Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  She didn’t quite get a question out before Rosie hurled one back to her. “Would you say, Elisabeth, that you trust the Bush administration as much as you did when he first took office?”

  Elisabeth, sounding wobbly, answered that she did.

  “Nearly everyone in this administration is under indictment or suspicious.” Rosie listed off Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzales. “What do you have to do to get impeached in this country?”

  Joy had reliable material teed up. “What you have to do is you have to have Monica Lewinsky come into your office.”

  Harden, the Oscar-winning star of Pollock, objected to the use of the phrase war on terror, dismissing it as propaganda.

  “Exactly, Marcia Gay, thank you!” Rosie cheered. “It makes people into evil and good.” Then she went one step too far. “What I’m saying is, in America, we are fed propaganda. And if you want to know what’s happening in the world, go outside of the US media, because it’s owned by four corporations. One of them is this one.” Rosie didn’t mention Disney by name, but she was clearly calling out her employer. “And you know what? Go outside of the country to find out what’s going on in our own country, because it’s frightening.”

  “You think we’re brainwashed as a whole country?” Elisabeth said. “I think not.”

  “I think our democracy is threatened in a way it hasn’t been in two hundred years,” Rosie preached. “If America doesn’t stand up, we’re in big trouble.” She questioned how a tower from the World Trade Center collapsed because, she argued, such a fire couldn’t melt steel. “We’re going to take a break and we’ll be right back in America, land of the free, home of the brave, peace out.”

  Just like that, even though she hadn’t realized it, Rosie had talked herself off The View. And it wasn’t, surprisingly, because she had just declared that 9/11 was an inside job.

  * * *

  In the first seven months of Rosie’s tenure, Frons had made it his full-time job to defend her. After the Clay Aiken spat, he told colleagues he understood where she was coming from. “Obviously, as a gay woman, she was very concerned about gay rights,” Frons said. “So even though Kelly Ripa felt insulted and she was on a sister show, I back my star. It was coming from a place that was real and caring.” Frons also stood up for Rosie during the Trump implosion. “She felt strongly that women needed to be respected, and she felt that whole thing with Miss USA was disrespectful to women in general. Within the context of the show, that works for me. Not a problem.

  “The hard one was when I was vacationing in Costa Rica with my family. And after a three-hour hike in the rain forest, I came back to my little hotel that didn’t have a phone in the room and someone came up to me and said, ‘Mr. Frons, Ms. Sweeney called for you.’”

  He dialed her back immediately. “What did she say this time?” he asked with a sigh.

  It was a quick moment that could have been lost to the average viewer. But not for ABC—the network’s entire chain of executives were humiliated that Rosie had instructed the American public to not trust its news division. Frons frantically called Rosie from Central America to figure out how to fix this mess. She was adamant that the media couldn’t be believed (a jarring argument a decade before Trump adopted it as part of his presidential platform). Although Frons convinced her to apologize, the damage had been done. “That was a passionate moment that cost her tens of millions of dollars,” Frons said.

  It had to do with the nature of the TV business. “People don’t understand the economics of local TV,” Frons said. “There are only two things that you give a shit about. Your money is coming from local news at six p.m. and local news at eleven p.m. So if somebody comes on your network and says, ‘You can’t trust the news on this channel,’ you have a problem.” For decades, ABC had cultivated a stalwart image as the trustworthy destination for news, through programs such as World News Tonight, 20/20, GMA, and Oprah’s syndicated talk show, which many viewers lumped in that category. “That’s basically like walking into a Wolfgang Puck restaurant and saying, ‘This food is made of body parts,’” Frons said. “It’s really crazy. She didn’t think about corporations or local TV stations in a personal sense. There are people who run these things. The largest employee base at ABC is probably the news department.”

  The local affiliates revolted. They didn’t want to shell out money to program Rosie as a lead-in to the evening news. “The phones lit up, particularly from the Southeast of the country, and they said, ‘We’re not buying that show,’” Frons said. The idea of a stand-alone Rosie talk show was no longer an option. As for The View, ABC decided Barbara was right, and that Rosie was too much trouble. They told her they couldn’t meet her $5 million salary requirement, which was the easy way out.

