Official Book Club Selection (8 page)

“Do you have a to-go box?”

But it’s certainly not as if starving was a sane alternative. After a bad binge, I might do crazy things I’d read about in so-called women’s magazines, like spend all day drinking only water with five lemons squeezed into it. Everything’s going to be okay now! I’d think, and then of course I’d be starving the next day. The problem is, when all you’ve allowed yourself are clear soups or elixirs as a corrective, it’s not like the craving for pie goes away. My eating habits were so shitty that even when I could suspend the cycle and eat okay for a week, I’d never develop a craving for healthy food. I remember once when I realized the healthiest thing I’d had all week was a pint of Häagen-Dazs, because in my mind, it was part of the dairy food group.

Diet pills never worked, either. They made me lose my appetite for maybe two hours. But I did try speed for three weeks! (I blame Mom, from her wild-eyed amphetamine freak days whilst I was in utero.) And may I say, you don’t know how proud I am to have this revelation in a genuine celebrity tell-all memoir. Let the bidding war begin between Tyra, Oprah, and Maury (just to get the price up) for the Kathy Griffin exclusive. I promise to sob on air. I’m crying right now.

A-a-a-nyway, what happened was, a guy I was dating named Phil—okay, I just banged him twice—got a bag of “black beauties” and “speckled eggs” for $40. I don’t even know if anybody makes those anymore. I’m pretty sure people jump straight to crystal meth now. Anyway, my trial period with speed didn’t work, either. They were basically jacked-up diet pills, and all they did was make me jumpy and irritable for a day, followed by me being three times as hungry afterward. I ended up going to a doctor, who gave it to me straight, albeit in the context of me asking, “Um, I have a … friend … who’s, um, having trouble with her weight, and might take ‘black beauties’ and ‘speckled eggs.’ What would the health implications be?”

She calmly replied, “Tell your …friend … the reason diet pills and amphetamines don’t work is because all they do is put off your hunger. Your body just stores your fat for a day, and then you wake up the next day twice as hungry. You’ll never be able to keep up with the speed.”

All right, all right, so much for speed. It was back to plan B. As I couldn’t afford Bally’s Total Fitness and I had a desperate need to over-exercise, I realized I was in luck because the YWCA was much cheaper. Do you remember a little phenom called step aerobics? If you do, then you know how crazy it was to take two ninety-minute classes in a row. It’s incredible that I didn’t die from a blunt injury to the back of my head from slipping on my own pool of sweat.

I was much clearer-headed when it came to what was working for me in my life, and that was my career. After two years of plugging away at acting classes, it was pretty obvious that I was never going to be a serious thespian. I knew that the Groundlings were my calling, so I started taking classes there as I was finishing up at Strasberg.

I could immediately tell that what I was learning at the Groundlings would undo everything I learned at Strasberg. For one thing, at the Groundlings I was never naked. Bra, maybe. But not naked. The big difference, though, was that at Strasberg it was about reaching deep down, and at the Groundlings, it was about whatever got a laugh, and if that meant superficial characters, so be it. Fine by me.

I started in the basic class, which is just improvisational training. But I was going to the main company’s shows all the time to soak it all in, and because the instructors were also cast members, I could see what they were teaching in action. These people were stars in my eyes. The hot names in the group back then were Laraine Newman, from the original cast of Saturday Night Live; Paul Reubens, who had just left, but who’d become the biggest star in LA since taking his incredible Pee Wee Herman show to the Roxy on Sunset; Cassandra Peterson, who was Elvira, Mistress of the Dark; and Edie McClurg, who had gone on to do a lot of John Hughes movies. But once I was familiar with all the members, I’d go to something like a Cheech and Chong movie and recognize Groundlings people in small roles, and get excited about what lay in store, possibly for myself. So being at the Groundlings, I just wanted to hang out as often as I could and get backstage to mingle with the actual troupe members.

