Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  “Please, let’s have a conversation,” Joy said.

  “Do you know why I don’t want to do this, Joy?” Rosie’s voice was cold. “Let me tell you why. Here’s how it gets spun in the media: big, fat, lesbian, loud Rosie attacks innocent, pure, Christian Elisabeth, and I’m not doing it.”

  “I haven’t heard that line,” Elisabeth said.

  Suddenly, the debate had changed its direction. They were rehashing the details of their broken friendship in front of millions of viewers. “Every time when you’ve been hurt, did I reach out to you?” Rosie asked.

  “I just don’t understand why it’s my fault if people spin words that you put out there or phrases that suggest things,” Elisabeth said. “I gave you an opportunity two days ago to clarify the statement that got you in trouble. I did it as a friend.”

  That inflamed Rosie. She accused Elisabeth of not siding with her.

  “Excuse me. Let me speak,” Elisabeth said.

  “You’re going to doublespeak.”

  “I’m not a doublespeaker! I don’t believe you believe that our troops are terrorists.” Elisabeth told Rosie that she shouldn’t have used the death toll in Iraq as part of their previous debate.

  “It’s true, you don’t like the facts,” Rosie said, contradicting the advice she often gave Elisabeth.

  “I’m all about facts.”

  Sherri tried to cut to a commercial, but the show still had time left. “They wouldn’t let it go,” Sherri told me later. “It was the worst feeling in the world.”

  In the control room upstairs, director Mark Gentile kept cutting back and forth as in a Ping-Pong match. When Rosie’s mother-in-law had visited the day before, he’d used a split screen so viewers could see her in the audience. Rene Butler, the show’s technical director, quickly suggested following that template as the arguments ratcheted up. Gentile approved it. “I said, ‘That makes sense, because the reaction is as important as the person delivering the information,’” Gentile recalled. “That’s all it was.”

  From the corner of her eye, Rosie saw in the monitor what they had done and she was fuming. She thought the show was sabotaging her for ratings, since The View had never used a split screen in a Hot Topics discussion before. She’d get to the bottom of this, but she had to fend off Elisabeth first.

  “They’re your thoughts,” Elisabeth said, wagging her finger at Rosie. “Defend your own insinuations.”

  “Every time I defend them, it’s poor little Elisabeth that I’m picking on.”

  “You know what? Poor little Elisabeth is not poor little Elisabeth.”

  “That’s right. That’s why I’m not going to fight with you anymore, because it’s absurd. So for three weeks, you can say all the Republican crap that you want.”

  Elisabeth struck another low blow. “It’s much easier to fight someone like Donald Trump, isn’t it? Because he’s obnoxious.”

  Joy and Sherri stood up to leave the table, which drew some laughter in the studio.

  “I think it’s sad,” Elisabeth said, not easing up. “Because I don’t understand how there can be such hurt feelings when all I did was say, ‘Look, why don’t you tell everybody what you said?’ I did that as a friend.”

  “What you did was not defend me,” Rosie said, her voice quivering. “I asked you if you believed what the Republican pundits were saying. You said nothing. And that’s cowardly.”

  “No, no, no,” Hasselbeck replied, furious. “Do not call me a coward. Because, number one, I sit here every single day, open my heart and tell people exactly what I believe. It was not cowardly. It was honest.”

  “Is there no commercial on this show?” Joy said. “What are we on—PBS?”

  The feud lasted for ten minutes, but encapsulated an entire season of TV. “I didn’t enjoy it,” Joy told me. “I thought people were complicit in making it go on and on.” She pointed to staff behind the scenes. “And then the director put up a split screen, which made Rosie very angry.”

  At the commercial, both Rosie and Elisabeth were so riled up, they had to physically back away from the table. Producers followed Elisabeth to make sure that she was okay. “After it ended, I said, ‘Elisabeth, how’s the baby? You’ve got to calm down,’” Sherri recalled. “Then I was with Rosie. She said, ‘I can’t take this. I’m so tired of this.’”

  The tourists in the studio looked frightened. “It was like watching your parents fight,” Sherri said. In the greenroom, the yelling echoed over the guests, who were waiting to join this act on live TV. “Alicia Silverstone was shaking,” said Sherri, about the Clueless star, who was scheduled to chat about how veganism had made her a calmer person. “She was terrified.”

