35 
THE VIEW
1996
Barbara Walters and Bill Geddie were at the River Café, the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, to shoot footage for one of her TV specials. They chatted as the crew set up lights. “We should do a daytime show,” her executive producer said to her, and not for the first time. He was a fan of daytime talk shows in general and of host Regis Philbin in particular; he had always wanted to produce one himself. She had an idea about a fresh approach. “My conversations with my daughter are so interesting,” she said. “We come at life from a completely different angle.” What about a show that featured a panel of women from different generations?
That seemed to be that.
The next year, in 1997, Patricia Fili-Krushel, the president of ABC Daytime, called Geddie to say she was in search of a show to air at 11 a.m. Eastern Time, a time slot where a series of efforts had flopped. The Home Show had been canceled in 1994; Mike and Maty had been canceled in 1996. Now Caryl & Marilyn: Real Friends was going into reruns in June until something could be found to replace it. David Westin, then president of the ABC Network, had given her an ultimatum. (Westin later became president of ABC News, succeeding Roone Arledge.) “We had failed in that daytime, that time period again and again and again,” Westin told me. “I said, ‘Pat, this is the deal: You got deadlines. I think you got six months to come up with something, or I’m going to give it to News.” That is, ABC News would take over the 11 a.m. hour to air a show of its own.
She called Geddie. “You’re always talking about doing a daytime show,” she told him. This was his chance.
Geddie and Barbara wrote a pitch for a show that he dubbed Everybody’s a Critic. She would cite two inspirations for it. One was Girl Talk with Virginia Graham, a daytime talk show that featured celebrity guests. Barbara had occasionally appeared on it during her early years at the Today show. But the syndicated show had been canceled in 1969, nearly three decades earlier. The other was the political roundtable on ABC’s Sunday morning program, This Week with David Brinkley, which she regularly joined. What the two shows shared was candid conversation, the sort of lively exchanges among opinionated people that you might overhear at a dinner party or a bar.
Fili-Krushel had reservations. Barbara wanted to engage on serious topics. Fili-Krushel wanted to keep it light. The show’s featured headlines should be ripped from the tabloid New York Daily News, she said. “The New York Times,” Barbara countered. “I want to talk about Syria.” But she was persuaded otherwise after watching focus groups of daytime TV viewers. The experiences of her impresario father, his roots in vaudeville and nightclubs, had ingrained in her the imperative of keeping the audience in mind. “I got it,” she said. “USA Today and the Daily News. This is our audience.” Less Syria; more celebrities.
One problem: Roone Arledge was against the whole idea.
The idea for the new show was “frivolous,” he told her, one of those dismissive adjectives often deployed against women. He warned it would undermine her hard-won reputation as a serious journalist. “Roone felt it was potentially dangerous, and it would be canceled within a year or so, and it would be very bad for her reputation,” Geddie said. “Completely unworkable,” Roone said.
But Fili-Krushel didn’t work for Roone. She called Westin, their mutual boss, with the proposal for Everybody’s a Critic. “And I said, ‘You know what? That’s a great idea. Why don’t we do that?’ ” Westin told me. “But Barbara was under contract to ABC News. And I went to Roone and he said, ‘No way. I’m not doing that because once she does that, she’ll be distracted. She won’t be paying attention to 20⁄20 and things like that.’ ”
It was the only time Westin could recall flatly overruling Roone. The two were close; they worked together for years in various roles. At the crucial meeting, they talked on a conference call. “I said, ‘I’m making the decision. This is too good an idea. We’ve got to make this. We’re doing it,’ ” Westin said. “He was furious, furious. I said, ‘I’m sorry; it’s just too good an idea.’ ”
ABC rented a suite at the Essex House hotel on Central Park South, near the network’s headquarters. Crew members set up a makeshift TV control room in the bedroom and arranged the furniture in the living room in front of a curtained window. In an adjoining suite, models and motivational speakers and TV personalities and would-be TV personalities waited for a chance to try out for a new daytime talk show that no one was sure would succeed.
