Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  Whoopi viewed The View as a financial safety net. The show allowed her a multimillion-dollar paycheck (which Whoopi needed because she covered the living expenses of several of her family members), while it left her afternoons free to produce TV shows, documentaries, and plays. Whoopi didn’t try to control and litigate every aspect of The View as Rosie had. Whoopi was more laid-back, and she deferred to the other cohosts and the crew. She saw herself as an employee-for-hire, not the boss.

  Sherri proved her own worth as she dialed up the humor at the table. Some producers initially questioned if the audience could forgive her for her flub about the earth’s being flat, but she overcame that. Geddie pulled her aside early to tell her that she wasn’t talking enough.

  “If you don’t speak up, Barbara will eat you alive,” Geddie advised her.

  “That’s when I learned to speak up,” Sherri said. “Barbara gave me more room and respect.” If Sherri got cut off, she’d push back, telling the View creator that she needed to finish her point. “Some people on social media would say, ‘How dare you speak to Barbara like that?’ What are you talking about? Barbara taught me how to do that.”

  The daytime viewers didn’t miss the toxic fighting. They stuck with the show, even as the iciness among the ladies thawed. It helped that the 2008 campaign provided more than enough drama for Hot Topics. Because The View was an established TV brand, the candidates saw it as a valuable platform for reaching women voters. The only political star of the season that the show couldn’t snag was Sarah Palin, who stopped doing interviews after her disastrous sit-down with the CBS Evening News’s anchor, Katie Couric. But Elisabeth spent an October weekend in Florida campaigning with the vice-presidential hopeful, a reminder that the personalities on The View weren’t journalists. On TV, Elisabeth wore a T-shirt that she designed herself with the words “Real AmeriCAIN Hero,” over protests from ABC about it looking like a free ad.

  In September, John McCain became the first Republican presidential nominee to brave the program. It was one of his toughest interviews (no offense to George Stephanopoulos), as the five cohosts jumped all over him. A headline from The New York Times said it all: “The View Couch Not So Cozy for McCain.”

  “No softballs coming from me, even though you have my vote!” Elisabeth said, teeing off a tense conversation about overturning Roe v. Wade. Whoopi wanted to know if McCain believed in the separation of church and state, wondering what would happen if Palin replaced him in a tragedy. When he described himself as a strict constitutionalist, she asked, “Should I be worried about returning to slavery?”

  But the most awkward moments arrived courtesy of the resident liberal. “I believe if he’s elected, he will go back to the old John McCain that he used to be, unless the Republican base has him by the short hairs,” Joy said, speaking about the senator from Arizona as if he weren’t seated next to her.

  “He’s so polite,” Barbara said as McCain winced.

  “You used to be more of the maverick. Then you turned,” Joy said a few minutes later. “You became more lockstep with your party, with George Bush’s policies.” She brought up a few smear-campaign ads, including one that said Obama wanted to teach sex education to kindergartners. “They are lies, and yet you at the end of it say, ‘I approve this message!’”

  McCain tried to duck. “I would be glad to come on this show with Senator Obama.”

  “You bring us Sarah Palin, we’ll ask Barack Obama,” Barbara said. That showdown never took place, but the Obamas were the first presidential couple that backed The View from the start, using the show to communicate to moms in America. Barack’s first View appearance was as a rising star of the Democratic Party. He returned as a presidential candidate in March 2008. That interview got off to an easy start with Joy asking if he was related to Brad Pitt, which had been reported in the press. “I guess we’re ninth cousins, something removed,” he said. From there, he spent ten minutes answering difficult questions about Jeremiah Wright, as he made the case for why voters should choose him over Hillary Clinton, whom he was still fighting in the primary season.

  Michelle Obama made a series of visits, too, filling in as a guest cohost in the summer of 2008. “I have to be greeted properly,” she told the table. “Fist bump, please.”

