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  Barbara, who couldn’t resist being a journalist even in social settings, probing dinner guests for intimate secrets, left no stone unturned in her search for the perfect View cohosts. She had Geddie research every female TV personality between the ages of twenty and fifty. They couldn’t aim too high, for a Joan Rivers or Brooke Shields, because they didn’t have a budget for real salaries.

  Barbara knew that she couldn’t devote all her time to The View. With her other commitments at ABC News, Barbara planned on appearing on her talk show two to three days a week. The other reason to keep some distance: her lawyer told her not to position herself as the lead on The View, in the likely scenario that the show imploded. That meant someone else would need to steer the daily Hot Topics debates. “I did not make myself the moderator, which I regret,” Barbara said. “Yes, it’s much more fun being the moderator.”

  Meredith Vieira, an ex–60 Minutes correspondent, crept on the short list for that role, based on a recommendation from the show’s supervising producer, Jessica Stedman Guff. Meredith, forty-three at the time, knew Barbara from bumping into her in the elevators at ABC, and she needed a job, since her newsmagazine show, Turning Point, was on the verge of cancellation. But Meredith wasn’t sure if this was the right step for her career. Before social media, serious women in journalism couldn’t dish on a talk show about their opinions. “Once she crossed the line, she was afraid she was going to be a joke,” Geddie said.

  “I remember being very hesitant about even going to audition,” Meredith told me over breakfast near her home on the Upper West Side. “I wasn’t somebody who watched daytime.” Not that she was a snob about it: “I was working, and it had never been an area of television that interested me.” She knew her options as a reporter were limited because she didn’t want to travel so that she could be at home with her three kids. “What’s the worst that can happen?” she thought.

  Barbara wasn’t convinced that Meredith was the right fit either—they wanted funny. So Stedman Guff, who knew Meredith through their children in school, took her out for a bite with Geddie, at the upscale Italian restaurant Café Fiorello. After the lunch, Geddie turned to Stedman Guff and told her that she was right. He liked that Meredith had a wicked sense of humor beneath her cool exterior. “Believe me, she wanted the job,” Stedman Guff said.

  Star Jones was another woman on the wish list. The thirty-five-year-old African-American lawyer was a rising star on TV from her legal commentary on Inside Edition and other shows. As a former prosecutor based out of Brooklyn, Star saw her profile rise through her coverage of the O. J. Simpson trial. She had attempted her own talk show for NBC, but the pilot didn’t impress executives, who decided she couldn’t carry a program on her own.

  “I thought to myself, ‘I am at a crossroads,’” Star recalled. “What do I do? And the phone rang.” It was a producer that she had worked with in the past, asking if she’d be interested in a panel show. Barbara’s name sold her. “Tell me more and send me the information,” she responded. Star agreed to fly to New York from Los Angeles, where she lived in a spacious Hollywood Hills house with a swimming pool, for a chemistry test.

  As the search barreled on, Barbara attended a charity event for Milton Berle, whom she’d known from his performances years ago at her dad’s nightclub. There, she witnessed a hilarious set from a bawdy red-haired comedian who reminded her of Carol Burnett. Joy Behar, fifty-four, riffed about feminism and the sex life of author Salman Rushdie. It made Barbara laugh—on the inside.

  From the stage, Joy had no idea she was leaving such a strong impression. She’d griped to her boyfriend Steve about the “Turner Classic Movies crowd” of Regis Philbin and Maureen O’Hara. “I did a joke about men who marry, how easy it is for them to get a young woman,” Joy said. When she wrapped, Steve told her that everybody in the room was in stitches except for Walters. “So what?” Joy told him. “I’m not going to work for her.” A few months later, ABC asked her to try out for The View.

  The most surprising contender came through the door by accident. Debbie Matenopoulos, twenty-two, a senior at New York University, had been working part-time at MTV as a production assistant. One night, at a party downtown, a casting director told her that ABC was looking for new talent. She should give it a shot.

