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Rosie O’Donnell still isn’t in a great place with Ellen DeGeneres after the latter denied being friends with her.
O’Donnell told The Hollywood Reporter how the pair were among the young entertainers in Hollywood going to parties together all those years ago, so it was weird when DeGeneres said they weren’t pally.
The comedian shared of what the dynamic was like between her and DeGeneres as “two rising comics in the scene,” “It was a good relationship. We were friends. We supported each other. Which is why when she came on my show, I said, ‘Let me not have you standing there by yourself. Let’s get a joke in there.’ And we sat down and came up with that, ‘Oh my God, I love Casey Kasem. Maybe I’m Lebanese.’ It became a big thing.”
DeGeneres had gone on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” back in 1996, where she revealed her character was going to come out as “Lebanese,” months before she famously came out as gay on her “Ellen” sitcom.
O’Donnell continued to tell THR, “Then the episode aired, Time ran its ‘Yep, I’m Gay’ cover and everybody was asking me, ‘What do you think about Ellen?’ It became a strange, ‘There can’t be two lesbians in this town,’ kind of a thing. Then we each had success and went separate ways.”
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She admitted, “She texted me a few weeks ago checking in, seeing how I’m doing, and I asked her how she’s surviving not being on TV. It’s a big transition. But we’ve had our weirdness in our relationship. I don’t know if it’s jealousy, competition or the fact that she said a mean thing about me once that really hurt my feelings.”
Explaining how the DeGeneres situation started, O’Donnell recalled, “She said it on ‘Larry King Live’. Larry King said, ‘Whatever happened to Rosie O’Donnell’s show? She went down the tubes as soon as she came out.’ And the quote that Ellen said was, ‘I don’t know Rosie. We’re not friends.’ I was watching TV in bed with my wife going, ‘Did she just say that?’”
O’Donnell continued, “It would never occur to me to say ‘I don’t know her’ about somebody whose babies I held when they were born. It wouldn’t be in my lexicon of choices to ever say. When she was in a perplexing situation and people were saying things about her, I said, ‘Let me stand next to you and say that I’m Lebanese, too.’ When it was a downward media time for me, she didn’t do anything.”
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The “The View” star said of what DeGeneres had messaged her recently, “She wrote, ‘I’m really sorry and I don’t remember that.’ I guess she saw me talk about it on Andy Cohen’s show. I remembered it so well, I had T-shirts printed and I gave them to my staff that said ‘I don’t know Rosie. We’re not friends.’ I have a picture of her holding [my then-infant son] Parker. I know her mother. I could identify her brother without her in the room. I knew her for so many years. It just felt like I don’t trust this person to be in my world.”
O’Donnell admitted DeGeneres had some staff from her show, including Andy Lassner, work for her. However, when O’Donnell once asked to go on to promote something, she was refused.
She recalled, “I remember going, ‘Seriously?’ After she said no that one time, whenever they would ask [me to appear] on the show, I would say no.”