  Rosie was confused. She told someone at The View that she thought her negotiations had been going well. She never realized the true reason the network turned against her. “They didn’t give me enough money,” Rosie explained to me. “They said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘I’m going to go.’”

  Barbara was thrilled by the latest turn of events, since it meant that she’d finally regain the control over The View. It was also a relief for half the staff, including Geddie and Gentile, whose jobs would be saved. On April 25, Rosie officially announced that she’d soon be departing the show.

  “Okay,” she said, after reminding everyone that it was the day after Streisand’s birthday. “Big news. Breaking news. Did you hear it’s on CNN as breaking news?”

  “I heard,” said Barbara stoically, dressed in black, suppressing any trace of a smile. “I know a little bit about it.”

  “I’ve decided that we couldn’t come to terms with my deal with ABC,” Rosie blurted out. “So next year, I’m not going to be on The View.… That’s showbiz. But it’s not sad, because I’ve loved it here.”

  “My turn.” Barbara dialed up her acting chops. “You keep saying don’t be sad, we should all be happy. And I am sad. I induced you to come here. I knew you were only coming for one year. I hoped that it would be more than one year. We have had, to say the least, an interesting year.”

  As the other cohosts offered their farewells, Barbara had another addendum. “I would like to make one thing perfectly clear. I do not participate in the negotiations for Rosie. It is ABC Daytime.” Barbara didn’t want any blood on her hands.

  “I’ll tell you who’s sad,” Joy quipped. “Donald Trump. He’s on a ledge right now. How am I going to resuscitate The Apprentice now?”

  Rosie reminded viewers why she signed on to The View in the first place. “I was at home. I thought, ‘A year with Barbara Walters. Who could resist that?’ Honestly, you’re a living legend.”

  “You know”—Barbara finally allowed herself to crack a smile—“it’s better being a living legend than a dead legend.”

  * * *

  Rosie’s last day would be in late June, per her contract. The morning that she revealed she was leaving, sixty-five camera crews camped outside The View’s loading dock, trying to capture a glimpse of Rosie in her car. She was a media sensation, the Paris Hilton of daytime. Her departure dominated all the cable news programs, from CNN to late-night TV to Bill O’Reilly. The next day, Joy counted off some of the mentions, noting there wasn’t an hour of TV that didn’t include a shout-out to Rosie.

  Guess who else weighed in? Donald Trump went on another media tour to declare victory against his nemesis. “It does say something that the guy is a businessman and this is what he does with his free time,” Rosie cracked. “He’s got an interesting, new hair color. Jell-O orange! I think it’s kind of comical, all the men yelling at all the women—as usual.”

  A few days later, Frons ran into Iger at a screening room at ABC, where they were both watching shows for pilot season.

  “You should fire her for what she said,” the CEO of the Walt Disney Company hissed.

  Frons knew he had to push back. “If we do that now, she’s going to come after us about freedom of speec
h. What is The View about?” He suggested that Rosie would try to tear down the show and inflict damage on Barbara. “If we throw her out,” he recalled saying, “it’s going to be really bad for us. We will have cornered somebody. And she’s not somebody you want to corner.

  “But if one more thing happens, and it’s her fault, that will be the end of it,” Frons promised.

  It was only a matter of time.

  15

  My Mouth Is a Weapon

  In her final weeks on The View, Rosie O’Donnell’s interactions with Elisabeth Hasselbeck grew more and more contentious, which is the narrative that most viewers remember about the two women. But Rosie genuinely cared about Elisabeth. She saw the show’s Republican as a pet project, someone that needed mentoring. “I loved her,” Rosie said. “Here’s what I said, ‘I’m the senior. She’s the freshman. I got a really good player on the freshman team, but I have to teach her how to loosen up.’” One of Rosie’s favorite instructions: “Nobody wants facts, Elisabeth. Everybody wants feelings.’”

