Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  At least one other person was fantasizing about a fifth seat. As soon as the episode wrapped, Barbara came out of hiding. She took the stage and waved at the crowd and gave each of the cohosts a congratulatory peck, assembling them for a class photo with her.

  With a pack of journalists waiting to interview the new cast, Sherwood rushed over to Barbara, looping his arm around hers. Her smile disappeared, and she winced at the sight of her new companion. “Come on, Ms. Walters,” he said, pulling her away from the flashing lights.

  Maybe she should have stayed. This next season of The View came close to being its last because Rosie and Whoopi would almost kill each other.

  22

  “Worse Than Fox News”

  The first clue that Rosie and Whoopi wouldn’t be compatible as coworkers dated back to 2009. Whoopi had made the controversial argument on The View that Roman Polanski hadn’t committed “rape rape,” about the 1977 criminal case involving the film director’s sex acts with a thirteen-year-old girl. Rosie, who wasn’t on TV at the time, couldn’t let such an egregious claim go unchecked. During a radio interview on Howard Stern—she’d made peace with the shock jock through a mutual friend, the actress Mia Farrow—Rosie unleashed on Whoopi. “I said, ‘That’s ridiculous!’” Rosie recalled. “‘I’m very anti–Roman Polanksi and anti–Woody Allen. I’m not for people who rape children. It’s a pretty clear line for me.’”

  Whoopi, who was stung by the criticism, sent Rosie a note. “It was a very angry letter,” Rosie said. “And I wrote back to her and I said, ‘You can’t change your idols, and you will always be one to me. I’m sorry if that hurt your feelings. I have different feelings about it than you. And I stand up for what I believe, but I’ll never be against you, Whoopi Goldberg.’” Rosie meant that, theoretically. But all bets were off once she returned to The View.

  On her original tour of duty, Rosie had at least pretended that she was going to be everybody’s friend. This time, she had her guard up. When Rosie reintroduced herself to the staff that summer, she looked detached, speaking slowly and deliberately, like the headmaster of a boarding school. It was a defense mechanism because she hadn’t been given control over Barbara Walters’s kingdom yet. As she pontificated about Season 18, Rosie made it sound as if she were the new executive producer, right in front of the man who actually held that role (not that Bill Wolff had the chutzpah to tell her to back down). That day, Rosie sputtered off a jumble of ideas about how the show would be smarter, focus more on news, and educate viewers. One part of her speech revealed just how much control she desired. “It’s our jobs,” Rosie said, “to make Whoopi better.”

  The room went silent. In the seven years that Whoopi had been on The View, nobody had needed to—or, frankly, had the courage to—give her notes.

  “We’re not going to do to Whoopi what we did to Barbara,” Rosie continued. That made it worse. Rosie was suggesting that Whoopi (at only fifty-eight) was approaching her expiration date, and that it was their responsibility to cover for her until she left, which wouldn’t be too far off in the future.

  Rosie’s words baffled the staff. They couldn’t tell if she was speculating about what she’d like to have happen, or if she was working off actual information from the network. One of the producers texted Whoopi, telling her that she needed to get to the office quickly. When she arrived a little bit later, she and Rosie had an awkward exchange. “What’s going on here?” Whoopi asked. Rosie realized that someone had tipped off Whoopi, which led Rosie to believe that the producers were out to get her. She stayed withdrawn in her interactions.

  Rosie saw Whoopi as part of her restoration project because Rosie blamed her for the stodginess associated with The View in its later seasons. Rosie tried to get Whoopi to not wear an earpiece, which was a strange direction—Whoopi needed one to communicate with the control room. “I never wanted to take the show away from her,” Rosie told me. “For years, she sat there and said nothing. She was nearly not even present. She would hold the cards and never ask a question to a guest. It was quite obvious she was getting a paycheck and nothing else. I wanted to raise the level of the show, and therefore her as well.”

  Whoopi wasn’t a control freak or a perfectionist, but she didn’t take orders. She wondered why she wasn’t getting any respect. When Lisa Hackner told Whoopi that Rosie was getting rehired on The View, Hackner mishandled the way she presented it.

