Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  As the friction grew, Whoopi frequently cut off her cohosts during Hot Topics to remind everyone who was in charge. “People don’t understand,” Jenny said. “Whoopi can knock over anyone in a debate. Her voice is strong not only in meaning but also in sound. I was able to get a point out in three words—like ‘I don’t agree’—and that’s all I would be able to say. I would be stepped on or interrupted.” Jenny thought that Whoopi didn’t like that Jenny hadn’t deferred to her enough. “I wasn’t going to play a kiss ass. To me, Whoopi had an addiction to controlling people’s thoughts, their words, the room, the table, your feeling, your mood. She had an addiction to controlling all of it and everybody.”

  The cohosts on The View always had a relaxed dress code, but Jenny felt that her wardrobe was under constant scrutiny. When she wore glasses on the show, viewers attacked her on Twitter for trying to look smart. “Really?” she thought. “I just couldn’t fucking see. The teleprompter was so far.”

  In the past, Barbara hadn’t paid much attention to the other cohosts’ wardrobes, but this became a new tic for her. “We would all show up in the makeup room,” Jenny said. “Barbara would check out what I was wearing. If she didn’t agree with it, or it didn’t complement her outfit, I had to change.” Jenny estimated that over the next seven months she switched fifty outfits as a result of Barbara’s withering gaze, as if they were doing a photoshoot at Vogue instead of a daytime talk show.

  Barbara would object to Jenny’s choosing a summer dress on a cold day. “What the hell are you wearing?” Barbara asked her about a sleeveless outfit by designer Victoria Beckham.

  “Mind you, she doesn’t look at anyone’s clothes but mine,” Jenny said. “I’d go, ‘Barbara, you’re wearing your own clothes.’” Jenny’s outfits were pulled by a stylist. She’d try to remind Barbara, “Stores right now have the spring collection. There’s nothing I can do.’”

  “Change!” Barbara would demand.

  “I always had to go put on a sweater.” And then there was this: “She wanted to start dressing like me. There were times when she’d say change, and she’d make people run out and get that dress in her size. I was a human Barbie doll.”

  To protect herself, Jenny tried to avoid Barbara. “When I’d hear the shuffle of her feet, I knew that Barbara was after me. It would get faster. Oh my God—she’s coming! Based on the speed of the shuffle, I would hide or get on the phone.”

  One morning that autumn, Jenny answered the door to her dressing room. Barbara was very upset about something she’d seen in the communal bathroom. She wasn’t trying to be mean to Jenny. But she needed to express her disapproval—and she’d lost her bearings.

  “Jenny, there’s a tampon floating in the toilet and it’s disgusting.”

  “I don’t have my period. It’s not mine.”

  “Do something about it!”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Jenny said, flabbergasted. “She’s standing in the hallway where the guests are, yelling at me about a tampon. I don’t know. Maybe in her brain, she went, ‘I’m going to the youngest, newest person here, because obviously she has her period and left a tampon floating.’ This is Barbara Walters. I’m not going to yell at her. So finally I said, ‘I’ll take care of it. I’ll take one for the team and I’ll flush it.’”

  * * *

  As The View went back to a disaster zone, the network rang the alarm bells. At least under Rosie, the show was a ratings phenomenon. With Jenny at the table, people were turning it off. “We didn’t bring the numbers up that year,” Geddie said. “They blamed everyone but themselves. The idea that a show has legacies to maintain, this was lost on them.” Without politics, The View had lost its edge and felt like every other copycat talk show.

  Lisa Hackner, the new executive vice president of ABC Daytime, called a meeting with the cohosts to tell them that 30 percent of the viewers had left with Elisabeth Hasselbeck. All the jaws in the room dropped. “They felt we needed more conflict,” Sherri told me. “I remember Whoopi making faces and saying, ‘We’re not going to fight at the table.’”

  As The View tried to swivel back to politics, Jenny found herself in an awkward situation. “They did try to change me. They wanted Elisabeth back, and I wasn’t Elisabeth. I would literally have meetings before the show of them trying to input opinions in me to go against Whoopi.” Jenny wanted to quit. “I was going to work crying. I couldn’t be myself. My fans were telling me, ‘Where’s Jenny? They aren’t letting you be you.’”

