Without Babs The View Isn’t All Roses

We love a good behind the scenes drama, especially when it involves our favorite ladies of The View. I’ve watched the show for years. I can remember when I was an ABC staffer and we’d all watch in our offices with the doors closed as though we were on important calls. Barbara Walters is amazing. She’s shattered glass ceilings while wearing high heels, fire engine red and being the epitome of grace under pressure. We knew she would be missed when she announced she was retiring. We had no idea what was coming. This story looks at the tensions when the cameras turn off. The shows premise of bring women of different backgrounds together to discuss ideas is super on our level, but we hate to see these powerful women fall prey to catty bullshit that all too often gives the rest of us a bad name. We hope the good old days of the View aren’t lost, and that this is a blip on the history of a great show and concept. Here are all the details, care of Vanity Fair:

One of those rumors, which had been circulating for several weeks, was that Rosie Perez had been fired. A show insider was quoted anonymously in the Daily News, in January, saying that Perez “was not the sharpest tool in the shed,” and in Variety saying that she had trouble reading a teleprompter. The stories had created a furor. “Outraged,” a group of prominent Latinas—including New York’s City Council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito—issued an open letter to ABC executives demanding “an immediate apology,” excoriating the network for “slandering” Perez and then adding “insult to injury” with its lukewarm defense of the actress, which had indeed been tepid: Perez’s “status with the show has not changed,” was the network’s initial comment. Rosie O’Donnell also expressed shock at hearing the news—“What the fuck?” she said, slack-jawed, on air. It was another drama in a season, the show’s 18th, that seems to have been filled with them—and that had made the goings-on at The View the buzz of the television world. 

Since Walters’s retirement last May, there had been the mystifying departure of Bill Geddie, the show’s longtime executive producer. There was the exit of his number two, also last summer, along with the sudden departure of two co-hosts, Jenny McCarthy and Sherri Shepherd. Rosie O’Donnell was rehired in July, in an attempt to boost sagging ratings. But problems only seemed to get worse. There was the screaming match between O’Donnell and a senior producer that was so intense that staff had to physically separate the women. There were the reports that Rosie Perez had broken down in tears backstage, rumors that Whoopi Goldberg had ordered that the senior ABC executive in charge of The View was not to speak to her, or even approach her. And the persistent rumors of a power struggle between Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg that last September, just two weeks into the season, erupted in a blowup between the two stars in front of the studio audience. During a commercial break, O’Donnell took the microphone and began complaining that Goldberg had cut her off and “hurt my feelings.” Goldberg explained that they’d run out of time, but O’Donnell did not know it because she refused to wear an earpiece on air. O’Donnell persisted. “This isn’t the time for this, Rosie,” replied Goldberg, according to the Daily Mail. But O’Donnell continued to vent, and Goldberg snapped. “Fuck it, I told you to leave it alone and you just don’t want to listen,” she shouted, as the audience sat in stunned silence. “If you want to go there, Rosie, I will, dammit. I’m really sick of your shit.” Five months later, in mid-February, O’Donnell abruptly left the show.

Loved and hated, hilariously parodied on Saturday Night Live, the first daytime talk show to host a sitting president—a show that was watched by 6.6 million viewers—and a must-stop for politicians and celebrities alike, The View, during Barbara Walter’s reign, was a cultural institution. But in the past year, it has become more of a cultural punch line. With viewership down to just under 3 million, and the show fighting for dominance in the ratings with shows that have copied it shamelessly, including CBS’s The Talk, the place had become mired in conflict. If press reports were to be believed, a group of high-powered, talented, and famous women were behaving like high-school mean girls. The co-hosts were bickering so badly, according to press reports, and the ratings were so weak, that the show might be canceled.

It was in early July 2014, less than two months after Walters retired, when the news first “leaked” that Rosie O’ Donnell was returning to The View. There was a ripple of surprise in the television world, and, in some quarters, plain shock. The last time O’Donnell had been on The View—for a single season, in 2006 to 2007—it had been one of the most dramatic and traumatic months in the show’s history. There has always been drama on the show—the uproar in 2010, when, to Walter’s visible horror, Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg stormed off the set during a live show to protest Bill O’Reilly’s comments on Muslims and 9/11; the controversy over Star Jones’s over-the-top wedding and misrepresentation of her 160-pound weight loss; and the moment when Sherri Shepherd, the actress and comedian, announced that she was not convinced that the earth was round.

But nothing would top the out-of-control shrieking match that exploded on air between O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck in May 2007. The subject was the war in Iraq—which Hasselbeck supported and O’Donnell did not—but the fight was personal. O’Donnell picked it, accusing Hasselbeck of not defending O’Donnell’s views on the American troops in Iraq in the conservative media. “Here’s how it gets spun in the media,” O’Donnell said. “Big, fat, lesbian, loud Rosie attacks innocent, pure, Christian Elisabeth.” As O’Donnell and Hasselbeck screamed at each other, Hasselbeck nearly in tears, Behar, caught in the middle, could be heard hollering: “Who is directing this show? Let’s go to commercial.” O’Donnell did not return to The View after that meltdown. A day later, her chief writer was reportedly escorted out of ABC after she was discovered drawing mustaches on photos of Hasselback that hung in The View’s studio. 

It had been Barbara Walters’s idea to hire O’Donnell. Meredith Vieira and Star Jones had left the show at the end of the previous season, and Walters was looking for a major star who would boost ratings. And O’Donnell was a huge star; her eponymous daytime talk show had been a big success, the winner of several Emmy awards. She’d gone on to briefly run Rosie, the revamped McCall’s magazine, leaving in 2002 in a nasty battle with the publisher, which ended in a high-profile trial for breach of contract. The case was ultimately dismissed by the judge, but not before stories about O’Donnell’s alleged abusive behavior toward the staff made headlines. 

But O’Donnell did bring a ratings boost to The View—they rose by 27 percent that season—not only because of her stardom, but because of other changes she helped to initiate as the show’s moderator. O’Donnell, says Brian Frons, was one of the best television executive producers in the business. “She could sit on the stage, because she had been a stand-up, and read the audience, have one eye on the monitor, have one eye on the panel, and make adjustments live on the air to make things more lively,” he recalls. It was O’Donnell who, according to Frons, helped move the show more toward politics and the discussion of serious topics—identifying early on the desire of the audience for more news and information, not just entertainment. The show became newsier, smarter, edgier, and the ratings soared. 

But O’Donnell was very difficult to work with—“like a roller-coaster ride or a bumpy trip on a fast-moving bus,” Walters wrote in her 2008 memoir, Audition. O’Donnell fought with Bill Geddie and other top staff. She fell into rages, screamed at the staff, insulted them, and was so vicious that some people who have worked on the show still speak of her using the word “hate.” But although executives in Los Angeles heard from Geddie and Walters how difficult things were, the unhappiness of the staff in New York was not finally why ABC let O’Donnell go. In March 2007, while discussing 9/11, and the “propaganda” of the war on terror, she had declared on air that “in America, we are fed propaganda and if you want to know what’s happening in the world, go outside of the U.S. media because it’s owned by four corporations. One of them is this one,” she said, referring to Disney/ABC. The network’s top executives were not pleased.

We hope you’ll read the whole story on Vanity Fair

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