Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (4 page)
Ruthie, my Kabbalah teacher, with whom I regularly meet, and who teaches me all things spiritual, told me my ego is my biggest fault and challenge.
Oy vey.
I wanted to go back because I knew it would be groundbreaking. One can break ground quietly; one can start a small crack or dent that does not mean much, except that it is an opening. When I started my show I was in the closet. There were no gay people on TV. Ellen wasn’t out yet and there was no
Will and Grace
. Now here we were ten years later; I could do it all again—only be out. I would be able to talk about my family like the other hosts did. I thought, “Wow—this could be a big deal.” I thought, when I saw the Times Square billboard, that this was what I was meant to do.
There are no mistakes.
Faith or fear.
Remember to breathe.
Maybe my job was to ride the wave, make it to shore, and rest. And then, once rested, surf out again, swim out again, only this time, without barriers or boundaries—without shame. Just be. Allow the light. Corny but true, that was my intent.
I have had tremendous luck in my career, amazing opportunities to work with some of the best artists alive, and now another opportunity was coming my way. I have been fortunate. Almost all the directors I’ve ever worked with have been women, which is shocking to begin with, considering the law of averages. I got to be directed by Nora Ephron, Angelica Huston, and Penny Marshall. I have come to know and love Mia Farrow, Chita Rivera, Sharon Gless. Celebrity is odd—hard to make your way through. As I said, a few months ago Jane Fonda was at my house. Now I know people think celebs hang out with other celebs a lot—but I haven’t found that to be true. Jane Fonda called me one day and said with sincerity, that she would like to know me better, be my friend. I invited her over and she came.
I’m the kid from Rhonda Lane, so how did I wind up here, or, rather, how did
she
wind up there, talking to me in my home? In the five hours Jane Fonda visited me, she was able to mine through all of my “movie-star mother” issues. And she walked down with me to my craft room and sat with me and watched twenty of the movies I had made, and looked at all of my art and asked me questions. Every fantasy I’d ever had about a mother being alive and wanting to know me came true, in that time with Jane Fonda in my craft room. And then we walked back up to the main house. Her son called and told her he had asked his fiancée to marry him the other night, and he wanted to tell her about it. I watched her eyes well up and I heard her ask about the ring, and, you know, I was thinking, “Wow.” I had just watched her live a real moment in front of me and the fact that she is able to live and feel all of that is why she’s a great actress, because most people can’t take that in. That was a moment of near complete clarity for me, with her in my kitchen, and thinking of her sitting on a tank in Hanoi in 1972 and speaking of peace at a time when I knew that peace was the answer because children know; their souls are closer to God. She inspired me as a child and here she was in my living room continuing to inspire me.
This is what I was thinking in Times Square, when I saw the billboard, how lucky I had been, past opportunities, none of them lost, so why lose this one? Jane Fonda had been in my house and now Barbara Walters was asking me to be on her show, and it was startling to me, and the very fact of that—the startlement of it—made it clear to me to go forward. With the intent to challenge the image this country has of celebrities. The intent to work with very talented people. The intent to laugh and hear laughter, and not to get lost. One year only. I knew a person is only as good as her brakes, just like any other forward-moving machine.
In real life, which is not the same as a memoir exactly—in real life the billboard happened second, the Emmys first. But this is not how the telling has happened, not how the story seems it should go. Barbara was excited to speak of our future collaboration onstage at the Emmys, and I was excited to see her do so, to be on the stage with her when she made the announcement, because she is legendary, Barbara Walters. She is a weather girl who made one of the widest wakes in the history of the women’s movement. She is, in this sense, a mother, or grandmother, to the many who have followed her footsteps. She has one daughter, Jackie, named after her sister, both of whom have been a source of private pain for Barbara. Throughout our entire relationship, I have always been acutely aware of both the public and the private facts: her struggles with her daughter and vice versa. She has told me I remind her of Jackie, whom she truly adores. Jackie has rejected the gold and glitter life: she lives in a small town in Maine, counseling troubled teens. Plain pain—in the end the only kind there is.
After Barbara asked me to co-host her show, I sometimes wondered about the daughter, and her hurt, and if she’d felt abandoned by a mother who was maybe so busy with the world that she didn’t have time for her kid. I don’t know. Women’s choices. What I do know is that the knot between a mother and a daughter is always fraught, always frayed, you can depend on that. I sensed a raw place in Barbara right from the start; I could practically see it, the haze of her heart, glinting like an ornament, but not, real, beneath her silken blouses.