  “When Michelle Obama came to cohost with us, Lizzie was going away for the weekend,” Sherri told me. “She’s so OCD, she made a long list for the babysitter. I remember taking the list and throwing it on the floor.” The future first lady witnessed that exchange. After she left, Michelle called Elisabeth from the car to chat with her about being able to let go of the little things as a mom. “Elisabeth broke down in tears,” Sherri told me. “I think she’d deny it to this day. I was, like, ‘How the hell did you get a call from Michelle Obama? You don’t even like the woman!’”

  Even Bill Clinton forgave The View. In September 2008, he clocked his first visit, predicting that Obama would win the election. While he was there, he revealed his admiration for one of the show’s cohosts. “Bill Clinton loves black movies,” Sherri recalled. “I have an underground hit called Who’s Your Caddy?” He leaned over during the commercial break. “He said, ‘I watched Who’s Your Caddy? five times!’ He knew all my lines from a movie I did with Big Boi and all these comics.”

  The next time Clinton was on, Barbara was deep in a conversation with the former president backstage about world affairs. He stopped her for something more important. “Did you see Sherri in One for the Money, where she played a hooker and she was so good!?” he asked about a little-seen crime caper starring Katherine Heigl. To prove he wasn’t bluffing, he brought up a scene where Sherri’s character pulled a doughnut out of her purse. “He knew everything that I’d done in this movie,” Sherri said. “I remember Barbara looking at me. She’d go somewhere with Hillary and Bill. She’d come back and say, ‘I just want you to know Bill Clinton is such a big fan of yours. He won’t stop talking about you.’”

  * * *

  The View coasted through Obama’s first term. The high point was that Obama made another visit in July 2010, as the first sitting president to grant an interview on a daytime talk show. Obama, who wanted to talk directly to the America public about his policies before the midterms, was pop-culture savvy enough to know what he was doing. He’d made one of his inaugural TV pitches on Tyra Banks’s talk show and later used Oprah’s endorsement on the eve of the Iowa caucuses to knock down Clinton.

  But nobody received a free pass on The View, not even the commander in chief. Sherri told the president that many black people felt that they weren’t getting enough support from his administration. During the commercial, he wanted her to know that he’d heard her. “Sherri, I try to do as much as I can,” he told her.

  As The View approached its fifteenth birthday, the show was still a force. In 2011, I was backstage working on a profile of Whoopi for Newsweek. After quizzing me about why I wasn’t writing about her, Barbara invited me to her dressing room. “It’s very interesting to me because the audience loves Whoopi,” Barbara said. “And she is not without controversy.” Barbara offered me an example. “We were talking about some television show. Whoopi said, ‘As for me, I’d rather stay home and smoke a joint.’ Someone else does that, you would get letters. But Whoopi does it in such a good-natured and honest way, the audience applauded. That’s Whoopi.” Barbara sounded at once both complimentary and a little envious.

  “Our ratings are very high,” Barbara concluded. As I got up to leave, she stopped me. “I just want to say, whether it’s on-the-record or off-the-record”—she strained for suspense in her voice—“this is a terrific lady.” I was momentarily confused why she was acting as if she were sharing government secrets, before realizing that she was still a master at manipulating the press.

  Whoopi had taken over Rosie’s old dressing room, but it didn’t have the same bad juju. She had lined a full wall with shelves to display more than a hundred colorful sneakers, from Alexander McQueen and other hig
h-end designers. On the morning of my visit with Whoopi, she was less buoyant than usual. She’d just learned about her friend Elizabeth Taylor’s death. After recounting some of her memories to me, Whoopi left to moderate the show. The show had an obnoxious guest that day.

  “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” said Donald Trump, who had just started spreading his birther conspiracy theories about Obama.

  Whoopi cringed. “I’m sorry, is Hawaii not part of the United States? Am I blind?” As Trump rambled on, Whoopi wouldn’t let him off the hook. “I think that’s the biggest pile of dog mess I’ve heard in ages. It’s not because he’s black—”

  “It has nothing to do with it,” Trump insisted.

  Although nobody could imagine Trump as a future politician, the exchange made waves. The press noted that Whoopi had challenged Trump and came close to calling him a racist, and he didn’t get mad at her as he did with Rosie. Trump knew that she was too popular. According to the Q Scores company, which tracks celebrity favorability, Whoopi was more liked than Oprah.

