackson (sans surgical mask) for a primetime special. Barbara happily promoted The View, but she almost forgot to mention her cohosts, naming them at the end.

  “This is the most adorable show,” Barbara said. “I’ve been watching it backstage. It’s so lively!”

  Rosie returned the compliment, telling Barbara how much she enjoyed The View during its second month on TV. “I think it’s a great format,” Rosie said. “It’s wonderful for women at home to see themselves and their perspectives reflected back in the four different people.”

  “Four different bigmouths and me,” Barbara said. “Would you mind coming on every day?”

  “Every day?” Rosie asked, as though she’d been cornered. “All right.” Rosie tried to find an excuse. “But you’re not there every day.”

  Barbara expressed gratitude to Rosie because The Rosie O’Donnell Show was the lead-in for The View in New York, giving it a bump. “Barbara always said the reason her show stayed on was because of me,” Rosie told me. “And we had huge ratings.”

  Before Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres, James Corden, or Andy Cohen adopted the persona of the talk show host as the superfan, there was The Rosie O’Donnell Show, which aired from 1996 to 2002. For six seasons, Rosie took on the title of the world’s utmost expert on movies, TV shows, musicals, and crafts, without uttering a cross word. She averaged 5 million viewers on her best days, nipping at Oprah’s heels and clobbering her at the Daytime Emmys. On TV, Rosie offered a ray of sunshine; it was not for nothing that Newsweek dubbed her the Queen of Nice. Rosie was so popular, she stepped in as host of the Grammys and the Tonys, making her Hollywood’s emcee of choice after Billy Crystal.

  Her show was the place to go if you loved talking about pop culture, celebrities—and Rosie O’Donnell. Instead of engaging in normal banter with her famous guests, many of her questions revolved around Rosie’s own obsessions: All My Children, Ally McBeal, Ring Dings, decoupage, Tom Cruise, and Barbra Streisand. No star, no matter how big, could escape Rosie’s rabid interests. On February 3, 1997, Hillary Rodham Clinton participated in an interview that was unlike anything she’d previously done on TV. Rather than discuss public policy or health care, the first lady played a round of trivia about The Mary Tyler Moore Show, kissed Oscar the Grouch, and belted out a duet of “The Telephone Hour” from Bye Bye Birdie.

  “We’ll be here all week,” Rosie said, waving a hand. “Gimme a high five!”

  When she’d conceived of her talk show, Rosie told her agent she wanted to do a modern The Merv Griffin Show, from the 1960s. It was a stark departure from the typical fare then offered in daytime, where other hosts encouraged their scandal-ridden guests to fight. But viewers were ready for something new. With the O. J. Simpson trial airing during the day, no family feud could keep up with that saga. Rosie’s pitch was simple counterprogramming: “A lot of Broadway, a lot of singing, and no celebrity gets hurt,” she recalled. “It was a celebrity safe zone, just like Merv was.” She remembered watching his show as a child. “I thought afterwards that Merv, Tony Bennett, and Sammy Davis were going to get something to eat and have a drink. I wish I was at that restaurant.”

  The formula for Rosie’s success was that she was your thirtysomething best friend. She was famous, but not so famous that you couldn’t imagine hanging out with her. She seemed genuinely humbled and excited to be around entertainment legends, from Elaine Stritch to Celine Dion. That enthusiasm came across in the show’s opening, which featured an animated Rosie soaring through the streets of Manhattan, a wink at the credits of Bewitched. In public back then, Rosie was America’s favorite kid sister, cousin, and daughter all rolled into one. Off camera, like most comedians, she was different. At the mall, she’d notice how strangers would come up and ask why she wasn’t smiling the way she did on TV. Rosie demanded a lot from her army of producers. She could be aloof and exacting. If they failed to deliver precisely what she had envisioned, from elaborate games with the audience to off-the-cuff musicals, she tended to lose her temper.

