FORTUNE -- Here is what Carol Bartz thinks of the Yahoo (YHOO) board that fired her: "These people f---ed me over," she says, in her first interview since her dismissal from the CEO role late Tuesday.
Last evening, barely 24 hours after Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock called Bartz on her cell phone to tell her the news, she called from her Silicon Valley home ("There are reporters at the gate… a lot of them.") to tell Fortune, exclusively, how the ax came down.
On Tuesday, Bartz was in New York, to speak at Citigroup's (C) technology conference the next day, when she was supposed to call Bostock at 6 p.m. "I called him at 6:06," she recalls. When he got on the line, she says, he started reading a lawyer's prepared statement to dismiss her.
"I said, 'Roy, I think that's a script,'" adding, "'Why don't you have the balls to tell me yourself?'"
When Bostock finished reading, Bartz didn't argue—"I got it. I got it," she told the Yahoo chairman. "I thought you were classier," she added.
Recruited in January 2009 after successfully building Autodesk (ADSK), Bartz never was the turnaround chief that the Yahoo board had wanted. Though she slashed costs and improved profit margins, she failed to improve revenue growth at a critical time when Yahoo has lost eyeballs and ad dollars to Google (GOOG) and Facebook. "They want revenue growth," says Bartz about the Yahoo board, "even though they were told that we would not have revenue growth until 2012."
As Bartz sees it, Yahoo's search partnership with Microsoft (MSFT)—a deal she negotiated two years ago to offload costs—has Yahoo paying Microsoft 12% of its search revenue and limits current growth but will help the company long-term. She attributes the directors' impatience to the criticism they faced when they turned down a lucrative deal to sell Yahoo to Microsoft in 2007, before she arrived. "The board was so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country," Bartz says. "Now they're trying to show that they're not the doofuses that they are." (Bostock, who is vice chairman of Delta Air Lines (DAL) and on Morgan Stanley's (MS) board as well as Yahoo's, declined to comment.)
After Tuesday's call from Bostock, Bartz says, she had two hours to let Yahoo know whether she would resign or allow the board to fire her. She called her husband, Bill, her three children--a son and two daughters—and her longtime assistant, Judy Flores. Learning that Yahoo's lawyers had gone to the St. Regis hotel to hand her papers, she ditched that hotel and booked herself into another. "Am I stupid?!" she asks, making clear that she took her career crisis into her own hands.
It was that evening when she pulled out her iPad and wrote an email to Yahoo's 14,000 employees:
To all,
I am very sad to tell you that I've just been fired over the phone by Yahoo's Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.
Carol
What does Bartz think of her successor, Tim Morse? "He's a great guy," she says. Morse was chief financial officer under Bartz, and now he is interim chief of a company whose stock has risen 6% since he replaced her. Asked whom she thinks the board might appoint long-term, she replies, "They should bring me in. I knew what to do."
Sometimes it's difficult to know when Bartz is being serious. As I prod her to tell me what she might do next, I mention her age, 63—"fuck you, yeah," she replies. And when I ask her if she's on any other public company boards besides Cisco (CSCO), where she is lead independent director, she says, "I'm on Yahoo's board." She tells me that she plans to remain a Yahoo director—which might be unlikely since she has now called her fellow directors "doofuses."
"I want to make sure that the employees don't believe that I've abandoned them. I would never abandon them," Bartz says. Besides, she adds, "I have way too many purple clothes."
She's referring to the color of Yahoo's logo. "I wish the Yahoo people the best," she adds, "because it's a fantastic franchise."
Update: Did this interview just cost Bartz $10 million? Yes, she had a non-disparagement clause...
Also on Fortune.com:
Bartz was the best CEO for Yahoo. Maybe
A look back at the way the restaurant chain handled the deaths of two CEOs and found the right man for the job.
McDonald's CEO Jim Skinner, photographed in 2011, is a product of the company's strong culture of promoting from within.
I wrote this article in 2005, a few months after Jim Skinner became CEO of McDonald's (MCD). The piece didn't run in the magazine because of space constraints, but MORE
Patricia Sellers - Aug 23, 2011 5:00 AM ET
Ursula Burns
When Ursula Burns went to Washington and met with President Obama last Friday, at least two people in the room personified her notion of what leads to great success: "The biggest differentiator is not how you are born," says the Chairman and CEO of Xerox (XRX). "It's how you're influenced throughout your life."