  That year, The View managed to outlast the biggest star of daytime. In May, Oprah invited the five cohosts to her studio for a final interview before leaving daytime, as a way to pass the torch. Barbara sent Oprah’s producers scrambling minutes before airtime, when she ordered them to find a clip from 1984—the first time she visited Oprah’s set. The trip to Chicago was also stressful.

  Barbara wanted someone to sit next to her on the plane. Joy, who’d been her traveling companion in the past, had no interest in making that sacrifice. She’d grown tired of hearing the same stories about how Jackie resented her mother, and Joy didn’t want to be trapped with Barbara for two hours. Finally, to fix the situation, Barbara’s hairdresser, Bryant Renfroe, upgraded to first class, using his own frequent-flier miles.

  He owed his friend. Barbara had recently set him up—through an acquaintance of Jackie’s—with Joseph Dwyer, the man who’d become his husband. “How often does that happen?” Renfroe said. Barbara had shown him a picture of the eligible bachelor on the day they were taping an interview with Jennifer Lopez for one of her specials. Barbara approached matchmaking with the same verve as she did chasing a scoop. “And the whole time at the interview, it was all about, ‘Did you talk to him yet? Have you met him yet? When are you going to meet him?’”

  “It’s going to work,” Renfroe recalled Barbara telling him. When it did, Renfroe asked Geddie to be the best man at his wedding in December 2011.

  * * *

  One reason the View staff was so insular was because the show didn’t fire many of its producers. Barbara didn’t think it was worth the trouble. She’d rather keep her inner circle close than risk them leaking horrible stories to the press. (That’s not to say those stories didn’t leak anyway.) But there were two notable exceptions. Despite landing many of the show’s biggest stars, the booker Sue Solomon got caught by the network in a thorny ethics violation in 2013. The show’s publicist Karl Nilsson had heard murmurs about Solomon engaging in activity that violated the company’s standards. She’d store the free press copies of hardcover books mailed to the show by publishers, load them up in a rolling suitcase (called “the bookmobile” by the staff), and sell them to the Manhattan bookstore the Strand for pocket change.

  Although Solomon was only making small sums of money, Nilsson tattled on her. When a human resources manager confronted Solomon, she admitted it, not realizing that it was a fireable offense. Barbara tried to save her by mounting a defense, but it didn’t do any good. ABC wanted to make an example out of her, to demonstrate that they had a zero-tolerance policy for freebies in a post–Star Jones workplace. After The View axed Solomon, they were down one less booker to wrangle the celebrity guests.

  The next casualty was even stranger. Joy increasingly found herself at odds with her comedy writer Andrew Smith, who had been on the staff since the beginning of The View. They had been squabbling because Smith claimed that Joy used some of the jokes that he wrote for her on The View for a new prime-time show she was hosting on HLN. Smith wouldn’t let it go, complaining that she owed him a second paycheck. Joy was over it, and she asked Geddie to get rid of him.

  When Geddie tried, Smith clutched his chest in horror, like he was having a heart attack. “He didn’t have a heart attack,” said Joy, who heard about it later. “I wasn’t in the room. The word is that he collapsed.” An ambulance pulled up at the View studio and wheeled him away to the hospital, where he told friends that he was diagnosed with a broken heart. Smith plotted for revenge by spending years on a manuscript for a Devil Wears Prada–like roman à clef about working for a daytime talk show, titled In the Ladies’ Room. He featured savage lampoons of everyone on The View, from an executive producer (“Bad Bob”) who was only concerned about being on camera himself to a transgender cohost with rage issues to Beverly Frost, an iconic yet superficial journalist who milked her interactions with celebrities to advance her own fame.

  When the narrator of the story is about to get fired, he fakes a heart attack to save his job. The character plots against his boss, an over-the-hill comedian reminiscent of Joy Behar who cares more about her hair than her zingers. However, no publisher would touch this twisted diatribe, which he quietly self-published to no acclaim or notice.

