Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  The following day, on June 21, King returned without Barbara, to give the moderator seat a test run. “I have to tell you I’m such a news junkie,” King said, as she transitioned to a story about an engaged couple that planned on returning all their wedding gifts. “I’m so fascinated by things in the news.”

  The research indicated the audience preferred Whoopi. She was more popular than all the other cohosts on the show, too. When asked to rate Whoopi’s favorability on a scale from 1 to 10, 64 percent of respondents gave her a score of an 8 or higher, according to internal documents. That was better than Barbara and Joy, who were both at 53 percent. King stood at 51 percent. Elisabeth came in dead last at only 36 percent, down from 42 percent before Rosie had joined the show.

  Ultimately, it had to be a gut call since the research couldn’t actually predict who would save The View. Barbara, Geddie, and producer Alexandra Cohen all decided to put the new moderator to a vote. Cohen picked Gayle. Geddie wanted Whoopi. “And I guess I had the deciding vote,” Barbara told me. “Although I think Gayle would have been wonderful, I thought Whoopi hasn’t been seen for a while, and she’s funny. I voted for Whoopi.”

  Geddie was confident they had made the right decision. “I knew Whoopi better than I knew Gayle,” Geddie said. “She would come on and make the show work and do the things we asked her to do. She had also been beaten up a little bit. She had a rough run with movies. I thought that we could rebuild her career together. I thought that was exciting. It was also an honor to be with somebody who was so talented, so lauded.”

  The thing that had made King famous—her connection to Oprah—also worked against her with The View. Barbara worried that Oprah might try to somehow hijack The View, leading to another ugly turf war. “My feeling with Gayle was—how do I say this in the nicest possible way, because I love her?” Geddie said. “She came from Oprah’s world. Having just been through Rosie, I didn’t need someone else telling me how to run the show. And I thought Gayle would be telling me how to the run the show. That was my honest opinion.”

  King was disappointed when she found out she wasn’t chosen. “I was very interested,” she told me. “But that didn’t work out. I thought it would be fun because, listen, you get to give your opinion, which I love. I love pop culture. I love politics. I thought you get to do the two.” And she would also have been able to sleep in, a luxury she’s not afforded with her current morning show. “It had better hours.”

  * * *

  Whoopi wasn’t the only new cohost. The View also wanted to hire Sherri Shepherd, which is ironic, because she had to fight to be a guest on the show. From 2002 to 2006, the comedic actress played a peon at a TV network on the ABC sitcom Less Than Perfect with Andy Dick and Zachary Levi. “Everyone on that show had gone on,” she told me. “They wouldn’t book me.” Her publicist told her that Bill Geddie didn’t know who she was. “One day”—in March 2005—“Johnnie Cochran died. Star Jones had to go to his funeral. I was pregnant and on bed rest. And my publicist called to say that Bill said, ‘If she came out here on a plane, we’re booking her.’” Sherri boarded the next flight for New York. “I came in on a wheelchair.”

  Geddie liked Sherri’s timing, and they had her back for more episodes. As the show was getting ready to dump Star, Sherri got the feeling that The View was trying to woo her for that seat. They even had an African-American producer talk to her about the advantages of working there. “I’m, like, ‘Okay, you guys are sending a black woman to try to get me on board.’” Sherri laughed.

  Finally, Barbara Walters approached her in the hall one day. “We’d like you to come on the show, dear.”

  “I said, ‘Barbara, I got a child with special needs,’” Sherri said about her son, Jeffrey, who was born in April 2005. “He’s got all this stuff in LA. So I’m going to say no.’” Barbara wished her well. “I knew when she walked away that I maybe made a mistake. And they never called me after that,” at least through the rest of the season. “I knew there were some things going on with Star, and I didn’t like being part of it. I don’t like drama.”

