The latest ruckus caused by Sherri Shepherd has nothing to do with the shape of the earth — this time, the View co-host is admitting that she’s “had more abortions than [she] would like to count.” Scandalous! Except that didn’t bother us as much as this quote from Shepherd:
Picture it, the women on The View are discussing the dreaded n-word. Whoopi Goldberg is explaining why black comedians use it and why they should be allowed to — she’s very frustrated. Elisabeth Hasselbeck doesn’t understand. She starts to cry and seems to make the argument that we can’t move forward in race relations if black entertainers keep using the word. I roll my eyes. Barbara is uncomfortable and interrupts. If you can’t picture it, check out the video after the jump.
If you want to listen to the abridged audio version of Barbara Walters’ over-hyped memoir, you can forget about hearing one thing in particular: moaning coming from the upstairs bedroom. That’s because the five-disc, six-hour spoken edition of Audition cuts out the most talked about talking points: “None of her romantic relationships outside of her three marriages — not even the most-publicized revelation from the book, her secret romance with former Massachusetts Senator (and then married) Edward Brooke — are anywhere to be found.” Some readers (listeners?) might view this as the publisher cheating consumers out of the most interesting, raunchy details of the TV vet’s life, but don’t go crying to them; they’re standing by their “abridged means edited” excuse. And Cindi Berger, Walter’s publicist, says that her client “approved the abridged version of the book,” but just didn’t feel the love stuff was important enough to include. “The focus was just to be about her work,” Berger explains. “The men in her life was not her priority.” Somebody should have told her endless publicity tour that.
Yes, according to conservative media group and underground revolutionary army-sounding The Resistance. Barbara “has now sunk to the very level of other attention-starved celebrities such as Paris Hilton or even Steve-O from Jackass,” because of a 30-year old affair she admits to in her new book Audition. As you’ll remember from the countless media reports and Larry King interviews, she was sleeping with then-Massachusetts senator Edward W. Brooke, who was married at the time, while seeing Alan Greenberg, the future chairman of Bear Stearns.
And then, after breaking up with Brooke, she dated Alan Greenberg and Alan Greenspan (how husband to NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell) at the same time. And oh, the hijinks that ensued because of their similar names! CONTINUED »
As part of promoting her book Audition, Barbara Walters, whose wrinkles you may count to find the age of the the TV biz, is throwing everyone under the bus. First it was ex-beau Sen. Edward Brooke, and now Star Jones, who tried reinventing herself as a skinny Court TV host and, well, found little success.
In her memoir, Walters claims Jones forced Walters and the crew to lie on the show about her gastric bypass surgery, which she’s only recently come clean about. So how does bitter Star Jones, who’s saying goodbye to maybe-gay husband Al Reynolds, feel about Barbara’s treatment? CONTINUED »
Is it fair to expect the press to snap up gossipy tidbits about your publishing house’s high-profile new book and then ask them to keep proper reviews under embargo? No!, says Galley Cat’s Emily Gould.
Barbara Walter’s memoir Audition, from Knopf, has been splashed all over this website and elsewhere for the revelation that she bedded a married Massachusetts senator (and a black one at that!). That news bite was revealed on Oprah by Walters herself as part of a publicity tour. But what about the rest of the book’s material? Knopf wanted today to be the first day any reviews would be published, since today is the official on-sale date. But the New York Times ran its review yesterday, flouting the request, which is essentially an invitation for a paper as influential as the Times to break the rules. Because it can.
Why didn’t Barbara Walters published her very personal memoir Audition, of which Knopf is printing 625,000 copies, before now? Because that would’ve involved revealing she has a developmentally disabled older sister, her estrangement from her nightclub impresario father, her on-and-off-again relationship with her daughter, the details of three broken marriages, numerous other romantic relationships (including that one), and the fact that when she left Today, there were no going away parties of the kind Katie Couric saw. CONTINUED »
In Barbara Walters, we see a woman who refuses to imagine what the end of her career might look like. Which is why she felt perfectly comfortable hitting up Oprah, to plug her book Audition: A Memoir, to reveal she carried on an affair with Massachusetts’ married republican senator, Edward W. Brooke, in the 1970s, after meeting in a New York restaurant. She wouldn’t want to go out on this note, would she?
The affair ended when Washington Post gossip Maxine Cheshire started running items about the twosome; Walters says that’s when she ended the relationship, though that’s also when Brooke asked his wife for a divorce. But for the good of their careers, they stopped seeing each other.
“Ed Brooke was simply the most attractive, sexiest, funniest, charming, and impossible man,” writes Walters. “I was excited, fascinated, intrigued, and infatuated.”
Every reporter’s attempt to get comment from Brooke, who is now 88, have failed, which, uh, might suggest he has no interest in discussing his decades-old tryst. Kudos to Walters, then, for throwing him under the bus to move copies of the book.
