Jenny McCarthy Recalls the Moment on The View That Made Her Suspect Barbara Walters Might Have Dementia

Jenny McCarthy is reflecting on her time working on The View.

The actress, 52, told Maria Menounos on the March 25 episode of her Heal Squad podcast that she was hired to co-host the popular talk show in 2013 to bring a fresh energy to the show. Just days after starting the gig, McCarthy revealed why things didn’t exactly go as planned.

“They wanted to do a flip of the whole show and be like, ‘Let's lighten it up,’” she explained. “‘Let's lighten up The View. Let's bring Jenny on for a pop culture, buzzy girl that is more fluffy, and that is my speed.”

“A week into hosting The View, Barbara Walters — I had mentioned something about Katy Perry, who Barbara just interviewed on her '10 Most Famous People of the Year' thing — and she said, ‘Who?’ And I said, ‘Katy Perry.’ And she says, ‘Who's Katy Perry?’ And it was the first sign that I realized that Barbara was suffering from beginning stages of dementia.”

Although there were reports that Walters, who died in December 2022 at the age of 93, had dementia prior to her death, a diagnosis was never confirmed.

She ended up retiring from The View in 2014, but McCarthy said the plan to bring pop culture into the show that season was quickly squashed.

“They were like, ‘We're flipping it. There's no more pop culture, we're going back to politics,’” McCarthy claimed. “So she didn't look bad. She knew politics, but she didn't know pop culture. And I was like, ‘Well, I'm screwed here because I am not political.’ I don't even know what I was raised as, a Democrat or Republican, that's how far removed I was from it.”

The Masked Singer judge, along with Sherri Shepherd, got fired from the morning show the following year, exiting at the same time that Walters made her departure.

“Behind the scenes of The View, it was the hardest job in the world,” McCarthy recalled. “Because it was not me. At night, I was laying next to [husband] Donnie [Wahlberg] and I would literally be twitching to fall asleep at night.”

She added: “They would come in my room before the show and try to prep me and they were trying to actually groom me to give the opposite point of view than all the ladies at the table, and I'm the last person that you want to be feeding me the opposite point of view because I wasn't that opinionated when it came to the politics.”

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Walters was a trailblazer in the world of journalism, creating The View in 1997 with producer Bill Geddie. When she died, original panelists Joy Behar, Meredith Vieira, Star Jones and Debbie Matenopoulos reunited to share their memories alongside alums Shepherd, Lisa Ling, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck as well as the current co-hosts Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines and Alyssa Farah Griffin.

"If not for her, I don't know where most of us will be," Goldberg said at the top of the show. "There was nobody like her. There isn't anyone like her and like all firsts, she's the first and there are many of us duplicates but there will never be another Barbara Walters."

Behar echoed Goldberg’s sentiments: "She started The View when she was 68 years old — very few people start a new career at that age. She had no mentors or role models because she was the original role model. She was not just a friend of ours. She was one of a kind, and very important to the industry."

"Barbara was the hardest working person ever," she continued. "I said to her, 'Why do you always get the interview?' and she said, 'Cause I don't go to the bathroom.' That was the secret to her success. She was a camel in disguise!"