  Rosie returned to her seat and finished the show as if everything had gone back to normal. How did she manage to do that? “Well, I’m a professional,” she said. “I’m an expert at what I do. You want to come to my apartment? There are a lot of awards and accolades.”

  * * *

  Rosie’s altercation with Elisabeth hit a deep nerve for her. “It felt like a lover breaking up,” Rosie said. “The fight that we had, to me as a gay woman, it felt like this: ‘You don’t love me as much as I love you.’ ‘I’ve taken care of you.’ ‘You have not.’ ‘How could you do that to me?’ ‘I didn’t do anything to you.’”

  After the show ended, Rosie yelled at Alexandra (“Dusty”) Cohen, who had been in the control room, about the split screen. “It was shocking to me,” Rosie said. She accused the producer of plotting to take her down. “Dusty called me and said, ‘She’s blaming me for your split screen,’” Gentile said. “Bill called me and said, ‘I know what you did. I know why you did it—just don’t do it again.’ That shows you there was no conspiracy. He had nothing to do with it. It was me.”

  Rosie doesn’t buy that explanation. “I think although Mark Gentile is a good enough director to possibly do a split screen without rehearsal, he didn’t do anything without rehearsal. That man would rehearse like someone with OCD who can’t stop washing his hands. He would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. I don’t believe that was an off-the-cuff shot that just happened to come up.”

  But she declined to provide an explanation for how they had conspired to get her. That day, Rosie grabbed some of her stuff and made her way for the exit.

  As she was leaving, Joy stopped her in the hall. “Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not.” Rosie was in tears. She called her publicist Cindi Berger and told her she never wanted to return to The View again. She was devastated at the way Elisabeth had acted. “Here’s a person who had been in my home, swam in the pool with my kids, who I’d done everything I could to connect with, including taking her to her first Broadway show. I have photos of it. I took her kid to see Sesame Street Live! with my kids. I made an effort. It felt very backstabby.”

  Rosie blamed many other people for letting her down. “It was like a girl fight from high school. And it hurt my feelings. Not just what Elisabeth did. What Mark Gentile did. What Joy Behar did. She brought up the topic and stoked the fire, and they went right to the split screen. She was very good friends with Meredith. I think it was upsetting to Joy that I came in and got all this attention.” But Rosie has no hard feelings about that. “I’ve always loved Joy.”

  After a year of wall-to-wall coverage about Rosie, the fight was the final cliff-hanger. It received more press attention than anything else that had ever happened on The View. “Rosie v. Elisabeth: The Gloves Are Off!” read the Los Angeles Times headline. “The Breakup” is how People described it. Fox News, CNN, the New York Post, and every celebrity blog had their own take, with some outlets referring to it as a “catfight.” “When I left, everybody in the world called me,” Sherri said. “They wanted to know if they could fly me out to talk about it. I said, ‘It’s none of my business. And it would be a disservice, because I didn’t know the behind the scenes.’”

  Donald Trump couldn’t resist another opportunity for free press. Surprisingly, he sided
with Rosie. “I think anybody that’s against the war in Iraq is the winner of the fight, because to justify the war in Iraq—only an imbecile could do that,” he told Extra. But later, after he watched the clip, he reversed his verdict and crowned Elisabeth the winner.

  Geddie went home that night exhausted. “I don’t know why this is the first thing that comes to my mind,” he said. “The thing that I remember was watching stories that evening on the local news. And people were talking about being in the audience like they’d witnessed a mass shooting. It was a horrible experience. I hope I never have to go through anything like that again. I mean, in retrospect, it’s kind of funny. But at the time, I remember thinking we absolutely terrorized the audience that day. They didn’t know where to look and where to turn and couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.”

  * * *

  This battle had one last casualty. Following Rosie’s exit, her writer and friend Janette Barber packed up her office because she knew that she wouldn’t be returning. She spotted a magazine tear sheet of Elisabeth on an employee bulletin board. “I happened to have a Sharpie in my pocket,” Barber said. “As I’m walking by, I drew a mustache on the picture. I figured the other writers who were on the same floor, they would know it was me, and this would be a funny goodbye.”