  That next year, Sherri was back as a fill-in. She was in the middle of a messy separation from her first husband, Jeff Tarpley, who had cheated on her. She laid it all out for the audience, and she killed it. Even Rosie started rooting for her, bonding with a hardworking single mom. Sherri appeared as the guest cohost on The View in May 2007 on the day of the infamous Rosie-versus-Elisabeth fight. Barbara was impressed that Sherri didn’t sell out the show by doing interviews about what had transpired. Kathy Griffin, who was also vying for a seat on the show, was less discreet. “When Kathy came on the next day, she kept trying to go there and make jokes,” Sherri recalled. “They were really uncomfortable. They knew I could keep my mouth shut.”

  Barbara decided to offer the fifth seat on The View to Sherri. It wasn’t the most expected choice. Sherri had grown up as a Jehovah’s Witness in Chicago, with a knack for comedy. Her stand-up routine was squeaky-clean, which worked in her favor for daytime TV. She’d spent the early part of her career as a recurring character on sitcoms such as Suddenly Susan and Everybody Loves Raymond. In 2007, she was cast as Tracy Morgan’s no-nonsense wife on 30 Rock.

  “It was very interesting,” Geddie said. “A lot of people said to me, ‘Why do you want Sherri? You already got your black woman.’” This disgusting insinuation revealed how the tokenistic racism of network executives shaped the casting of a TV show. Geddie challenged the notion that Whoopi and Sherri were in any way similar. “I said, ‘This is going to be a completely revolutionary thing.’ A lot of white people think black people think the same about a lot of things—certainly ten years ago, they did. We were going to show they were completely different people with different points of view about almost everything except for they are black women.”

  Although that sounds like common sense now, it wasn’t always the case on TV. For a long time, many panel shows thought they checked the diversity box if they had one woman (or man) of color as part of the cast. “Actually, it’s one of my proudest moments, that we were able to hire two black women for The View at the same time,” Geddie said. “I thought it spoke well of the show we were trying to create, and it spoke well of ABC for letting it happen.”

  The only problem: Sherri wasn’t sure she wanted to do The View. She’d always thought of herself as an actress. If she moved to New York, she couldn’t take her son with her until her legal disputes had been resolved with her husband, whom she divorced in 2010. “I was probably six hundred thousand dollars in the hole going through this custody battle,” Sherri said. “I didn’t have a lot of money.” She was disappointed by how small The View’s offer was.

  Sherri found a secret friend as she negotiated for more pay. Although Rosie had been banished from The View, she became Sherri’s agent, texting her salary advice. “‘This is what they are offering me, which is hugely, grossly low,’” Sherri recalled saying. “Rosie was amazing. She said to me, ‘This is what I made. This is what Joy makes. This is what Elisabeth makes.’ They had offered me a salary that was lower than Elisabeth. Rosie said, ‘You’re an established actress. Go back and counter with this amount!’ They came up.”

  Rosie pushed her to ask for more perks. “They paid my rent”—worth $85,000—“for the first year,” Sherri said. ABC had initially offered her one business-class plane ticket to New York. As part of her renegotiated deal, she got eight first-class tickets to Los Angeles to visit her son on the weekends.

  The experience taught Sherri that women have to help each other out at the negotiating table. “To this day, if there’s a woman who does a talk show, I’ll let her know what I make,” Shepherd said. In 2010, CBS launched their own knockoff version of The View, called The Talk.

  “When Sheryl Underwood got The Talk, she had no idea what she was supposed to ask for,” Sherri said. “She had no clue, and I told her. Of course they are going to offer you the lowest amount. I was very thankful to Rosie for what she did for
me.”

  ABC had originally intended on revealing Whoopi and Sherri together as the new cohosts. But as the talks dragged on with Sherri, the press started reporting that the two women were joining The View. On August 1, 2007, Barbara promised viewers a surprise: “You may notice that we are only three. Well, we’re almost four. Because today we have a very big announcement to make.” But she didn’t name Whoopi yet. Instead, she turned to a story in the tabloids about how Britney Spears was a bad mother and asked, “Are people picking on her or is this really out of control?”

  After an interview with Jon Voight and a segment on “kids’ summer gadgets,” Barbara was ready to confirm what everybody knew. “You are about to meet the new moderator of The View, and we are thrilled,” Barbara said in the show’s last minutes. Whoopi entered the studio, as fans scrambled to give her a high five on the way to the stage.

