May 08 2008
Star Not Happy With Babs’ “Audition”
You have to kind of wonder what really goes on backstage at The View. There’s just been too much happening the past few years. While when they show started, they seemed like one big happy family, a sisterhood, the infighting that has come to light is at some point shocking.
Sure enough, Debbie Matenopoulos ended up leaving on some odd terms, but that was quickly forgotten as the show continued to have much success. Then Meredith Vieira left for the greener pastures of The Today Show, and Star Jones announced a surprising move to leave. She’d undergone quite a metamorphosis in the year before that, first dropping a stunning amount of weight on the show, then getting married. It no longer seemed important for her to tell us with every given opportunity that she was a lawyer.
It was never quite clear one way or another why she was departing, but it was clear there was some type of animosity somewhere. Rosie O’Donnell joined the cast after this, but it was never harmonious. She brought ratings, which I’m sure is what ABC was looking for, but they may not have been looking for the quite all of the attention Rosie and The View were getting, as she battled not just The Trump and Kelly Ripa, but also her cohost Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Barbara Walters.
Rosie left the show after just one season, and was replaced by Whoopi Goldberg. The show has seemed harmonious with this turn of the cast, but now fights are coming to light again. Barbara Walters has a new memoir out, Audition, in which she talks of The View and an interesting chapter of her life in the the 70s, when she had an affair with the married United States Senator Edward Brooke.
It’s Star Jones that is objecting the most to what Barbara has written, and surprisingly not Brooke or his wife. Star is upset as Barbara wrote of everyone on the show being upset with Star as she refused to admit on the air that she had gastric bypass surgery to lose all that weight. She reportedly didn’t want to be the poster child for the extreme weight loss surgery, embarrassed that she couldn’t get it under control any other way. Barbara wrote in her book that it “put us all in a terrible position,” feeling they had to lie for Star. She wrote that Joy Behar was particularly out of sorts with it all.
Star has now struck back at Barbara, saying it’s a “sad day when an icon like Barbara Walters, in the sunset of her life, is reduced to publicly branding herself as an adulterer, humiliating an innocent family with accounts of her illicit affair and speaking negatively against me all for the sake of selling a book. It speaks to her true character.”
I’m guessing we’ve heard the end of it, as Barbara doesn’t seem the type to strike back, unless she issues a statement publicly on the air of The View. It just seems like it doesn’t end for them, though, regardless of what happens with this sitaution. It makes you wonder if everything does go back to Barbara, as both Rosie and Star had problems with her. She must run a tight ship.
Photos Courtesy of msnbc.msn.com and keplers.com.
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