Authors: Joe Muto
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Politics
“Never turn it off. For any reason.”
Jesse Watters was another
Factor
associate producer, a few years older than I, but still shy of thirty. He had somehow worked his way into Bill’s good graces enough to become the show’s resident ambush interviewer, regularly sent out with a camera crew and a handheld microphone to capture any reluctant guests unfortunate enough to stir Bill’s ire. It was a position that held some esteem—ensuring the frequent reception of kudos from the boss, and the chance to be on air every once in a while.
Jesse had done dozens of these ambushes before, so this was old hat for him. But I’d never been. It would be my first time, and I was nervous. Meanwhile, my partner was decidedly not nervous. He lounged in his seat, looking relaxed and not at all like someone who was about to publicly interrogate a famously volatile celebrity. It was October 2007, late afternoon on a Friday. Our commuter train was rolling toward Huntington, a Long Island bedroom community and the site of a book signing that, unbeknownst to the author, was about to get rudely interrupted by an ersatz camera crew from the number one program on cable news.
Our target: talk show host, comedienne, provocateur, and Sworn Enemy of Bill: Rosie O’Donnell.
—
The marching orders had come just the day before, during the pitch meeting. Jesse had informed Bill about the signing. Rosie would be autographing her new book,
Celebrity Detox
—an account of her brief stint cohosting, and controversial departure from, the syndicated lady chat-fest
The View
—and the event would be open to the public.
“How about an ambush?” Jesse asked.
“Let’s get her,” Bill said, smiling with anticipatory delight.
Bill and Rosie had been feuding for months. The first incident came in March 2007, when Rosie, then still in her position as the lead host on
The View
, went off on a rant about an incident involving British sailors getting seized by an Iranian naval ship. Her theory was that it was a Bush administration plot to spur the U.S. into war with Iran.
“I have one thing to say: Gulf of Tonkin. Google it,” Rosie had told the studio audience, which consisted largely of middle-aged housewives, most of whom were doubtlessly uninterested in her geopolitical conspiracy theories. That alone would not have been enough to draw the attention of
The
Factor
, but a few days later, Rosie started with the 9/11 Trutherism:
“I do believe it’s the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel. I do believe that it defies physics for the World Trade Center Tower Seven, building seven, which collapsed in on itself, it is impossible for a building to fall the way it fell without explosives being involved, World Trade Center Seven. World Trade Center One and Two got hit by planes. Seven, miraculously, for the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible.”
It was an over-the-top, bonkers rant, one that Rosie had to have known would set off alarm bells at Fox News headquarters, sending hosts and producers scrambling for the red wall boxes that are on every floor, clearly marked
IN CASE OF LIBERAL CELEBRITY SAYING SOMETHING OBJECTIONABLE, BREAK GLASS.
Enter Bill O’Reilly.
He weighed in with a Talking Points Memo calling Rosie a “fanatical leftist” and “irresponsible,” accusing her of “actively supporting Iran over her own country” and calling on ABC to fire her from
The View
.
Rosie, no shrinking violet, punched right back on her show the next day, referring to Andrea Mackris and the harassment suit.
Sam and I were watching live when she said it, and our jaws dropped. We couldn’t believe she’d gone there. It was the nuclear option.
What’s even more startling is that it worked. Bill decided that the budding feud had already gone too far. E-mails went back and forth. Phone calls were made. Someone on our staff talked to someone on Barbara Walters’s staff. A settlement was hastily negotiated: Bill wouldn’t call for Rosie’s firing anymore as long as she stopped referring to Mackris.
It was all supposed to be hush-hush, but Rosie, in typical fashion, pulled back the curtain a hair, cryptically writing on her blog that she’d been told she wasn’t allowed to talk about the lawsuit again. Bill, meanwhile, kept his end of the bargain, reluctantly dropping the on-air feud but privately holding on to the grudge, keeping it in his pocket for a rainy day.
As it turns out, all the behind-the-scenes machinations were mostly a moot point—ABC announced barely three weeks later, in late April 2007, that contract negotiations had failed, and Rosie would not be coming back for a second season of
The View
.
