Ladies Who Punch Read online

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  By the midnineties, Barbara Walters was at the head of her class at ABC, carrying a hefty workload as the number one star of TV news. She served as the coanchor of 20/20, then a place for meaty investigations, cranked out Oscars specials, aired her 10 Most Fascinating People (which began in 1993 with Hillary Clinton at the top), and constantly outhustled her peers for exclusives. In 1995, she scored the first interview with a paralyzed Christopher Reeve, making headlines around the world. A year later, after the O. J. Simpson verdict, prosecutor Christopher Darden sat down with Barbara before anyone else.

  Barbara grew up in New York and Florida, where she lived in a pistachio-colored house. Her father, Lou, ran a string of nightclubs, packed with showgirls and hit singers, which gave her early brushes with famous people—he was constantly socializing with the likes of Milton Berle, Johnnie Ray, and Frank Sinatra. “It made me the way I am,” Barbara told me one day. “I’m not in awe of any celebrity.” Her mother, Dena, stayed at home with Barbara’s older sister, Jacqueline, who was mentally disabled. “My childhood was totally influenced by my sister,” Barbara said. “It gave me a childhood that was sad and kind of lonely because there were things I couldn’t do, like have friends over.”

  Barbara had a few false starts to her career. She wanted to be an actress, but she was too scared of rejection. “You can’t be an actress if you’re afraid of being turned down,” she recalled. After a stint as a publicist (during which she learned how to manipulate the press, a skill that came in handy later), Barbara joined the staff of Today in 1961 as a writer. Because of her gender, this was groundbreaking for the time. “There were six male writers and one female,” Barbara said. “And you didn’t get to be the female writer unless she got married or died.”

  Through sheer determination, Barbara migrated in front of the camera, reporting segments about fashion or a night out with a Playboy Bunny. “I was not the natural choice when I began,” Barbara said. “I was not beautiful. I had a speech impediment. That didn’t help.” She said the standards were different back then. “Most of the women in television now are very lovely, but they are also talented. In my time, they were maybe not as talented.” Her secret to success was perseverance. “What I had was this creative curiosity and ability to ask questions,” she said.

  Her agent slipped a clause in her contract that if the current host left, she’d assume the title. Nobody thought he’d go anywhere, but when Frank McGee suddenly died of bone cancer in 1974, Barbara took over as the first female cohost, opposite Jim Hartz. “Since then, a woman is the cohost on the Today show,” Barbara said. “That’s my legacy.” (In fact, now there are two women: Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb.) Barbara drew in viewers with her tenacity as she interrogated powerful men such as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger with her prickly questions. Because of Walters’s success, TV executives started to let more women cover hard news, enter war zones, and tackle politics.

  In 1976, she shattered another glass ceiling, when she left NBC for ABC to be the first woman coanchor of a nightly newscast. Her new employer shelled out a record $1 million a year to nab their new star—a deal that, forty years later, created a culture where Megyn Kelly could demand $25 million from Fox News, before ultimately fleeing to NBC. The hysteria over Barbara’s move to ABC was followed by questions of whether she could cut it. The press ran sexist stories about how she owned a pink typewriter. Her coanchor, Harry Reasoner, hated her, and the tension was awkward. “We were terrible together,” Barbara said. “From the beginning, viewers were angry with me for doing this to poor Harry.”

  She survived by leaving the news desk and reinventing herself through her trademark specials. Barbara would convene three newsmakers—a celebrity, a world leader, and a miscellaneous person in the news—for an hour of prime time. She wanted to capture her subjects in intimate settings, so she devised the novel conceit of visiting their habitats. Barbara popularized the idea of bringing cameras into celebrity homes, long before audiences were used to MTV’s Cribs or the Kardashians. She became just as famous as the people she interviewed, as she rode a wave of success for the next two decades.