  The View publicist didn’t appreciate the prank. Someone on the staff slipped a story to the New York Post’s Page Six that Barber had destroyed an entire floor’s worth of artwork featuring pictures of Elisabeth. “Photographs at The View’s offices were defaced,” read a network statement. “ABC Legal and Human Resources are investigating the matter.” They eventually decided that Barber could never enter an ABC building for the rest of her life. “At most, I owe them two dollars and ninety-five cents for a Ladies’ Home Journal,” Barber said.

  Rosie took the next day off to celebrate her wife Kelli’s birthday, and she posted a series of comments on her blog that suggested she was done with The View. Rosie kept complaining about the split screen. Then came the official word. Barbara was all too happy to have Rosie permanently gone from the show. “It was a good enough reason for us to all agree to go our separate ways,” Frons said. “That was the end of it.”

  The next new episode aired on May 29. Just as the show went live, Barbara started to involuntarily cackle from Rosie’s moderator chair. “Why is this woman laughing?” Barbara asked herself, as she couldn’t suppress her glee. “What a nice way to begin the week.”

  “What’s new?” asked Whoopi Goldberg, who was filling in.

  “It’s been quite a week as all of you know,” Barbara said. “It’s a week that makes us in many ways”—she looked down to her notes—“very sad. There was a little contretemps on the air. I think the Iraq War brings out very hot feelings.” She leaned forward. “As most of you know, Rosie O’Donnell is not coming back to finish the last three weeks on the show. Rosie and I have been emailing each other all weekend with the most affectionate notes, because we are very close friends.” Barbara once again relieved herself of any responsibility. “I would like to make it very clear Rosie was never fired.” Barbara offered a glorious forecast for her own longevity. “We’ve been a hot show for ten years. And we are going to be a hot show for many years to come.”

  One pundit had a different reading on the situation. “Rosie will be back,” Trump had said immediately after the fight.

  16

  Rosie Detox

  Rosie O’Donnell had a going-away present for Barbara Walters. In the summer of 2007, as The View tried to move on by hiring two new cohosts, Rosie was putting the final touches on a book. She’d received a $2 million advance for a memoir about her ruminations on fame, which she called Celebrity Detox. She would donate all the proceeds to her charity for Broadway kids.

  Rosie saw this as a cleansing from The View. “They lie for a living,” she told me. “From Lisa Ling to Debbie Matenopoulos, every person who has left that show has been fired—except for me! And it’s like the Trump administration. They will just continually lie and present a false front. They would go on TV and pretend to be friends when bad things were happening. You have to talk about it.”

  The last person who should have seen her latest manifesto was Barbara, who didn’t speak to Rosie anymore and was trying to escape from this messy divorce. Yet an early copy of Celebrity Detox arrived one day in the mail at her offices at ABC News, with a note from Rosie about how much she loved Barbara. Rosie had a funny way of showing it. After Barbara cracked open the pages, she was livid.

  Rosie had kept the contents of Celebrity Detox a secret from most people, including her and Barbara’s publicist, Cindi Berger. The book featured a series of vignettes about Rosie’s time on The View along with passages from an unpublished manuscript, some poetry from her blog, and memories about her childhood. She didn’t burn the house down by writing a juicy tell-all about her daytime cohosts. But one chapter—written as a letter to her brother Eddie—landed like a grenade.

  “It’s a difficult situation, because I got hired to do a job, I came, I did the job, I delivered, but I’m still not accepted here,” Rosie wrote. “I’m never going to be accepted here.” Without mentioning Mark Gentile’s name, she called the show’s director “inconsistent” because of his “murky shots.” She found him to be “tense, tightly wound. Art has to come from someplace quiet.”

  But her sharpest arrows were aimed at Barbara. Rosie wrote that during commercial breaks at The View, fans would yell, “I love you, Rosie.” Barbara, in a “school-teacher tone,” would tell them, “It’s impolite to say ‘I love you’ to one person when there are four of us up here.”

