Audition (97 page)

My other inspiration came from a woman named Virginia Graham, who at one time had a modestly successful daytime program called
Girl Talk
, on which I occasionally appeared, sometimes along with another guest or two. Again the conversation was unrehearsed, and when it spun off in different directions, it could be a lot of fun. So I wondered, if we took a small and varied group of women and made them a permanent cast, would that work for an informative and entertaining hour? I thought it might.

The network was not overly impressed but said they would consider it enough to have us make a pilot. Furthermore, they insisted that I would have to be one of the women on the panel. Otherwise they didn’t think they could sell the program to advertisers. I told them that if I could appear on the show just two or three times a week and not have to be the daily moderator, I would give it a try.

The key, of course, was to choose the right women with the right chemistry. Just a simple thing: find four smart women of different ages and different personalities who could disagree without killing one another and, better still, might actually like each other.

First step: we rented a large hotel suite, outfitted it with comfortable sofas and chairs, brought in cameras, put a mini control center in an adjacent room, where, on a television monitor, we could then watch the various applicants talk and see how they related to one another. We would give them a list of subjects from the newspapers that day and let them just go at it.

We had talked to dozens of talent agents, and the word got around that we were planning a gabfest with a bunch of women. The result of this was that we were deluged with résumés, phone calls, and tapes. Everybody and her aunt knew the perfect person. All you have to do is talk, the various applicants thought. So why not me?

The very first group of four looked promising but who knew? As a possible moderator, we were considering an attractive woman named Meredith Vieira. Meredith had, at one time, been a correspondent on
60 Minutes
on CBS, but because at the time she had one young child and was pregnant with a second, she didn’t want to travel. Don Hewitt, the program’s executive producer, felt that all his reporters had to travel to do stories and he couldn’t, in all fairness, make an exception for Meredith, so they came to a rather unhappy parting of the ways. More recently I knew Meredith from ABC, where she was working on a newsmagazine the network was trying out, called
Turning Point.
Unfortunately the program didn’t make it. Meredith’s contract at ABC was not renewed, and she was at loose ends. I checked and heard from her producers that she was not just smart but, almost more important to me, possessed a wicked sense of humor.

At first Meredith wasn’t really interested in appearing on a daytime program. Her whole professional life had been on news broadcasts. Why should she take the risk of going on an untried daytime talk show? But her husband, Richard Cohen, who had himself been a news producer at CBS, persuaded her to consider it. “It could be fun,” he said, “and you won’t have to travel.” She could also be back from the studio before the kids got home from school. What did she have to lose?

Score one for our possible moderator.

Sitting on the couch next to Meredith was Star Jones, an African American woman who had been a prosecuting attorney in Brooklyn and distinguished herself first reporting for Court TV and, later, covering the O. J. Simpson trial for
Inside Edition.
Star was large in every way, from her résumé to her weight to her personality. She was funny and knowledgeable, especially on subjects relating to the law. Her favorite word was “allegedly.” She was single, in her thirties, and looking for a husband. The reports that Bill and I got were that she was sometimes difficult to work with, but we thought, as part of an ensemble, she would be okay.

Then there was the woman we agreed might provide real humor. Her name was Joy Behar. A comedian, she had worked small clubs around town but was almost unknown to the wider public, including me. One night I went to a benefit honoring Milton Berle, an old family friend whom I have mentioned before. I was sitting next to Regis Philbin when the entertainment began and onstage came a good-looking redhead who told a joke about the author Salman Rushdie. Rushdie had written a book which some Muslims found blasphemous, and a directive had been issued that he should be killed. As a result Rushdie was in deep hiding, protected by Scotland Yard. “I’ll tell you the difference between men and women,” said Behar. “Rushdie has been in solitary confinement for five years with no visitors at all allowed…and in that time he’s been married twice.” Well, it loses something when I tell it, but I thought, “This woman is perfect for us.”

