Rosie’s show changed daytime TV. It made networks reevaluate what the stay-at-home moms wanted to see. “I don’t think we had established definitively that a daytime talk show was for women,” said the comedian Judy Gold, who took a job as a human-interest producer on the show. “That was the result of Rosie.” She cleared the path for a wave of celebrities to test the waters with their own family-friendly vehicles, from Roseanne Barr to Tony Danza to Bonnie Hunt. Even Oprah had to rejigger the content of her show, covering fewer tabloid stories and more celebrity interviews—and products, such as her annual Christmas list of favorite things. If it weren’t for Rosie, DeGeneres might not have followed suit, with her dance moves and shopping trips to CVS with Michelle Obama.
Rosie wasn’t just an influencer. She was also a tastemaker. After she showed her audience a Tickle Me Elmo doll, it became the sold-out holiday toy of 1996, fetching thousands of dollars on eBay. She sang songs about getting a mammogram for breast cancer month, which saved lives. She conducted one of the first interviews in the US with J. K. Rowling, after Rosie discovered Harry Potter before the rest of us. At the end of their talk, she gave Rowling a home computer (a Mac desktop) because Rosie felt bad that the future billionaire wrote her novels in longhand.
Even if Rosie didn’t say the word gay out loud, The Rosie O’Donnell Show had its host’s identity proudly on display. “I remember saying to John McDaniel, ‘My God, if anybody knew how gay this show was,’” Gold said. “I mean, it was the gayest show ever!” On any given day, there was never a shortage of chorus boys or interviews with the likes of Richard Simmons or Liza Minnelli. McDaniel had a partner at the time, but he wasn’t allowed to mention him on TV. “I had been out since I was in elementary school,” he said. “It was weird to be in a situation where we weren’t allowed to talk about it.”
DeGeneres came out in 1997, which marked a turning point in the culture. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, she’s going to ruin her whole career,’” Rosie said. “And then she came on my show, and I said, ‘I got to figure out a way to stand next to her so that everybody in the know is going to know I’m not leaving her out there alone.’” Rosie devised a clever exchange, in which DeGeneres revealed the character on her sitcom is Lebanese. (“Maybe I’m Lebanese?” Rosie retorted.) “Every time I’d watch Matt Lauer accuse somebody of sexual impropriety, I thought to myself, ‘You hypocritical fuck,’” Rosie said. “I never wanted to be a hypocritical fuck.”
Despite all her success, Rosie couldn’t ease up on the gas pedal. “It was a shit ton of pressure on Rosie at all times,” Kellison said. She arrived in the studio at 6:00 a.m. each day to prepare. So did the people around her, which could be grueling for a staff largely composed of nocturnal animals. “I was in my early thirties and I’m tasked with running this multimillion-dollar corporation,” Kellison said. “There are a hundred-plus employees, and I had never managed anything like that before.”
His father-in-law—who worked as a partner in a Boston bank—sent him a stack of management books. His favorite tidbit of advice came from How to Win Friends and Influence People. “This thing Dale Carnegie said, if there’s one magic sentence to stop someone in their tracks and have them be sympathetic with you, it’s this: ‘I don’t blame you for being mad at me. If I were you, I’d be mad at me, too.’ I remember going to Rosie’s office. She was really upset about something.”
Kellison used the line. “It’s okay, Daniel,” she said. “You’ve got to be more careful about these things.” Its effectiveness eventually wore off as he kept getting things wrong for her.
Some of Rosie’s biggest clashes were with her directors. Even as she hosted a live TV show, she kept an eye on the monitors behind the cameras at all times, calling out which shots she wanted with her own unique hand gestures. “Bob I yelled at every day,” Rosie said about one of her directors. “I’m admitting it. I couldn’t believe I’m watching TV and there are little kids doing an Irish jig and he’s not on their feet or their faces.” She didn’t like another director she remembered now as “this really old man” who used to work for Merv Griffin. He kept telling her, “You guys are reinventing television.” But he couldn’t keep up with Rosie’s pace.
