Ladies Who Punch

by Ramin Setoodeh

  Just the thought of that made Whoopi cringe, but what could she do? After the holidays, Rosie received a late present—a back injury for Whoopi. The moderator was bedridden and called in sick for two weeks. And another cohost needed a leave of absence. Just barely into her View debut, Rosie Perez took off time in January to rehearse for her Broadway play because she said she couldn’t juggle both. O’Donnell was finally getting a break. She had a clean runway to mount the relevant and edgy talk show she’d imagined The View could be.

  But she didn’t have it in her. Maybe if Rosie had started with more time at the beginning of the season, with a staff devoted to her, there could have been one more act as Rosie the talk show host. As the fill-in moderator of The View, with a revolving panel of cohosts that included men such as Mario Cantone and Billy Eichner, the numbers didn’t rebound for Rosie. They actually dipped slightly because the show’s fans missed Whoopi. Not even the show’s creator could put The View back together again. With so many vacancies at the table, Barbara charged back through the door as a happy substitute on a few days. She was less polished than she used to be—stammering instead of crisply attacking stories—but it hardly mattered. The show had gone so far off the rails that Rosie was relieved to have Barbara’s help.

  One morning, in the Hot Topics meeting, Rosie addressed the staff. She wanted to know why a reporter from Page Six had called her publicist, asking about Barbara’s memory lapses backstage. Despite so many paranoid discussions about press leaks that year, no one could figure out where they were coming from.

  Rosie looked at a senior producer, Jennifer Shepard-Brookman, who was close to Whoopi.

  “The leaks are out of control this year,” Shepard-Brookman said, according to documents filed in court.

  “Really, you don’t think the leak is here?” Rosie countered. “Maybe one of you told your teenage sons and he leaked it.”

  Shepard-Brookman pushed back, denying that she (or anyone in her family) would do such a thing. She thought Rosie was picking on her because Whoopi wasn’t there and started crying. A few weeks later, Shepard-Brookman sent an email to Rosie about the confrontation, listing some secrets about Rosie that she could have leaked if she’d wanted to. Rosie showed the letter to the network, which fired Shepard-Brookman.

  “One of them tried to sue me,” Rosie said, about a slander lawsuit that Shepard-Brookman filed that was eventually dismissed by a New York judge.

  With all that Sherwood went through to get The View in the hands of ABC News, none of the top executives wanted it. They didn’t think they could improve the show. When James Goldston, the head of the news division, asked Robin Roberts or George Stephanopoulos to do something, they listened because they understood that a newsroom had to have a hierarchy. But at The View, the cohosts couldn’t be bothered with anything as conventional as a boss. The show turned out to be a huge time suck, with constant drama and never any resolution.

  Nevertheless, the ABC News team had to at least try to attract some viewers back. They decided they would fire the cohost who had already taken herself off the show. They started testing other women to fill in for Perez. They weren’t sure if they would just let her disappear into the fog of Broadway, or if they’d bring her back for one last goodbye. I wrote a story in Variety about their plan to fire Perez, citing internal complaints about her performance on TV. Pandemonium ensued. An organization of Latina leaders started a petition to save her job and demanded an apology from ABC.

  O’Donnell and Whoopi, back from her own hiatus, had been kept in the dark. They called the network, demanding answers. On TV, O’Donnell assured viewers that Perez would return. The news team was terrified of creating an “Ann Curry situation,” referring to NBC’s disastrous firing of their beloved coanchor on Today. They backtracked and allowed Perez back on, even if the show wasn’t working with her on it. (Their spinelessness became a subject of ridicule among the old daytime executives. Curry, they pointed out, had been on Today for fifteen years. Perez on The View had barely made a dent.)

  This was all too much for O’Donnell. At home, in addition to her marital problems, her teenage daughter Chelsea had run away with her boyfriend, leaving Rosie panicked at what to do. (They were estranged for the next three years.) Rosie desperately wanted out of The View, and she begged her agent to get her out of her contract. This would never have been possible if the show were a hit, but given the low ratings and the across-the-board exhaustion from all the fighting, Sherwood approved it. When Brian Balthazar told Rosie that he planned on taking another job, Rosie wasn’t fazed. “I’m leaving, too,” she told him. She’d only lasted on the show for five months.