And so there we were on the stage at the daytime Emmys, together. Because the news of our collaboration had already leaked, we did, instead, a bit of prepared banter. I said, “I just read on the Internet that you have something to ask me.” The stage was hot, from the full force of the lighting, and below us I could feel the swell of the crowd. Barbara said, “Would you be on my show next year?” and I said, “It’s either you or
Celebrity Fit Club
.” This part we had planned, but then I swerved. I surprised Barbara, the same as many months later she would surprise me, and a rift would form between us, and within me a rift that would forever change the way I saw celebrities, myself included. But I had no way of knowing, that day, no way of anticipating all that was to follow: the abandonments, the dissembling, lies that lit the way toward truth, a new path for me, a total turn.
The View.
It changed my view forever.
But on that day, at that moment, we were just at the bare beginning. The conflict had not even started to simmer. I turned and I looked Barbara in the eye, like she’d looked me in the eye the night of my documentary, and said to her onstage, “Thank you for asking me, Barbara Walters.” And Barbara Walters, she got choked up, and I think I saw the haze of her heart beneath her dress, and then she leaned forward, and put her forehead next to mine.
Blog 12/24/05
five and fierce
pins put in his busted elbow this morning
now—in bed next to me
his lips dry and cracked
a newborn waited
unaware
on the cot next to his
mother and grandma
crying beyond scared
too tiny—this baby
to go under and out
to have to fight so soon
for life—air
unfair
out of myself
gratitude
perspective
half-full
i cannot spell
i never could
commas and capitals
only in the way
on i go
unworthy
blogging
hmmm
who is the mother
we both say me
instantly
instinct
not of my body or blood
this brilliant boy
naming every animal
without a thought
the doctor comes in
i am not as famous now
but any fame helps
always
in emergency rooms
what did you do kiddo
he asks
broke my skeleton he answers
and my knees wobble
as my heart again grows
do i regret leaving
the razz ma tazz
queen of the world
they said
all of them strangers
my world
made up of 6 vital souls
that is the deal i made
my promise wish prayer
how selfless people think—say
no—i know—purely selfish
life perservers
each one
i took 4
knowing with them i could never drown
my boy will remember this day
his two mommies there
when terror shook all 49 pounds
soft songs sung
chances are i would have missed this
had i not jumped
i would have been at 30 thousand feet
hovering speeding across
to important and validating
saving strangers righting wrongs
lay down the cape
two and 1/2 years now
i have been back here
at sea level
present panicked and plain
a mom
with watery eyes
nodding at the others
my sisters my friends
take care of your children
as i will mine
Barbara’s Show
I
n the right story, which is not the real story, my first day on
The View
is noteworthy, a grand return to daytime television. In fact, though, I don’t recall much about it. What sticks in my mind are the precursors. I remember Bill Geddie, Barbara Walters’s producer, coming to my apartment in New York City sometime during the summer before the season started. We have a little apartment and Bill is a very tall man, he’s six foot five or something, a big guy, and a Republican. I’d hosted
The View
in the past, when I’d had my own show, so I knew what his politics were. I knew they were different from mine. Sometimes in the past I had even called him on them, in a sort of friendly way, like, “Why are we talking about lip liner when twenty-seven marines were killed in Iraq this week?” And he would say, “Because that’s what we do on this show.”
So, going in, I knew that we had very different politics, and this was a concern for me. I wanted to meet him first, to talk, and to make sure we could agree on how to make good television. After all, I’d never had a boss before, never in my life, in my career; certainly not in any traditional sense. There’s real freedom in that but also real risk; you’re on your own. No one owns you, and you don’t own anyone. Those days are long gone, and while for the most part I’m grateful at how far I’ve come, how lucky I’ve been, I sometimes miss, or maybe just remember, the days way before I became who I am, the days when I had no worth, and yet, oddly, maybe more worth, because there’s a purity to beginnings, to being unbossed, outside of any contract, your years your own.
I wondered what it would be like to be part of a team—that’s what
The View
was, after all, a team—and as I wondered these things I recalled other things, the radical aloneness of being eighteen, in a time far before fame. I remember going up and down the East Coast, crisscrossing the country, making my way. Unbossed, radically free, and also alone, I did club after club. I got to know every airport. I’d land in a city and look for the guy with my name on a white sign. He’d drive me to the hotel, or the condo that the nightclub rented for the comics. Those condos, you can’t forget them. They always smelled stale. They always had fridges with one leftover bottle of beer and a devilled egg with someone’s mouth marks on it. Usually, the comic before, who’d been doing the city’s circuit for a few weeks, hadn’t paid the phone bill, and I’d lift the receiver to nothing.