  “So, listen, did you ever watch The View?” Barbara asked.

  “Once or twice,” Whoopi said. “I remember seeing it. You look familiar.” She said she had to unplug her home phone because her mother wanted to know if the stories about her new job were true.

  Sherri officially joined the cast on September 10, 2007. “This is the worst-kept secret of the month,” Barbara said as she introduced her to the Four Seasons’ song “Sherry.”

  “Oh my gosh.” Sherri sat in the middle of the table and let out a scream. “I’m actually one of the girls.”

  * * *

  Nobody was sure if this new team would coalesce into a ratings victory. Whoopi’s first day as moderator got off to a less-than-ideal start when she defended disgraced football player Michael Vick for his dogfighting ring that led to the death of innocent animals. “This is part of his cultural upbringing,” Whoopi said, arguing that people in the South were accustomed to such things. She was swiftly denounced by animal rights groups.

  Brian Frons called Whoopi that night at home. “There was a lot of bad press,” he recalled.

  “Hi, boss,” she said. “Am I in trouble?”

  “She was scared,” Frons remembered. “You could hear it in her voice.” Whoopi was worried that she’d already crossed a line. Frons assured her that the network still supported her. The next day, Whoopi issued a clarification that she didn’t endorse animal fighting. She was just trying to point out that it was a long-standing tradition in parts of the country. It was her only early blip. In a few weeks, Whoopi had stabilized The View and created a new era of prosperity for the show.

  Sherri had a more difficult time adjusting. When she’d come on for a day, it was easy to fire off a round of jokes and be done. But as a regular cohost, she suddenly found herself in the middle of lofty discussions leading up to the 2008 presidential election. She didn’t know what to say. “It was the politics,” Sherri told me. “I was a Jehovah’s Witness. They don’t vote. I never voted. Even though I’m not in the religion anymore, that’s what I learned. I don’t like conflict. I don’t like debating and arguing. I was raised not to speak back to my elders. The lady who created the show was an elder. That was very hard for me. I was just a funny girl.”

  Sherri made an infamous mistake on her second week on the show. In the morning meeting that day, the ladies decided they wanted to talk about evolution vs. creationism. While getting her makeup done, Barbara looked at Sherri through the mirror and declared, “I want to debate my Christian friend.”

  Sherri had no idea what that meant. On TV, the discussion started off without much flare. Then Whoopi tried to make a point about rejecting something that we all know to be false: “Is the world flat?”

  “I don’t know,” Sherri responded.

  There was a second of devastating silence.

  “What do you think?” Whoopi asked.

  “I never thought about it, Whoopi.”

  “You never thought about whether the world was round?” Barbara asked.

  “But I’ll tell you what I’ve thought about,” Sherri said, trying to recover. “How I’m going to feed my child. Is the world flat has not been an important thing to me.”

  “Didn’t Columbus already work this question out?” Joy quipped.

  This moment almost ended Sherri’s career. “I was so nervous,” Sherri told me. “I don’t debate. I swear I blanked out in that moment. I literally had a brain fart.” That clip suddenly became how people identified her. “I didn’t realize until my phone was ringing off the hook how serious this was. People who had been rooting for me were completely ashamed. I think I lost my black card. Black people were, like, ‘She has taken us back two hundred years.’ Bill Maher said I should be fired with a stupid stick. Bill O’Reilly called me a pinhead. That’s when it hit me: This is a huge show. I found out I was the second-most-googled person in the country.”

  The next morning, while she was preparing to go back on TV, she heard Wendy Williams say on the radio that Sherri could be replaced with a potato sack. Sherri lost it in her dressing room. “I broke down and cried. Someone went and told Whoopi, and she flew into the room.”

  “Sherri, Barbara picked you, which means she wants you,” Whoopi comforted. “Look into my eyes.”

  “But she was wearing those colored glasses,” Sherri recalled. “I said, ‘Whoopi, I can’t see your eyes!’ And she flipped them up and said, ‘Turn that off.’ She really encouraged me.”

  Sherri realized she had to cram harder for this gig. She took the job seriously, studying the headlines of the day and coming up with personal takes on stories. “I started reading the newspaper. I never used to do that.”