Barack Obama had a remarkable single mother to influence him. As did Burns, who grew up MORE
Patricia Sellers - Aug 16, 2011 10:55 AM ET
L. to R.: OWN honchos Christina Norman, David Zaslav, Oprah Winfrey, Tom Freston, Lisa Erspamer
I was on stage with Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the producer and director of Miss Representation, on Friday just after the news broke that Christina Norman was out as CEO of Oprah Winfrey's new TV network, OWN.
What an odd coincidence, since Newsom's documentary explores the dearth of women in "clout positions" in the mainstream media. Newsom says MORE
Patricia Sellers - May 9, 2011 2:54 PM ET
Sara Lee CEO Brenda Barnes delivered the news herself this morning: "I suffered a stroke a few weeks ago, and I am now in the process of recuperating," she said in a statement released by the company.
The news is shocking, not just because Barnes is only 56 years old. She has always looked and seemed younger than her years. And while she always has taken her job seriously, she has MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jun 14, 2010 3:33 PM ET
With Comcast (CMCSA) finalizing its deal to buy 51% of NBC Universal from General Electric (GE), skeptics are asking: Why would Comcast CEO Brian Roberts put his faith in Jeff Zucker, the NBCU chief who has dragged the NBC broadcast network from first to fourth place?
Because Jeff Zucker is one of the most determined, driven, ambitious, ingenious, competitive, compelling, resilient people you will ever meet.
Read "Life imitates TV," a Fortune MORE
Patricia Sellers - Dec 3, 2009 1:15 PM ET
by Patricia Sellers
Photo courtesy of Avon
Liz Smith, who was on track to succeed Andrea Jung as CEO of Avon Products (AVP), is moving to a new company and a new industry. Again.
The onetime star exec at Kraft (KFT), who made an unlikely leap from food to cosmetics in 2004, is the newly named chief executive of OSI, a chain of casual-dining eateries.
"What?!!" is a question that Smith MORE
Patricia Sellers - Nov 3, 2009 3:44 PM ET
by Jessica Shambora
We're toiling away on this year's Fortune Most Powerful Women in Business list, due out September 10. Anything can happen up to the minute we go to press, and this news today caused us to shuffle those yet-to be-unveiled rankings: Procter & Gamble's (PG) Melanie Healey is moving up to head the company's enormous North American business, effective October 1.
No. 37 on last year's MPWomen list, Healey currently MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Sep 2, 2009 12:46 PM ET
by Patricia Sellers
There aren't many hero CEOs anymore. So it's remarkable that two of the most admired chiefs have announced their retirement within the past three weeks.
First came Anne Mulcahy, who saved Xerox (XRX) from near-bankruptcy.
Now comes the news that Procter & Gamble (PG) CEO A. G. Lafley is stepping down after reviving that consumer giant and doubling its size to $83.5 billion in less than a decade. Like Mulcahy, MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jun 9, 2009 12:02 PM ET
by Jessica Shambora
Yesterday on Postcards we wrote about an historic event: Xerox (XRX) CEO Anne Mulcahy announced she will pass the baton to president Ursula Burns on the first of July in the first ever woman-to-woman transfer of the CEO role in the Fortune 500. Burns will also be the first African-American female to lead a company on the list. (Click here for a 2006 Fortune profile of Burns.)
While Fortune, MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - May 22, 2009 3:24 PM ET
For the latest on the most influential women in business, philanthropy, government, and the arts, like us on Facebook. 
In a funny and candid interview, Google VP Marissa Mayer explains how she got to the top. Watch
Xerox CEO Ursula Burns shares how she once accepted a job with Dell but ended up staying with Xerox. Watch
Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), "MySpace Cowboys," Martha Stewart ("I cannot be destroyed"), Ted Turner ("Gone with the Wind") and Oprah Winfrey ("Oprah Inc."). Since its launch in 1998, Pattie has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women" cover package.
A specialist at dissecting larger-than-life personalities, she has also profiled former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack, and countless CEOs.
Pattie co-chairs the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business, philanthropy, government, academia, and the arts. She started at Fortune in 1984, covering the big brand companies.
In Pattie's blog, Postcards, she provides insight into the lives of super-achievers through commentary, career advice, and Guest Posts by CEOs and other leaders.
.
Fortune Most Powerful Women
Sheryl Sandberg:
Gina Bianchini