  If all this weren’t hard enough, Barbara’s health continued to deteriorate. One day, just as the show ended, she collapsed into the arms of a stage manager. She had to be taken to the greenroom, where they laid her down on a sofa. The staff called the paramedics. But Barbara, concerned that the sight of her on a stretcher would make it into the papers, instructed them to take her to her dressing room. Once inside, she locked the door and wouldn’t let anyone in. “Barbara, are you okay?” they pleaded. She finally came out to be taken to the doctor. The next day, Barbara acted like it was business as usual.

  Barbara, who had let her career define every facet of her life, couldn’t fathom a future without the cameras. “She kept saying backstage, ‘I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave,’” recalled Jenny, who felt bad for her. “Look at what Barbara did to me. I had zero hard feelings. I loved her like a grandma. She didn’t know any better.” But Jenny was less forgiving of her other cohost. “Whoopi knew better.”

  That spring, Barbara pleaded with Whoopi one more time to allow her to moderate The View for her final days on TV. Whoopi wouldn’t budge—she wasn’t forfeiting her ground. When Barbara tried to go over her head by complaining to the ABC brass, Whoopi referred them to a clause in her contract that afforded her the show’s sole moderator duties.

  “Every day I went home and I was miserable,” Jenny told me. “It really was the most miserable I’ve been on a job in my twenty-five years of show business. I kicked myself for not taking the CBS job, of course. But I felt there was a little bit of hope. I thought, maybe when Barbara leaves, the ratings will go up, because they kept saying the focus groups hated Barbara and that’s why they were forcing her into retirement.”

  The viewers who grew up with Barbara could tell that it was time for her to let go.

  20

  Barbara’s Long Goodbye

  This was the end of the road for Barbara Walters. There would be no more day trips to the White House for strolls with the president or the first lady, no more traipsing through the halls of celebrity mansions, no more overseas excursions to dine in palaces with world leaders, no more scuffles with the publicists of ungrateful pop stars, no more phone calls to the mayor of New York City to break news, no more power lunches at Michael’s to discuss the terms of her next exclusive. The American public was about to lose a voice that had defined contemporary news. “I’ve been on television for fifty years,” Barbara told me in the winter of 2014, as her retirement clock ticked down. “Mickey Mouse is the only one who has been on longer than I have.”

  Barbara braced for retirement as if she were running for office. Her farewell resembled The Never Ending Story, with months of programming and special segments on The View. She participated in a two-hour prime-time retrospective about her career that aired in May 2014. And she’d agreed to a sit-down interview with herself. Yes, that’s right—the final episode of The View featured Barbara vs. Barbara. The woman who faced off against her wasn’t a CGI-created clone (although Mark Gentile had pitched that idea in a meeting), but the next closest thing: Cheri Oteri, reprising her impersonation from Saturday Night Live.

  The comedic skit featured Oteri as Babs, gleefully envisioning her impending unemployment with trips to Costco and Six Flags with her dog, Cha-Cha. It needed to be pretaped because the producers were juggling a lot of A-list guests for that show.

  “They were setting up, and we were sitting across from each other, dressed alike and everything,” said Oteri, who wore a fuchsia jacke
t with pearls to match Barbara’s. As they were ready to begin, Barbara looked into the monitor and squealed, “Oh my God! My hair is a mess!”

  That caused an army of beauticians to storm the stage. “They lean in to Barbara, and they say, ‘You’re looking at Cheri’s monitor!’” Oteri recalled. “And she started laughing so hard, I swear that endorphins were released in my body.” Oteri waited for somebody to turn their attention to her. “The funniest thing was all the hairdressers just walked away. Nobody would even touch my hair.”