Cameras began to roll for the first audition—three prospects and Barbara, arrayed on a couch and some chairs. Talking.
“We’ve all seen it: ‘39 Dead in Cult Suicide,’ ” said Meredith Vieira. The veteran journalist had arrived that morning a bit wary of this prospective enterprise. She held up a copy of the New York Post from a few days earlier with the headline in screaming type. Thirty-nine people had been found dead at an estate in a San Diego suburb, members of a group that believed the Hale-Bopp comet then streaking across the sky was their ticket to heaven. “Heaven’s Gate,” they called themselves.
“These young people are obviously searching for something,” said Star Jones, a former prosecutor in Brooklyn who was trying to get a toehold on TV as a legal affairs commentator.
Debbie Matenopoulos, a senior at New York University whose TV experience consisted of a part-time job as a production assistant at MTV, chimed in. “This UFO thing doesn’t strike me as odd,” she said breezily.
When Barbara called the mass suicide a senseless tragedy, Meredith challenged her, albeit teasingly. How do you know? she asked. You haven’t been to heaven.
For the audition’s second take, Meredith, Star, and Debbie stayed in their seats. Joy Behar, a stand-up comedian who had hosted a cable TV variety show, was summoned to take the place of Barbara. Barbara went into the bedroom to observe on the TV monitor with Geddie.
The conversation that followed among the group on the audition tape was engaged and engaging. “Barbara and I looked at each other and we thought, ‘We are geniuses! Look what a great show it’s going to be!’ ” Geddie told me. They began to try different combinations, swapping in the women waiting in the next room. “It never worked again, the entire day of these people coming through,” he said. “It was tedious. Nobody had anything to say.”
They ended up with the cast they had started with.
There was still a tentative tone to the handwritten letter Barbara sent Mary Alice Williams, telling her she didn’t make the cut. “This is a very difficult note for me to write, for you know I think you are absolutely terrific,” she wrote to Mary Alice, who had been an anchor on programs at CNN and NBC. Barbara had urged her to try out. “It came down to a choice between you and Meredith, and since Meredith is already an ABC employee, the weight was on her side. Who knows? Things can possibly change.”
At the beginning, though, the lineup would be the even-keeled Meredith, a working mother in her forties, as moderator. On the panel would be the outspoken Star and the quirky Debbie, a member of Gen X. When Barbara couldn’t be the fourth member on the set because of her other obligations, Joy would step in; she soon became a standing member of the panel, too. “The ladies,” Barbara would call them, viewing them as her TV daughters, although not all of them would last as members of the family.
“I wasn’t sure if it would be a success,” Joy told me. She had other projects in the works, including a sitcom; she had already recorded the pilot for that. “But I wanted to live in New York; I didn’t want to be in L.A. at all. And I also felt that it would be a smart show because of Barbara.” Her agent advised against taking the gig, arguing it didn’t pay enough. “And I said, ‘Well, it’s in New York, and it really uses my abilities to talk off the top of my head. And it’s Barbara Walters.’ And so that’s why I took the job.” A quarter-century later, she would be the only original panelist still sitting at the table.
Debbie would be let go two years later; what were generally derided as her goofy comments had made her a regular target on Saturday Night Live. “We hired her because she wasn’t intimidated by the rest of them, and she should have been,” producer Jessica Stedman Guff told me. Star would be pushed out in 2006 amid a flurry of recriminations. Meredith would leave that year, too, to become co-host of Today, the job Barbara once held. Joy would outlast even the show’s founders. There would be friction and fame, shouted arguments and tearful dramas. Eventually, even the august New York Times would call it “the most important political TV show in America” and put the co-hosts on the cover of its Sunday magazine.
It would be called The View.
Barbara didn’t need the work when The View was launched, and yet she did.