  For a pre-interview with Geddie, Debbie arrived dressed to kill—if only she’d been trying out for The Real World. She’d donned a baby T-shirt with John Travolta’s mug from Welcome Back, Kotter, a black miniskirt, and knee-high boots. Her hair was dyed Kool-Aid pink for a segment that she’d just taped for MTV’s House of Style, as a free extra. She carried a blue bowling bag for a purse. “It was actually a Kate Spade bowling bag purse,” Debbie recalled.

  Geddie immediately liked her offbeat style, and Barbara stopped by to offer a quick hello. “I met Barbara with my pink hair,” Debbie said. He wanted a reel of her best clips; she didn’t have one. She ran back to MTV and asked her friends to splice together the few minutes that comprised the totality of her on-air experience. “If you were cute and in the office and willing, they put you on television—that’s how MTV was back then.” She was laughing the whole time. “I thought, ‘This is as far as I’m going to get.’ I’m really out of my league here. But I’d have a cocktail story for years.”

  * * *

  On a morning in April 1997, ABC secretly held an audition for The View at the Essex House, the stuffy midtown hotel on Central Park South. The network had rented two adjoining suites. One was used as a waiting pen for the roughly fifty aspiring cohosts who had been selected by Geddie as viable candidates. The other room had been configured with a mock table and chairs. The bedroom was set up with a TV for Geddie and other top honchos to watch how this scrimmage would play out.

  As soon as Debbie entered the waiting area, she felt sick to her stomach. She would habitually throw up when she got nervous—a drawback for a potential TV star. “I was the only person in the room that didn’t have some sort of notoriety,” Debbie said. She sized up her competition, which included actress and motivational speaker Mother Love, NBC anchor Mary Alice Williams, and supermodels Veronica Webb, Emme, and Catherine McCord.

  While these weren’t exactly big celebrities, they were famous enough faces to spook a college student with only a vague interest in broadcasting. “My heart was beating really fast,” Debbie said. “I was intimidated.” She convinced herself that she’d never get the job and decided to flee. But just as she made her way for the exit, she was spotted.

  “Oh, Debbie, I’m so glad you came,” Barbara cooed, having already committed her name to memory.

  Barbara clutched Debbie by the shoulder and slowly moved her back to the center of the room. Barbara then parceled out instructions to the group without loosening her grip, as if she’d just caught a scared puppy. “I’m frozen,” Debbie said. “That’s the reason I stayed, because I was opening the door to leave and she was there.”

  To audition, four women at a time were summoned to the table, with mock topics printed out on note cards. Then they had to make small talk, to see how they’d interact individually and as a group, with new applicants rotating in and old ones out. Barbara wanted the vibe to resemble coffee with girlfriends, but it wasn’t as effortless as it looked. A rhythm had to be mastered, so that the cohosts weren’t shouting over one another. “A topic is like a hot potato,” said Star, who stood out that day in a red cashmere power suit. “You pass it and it moves.” Those that tried to suck up all the oxygen with soliloquies would get the ax.

  Meredith introduced the first group—Barbara, Star, and Debbie—and read the topics from the note cards. “It seemed like a safe role for me,” Meredith said. To get started, the women discussed a story about the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego where thirty-nine of its members had committed suicide to gain entrance into heaven. After Barbara condemned the incident as a senseless tragedy, Meredith pushed back: How do you know? You haven’t been to heaven. Barbara blushed, but she liked the back-and-forth
. The ladies were onto something.

  Another topic from the note cards asked for each of the cohosts to pick the most important people of the twentieth century. In addition to Albert Einstein and Bill Gates, Debbie had an unconventional name on her list—Madonna. The room suddenly erupted in shrieks, as Star addressed her in outrage: You must be crazy.

  Debbie’s choice cemented her fate in TV history. “Later on, they told me that’s why I got the job,” Debbie said. “And I swear to God, that’s how I felt at the time.” She chose Madonna for “what she had done for AIDS, gay rights, women’s rights, and empowerment.” Back then, before reality TV legitimized fame, the reach of even the biggest celebrities had its limits. It would be hard to imagine sitting across from Barbara and justifying that Madonna had accomplished as much as a US president. But it worked. Geddie wagered it would make for must-see TV.

