rom her new perch at the head of the glass table on “The View” Tuesday morning, Rosie O’Donnell was expressing skepticism about Oprah Winfrey’s recent declaration that she was not gay.
“I don’t mind opinions,” Barbara Walters says of “The View,” of which she is co-owner. “But I don’t want us to be bashing anybody.”
After showing the “View” audience a clip of Ms. Winfrey and her friend Gayle King struggling to pump gas while driving cross-country this summer, a “Thelma and Louise” excursion they had recorded for the fall premiere of Ms. Winfrey’s talk show, Ms. O’Donnell said, “I think that’s very typical of gay relationships — not saying they’re gay.”
“You might be a little bit gay,” said Ms. O’Donnell, hardly shy about her own homosexuality, as she spoke to Ms. Winfrey, whom she called “Opie,” as if she were there. “You’re just not doing it.”
Ms. O’Donnell appeared to be warming up for yet another rant — only a few days earlier, she had said that “radical Christianity is just as threatening as radical Islam” — when a voice suddenly materialized from the opposite end of the table to offer a subtle but firm transition: “Just to get away from that, because I’d like to get away from that.”
It was Barbara Walters, who is not only a co-host of “The View” and its co-executive producer, but also a co-owner of the show, with ABC. Five months after hatching the idea of hiring Ms. O’Donnell to replace Meredith Vieira as moderator of “The View” and then selling ABC on the notion, Ms. Walters’s gamble already appears to be paying off, though, as that “Oprah” moment made clear, she has been keeping a vigilant eye on her newest hire.
Midway through her third week on the job, Ms. O’Donnell has washed over the relatively placid set of “The View,” as it begins its 10th year, like a jolt of Red Bull. Thus far at least ratings are up over last year at this time, by 30 percent during her first week. New sponsors have also come on board, lured by the prospect of having Ms. O’Donnell plug their products in the body of the show, including Fisher-Price’s 10th-anniversary “Tickle Me Elmo” doll.
Last week Ms. O’Donnell managed to wangle free cookies for the 200-member “View” audience for a year by paying homage to a new sponsor, the Keebler brand, in a way Ms. Vieira never could have: she suddenly rose from her seat to sing Keebler’s praises alongside a costumed Keebler elf and a chorus line of male dancers in white tails.
And yet, Ms. Walters said in an interview after Tuesday’s show, for all the energy Ms. O’Donnell has transfused to “The View,” it has occasionally fallen to Ms. Walters and her co-executive producer, Bill Geddie, to rein in Ms. O’Donnell, both on camera and off. This has been especially true, Ms. Walters said, when Ms. O’Donnell has sought to hype a product they don’t like or book a guest they don’t want (they were too discreet to say which) — or, in the case of Ms. Winfrey, to poke fun at perhaps the biggest star in television.
“I have to be very careful,” Ms. Walters said Tuesday, speaking from her corner office on the 10th floor of an ABC office building overlooking Lincoln Center. “Rosie’s opinions are her own. They’re very strong. And I don’t mind opinions. But I don’t want us to be bashing anybody. We’ve talked about that, and Rosie is very conscious of it.”
“Rosie has a thousand ideas a day,” she added. “Her enthusiasm shows, on the air and off. But there are also times when we say: this doesn’t work, it can’t just be anything you want.”
For her part Ms. O’Donnell said that any anxiety she had expressed in advance of her first day — at one point this summer she had lamented, on her blog, the loss of control she was feeling — had melted away, largely under Ms. Walters’s tutelage. Among the “notes,” or informal critiques, that Ms. Walters had given her, Ms. O’Donnell said, was a gentle reminder to let her co-hosts talk more, which she has taken to heart.
“I know from being in the ensemble of a Broadway show,” said Ms. O’Donnell, whose credits include “Grease” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” “that when everyone looks good, you look good. The goal is not to take focus, but to share focus.”
In effect the arrival of Ms. O’Donnell represents Phase 1 of what Ms. Walters intends to be a two-part renovation of “The View,” following the orderly departure of Ms. Vieira for “Today” on NBC and the abrupt sign-off of Star Jones.