Finally we auditioned a lively young girl in her twenties who told us that she was appearing occasionally on MTV. Her name was Debbie Matenopoulos. She was kind of ditsy and likable, and we thought she might be just right for the youngest member of the panel.

Here is what was so amazing. This group of four was the first panel we tried out in two full days of auditions. We thought they were great but we didn’t think we should just go with the first group, so we tried out something like fifty women and mixed them up in different groups of four. Finally, toward the end of the second day, Bill and I looked at each other and said, “You know, the first group was the best. Let’s go with Meredith as the moderator and Star, Joy, and Debbie on the panel.” I would join the group twice a week on the days I could fit it in among my other assignments.

As for the name, we liked
The View from Here
, but we were told that name was being used by a program in Canada so we shortened it to
The View
, and that was that.

Bill and I were co–executive producers. Together we worked out a format based on my original idea. The basis of the program would be the unrehearsed and spontaneous chat sessions among the women. We would call this segment, “hot topics.” Essentially the program still follows that early format.

Bill was and is indispensable. He hired a director and a bunch of bright young producers, gave them marching orders, and whipped the show into shape. The producers, most of whom are still with us, start with Alexandra “Dusty” Cohen, who, as supervising producer, is Bill’s right arm. Then there are two coordinating producers, Matthew Strauss and Patrick Ignozzi; Donald Berman and Sue Solomon are responsible for booking the guests. We also have had, from day one, the talented and creative director, Mark Gentile, and a wondrous young woman, Fran Taylor, who has managed, no matter what their size or shape, to dress all the cast members. Linda Finson supervises production and the budget of the show. These are just some of the staff who, then and now, helped to make
The View
a success. We have had very little turnover throughout the years.

In the beginning my job was to do the outside work, which was primarily to deal with the network, the advertisers, the publicity people, and the press. In short I had to keep us afloat.

The View
was launched on August 11, 1997. We deliberately put it on when the viewing audiences were at their summer low. This, we felt, would give us a chance to work out the kinks and get used to one another. We felt fresh and new. The set, however, was neither fresh nor new. The network didn’t have enough faith in our budding program to invest in a new set. What we inherited was left over from an unsuccessful ABC soap opera called
The City.
It was located on West Sixty-sixth Street, next to the Hudson River. A few more steps to your right and you’d be in the river.

One more thing: we were a network program, not syndicated. In syndication the programs are sold to individual stations all over the country. They can appear on any network or station at any time. For example, Oprah airs at 9:00 a.m. in Chicago but at 4:00 p.m. in New York. Because we are a network program, we are on the air every day during the same time period, 11:00 a.m. in the East and 10:00 a.m. everywhere else. When we made our debut, all of the ABC-owned and-operated stations were obliged to carry us. (There are ten of them.) But at that time of day, stations not owned by ABC but affiliated with the network had the choice of carrying the show or not. What we did not know was that more than 20 percent of the country would not be carrying the show in the morning time period. Sometimes, the affiliates would run it in overnight hours. This included quite a few big cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., as well as many smaller markets. Other cities, like Miami, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee, didn’t carry the show at all. Week after week, part of my job was to phone the heads of these various stations (many of whom I knew personally) or their station managers, to try to persuade them to carry
The View.

It was like the riddle of the chicken and the egg. If we wanted to get big guests to come on the program, we needed ratings to entice them. Therefore we had to have as many stations carrying us as possible. On the other hand, if we didn’t have those big-name guests and the big ratings, the affiliates wouldn’t carry us. They would instead stick to their own programs, which they felt would do better than
The View.
But little by little the viewers got a taste of our program and liked the taste. Over time our ratings began to rise, and gradually the stations climbed aboard. Today we have almost 100 percent coverage.

My being involved with the program had other ramifications. I could help book the big-name celebrities. For example, I had interviewed Tom Selleck for one of our
Specials.
He, like the very nice man he is, agreed to be our first celebrity guest. In the first week we had Michael J. Fox and Sylvester Stallone visiting us, both good pals doing me a favor. In the beginning the big-name guests only wanted to come on the show when I was on. This occasionally still happens, and I try to be on the program if it is someone I know really well, like Tom Cruise or Michael Douglas. But as the program became more popular, it became easier to book guests whether I was on or not.