  But in her own home, Barbara’s personal life was fraught. In the fifties, her father gambled away her family’s fortune on a series of bad investments, putting pressure on Barbara to support her parents and her sister with her money. This was an especially odd arrangement for a woman of her generation, who would normally rely on a husband’s paycheck for security. It meant that Barbara had to stay employed—in spite of Lou Walters’s concerns about her longevity on TV. “He was afraid I was going to get fired,” Barbara said about her father. His doubts instilled two traits in her that followed her for the rest of her career: a boundless desire for success and a lurking, irrational fear that her savings could vanish overnight. “I had to support them for so long,” Barbara said of her family. “I knew I had to work, and I just worked harder.”

  Barbara consistently chose her job over her marriages (she had three, with the last one ending in 1992) and raised her adopted daughter, Jackie (who she named after her sister), as a single mother. “I don’t think there was a person I should have been with,” Barbara said. “I don’t look back and think, ‘How did he get away?’”

  In 1984, she met the man who would become her most important companion—her hairdresser, Bryant Renfroe, who always stood by her, just a few feet away from the cameras. He came into Walters’s life after he’d left his salon in Florida to perform miracles at ABC on Joan Lunden and Kathie Lee Johnson (who later married Frank Gifford). Fate led him to Barbara’s apartment one afternoon, after her stylist had to bail. “When I finished, she looked at me and said, ‘I can’t go out like this.’”

  Renfroe ripped up the instructions from the previous stylist and started over. “I always thought her hair looked awful,” Renfroe confessed. “It was choppy, uneven, messy, unconstructed.” He created Barbara’s modern-day look, a bob haircut that was emulated by millions of career-climbing women (just ask Hillary Clinton). “It’s called giving you cheekbones and jawlines,” Renfroe said.

  From then on, Barbara was inseparable from her gay best friend. Renfroe traveled with Walters to all her big interviews and meetings, such as a lunch with Princess Diana at Buckingham Palace. (Barbara always personally introduced him.) Renfroe not only tended to her hair, he provided her with constant moral support. “There were times where the producers gave me headphones because it was important that I heard,” Renfroe said. After she’d wrap an interview with anyone from Cher to Barack Obama, Barbara would scan the room to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, usually calling out one person by name (“Bryant!”) for last-minute feedback. Barbara’s idea of hell was forgetting an obvious question and waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat about what she should have asked. She relied on Renfroe to be her safety net.

  No matter how successful she became, Barbara always pondered new ways to expand her empire. So in her late sixties, when most TV journalists are winding down—if not already deep in retirement—Barbara had a fresh idea. In the spirit of Gatsby, she gazed out at the green light from Oprah’s and Rosie’s docks and envisioned a rival creation, a competing act.

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  The View was born out of a conversation between a mom and her daughter, which seems right because of the maternal relationships—between Barbara and her cohosts—that would fuel the show.

  In the summer of 1996, while wrapping one of her celebrity specials, Barbara took aside her producer Bill Geddie to tell him about a conversation she’d had with Jackie, then in her late twenties. “It’s so interesting,” she told Geddie. “She comes at the world from a completely different point of view.” Barbara wondered if they could create a show around that premise, with women of different generations debating the headlines of the day.

  Her inspiration for the format of The View came from two places. The first was ABC’s This Week, a Sunday news program in which anchor David Brinkley held a roun
dtable with pundits arguing about politics. The other, Girl Talk, which aired from 1963 to 1969, lived up to its name with its host, Virginia Graham, booking trailblazers such as Cindy Adams, Olivia de Havilland, and Joan Rivers for cozy chats—Barbara herself had been a guest repeatedly. “I thought if you could combine those two together, you’d have a successful show,” Barbara said.

  And then there was a show from Barbara’s own history, a missed opportunity that still gnawed at her. In the seventies, she hosted a local NBC program called Not for Women Only (the title alone hinted at the bias women in the TV industry faced). Barbara, who juggled the gig in addition to Today, would assemble a weekly panel of experts—among them soap opera writers, inventors, politicians’ wives—to talk about important issues in the culture, at a time when the women’s movement was on the rise, personified by strong heroines on such shows as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and One Day at a Time. Barbara’s side project, which she binge-taped in an afternoon, was essentially a predecessor to The View, with rotating cohosts. “I sometimes think I should have hung on to that show, syndicated it, and I would have been a very rich person,” recalled Barbara, momentarily forgetting her own considerable worth. “I didn’t. But it taught me a lesson for The View.”