Bill declared victory, temporarily breaking the terms of the feud settlement to engage in a little on-air gloating. A few days later, Rosie got into a brutal live TV shouting match with her conservative cohost Elisabeth Hasselbeck and ended up leaving the show several weeks earlier than planned.
O’Donnell dropped out of the spotlight after that, apparently taking time to regroup and write her book. Without Barbara Walters to protect her, she was again fair game. And so a few months later at the pitch meeting, when Jesse presented the opportunity for the ambush, Bill was chomping at the bit, practically bouncing in his chair with glee.
Jesse explained that the layout of the bookstore was such that a full crew—his usual accompaniment, consisting of two guys to handle both the camera and a large multidirectional microphone—wouldn’t be able to infiltrate. He’d need to go in stealthily. Instead of the large shoulder-mounted camera, he’d need someone with a small camcorder that could be concealed in a bag until the absolute last moment.
“So we need a volunteer,” Stan said. “Who wants to go with Jesse tomorrow?”
Sam’s hand shot up.
“I’ll do it,” he called out.
O’Reilly looked him over, coolly assessing him, his height, his bulk, his unruly facial hair.
“Hmmm . . . I don’t know, Martinez,” Bill said. “I think you might scare some people too much.”
The semicircle of producers exploded with shocked laughter, as Sam sputtered, red-faced with indignation.
“No offense, of course,” Bill said, smiling somewhat cruelly. “It’s just that they’ll see you coming from a mile away. I think we need someone more . . . subtle.”
My hand crept up.
I wondered immediately if I’d made a mistake. I’d never been on an ambush before. I’d never even been on a field assignment. I had zero qualifications, aside from the fact that my college film experience left me arguably more adept with a camera than some of my colleagues.
But I was still, at that point, the newest staff member, and I was eager to make my mark with Bill. Nine months into the job, despite my constant presence at a desk just outside his office, and two hours a day spent staring at him through the radio studio’s glass partition, I still wasn’t entirely sure that he knew my name; as near as I could tell, he was under the impression that I was a summer intern who had overstayed his welcome.
I had another reason for volunteering, a less selfish one: I wanted to take some of the heat off Sam. I could tell by looking at him that Bill’s offhand dismissal had made him angry—rightfully so, I should add. But Sam was a bit of a hothead, and I worried that his immediate reaction would be to say something to Bill that he wouldn’t be able to take back.
“I can do it,” I said.
Bill turned to me, studying me through narrowed eyes.
“Yeah, I think that would work,” he finally said. He turned to Jesse. “Watters? Is Muto good for you?”
Oh, he did know my name. Bonus, I guess.
After the meeting, Bill pulled Jesse and me aside to give us some instructions. “Be low-key,” he said. “Don’t just barge in there. Wait in line with everyone else to get your book signed, then—BAM!—pull out the camera and hit her with the questions.”
Jesse and I nodded.
“You have to be respectful,” Bill continued. “Dress nice. Khaki pants and a blazer,” he said, probably more for my benefit than Jesse’s; the ambush specialist was wearing his normal work attire of suit pants and a tie with a preppy print, while I was wearing my usual beat-up boat shoes, jeans, and button-down.
“What do you want me to ask her?” Jesse said.
“Ask her about the 9/11 thing,” Bill said. “Does she still believe that it was a conspiracy? That kind of thing.”
Jesse nodded, and scribbled in a notebook.
I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
—
The next day I wore, as instructed, khaki pants and a blue blazer. Sam, who had calmed down by then, howled when he saw me.
“You look like King of the White People,” he said. “Are you even allowed to hang out with Latin folk like me anymore? I feel like you’re about to ask me to clean your house or something.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I look damn good. But now that you mention it, my apartment is looking a little dirty. . . .”
I ducked, laughing, as he whipped a yellow highlighter at my head.
Jesse and I left the office before the TV show even started taping, and headed to Penn Station. Even in the early afternoon, a full ninety minutes before rush hour, the station’s lengthy underground concourse was a shit-show mélange of confused tourists wheeling massive suitcases, disgruntled commuters stocking up on sixteen-ounce tallboy cans of beer for the train ride home, and rowdy groups of teenagers from Long Island stumbling up the stairs from the train platforms, hooting and high-fiving in anticipation of a Friday night in the big city.
