Days after Lindsay Lohan pulled out of an interview with Barbara Walters for ABC’s 20/20, the news broke on Monday that the Liz & Dick star has signed on to appear on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.
On Monday’s episode of The View, Walters simply said, “I am happy for my colleague Jay Leno.”
As co-host Whoopi Goldberg pointed out, there was definitely a “but” at the end of that sentence.
Walters reveals that a rep from Lohan’s new publicity firm, Rogers & Cowan, called to cancel saying, “Lindsay doesn’t feel up to it.”
But with the news that she will be sitting down with Leno breaking, Walters and her co-hosts realized that wasn’t the whole truth, especially in light of the on-set drama at the Lifetime movie and the ongoing investigation into her car accident from June.
“If they’d said to me, ‘You know, Barbara, she isn’t up to the kinds of questions that you might ask.’” Walters explained. “Though, most of them were comparing her life to Elizabeth Taylor, both child stars, both aggressive mothers, etcetera, and it would have been a wonderful, wonderful interview and she could have set a lot of things straight. If they would have told me that, I wouldn’t feel quite as disappointed as I do today.”
ABC had previously told Celebuzz it was also “disappointed” about the cancelation.
And PR expert Howard Bragman told Celebuzz that it may have been a good move to pull her from the Walters interview. “Sometimes, it can be worse to do an interview that you’re not ready for,” he said.
Watch Walters talk about the cancelation above.
