Celebrity Mound

Years after coming clean about her gastric bypass, Star Jones is cracking fat jokes!

“If I punched every b-tch who called me fat, it would be dead bitches all up and down the highway,” Jones said during a taping of The Bad Girls Club reunion special (watch above; her joke is at 1:19 in)

The reunion episode airs Tuesday on Oxygen.

Last week Jones got into a public feud with Barbara Walters, who claimed Jones asked her to cover-up the gastric bypass on The View.

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THE backlash has begun against Barbara Walters for admitting in her autobiography, “Audition,” to an adulterous affair 30 years ago with Edward Brooke, the then-married Massachusetts senator, while she was simultaneously seeing Alan “Ace” Greenberg, who became chairman of Bear Stearns.

“Barbara Walters is a shameless media whore,” says Marc Dice, spokesman for conservative media watchdog group The Resistance. “Barbara has now sunk to the very level of other attention-starved celebrities such as Paris Hilton or even Steve-O from ‘Jackass.’ ”

Walters’ spokeswoman, Cindi Berger, told Page Six: “This conservative watchdog seems to have lived a sheltered life in his doghouse.”

In “Audition,” Walters also reveals she broke up with Brooke only after Pete Peterson, the Blackstone Group founder who was Richard Nixon’s commerce secretary, told her that her bosses at NBC wouldn’t look kindly on her affair. But by the time she told Brooke it was over, he’d already asked his wife of 30 years for a divorce.

Meanwhile, Christie Brinkley – who divorced Peter Cook when she caught him cheating – told “The Insider” last night: “I was a little surprised by [Walters'] affair with the married man. Barbara is a pretty smart cookie, how did that happen? I didn’t think intelligent women did that.”
“Audition” also reveals that after breaking up with Brooke, Walters continued seeing Greenberg while also dating Alan Greenspan, the future Federal Reserve chairman.

Her Latina housekeeper couldn’t keep the two Alans straight. “When they gave me the message, I could only ask, which one talked louder?” Walters wrote. “Alan Greenberg . . . talked in a normal tone of voice. Alan Greenspan was very soft-spoken. He almost whispered. And that’s how I would know whether it was Greenspan or Greenberg.”

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The war of the words is continuing between Barbara Walters and her former View co-host Star Jones.

“Poor woman, she’s gone through so much,” Walters said on Larry King Live Monday night.

Walters was asked about Jones’ comment to Usmagazine.com last week: “It is a sad day when an icon like Barbara Walters, in the sunset of her life, is reduced to publicly branding herself as an adulterer, humiliating an innocent family with accounts of her illicit affair and speaking negatively against me all for the sake of selling a book. It speaks to her true character.”

Walters – who claims in her new memoir that Jones forced her to lie about her gastric bypass surgery on The View – responded: “I think [Star's] suffering now and that’s why she’s lashing out.”

Walters insists she was a fan of Jones (who split from husband Al Reynolds in March).

“I was very fond of Star,” she told King. “The network wanted to let her go. The ratings were going way down… It took her a long time to get a job.

“I wish her well,” Walters added.

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Star Jones is speaking out against Barbara Walters for including her in her new memoir, Audition.

In the book, Walters claims Jones forced her to lie about her gastric bypass surgery on The View. Walters also reveals that she had an affair with then-married Senator Edward Brooke during the 1970s.

Usmagazine.com caught up with Jones (who recently split from husband Al Reynolds) as she left a tennis workout in NYC Wednesday.

“It is a sad day when an icon like Barbara Walters, in the sunset of her life, is reduced to publicly branding herself as an adulterer, humiliating an innocent family with accounts of her illicit affair and speaking negatively against me all for the sake of selling a book,” Jones told Us. “It speaks to her true character.”

Star Jones had her View co-hosts cover-up her gastric bypass surgery.

“She decided to have a gastric bypass operation, but then she decided not to tell anybody,” Barbara Walters said in an interview with Oprah Winfrey airing Tuesday.

“Then we had to lie on the set everyday because she said it was portion control and Pilates,” Walters said. “Well, we knew it wasn’t portion control and Pilates.”