  Rosie hastily announced her second exit from TV, citing her family and her health as the reasons she needed to go. She departed The View for the second time on February 12, 2015, looking to be relieved to finally be done with the producers and Whoopi. “I never wanted to take the show away from her,” Rosie told me in 2018. “All I wanted to do is make that show be as good as it could be. Now it’s unwatchable.”

  23

  Enjoy the View, While You Can

  The irony was that Whoopi Goldberg never wanted to be the guardian of The View. She’d inherited this prize, but she hadn’t tried to outlast her opponents, nor had she hatched any schemes to be the last woman standing. It would have mattered more to Rosie O’Donnell if she had kept the show, or to Barbara Walters if she had figured out a way to freeze time and postpone her retirement. Whoopi never pictured The View as something that came close to matching her other career accomplishments. She considered following Rosie out the door, telling several producers on the show that she was ready to quit and let the show rot in the hands of the news team.

  Whoopi’s relationship with The View remains complicated. In early 2015, she told me that there were a lot of executives in charge who didn’t know what they were doing, without naming them. She’d initially said that she’d talk to me for my book, when it looked like she’d be leaving the show. But she changed her mind, and she stopped doing any press for The View. Whoopi vented to an executive about how much she hated my book cover, which she discovered online, because it featured an illustration of her sitting at the same table as Rosie.

  When ABC renewed Whoopi’s contract for Season 19, she took a pay cut, from $5 million to $4 million a year, as a result of the ratings decline. The network decided that the show would go live on Fridays, to handle breaking news, in case the next election cycle got crazy (it did). Whoopi accepted a one-year deal on the condition that she only worked four days a week, meaning someone else would need to moderate on Fridays. She thought with the ABC News executives in charge, The View might not last much longer. If it did, she’d give herself a lifeboat to make a quick escape.

  As the show trudged onward that spring without Rosie, the network prepared to pull the trigger on yet another reboot. Ben Sherwood had placed all the blame on the worst season of The View on the daytime team for foisting Rosie on them, even while his executives made the decisions that led to her demise. Now they were busy testing out other cohosts. Rosie Perez and Nicolle Wallace sat tight, unsure of what their futures would be. Bill Wolff vocally complained that the news team didn’t communicate with him, and he couldn’t get any directions.

  Over the July 4 weekend of 2015, I broke the news that ABC executives were thinking about cutting both Nicolle and Rosie Perez. This time, there would be no reversing their decision. “Rosie Perez rang me and said, ‘We got fired in fucking Variety,’” Nicolle recalled. “I was, like, ‘What?’ So I called Barbara Fedida, and I’m, like, ‘Did we just get fired?’”

  Fedida, who served as Sherwood’s eyes on the East Coast, wouldn’t tell Nicolle what was going on. “Shouldn’t you have called me?” Nicolle wanted to know. “She was really mealy-mouthed about everything, and that was the only conversation I had with anyone in management. My agent couldn’t get an answer.”

  ABC News later offered Nicolle a smaller role on the show, to appear one d
ay a week. Nicolle declined the demotion, and she left with Perez. She never looked at The View as a news program. “The devastation of leaving probably had nothing to do with entertainment television,” Nicolle said. “That, probably, wasn’t a good fit for me. But the idea of not seeing Whoopi every day was crushing.”

  Nicolle didn’t have any regrets about doing the show: “Spending a year there was like when I was in high school and went abroad. It enriched me in every way; it expanded my horizons. Doing television in front of a live audience retrains you.” She saw her stock rise at NBC while covering the election, and she eventually got her own afternoon show on MSNBC.

  Whoopi was furious that the network had dumped her friend without asking her what she thought about it. For a few weeks, as retribution for Nicolle’s firing, Whoopi refused to speak to any of the ABC News executives. When Sherwood came to New York, he tried to get in a word with her, as he reminded her that he’d taken Lisa Hackner off The View. That line of reasoning didn’t cut it for Whoopi. She blew up at him, telling him that his managers had permanently destroyed the show.