I followed Jesse as he wove expertly through the crowd. He stopped at a newsstand. “Do you need any magazines or newspapers or anything?” he asked. “Since we’re technically traveling for work, we get a per diem. So if you want any soda or candy, or something to read for the train, get it now, because you can expense it later.”
As I’d come to find out over the years, that was typical Jesse; the man knew how to work the system like nobody I’d ever met. There was a reason why he was the only producer on the staff to regularly appear on air: His personality was a perfect match for the program. He was unctuous, a bit smirky, and sarcastic to the point where I decided it was a miracle he’d never been punched in the face; but he was still oddly likable, the kind of person you’d much rather have working for you than against you. He was one of the more conservative members of the staff—a political slant he regularly attributed to a rejection of his Philadelphia hippie parents—but his ideology didn’t consume him. That’s what made him so good at ambushing liberals. He was able to approach them with a certain
aren’t we all having a good time
demeanor, treating the ambush like an amusing lark and making for much better television.
49
After picking up some sodas and reading material, we found seats on our train and settled in for the hour-long ride. I fiddled with the camera the whole way out, learning the buttons by feel, practicing pulling it out of the bag in a smooth motion, hitting the
POWER
and
RECORD
buttons in quick succession and aiming it inconspicuously from waist level. I did not want to screw up the ambush with a technical error. Jesse would be pissed, obviously, if I failed to get his confrontation on tape; but his annoyance would be like a soft kiss compared to Bill’s.
Jesse and I got off the train at the Huntington stop and walked the few blocks to the bookstore, a massive, high-ceilinged space that was teeming with people. We purchased two copies of the book, a slim hardcover, and took a spot at the end of the signing line. It was still an hour and a half before Rosie was scheduled to show up, but the queue already snaked halfway around the store.
It was a bigger crowd than we expected, but it was still a fish-in-a-barrel scenario for Jesse, who wasn’t used to his subjects just falling into his lap like Rosie was about to do. “There’s no sport in it,” he’d complained on the train ride up. He preferred putting in legwork, doing a little reconnaissance, learning the habits of his prey before striking. He’d once spent three days in a Starbucks outside the New York Times Building, trying to figure out which entrance a certain editor who had raised Bill’s ire liked to use. (He never spotted the guy, and the ambush was aborted, a rare failure.) Another time, at the height of O’Reilly’s feud with Keith Olbermann, Jesse had spent the better part of a week staking out the MSNBC host’s Manhattan apartment, recording his comings and goings. (His surveillance on that one was more successful than with the
Times
guy, and he was able to assemble a detailed dossier on Olbermann—times of day he traveled, method of transportation, identity of companions—but Bill eventually opted to not pull the trigger for the ambush, determining that the resulting wave of publicity would probably help Olbermann more than hurt him.)
Waiting in the Rosie O’Donnell line for the easy get, Jesse and I must have looked ridiculous. We were dressed almost identically, having taken Bill’s wardrobe instructions arguably too literally. Instead of blending in inconspicuously like O’Reilly had wanted, we stuck out like awkward, preppy sore thumbs: two dressy twentysomething males waiting in a line dominated by casually dressed middle-aged women—the demographic that apparently made up the bulk of Rosie’s fan base.
“We clearly don’t belong here,” I said to Jesse with a lowered voice.
“Just relax, man,” he said, also keeping his voice low. “Act casual. Nobody suspects anything. Just pretend that you’re a fan who wants a book signed.”
My ears perked up at this. A stint with a sketch/improv group in college had convinced me, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, that I was good at improvising.
50
I can handle this.
I struck up a conversation with the two women in line behind us, making up a fake name and a fake job, overzealously gushing about how much of a Rosie fan I was, how excited I was to meet her, and so on. The women were friendly and chatty, actually laughing at one point over how much Jesse and I didn’t fit in with the rest of the crowd, giving me a brief heart attack.