The condos were lonely, and made more so by the smattering of personal stuff the prior occupants always left behind. I’d find the last actress’ shirt in the closet, belted with sequins, or a used condom. Once I found a wadded up note, which, when I unfolded it said, “
Richard, go left out the drive and keep going straight till you fall from the cliff. Fuck you. Michelle.
” Michelle who?
But I wasn’t depressed. I wouldn’t say I loved it, but I had the sense of making it, doing it on my own, getting as much as $300 a week, which was more than I ever could have asked for. God, the gratefulness. Is it all gone now? I had two credit cards. I rented my own place in LA, for when I wasn’t traveling. I opened a bank account in LA, with an ATM card to boot. In truth I knew nothing about banking. I just put in money. I never wrote down how much, where, when. I just deposited whatever I had and knew, since this was a bank, that everything would be taken care of. I trusted them, the bankers.
My method of money management was this: whenever I needed to write out some checks for monthly bills, I’d skateboard down to the Wells Fargo on Van Nuys Boulevard and pop in my ATM card. Balance? The machine always asked me. Yes, I’d punch in and it would respond with a figure: $782.92. Excellent. Thank you. I took the piece of paper back home and went to work. I went through my bills, in order of importance: rent, car payment, gas, electricity, Visa. All totaled $700. Lucky for me I had $82.92 to play with.
And with the stamped invoices in my chubby round hand, I skated down to the mailbox, dropped them in, and then quick cashed myself forty big ones. On the way home I would stop at the 7-11 for a six of beer and some pretzels.
A few days later, the bounced check notices would start arriving in the mail. Oh God, I’d think, not again. I made an appointment one afternoon with the bank manager. He wore a suit; I wanted to discuss with them the problem of their shoddy record keeping. I had facts and figures and a loose-leaf sheet with the balance receipt stapled to the top left-hand corner. This guy was toast.
I walked into the bank. There was a velvet rope with a tasseled edge. There were tellers behind panes of glass. The man I’d come to speak with was seated behind a big boat of a desk, and I could see his shiny shoes. He listened. I explained.
“Monthly, you know. It happens all the time. I get the balance, and that day write out checks, and you say I don’t have it? Impossible. I have the receipt.”
The man, listening to this, was stunned. He didn’t move. He didn’t laugh. He just stared at me. After a moment he asked how old I was. Twenty two, I told him, and I had two Visa cards and I was a professional stand-up comic; I had been on
Star Search
; in clubs; I was not someone who could have their bank messing up like this, month after month.
The man asked me to go over it again, my system, how I knew the mistake was not mine, the date on my balance receipt. I went slowly because he was having trouble understanding, which seriously concerned me, seeing as he was a bank employee. When I was done he lifted up my blank checkbook, with absolutely no notation of deposits or withdrawals, and flipped through it. The dry pages rustled. He took the loose-leaf paper with the ragged receipt stapled to it and walked into the belly of the bank.
“Heads are going to roll,” I thought. “Someone is in deep trouble.” After ten minutes, he came back out. “Okay Rosie,” he said. “Listen, I’m giving you free unlimited checking, including a no bounce fee. You will no longer be charged anything concerning your checking account, as long as you agree to come to one training course on handling you account.”
“Fair deal,” I thought. I’d get to hold forth in the course about my superior banking methods, and in return, I’d get a no bounce fee.
So many people in my life have been nice to me. I see it clearly now.
The course was on a Sunday, at twelve noon. Everyone there was a Spanish speaker, except me. The teacher asked each of us how we recorded our transactions. Immediately I raised my hand and said, “I just go to the ATM and see my balance, and then write checks for less than that amount.”
The teacher started to laugh, really laugh, and then so did the students, who felt the funniness without understanding a word. I had cracked everyone up, and I wasn’t even trying.
“That’s a good one,” the teacher said. “You should be a comedienne.”
Well, I was becoming a comedienne, and the truth is, my act was getting better and better even if my banking skills were not. I could get an audience going. I was out there on my own. My own boss. I learned to write my own lines, and then I learned something else: not to write them, to just stand on a stage and let things float to me, sudden sayings, riffs and swerves, which is the best art and the best humor: unplanned.
I didn’t need to know a lot about Bill Geddie, or any boss really, to know that the whole point of management is planning. Bosses plan their company, their strategy, their time, their talk. At heart, I’m an improviser, not a planner. That’s why I knew it would be a challenge to have any kind of boss, Bill Geddie or otherwise, but I knew I would try. I believed we both would. Despite the fact that he is a conservative and I am not, he also values human rights, so I knew there was some common core between us. At least I hoped so. Because this is what it’s all about: a common core.
