One more time, there’s going to be a dead-end argument about what liberals are made of and what conservatives are made of. Yet neither Elizabeth Hasselbeck nor Rosie O’Donnell are on TV as representatives of either group. They are/ were on TV to bring life to The View and to gain audience and advertisers.
The underlying issue about The View, I think is about Miss O’Donnell’s bigness. And Miss Walters’ mouseness.
There’s a saying where I come from in the northwoods, You can’t put ten pounds of mud into a five pound bag. And you especially can’t put a huge personality like Miss O’Donnell into a venue made for 4 or 5 regular-large sized personalities.
That was THE issue at The View. Agree with Miss O’Donnell or not, and I know many on each side… she instantly became the magneto of the machine at The View. She drove the show. She got the extra ratings. More people tuned in because she was there. They liked her before The View, and followed her there. And that’s fine. They also liked the alchemy of Joy and Barbara and Elizabeth as well. And the guest hosts. All A-Ok.
Barbara Walters was insightful to bring on a big engine for cars which were sitting on the tracks, filled with good ideas and thoughts, but not moving much, not attached to a powerful engine.
At first, you could see, Miss O’Donnell took charge of The View as though it were her stage alone. She literally acted as MC, directing the entire hour’s discussion. I thought, Oh-oh, the other women might eventually feel resentful and overshadowed and may figure out how to get rid of her if she continues that. Even with Miss Star Jones on the show, there still was a détente kind of equanimity between all the hosts. No one dominated for long.
But after her first weeks on The View, Miss O’Donnell became often more circumspect, more inclusive of the others. It didn’t seem like ‘THE ROSIE SHOW!’ so much now. Now it seemed more like ‘the rosie and friends show,’ but with Miss O’Donnell still pulling the train. Only with more stops.
I dont know how you take a giant personality and fit it into a matchbox. Especially a wild one that is not domesticated. I think the truth is, you don’t. You can’t ask a big cat to be a house cat. You cant make a grizzly bear into a teddy bear that just sits there til you move it. Miss O’Donnell is no Winnie-the-Pooh.
She is a casebook example of a bright, what I would call, “extra- extrovert.” Her energy is very vital. She pounces and blurts. She says what comes to mind. Her associations are broad. She has a long memory. She is dedicated, fierce, opinionated. Funny often. Bossy girl. Big heart. Young in years no matter how old she becomes. Eccentric. Odd. Smart.
All of these traits can seem and be spun out with forethought, or brashly…or some mixture of both. All these traits, which are the traits of many BIG personalities of high energy including politicos, thinkers, teachers and entertainers… all these traits can be used as reflections of one’s gifts and bring much good in many ways.
These same traits can also bring down opprobrium from those don’t like the bigness, the loudness, the oddness, the ‘take-control-ness’ of such a soul. Those who much prefer measured things, or prefer a certain aesthetic, or who are quite introverted are often put off by those kinds of Bigness.
Another way of saying this is energically. You may enliven a venue like The View with such a person, but you cannot run 5000 volts of electricity through a vehicle built for even 4500 volts without the vehicle starting to shake and strain and eventually just fly apart.
Fly apart it did.
It was inevitable. It was.
Many who watched The View will likely miss Miss O’Donnell. Some may not. Mice have big ears; they hear everything. Barbara Walters seemed to hear much, and yet spoke evenly about Miss O’Donnell despite whomever and whatever anyone else said. It’s easier for many in the upper media to cave instead, to want to be on the side of the most powerful detractor, or the most moneyed.
Miss Walters’ biography, the real one that underlies the glossy one, is one of tremendous striving against huge odds, as a female picked apart by the media for nearly 50 years; how she looks, who she’s seeing, what she says, doesn’t say, the qualities of her mind, heart, brain, soul. I have no doubt the cost has been sky high and yet, to sit with some of the people she has interviewed… what time capsules she must carry of this wide, strange and beautiful world.
I once sat opposite Miss Walters at a banquet. She is a tiny tiny woman who that night was dressed in a flirty dress of black lace. I listened as various of the ‘inner circle,’ (of which I, a Latina from the backwoods who doesn’t know quite which fork to use, am definitely not a part of) came to ask favors of Miss Walters, to preen themselves, to show off in front of her. How very very few just said, So Barbara, how’s it going? No one asked her what was on her heart or mind. A person could die from that kind of sterile public ‘love.’
I have a theory about women in media. Some just want to be giants. They throw others onto the third rail just to have one less talented competitor. But some women in media who somehow became giants themselves against the odds, are also giant-makers. Miss Walters is definitely one of the giant-makers.
Did I say at the beginning, I did, didn’t I? Barbara Walters as mouse. Forgive me for not being clear. I meant a mouse like Reepacheep. In C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles, Reepacheep was indeed a mouse, a warrior mouse who had more bravery and more guts and more insight and more wherewithal than most anyone else. That kind of mouse; tiny in body and huge in vision and daring.
Some will say, have already said, Miss O’Donnell is big only because she is way rounded of body and big in idiocy. Some will say, have already said, Miss Walters is nothing more than a shill for Ratings. I’d choose two different R words:
Rosie and Reepacheep, long may each thrive in good health and ever more wise ways.
Someone the other day was saying that Joy Behar was so self-centered. My grandmother used to tell us that “some people are so narrow minded they can see through a keyhole with both eyes.” I’d say Miss Behar is a lion-heart, and her sincere generosity to other comedians on The View is unusual in such a cut-throat business. She is a rarity, not only funny, but feasts on the funniness of others.
And as for Elizabeth Hasselbeck, Pssst, I’ll just whisper to you Elizabeth, as an abuelita, grandmother. I say to you: Put this all behind you now. Calma y tranquilo. Be calm and tranquil Elizabeth, for that little warrior inside you who is on the way to earth. The fire jumping over fire with a colleague can be doused now. It’s alright. Let it go. Calma y tranquillo. Everyone has views and tics that are reasoned and unreasoned, depending on the subject and the day. And a true warrior loves peace more than anything.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=3212816&page=1
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“Rosie O’Donnell,Too Big In Many Ways: Barbara Walters as Mouse”: I Put the Culture on the Couch © 2007, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved, is printed here under Creative Commons License by which author grants permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under the conditions that the use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety and not altered, added to, or subtracted from, and that it be attributed with author’s name and this full copyright notice. For other uses, contact copyright holder. Dr. Estés is the author of Women Who Run With the Wolves, and the forcoming from Alfred A Knopf, The Dangerous Old Woman.