In Barbara Walters’ new memoir Audition (yes, there are entire decades of her life she hasn’t covered yet), she relays some of her own horror stories after leaving the Today show. Perhaps a certain struggling CBS Evening News anchor can relate? When she headed to ABC to anchor the evening news, Walters encountered her own brand of backlash.
“The blood was so bad between us that Harry’s cronies on the crew took to using a stopwatch to note my airtime [so that Reasoner got his share]. Harry’s hostility soon began to show on the air. I remember reaching toward him at the end of one broadcast, in a friendly manner, just to touch him on the arm. He recoiled, physically recoiled, in front of millions of people. The media picked up on the bad chemistry.”
And Walters still knows a thing or two about bad chemistry. CONTINUED »
Barbara Walters’ mostly uninteresting Oscar special last night – oooh! Juno’s Ellen Page doesn’t believe she deserves an Oscar, and neither did the Academy! – did get us riled up for a brief moment. It happened during the show’s opening, where Walters introduced the people she’d be talking to while drifting around the airy home that may or may not belong to her.
And when you least expect you, you got to see more leg than Katie Couric ever offered.
Larry Birkhead, the shark-toothed suitor of Anna Nicole Smith, is best remembered for successfully implanting his sperm into Smith’s uterus (despite competing specimens from lawyer Howard K. Stern, Bahamian royalty and the husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor) and for conveniently stepping forward to accept his parental responsibilities just as soon as he realized that the bulk of Smith’s multimillion dollar estate was set aside for the care of baby Dannielynn.
And now he’s known for something else: Deluding himself into thinking he was Barbara Walter’s “10 Most Fascinating Person of 2007.”
Hey, Barbara Walters might have made Matt Leblanc cry, but evoking emotions from third leading men on popular sitcoms is not what she’s about. She’s a journalist, no strike that, a Journalist.
The celebrity interview is over: “I am not going after the tabloid stuff, I don’t do it,” she said.
Um, what word is missing? Oh, yeah, anymore. She claims all of this year’s 10 Most Fascinating People won’t be fascinating in a schadenfreude sense or because they have a new movie out.
Well, 78 isn’t too late to try to change a legacy. Because convincing us that she’s not responsible for us getting misty when we see a celebrity under soft lighting is going to be harder after she’s dead.
Bill O’Reilly goes on The View to promote his new children’s book, “Kids Are American, Too.” (Rejected titles included “Gays Are American, Too” and “Hey! Did You Know Black People Ran Their Own Businesses?”) And all joking aside, we think Bill made the right call stopping by the morning gabfest.
Afer all, we can’t think of a better place to corrupt the minds of innocent minors (and slow-thinking adults) than a daytime talk show featuring a menopausal shrew, an actress/comedienne who wants a threesome with Nancy Pelosi and her husband and a woman who’s still convinced the Earth is flat. [Queerty]
It was so hard to pick the single most vomitous portion of this interview (which aired on Sirius yesterday) between Barbara Walters and Inside The Actors Studio host James Lipton, that we’ve picked the top three moments, in order of ascending grossness, instead.
First, we were bemused:
BARBARA WALTERS: 1968 was my first year at The Today Show—trust me—I would not be floozying around in Paris…this is a disgrace!
Then slightly uncomfortable:
BARBARA WALTERS: What profession would you like to attempt if you weren’t doing this?
JAMES LIPTON: I would like to be a classical dancer, but what this provides, though Barbara, that I would be forever young and never injured.
And finally, borderline queasy:
Months after stepping down as the bombastic moderator of The View, Rosie O’Donnell finally admits her real reason for her abrupt exit: Barbara Walters had her canned. The ugly truth came out during Roseanne Barr’s late night set at Comix (where, incidentally, the laughter was also canned) where O’Donnell also shared a few of Barbara’s more intimate nighttime rituals.
Rosie started off by saying, “When I was fired by Barbara Walters” - the first time she didn’t stick to “The View’s” spin that her departure from the show was by mutual agreement.
Rosie claimed onstage that Walters and other “View” couchmates wear earpieces through which producers tell them what to say, which she refused to do.
Rosie also confided that she and the veteran newswoman were actually so close early on in her tenure as moderator that Walters recommended Rosie use Astroglide, which, she added, took her by surprise.
And while we’re not particularly shocked by O’Donnell’s admission that Walters showed her the door, we are slightly traumatized by the fact that we’re now privy to Barb’s preferred brand of lubrication. In fact, it’s pretty much the second grossest View related news we’ve heard all week, right behind the revelation that Whoopi Goldberg’s always fantasized about a Nancy (and Paul) Pelosi “sandwich.”
Editorial Director