  Elisabeth tried to incorporate some of that advice, but she’d revert to her old ways. Rosie didn’t like how Elisabeth would shift into Fox News mode to defend George W. Bush’s policies as a pro-war, anti-abortion Republican. Rosie ran up against the same problem with Elisabeth some of her cohosts had. “Bill Geddie spent thirty minutes coaching her in her dressing room daily,” Rosie said. As she offered this morsel of information, she picked up my tape recorder and moved it closer to her mouth. “I don’t know if you got that part,” Rosie said sarcastically, speaking louder. “She would sometimes take those notes to the table.”

  Rosie criticized Elisabeth for lacking a personal connection to her arguments. “I tried to get her to talk more about her own self and how she felt rather than being a robotic pundit. Our show is not a show like Crossfire. It’s about four women expressing their feelings about their lives and what’s going on in the world. You have to have access to your own feelings, not just reiterate lines you heard spoken somewhere else.”

  When it became clear that Elisabeth didn’t want to be molded by Rosie, their friendship was irreparably damaged. It became a ticking time bomb for the show. Rosie and Elisabeth traded daily blows during the show’s Hot Topics debates. On the surface, it was always about politics—and in spring 2007, there was plenty to argue about. But the subtext behind these clashes was that Rosie felt betrayed by Elisabeth, who’d cooled on Rosie. As Elisabeth had learned from Survivor, she saw that it was time to defect to her original alliance. After Rosie announced that she was leaving, the power dynamic tilted back to Barbara Walters, who was smart enough to keep a safe distance. She decided to skip out on many of Rosie’s last shows, leaving Elisabeth alone to defend the turf.

  Their exchanges felt increasingly awkward. For example, in the middle of April, Rosie posted on her blog a question from a fan, who asked if Elisabeth was pregnant. Rosie said she had no idea, which only stoked rumors on the internet. On April 30, 2007, Elisabeth relented and confirmed that she was three months pregnant with her second child. “I figured we’re going to be lonely without you,” she said on air, looking at Rosie. “So, Tim and I thought we should get busy and maybe make a little cohost.”

  Barbara was overjoyed that the baby was due in November, in time for sweeps. The show would need a boost after losing their buzz magnet. Even on her way out, Rosie was still a one-woman publicity machine. She censored herself even less than before, and she turned Hot Topics into a rage session about Bush, finding new and inventive ways to attack his motives for invading Iraq. (To Rosie, Bush’s villainy was second only to one other man’s. At a charity dinner at the Waldorf Astoria, she slammed Trump: “Eat me! It was always my dream to give an old, bald billionaire a boner.”)

  “You have somebody who has senioritis,” said Brian Frons about Rosie’s behavior on the way out. “Remember being in high school? It’s May. I’m done in mid-June. I’m ready to go.” He noticed a change in the intensity of Rosie and Elisabeth’s squabbles. “They’d had enough of each other.”

  There was another complication. Joy was right when she speculated that Rosie had romantic feelings for Elisabeth. “I think there was underlying lesbian overtones on both parts,” Rosie claimed, as she described her chemistry with Elisabeth. Rosie backed up this idea with some dubious evidence: “I think this is something that will hurt her if you write it. She was the MVP of a Division One softball team”—at Boston College—“for two years that won the finals. There are not many, in my life, girls with such athletic talent on sports teams that are traditionally male that aren’t at least a little bit gay.”

  Although she was attracted to Elisabeth, Rosie never wanted to act on it. “There was a little bit of a crush. But not that I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to support, raise, elevate her, like she was the freshman star shortstop and I was the captain of the team.” Rosie changed sports metaphors from baseball to basketball. “I was going to Scottie Pippen her. If I was Jordan, I was going to give her the ball and let her shoot. But it was in no way sexualized.”

  Rosie explained that intimacy came hard for her given her difficult childhood. “I was sexually abused by my father. I am not a person who has sex for fun. I have to know you. I have to love you. I have to work through a meditation to get to a place where I’m able. I’ve had sex with eight people in my life.”