  “Rosie is coming back to save the show,” Hackner had said.

  Oh, really? Whoopi thought. What have I been doing here?

  As a result, Whoopi never warmed to Rosie as a colleague.

  Most of the veteran producers knew that Rosie and Whoopi would never survive at the same table. The staff didn’t understand why Anne Sweeney and her daytime team thought this pairing would last, especially given Rosie’s history on the show. But as bad as Rosie’s eruptions had been with Barbara or Elisabeth Hasselbeck, this turned out to be much worse. It would soon come to be known as a fact among even ABC loyalists that working at The View was total hell.

  The Season 18 premiere episode earned 3.9 million viewers, its highest ratings in eight years, as a result of the curiosity about Rosie’s return to daytime TV. In a few days, those numbers swiftly dropped, after it became obvious that the show without Barbara had become a shadow of itself in its glory days. It felt as if the four cohosts were on different planets. Nicolle Wallace, who still kept her other job as a pundit on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, relished wonky policy discussions. Rosie Perez wanted to talk about sports, making The View seem more like a product from ESPN. And Rosie O'Donnell looked defeated. With Whoopi as the moderator, she felt censored and restrained. Instead of entertaining America with her quick takes on news stories and her biting jokes, she kept flashing a death stare at Whoopi for interrupting her. “Some people would say, ‘What’s going on with you and Whoopi?’” Rosie recalled. “I was, like, ‘Are you watching the show! It’s pretty much right there.’ I have no desire for a public feud.”

  One of Rosie’s many mandates was to start the morning meeting a half hour earlier, at 8:30 a.m., to allow a jump start on preparing for the show. Whoopi, who took a car from her home in New Jersey, insisted that the meeting stay at the regular time of 9:00 a.m., since two hours had always been sufficient time to figure things out. (“There was no chance that Whoopi was getting there at eight thirty,” said one producer, laughing.) Rosie, who also commuted from New Jersey, took Whoopi’s objection as proof that she wasn’t invested in fixing the show. As a compromise, Wolff tried to start the meeting at 8:45 a.m. “She was late the first time,” recalled Rosie, who made a sarcastic aside to the staff about Whoopi’s tardiness.

  “I don’t think she was interested at all,” Rosie said about how Whoopi responded to Rosie’s ideas. “We have different ways of treating our employment.”

  Rosie was furious at Whoopi for shutting down discussions about one major news story in particular. In 2014, dozens of women came forward to accuse Bill Cosby of rape. Whoopi didn’t want to give those stories any airtime. “Because he’s a black legend and she’s a black legend,” Rosie said, offering an explanation. “Black people have been oppressed for two hundred or more years. There are probably fifty famous black people in the nation, depending on how you define fame. It would be hard to rip one of your legends down.” Rosie paused, to think about it some more. “Although, I will tell you this. If Barbra Streisand was accused of raping or doping young boys who were her fans, I would stand up against her. And I love her more than I love any human on the earth.”

  A few weeks into the show, Whoopi cut off Rosie during a Hot Topics debate to go to a break. Rosie whipped herself into a frenzy. She rushed into the audience, with a microphone in her hand, berating Whoopi about the way Rosie was being treated.

  “This is going to be all over Twitter!” Rosie Perez gasped.

  O’Donnell calmed down only after her assistant handed her an anti-anxiety pill. Staffers noticed that this new version of Rosie was
more on edge than she’d ever been. In the shiny refurbished studio, she’d largely keep to herself, looking miserable. She’d quickly lose her temper whenever something wasn’t going right, which happened all the time. If producers were slow to respond, she’d get in their faces, yelling about what needed to happen. She was so distressed about the show that she started complaining to celebrity guests waiting to go on about how terrible Whoopi was to her.

  “Whoopi Goldberg was as mean as anyone has ever been on television to me, personally—while I was sitting there,” Rosie told me. “Worse than Fox News. The worst experience I’ve ever had on live television was interacting with her.”