Winfrey responded, “We in the audience go, that’s some damn Pilates teacher!”

Walters – who is on a press tour for her memoir, Audition, in which she admits to an affair with a married senator in the ’70s – also told Winfrey she has no regrets over on-air spats with former View co-host Rosie O’Donnell.

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No one doubts she’s hard-driving. But she has never learned to drive, Barbara Walters reveals in her new memoir, “Audition.”

She also discloses that she looks better on camera when shot from the left – advice she got from Sir Laurence Olivier when interviewing him in 1980.

And she allots six pages from the book’s 612 for a startling confession: Her “long and rocky affair” in the 1970s with politician who was married and – further upping the ante – an African American. This covert romance between U.S. Senator Edward Brooke and Walters, then co-host of NBC’s “Today” show, made headlines (and raised eyebrows) when it was leaked last week.

“I think it surprises people because it’s me,” said Walters during an interview Friday in her lustrous corner office at ABC News. “I know people see me as” – she paused, searching for the right word – “a little stern, or a little priggish.

“It WAS 30 years ago,” said the 78-year-old TV legend, “and it was a big part of my life at the time. I thought in the beginning that he was exciting and brilliant, and I didn’t expect it to progress. But when it did, that’s when I got scared and said, ‘You’re a married man, I must break this off.’ And he went home and asked for a divorce.

“I knew it was something that could have destroyed my career. And, since I’m always talking about feeling guilty: I don’t THINK I destroyed his career, but, for whatever reasons, he did not get re-elected.” In his bid for a third term, the Massachusetts Republican was voted out in 1978. “He was a superb senator.”

Despite this steamy tidbit, “Audition” doesn’t kiss and tell. Readers who hope it unearths mounds of celebrity dirt should be advised: It isn’t a tell-all. No settling scores: “I have no one to get even with,” insisted Walters.

Her display of equanimity includes Rosie O’Donnell, a panelist last season on Walters’ weekday ABC chat show, “The View,” who routinely picked fights with her fellow panelists and the world beyond.

“We had our ups and downs,” Walters said, “but I have enormous affection for Rosie, and I think she’s a great talent.”

Walters also pardons Harry Reasoner, who sabotaged the experiment that, in 1976, brought her to ABC as the first female co-anchor of the evening news.

“Harry didn’t want a partner,” Walters recalled. “Even though he was awful to me, I don’t think he disliked me.”

How could she be so forgiving?

“I may not be a very good interviewer anymore,” she replied, deadpan. “I’ve gotten very mellow.”

The final part of “Audition” addresses Walters’ resurrection at ABC News as co-anchor of the “20/20″ newsmagazine, where, for a quarter-century, she interviewed nearly every public figure worth interviewing – unless she happened to be talking to them for her “Barbara Walters Specials.”

She has always felt at home plying notables with questions.

“I’m not afraid when I’m interviewing,” Walters said. “I have no fear! … In my private life, I’m much more coulda-shoulda-woulda. Including when I was writing this book.”

Even so, “Audition” – Walters’ first book in 38 years – does what an autobiography should: charts her remarkable life, her relationships (three marriages among them) and career, while also striving to make sense of that life, and herself.

“The book makes me feel very exposed,” she said. “But I’ll get used to it.”

Her account of her formative years lays to rest any notion that Walters, whose father was the noted nightclub impresario Lou Walters, was raised in New York cafe society. Her father made and lost fortunes in a dizzying cycle that taught her success was always at risk of being snatched away, and could neither be trusted nor enjoyed.

“That’s why the book is called `Audition,’” Walters said. “I always felt I need to prove myself, over and over.”

Growing up, she found her insecurity was made all the worse by her older sister, Jackie, who was mentally disabled. In that less enlightened era, Jackie’s condition had a spillover effect on Barbara, stigmatizing both of them in the eyes of other kids.

“It was a lonely, isolated childhood,” Walters said.

The complicated feelings that churned long after her sister’s death in 1985 inspired “Audition.”

In fall 2004, when Walters retired from “20/20,” she was thrilled at the prospect of having time “to take Spanish lessons and go to museums. And then I thought, `Am I going to get very depressed? “20/20″ was a big part of my life.’”

