O'Donnell told 'The Hollywood Reporter' that DeGeneres texted her a few weeks ago to see how she was doing.
Rosie O'Donnell spoke about the "weirdness" in her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres this week, getting candid in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
"It was a good relationship. We were friends," O'Donnell said of herself and DeGeneres when they were both rising comics. "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."
O'Donnell explained that her dynamic with DeGeneres changed as they each got more famous. "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."
Since then, O'Donnell said, the two haven't spoken much, until DeGeneres texted her a few weeks ago to see how she was doing. "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."
The latter anecdote was O'Donnell's reference to when DeGeneres once told Larry King that she and O'Donnell were "not friends."
"I was watching TV in bed with my wife going, 'Did she just say that?'" O'Donnell recalled. "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."
O'Donnell said Ellen wrote in her text, "I'm really sorry and I don’t remember that.'" O'Donnell explained: "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 also said DeGeneres once denied her request to be a guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which O'Donnell found especially odd because the two shows used much of the same staff. "I asked to go on because of something I was promoting, and she said no. And 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."
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