In recent months, The View has been clocking headlines for mysterious fart noises, Whoopi Goldberg apologizing for making offensive Holocaust comments and others, and Joy Behar’s aggressive flirting with Liam Neeson, as opposed to endless rumors about in-fighting amongst the co-hosts. It’s the kind of atmosphere that former host Rosie O’Donnell might be more comfortable with, as opposed to the set-ups that were in place during her pair of past stints as moderator, where she feuded with both Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Goldberg herself. But fans will probably see The View ending outright before the award-winning comedienne would ever return to the daytime hit.
As the latest guest on the podcast Now What? with Brooke Shields, Rosie O’Donnell reflected on past ups and downs in her career, from Penny Marshall hand-picking her to join the stacked cast of A League of Their Own to having her Now & Then character’s lesbian identity erased from the final script. Later in the episode, Shields brought up The View, which O’Donnell was part of from 2006-07, before she rejoined in 2014 ahead of exiting the show again in 2015. She addressed her lifelong love of sports and her dedication to teamwork being a motivating factor whenever she landed the topical chat show, but said producer Bill Getty’s favorable relationship with Elisabeth Hasselbeck caused strife, despite her attempts to stay friendly. Here’s how she put it:
I was trying to get her to 'feel' more than to 'fact.' I'd go, 'What what do you feel about this?' I tried. Here's what I did. When I took the job. I said to myself, 'I'm going to love her no matter what.' I took her to her first Broadway show. I took her kids to see the Nickelodeon shows with me and my kids. I had her to my house with her husband; they swam in my pool. I thought we were friends in a civil kind of way, and then one day on the show, she kind of throw me under the bus and I was like, 'Are you fucking kidding me?' I finished the show, got my coat, walked out and said I am not going back. And I didn't, until a few years later when they asked me to come back, and Whoopi was on it, and you know, we clashed in ways that I was shocked by.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck certainly wasn’t the only person that Rosie O’Donnell traded barbs with on The View, but that back-and-forth seems to have stuck with her more than 15 years later. The L Word: Generation Q star exited the show for the first time in 2006, with the reasoning given by ABC as being contract-related.
O’Donnell, who hosts her own podcast called Onward, then talked a bit about other arguments she got into during her two stretches on The View. She claimed her attempts to bring focus to the 2007 documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib were deflected by Bill Getty in lieu of focusing on “new fall lipstick colors,” and said Whoopi Goldberg pushed back against her effort to shine a light on the Bill Cosby allegations that were spreading.
When asked if she felt instances like those made her into a “villain,” a label that several former View co-hosts have earned from viewers, O’Donnell said:
In some ways I was, but it was alright, you know? I had produced my own show; I was the solo boss, and here I was not having any power to make decisions.
Her second stint on The View, which was bolstered by fellow new co-hosts Rosie Perez and Nicolle Wallace, was also short-lived. She ended up leaving again in February 2015, sharing her personal reasons for leaving as being tied to health problems. But she doesn't sound like she'd change things around if she had them to do again, even if she probably won't ever go back. When asked about any possible regrets, O'Donnell answered with:
No, I don't have any regrets in terms of like career and show business like that. I feel like each thing, I learned something. But I know this: it's not the best use of my talent to get in a show where I have to argue and defend basic principles of humanity and kindness. I don't know. It was it was not something that I would ever do again.
Having also hosted one of the more popular talk shows of the 2000s, Rosie O'Donnell knows a thing or two about how daytime TV programs can be produced in ways that don't make hosts feel like they're being ignored. But while you'd have to look around to catch repeats of that show, new episodes of The View can be found every weekday on ABC at 11:00 a.m. ET.