She cycled through four directors in her first seven months. “At a certain point, it’s diminishing returns,” Kellison said. “There are only so many people who can do this sort of work, and it’s an imprecise art.”
Rosie was furious one day when a producer patched in a call from the mayor of Philadelphia, who was supposed to offer her the keys to the city. This turned out to be a prank. The voice on the other end was Captain Janks from Howard Stern, who berated her. “Howard Stern said you were a fat pig,” Captain Janks said on live television. “Oh, really?” Rosie responded, as all the blood drained from her face. She was devastated that her team had let the call through without properly vetting it.
Megastardom had other drawbacks. Rosie couldn’t appear in public without creating a mob scene. The paparazzi would stalk her on vacations. “I went to Florida for my birthday and they got pictures of me on my Jet Ski,” Rosie said. “I was with some lesbians I knew from LA.”
When she returned to work, Kellison pulled out a tabloid that had run the photographs. “They got you,” he sighed. “What are we going to do?”
“I said to myself, ‘I’m going to get a new executive producer,’” Rosie recalled. She fired Kellison and replaced him with McLoughlin, who lasted a year before going back to Los Angeles to Telepictures. Next arrived former View producer Roni Selig, who also didn’t work out. The duties of overseeing the show finally fell to Rosie’s longtime manager Bernie Young, a former police detective. That’s how tough you had to be to keep Rosie protected. “It just came down to one day, she said, ‘Look, man, you take the job,’” Young said.
If an employee met Rosie’s standards, she could be a selfless and giving boss. Rosie told St. Onge that she stressed her out as an assistant, but Rosie eventually let her audition as a writer, where she thrived. To accommodate her mostly female staff, Rosie built a full day-care center in the corner of her studio, so that parents could bring their kids (age one and older) to work as she did with Parker. The babysitting services were free of charge. When St. Onge couldn’t find her son there one morning, she was told he’d gone to the stage to watch Destiny’s Child rehearse. “Tell your mom what I told you how to say,” one of the singers said. St. Onge’s son responded with glee, “Beyoncé is my fiancée!” Hugh Jackman stopped by to play blocks with the kids. “I think everyone wanted to see it because it was such a curiosity and so unheard of,” St. Onge said.
The list of celebrities who needed Rosie to promote their latest projects never diminished. Rosie got in early on the careers of Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Ricky Martin, and Justin Timberlake. They appeared alongside Hollywood titans such as Cher, Madonna, Julia Roberts, and Tom Cruise, whose arrival was marked by a cardboard countdown clock as the day approached. But nothing compared to her ultimate interview.
On November 21, 1997, Barbra Streisand received a whole hour on The Rosie O’Donnell Show, more time than Hillary Clinton. Rosie wanted to air the interview without any commercials, but Telepictures wouldn’t allow it; they needed to pay the bills. Rosie burst into tears the moment Streisand walked onstage, saying that she felt as if her mother had come back to life. “I’m always wary about doing an interview with someone who is a big fan of mine because I don’t want to disappoint them,” Streisand told me. “I don’t want the reality to step in, like, ‘Am I a real person? I’m not twenty feet high and on a movie screen.’” Streisand was charmed by Rosie. “She’s adorable.”
Streisand likes to be shot from the left side of her face, so Rosie flipped her entire set so that Barbra would be seen from her best angle. Rosie even did it a few weeks early, to hide the true motive behind the redesign. Streisand admitted it years later: “She changed the chair to give me my good side.”
“Listen to me,” O’Donnell said, la
ughing. “I would do anything for her. She wanted it, and she wanted it covered up so you didn’t know she was vain. I was, like, ‘Done and done.’ What else?” Rosie told me a story about how she caught Streisand’s appearance on Ellen in 2017. Rosie was aghast that her hero had been relegated to the second guest spot, behind the actress Sofia Vergara. “I will never talk to Ellen again,” Rosie said. “Such disrespect.” She sent a message to Andy Lassner, DeGeneres’s executive producer, who had worked on Rosie’s talk show. The email read, Go to hell.