When you reach the intermediate class, you start to develop characters. Some people would do composites of types, maybe by imagining, “What if Abraham Lincoln was a punk rocker who worked at the Mall of America?” Or “What if the Heisman Trophy winner was ten years old and had a facial tic?” Or today, it might be, “What if one of those Twilight freaks could actually form a sentence at an awards show and didn’t have gray skin?” I was better at playing characters that were simply based on people I knew. So my first characters were Mom and Dad. I worked as a bank teller at the time, so when the exercise was, “Play someone you know, but as a different gender,” I’d think of all the characteristics unique to my dad—sarcastic wit, eye-rolling, and strategic swearing—make him a woman, and put her in a bank. My sister Joyce was another character, a negative preacher of doom and gloom who also loves the Ronettes.

Moving up at the Groundlings was about getting through the levels of classes, and then hopefully making it into the performing groups. There’s the Friday and Saturday group featuring the main players, and the Sunday show they’d call the B company, or farm team. Getting into the Sunday group is one thing, but you needed to get voted into the Friday-Saturday gang. It’s a really touchy line they walk with that policy, because it allows for criteria other than pure talent (i.e., jealousy) to determine who gets in. If you were a main company player, maybe you’d think a really funny farm-team guy or gal would steal your spot. The trick, therefore, was trying to dazzle the Friday-Saturday people, but not threaten them. Sometimes you’d tell them, “If you vote for me, I’ll write scenes for you.” You’d try anything you could. But ultimately if you were the one getting the most applause, the biggest laughs, they couldn’t deny you. That quality trumped everything.

This is from the Groundlings days. That’s Mindy Sterling of Austin Powers fame on the right. And apparently I’m fighting the power. (Photo: David Siegle/Courtesy of the Groundlings Theater and School)

Well, once I got into the Sunday group, I was parked there a long time, as in two years. The normal run in the Sunday B company is six months to a year before moving on to the Friday-Saturday group. But my problem at the Groundlings was I wasn’t a chameleon. I was always a variation of myself. The people from my peer group who had a kind of unstoppable popularity and moved quickly to the next company were Jon Lovitz and Mindy Sterling, actors who were great at coming up with a million different faces and voices. Jon originated the liar guy and his Master Thespian bit—characters he made nationally famous on Saturday Night Live—back at the Groundlings. Mindy, meanwhile, who went on to play Dr. Evil’s fraulein in the Austin Powers movies, had this great rubbery face and pliable voice that she could adapt to any wacky part. Me, I was stuck with this face—okay, former face—and one inescapable voice.

My two strongest characters at the Groundlings then were what I do now in my stand-up act: some version of myself, or my mom. You did well at the Groundlings if you were the biggest and the broadest. But I would make the stupid mistake of writing a skit for three characters, and I kept casting myself as myself—because usually it was about something that had happened to me—and then I’d ask Julia Sweeney or Jon Lovitz to play the other larger-than-life, crazy characters I couldn’t do. I gave myself the straight person in my own skits. That wasn’t the way to get noticed. I didn’t know it then, of course, but that whole time what I was doing, being myself, was more appropriate for stand-up.

So while I didn’t exactly help myself gain access to the Friday-Saturday company, it also didn’t help that I had a series of B-company directors who just didn’t think I was funny. And if a director doesn’t think you’re funny, you’re not in the show as much, and then how are you going to prove to the main company that you’re worthy of admission? If you’ve watched Saturday Night Live over the years, it’s the same thing with that show’s reigning monarch, Lorne Michaels. If he doesn’t like someone, they’re just not in the show, or they’re only doing small parts.

In my case, it really felt like I was part of a blackballed clique. I was friends with a guy named George McGrath, who could be a diva, but I thought he was really funny. Well, this one director hated him. And because I was always trying to do sketches with George, you could say I backed the wrong horse. (George would go on to win an Emmy co-writing Pee Wee’s Playhouse, incidentally, so if anyone deserved to say “Suck it” before me on an Emmy telecast, it was George.)

But what that experience really taught me was that I was just going to have to work harder. I have to be so good, I thought, that this director has to put my pieces in. But because no one wanted to work with me, I had to learn to write monologues. After writing and writing and writing—bad pieces, then mediocre ones, then good but not good enough stuff—I finally hit upon my first successful character.