  Whoopi helped her in another way to prepare for her new life in New York. One afternoon, Whoopi invited Sherri to the Time Warner Center for an interview Whoopi was conducting with Bill O’Reilly. Although Sherri had a wardrobe provided to her on TV, her own clothes were modest. “I wore what you normally wear in California, which is a Gap tank top, a denim skirt, and flip-flops,” Sherri said. “I remember she introduced me to Bill, and he looked at me like roaches were crawling out of my head. Who is this person that represents The View?”

  Like a great makeover scene from a romantic comedy, their next stop was a clothing store. Whoopi took Sherri to an Eileen Fisher boutique in downtown Manhattan. “She stood outside the dressing room,” Sherri said. “I’m looking at the price tag, going, ‘This is three hundred dollars!’ The winter coat was eight hundred dollars. My credit card limit was two thousand dollars. I’m going, ‘I’m not going to be able to afford this.’ We go up to the counter and I don’t know what to tell them when my card gets declined. I thinking, ‘I’m going to embarrass Whoopi.’”

  Sherri tried to gracefully leave the store. “As they’re ringing it up, I said, ‘I think I’m going to have to put some of these back.’ They said, ‘Oh, no. Ms. Goldberg already paid for everything.’”

  Sherri couldn’t believe Whoopi’s generosity. “I hugged her and I was just bawling. She said, ‘Pay it forward.’ That’s all she said. After that, I was chic.”

  18

  Elisabeth’s Last Stand

  If Bill Clinton helped put The View on the map, Barack Obama affirmed the show’s place at the very center of the conversation. The 2008 presidential election was a nonstop marathon of debates related to gender and race, from Jeremiah Wright’s inflammatory sermons to Hillary Clinton’s razor-thin primary defeat and Sarah Palin’s pro-life beliefs. The View was more than equipped to tackle all of that, thanks to the ingenious casting of its new panel.

  “We never talk about race,” Whoopi said on November 5, 2008, the day after Obama’s historic victory. “This is the great thing about this show. We talk about things that no one else on television talks about.”

  Whoopi had spent the night of the election at home, watching on TV as the Obamas ascended the stage at Grant Park in Chicago. She called her mom to ask a question that hadn’t occurred to her before: Did she ever think she’d live to see this day? Her answer gutted Whoopi: No, I never thought this day would come in my lifetime. “I always
thought of myself as an American with all of the promise that America holds,” Whoopi said on the show. “But suddenly, last night, I felt like I could put my suitcase down.”

  The other ladies tried to offer their own takes, with Elisabeth unraveling a saccharine story about how she told her daughter, Grace, there were no losers from the election. Barbara still couldn’t get over how Hillary Clinton had fallen short despite her immense campaign funds. But none of these opinions on The View would have resonated without the two African-American women at the table.

  Sherri Shepherd wept with happiness as she talked about voting for the first time, taking her son, Jeffrey, along with her to the polls to cast her ballot for Obama. As a young girl, she’d always been told she wouldn’t have the same opportunities as other people because of the color of her skin. “To look at my son and say, ‘No limitations on you,’ it is an extraordinary day for me,” Sherri said, her words cracking. The View had undoubtedly reclaimed its voice.

  In her first year as moderator, Whoopi had kept the show running without any major scandals, and, more important, she’d actually improved on Rosie’s strong numbers. “We were in the catbird’s seat,” said Bill Geddie. “We had two black women at the table for this historic event. That year, when Barack Obama became president, that whole political season leading up to John McCain and Game Change and Sarah Palin; that, to me, is the best The View ever was! I always figured after Meredith left it was going to be diminishing returns. It wasn’t. We were on Time’s most influential list. We were flying high. The wind was in our hair, man.”

  Barbara naturally took credit for Whoopi’s career comeback. “I do feel that we started a whole new chapter in Whoopi’s career, and I must say she’s always appreciative,” Barbara told me in 2011. “Not everyone says thank you, but Whoopi always does. In this case, we offered her a new opportunity and a steady job. It just gave her a boost to every aspect of her life.”