Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (7 page)
Noise. And you know, I was sitting up there and worrying what clothes I was wearing and if I looked okay and watching people look at me and nod and then ask for my picture and the autograph. And the ones with frowns on their faces that I knew didn’t like who they thought I represented or who they thought I was—to them I was the enemy. Terrorist even. Traitor. And then other women, came right over, saying, “Hey, how’s it going, Ro?” as if I had gone to their high school, and I responded in kind because that’s who I am.
After the matches we went to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Queens. A woman followed me into the bathroom. She could see my feet in the stall and I could see hers as she stood by the sink. “Rosie!” she said. “My name is Phyllis, I’m gonna wait! Take your time, honey! But I’m out here waiting! When you’re done, I’m gonna give you such a hug! I’m gonna give you a squeeze!”
And what I was thinking was how was I going to poop in this situation. My whole life was ruined because there was not a private bathroom in my dressing room at
The View
, so now I could not go poop until I got home. I am not a public pooper. I never have been, I never will be. So my entire digestive system was now in a tizzy because I had nowhere to poop at work. I just don’t understand; it’s like they think we’re camping.
Finally, I came out of the stall and saw her. Her hair was gray, and it was eight inches above her head and she had it in a clip, and her eyes were a little off. “How are you?” she said. She had no idea she was a poop preventer. “I’m Phyllis,” she said. “Look at you! Back on the show! Looking great!”
We hugged, Phyllis and I. I indulged her. I took it all in, steadied myself on the surfboard, hoping all the while that I might make it through this new rise—fame.
Letter to My Brother
E
ddie:
There is no way I can stay on this show. It is everything I am not. It’s called
The View
, but that’s a misnomer; it’s really a view, one view, ABC’s view, and I’m not a parrot or a puppet.
When I had my own show I expected 100 percent from myself. And I expected 100 percent from my staff too. But
The View
show has already been set up in a way where the staff is not inspired or rewarded.
It’s a difficult situation, because I got hired to do a job, I came, I did the job, I delivered, but I’m still not accepted here. I’m never going to be accepted here. It’s not my show; it’s nine years of someone else’s show; it’s a culture I don’t understand and it’s one I don’t agree with either. I can’t grow here. I have to grow. What other choice does one have? You either grow or you die.
The director. He’s able to make music look really good. Sometimes he’s spectacular, to a level that awes me when I watch it. And yet, he’s inconsistent. Everyone is; I know I am, for sure. How is it, I wonder, that a man who is able to do such spectacular work sometimes gets such murky shots? I’ve counted his cameras. I’ve watched him closely. He is tense, tightly wound. Art has to come from someplace quiet. Even when it’s raging, when it’s rageful, it comes from some still place inside you, someplace hard to get to, harder still to stay. I wish he could find that quiet place.
Listen, Eddie. It’s hard. And that’s why it’s no one’s fault. They’ve been making doughnuts at this factory for nine years. And people have been buying the doughnuts and everybody was happy with the doughnuts. So I’m not one to say, “You can’t make doughnuts that way.” But it’s not the kind of doughnut I make, and it’s not the way I make them. I’m gonna tell Barbara after Christmas break that I’m not going to sign on next year because I can’t. But I’ve had a great time, and thank you, but let’s not turn this into a negative because it isn’t.
In the middle of the show yesterday, the lights went on, like it’s last call at a bar. Every light in the studio went on, bright. I said, “Whoa!” For about ten seconds the lights were on. Afterwards I wanted to say, “What was that?” But I wasn’t sure anyone would answer, or, if they did, tell me the truth. Oh, a glitch in the computer. A DC power surge. Could be this. Could be that. Thing is, Eddie, it seems to me that no one really cares.
I wonder why I care especially because it’s not my show, which is maybe the point, and problem.
I just want it to be what it can be. I want the fucking IFBs out of everyone’s ears, everywhere, not only here, but on every network; make TV live, truly live. All of us doing talk shows, acting, delivering the news: whatever the medium, it’s important to make TV what it can really be. And to do so requires those who sit on my side of the screen to hear, to listen, to stay present.
And Barbara. At some point, a person gets tired. It’s inevitable, the aging process, I can feel it in myself. My eyes aren’t what they once were. Barbara Walters is almost twice my age and she’s been doing this for nearly half a century; at some point it becomes necessary to step back. I hope when the time comes for me to do this, I will be graceful and go. Everyone has to go. Going is part of the gig.