Once when I was back in Chicago, I went to a midnight screening of one of the Rambo movies, those Sylvester Stallone shoot-’em-ups about the crazy Vietnam vet. I was sitting in front of an African-American woman, and she talked to the screen the whole time. And it was hysterical, certainly more entertaining than the film. So remembering that moment later at the Groundlings, I started trying to think like that woman. She took that movie so personally, it was funny. “Ooooooh, Rambo!” she’d yell out. “Looka Rambo cl–i-i-i-mb-in’ up dat tree like he an animal! Looka Rambo! RAMBO, WHERE YO KNIFE?” Thankfully, we live in a world where one person’s intimate exchange with a ludicrous movie character can be another person’s ticket to comic notoriety, and when I presented this monologue to the director of the show, he put it in, and it absolutely killed. I even got written up in the LA Weekly, whose reviews could make or break a Groundlings show.

It was also the only sketch I did for six months, and suddenly I got a taste of pigeonholing. That’s right. I had pigeonholed myself as a thirty-year-old African-American woman from Chicago who goes to Rambo movies at midnight. My spirits would soar because this bit started to get me auditions with casting directors, sometimes for a big network show, but then I’d go in and they’d say “Do that Rambo sketch!” I’d do it, and they’d say “Bye-bye, thanks! Isn’t she great?” I was now performing for free in offices around town, for people who had nothing to give me in return.

It taught me a lesson about going in to read for roles. Are television and film executives and casting heads calling you in for their own amusement? Or are you really appropriate for the part? That’s when I started trying to find out as much information as I could before I went in for auditions or meetings. It’s something I think all actors should do, so you’re not wasting your time. If I’m sitting there at an audition all dolled up in high heels and a cute outfit but I’m surrounded by tall, gorgeous blondes, I’m thinking they’re calling me in because I’m the performing monkey. At the Groundlings I was surrounded by girls who looked like me, yet they would waste all this time and energy being upset that they weren’t up for the role of the ingénue in whatever it was they auditioned for. This line of thinking inhibited a lot of careers, in my opinion, because instead of being happy about being up for the best-friend role, they’d be crying, “How come I’m not the girl who gets the guy?” Let me tell you something; I knew I was never going to be an ingénue. At eighteen, I wasn’t that girl. My thinking was, don’t ever try to be anything but the homely, wisecracking girl. Be Rhoda, and go balls out for it. Find the meeting or audition where they’re looking for someone who’s able to be funny on their own, quick on their feet, rather than think I’m going to be able to compete with the tall, stupid, gorgeous girls. Hooker with the heart of gold, quippy secretary, nosy neighbor, that’s what I wanted to do—and knew I could do it better than anybody else—and so I’d go into casting offices and say, “I want to be second banana.”

Even with this more realistic goal, it took years for me to get an agent. I tried answering ads in every industry publication that existed: Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Back Stage West, you name it. I went to public casting calls that I would hear about on local television commercials or read about in the Los Angeles Times. I had my ear open at all times, and in all situations, in hopes that I could at least overhear a conversation between a couple of people in acting class or audience members when I attended a play, or at dinner parties, hoping to get some kind of a tip on where auditions might be held at any time.

I went to several talent agencies, and the drill was always the same. I would paper Hollywood with invites to the Groundlings, or any underground play I happened to be doing on the side, and about once a year, some little down-and-out, Broadway Danny Rose–style agency—usually one that sat above a resale jewelry shop, the kind that boasted client pictures of Linda Blair fifteen years after The Exorcist, or Erin Moran long after Happy Days—would “sign me.” I would go in for the meeting, filled with hope that this would be the agent who would believe in me and send me out on real live television auditions. But invariably, I would have a less than promising meeting, keep working away in the Groundlings, and never hear from that agency again.

I soon learned that the agency business is simply a numbers game. In my opinion, 98 percent of all agents sign up unknown actors hoping the actor will have a gig that just falls into their lap, so they can then collect their commission. And guess what? In my case that’s eventually what happened. In defense of agents, I will admit that it is difficult for an agent to promote an actor if that actor really doesn’t have anything going on. So it is kind of a chicken-and-egg situation. That’s why I don’t count on agents for very much these days, except to negotiate contracts. I learned early on that a very important thing to let go of was the notion that anyone was going to get me work except me. I wasted a lot of time waiting for the phone to ring, when the most important thing is to generate your own shows, your own performances, get out there and do it, anyhow, anywhere, until they can’t help but notice you if you’re good. And even then, you better not have a big nose.