Read Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) for Free Online Page B

View
; we finally started giving them big red bags inside of which were small simple things, but the message was big.
We care
.
    I started out, in the preseason meetings and then on the show itself, with so many ideas and ideals and yet, no matter how much excitement I felt, it always sat side by side with my misgivings. I could not escape the sense, impossible to pinpoint but palpably real in the air, that while I was hugely welcomed as a co-host, I was also hugely threatening. I was too big, and that’s true. I am. Then again, maybe I’m giving myself more credit than I deserve. Maybe I was more of an irritant than anything else. Or maybe my ideas were too cumbersome for them, and kept cluttering what had been, before my loud-mouth arrival, something simple and clear. I would suggest something and my ideas didn’t seem to get the reception I’d hoped for, or maybe that was just my perception; no, it wasn’t. Who has not had the classic dream of swimming against a current, or screaming only to see the sound shred to silence in huge winds, or this dream, my dream: trying to dial the phone, but not being able to move my fingers so there is, and cannot ever be, the satisfying click of connection. Often, at
The View
, or in the months before the show started, I felt like I was on a turnpike and each time I picked up some speed I’d get stopped at a toll booth, and inside there was a bored person holding out his hand in a latex glove.
Pay to proceed, please
. It was exhausting.
    I wasn’t used to this. My own show was syndicated, so I’d operated outside the demands of any particular network. The whole time I did my show I had only one person to talk to, Jim Paratore, the tall guy with the shiny shoes. I had this one go-to guy who knew me as I knew him, the communication clean. In addition, when I started my show I was not nearly as famous as I am today, so I was able to just have a cheeseburger with Jim and say, “Dude, this is how I do it, okay? I’m gonna try to give a hundred percent and we’re both gonna make a lot of money and have a good show. And this is how I see it.” Jim let me do everything, from the opening credits design, to how the set should look, to what color it should be; he let me do every single thing. I had total creative control.

    When I remember the summer before the start of
The View
it seems the season was unusually hot. New York City is never a great place in July or August, but those preseason months seemed especially oppressive to me, the heat draped over the city, muffling the skyscrapers, melting the tar so it oozed and stank in the streets. In Nyack, the roses bloomed for a brief period, flared pink and wine, and then the petals flaked off and scattered in the scorched grass. I smeared my kids with sunscreen as thick as mayonnaise but it never seemed thick enough, because the barrier filtering out the harmful rays had been so thinned from CO 2 that we were all essentially roasting on the racks—that’s what it seemed to me. I was driven from Nyack into the city for these preseason meetings, and I always ran the brief distances between my front door and the cool air of the car, sprinted as though I were being chased by something fierce, and in fact I was.
    One of the biggest conflicts, right from the start, had to do with the IFB, a device too tiny for the huge significance it held for us all. The IFB is essentially a gadget that you shove in your ear and that is connected, wirelessly, to the control room. They are used regularly on many television shows, from newsrooms to talk shows—day or night. I find this amazing, disturbing. The general point of an IFB on any television show is that, as you are talking to the audience, the people in the control room can also talk to you, send you suggestions and updates, feed you your lines:
    MIRACLE HEALERS
    A SPECIAL DATELINE INVESTIGATION
    THE PREACHER HEALING THE ILL—
    WILLING WANTING TO BELIEVE
    INTO HIS EAR
    CANCER—LEFT