  “She did hold people to a very high standard,” said her friend Janette Barber, who eventually became the head writer on the show. “The way I used to say it was, ‘If you fuck up, you’re gone. If you make a mistake, then you have a chance to fix it.’”

  Rosie was born in Commack, Long Island, as the middle child—the Jan Brady—of five kids. Show business was always an escape from the bleak reality of her youth. She watched soap operas with her nana and took the train to Manhattan to catch Broadway matinees, collecting all the Playbills under her bed. One of her fondest memories was coming home from school to her idol Barbra Streisand’s albums. Her mom, Roseann, adored Streisand, an infatuation O’Donnell clung to in the pit of her heart. After her mom died from breast cancer in 1973, ten-year-old Rosie used to imagine what it would be like if Streisand had gotten sick instead. Rosie thought that Streisand’s fame and wealth would have unlocked a cure.

  Rosie was expected to pitch in around the house and care for her younger siblings. But she was dealing with another darkness. As a little girl, Rosie was sexually abused by her father, Edward Joseph. Although she’d identified herself as a victim in her 2002 memoir Find Me, she never publicly named her father as the perpetrator until now. “It started very young,” Rosie said. “And then when my mother died, it sort of ended in a weird way, because then he was with these five children to take care of. On the whole, it’s not something I like to talk about. Of course, it changes everyone. Any child who is put in that position, especially by someone in the family, you feel completely powerless and stuck, because the person who you would tell is the person doing it.”

  Rosie wasn’t the best student, but she had a knack for comedic timing. In high school, she started playing clubs on Long Island. In 1984, she scored big as a contestant on the second season of Star Search, on which she became a semifinalist in the comedy round. That led to acting opportunities, and a stint as a VH1 VJ; she wrote her own riffs between music videos (excellent training for any would-be talk show host). By the early nineties, Rosie boasted a formidable movie career, with roles in A League of Their Own, Sleepless in Seattle, and The Flintstones. (The less said about Exit to Eden, t
he better.)

  Between films, in 1994, she starred as Rizzo in the Broadway revival of Grease. The show’s musical director, John McDaniel, auditioned her at his home in Los Angeles, with the song “There Are Worse Things I Could Do.” It was an apt choice. “She’s not a great singer,” McDaniel said. “She’s an enthusiastic singer.” He fibbed a little. “I called the producer in New York and told her that Rosie was fantastic, and we’ve been great friends ever since.” The production was a smash. Rosie returned the favor a few years later by making McDaniel the bandleader on her show.

  What made Rosie so relatable on TV could sometimes backfire. Her honesty could hurt others or herself. In a profile in Cosmopolitan around the time of her stint in Grease, she revealed to the writer Patrick Pacheco that she was single but open to dating women. “I wasn’t ever lying to a gay reporter,” Rosie said, looking back on that day. “I know he’s gay. He knows I’m gay. And we both knew that we were in a culture that wasn’t allowing you to talk about it.” Her publicist at the time, Lois Smith, had to do damage control, calling Cosmopolitan editor in chief Helen Gurley Brown to get the quote extracted from the story. Rosie followed Smith’s advice not to walk with her girlfriends down a red carpet. “Listen, this was not done out of homophobia,” Rosie said. “It was done out of love and protection.”

  Rosie’s original career plan was to continue to make films and eventually transition into the director’s chair, a bold dream for a young woman in Hollywood. Her role models were Nora Ephron and Penny Marshall; Rosie had been directed by both. By her midthirties, she was pulled in another direction after she adopted her son Parker. On the set of the Nickelodeon film Harriet the Spy, in which she played the title character’s nanny, she only saw Parker for an hour a day because of the hectic shooting schedule in Toronto. “I took my maid,” Rosie said. “And when I came home from work, he wouldn’t go out of the maid’s arms and come to me. I called my agent and said, ‘You need to get me a job where I can stay in New York City. I’m not doing another movie. He needs to be in his own crib. He needs his family around.’”

