Ellen DeGeneres once called Steve Jobs to complain about her iPhone, former producer claims
Ellen DeGeneres has been filming The Ellen Show from her California mansion. (EllenTube)
A former associate producer on The Ellen Show has claimed that Ellen DeGeneres once called Steve Jobs to complain about the font size on her iPhone.
The producer, who chose to remain anonymous, told the New York Post in an interview that the talk show host lives in a “privileged bubble”.
They said that several years ago they were in DeGeneres’s office when she lost her glasses and was unable to read a text on her phone.
“She stopped everything and made a call,” said the producer. “Next thing we know, we literally hear [Apple CEO] Steve Jobs pick up and say, ‘Hi, Ellen.’
“Ellen told him the iPhone should have a bigger font. That’s her. It’s not that she’s some demon. She just lives in an incredibly privileged bubble and is out of touch with the real world.”
Shelley Ross was the executive producer at Good Morning America at the time of Diane Sawyer’s landmark 1997 interview with DeGeneres, during which she came out as gay.
She said she like DeGeneres when they first met, but added: “Something happens when people become stars and get into that economic stratosphere.”
Ross compared DeGeneres, who is now worth $330 million (£267 million), to Oprah Winfrey, and said: “It hasn’t been handed to them. They’ve had everything possible thrown at them.
“Just think of everyone who laughed at them and said ‘You’re too fat.’ ‘You’re too Black,’ ‘You’re too gay’ – but they went ahead anyway.
“There has to be some underlying damage in there that never gets smoothed out.”
Ellen DeGeneres has been battling controversy over claims that she is ‘one of the meanest people alive’.
In March, comic Kevin Porter described Ellen DeGeneres as “one of the meanest people alive”, and then encouraged Twitter users to share their “insane stories” about DeGeneres’s, pledging to match each one with a $2 donation to LA Food Bank.
The damning thread contained hundreds of unverified stories of the daytime talk show host’s behaviour claimed by apparent ex-employees as well as Los Angeles locals, seemingly at odds with her hyper-positive and generous reputation.
Less than two weeks later, things went from bad to worse when DeGeneres opened her first quarantine episode of The Ellen Show from home with a tone deaf joke about being queer in jail.
She said, from her $27 million mansion: “This is like being in jail, is what it is. It’s mostly because I’ve been wearing the same clothes for ten days and everyone in here is gay.”
This month, a bodyguard assigned to protect DeGeneres at the 2014 Oscars claimed that her famously friendly demeanour is nothing but “false facade and bravado”.