She decided to write a book about her childhood and her sister – just a little book. But after prodding from her publisher, her scope kept expanding. And then she signed a new contract with ABC News to continue her quarterly interview specials. Not much time left for museums.

“For the past three years, all summer long, I was writing this damn book – although when I was writing it, I said more than `damn.’”

Then came revisions and proofreading. And now publicity, including her visit Tuesday to “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” and an hour special on ABC, “Audition: Barbara Walters’ Journey,” airing Wednesday at 10 p.m. EDT.

Walters summed up this journey: “I never would have done a book, had I known!”

It was particularly hard to write the chapter about her sister, Walters said – “going back and examining the guilt that I felt about how she was always so very loving, even while I was resenting her.”

Harder still for Walters was the chapter on her daughter, also named Jackie, whose troubled adolescence led to serious drug abuse.

“That was the chapter I was not going to put in. I didn’t think it was necessary. But Jackie felt that if parents saw we went through it and survived, it might give them hope.” Now living in Maine, Jackie Danforth runs a residential therapy intervention program for girls.

Also difficult for Walters was revisiting those first years at ABC News, a period that seemed to mark the end of everything she’d worked for.

“I thought it was all over: `How stupid of me ever to have left NBC!’”

But salvation arrived in the form of a new boss, ABC News president Roone Arledge.

“I don’t know what would have happened if Roone hadn’t come in and sent Harry back to CBS, where he was much happier. Roone could’ve said, `We’ll pay her off. We’ll keep Harry. We know him.’ Instead, he said, `We’ll take a chance on her.’”

Since then, Walters has lived a life that, when she takes a moment to consider it, amazes her. But during her interview, she looked ahead cheerfully. She even spoke of making a clean break from ABC (including “The View”), maybe in the not-too-distant future.

“And I do think about death,” she added, though not in any way that bums her out. “I’m a very optimistic person. And I’m VERY healthy, knock glass,” she said, rapping her glass-top desk.

This talk of mortality reminded her of the zany Broadway hit “Spamalot,” based on a Monty Python film.

“You know the scene where they’re collecting dead bodies during a plague, and there’s a guy they keep throwing in the heap, and he keeps saying ‘I’m not dead yet’? Then they bash him on the head, and he gets up again and says, ‘I’m not dead yet!’”

Barbara Walters smiled and said, “He’s my hero.”

After three decades of keeping mum, Barbara Walters now says she had a past affair with married U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, whom she remembers as “exciting” and “brilliant.”

Appearing on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” scheduled to air Tuesday, Walters shares details of her relationship with Brooke that lasted several years in the 1970s, according to a transcript of the show provided to The Associated Press.

A moderate Republican from Massachusetts who took office in 1967, Brooke was the first African-American to be popularly elected to the Senate. Both he and Walters knew that public knowledge of their affair could have ruined his career as well as hers, Walters says.

At the time, the twice-divorced Walters was a rising star in TV news and co-host of NBC’s “Today” show, but would soon jump to ABC News, where she has enjoyed unrivaled success. Her affair with Brooke, which never before came to light, had ended before he lost his bid for a third term in 1978.

Brooke later divorced, and has since remarried. Calls to a listing for Brooke in Miami by The Associated Press were not immediately returned Thursday.

Walters is the guest of Oprah Winfrey to discuss her new memoir, “Audition,” which covers her long career in television, as well as her off-camera life. On “Oprah,” Walters recounts a phone call from a friend who urged her to stop seeing Brooke.

“He said, ‘This is going to come out. This is going to ruin your career,’” then reminded her that Brooke was up for re-election a year later. “‘This is going to ruin him. You’ve got to break this off.’”

Winfrey asks Walters if she was in love.

“I was certainly — I don’t know — I was certainly infatuated.”

“Infatuated.”

“I was certainly involved,” Walters says. “He was exciting. He was brilliant. It was exciting times in Washington.”

Also during the program, Walters chokes up while describing the struggles of her older sister Jackie, who was mentally retarded. Walters confesses that, as a child, she sometimes felt embarrassed by Jackie.

