Rosie O’Donnell — quite rightly, I believe — has had enough of Barbara Walters and "The View." I am told that she is not likely to renew her one-year contract when it ends in June and will leave the crazy talk show after boosting its ratings higher than ever. Sources say that Rosie feels that the backstage antics at "The View" "are completely dysfunctional." O’Donnell, who’s got plenty of money and lots of outside interests, simply doesn’t need to be there. I am told that her contract was for "one school year" and that ends in June. But ABC might feel differently, given that O’Donnell has made "The View" bigger than ever. It’s conceivable that the network brass will prevail — either buying out or retiring Walters and convincing O’Donnell to stay as the show’s moderator. Ironically, oddsmakers would have guessed that Elizabeth Hasselbeck, Rosie’s political and ideological opposite, would have been the one to cause O’Donnell the most pain at the show. But it turns out that Walters, the woman who chose O’Donnell for the job in the first place, surfaced as her backstage enemy. The tension between Walters and O’Donnell surfaced yesterday, first when Page Six reported that the pair had a fight about the Donald Trump-Miss USA saga just before the show went on air Monday morning. Then later yesterday, a letter from Trump to Rosie was leaked, in which Trump told O’Donnell that Walters, essentially, had betrayed her to Trump and acted disloyally. Whether or not this is completely true is irrelevant. But this — not the public façade she’s carefully crafted — is the Barbara Walters I’ve seen in action over the years. The first indication of this was seen earlier last year when she ditched the unpopular Star Jones in a most unceremonious and ungracious way. That should have been some indication to everyone that Walters was capable of just about anything as she struggled to preserve what’s left of her crumbling fiefdom at ABC. According to my sources, the Trump letter wasn’t the first piece of correspondence in this story. Walter apparently sent O’Donnell a letter over the Christmas holiday that wasn’t particularly supportive either. O’Donnell told friends she couldn’t believe Walters’ take on the situation. How this leaves "The View" for the rest of the TV season remains a mystery. O’Donnell isn’t going to quit, and Walters can’t fire her without ABC’s approval — and she won’t get it. The show is already lacking a fifth correspondent, and without O’Donnell — who replaced Meredith Vieira — it doesn’t have a marquee name as moderator. Of course, we’d love to hear what Joy Behar is saying off camera about all this.
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Forgetting the whole Trump thing, did anyone really think she was going to renew with the show?
