Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  “Two words: dancing food,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Mary McNamara. “Rosie Live ended with dancing food. There’s nothing else to say, really except perhaps, Liza Minnelli. Rosie Live opened with a little song and dance from Liza Minnelli, who rose to the stage, as if from the grave, to sing a duet with O’Donnell, in a luminous white suit, complete with fetching Broadway hat. Liza, we love you, we will always love you, but there is no shame in retirement.”

  While promoting Rosie Live in its lead-up, Rosie couldn’t resist taking a few more jabs at The View. She told reporters that the ladies weren’t friends in real life. Barbara had to respond cryptically on TV: “There are some people who have done this show and then for years feel they have to dump on it maybe for their own publicity. And that not only hurts me, but I resent it.”

  On her blog, Rosie posted a video of herself watching the clip. She let a webcam focus on her face. “I did not know what Star Jones and Debbie Matenopoulos did. But, lady, she is pissed off!”

  Rosie continued to stir up trouble during an interview with Conan O’Brien. “Listen, I don’t want to dump on the show in order to benefit my own career,” she said, with a deadpan delivery. “Because, I didn’t have a career before that show. So I’m very thankful to The View for the help that it’s given me in my life. And I’m a big fan of the program and the producers.”

  “That’s the scariest smile I’ve ever seen since Jack Nicholson in The Shining,” O’Brien said.

  She didn’t reveal it, but Rosie was hurt that the show had moved on without her. “I felt like Lord Voldemort, whose name shall not be spoken,” she told me. “Even when there were photos sometimes, they would crop me out.”

  * * *

  Since she could work only when she wanted to, Rosie returned to semiretirement. She spent her time listening to TED Talks, painting in her crafts room, and taking long vacations to Miami. Her wife, Kelli, moved out in 2007 and they separated. Rosie also broke up with her blog. “At the beginning, no one knew what a blog was and I took that art form,” she told me. “It was a discovery for myself. After a while, it sort of defeated the purpose. The media has changed a lot. I had to hear about myself on Entertainment Tonight.”

  Despite her having been a movie star in the nineties, the acting offers dried up after she’d become a famous talk show host. “People have a definite opinion of you either way,” she explained. “It’s hard to get lost in a character in a movie. You almost stick out.” She had a drawer of scripts that she’d written in binge sessions. In 2009, she starred in a Lifetime Movie based on one of them, called America, in which she played the psychiatrist of a teenage boy in foster care.

  In an interview around that time, she told me that she had tried her hand at directing—her son Parker’s school play. She couldn’t do another one because the next year they staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I’m Shakespeare illiterate,” Rosie said. “I could not get it. And then I got the CliffsNotes. That didn’t help.”

  Then, she also dreamed of starring as Miss Hannigan in a Broadway revival of Annie. “I would do it in five seconds. I already know the whole thing.” She belted out a favorite line from “It’s the Hard-Knock Life” to me over the phone: You’ll stay up till this dump shines like the top of the Chrysler Building!

  Rosie wanted another shot at a talk show. In 2011, she was negotiating with NBC (again), this time about the possibility of returning to daytime with her own show. That’s when she got a visit from another member of TV’s royal family: Oprah Winfrey. They may not have been able to share airtime before, but they were in different places now that made a collaboration possible. Oprah was leaving The Oprah Winfrey Show to launch the Oprah Winfrey Network. She needed strong, inspirational programming for women, and she wanted to bring Rosie on board as one of her stars.

  Rosie decided to back away from the NBC offer because she loved Oprah so much. “I wanted to be on Oprah’s team,” Rosie told me. She signed a two-year, multimillion-dollar deal to host The Rosie Show. Oprah was hoping to transfer some of Rosie’s View buzz and viewers to her new network.

  Unlike the variety show, The Rosie Show premiered on October 10, 2011, to good reviews. She recycled some of her favorite tricks, including fun celebrity interviews with the likes of Russell Brand and Valerie Harper, along with more musical ditties and games with the audience. But the show’s ratings quickly fizzled, averaging only 186,000 viewers.

