Wild drama on ‘The View’
New book, “Ladies Who Punch,” has the details.
Barbara Walters warned in an old opening of “The View” that perhaps she’d created a show featuring “different women, (with) different points of view, maybe a little too different.”
“Ladies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of ‘The View,’ ” by Variety’s New York Bureau Chief Ramin Setoodeh (in stores now) alleges behind-thescenes betrayal and consistent conflict on the show. For weeks, the work through early excerpts has spurred headlines about the co-hosts’ contempt for one another. The book even seemed to reignite a feud between Rosie O’Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, whose tenures as hosts overlapped in the 2006-2007 season.
The show is now in its 22nd season. Here are the book’s most shocking claims:
Rosie O’Donnell’s bumpy tenure
Setoodeh says it was an adjustment when O’Donnell joined the team. She hosted the show from 2006 to 2007 and then again from 2014 to 2015.
“It was a completely different show,” current host Joy Behar told the author. “It became a lot about Rosie O’Donnell.” Former show director Mark Gentile assessed: “From Day One, she was here to teach these morons how to do a show. Everything we did was wrong, no matter what it was.” O’Donnell also had ire for former executive producer Bill Geddie, an “idiot” she thought of as a “misogynistic alpha male.”
Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s hardships
Hasselbeck wrote in her book, “Point of View,” out last week, that being fired from “The View” was so traumatic it brought on an asthma attack. Setoodeh says Hasselbeck “threatened to quit often, sometimes even telling Barbara to her face (or behind her back) that she was over ‘The View.’ ”
Setoodeh also writes of an alleged backstage meltdown that stemmed from a heated on-camera discussion about the morning-after pill. After Hasselbeck expressed her conservative view, an exchange with Walters supposedly set Hasselbeck off. “As the show cut to a commercial, Elisabeth ripped up her note cards and stormed off the stage,” the book says.
Star Jones’ dramatic exit
Star Jones, one of the show’s original hosts, took things into her own hands in 2006 when she announced her departure from “The View” on-air, to the surprise of her colleagues. Jones revealed the show was “moving in another direction.”
“Nobody at ABC had the courage to tell Star to her face that she was getting fired,” Setoodeh writes. The news supposedly was broken to her by Jones’ exhusband, Al Reynolds.
Jenny McCarthy’s misery
McCarthy, a host from 2013 to 2014, told Setoodeh it was “the most miserable” she’d ever been in the industry. “I was told, ‘We cannot do pop culture anymore because (Walters) doesn’t know who the people are,’ ” McCarthy relayed to Setoodeh, explaining the show wanted her to dive into politics. “I panicked because I don’t consider myself a political person . ... I was going to work crying. I couldn’t be myself.”
Joy Behar’s close-call firing
Behar, with the show from the start, was ousted in 2013 but tells Setoodeh she had a close call when O’Donnell first joined the show in 2006. Behar says she was told “a hundred times” to keep O’Donnell’s coming aboard under wraps, but when approached by Entertainment Tonight, she told the outlet she was excited to work with her new co-host. Minutes later, she was reminded by Walters not to “say a word” about O’Donnell.
“I go back to my (hotel) room, practically saying the rosary, even though I don’t believe it,” Behar said in the book, noting she then got a call from Walters.
“I want you to know I’m not renewing your contract,” Walters supposedly said. Behar told Setoodeh she was ready to get another job but that Walters “changed her mind ten minutes later.”
Behar said she had a similar nonchalant attitude when she was given the boot.
“I had been planning to get out of there,” she told Setoodeh, equating it to being “just bored.”
Behar returned to “The View” in 2015 and is a current co-host.