  Rosie had put in writing what nobody at ABC would even dare to whisper in the halls—that Barbara should probably retire. “At some point, a person gets tired,” Rosie wrote. “It’s inevitable, the aging process. I can feel it myself. Barbara Walters is almost twice my age and she’s been doing this for nearly half a century; at some point it becomes necessary to step back.” Rosie implicated Bill Geddie in keeping Barbara on TV. “I would like him to feel her fatigue, be in her bones; I’ll bet it hurts there.”

  Then Rosie offered her own judgment on Barbara’s career: “Maybe it’s time for her to take a break. To go off the air, find the ground, sit down. Rest. She deserves that.”

  Barbara had no intention of going anywhere, and she certainly wasn’t going to take career advice from Rosie. Barbara handed her copy of Celebrity Detox to a publicist at ABC News, with directions to contain the damage. The network’s West Coast daytime management team got involved. ABC secretly leaked Barbara’s edition of Celebrity Detox to the New York Post. The paper could write an article about it under one condition: ABC wanted to cast Rosie as a villain by having psychologists evaluate her mental health after skimming the book.

  On September 16, 2007, the Post ran its story, “In the Mind of Rosie O’Drama,” three weeks ahead of the book’s publication. The lead sentence said it all: “Ranting Rosie O’Donnell is full of rage, has a profound distrust of men, craves public adoration, shows signs of post-traumatic stress disorder and dishes out her anger mostly to women because of deep-seated abandonment issues over her mother’s death, said a psychiatrist after reading her latest memoir, Celebrity Detox.”

  The medical professionals quoted in the piece determined that Rosie was a control freak who couldn’t get along with anybody. For gravy, the Post included a statement from Barbara: “Rosie has written a sad book, but I prefer to focus on the happier times we had and the happier times we hope to have in the future.”

  Rosie never knew that Barbara was behind the hit job.

  * * *

  The press tour for Celebrity Detox seemed to fall apart before it even began. Rosie created a ruckus in early September by ranting about an error on the cover that had the wrong year of her mother’s cancer diagnosis. “This book has been more of a pain in the a** than it was worth,” she blogged. That prompted Access Hollywood to report, “Rosie O’Donnell lashes out
over her own book.”

  Other outlets quickly started picking up the controversial statements. “Rosie O’Donnell has some words of advice for Barbara Walters: Go already,” read a People article from September 11, 2007. After the book finally hit shelves on October 9, critics were confused by its lack of cohesiveness. Entertainment Weekly (which complained that Rosie “nurses a lot of grudges”) graded it D.

  While doing press, Rosie let it slip that she was in negotiations to return to TV. Given her success tackling political subjects on The View, MSNBC wanted to give her a nightly talk show that would air at 9:00 p.m., the time slot after its biggest star, Keith Olbermann. At the time, I was at 30 Rockefeller Center taping a TV appearance, and I overheard Olbermann talking while in a makeup chair about how the Rosie contract was a done deal. A few days later, I approached Rosie, who was signing copies of Celebrity Detox at a Borders bookstore in Manhattan’s Time Warner Center. She told me she was definitely going to MSNBC. “It’s happening very soon,” she promised. “I’m following Keith.”

  At the last minute, the network got cold feet and never took her on. By blabbing about it too early, she spooked them. (View producers had a theory that Barbara had a hand in sabotaging it, by dissing her to MSNBC executives.)

  “I’m glad I didn’t do it,” Rosie told me a few years later, because she was a fan of the person who eventually took over the hour. “Watching Rachel Maddow to me is like taking a class at Harvard. She’s so freaking smart that, half the time, I have to watch it twice to understand the totality of what she’s saying.”

  With no offer for a daytime or nighttime show, Rosie’s agent threw her hat in the ring for other opportunities. She had volunteered to replace Bob Barker on The Price Is Right, but talks stalled because CBS didn’t want to move the show from Los Angeles to New York. In November 2008, she starred in a one-off variety show, Rosie Live, which aired on NBC on the night before Thanksgiving. She’d recruited her pals Alec Baldwin, Clay Aiken, Harry Connick Jr., and Alanis Morissette to perform skits and songs. But it was a ratings turkey, with only 5.25 million viewers.