Rosie O'Donnell Talks about 'Weirdness' Between her and Ellen

Rosie O'Donnell spoke about the "weirdness" in her friendship with Ellen DeGeneres, and shared a story that fits with DeGeneres' "Queen of Mean" reputation, CNN reported.

Talking with The Hollywood Reporter, O'Donnell also said that before DeGeneres' bombshell coming out moment on the fourth season of her eponymous sitcom, "Ellen," in 1997, she had already come out on O'Donnell's talk show.

"Well, she came out first on my show, remember?" O'Donnell reminded the entertainment news outlet. "She came on and my show was live."

O'Donnell explained, "I had said to her, 'I don't want you to be out there alone,' because the reason she was doing publicity was 'The Puppy Episode,' this big surprise episode of her sitcom. And it had been rumored that's what she was doing, coming out, but nobody really knew.

"I had known her for years doing stand-up and as young entertainers in Hollywood," O'Donnell went on to say. "Me, Melissa [Etheridge], k.d. [lang] and Ellen, we all would go to parties together.... It was all different kinds of gay people. Celebrity lesbians."

O'Donnell recalled that after the coming-out episode of DeGeneres' sitcom, "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."

CNN relayed that in the interview with THR, O'Donnell said "that she and DeGeneres have also had 'weirdness,' saying, '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.'"

Specifically, O'Donnell thought of herself and DeGeneres as "friends" – something that DeGeneres evidently forgot all about during an appearance of "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 told THR. "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,'" O'Donnell continued. But that sense of friendship was seemingly not returned. "When it was a downward media time for me, she didn't do anything."

When their positions were reversed and DeGeneres had a talk show of her own, O'Donnell said, she refused to have O'Donnell on the show, despite "having the same staff from my show" and the two talk shows being "very similar."

"I asked to go on because of something I was promoting, and she said no," O'Donnell recounted. "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."

O'Donnell recounted that after she shared the story of DeGeneres denying to Larry King that she knew O'Donnell on "Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen" last year, DeGeneres offered an apology, saying, "I'm really sorry and I don't remember that."

For O'Donnell, though, the denial stung hard.

"I knew her for so many years," the comedian told THR. "It just felt like I don't trust this person to be in my world."