Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (11 page)
When I had my own show, I could never call in sick, but sitting there, watching my daughter feel fear, it occurred to me I could call in sick tomorrow if I needed to; there were three people other than me holding this big ball.
“Mom,” Chelsea said. “Zoë’s lost.”
I was starting to think she was right. Zoë is an anxious, obedient animal who comes when called, and who sticks close to familiar territory. I wondered if Nick, the Lab, had led her out beyond the fence, and then not bothered to lead her back.
“Honey,” I said. “She’ll be fine. She’s maybe down by the water.”
Chelsea began to cry. “We need to find her!” she said.
I was tired; Kelli was in the city; it was me and four kids. The last thing I wanted to do was pile my brood into my car to drive around looking for a dog. I called Geraldine, our nanny, who came and took Chelsea and Parker out in the car while I stayed home with Viv and Blake. I put them to bed. I lay down next to Blake. There was a shadow on his wall, and it looked like the yin and yang symbol. The curve of darkness cupped in the curve of light. I’ve never known, or asked, what it stood for. It seemed, suddenly, that I knew. It meant you could be two in one. You could be both dark and light, good and bad, tethered and free, brilliant and not. I was striving for excellence on the set, but I could also not show up on that set if my kids were sick, if the dog died, on a bad day—if need be. I was a celebrity, but I was also a plain mom lying with her five-year-old in a bed, like millions of other tired mothers all across this country, right now. I fell asleep.
An hour or so later Geraldine brought Chelsea and Blake back. Zoë could not be found. Chelsea was devastated. She slept in my bed that night, my girl, and somewhere, hopefully not far from here, her dog was figuring out the maze she was in, slowly scenting her way home.
I had not slept well because Chelsea had not slept well; she had sobbed half the night, and kept getting up, tapping on the window, hoping to see some shadow of her dog. Jane Goodall. She had talked about the connection between people and animals. And Temple Grandin had recently written a book about animal minds, and how they share some similarities with the way autistic people think. Why not a show on, no, not pets, but on animals and what the bond between us and them is made of? Why not a show about how autistics share similar cognitive capacities with nonhuman species, or, for that matter, why not a show on autism itself? Or on foster care? Or on cults? Or on psychics? Or on depression? A whole one-hour show. Not a segment, but a whole devoted hour. The idea excited me.
You can’t get breadth or depth in a seven-minute segment.
Whole-hour theme shows was not what
The View
had been about. I was not trying to take it over. That had honestly never been my intent. My intent was to make a show that would allow every single one of us with our particular talents to shine. My intent was to make a show that was excellent and that still allowed me to have a family.
I didn’t know that
The View
would expand its views and allow whole-theme shows on autism, foster care, depression, shows that refueled me and that I loved. I didn’t know how angry I would get at Barbara, nor how much capacity we both have for forgiveness. I didn’t know that Zoë, Chelsea’s nervous dog, had in fact
not
run away, that the whole time we’d been looking for her she’d been locked accidentally in the family van, where she’d been riding with us the day before, sleeping in the backseat, out of view.
The View.
I could never have guessed a single syllable could hold so many contradictions.
I left that day with an inexplicable sense of hopefulness, excitement. I felt there were opportunities for me, yins and yangs, this’s and that’s, mother and worker, famous and anonymous, excellent and banal. Bill Geddie had intimated that my theme segments were very possible. I pulled into our driveway. Chelsea had been crying for almost twenty-four hours straight and still no sign of Zoë. The plan was to make Lost Dog signs and post them around town. Geraldine went to get a stack of papers from the family van. I could hear, from the kitchen, the door slide open, and then, in her lovely Irish accent, “Holy be Jesus,” and an excited, exuberant overwhelming yapping—there was no doubt. That was Zoë!
We ran outside. Zoë was running in circles, trembling, jumping, peeing, pooping, rolling over, scuttering to a stop, running again; she was saved. Saved! Chelsea scooped the dog up in her arms, buried her nose in the mottled fur. We brought the now-freed Zoë a bowl of water. We could not believe we hadn’t heard her bark through the windows. Maybe she had only barked for a while. Maybe, as hours passed, she’d given up hope, curled into a corner.
Much later on, toward evening, after everyone had calmed down, after Zoë had been debriefed and untraumatized and Chelsea had had time to comb the snarls and comfort her hound, I knelt down and cupped Zoë’s bony chin in my hand. No one was around to see me. I’d never studied the dog up close. I saw, this close, that she had very pale whiskers sprouting from her snout, and that her eyes were the color of melted butter. “Zoë, Zoë,” I said. And for the first time I felt a little love for the yappy, nervous dog. I felt grateful I’d been around to see her lost, and then found. I had
The View
to thank for that, for a schedule that was flexible enough to let me live a family life. Things were coming together. “Yes they are, Zoë,” I said. I scratched her chest. And for a brief moment, I felt a kinship with this little beast, so different from me on the one hand, but so familiar on the other. You can see it in the eyes, the similarities. And at the same time, you can see it in the eyes, the differences. The bottom line difference is maybe this. Animals are indisputably and always themselves. They cannot lie. They cannot cheat. They cannot act. “Zoë, Zoë,” I said. I stroked the small skull.