* * *
Every interaction with Rosie O’Donnell is a high-wire experience. When I first met her in 2006, she offered me a tour of her movie-star house on the Hudson River. She was especially proud of her kids’ adjoining bathrooms, reminiscent of The Brady Bunch, and she didn’t fuss with dressing up for a photo shoot. She cracked open a cupboard of snacks as she speculated about a celebrity guest that Rosie thought had come late for an appearance on live TV because she was on drugs. (Her wife at the time, Kelli, who was listening in from a nearby room, interrupted, “This is off-the-record, right?”)
In 2007, Rosie attended a book signing at a Borders in Manhattan, and she electrified a crowd of housewives from New Jersey and Long Island. In 2009, over a phone call, she seemed touched when I told her I used to do my algebra homework in front of her show in high school. She asked me where I went to college. “You must be supersmart,” she said. “What did you get on your SATs?” In 2014, we met at a restaurant on the Upper East Side, where she seemed hopeful about a number of things related to The View. When I saw her a few weeks later, she’d already changed her mind about everything she’d said.
In the spring of 2018, after months of sending me emails written in haiku about how she couldn’t meet me, she agreed to a lunch. She arrived wearing a baggy hoodie from the musical Hamilton, offering me so much information in the first two minutes, I had to race to turn on my tape recorder. Even as she spoke freely, she was worried because of what happened to Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon after the scandalous tell-all Fire and Fury hit the internet. “I don’t lie,” she said. “So I’m going to tell you too much and it’s going to be bad for me in the end.”
Her stories were packed with kaleidoscopic asides that overtook her original points. She was candid and raw, especially when she talked about her crippling depression: “I was watching Homeland last night, and I was, like, ‘I wish I had bipolar.’ It’s so much more treatable with medication. It’s so much more receptive to serotonin and dopamine. It’s so much better than when you’re just depressed and your body basically shuts down. It’s like you’re under the water and you can’t find your way to the surface.”
In 1999, at the height of her talk show fame, Rosie had a breakdown. She traced the cause to the Columbine High School massacre that took the lives of twelve students and one teacher. “I went on medication, antidepressants,” Rosie recalled. “I had always had depression, but I did the Irish thing of having some beers and put your boots on, girl. And then I fell through the ice. I was finally famous and powerful, and in my world that came with a magic wand for justice. I was going to cure a lot of diseases. I was going to call all the famous billionaire women; we were going to form the Justice League of Women. We were going to go around like Emily’s List on steroids and fix these social ills. That’s what I thought came with fame.”
She understood that this notion about fame, which she’d carried with her since childhood, was an illusion. “When I realized I could do nothing about children being murdered in school and their bloody bodies flip-flopping out of the second floor, I had some sort of break. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t stop crying. I had dreams that there were people in my house. I woke up every twenty minutes. I was a mess. In hindsight, I probably should have been hospitalized.”
She went to see a psychopharmacologist, who prescribed her the antidepressant Effexor. “I said, ‘How long am I going to take this?’ She said, ‘The rest of your life.’ I said, ‘That seems harsh.’”
Rosie struggled to pretend to be happy on TV each day. She finally erupted on May 19, 1999, during an interview with Tom Selleck that turned into a discussion about the National Rifle Association. He was there to promote his movie, the romantic comedy The Love Letter, and she tried to ask him about gun control.
“You can’t say that guns don’t bear a responsibility,” Rosie said, in a debate that still feels relevant twenty years later. She wanted to know why the NRA supported assault rifles. “This is a gun that can shoot five bullets in a second.”
“I can’t speak for the NRA,” Selleck huffed.
“But you’re a spokesperson, Tom. You have to be responsible for what they say.”
“Now you’re questioning my humanity.”
Rosie’s confrontation turned into breaking news, a window into an activist persona that later defined her on The View. “There were personal attacks on me and my family,” Rosie said about the NRA. “They are a terrifying group, and they know how to shut people up.”