And I’m sure it doesn’t come easy for Barbara either. Who am I to say? I can only say what I see, feel what I feel. I feel, sometimes, her tiredness. I would like to tell Bill Geddie about her tiredness. I would like him to feel her fatigue, be in her bones; I’ll bet it hurts there. I’ll bet behind the glam and glitter it hurts to be Barbara, sometimes, because, while you can hide aging, you can’t erase it; it leaves its grainy footprints, its smears. I want to tell Bill Geddie this. I want to remind him that he has worked with her for twenty-five years. His whole entire career is with and for and by her. And does he think with her legacy that it is still in her best interest to do live television? Does he even consider this, or is the profit too pretty? Maybe it’s time for her to take a break. To go off the air, find the ground, sit down. Rest. She deserves that; if anyone does, she does.
The point is, Eddie, it’s hard to be here, to watch this happening.
And I would be less than honest if I were to say that there is no trouble between Barbara and me. I mean, our differences are obvious.
During the commercial, people scream, “I love you, Rosie,” and Barbara tells them in a schoolteacher tone, “It is impolite to say I love you to one person when there are four of us up here.” Then a stony silence sets in. There are many rules I don’t understand.
Once I was visiting Georgette Mosbacher and some fund-raiser guy, also visiting, told me about a new hospital for vets, for amputees from the Iraq war, and how these soldiers were not getting good medical care. And the fund-raiser told me his agency had already raised $5 million for these men, this hospital. “Did any celebrities give?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said. “Cher gave three hundred thousand.”
“I will match Cher’s gift,” I said to him.
Barbara found out about this. I could sense she thought I was crazy or just plain overboard. I must seem all excess to her, even in giving.
Here’s the thing. I believe that people of substantial wealth, wealth of the sort that it appears to me Barbara has, and that I have, are called upon to give substantially. It makes no sense not to. If people as wealthy as celebrities such as Barbara and myself gave away half of our net worth, we would still have plenty left over, and we could actually save millions upon millions of lives. To not do so seems wrong, if not downright sinful.
I’d be a liar if I said I do not stand in judgment of those who disagree. I do. It is small minded. Greedy.
I need to try harder.
What I’ve learned: rich is not as much a fact as a feeling. Because no matter how much money you have, the thought of parting with half of it can seem devastating, when in actual practice it would change your life, your access to resources, not one bit. I try to remember this, and stretch each year just a little farther. If I want to give ten thousand, I ask, “But why not ten hundred thousand?” And indeed, why not? What will change in my life if I do this? Nothing. What will change in the recipient’s life? Everything. Looked at from this point of view, withholding seems cruel.
Barbara I doubt would agree. So, no surprise, we see things very differently, Barbara and I. But the biggest differences aren’t money or clothes or what have you. Bottom line, she’s just not an entertainer. And she shouldn’t have to be. I don’t want to push Barbara to be something she’s not. It’s her show. This is her parade. I’m going at a different tempo. The ratings are up, which pleases her. But from a personal perspective, I think I’ve been very hard for her to handle.
My relationship with Barbara sometimes makes me wonder what it would be like with Mommy now—if we would get along, if we could find our way to friendship, to a mutual respect.
It’s all about sharing, Ed.
Call me later,
Ro
Who’s Real?
W
ho’s real? In celebrity land it can be hard to tell. Of course, this makes sense, because celebrity is in essence a mirage. It’s the pool of blue water you see as a dot in the desert from a great distance, a dot that gets larger and larger as you get closer and closer, looking ever more luscious, until you cross a line you didn’t even know was there and, poof, Houdini waves his famous wand, the crowds cheer and jeer, and—the water’s gone. And what is it you then hold in your hands? Sand, of course. It’s sand.
How would I know this if I am the celebrity and not the celebrity watcher? This is a good question. How can the mirage reflect on its own reflection? From my earliest memories I was practicing for fame, dusting my icons daily. There was Lucille Ball, Bette Midler, Johnny Carson, and of course Barbra Streisand.
I wonder if it is possible to love an icon. And I also wonder what the difference is between love and adoration. The celebrity I most, hands down, adore, respect, admire is Barbra Streisand. In fact, one reason I took the job on
The View
was because I knew she was going to go on tour, and I figured if I were back in the boxing ring, so to speak, I’d get great tickets to her concerts. I first had Streisand on my show in 1997. She wrote me a note a few days before she was to appear. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” the note said. “Is it all going to change?”
“Yes,” I wrote back.
Streisand came on, the cameras were filming me meeting my dream in flesh, my fantasy in life, which is also, without doubt, death. And Streisand wanted to protect me from that, from my own disappointment and from its being aired to millions across the country. Only here’s the thing. I wasn’t disappointed; she retained her glory up close. She came close to perfection, and in the coming years would come closer still. I found her to be everything I had dreamed—and more.