Our panel knew none of our early concerns. What they knew was that
The View
was a great opportunity for them. Our first few weeks went surprisingly well. We five women would then, and still do, arrive in the large makeup room at 9:00 a.m., a full two hours before the program goes on the air live. We then receive a sheaf of papers from a researcher, with the news stories of the day. Talking and laughing, we decide which subjects we want to tackle. If it starts a discussion or better still, an argument, we know we are onto something, but we are careful not to leave the argument in the dressing room. We save it for the broadcast so we can let the chips fall where they may. Then as now we loved stories that concerned sex. Surefire winners. I often cringed because I thought they went too far, but Meredith and Joy both had raunchy senses of humor, so vaginas and penises became part of our almost daily vocabulary. I sometimes said, “Enough with the penises,” but the conversations were lively and just shocking enough. Besides, I rather liked my position as the panel prude.

Star often had the most to say, and her views were almost always interesting and provocative. She soon became the audience’s favorite member of the panel. She was also the one viewers remembered the most, being the only African American of the group. An extra plus was that, as a lawyer, her habit of saying “allegedly” kept us out of trouble.

Joy was truly funny. She was also opinionated and very smart. We had made the right choice.

Meredith made a terrific moderator. While her hair and makeup were being done, she sat with an assistant, and together they wrote all the introductions to whatever the hot topics would be. Her introductions were on the teleprompter. The rest of the hot topics were ad-libbed.

However, as charming and funny as Meredith could be, it took the audience a while to identify with her. At first, she came across as just another pretty lady. In time, though, the audiences came to realize that she was probably the most outrageous of all of us. One day she would tell us that she didn’t wear underwear, the next day she would tease about her three children and tell stories about her cat who peed all over the house.

Meredith could get away with almost anything, but she also had her serious side. Her husband, Richard, has multiple sclerosis and had colon cancer. Meredith talked of this from time to time, although never in a maudlin way. We all talked about personal aspects of our lives. We were a kind of family sharing our good times and bad.

Joy, the viewers learned, was divorced, had a daughter, Eve, and had been living with Steve, a former teacher, for almost twenty years. He was often the butt of her good-natured jokes.

Star’s dream, she told us, was to marry an African American Christian man with a good job. She was not, she told us, about to support any man. In the meantime she discussed her dates. Most of them didn’t seem to last, and we secretly prayed that she would meet some real nice guy real soon.

We also, as time went on, worried about her increasing weight gain. But none of us had the courage to say anything to her. Star didn’t take to criticism easily and could tell us to mind our business—especially because, on the air, she constantly talked about how much she liked her body. The audience could relate to her, but in retrospect, we should have pushed the matter as she was becoming dangerously obese. I regret that I didn’t confront her, although later Star told me she wouldn’t have listened anyway.

In the early months of the program, of all the women, I shared the least about my life. I was afraid to let go too much on
The View
because I was known as a serious interviewer on
20/20.
As a result I came across as rather reserved, and sometimes I inhibited the others. I worked on this and knew that I was making progress when, one day, having made a joking remark, my daughter said, “At last, Mom, people know you have a sense of humor.”

Part of my reticence to talk about myself was that Roone Arledge, still the president of ABC News and my boss, had been against my doing the program at all. He didn’t forbid it, though he could have. Instead he said that he thought my involvement might take away from my authoritative position in news. (This was many years before television journalists were expected to have personalities as well as deliver the news.) I thought about it for a while and decided it was a challenge I wanted to take, but Roone’s admonition stayed in my mind. Fortunately, as it turned out, the viewers knew me so well from all those years on the air that they were able to accept the fact that I wore two hats. Indeed, I think, as my daughter expressed, the fact that I could have fun and laugh made me more likable to the viewer. So everything seemed to be working.