  Then Wolff announced he was exiting to be the executive producer of Chelsea, Netflix’s streaming talk show from comedian Chelsea Handler. He didn’t last through the end of the show’s first season. “He wasn’t the right fit,” Handler told me.

  Since ABC was starting from scratch again on The View, they decided to throw everything at the wall for Season 19 to see what would stick. They unveiled a cluster of new cohosts: Raven-Symoné, the former Disney Channel star; Michelle Collins, a comedian; and Candace Cameron Bure, the conservative former child actress who played D. J. Tanner on Full House. But her schedule made her a part-time host, as she lived in Los Angeles, where she’d committed to shooting Netflix’s revival of her sitcom, Fuller House.

  To round out the panel, James Goldston asked GMA Weekend coanchor Paula Faris to take a seat at the table. Faris, who’d been a staple at ABC News, worried that The View would hurt her career. It did: Whoopi thought she was boring at the table. “She’s not a journalist,” Whoopi would say. “Barbara Walters was a journalist.” Other than that, Goldston didn’t want much to do with The View. He let Fedida, who had previously worked at CBS News, run point on it.

  Sherwood, not knowing who could manage the day-to-day operations, needed some executives with daytime experience. The show took on Hilary Estey McLoughlin as a consultant. McLoughlin, who had been the second executive producer of The Rosie O’Donnell Show, had hit a rut in her career. She’d been at CBS, trying to launch a View-like knockoff that never made it past a pilot, with a panel that included Jerry O’Connell and his wife, Rebecca Romijn. The new executive producer would be Candi Carter, who had worked on Oprah, but she’d never been the one in charge.

  As all these pieces were being assembled, McLoughlin decided that the show needed to re-sign Joy Behar, as the sixth cohost of this rotating panel. “It was a mistake to get rid of me,” Behar told me. “They begged me to come back. First, I wasn’t interested. I was in Provincetown with my husband, minding my own beeswax.” McLoughlin sweetened the gig: she offered Behar the role of moderator on Fridays.

  Drama had a way of finding The View, regardless of who was in the cast. No sooner had the season started than Michelle became the subject of an unpleasant controversy when she made fun of Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s face. It became a scandal in conservative America. A network executive had to visit Michelle’s dressing room to ask her to apologize. She blamed Joy for setting up the joke that Michelle bungled. Joy and Michelle came to dislike each other as the two comics on The View. Michelle had barely started as a regular cohost when the network decided that she’d been a bad hire. A few months later, they reduced her appearances. Then they fired her in June 2016.

  As the show got into the swing of the 2016 presidential election, Candi Carter bad-mouthed Raven for not keeping up. Candace was a conservative, but she wasn’t informed about politics in a way that made her useful for interviewing senators or presidential candidates. Having her on the show was a pain because she was never in New York. When she visited, it was like an aunt who dropped in for a few days, before she had to leave again to tape Fuller House.

  The show was still suffering. With so much paranoia about leaks, McLoughlin and Carter wouldn’t talk about their plans in staff meetings out of fear it would end up in the papers. At the Daily Mail, a writer who went by a pseudonym was penning a series of articles that detailed verbatim some of the backstage fights. ABC thought that this was an inside job—that one of the shows dissatisfied producers was secretly writing these stories.

  In the post-Barbara-and-Rosie era, The View could no longer convince big celebrities to be interviewed. The show found itself in an embarrassing situation when the cast of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a film distributed by Disney, committed to the dark side—by agreeing to appear on CBS’s The Talk. Producers flailed and placed a call to Disney CEO Bob Iger, who agreed to personally torpedo the booking. But Harrison Ford never made it on The View either.

  One viewer still kept close tabs on the show. Sometimes Barbara would call the control room to offer a few words of constructive criticism. Despite telling me that she wouldn’t watch the show because it would make her sad to not be part of it, she couldn’t help herself. She had to know about all the comings and goings. In October 2016, The View cut ties with Raven, more than a year after her arrival, and the revolving door continued, as the search for the perfect cohosts seemed to be as elusive as finding everlasting love on The Bachelor. “It’s too many,” Barbara Walters said of all the cohosts that had been tried out. “I think you should tune in and know who they are. There are days when I tune in and I don’t recognize anybody.”