“She stuttered terribly. People made fun of her. People made fun of me,” Walters says. “I didn’t bring friends home. I felt terribly guilty because she was very loving and I didn’t always feel that way.”

Jackie Walters died in 1985 of ovarian cancer.

“When I think of her, because she was beautiful and loving and all of that, it makes me cry.”

Brooke served two full terms from 1967 to 1979, taking on the populist causes of low-income housing, increasing the minimum wage and mass transit. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, an honor only 21 U.S. senators have received.

Though Barbara Walters went on The View this morning with word from Britney Spears’ pal Sam Lutfi, sources close to the troubled pop mom tell PageSix.com exclusively that it was Brit who initiated contact with Babs.

After a short chat, Brit passed the phone to Sam, who offered Barbara an update on the singer’s status. Among the news relayed: Britney is suffering from “mental issues which are treatable,” she has been to a psychiatrist, has been having mood swings and is having trouble sleeping.

Sources close to the “Gimme More” singer confirm to PageSix.com that the troubled pop star saw L.A. psychiatrist Dr. Deborah Nadel on Friday. However, it is not yet clear if this was a court-mandated psychiatric evaluation or a personal visit.

Sam also told Barbara said Britney is in touch with her mother, who arrived in L.A. on Sunday. (PageSix.com exclusively reported two weeks ago that the two have been communicating through their attorneys.)

“She has been in touch with her mother,” the talk show host said, “and her mother has been very supportive of whatever it is Britney is going to do.”

Rosie O’Donnell has some words of advice for Barbara Walters: Go, already.

In her upcoming memoir, Celebrity Detox, which sheds light on, among other episodes in her life, the TV star’s tumultuous stint last season on The View, O’Donnell, 45, addresses Walters, 77, to say, “And Barbara. At some point, a person gets tired. It’s inevitable,” the New York Post reports.

“Barbara Walters is almost twice my age,” the book (which is to be published Oct. 2) is quoted as saying. “At some point it becomes necessary to step back. Everyone has to go. Going is part of the gig.”

O’Donnell also reportedly states, “I would be less-than-honest if I were to say that there is no trouble between Barbara and I. I mean, our differences are obvious.”

O’Donnell writes that during commercial breaks on The View, audience members would sometimes shout out, “I love you, Rosie” – “and Barbara politely tells them in a schoolteacher tone, ‘It is impolite to say I love you to one person when there are four of us up here.’ ”

As might be expected, O’Donnell’s book also tosses barbs at her old feuding partner, Donald Trump. Of their fight, which started when she commented on his handling of the Miss USA scandal, O’Donnell writes, according to the Post’s Page Six column, “I honestly did not anticipate the malice of his response.”

This time defending Walters, whom Trump called a “liar,” O’Donnell reportedly writes, “I did not anticipate that he would be cruel enough to do what he did to Barbara. She should have been left alone.”

Asked for comment on what her former co-host has written, Walters on Monday told Extra, “Rosie sent me the book with a note telling me how much she loved me. I have read the book – and I would like to concentrate on the love that she sent.”

O’Donnell’s publicist, Cindi Berger, is also quoted as telling the Post, “Rosie loves and adores Barbara and always will.”

For her part, rather than scaling back, Walters is, in fact, stepping up her professional activities. On Tuesday SIRIUS Satellite Radio announced that, staring Sept. 17, she will host Barbara Live, a weekly live call-in show on SIRIUS Stars channel 102, Mondays from 6 to 7 p.m. ET.

O’Donnell’s blasts, meanwhile, arrive a week after Whoopi Goldberg, 51, made her debut in the chair vacated last May by O’Donnell and as the latest member of the show, Sherri Shepherd, 40, joins the panel.

Not that O’Donnell isn’t squawking a bit about the book herself. As she posted on her blog last Thursday (spelling and punctuation hers):

so i just got my first hard copy of my new book
CELEBRITY DETOX

there on the front flap
in print

“when rosie odonnells mother was diagnosed with cancer in 1968, ten year old rosie thought fame could cure her”

i was born in 1962
my mother got sick in 1973

WTF !!!!!!!!!!

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