In the pre-show meetings that summer I felt the tensions of what was to come. These tensions are difficult to pinpoint in fact, but in my body they were not. Icy looks? Clenched fists? Tart tongues? No, not really, not then, certainly, when we were all trying our best to make it work. It was hot that summer, and I seemed to always sweat, because my body knew it needed to feel fear. I am a fat, loud, say-it-like-it-is-far-left-liberal while Barbara is a petite, poised, cautious, polite hostess. Why did we think the combination could work? Why did
I
think the combination could work? Simple. I wanted her to like me. Maybe even love me. Because no matter how famous I am, a part of me is always on the outside, too heavy, too hot, too damn much, at least for myself. Say it like it is, Ro. Okay. But God, it can be hard to hear.
I think I sensed what later became apparent, what later the media jumped all over: how upsetting I could be to Barbara, because I don’t like scripts, or pretense. Much later on, weeks later, months later, I remember reading a newspaper report: “Walters was white” it said. The journalist wrote that the normally perceptive Rosie O’Donnell went on and on about money when, in fact, Walters does not like to discuss these things.
I sensed there were serious stylistic differences between me and the rest of
The View
right from the start. They were as restrained and circumspect as I am garrulous and on edge. And then there’s this. For six years I had my own show, ran things my own way, and these things reflected my beliefs at every level. My bottom line belief when it comes to almost anything is authenticity. If you are organic in your approach, you can be assured that good things will grow. On my show, I strove to say what was true for me regardless of its impact on advertisers or even the audience. When I said I loved Tickle Me Elmo, it was because I did, not because the company had some financial stock in that particular slice of airtime. It has always been of absolute importance to me to speak my mind, for better or for worse. Because I don’t actually have a choice. It’s my mind. It’s not a car I can trade in for something slicker, or smoother, or sweeter. It’s all I have to offer.
In the beginning, though, I had so much hope, so many ideas for the show. One thing I wanted right off the bat: the set changed. I wanted gifts for the audience. My belief is that the audience should feel welcomed, special; they are your guests. When you welcome them onto the set you are, in a very real sense, welcoming them into your living room, your home away from home, and they should be treated to creature comforts. The audience should never have to wait outside in the rain for a seat in the show. They should never feel thirsty; they should have a place to put their coats, rest their feet, sit softly. These things are important to me; they reflect the real appreciation I feel for the people who take the time to hear me, crass, crap or cream, no matter. I like to give the audience gift bags, even, and we finally did that on
The View
; we finally started giving them big red bags inside of which were small simple things, but the message was big.
We care
.
I started out, in the preseason meetings and then on the show itself, with so many ideas and ideals and yet, no matter how much excitement I felt, it always sat side by side with my misgivings. I could not escape the sense, impossible to pinpoint but palpably real in the air, that while I was hugely welcomed as a co-host, I was also hugely threatening. I was too big, and that’s true. I am. Then again, maybe I’m giving myself more credit than I deserve. Maybe I was more of an irritant than anything else. Or maybe my ideas were too cumbersome for them, and kept cluttering what had been, before my loud-mouth arrival, something simple and clear. I would suggest something and my ideas didn’t seem to get the reception I’d hoped for, or maybe that was just my perception; no, it wasn’t. Who has not had the classic dream of swimming against a current, or screaming only to see the sound shred to silence in huge winds, or this dream, my dream: trying to dial the phone, but not being able to move my fingers so there is, and cannot ever be, the satisfying click of connection. Often, at
The View
, or in the months before the show started, I felt like I was on a turnpike and each time I picked up some speed I’d get stopped at a toll booth, and inside there was a bored person holding out his hand in a latex glove.
Pay to proceed, please
. It was exhausting.
I wasn’t used to this. My own show was syndicated, so I’d operated outside the demands of any particular network. The whole time I did my show I had only one person to talk to, Jim Paratore, the tall guy with the shiny shoes. I had this one go-to guy who knew me as I knew him, the communication clean. In addition, when I started my show I was not nearly as famous as I am today, so I was able to just have a cheeseburger with Jim and say, “Dude, this is how I do it, okay? I’m gonna try to give a hundred percent and we’re both gonna make a lot of money and have a good show. And this is how I see it.” Jim let me do everything, from the opening credits design, to how the set should look, to what color it should be; he let me do every single thing. I had total creative control.