Trumped
S
o, Donald. Donald Trump. I have in my home office, on my window ledge, several pieces of true Trump merchandise: Cologne, vodka, bobble head, each piece packaged in royal purple wrappings, gilded gold bows, bottles sprayed silver and embossed.
All throughout those trying Trump days, the merchandise reminded me that this was not a
man
who was spewing such ugliness—
my little fat Rosie can’t wait ’til I sue the degenerate fat ugly third rate fatassfatlittlemyRosiedegenerateuglyfat
. . . he just kept going. I started to feel somewhat sorry for him. I also started to see that he was not a man. He had once maybe been a man, or a boy, but that human spirit seemed to have gotten lost to a mechanical repetitive meanness, a push button person with its circuits askew. He’d been on the
Today
show with Meredith Viera during his rampage and she had said something like, “How about saying, right now on the
Today
show, ‘I’m not gonna bring up Rosie again’?” And he sat there for about two seconds and then he was sucked straight back into this maniacal rant
.
I kept Trump products in my office because they reminded me that my “attacker” was not a human being but a windup toy with Tourette’s, a man who had allowed himself to get pulled so deeply into capitalism that he had turned his entire being into a product with a price tag on it; he was gift wrapped and stuffed with Styrofoam.
But I’m ahead of myself here. I was in a good place when the Trump business began. Zoë was home. Streisand had stayed in my house and lovingly left pieces of herself behind.
The View
was beginning to open itself up to more and more of my suggestions, not just about the set, or the lighting, or how to usher the audience in; they were taking more risks, slowly, like children stepping into the sea. Joy and Elisabeth did not let go of their IFBs when Barbara left for her extended Christmas vacation, but I was able to be okay with that, able to respect them for knowing what they would and would not do. And I felt they would soon make the leap into spontaneity, soon, but not now; I could sense their loosening. The autism show had been approved; I was going to contact Temple Grandin, whom I had never met before, but it’s opportunities such as these, meeting people such as her, that make my work worth it.
At home, we were getting ready for Christmas, the tree up, the lights laid out, and when it was over, we would go to Florida, and I would have a week away from the show, a week just to be with my kids, to catch up with them and their lives—essential. The night of December 19, Kel and I were relaxing, watching TV, and on came Trump in a press conference about his benevolence vis-à-vis Miss USA and her expected recovery from an alcohol problem. To say I found it distasteful would be an obvious understatement. I have a problem with the whole notion of Miss USA as it’s defined and enacted by men like Donald, taking twenty-year-old girls, parading them around onstage in bikinis while he and a bunch of other old men give them a score, and if they win—then what? They become Donald’s own doll for a year, his brand for 365 days, because he’d bought the pageant, which means, to me at least, he’d bought the girls, and buying people, especially young nubile ones who probably make you far more money that you pay them to do your bidding— of course I have a problem with this. It’s like watching a pimp and a prostitute. And we’re all participating in it.
So I was not pleased to find Trump on the TV screen in my bedroom, holding his press conference in which he stood there with a twenty-one-year-old girl he believed had acted inappropriately, and then to see him announce, in an appropriately trumped-up voice full of trumped-up compassion, that he would “give her a second chance,” or some such thing. He would allow her to keep the crown, his tone full of righteousness and factory-made feeling, the whole thing designed to convey to the public the impression he had carefully crafted. It is Trump’s falseness that angers me more than anything. Call it like it is. That’s all I ask. Don’t pretend. If you fake life, then you have damaged the social and biological fabric on which we all depend, for breath and love.
I certainly hadn’t been planning on imitating him on TV; he wasn’t written into the segment, but he’d been on my mind since I’d seen him the night before, and so when something in the conversation that day on
The View
reminded me, I brought him up. I spoke my mind. People found it funny. I said he had gone bankrupt twice; in fact, some of his companies had filed for bankruptcies.
To him I guess it felt like I was saying he had a communicable disease with a bad odor. He took the bankruptcy comment hard, very hard. I honestly did not anticipate the malice of his response; but looking back at it, I can understand it. I assumed Donald believed he had money. I did not assume Donald believed he
was
money. But apparently he does. The violence of his response suggests to me that money is the means by which he has defined himself, so the bankrupt statement felt devastating to him, and his coins came clattering down. The stuffing of his self spilled out—think of a torn scarecrow, only instead of hay, it’s crisp $100s blowing through the cornfields, spiraling up into the sky. Money was blowing everywhere; he burst open like a birthday piñata and coins came out, and instead of getting to work repairing the rip, he kept spilling and spilling until he was thigh-high in cold cash, gold coins, and rage. On my end, I watched. I caught some of the coins he threw my way. I looked at them, ran my finger round their rim. Interesting, I thought. Very interesting.