  Barbara didn’t just want to headline her talk show, she also wanted a piece of ownership through her company, Barwall Productions. If it worked, it would be a big step forward, moving Barbara from TV star to entrepreneur. She picked Geddie as an ally because she trusted him. He’d spent a decade with her as the steady hand that oversaw her specials. Geddie, an imposing six-foot-four Republican from Texas in his early forties, could look like a bodyguard next to his five-foot-five boss; he acted as her protector. In his spare time, he’d written a screenplay for the little-seen 1996 thriller Unforgettable, starring Ray Liotta as a man wrongfully accused of murdering his wife.

  It taught him how he didn’t want to spend the rest of his career. “I was not allowed on the set and it was rewritten many times,” Geddie said about his foray into Hollywood. “So I go to a test screening with a bunch of New Yorkers. It was very exciting for me and my wife. The first third of the movie is exactly what I wrote. Then it changes and people start laughing—it’s not a comedy. By the end, it was a horrific experience, and we both sat up like ghosts, thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is the worst movie ever made!’ We walked through a crowd of smoking teenagers in front of the theater. And I remember one young girl took a big inhale and said, ‘Who writes shit like that?’”

  Geddie plotted to move up the ladder in TV. After he received a tip that ABC was canceling one of its daytime offerings, he told Barbara that this was their chance. They wrote up a proposal for what they could slot into that hour. In that first draft, they needed a name for their show, so they used a placeholder, Everybody’s a Critic. It hinted at the tone for what the man behind the curtain hoped to achieve. “I wanted it to be a bitchy show,” Geddie said. “Barbara did not want it to be bitchy. I got my wish, by the way.”

  The ABC Daytime team, run by executive Patricia Fili-Krushel (who’d go on to head NBC News for a time), was in a bind. Nothing they had programmed at 11:00 a.m. eastern time had worked—their latest casualty was Caryl & Marilyn: Real Friends, a talk show starring two Kathie Lee wannabes who’d appeared in a failed NBC sitcom, The Mommies. Because the hour had been so beaten up, roughly 40 percent of the affiliates had taken it back for local programming. As opposed to prime time, when everybody in the country sees the same shows, daytime TV operates under a different system—one in which regional managers can pick and choose what to air in their towns.

  Think of it like the electoral college, but for entertainment. “In daytime, a show must earn the right to stay on, as you clear the country piece by piece,” said Stuart Krasnow, a veteran talk-show producer at Telepictures Productions who worked on Caryl & Marilyn and later The View. Other series aren’t held to that standard, which makes the hurdles for daytime TV greater. “You have a couple hundred different bosses in all these stations that are not going to be happy if the numbers aren’t good,” Krasnow said. “They expect drastic changes. Or get out of the way.”

  At the time, Barbara wasn’t even aware of these intricacies. She was just trying to get her idea approved. She met with Fili-Krushel, who was skeptical at first: “She comes in with the pitch, and I loved the idea, but it was a half-hour show at that point. I said to her, ‘We need an hour. If we can develop the back half, let’s pilot it.’”

  Fili-Krushel had another note. She said that the show’s featured stories needed to be juicier items ripped from the headlines of the New York Daily News.

  “No, The New York Times,” Barbara insisted. “I want to talk about Syria.”

  “I said, ‘That’s not going to work in daytime,’” Fili-Krushel remembered. “So we took Barbara to a daytime focus group. Barbara is nothing if not really smart about television. And she says to me, ‘I got it. USA Today and the Daily News. This is our audience.’”