  In this uncharacteristic moment of levity, Barbara followed the advice from the show’s closing line: She took a little time to enjoy The View. But more often than not, she embarked on her farewell tour with clenched fists and chattering teeth. When Whoopi tried to soothe Barbara’s nerves backstage one morning by asking about the last time she’d taken a vacation, she went blank. Barbara was most terrified about all the free time that would loom over her. “I don’t know how I’m going to fill the days,” she confessed to me in her dressing room, after a View taping. “I’ve never had to in my whole life.” She didn’t count too many girlfriends as part of her social life, or hobbies outside of her demanding job. Her only family was Jackie, who lived in a different state. Did she go on dates? “I’m not going to discuss that part of my life,” she protested. “I think it’s unseemly.”

  During a Hot Topics debate after Valentine’s Day, she accidentally caused a media uproar when she blurted out on The View that she owned a vibrator nicknamed Selfie. The flub arose from some teasing by Whoopi and Jenny McCarthy, which made Barbara go into a tailspin of confusion. “We were all embarrassed,” recalled one producer. As she left her apartment the next day, a camera crew from TMZ tried to catch her with some follow-up questions about the sex toy, which didn’t exist. She had to issue a correction to viewers. “I don’t have a vibrator!” she said on TV. “I don’t even put my cell phone on vibrate.”

  To prove that there was life outside television, Barbara had enrolled in an art-history class at New York University. She arrived promptly at 1:00 p.m. from ABC. “I went for the first time on Monday to class,” she told me a few days later. “There were seven of us, and the professor never showed up. We left at a quarter of two! I’m going to find another professor. That’ll teach me.”

  She wasn’t sure whether she could adapt to a more mellow lifestyle. “I don’t know how I’m going to feel,” she said, trying to downplay her fears. She insisted that she wouldn’t cry, as Jay Leno had after he was pushed out of The Tonight Show that year. She had a sense about what she’d miss the most about TV: “When there are days I want to express an opinion, and I have no outlet.”

  For all the barriers that she’d shattered for women in the news business, Barbara’s retirement would be most profoundly felt at The View. As her profile had diminished at ABC News, she still trudged through the doors of her morning talk show, with an unstoppable appetite for juicy stories and interviews. The View had given her a platform that she never thought she’d needed when she launched the show in 1997 as a side project.

  “I remember a couple executives saying to me, ‘Don’t get too excited—she’s sixty-seven years old,’” Geddie said about his early days on the show. “‘Nobody wants to see a woman after the age of sixty.’ You know what? They were right. That was the way it was back then. I didn’t even think that was sexist.”

  The View managed to give Barbara longevity. It’s not likely that she would have been a regular presence in homes in 2014 without the show. “Barbara went on through her mideighties,” Geddie said. “I consider that a wonderful thing for her and a wonderful accomplishment. She proved somebody could do this for that long, on live TV.”

  When they’d launched the show, they thought her legacy was already sewn up. “How about this?” Geddie chuckled. “How ironic is it that whenever somebody talks about Barbara Walters in articles, it’s never the Barbara Walters as the first lady of journalism, or the Barbara Walters specials, or Barbara Walters of ABC News, or Barbara Walters the first female anchor. It’s always Barbara Walters creator of The View. You hear it all the time. It just makes me laugh. It’s not that I don’t think it was important. I just didn’t think it would be as important given everything else she’s done.”

  Although The View had served as a petri dish for vicious feuds, Barbara wanted to look past the bad times as she approached the end. “I never hold grudges,” she said in our dressing-room conversation that winter. “This is such a crazy and tough business that you might as well make your peace.” For evidence, she told me that she had just had lunch with Star Jones. “I don’t like the way she left. I can barely remember the way she left! What good does it do for me to feel bitterness toward her?”

  They had reconnected, after they both had heart surgery, and Barbara let Star take her on a shopping excursion. “I said, ‘That’s a great coat.’ She said, ‘I can get it wholesale. Let’s go!’”

  Barbara even forgave her most difficult cohost, and Cindi Berger helped orchestrate the reconciliation. In February 2014, Rosie O’Donnell set foot back on The View for the first time in almost seven years.

