Ramin Setoodeh - Ladies who punch: the explosive inside story of The view

Barbara Walters was creating a scene. Not that she minded it. As the most powerful woman in the news business, her mere presence at Spago in Beverly Hills infused the room with an aura of royalty. The chef came over to welcome her. Other patrons leaned over their plates to get a better look. Any meal with Barbara was always an intimidating exercise, which started with her dropping the names of some people shed recently run into: Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, Jennifer Lopez, and more. On this evening in the winter of 2007, her dining companionBrian Frons, the president of ABC Daytimetried his best to keep up.

The View, the daytime talk show that Barbara had created in 1997 with a panel of mild-mannered women, had peaked in Season 10. The show was averaging an impressive 3.5 million viewers, up 17 percent from the previous year. Normally, nothing made Barbara happier than strong ratings, like the high school valedictorian that gloated over every percentage point on a math quiz. Yet, despite a surge in viewership, Barbara felt miserable.

In just a few months, The View had suffered through a series of embarrassing controversies, drawing the anger of Donald Trump (mocked for his hair and, even worse, his finances), Kelly Ripa (accused of homophobic behavior after she told a guest, Clay Aiken, not to cover her mouth with his hand), and the entire Asian American community (subjected to a racist impersonation). One culprit was behind all these fires: Rosie ODonnell.

Barbara knew what had to be done. In the past, shed quietly orchestrated the firings of other cohosts on The View as they outlasted their welcome: Debbie Matenopoulos in 1999, Lisa Ling in 2002, and Star Jones in 2006. Even though Barbara had recruited Rosie herself, she admitted that shed made a terrible mistake, telling Trump that much in a private conversation.

Barbaras decision to push out Rosie wasnt simply a power play. It was an act of self-preservation. Rosie had disrupted the normal mechanisms of a talk show. She fought constantly with the shows director, Mark Gentile, and berated the senior staff. She hated the executive producer, Bill Geddie, so much that he took a temporary leave of absence to get away from her. On top of that, Rosie was running around telling the staff that Barbara, at seventy-seven, was much too old to be on TV.

For most of her career, Barbara had been known as a serious news anchor. Now, all that had changed. Her empire had expanded in a lopsided direction, unheard of for a news icon. She looked more like the matriarch of an out-of-control familya septuagenarian Kris Jenner before the world knew who that was. Camera crews from TMZ regularly camped out on the sidewalk of Barbaras Upper East Side apartment, trying to ask her about the latest drama unfolding on The View. She didnt like it one bit.

I know youve been very calm this year, and I really appreciate that, Barbara told Frons after theyd exchanged pleasantries.

I want the best for you and the show. He sighed, momentarily relieved.

Barbara was nothing if not direct. I do want you to know, she calmly announced, if you re-sign Rosie to this show, Bill and I are going to quit.

Barbara Walters, the griller-in-chief of world leaders and presidents, had a soft spot for a heroine that gulped cosmopolitans. Barbara loved Sex and the City, the HBO series about four girlfriends trying to have it all in New York City. Sometimes, for a fleeting moment, shed imagine herself in Carrie Bradshaws Manolo Blahniks. I watch old reruns, she told me one afternoon, sitting in her dressing room at The View, decorated with framed pictures of her daughter, Jackie, and her beloved Havanese dog, Cha-Cha. I still think Sarah Jessica Parker is adorable, and I want her to meet Mr. Big and live happily ever after. The View, which debuted one year before Sex and the City, even played like the unscripted versionminus the one-night stands, but with just as much yakking, fussing, and chatter about defining a womans worth on the journey to having it all.

In television history, The Views influence is significant in a way that doesnt usually get said out loud. When Barbara started the show, with a group of pals (Meredith Vieira, Star Jones, Joy Behar, and Debbie Matenopoulos), news and opinion were clearly separated. In the pre-Twitter age, reporters such as Barbara werent allowed to tell the public what they thought, let alone speculate about a presidents marriage or relationship to his mistress or children (which The View made into a national pastime). The show offered a venue where opinion wasnt just as important as news, it was the news in some cases, such as when Rosie ODonnell made noise with her September 11 conspiracy theories or Whoopi Goldberg refused to believe her friend Bill Cosby was a rapist. We didnt create a new format, Barbara said. We created a new atmosphere. In 2011, Anderson Cooper unveiled an afternoon talk show while keeping his anchor job at CNNnobody questioned him because Barbara had already done it.

Speaking of CNN, its political coverage had come to look a lot like The View, with Trump supporters playing the role of Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Its hard to watch television now without running up against a row of bickering pundits. The View got there first, as the Martha Washington of panel shows, and it made the idea of a single talk show host (Jerry Springer, Sally Jessy Raphael, Ricki Lake, etc.) seem quaint. In our supersize culture, why settle for one voice when you can have fiveeven if that means straining to hear them scream over one another?

Barbara handpicked all the original cohosts of The View, called them the ladies, and treated them like her TV daughters. As each of the ingnues rose to fame, their own personal lives and dramas became mini-sagas that unfolded in real time. To be a cohost of The View meant excavating your deepest secretsa foreshadowing of our TMZ (and TMI) culture. In a way, The View was TVs first mainstream reality show after The Real World. Yes, three years later, Survivor took credit for that, but The View opened a window into the personal relationships among strong women, a predecessor to Bravos Real Housewives or MTVs The Hills. It was like a reality show and a soap opera, said Debbie Matenopoulos, the youngest cohost, who got the job when she was twenty-two. Theres something about how raw and real it would be.

The View certainly paved the way for the CBS knockoff series The Talk, which emphasized less politics and more celebrity; the Fox show The Real, targeted to younger women of color; the ABC cooking show