She was already the best-known broadcaster on the air. That said, she was now sixty-seven years old. While older men might be seen as distinguished-looking, the working assumption of the day was that no woman would be allowed to age on the air. Geddie recalled a conversation he had when he joined Barbara’s team in 1991, when she was sixty-one. “One of the male executives at ABC said, ‘It’s a great job, kid, but you’re only going to have it for another year or two.’ I said, ‘Oh, why?’ He says, ‘Nobody wants to see a woman over sixty on television.’ ”
“She saw the writing on the wall,” Joy told me. “She knew about ageism, sexism in the industry. She didn’t want to retire like Walter Cronkite was forced to retire at sixty-five. She saw that, and she said, ‘They’re not going to put me out to pasture,’ and she came up with this show. I mean, it was brilliant. It was a show to go into her nineties, if she wanted. And she almost did.”
There would soon be some troubling signals for her at ABC News. In 1998, the network merged 20⁄20 and Primetime and made Diane Sawyer and Barbara co-hosts on a Sunday night edition of the expanded 20⁄20 franchise. Diane had lobbied for the change “as only Diane can lobby,” Roone would recall; she thought it would ease the war between her and Barbara for big interviews. But Barbara opposed it. Despite the name change, the editions on other nights of the week, hosted separately by her and by Diane, continued to compete. Ratings fell. The Sunday program wouldn’t last.
“We hadn’t taken lemons and made lemonade,” Barbara complained. “We’d taken lemonade and made lemons.”
Two years later, Westin split them back into two separate shows, each with its original name. But the next year, in 2001, ABC moved 20⁄20 out of its traditional Friday nighttime slot to make way for a dramatic series, Once and Again, that would end up surviving just one more season. Media analysts interpreted the schedule change as a slight for Barbara; so did she. She was “amazed and disappointed,” she told The New York Times, suggesting it might prompt her to reconsider her contract with the network.
She would retire from 20⁄20 in 2004, at age seventy-four. By then, The View was going strong. She would be a mainstay on it for another decade. “She loved to be on the air; she really did,” Alexandra Cohen, the supervising producer of The View known to everyone as Dusty, told me. “It was really like oxygen for her. And the more it became water-cooler conversation, the more she loved it.”
Over time, she became more willing to reveal herself on the show, even to make fun of herself. On this, Roone had been right. On The View, Barbara became less the journalist, more the personality. It was a chance to demonstrate that she wasn’t only the relentless inquisitor. “I think there was a time when I was considered too serious and without a sense of humor because I was always in charge, especially asking very strong men questions,” she said. “It was considered rude or pushy.” But on The View, “I could be funny; I had women whom I could joke with, and I could show—good, bad, or indifferent—my personality.”
For the Halloween show in 2003, she dressed as Marilyn Monroe, sporting a tousled blond wig, a strapless pink gown, a feathered boa, elbow-length satin gloves, and oversized faux diamond jewelry. She sang a breathy version of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in a performance that made some on the set cringe. A year later, The View was being shot in Las Vegas on a set outside Caesars Palace, designed to resemble the Roman Colosseum. She arrived atop a throne being carried by four muscular men scantily clad as gladiators.
“Move over, Cleopatra,” Meredith declared to laughter.
Four years later, The View was back in Las Vegas. This time, Barbara climbed into illusionist Lance Burton’s magic box and, to all appearances, was sawed in two—her blond hair visible at one end of his table and her apparently disembodied feet sticking out of the other.
Walter Cronkite never did that.
At the start, the executives at ABC Daytime weren’t entirely confident this show would break the losing streak for its late-morning time slot.
“They wanted it to work, but they didn’t expect it to work,” Geddie said. Here’s how he knew that: They decided against investing in a new set. Instead, the show was assigned to use the set that had been constructed for a soap opera called The City that lasted for a year and a half before being canceled in March. It depicted a loft apartment in SoHo with an enormous paned window that would have provided a magnificent view of New York City, if it hadn’t been just a faux window on a TV set.
“It’s got a view,” Geddie thought when he saw it. With that, he had the perfect name for the new show; his initial proposal of “Everybody’s a Critic” hadn’t survived. It should be called “The View from Here,” he proposed. But a trademark search found that a Canadian show had already copyrighted that name. So the American version would be shortened.