  “I never read it,” Joy said. “Was it any good?”

  * * *

  The View had fought through its share of adversaries, but none compared to Mitt Romney. The next Republican presidential nominee was such a bore that the cohosts couldn’t build up much interest arguing about him in 2012. “We thought the next election would be just as big for us,” Geddie recalled. “It turns out that Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney was not interesting to anybody. We went all-in and you never saw the dial budge.”

  The View faced competition from The Talk, the CBS panel show started in 2010 by actress Sara Gilbert with gushy conversations with celebrities but no politics. Although the show got off to a soft start, CBS kept tweaking it until it started to pick up steam. It had one advantage that The View didn’t. One of its cohosts, Julie Chen, was the wife of former CBS chairman Leslie Moonves. “We’re not at all affected by The Talk,” Barbara once told me. “I don’t think the success of her show diminishes us. Nor do I think the success or failure of The View affects them.” Barbara was aware that they had promotional leverage. “The only thing I’ll say is, if you’re married to the president of the network, you get more promos.” (Chen left The Talk in September 2018, after CBS fired her husband for sexual assault allegations.)

  But The Talk was hurting The View by closing the gap in the ratings. In 2011, as part of a series of management shake-ups, ABC pushed out Brian Frons as the head of daytime, with a less experienced network executive, Vicki Dummer, taking over his duties. “That led the network to come to us after the election and say, ‘This whole political stuff isn’t working,’” Geddie said. “It’s kind of funny now when you think about it.”

  ABC wanted to get rid of Elisabeth, who was never popular with the liberal executives to begin with. Research showed that her likability numbers were low. They’d never rebounded after the Rosie feud, and ABC blamed her polarizing personality for keeping ratings on The View stagnant. Geddie argued that the numbers didn’t tell the whole story because viewers loved to loathe Elisabeth. “Here’s what would happen,” Geddie said. “The focus group is full of people who are willing to spend an entire day for fifty dollars and a free sandwich. Are they Republicans? No. You’re listening to liberals talk about Elisabeth Hasselbeck.”

  As all these discussions were going on, Barbara was suffering from a series of health setbacks. She’d managed to stay on TV through her early eighties, an extraordinary feat. She had no interest in signing off, even though she’d dangle it as something that would hypothetically happen one day. “I never believed she would retire,” Anne Sweeney told me. In May 2010, Barbara had open-heart surgery to replace an aortic valve, as doctors stopped her heart for thirty minut
es. She was ordered to rest. But she sneaked out of bed for the Obama interview. “I remember looking at her, going, ‘This woman has nine lives,’” Sherri said. “She’s not in heaven because she knew Obama was coming.”

  The next time she needed serious medical help, her recovery wouldn’t be so quick. In January 2013, at eighty-three, Barbara fell and cut her head at an inauguration party in Washington, DC. Ten days after that, she came down with a rare case of chicken pox, which she told colleagues she contracted from an acquaintance, the actor Frank Langella, who had been Whoopi’s boyfriend. When Whoopi announced Barbara’s diagnosis on The View, the audience got quiet. “Apparently, she’d never had it as a child,” Whoopi said. “She’s not allowed any visitors. We are telling you, Barbara, no scratching. We love you, we miss you. We just don’t want to hug you.”

  “This is what you get for interviewing Honey Boo Boo,” Joy Behar said, laughing.

  Producers say that when Barbara returned to work in March, she wasn’t the same. Her memory was foggy, and although she could still fire off tough questions, she would get tripped up about the chronology of events. It was time for her to think about slowing down. Around that time, she had lunch with Sweeney and asked her to write down the year 2014 on a scrap of paper.

  “A couple months later, she said, ‘Do you have that piece of paper?’” Sweeney recalled. “She picked her date.”

  * * *

  In the meantime, the network was getting anxious about The View as the vultures started circling. Dummer wanted to move quickly to do something for the next season, so that the ratings could improve in Barbara’s last year. “We need to change things up and get rid of your far left and far right—Joy and Elisabeth—and make the show more daytime friendly,” Dummer told Geddie.