  It was one thing to be a successful talk show host. It was another to be putting on a show for almost nobody. The pressure got to Rosie. She started spinning in many directions. She wondered if she needed to be more political or focus more on serious guests.

  Rosie picked fights with Oprah’s longtime director Joe Terry, because he couldn’t get the shots that she wanted. She made the job of her bandleader, Katreese Barnes, strenuous by calling out impromptu on live TV for songs to be played. “I’m not upset that I don’t know ‘Into the Woods’ by heart,” Barnes told me in an interview for The Daily Beast. “A little heads-up would have been nice.”

  The blame for The Rosie Show didn’t fall solely on its host. She arrived at OWN shortly after the launch of the network. Rosie was slotted for 7:00 p.m. nightly, when most of her cultivated audience was sitting down for dinner with their families. Outside of that, it was hard to find the show on most TV dials. Oprah had asked Rosie to relocate to Chicago, to tape in the old studio from The Oprah Winfrey Show so they wouldn’t have to fire stagehands and crew at Harpo. But that proved to be a bad fit. Rosie was a native New Yorker. In the Windy City, she looked homesick.

  “She was surrounded by people she didn’t know,” said Janette Barber. “They were putting her in positions as producers that weren’t working. Honestly, Rosie needs to sit. Did you ever notice that when she stands, her hands become an issue in a monologue? So don’t float her out there. If you make her comfortable, the genius is going to come out.”

  After Christmas, Rosie moved to a smaller studio and got rid of her audience. But the writing was on the wall. The Rosie Show was canceled by Oprah in March 2012 after six months of dismal ratings. “I wish I could have done a little better for her,” Rosie said. “It was a little disorganized.”

  By then, The View had totally moved on. “Rosie thought she was coming in to save us,” Bill Geddie said. “You can’t change this successful show. The person who got that was Whoopi. She always got that she worked for us. She was the custodian of a franchise that existed successfully long before her.” Geddie shook his head. “Rosie never got that.”

  Part Three

  Whoopi’s View

  17

  Sister Act

  Why would Whoopi Goldberg want to downgrade to television? Barbara Walters couldn’t process this career U-turn. Here was the Oscar-winning star of Ghost and Sister Act taking up residence as the center square in a neon tic-tac-toe board for a reboot of Hollywood Squares. It was February 15, 1999, and Whoopi was a guest cohost on The View to promote her new game show. Most movie stars were still wary of spending a full hour at the Hot Topics table for fear of being seen as auditioning for Debbie Matenopoulos’s seat, but Whoopi wasn’t so precious about her image. Besides, she was proud to be producing Hollywood Squares, and she wanted to tell viewers about it.

  Dressed in black from head to toe, with a pair of shades that dangled over her nose, like a true nineties celebrity, Whoopi rolled with the irreverent mix of news and girl talk. Since it was Presidents’ Day, Meredith Vieira started with an obscene joke about Whoopi being a frequent visitor to the Oval Office, “but never on her knees.”

  That made Whoopi laugh. “I anticipated getting subpoenaed, but it never happened.” She admitted that she refused to sleep over at the White House in case anything cataclysmic happened.

  After a commercial break, the rest of the ladies cleared the stage so Barbara could conduct a one-on-one interview. Whoopi was prepping for her third lap as the host of the Academy Awards, and in a few weeks roughly 46 million viewers would t
une in to watch her royal entrance as Queen Elizabeth I, decked out in a corset and a wig to the delight of everybody in the room (especially Meryl Streep). Whoopi only agreed to the notoriously difficult assignment after Oscars producer Gil Cates played up what it would mean to have a black woman emcee the last telecast of the twentieth century.

  “Is there anything this woman can’t do? She is our national treasure!” Barbara singled out some of Whoopi’s recent accomplishments. “Why did you need Hollywood Squares? You’re a big-time actress!”

  “’Cause it was a good job, more than anything. A lot of good money. But also a little bit of control over what I was doing. You know, I’ve never had any control over movies. I’ve never produced any of my movies. I never got to that place where I could ask for those things.”

  “Why not?”

  “I think because I didn’t realize that was mine for the asking. Now I know. And I love television.”