I have read that children who lose a parent early never go through the inevitable process of parental disillusionment that is so essential to growing up. When you are very young, your parents are the tallest trees; you look way, way up, and thirty thousand feet above you, so it seems, are their round faces floating amid blobs of light and shadow. Maturity perhaps can be best defined by the diminishment of distance between you and them, until you eventually realize that they are just life-size people, flawed and fragile, and yet you love them still.
I know about this journey, but have I ever taken it? My mother died before I could take the trip to the treetops, to the moon, and back. I remember Neil Armstrong’s trip to the moon, and how he saw, along with the rest of the nation, that whatever was up there in the night sky was not a piece of cheese, or a man in an orb, or a pearl on a background of black velvet. He saw what was up there as it was—a stark and severe beauty. My mother died. Sometimes, I wonder if she took with her my chance for transformation. Because I still see certain people as a child does. This is a great gift. A profound problem. A religion.
Our country is more religious now than I have ever known it to be. The other day I read in the
New York Times
about the controversy over a recent children’s book that mentions on its first page the word
scrotum
. Certain people, among them librarians, are claiming that for this reason the book should be banned, because children must not read such words as
scrotum
. A body part. No different from
arm
or
eyebrow
. We can lasciviously pour billions of gallons of CO
2
smut into the real air, thereby ensuring that our children grow up on a wasted planet, but we are too prudish to allow them exposure to a normal human body part. Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. About the wrong things.
Here’s an example. Jim McGreevey. Remember him? He was the governor who was disgraced because he had an affair with a guy he put on his payroll as the head of homeland security for New Jersey. At the time he came on
The View
there was a lot of controversy in the gay community as to whether or not this man “helped” or “hurt” us because he used gayness as a smoke screen to deflect attention from his very unorthodox and possibly corrupt administration. Many were offended by McGreevey, offended by the fact that he had had sex with a guy and therefore likely endangered his wife and, to make matters worse, brought this man to the house while his wife was having a C-section: slimy stuff, no question. McGreevey’s explanation: that being a closeted gay makes you act weird, that the weight of the repression drove him mad sort of thing. He used the cultural prejudice against gayness as an excuse for his poor judgment.
I had read his book before he came on, and it seemed to me like he was the typical nerdy gay Irish Catholic kid. I know fifteen of them from my neighborhood. They couldn’t come out, and now they’ve come out, and I’ve seen the story; I get it.
He came on
The View
. He was well dressed, groomed, buttoned up. His shoes were shiny. I thought to myself “What are the chances this guy will give me the truth?”
On air, I sat back. Some were hoping they’d put McGreevey on live national TV and I’d call him a slimebag and chastise him for getting away with it all by using the gay freak flag as a defense, but here’s what was in my mind: a lot of guys do just what he did to their wives with another woman, and no one cares. So why, when it’s with a man, does it become a crime? That’s what I was thinking. I didn’t say it though. I kept that quiet.
I let Elisabeth ask the questions. She had many. They got into a predictable brawl, which was probably what everyone really wanted, because some tend to think brawls make for good TV. I disagree. At one point during the “debate” I interjected and tried to explain to Elisabeth the point McGreevey was fumbling for and he said, “Wow, you said that well. I wish I could do that.”
I turned to him and said, on live TV, “You can’t because you speak like a politician, not like a human being.”
That’s my whole point.
Like a human being
.
The rest of the show I don’t really remember. The phrase “like a human being” kept repeating itself, as does the ticker tape at CNN.
Like a human being human being human being human being
. Weird words. A human. Being. Being what? That’s what I’d like to know. Being who?
When Streisand sings, I feel myself begin to be. Her voice, so resonant you don’t realize until you hear it that you have forgotten you are in existence. While it may seem strange, the idea one can forget one is alive is true for me, and I believe for others as well. There is so much sheer
stuff
to get through, so many interviews, appointments, tasks, books, talks, projects, meals, meetings, so many roles to play—mother, wife, friend, activist, philanthropist, comedienne—that one becomes a what, not a who. I become
what
I am doing, and that
what
flips as fast as the pages in a book, shape shifting, slippery. I have a friend who told me she gets so busy she forgets to breathe. As for myself, I can go hours, days, weeks, months, without any sense of my is-ness, instead becoming a series of tasks checked off. Next! Next! Next! This is a shame. It may even be a sin.