  Rosie had idolized Whoopi as an actress, but the reality of working with her didn’t line up to what Rosie had thought it would be. She’d put Whoopi on a pedestal, like Barbara, and once Rosie got to know the real Whoopi, it all came crashing down. “I revered her,” Rosie said. “She’s a minority, feminist, smart, funny, groundbreaking legend who is black in America. I’m never going to not have respect for Whoopi Goldberg. But that was a painful experience, personally and professionally. With Elisabeth Hasselbeck, I didn’t see her in a one-woman show that changed my life as an artist. But I did with Whoopi Goldberg, and I watched her make her way through a world, which is racist and sexist and homophobic, and succeed like only four women of color have in our age range. I didn’t understand how she played on a team was different than the way I played on a team.”

  As the show unraveled into a modern-day set visit to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? with Rosie and Whoopi channeling Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Bill Wolff was swallowed alive by his two strong leads. Backstage, nobody was making any decisions. Wolff couldn’t answer even simple questions, approving—for example—that the show’s bookers reach out to A-list stars who were so big, they probably wouldn’t do The View. “Hmmm,” he’d reply. “Let me get back to you.” Wolff started to have anxiety attacks and popped Rolaids in the office, as he tried to please everybody, while never putting his foot down. “He was a sweet man, but useless,” recalled one producer.

  “It was a crazy amount of change all at once,” said Barbara Fedida, the senior vice president for talent at ABC News. “It was a table of women who had never worked together before. It was a new executive producer who had never worked in this genre—cable talk is very different than broadcast talk. It was unclear what promises were made to each person sitting at the table.”

  Under Walters, the morning meetings had always been run efficiently. Now these gatherings, regardless of the start time, had become bureaucratic ordeals. The room kept getting bigger. Those in attendance included Wolff and his new coexecutive producer, Brian Balthazar, who’d worked with Kathie Lee and Hoda on Today. In October, Ben Sherwood struck a fatal blow to the daytime side, when he officially put his news executives in charge. (Since Whoopi didn’t trust Hackner, it made it easier to move her away from The View.)

  Coming from Good Morning America, James Goldston, Tom Cibrowski, and Fedida would sit in to observe The View, as they filtered through the news stories or introduced cheesy segments such as View Your Deal, which had the cohosts peddling discounted merchandise such as luggage or sunglasses on TV. This was a recycled shtick from GMA, where it had been called Deals and Steals. Rosie refused to participate, and she vented out loud (and on Twitter) that it cheapened the show to hold a weekly garage sale.

  The four cohosts would all receive a packet of potential stories for the Hot Topics meeting. Nicolle was game for anything, even pop culture stories that she didn’t know much about. She’d offer to study The Bachelor or watch clips of the Kardashians. “Nicolle was the only one who tried to make it less awkward, so Bill wouldn’t look like an asshole,” recalled one producer. “She tried so hard.”

  The other cohosts never bothered to crack open the list. Rosie would sit quietly in the meeting, wearing sweats, Crocs, and a look of disdain.

  “What do you think of Topic Number Thirty-Eight?” Wolff would gently ask.

  “It doesn’t interest me,” Rosie would say.

  Perez would sometimes chime in about something she’d heard on NPR that morning that wasn’t included in the lineup. Her favorite stories, in addition to sports, were about AIDS, world peace, and immigration. But these complicated issues couldn’t be quickly debated on morning TV.

  The ABC executives knew they had to do something about the chemistry of the panel because the cohosts made for strange bedfellows. As Wolff had assembled a cast under the gun, he’d forgotten a golden rule of TV: stay young. Nicolle was forty-one, and the Rosies were in their fifties. The View was missing a millennial to make it multigenerational, which was Barbara’s founding principle.

  The ABC executives realized that they had also gotten the Republican component wrong. With Elisabeth, the show had used its conservative as a foil against all the other voices. Nicolle wasn’t confrontational, and she spent most of her time on TV nodding at her peers. In one of her early episodes, the Hot Topics dealt with Donald Trump wanting to close the borders to Americans who had been infected with the Ebola virus overseas. “I think when Rosie O’Donnell and I were screaming at each other in agreement was when the first alarm bells went off about me,” Nicolle said. “They thought, ‘Oh, no! She’s not going to fight with Rosie.’ They’d been trying to capture lightning in the bottle again from the Rosie-and-Elisabeth years.” When Nicolle wasn’t on camera, she was joined at the hip with Whoopi, traveling with her to the hair-and-makeup room for camaraderie—and protection.