Soon, Ms. Walters said, she and Mr. Geddie will take up the question of who should succeed Ms. Jones. While there is no front-runner, they said, they are committed to the idea that Ms. Jones’s successor as co-host be a member of a minority, so that what is now a panel of four white women is more reflective of society.
“Personally I miss an African-American voice at the table,” said Mr. Geddie, who was interviewed alongside Ms. Walters. Even before Ms. O’Donnell’s arrival, the producers had begun bringing in guest hosts, some of them candidates for the job and others, like Sara Ramirez of “Grey’s Anatomy,” not.
For the moment their priority remains the acclimation of Ms. O’Donnell, as well as of her co-hosts and the audience, which was about 3.4 million viewers a day her first week. The producers have already reconfigured the seating arrangements for Ms. O’Donnell and her three co-hosts: Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Joy Behar, in addition to Ms. Walters. On Ms. O’Donnell’s first show Ms. Walters was seated to her left and appeared almost on the verge of being swallowed up by her.
Though Ms. Walters is not substantially shorter than Ms. O’Donnell (they are both about 5 foot 6), Ms. O’Donnell is “taller from the waist up,” Ms. Walters explained. And so a solution was hatched: three inches were cut from the legs of Ms. O’Donnell’s chair, and Ms. Walters was moved to the other end of the table, switching seats with Ms. Hasselbeck.
It may have been the best favor that the producers ever did for Ms. Hasselbeck, a former contestant on “Survivor” who is the youngest of the panelists. In Ms. O’Donnell she has found both a foil for her political and social views — Ms. Hasselbeck is generally conservative; Ms. O’Donnell is anything but — and an ally when the subject of young children is raised. (Ms. Hasselbeck has one child, Ms. O’Donnell four.)
On Tuesday’s show Ms. Walters managed to steer the conversation away from Ms. Winfrey successfully by raising, and then knocking down, an idea floated by Ms. O’Donnell to have the four co-hosts travel to Florida on a bus, in their version of Ms. Winfrey and Ms. King’s road trip.
When Ms. Walters said she had no intention of being cooped up in a small space with “other people’s children,” Ms. O’Donnell drew close to Ms. Hasselbeck and said, in a stage whisper, “Let’s look offended.”
In an interview yesterday Ms. Hasselbeck emphatically denied a recent report in The Daily News of New York that she was “crying every day” in the wake of Ms. O’Donnell’s arrival.
“Rosie and I were hanging out in her pool with our kids this weekend,” she said. “We have a lot more in common than people think.”
Meanwhile, just as Ms. Hasselbeck’s profile has been raised by Ms. O’Donnell’s arrival, so has Ms. Walters’s, to the extent that is possible after a 30-year career at ABC. (In November the network will celebrate 30 years of her prime-time specials with a two-hour special titled “30 Mistakes in 30 Years,” in which she will revisit her bloopers, including calling Arnold Schwarzenegger “Warren,” and those of her guests.)
A bit Ms. Walters did recently on “The View” about hearing her dog, a Havanese, actually speak to her — she supposedly told Ms. Walters she loved her — may have led The New York Post to question Ms. Walters’s sanity, but she and Mr. Geddie have mined it as comic gold. (The Post headline was “Babbling Walters: Stress Taking Toll on ‘View’ Boss.”)
Ms. Walters did reject one follow-up idea from Mr. Geddie, in which he would have put a camera on the dog, Cha Cha, for an entire show, so that any chance utterances would be recorded. “Cha Cha feels she’s being exploited,” Ms. Walters said.
And although she retired from her other job, as co-host of the newsmagazine “20/20,” in 2004, Ms. Walters continues to land big “gets” outside “The View,” including traveling to Australia yesterday on behalf of ABC News to interview Terri Irwin, widow of Steve Irwin, the “Crocodile Hunter.”
Asked how she had gotten the interview, Ms. Walters said, “She, I guess, knew my name