  Rosie had filled in as a guest cohost on Live with Regis and Kathie Lee. She was intrigued by the more laid-back lifestyle of a morning talk show host, so she could have afternoons and evenings free to spend with her son. Kathie Lee Gifford was rumored to be about to step down (she didn’t until five years later, in 2000). “I said, ‘If that’s really true, tell them I’ll do it!’” Rosie said. “Then she decided to stay.” Rosie figured she could try it on her own. Did she really need a cohost?

  In addition to The Rosie O’Donnell Show being a safe haven for stars, Rosie wanted it to feel like a late-night show that aired during the day. “Nobody had done this yet, so it seemed like a far-off thing,” Rosie said. She promised not to stoke any controversies. “I was not really known for anything political at the time as much as I was just a truth-telling comic, who was funny and round.”

  The pitch attracted widespread interest around Hollywood. “A lot of people were after her,” said Hilary Estey McLoughlin, the former president of the production company Telepictures, who met with Rosie. “I guess we talked her into it.” The company’s leader, Jim Paratore, was an enterprising producer who later created talk shows for Ellen DeGeneres and Tyra Banks, among others (and also launched TMZ). Rosie’s contract stipulated that she wouldn’t trash-talk like on Jerry Springer. She negotiated an up-front salary of $1 million and potentially much more through significant ownership of the show, which would be syndicated and sold to the networks. “I said, ‘I want the Oprah deal,’” Rosie remembered. “And, yeah, I got a lot of money. More money than a human needs in a lifetime.”

  Rosie had only one choice for her executive producer. When she had appeared on Late Night with David Letterman to do stand-up comedy, she felt safe with a young producer named Daniel Kellison. “I think you’d be a perfect fit for it,” she told him. The Telepictures executives thought he was too green, but they flew him first-class from New York to Rosie’s home in Los Angeles for a meeting. “Jim and Hilary are there,” Kellison said. “Jim starts in and says, ‘You’re too young. You don’t have much experience. We’re talking to a lot of people.’”

  Then Rosie strolled into the room. “I already told Daniel he’s my choice. I hate everyone else.”

  “And Jim and Hilary looked sick,” Kellison said. “All of a sudden, their negotiation went out the window.”

  Kellison’s agent, James “Baby Doll” Dixon (who went on to represent A-listers such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert), urged him to play hardball. “He goes, ‘Rosie is going to call you. Don’t call her back.’ Ugh. Okay.” It worked exactly according to their plan. “They are going crazy.” Within a few days, Kellison had been offered a massive deal. “It was a pretty outrageous amount.” He said, laughing. He also received a stake in the show, which vested over time. When Kellison told Letterman about the offer, the late-night host gave him his blessing. “Letterman was my hero and I hadn’t been planning on leaving.” Kellison had worked on Late Night for eight years right out of college. “I remember when I left, there was a case of wine on my chair. It was a Château Lafite Rothschild from 1982, worth more than one hundred thousand dollars.”

  The hiring spree for The Rosie O’Donnell Show resembled that for a buzzy internet start-up. Producers arrived through unconventional routes. Some came from magazines, with the (flawed) thinking that journalists could help pre-interview guests. Others were comedian friends that Rosie had met on the nightclub circuit. Caissie St. Onge, who served as Letterman’s assistant, went to see Rosie in Manhattan on a rainy afternoon. “I was wearing a silk skirt,” St. Onge said. “I got splashed by a truck on the way over. I went to my interview covered in mud.”

  Rosie didn’t care. She was playing a video game on her computer. “I have to finish this or else it will make me crazy,” she told St. Onge. “Plus, I’m a little nervous meeting new people.”

  Rosie broke the ice by complimenting St. Onge, telling her that she reminded her of her little sister Maureen. “We got into a talk,” St. Onge said, “about how people would say to her, ‘Not to insult you, but you look like Rosie O’Donnell.’ I said, ‘I would not be insulted to be told that I looked like her.’” And just like that, Rosie had a new assistant.