  Once the first session had ended, Barbara got up. She took a spot in the bedroom with Geddie and watched the next group on the TV screen: Joy, her replacement, cozied up to Star, Debbie, and Meredith. The chemistry still crackled without Barbara, and she and Geddie were overjoyed.

  “We’re geniuses,” they said, chuckling to each other. “This is going to be a great show.”

  “Then we pulled Joy out and put in another comedian, and it didn’t work,” Geddie recalled. “We pulled Debbie out and put in another young person, and it didn’t work. We pulled Meredith out and put in another journalist type, and it didn’t work. We tried four completely different fresh people. It never worked again. It was never engaging for the rest of the day.”

  One of the early front-runners decided she had to get a look for herself. After Star’s turn was up, she didn’t pack up. Instead, she snuck into the executive suite, taking a seat right next to them. “All of a sudden, the mattress sags and I look over and Star is sitting on the bed,” said Stedman Guff, who had to escort her out.

  “You can’t sit here while we’re auditioning,” Stedman Guff told her.

  Star, who was never one to surrender in an argument, listed her career accomplishments. “I’m in this business,” she protested. “I’ve been a producer. I’m a lawyer.”

  “I don’t care what you are, honey,” Stedman Guff said. “You’re getting out.”

  That tiff offered an early glimpse into Star’s personality. After word got out that Geddie was considering Star for the show, he was bombarded with horror stories. “She was considered difficult, a problem person,” Geddie said. He wasn’t put off by the warnings because he’d worked with challenging talent before. “I always said the same thing: everybody is difficult, and everybody could be terrible.” Geddie paused. “I hadn’t met Rosie yet.”

  There was no need for lengthy deliberations. “The first group was the group we hired,” Barbara said. Joining her as the new cohosts of The View would be Meredith, Star, Debbie, and Joy. Over the years, Barbara loved to speculate about the fairy dust that brought the women to her audition in that exact order. However, it wasn’t entirely coincidental that the foursome they opened with was the group they picked. “We started with them,” said Geddie, “because we liked them best—a comedian in her fifties, a journalist mom in her forties, a professional lawyer in her thirties, and someone in her twenties.”

  Walters personally called all of her new cohosts to tell them the good news. “I thought, ‘I’ll give this a chance,’” Meredith said. “I never thought twenty years later I’d be talking about this. It was an interim thing for me until I figured out what I wanted to do.”

  Joy’s job wasn’t full-time like that of the other cohosts. She’d be filling in as the alternate on the mornings when Barbara wasn’t there. “It was nice to have a couple days off,” said Joy, who was contemplating a sitcom but didn’t want to move to LA from New York. “My agent at the time told me not to do it. The money wasn’t enough. But I wanted to do it because it was in New York and right near my house.”

  At least she had an agent. Debbie was in the wilderness, without any representation. Or electricity. She’d been ducking notices from Con Edison about her unpaid bills. One night, returning home from class, she clicked the red button on her answering machine to find a familiar voice. “Oh, Debbie, it’s Barbara,” the room purred. “I just want you to know that you’ve got the job. I couldn’t do this without you.”

  Debbie rewound the tape and listened to it again, in case a friend was playing a prank on her. It sounded real. She only believed it after her roommate confirmed that it wasn’t a joke.

  “You got the job!”

  They ran downstairs to buy a bottle of champagne to celebrate. When they got back, the unpaid electricity bill had caught up with them. “In one day, my lights go out and I get the job of a lifetime,” Debbie said. “Here we are drinking champagne in the dark.”

  * * *

  One last important hire was left. The show needed a director. Barbara met with a handful of prospects, but her favorite was a lanky guy who owned his own production company devoted to low-budget music videos and series on MTV, Comedy Central, and Lifetime. Mark Gentile convinced Barbara that he’d be a steadfast workaholic for The View.

  “It was a time for me where I had quite a few shows on the air, and I was making a lot of good money,” Gentile said. “But I wanted to move to a higher place in my career. I wanted to find a single show that I would focus all my energies on and would make successful.”