  Barbara couldn’t resist connecting the dots. Maybe Whoopi could apply to be a View cohost. As soon as Barbara blurted it out, she joked that Whoopi would be too hard to work with. “We feel she’s a little overbearing, too strong.”

  “Everyone says that,” Whoopi said. “Until they get to know me. And then they never come around.”

  Nobody took this exchange seriously because Whoopi was too big for The View in 1999, and the show couldn’t afford her. Born as Caryn Elaine Johnson in 1955, Whoopi (as she renamed herself after the toy cushion) grew up in the New York City projects with a dream of becoming an actress. After a series of odd jobs, she joined an improv theater group in California, which helped her fine-tune her stage presence. In her late twenties, Whoopi traveled with her one-woman sketch show, called The Spook Show, to Europe and then back to New York. Director Mike Nichols, who caught a performance, was so dazzled he took Whoopi under his wing, transporting her to Broadway in October 1984. The director of The Graduate was drawn to her unique talents. “One part Elaine May, one part Groucho, one part Ruth Draper, one part Richard Pryor, and five parts never seen before” is how Nichols described Goldberg to The New York Times. Her show became an HBO special, 1985’s Whoopi Goldberg: Direct from Broadway, where she gained even more exposure.

  That same year, Steven Spielberg cast her as Celie in The Color Purple, which earned her a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Whoopi became the first bankable black female movie star in Hollywood. Her two biggest hits were 1990’s Ghost (where she won an Academy Award for playing a clairvoyant) and 1992’s Sister Act (as a lounge singer who poses as a nun). By the time the 1993 sequel for Sister Act rolled out, the film’s poster didn’t need to spell out her last name. Whoopi had become a six-letter brand with international recognition.

  Whoopi showed the world that female actresses of color could rule the box office, making room for Whitney Houston, Queen Latifah, Halle Berry, Tiffany Haddish, and others to follow. Keeping up with her multidimensional talents, Whoopi attempted a late-night talk show at the peak of her stardom in 1992. As the female counterpart to The Arsenio Hall Show, The Whoopi Goldberg Show lasted for a year, despite her A-list interviews with Joan Rivers, Carol Burnett, and a young Neil Patrick Harris. Compared to Barbara, Whoopi had a less confrontational—and more conversational—interview technique. In one episode, she lamented to Goldie Hawn about the double standard that women faced in Hollywood, where they weren’t applauded for being strong and true to themselves.

  “Unfortunately, it’s confusing to men,” Hawn said, about what happened when she tried to express her opinions to directors. “Suddenly, you’re a bitch.”

  “It is possible to have it all.” Whoopi tried to personify that. She once told me that her pal Elizabeth Taylor taught her an inventive trick. Every time one of her movies opened to big numbers, she’d call up the studio the next Monday and ask for a gift of a classic painting that she’d wanted. This allowed her to amass a fantastic art collection, with pieces by Andy Warhol and Cristina Vergano.

  In Whoopi’s forties, as is the case for most actresses, the starring roles in movies started to diminish. She still kept working, appearing in made-for-TV fairy tales such as ABC’s Cinderella (as Prince Charming’s mother) and NBC’s Alice in Wonderland (the Cheshire Cat). Whoopi wasn’t a prima donna by any stretch, but she had her quirks. When she traveled back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, she took a bus—called “the rolling house,” with a bedroom and two alternating drivers—because she was scared of flying. She put on a lot of miles for Hollywood Squares, which she exited in 2002 when the production company tried to lower her salary.

  In 2004 Whoopi’s career hit another wall because of George W. Bush. Whoopi was performing at a fund-raiser for Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry when she made a cheeky joke: “I love bush. But someone is giving bush a bad name.” Although it might seem tame by today’s standards, the line created hysteria in the press. The next morning, the New York Post reported that she had delivered “an X-rated rant full of sexual innuendos against President Bush.”

  SlimFast dropped Whoopi as their national spokesperson. The Democratic National Convention didn’t invite her to attend Kerry’s speech in Boston. She stopped getting offered movie and TV roles, and she blamed the joke for that. “I never thought living in America, especially as a comic, you could be gotten economically like that,” Whoopi told me later, sitting in the kitchen of her home in New Jersey. “I didn’t work for years.”