When Streisand sings it’s a physical feeling for me, a welling up of things that are gorgeous and yellow. I listen and think of my mother listening. She is lying on the couch in our living room, creaming Nair on her legs, skinny with sickness, Streisand seeping through the pores in the radio on the shelf. She is standing by the window in our kitchen; it is May, and early, the day wet and blue, Streisand singing a sadness she has no way of speaking. Streisand’s voice filled the house on Rhonda Lane, and it filled me as well, and became a substance that was soothing, a sound I could return to when the going got bad, when my mother died. I listened closely, the same way a burgeoning scientist studies his first glass slides beneath the mail-order microscope he got for Christmas. I listened at my desk, in bed, at the breakfast table. Hers is a voice that you can break down into pulse and wave. Hers is a voice that proves sound has segments—flecks of color, scents of tang and soil, blood and mineral, memory and sadness, hands-holding. The voice stirs your soul and demands you to sing along. I find it odd and obvious that incurable stuttering can be cured through singing. The brain switches over. It is impossible to lie when singing. It is impossible to be anything but a
human . . . being
.
Ninety-nine percent of celebrity worship is built on illusion. Ninety-nine percent of celebrity culture is false. Streisand’s genius is that she demands you to exist in real relationship to her voice. Streisand is not about distraction from the self. She is about a return
to
that self. When you hear her sing, you are brought backward into memories and forward into all you might be able to be if you could just catch the courage.
Courage
. A word I like. It comes from the French word
coeur
. “Heart.” Streisand has a heart. My heart, a nation’s heart. I wanted to film the heart’s collective beat and give it back to her as proof of what she has to offer. I began to make arrangements with my producer Jen Le Beau to gather the equipment. We wrote to Streisand’s people and asked for permission to film her fans outside the concert halls, to interview them and get on tape what it was they felt for this singer, actress, and activist. I envisioned the movie I would make, the gift I would give her.
I thought about proposing to
The View
the idea—stalking Streisand segments. Unlike McGreevey, this was the sort of stuff that would have really had meaning for me.
I wanted to ask about a stalking Streisand segment, but on the other hand, I was feeling a “what’s the point” exhaustion. I could hear them saying no; it was out of bounds for them. And it was just around this time, the time of wanting to suggest a Streisand segment and feeling so pessimistic about their response—well, just at this time I felt things start to shift a little in myself. One of my concerns was losing balance, caving in to the crowd, becoming an emblem or an icon to even myself. Starting to see myself as I was seen, which is larger than life, and therefore dead; celebrity culture can kill you. I would learn this later all over again, and in the worst way, when Anna Nicole Smith died. In some awful way, her death was not a surprise. It was a confirmation of things I already knew.
But I’m ahead of myself here. Anna Nicole Smith was still very much alive. And the pace of my life started to pick up dramatically. As I slipped back into celebrity land, the tasks multiplied a thousandfold, and the letters addressed to me but having nothing to do with the real me—the mother me, the married me, the friend me—the letters addressed to the celebrity me began to pour in again, asking for money, for help, for salvation. I had gone for four years living alone, and now my mailbox was overflowing and people were telling me I was fantastic, the funniest, the happiest, the brightest, the est-est of the ests; people were talking about my comeback as though I were not a person but a sport, and when enough people speak of you, and see you, in a certain way, you can become that which they think, or speak, or see. How to best explain this? It is a shift that happens in the head, and that very few celebrities will ever really speak about—the inflation of self, the pride. One begins to believe in the specialness, and a dangerous sense of entitlement takes over. It feels shameful to speak of, and I do not do it easily. The drunkenness is not from alcohol or morphine; it’s from the steady stream of praise pouring in.
How did it manifest? In just the subtlest ways, like the inability, or unwillingness, to wait in line. The need to get my groceries, my tickets, my gasoline, my art supplies, immediately. Let me put it this way. Life is full of red lights and stop signs. When celebrity addiction starts, you become impatient with, even angry at those necessary obstacles. You think you could run a red light, or two. And then you do.
And there were other signs as well. I took
The View
job in part so I could have balance in my life, not be swallowed up by the demands of a career. Because the show was over by noon, I figured I would be able to pick my children up from school. During my years off screen, I picked my kids up all the time. I stood at the curb with all the other mothers, and made friends. At first, everyone was shy, but as time ticked on, and the years passed by, the other mothers began to forget I was Rosie O’Donnell and they came to think of me as Ro, another woman picking up her children at the end of the day. I loved those moments with the other mothers, worrying about grades, or who was misbehaving, or what the third grade teacher did. Sharon became a good friend. We worked out together. We discussed this and that. We waited in the dampness and the drizzle. We waited in the slush and the snow. We watched each other greet our hearts at 3:00 p.m. every afternoon, swooping the child up, each reunion as rich as the first one, this ritual important. I didn’t want to lose it.