  “Things boiled over,” Nicolle said. “Rosie jumped on me one day about torture. She’d seen me on Morning Joe defending what George Bush had done on enhanced interrogations. She was really upset and got really mad about it.”

  When Rosie got heated in another meeting, Nicolle marched to human resources and reported her. “I can get…” Rosie trailed off. “I said, ‘Are you kidding me? Are we not talking about Bill Cosby? Are we not talking about the number one story?’ I raised my voice. I was in my dressing room, getting my makeup done, and somebody comes and goes, ‘Nicolle Wallace just went to HR.’” Rosie couldn’t believe it. “I didn’t know what HR was, first of all.”

  Nicolle had brought her husband to work that day, as her own security guard. “I get out of my chair, walk in her dressing room,” Rosie said. “I’m, like, ‘What the hell happened, Nicolle? You went where?!’”

  “I just felt you were threatening me.”

  Rosie, who later became friends with Nicolle, offered an explanation for why they weren’t close on The View: “She was an ally to Whoopi Goldberg, who seemed to have an anti-Rosie agenda for all the world to see.”

  After Thanksgiving, Rosie told the staff that she had separated from her wife (they divorced the next year), after they’d been fighting at home. Her entire life seemed to be coming undone. Late on some nights, she’d call up a producer, saying that she couldn’t possibly go to work the next day, sitting on TV next to “a rape defender” (meaning Whoopi) and “the woman who supported George W. Bush’s torture techniques” (Nicolle). “I never took it personally,” Nicolle said. “If she was upset that I worked for George W. Bush, it was never like I hid the cucumber.”

  For Nicolle, daytime TV was a roller coaster that was different from politics: “It was really dramatic. We all kind of had to ride Rosie O’Donnell’s highs and lows, because she was going through a lot and pulled everyone in. She’s so intense. If she’s upset, we all kind of absorbed that. I think in some ways, Whoopi absorbed the brunt of it. They had some famous fights.”

  The network was simply trying to prevent another civil war on TV. “Once it was clear it wasn’t going to work,” Fedida said, “the only thing we wanted to do is not have it be a blowup disaster. We didn’t want them to start fighting on the air to the point where the audience would be uncomfortable watching them. That was the mandate: get them on the air and off the air every day, and to make sure nothing crazy goes on.”

  On December 18,
a discussion in Hot Topics about racism and President Obama turned into a bitter shouting match.

  “Do you all think we live in a racist country?” Nicolle had asked.

  “Without a doubt,” Rosie said.

  “Listen, you are a white lady telling me what is racist to you,” Whoopi said.

  “I’m a gay American who has been called a dyke,” Rosie protested. “I know what homophobia and hatred looks like.”

  “That is not the same,” Whoopi said.

  “I have a black kid I raised, Whoopi.”

  “That is not the same.”

  The show’s guest cohost that day, Laverne Cox, had to intervene to stop them from attacking each other.

  “I thought my head was going to explode,” Rosie told me. Her cardiologist, who was watching The View that morning, saw Rosie’s carotid artery pop in her neck. “My doctor called me and said, ‘Come in right now. Your heart rate during that is dangerous for you. I don’t want you doing that show anymore.’” Rosie feigned ignorance. “But I could feel it. I felt it in the midst of fight or flight or freeze.”

  After the show went on hiatus for Christmas, Rosie didn’t show up to Whoopi’s annual holiday party at her house. Whoopi had hired the Santa Claus from 30 Rockefeller Center to mingle with her coworkers and famous friends. But as Rosie’s comeback to The View was crumbling, she wasn’t feeling any cheer.

  * * *

  Was this how The View would die? Only so many scenarios could unfold. Either Rosie would let go or Whoopi would, to let the other one try to salvage the show. Or the two of them would hold on indefinitely, squabbling as The View sank into the black hole of cancellation. Already, rumors were going around ABC that the show might not make it another season—that’s how catastrophic the last few months had been. If it went, Sherwood would get his extra hour for more sales on Good Morning America.