  * * *

  In the summer of 2016, Barbara thought it was time for another visit with her TV daughters. That August, ABC had cleared an hour of its schedule for a prime-time special starring the ladies of The View, timed to its twentieth season. Like Bravo’s Real Housewives, another TV staple on which frenemies acted like girlfriends, the network envisioned a juicy reunion show with confessions about rivalries and shattered friendships. The only missing ingredient to ratings gold were the cohosts, who hadn’t signed on.

  Carter wasn’t managing the reunion show, but she still tossed off ideas. She kept telling the staff that the key to viewers would be getting Rosie and Elisabeth to face off one more time. Barbara believed she could get Rosie there. But Elisabeth wasn’t responding to calls or emails. She had abruptly exited Fox & Friends, leaving in December 2015 after Roger Ailes decided that she wasn’t enough of a team player. She’d only work mornings, refusing to engage with staff requests for the rest of the day, instead of living and breathing the Fox News brand.

  As the pink slips at The View had piled up, the former cohosts got some revenge. When ABC came asking for one last interview, Rosie Perez, Nicolle Wallace, and Jenny McCarthy all turned down their invitations. Even Whoopi, who was employed by ABC, told producers that she wasn’t sure if she would participate. Barbara offered to help save the day. She herself tried to reach Elisabeth, whom Barbara had made into a star. But Elisabeth wouldn’t do this one last favor for her mentor. The hounding resulted in a terse email from Elisabeth’s agent to ABC:

  Hi. We have told a few people already that Elisabeth isn’t interested or available for this, but thank you.

  As the story of Elisabeth spurning Barbara spread throughout ABC, the reunion show fell apart. The ladies would never be getting back together again. “She told Barbara no,” Star said. “That just wasn’t right. There’s nobody who had a more contentious exit than me—I walked out on the show in a pink suit. Why are you mad? It’s not that deep.”

  On August 23, 2016, ABC aired their twentieth-anniversary special on The View, produced by David Sloan. An old hand at 20/20, he had never worked on The View. It played less like Bravo and more like a bad infomercial. The cohosts who had agreed to talk—including Meredith, Star, Debbie, Lisa,
Joy, and Sherri—never met. Instead, they were brought in to speak to the camera directly, ticking off some of their happier memories. Whoopi declined to be part of it. Barbara gamely reminisced about how her conceit for The View was challenged in its early days.

  Despite a sound track of pop songs such as “Something to Talk About,” a lot was left unsaid. The special didn’t generate any headlines, nor did it offer insights into Rosie vs. Trump with only a few months before the election. ABC might prize itself for hiring some of the country’s best journalists, but it failed to dig up any news related to one of its biggest franchises.

  * * *

  Over time, Barbara’s trips to ABC ceased. She stopped doing live TV. She interviewed Trump before the election—he was still a friend—but she never visited him in the White House. Cha-Cha passed away. Her circle of visitors got smaller and smaller.

  As for her other surrogate daughters, the last time they all gathered in the same room was right before her retirement. They all still cherished the memory. Debbie Matenopoulos, the youngest child, remembered waiting with Barbara backstage as she prepared to take the stage for her last bow.

  “I’m really sad,” Debbie told her. “My mom wants me to tell you, you can’t do this! Nobody is going to watch the show after you leave.”

  “Oh, baby,” Barbara responded loudly. “How long can the show go on? It’s going to be canceled in a few years.”

  The other cohosts, some of whom were still employed by ABC, were all within earshot. They didn’t know how to react to this depressing prediction.

  “The whole cast was right there!” Debbie recalled. “They could hear us. But what are you going to do?”

  As the creator of The View, Barbara Walters had made it acceptable for women in the news business to express their true opinions. Debbie laughed and said, “That’s the beauty of Barbara Walters. She can say what she wants because she’s earned it.”