Jenny McCarthyis opening up about her “terribly unprofessional” firing fromThe View.
Speaking with Ramin Setoodeh, author ofLadies Who Punch: The Explosive Inside Story of The View, on SiriusXM’sThe Jenny McCarthy Show, she discussed the day that she and many other staff members were let go, including costarSherri Shepherdand co-creator and former executive producer Bill Geddie.
“I love Bill [Geddie],” McCarthy said Friday about the longtime producer of the talk show. “Bill is someone that I think sometimes got a really bad rap.”
“When it was — I call it the Red Wedding atThe View, the day there was like 17 people let go,” she explained about the day that both she and Shepherd were fired, comparing it to the brutal slaughter in season 3 ofGame of Thrones. “And then Bill and there was five other producers or something like that. It was a lot of people. … I felt so bad for Sherri and Bill, my heart broke for them.”
Although McCarthy said that she “was only there a year,” she also “knew it wasn’t really my place to be.”
But she felt for Geddie, who created the show alongsideBarbara Walters.
“But for Bill, to watch someone like that be kind of shoved out the door after creating the show with Barbara the way they did — the way they handled pretty much anyone’s firing was, I think, unprofessional,” she said, and added, “Terribly unprofessional.”
She also claimed on her episode with Setoodeh that ABC lied to her about keeping her on the show, which resulted her from turning down other work at the time.
“Towards the end of the season, I was getting other offers to do shows, so my agent said, ‘Will you let us know if this is working out, because it doesn’t feel like it is, but let us know because we want to take these other jobs,’ and they said, ‘Yeah, she’s fine, we’re going to bring her back, we love her,’ ” she alleged.
Said McCarthy: “It was all a lie, it was all a lie so we wouldn’t take the next job.”
PEOPLE is out toShepherd’s rep for comment. Walters has not commented on any of the claims in the book. A rep forThe Viewhad no comment.
Charles Sykes/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty; Cindy Ord/Getty
According to McCarthy, she took the job expecting to bring some humor to the Hot Topics segment and even turned down an opportunity with CBS for her own daytime talk show. ReplacingJoy BeharandElisabeth Hasselbeck, McCarthy intended to provide pop culture expertise as the show veered away from politics.
McCarthy told Setoodeh that after she started atThe View, she began wondering which version of Walters she’d see every day at the studio: “Hopefully, I get the Barbara Walters who is nice,” she recalled telling herself.
“You know the movie Mommie Dearest?” I remember as a child watching that movie and going, ‘Holy cow!’ ” McCarthy said of the biographical drama about Joan Crawford’s allegedly abusive relationship with her adopted daughter, Christina Crawford.
“I’ve never seen a woman yell like that before until I worked with Barbara Walters,” she added.
McCarthy also said that Walters, then 83 and approaching her final year on the show, wasn’t ready to let go. “Imagine a woman like Barbara Walters,” McCarthy said. “It’s her last year and she doesn’t want to leave. Think about that. And I’m the new bitch there.”
McCarthy also claimed that Walters would forget who the celebrities being discussed on the show were, such asKaty Perry. McCarthy said she was told they couldn’t “do pop culture anymore because [Walters] doesn’t know who the people are” and that she was instructed to tackle politics instead.
“I panicked because I don’t consider myself a political person,” she said. “Now I had to figure out, ‘Am I coming out as a Republican or a Democrat? Where do I stand on all the social issues and political issues?’ “
McCarthy said she became increasingly unhappy as the show swiveled back to politics.
“I was going to work crying. I couldn’t be myself,” she said. “My fans were telling me, ‘Where’s Jenny? They aren’t letting you be you.’ “
“Every day I went home and I was miserable,” she added “It really was the most miserable I’ve been on a job in my 25 years of show business. I kicked myself for not taking the CBS job, of course.”
The Viewairs weekdays (11 a.m. ET) on ABC.
source: people.com