  He chatted with Barbara for fifteen minutes. At the end of their conversation, he closed with a hard sell. “I’ll tell you what,” he vowed. “I’ll work with you for six months. If you don’t love everything I do, I’ll give you all your money back. Every dime. I don’t want it.”

  The next day, he got a call from the network with the job offer. True to his word, Gentile refused to cash a single paycheck for many months, until he’d received the A-plus from his boss.

  The look and feel of The View needed to be worked out. To curb her nerves about the show ruining her reputation, Barbara pushed to make The View unlike other daytime talk shows. She nixed the idea of a live studio audience, preferring to do the debates in a small room, reminiscent of her own quiet studio at 20/20. Cameras were set up, but that bare-bones version tested miserably. She caved and agreed to what she described as “a small audience.”

  The network shot one pilot with Barbara and another without her. The early feedback suggested that the intrepid journalist might not be as beloved in a different environment. “The show with Joy tested better than the one with Barbara,” Fili-Krushel revealed. “I said to Bill, ‘We have to edit this report!’” Geddie told her that Barbara, as the executive producer, would want to know the truth. “Not a good idea,” Fili-Krushel recalled.

  When Barbara saw the results, she was genuinely hurt: “Why do they like the show better with Joy than with me?” That led Barbara and Joy to have a rocky first year, as Barbara continually worried that Joy was out to sabotage her. Barbara even jokingly compared her new colleague to All About Eve. The daytime executives were unnerved that the thick-skinned Barbara would be so insecure. They tried to assure her that Joy rated better simply because she was funny, which the audience liked.

  In another complication, Arledge phoned Fili-Krushel to try to kill the project: “Pat, I understand you don’t like Barbara’s pilot.”

  “I go, ‘Roone, where did you hear that from? I love Barbara’s pilot,’” Fili-Krushel recalled. It quickly dawned on her what he was trying to do. “So I called Bob Iger”—now the CEO of the Walt Disney Co., who then was the chairman of ABC—“and I said, ‘We can’t afford not to put programming on air.’” He was on her side. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ll handle Roone.” (Iger had his doubts, too. “We can’t get one host to work. How are we going to get five?” he asked after watching the test episodes.)

  The odds were stacked against The View because research indicated that the audience at home wasn’t highly educated women—but primarily made up of low-income moms. According to a survey by Fr
ank N. Magid Associates, 40 percent of daytime viewers lived in households with an income of less than $20,000 a year, and 85 percent of them hadn’t graduated from a four-year college. Black women watched the most daytime TV, followed by Latina and Asian women. White women came in last. The conventional wisdom was that this demographic didn’t want to catch up on news stories in the middle of the day. They were seeking an escape with beauty tips, makeovers, celebrity sightings, and fights on Jerry Springer—or so everyone thought.

  The new home for The View was a sign of just how long ABC thought the show would last. The network didn’t furnish Barbara with a shiny studio near Regis and Kathie Lee or Good Morning America. Instead, The View took over the digs from the recently canceled soap opera The City on West Sixty-Sixth Street, just a block from the Hudson River.

  The building was a schlep for celebrities coming from Rockefeller Center (where Rosie held court) or Times Square. The producers’ offices were in the basement. The dressing rooms didn’t even come with individual toilets, but rather a communal bathroom for all the ladies to share. “Oh my God!” said Star, when asked about the arrangement. “Until this moment, I didn’t even realize it was one bathroom. We were a family. You share a bathroom with your sisters.”

  The loftlike stage where the soap opera had taped needed to be reimagined for a talk show. Gentile, who was commanding the makeover, was trying to wrap his brain around how to squeeze all four (and later five) ladies behind a single table. He found the solution one weekend at a Pottery Barn in Connecticut, where he spotted a piece that would make TV history: “It was just a wooden table with a leaf. It was low-rent.” He’d have the cohosts sit on one side, and The View’s logo at the end, shined from a spotlight that he set up next to the camera. “Just don’t walk in front of it,” he said. “That’s the show.” Although the table changed over the years, the basic concept never did, a testament to Gentile’s engineering.