  Rosie was up-front with her colleagues about who she was. “Being gay was never the hardest part of my life,” Rosie said. “My childhood was. This is 1995. Nobody’s out.” She felt a financial responsibility to disclose her sexual orientation to the executives at Telepictures. “I said, ‘I want you to know, before you invest this money in me,’” Rosie recalled. “‘I don’t want you to come to me in three months and go, “Oh my God, the National Enquirer has this thing.”’”

  Rosie had clear guidelines for how she’d talk about her personal life. She never pretended that she was sleeping with men. Even when she discussed her crush on Cruise, she made it clear that she had no sexual interest in him. She’d blush as she described her ultimate fantasy—she wanted him to come over to her house and mow the lawn with his shirt off. “It’s one thing to say that I am,” Rosie told Barber. “It’s another thing to say, ‘I’m not.’ And that I won’t do. If I’m not going to tell my truth, I’m sure as hell not going to tell a lie.”

  * * *

  On the morning of June 10, 1996, at 10:00 a.m., Rosie O’Donnell made her grand entrance through a blue curtain on the eighth floor of 30 Rockefeller Center, in the same studio that Phil Donahue once occupied. “Hiiiii!” she welcomed viewers in a casual black pantsuit matched with a red shirt. “I felt like Jerry Springer,” she said on TV, after the audience gave her a standing ovation. “You ever notice, his show, they stand up every day? My show is going to be different. It is! Today on The Rosie O’Donnell Show, women who sleep with their in-laws. Kidding! Hahaha. Just a joke.”

  The atmosphere on The Rosie O’Donnell Show resembled that of the world’s happiest kindergarten class. Her wooden desk looked on TV as if it we
re designed by Toys “R” Us, with a collection of action figures, PEZ dispensers, and Koosh balls that she flung into the audience. The tourists in her studio were bribed into clapping with free gifts (books, CDs, Broadway tickets) and snacks—such as the Ding Dongs and chocolate milk under their chairs to keep them caffeinated. In later seasons, the prizes got bigger. “We would give people cars,” said McLoughlin, who later took over as the second (of four) executive producers on the show. “People would not like the cars they got; it didn’t have the specs they wanted. She would tell us to go back and get the car they wanted.”

  Each morning, three producers checked her desk, to make sure all her props were in order. Rosie had a digital music player, before the iPod had been invented, that allowed her to cue to some of her favorite songs (her playlist included Streisand’s “People,” Savage Garden’s “I Want You,” and Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ la Vida Loca”). She loved to mouth along to the words whenever she felt inspired. Each episode began with an introduction from a member of the audience. Rosie had a knack for improvising with strangers, which she’d developed from her years on the road. After a few minutes of that, she took a seat, to dish about what she’d done the previous night or to share stories about her kids. Rosie called this part of the show chuffa, a term she borrowed from director Garry Marshall that referred to actors filling in their dialogue on the day of a scene. Finally, it was time for the interviews—a roster of three or four guests that ranged from genuine stars to nostalgia TV. She launched her first show with George Clooney (after calling in a favor to Warner Bros., which produced her show and ER), Toni Braxton, and Susan Lucci.

  Just as The View did a year later, The Rosie O’Donnell Show debuted in the summer so it wouldn’t face stiff competition. However, unlike The View, Rosie didn’t need to worry about her initial ratings. She was an overnight hit. “I always say, arrogantly, it surprised everybody except for me,” Barber said. “I had seen her at the mall. I saw what happened with her and people.” On the set of A League of Their Own, for example, Madonna originally drew the biggest cheers from the two thousand extras in the stands. “By the end of the month, Rosie would walk out and it would be like the second coming of Christ,” Barber said. “Joan Rivers was like that, too. She would take that extra minute; she would remember them. They felt they were her.”