The show would have to win over its early doubters. After the turbulence in the time slot, some of ABC’s biggest affiliate stations had chosen to air other shows then. Barbara began calling station managers in Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C., to woo them back. She also persuaded some big-name actors to join the new show as guests despite its low initial ratings, a favor for its celebrity booker. The first week on the air, The View managed to score appearances by Tom Selleck, Sylvester Stallone, and Michael J. Fox.
Barbara developed a routine for the days she was on the show. Hairdresser Bryant Renfroe and makeup artist Lori Klein would arrive at her Fifth Avenue apartment in a chauffeured car provided by the network; she would dump her bags in the back seat and then lead her small entourage in a morning march across Central Park. When they emerged on the West Side, the car would be waiting there, and she would climb in to ride to the studio on West End Avenue. (“A few more steps to your right and you’d be in the river,” she said.) The co-hosts would gather in the makeup room about 8:30 a.m. to choose a half-dozen issues for the “Hot Topics” segment that started the show.
“I was always saying, ‘Make sparks,’ ” Geddie told me. He wanted to avoid subjects on which they all agreed, dismissing them as “ladies who lunch” conversations. He finally had a sign printed up—“MAKE SPARKS”—and hung it in the small holding room just off stage.
They made sparks, not always intentionally. The View was groundbreaking, the start of a wave. Barbara, who had defined the big TV interview a quarter-century earlier, was now at the forefront of the new age of reality TV. The show blurred the lines between news and opinion. It showed women—forceful women, loud women—in charge. It opened the door for candid conversations about marriages and miscarriages, about identity and sex. (“I sometimes said, ‘Enough with the penises,’ ” Barbara recalled, describing herself as “the panel prude.”)
This was not the chitchat among the well-mannered ladies on NBC’s Not for Women Only, which she had moderated in the 1970s, or on the syndicated Girl Talk with Virginia Graham in the 1960s. These discussions were supposed to be revealing even if they were painful, perhaps especially if they were painful. It was a reality show and a news program and a soap opera. “A genius bit of television,” Vanity Fair declared.
“We didn’t create a new format,” Barbara said. “We created a new atmosphere.”
The View reflected the rising tide of feminism across the country. “The idea of women talking to one another on daytime television is not exactly radical,” The New York Times wrote in its review when the show began. “The idea that those women should be smart and accomplished is still odd enough to make ‘The View’ seem wildly different. It actively defies the bubbleheads-’R’-us approach to women’s talk shows.”
In the years that followed, a string of talk shows would be launched in the image of The View, tinkering mostly with the precise gender makeup of the co-hosts. NBC premiered Later Today (with three female panelists) in 1999; it lasted a year. Dick Clark Productions started a syndicated show called The Other Half (with four male panelists) in 2001; it lasted two years. CBS debuted The Talk (with five female panelists) in 2010; each show began with a segment on a headline of the day called “Everybody Talks,” its version of “Hot Topics.” In 2014, Fox News launched Outnumbered (with four female co-hosts and one male), a conservative-leaning version of the genre. Tyra Banks’s FABLife (with one male and four female panelists) debuted in 2015 for a single season.
None of them achieved the lifespan, the ratings, or the buzz of The View.
In time, the show had an effect not only on the broadcasting industry but on American politics. It became a floating focus group, part of the national conversation, and a destination for ambitious pols. The back-and-forth seemed more casual than, say, Meet the Press, but in fact it demanded more authenticity and tolerated fewer canned answers than traditional political shows. It gained credibility with women just as they were becoming an increasingly powerful force in elections.
In 2010, when Barack Obama became the first sitting president to appear on a daytime talk show, it was on The View. Joe Biden appeared on the show as vice president and as a presidential candidate. So did John McCain and Mitt Romney and Donald Trump.
But the biggest ratings she ever got—indeed, the biggest ratings any such show had ever gotten—weren’t for an interview with a president but with someone else who worked at the White House. With an intern named Monica.