  Barbara had initially shopped her idea to Roone Arledge, the broadcasting titan who oversaw ABC News. Arledge had saved Barbara after he first arrived, in 1977, by giving her a second chance with the specials after her botched shotgun wedding to Reasoner (who left for CBS). Arledge had also created This Week, the political talk show that Barbara was copying.

  Arledge, who previously ran sports at ABC and pioneered Monday Night Football, managed his news division like an Olympics team. Anchors weren’t just expected to fight competitors from other networks for scoops—they often faced off against one another. For Barbara, this was no problem.

  Competitiveness ran in her veins. She was one of the few TV reporters who dialed publicists and lawyers herself, instead of relying on producers to ask them to deliver their clients. But this anything-goes hierarchy at ABC created tension in the newsroom and sparked rumors (which were true) that Barbara and Diane Sawyer were always trampling over each other for a story. “There were no rules,” Sawyer told me. “Roone thought that competition even in the family would be good.” Sawyer met with him in 1990, a year after arriving at ABC, to protest: “I really felt that it would be impossible for me to be put in a situation where I would be calling and Barbara would be calling, too. That’s not what families do.”

  Arledge had the clout to take Barbara’s enterprise under his wing. But instead, in a decision that would shape the future of The View and create a two-decade tug-of-war, he punted Barbara’s baby to the daytime division. He did worse than that. He strongly advised her against pursuing such a foolish lark. “Roone did not want me to do the show,” Barbara said. “He felt it was too frivolous. He thought it would lessen my reputation.”

  As confident as she was on camera, Barbara hated making decisions about her career. Even the smallest fork in the road turned her into a puddle of uncertainty, a result of having to fight so hard for every opportunity. At NBC, she’d tormented herself for months about leaving for ABC. Once the ink had dried—and faded—on her contract, she spent years at ABC wondering whether she’d made the wrong decision. “Editors love to work with me because I know what I want,” Barbara said. “But not in real life.”

  Arledge’s disapproval spooked his star. She felt backed into a corner and started second-guessing herself. She worried that her talk show would interfere with her stature—how could she fly to the Middle East in a moment’s notice if she expected to greet all those stay-at-home moms in the morning? She loved rolling the dice with trick questions during an interview, but she didn’t like personal risks.

  “I’m not really sure I want to do this,” she told Geddie.

  He pushed back. “It’s really important to me,” Geddie pleaded. “I can’t keep doing the Barbara Walters shows for the rest of my life.”

  She trusted him, and she agreed to dive in. He provided this consolation: “If it’s embarrassing, it’s going to be two years of embarrassing. Not twenty years of embarrassment.”

  Before they took off, the show needed a ne
w name. Calling it Everybody’s a Critic suggested something less approachable. Outside of Siskel & Ebert, which featured two middle-aged white men reviewing movies, most TV shows didn’t thrive on so much opinion. It would be another five years before American Idol debuted and opened the floodgates on a parade of self-appointed experts doling out their nasty critiques on everything from fashion (Project Runway) to food (Top Chef) to ballroom moves (Dancing with the Stars).

  Geddie kept coming back to the idea of different views at the table. Late in the process he thought up a new name.

  “I’ve got the greatest title,” he told Barbara. “It’s going to be called The View from Here.”

  She liked it, but ABC ran a trademark search and came back with an obstacle. A show in Canada already went by that name, so Geddie went with the abridged version.

  “They ran another search, and there was nothing called The View,” said Geddie. “I always thought it was a terrible title. It just didn’t make any sense.” He laughed. “But now I think, ‘What a great title!’”

  2

  Audition

  After Barbara Walters had secured the daytime division’s stamp of approval for The View, she was missing just one key ingredient—her outspoken sidekicks. She cast a wide net for the women who’d soon simply be known as “the ladies,” the coconspirators in her shenanigans. As Barbara came to announce every day in the show’s opening credits, she wanted The View to be multigenerational. That didn’t matter much to Geddie, but Barbara insisted on it based on the wide gap that separated her and Jackie. She arrived at the number of cohosts, four, through TV math. Three would be too few, and with five, not everybody might be able to speak before the next commercial break.