  Even by Rosie’s standards, she delivered a tour-de-force performance. “Is Hasselbeck here?” she asked on TV. “Just checking.” She tore into recent headlines, including Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death from a drug overdose and the toxic side effects of fame for Justin Bieber. She defended Dylan Farrow’s allegations that her father, Woody Allen, had sexually assaulted her at seven. “I totally believe her,” Rosie said. “I’m very good friends with Mia Farrow. She’s the best mother I’ve ever seen.”

  “I know Woody as a parent, and I disagree,” said Barbara, taking the side of an alleged child molester.

  “But you can never really know what goes on in a house,” Rosie said. These weren’t the kinds of discussions that The View was having with Jenny McCarthy at the table. “How did I do on that one?” Rosie asked her cohosts about the Farrow story. “It’s my first time back. I’m afraid I’ll be exiled!”

  “You’ll never be exiled from this show,” Barbara said meekly.

  “I had seen her before that,” Barbara said later, as she described prior interactions with Rosie at social events. Barbara indicated that not everyone on the show was as forgiving as she was. “There were some people behind the scenes here who were not happy. They had difficulties with Rosie.”

  Anne Sweeney, who still oversaw The View, was in the studio audience that day, and she didn’t care about that. She was dazzled by how quickly Rosie had breathed new life into a stale talk show. Nobody had dared to suggest any names to replace Barbara with her still on TV, but Sweeney had an idea. It would be a long shot—and not necessarily a move sanctioned by HR—but if she could get Rosie back on The View, the show would crush The Talk.

  * * *

  As she finished her career, Barbara kept her calendar packed through the grand finale. On May 12, ABC News renamed its skyscraper headquarters on the Upper West Side the Barbara Walters Building. The rechristening took place with a ribbon-cutting ceremony with Bob Iger, Diane Sawyer, Robin Roberts, and dozens of news minions. “If I have a legacy, I hope that I played a small role in paving the way for so many of you fabulous women,” Barbara said, dropping her voice to convey the bleakness of a world without Barbara Walters.

  She was secretly demoralized that the plaque in the lobby with the building’s new name was so small. “You have to really search to find it,” she told me later. Then she started to interrogate me. “Tell me where it is. You don’t even know. I’m not being humble. I do not know where it is.”

  More than one producer thought that retirement wouldn’t actually be in the cards for Barbara, that she’d drop a surprise that she was staying on The View for all of eternity. In staff interactions, she sounded remorseful and anxious. But when the cameras rolled, she wiped away any smear of doubt that she’d made the right decision.

  Barbara kicked off her final week on TV by staying up past h
er curfew to be a guest on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, dishing out her greatest reporting tips to Cecily Strong. “Do not be afraid to ask the tough questions. Like, if you were a tree, what kind of a tree would you be?” Barbara said, referencing an often-ridiculed line she used on Katharine Hepburn. “Or, your place or mine, Brokaw?” (That joke has not aged well, given that the NBC News veteran was accused of sexual harassment in April 2018 by former colleagues.)

  On The View, she pulled off an impressive trick when she lured all the original cohosts to sit on the sofa with her for one last dish session, including Meredith Vieira, Star Jones, Debbie Matenopoulos, Joy Behar, Lisa Ling, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Rosie O’Donnell, Whoopi Goldberg, Sherri Shepherd, and Jenny McCarthy. But not everybody was on speaking terms. That morning led to an awkward face-off between Rosie and Elisabeth, who hadn’t seen each other since their televised screaming match.

  “Where is Elisabeth?” Rosie asked as she roamed the studio halls.

  “Some of the people who worked on the show said, ‘She hasn’t left her dressing room and the door is closed,’” Rosie recalled. “I said, ‘Let’s change that.’ I knocked on her door. I opened her door and said, ‘How are you doing? What’s going on?’” Elisabeth agreed to take a selfie with Rosie. Then Rosie let it slip to Elisabeth that the reunion had all been Rosie’s—not Barbara’s—doing. “I casually leaned over to her and said, ‘Do you know this was my idea?’” Rosie told me the story that she had told Elisabeth. “While eating dinner with Anne Sweeney, I said, ‘Do you know what would be great? To get all the cohosts back!’ Anne said, ‘Do you think everybody would come back?’ I said, ‘Everybody would say yes because it’s Barbara Walters.’”