  She tried to fix their problematic relationship. On May 1, after a nasty fight about whether oil propelled us into Iraq, Rosie took to her blog: u have seen my last hasselbeck spat. 2 day was it no more. She didn’t want to wage any more attacks on a pregnant mother. That wasn’t a promise she could keep. On May 17, Rosie and Elisabeth circled back to the Middle East. Instead of actually debating, they took a combative route, firing off questions to trip each other up.

  “I just want to say something—655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead,” Rosie said. “Who are the terrorists?”

  Elisabeth looked stunned, and she dug in the knife. “Wait, who are you calling terrorists now? Americans?”

  “I’m saying that if you were in Iraq, and another country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?”

  Fox News reported that Rosie had branded US troops “terrorists,” which stung because she had visited veteran hospitals and donated to them. Even blue-state MSNBC attacked her, with guests on a panel on Chris Matthews’s Hardball blaming Rosie for making that claim.

  Rather than tune out the coverage, Rosie let it get to her. She wanted Elisabeth, as her onetime ally and friend, to stand up against the right-wing media. But Elisabeth had no reason to do that. On May 21, she urged Rosie in the morning meeting to explain what she had meant. But Elisabeth wouldn’t defend her on TV, which was the final straw in their friendship.

  David Tutera, the wedding planner once banished from The View because of Star Jones, stopped by that week for a lifestyle piece. “I think it’s the most uncomfortable segment I’ve ever done on television,” Tutera said. “When the cameras were on, you can’t tell. When they were off, you felt like something bad was going to happen, that horrible energy.” He noticed the two cohosts weren’t making eye contact. “Rosie is just a cannonball.”

  Rosie provided a similar description of herself: “It’s almost like chaos kicks me into a gear. In a way, my mouth is a weapon. I, for a living, am a wordsmith. And so, I’m heavily armed. When I’m angry, I can…” She imitated the sound of pellets firing from an air rifle. “Most people can’t do it that fast.”

  * * *

  On May 23, that anger finally exploded, in what will forever be remembered as doomsday on The View. In its decade of existence, the show had been responsible for its share of feuds. But nothing in daytime TV history could have prepared viewers for this breaking point. Although Rosie had once sworn that she would never replicate Jerry Springer, she was about to give that show a run for its money. “They became very personal on air,” Joy Behar told me. “T
hat’s the thing you try to avoid on television. I don’t get personal. I never had a personal fight with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, and that’s why we’re fine.”

  Barbara was absent that morning. “I remember we were downstairs in the makeup room,” said the comedian Sherri Shepherd, who was filling in as a guest cohost. As Elisabeth talked, Rosie made sarcastic asides to no one in particular—the tension was building. “I got makeup and hair,” Sherri said. “I’m a Pentecostal girl. I said to them, ‘Do you speak in tongues, because we need to start praying. I don’t know what is going on here!’ When we got to the table upstairs, nobody was talking. I could see Rosie is mad.”

  On TV, Rosie kept her feelings in check for a few minutes. After a commercial, Joy pulled out a page of complaints against Bush, whom she called “the worst president that we’ve ever had in the history of this country.” Elisabeth frowned. “Let me get through the list,” Joy said.

  “It’s very long, so we might be here for a while,” Elisabeth huffed.

  Rosie stayed on the sidelines at first. Joy objected to a number of infractions from Bush, including his reluctance to visit New Orleans right after Hurricane Katrina and his inability to pronounce the word nuclear correctly. Elisabeth tried to shut down the discussion. “We’re a democratic society,” she said. “You have the election in 2008 to change things.”

  “Do you know how much damage this guy can do in a year and a half?” Joy said, incredulous. “He can invade Iran for all we know.” Elisabeth insisted that the Republicans in Congress backed Bush for not pulling out of Iraq because it would send the wrong signal to our “enemies.”

  That gave Rosie an entrance. “You just said our enemies in Iraq. Did Iraq attack us?”

  “No, Iraq did not attack us, Rosie,” Elisabeth said. “We’ve been there before. I’m saying our enemies, al-Qaeda, are you hearing that?”