As her talk show entered its later seasons, Rosie tried to stretch in different directions. She was less interested in celebrities and more focused on how to make a difference. She invented the segments Super Kids, in which she spotlighted young people from disadvantaged backgrounds; Chub Club (weight loss); and one on adoption. Feeling burnt out, she told her producers that she spoke with Oprah, and the two had decided to merge their talk shows, so they could each take half a year off. The idea never came to fruition because The Oprah Winfrey Show was owned by Harpo, a different production company.
In 2000, Rosie proudly endorsed Al Gore on TV, despite her promise to Telepictures not to get wrapped up in politics. The week of the election, she intervened on behalf of Streisand, who got into a dispute with Barbara Walters. “I went on her show the Friday before the election,” Streisand said of a conversation that aired on 20/20. “I remember saying, ‘There are three reasons to vote for Al Gore. One, the Supreme Court. Two, the Supreme Court. Three, the Supreme Court.’ And when I saw it on television, I was so deeply disappointed because it was edited.” Walters blamed ABC for the cuts. “She said, ‘Channel Seven made her do it,’” Streisand recalled. To help, Rosie aired a political PSA that Streisand had created. When the network tried to stop her, Rosie put her career on the line, threatening to not sign her contract extension and to end her show.
She’d stay only two more years. Paratore kept offering her more money, but Rosie knew that six seasons was all she had in her. She wanted to retire and take the spotlight away from her kids. “When I left my show, I had enough money that I never had to work again my entire life. I don’t look at the money. I don’t know how much I get paid,” she said, referring to her acting roles.
The final curtain on Rosie’s talk show would come down in the summer of 2002. In March, as her days on daytime were dwindling, Rosie came out of the closet to protest a law in Florida that banned adoption by gay couples. She gave the interview to Diane Sawyer, choosing her over another eager colleague. “Barbara is a legend and that can never be taken away from her,” Rosie said. “But she’s older than Diane.” Barbara, never one to tolerate losing a scoop, revealed on The View on February 14 that she’d always known Rosie was gay and that she supported Rosie. Since Sawyer’s prime-time special wouldn’t air for another month, Barbara managed to insert herself in the story.
To replace Rosie, the producers at Telepictures looked everywhere, hoping that her program could continue with a new host the way that The Tonight Show had. On the short list was Joy Behar, who had subbed for a couple of days when Rosie had been sick. But Joy declined the offer, and the comedian Caroline Rhea took a shot at it. She was canceled after one season because “she didn’t connect in the same way,” McLoughlin said.
Looking back, Joy wished that she had made a different decision: “When Rosie O’Donnell left her show, Hilary wanted me to take over. I said, ‘I’m on The View. I’ve got a steady gig. I don’t know i
f I feel like bothering with that.’ And I didn’t do it. I regret it. I wish I had jumped in. I think I would have done a pretty good job.”
12
All Aboard!
After a blissful four years of soaking in the Miami sun and spending time with her kids, Rosie O’Donnell isn’t sure why she agreed to return to daytime TV. “The View was a laughable program,” Rosie told me. “They had no respect and no one thought anything about it.” As evidence, she pointed to a never-released documentary she made about producing the Broadway musical Taboo, with Boy George. It was filmed in the days after she exited her talk show. “There’s a part,” Rosie said, “where someone says, ‘Cut to you in ten years. Where will you be?’ I go, ‘Probably a host on the fucking View. Can you imagine that!’ Guess what? I have it on tape from 2002.”
Like the other women that came before her, Rosie was sold on The View strictly because of Barbara. But Rosie became the first A-list cohost to board the daytime talk show. Rosie didn’t need money or fame; she had both in abundance. She was after something else. She saw Barbara as a mother figure, which is how she pictured every older female celebrity—from Bette Midler to Joni Mitchell to Florence Henderson—whom Rosie remembered from her childhood.
Barbara needed help, so Rosie switched into martyr mode. She couldn’t say no: “I loved her and I wanted to work with her. I never, ever, thought for a moment that Barbara Walters didn’t love me. But sometimes my big love overwhelms people.”
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