  When Meredith left The View, Whoopi’s team approached the show to see if they’d consider her as the new moderator, since she’d been a frequent guest. But Barbara, who was smitten by Rosie, didn’t think she needed Whoopi.

  * * *

  In the summer of 2007, Barbara Walters found herself at a seemingly impossible fork in the road. Without Rosie O’Donnell, her earlier prophecy about The View might come true and the show might not survive with a new cast. To fight off a ratings drop, Barbara decided that she’d need to inject energy by hiring two new cohosts, bringing the number of ladies at the table back up to five. She’d have to leverage everything she and Bill Geddie knew about television to select the right women. But she also didn’t want another loose cannon who’d spar with her endlessly on—and off—television.

  The latest research conducted by the network pointed to trouble. Viewers polled by the strategy firm SmithGeiger responded that they saw Barbara and Elisabeth Hasselbeck in a more negative light as a result of their feuds with Rosie. “We believe Barbara and Elisabeth both remain assets of the show and will rebound quickly, assuming the fighting and controversy of the show are behind us,” read the report, which I was able to look at. The document provided some guidance on hiring the new moderator: “In searching for a new cohost to fill the vacancy left by Rosie, The View should seek out a woman who can provide strength, humor, and a touch of the unexpected, without crossing the line into over-the-top outrageousness, arguing or name calling.”

  In her heart, Barbara wanted the moderator job for herself. There was no reason to worry about The View tarnishing her reputation anymore. And she was at a place in her career, at seventy-seven, when she had more time, because she wasn’t chasing as many breaking news stories. She’d retired from 20/20 in 2004, as the program abandoned long-form journalism for trashier stories. Over the years, Barbara had gladly stepped in as the moderator when either Rosie or Meredith was out. But she had to face a hard truth: The View needed star power, and she couldn’t justifiably take that job. “I thought it had to be a big name and so did Barbara,” Geddie said.

  Barbara once explained to me the conundrum that she had faced: “I felt funny, even though it was my show, saying, ‘Why not me?’ That’s what happens when you wear two hats. When you’re the producer, you say maybe there’s someone better than I am. When you’re me, you say, ‘I’m as good as them!’”

  Barbara and Bill had three names in the running to join The View. They were all black women, which wasn’t a coincidence. The show wanted to speak to this important demographic that watch
ed daytime TV. In time, this casting would be one of the smartest decisions that The View ever made, given the outcome of the 2008 election.

  The first choice to replace Rosie was Whoopi. Not everybody was completely sold on her, though. “The only reservation I had was that Whoopi had done her own show and it had failed,” recalled Brian Frons, who was privy to the decision making. “And there were two other things. One, was she going to bring the energy? Number two, was she going to dive in on the stuff”—such as pop culture and reality TV—“that was maybe less interesting to her given her sophistication and intelligence?”

  The other option was Gayle King. Back then, before taking over as the coanchor of CBS This Morning, she was still known to America as Oprah’s best friend. Some of the producers at The View favored King because they believed she was the most like Meredith. They thought, with her background in news, she could introduce the show’s Hot Topics with the right touch, seamlessly moving from serious to silly stories. Everybody in daytime TV wanted to emulate Oprah. This would be as close as you could get.

  Without making the show’s intentions known to the public, Barbara asked King to audition. On June 20, Barbara introduced her. “We are very happy today to have our colleague and our friend Gayle King with us,” Barbara said. “Gayle is a very busy lady. She is the editor-at-large of O magazine. I love that magazine.”

  Joy couldn’t resist poking around, wondering what King’s job entailed. “We need someone who’s a liaison between Oprah in Chicago and me in New York,” King said, not really explaining her duties. “And that’s what I do.” She then talked about how she wished that O. J. Simpson, who had written a book called If I Did It, would go away, and she defended Hillary Clinton for picking a song by a Canadian—Celine Dion—for her campaign anthem. “If it’s a good song, it doesn’t matter to me,” King said.