It had been, so far, an abnormally warm December, the warmest since people had begun keeping records in 1852. On Trump day, the weather was fifty-two degrees, and the lilacs were beginning to bud, as were the rhododendrons, their sealed pods loosening at the seams, ruffled bits of pink petals visible. The children loved it—they could play outside without a jacket or a hat, but if you read the newspaper closely and completely you could find the articles that commented on this strange situation, and if you went to certain Web sites you could see, with the aid of visual graphs, the upward spiking trend, or the polar ice caps then and now, the
then
showing large opaque sheets, the circle of ice radiating far afield, and the
now,
the ice diminished, wedges of lime green land showing, chunks of melting ice atop which polar bears precariously balanced.
I was in my craft room looking at polar bear pictures, wondering about the ominous warmth, on Trump day. The world was warming up faster, it seemed, than anyone had predicted, and I was surfing the Web, and I came to a sight that showed polar bears. The text explained the warming, melting ice left them in a strange land where they were slowly starving. I saw one photograph of a bedraggled white bear, his once fluffed fur now matted, and the hull-shaped rib cage showing through, and my own ribs hurt, down deep.
I was looking closely at the pixilated image, so at first I didn’t hear Kel come in. Then I turned. She stood at the entrance to the room, the door open, so behind her I could see the tips of trees, the branches bare and black, the plump buds a sci-fi green. “They will probably want to talk to you,” Kelli said.
“Who will?” I asked.
“ABC,” she said. “The Trump crap.”
She was right, of course. I had learned by now what ABC wants and doesn’t want me to say or do. Probably they would want me to apologize to Trump. I wasn’t going to. I didn’t say anything slanderous or libelous. And this is the job they were paying me to do. I was doing it the best that I could, and I couldn’t do my job if they were going to want me to apologize all the time.
There’s the rub, as Hamlet once said.
The View
’s relationship to me was one of fundamental contradiction. They had hired me, and continued to want me on the show, because I had brought them from a faltering position to a top-rated talk show that was attracting new viewers weekly. Great. Great! But they were also constantly trying to tone me down, which made no sense. A toned-down me, a washed-out, Xeroxed version of Rosie O’Donnell would not work. I am successful because I am who I am, this range of color undiluted.
Trump was their problem, not mine. I told Kelli that, we talked a while, and then she left. I shut down the computer and started to paint, the music cranked up high. I knew what they would do next. I, for my part, was going to do yellow and blue, but I guessed they would call Barbara where she was vacationing on a yacht in the middle of some exotic sea. I pictured it now like moving marble, the boat chiseled from a chunk of pure gold. I pictured her with white-gloved waiters. She was off in the rich people’s club. As it turns out, Donald is a member of that club.
Now, allow me to digress, for just a moment. Like I said, the issue of money and clubs has been a fraught one for Barbara and me this year. To me, she is clearly rich in a way that I am not and never will be, but when I said this on air, she practically turned the color of cranberry and shot me one of her steely stares. What had I said that so shocked her? I had said that she was wealthier than I, and she had responded as though I had slapped her. I find money fascinating, how full of shame and secrecy it is. Why is money so private? Why, when I talk about money out loud, as I often do, is it perceived by so many as crass? Kelli says that it sounds like I’m bragging when I say “I have more money than a human needs,” but because in my mind money is not really linked to worth, it’s a simple statement of fact.
However, let me double back on myself, because what I’ve just said is not totally true. I’ve said that in my mind money is not linked to worth. If this were totally true for me, than I would not care whether I was offered a salary of $50,000, $150,000, or $150 million. But when I think about what I want to do next year, the money figures in. So am I not being honest here?
The money figures in because I have, like every other American, a tiny whisper of fear that the bottom might fall out, but it’s so tiny as to be almost imperceptible. What really makes the money figure in for me is that I know it’s a reflection of how the other person sees me. Even if I don’t measure by money, the people hiring me sure as hell do, so if someone offers me a low salary, it feels like a blow, because the translation is simple: you suck. What I can say for sure is that if everyone agreed to separate money from worth, if money were truly
just money
and had no symbolic meaning beyond itself, then I am at a point in my life where I neither want nor need more.
I talk about these things. I don’t understand why you are not supposed to talk about these things. So when I brought it up that day on
The View
, Barbara looked ill. What I was trying to discuss: that it isn’t the amount of money necessarily that makes someone rich; there are other intangibles. I might have more money than Barbara. I don’t know, but even if at some point I did, she will always be richer than me. She’s part of high society, a club I cannot ever be admitted to. And when I visit her club, like the time I went to her home for dinner, it is, for me, like visiting another planet. Barbara Walters could lose all her money and she will still be high society, and I could make six times the money I have, and I will always be a working-class kid. I find this fascinating.
And for this reason I find Donald fascinating.
When he cracked, Barbara was on vacation, in the ocean, and ABC obviously called her and told her about the “problem.” Before this happened I did not fully appreciate how much Donald is a member of the rich persons’ club. I knew it, but I hadn’t given it much thought. In any case, Barbara wrote a message for the press; I picture her leaning against the silver railing of the ship, her blond hair blowing in the wind, a pen poised above pressed stationery paper, penning her missive like a 1940s film character. She is glamorous. Her message to the press was glamorous, in that it was carefully carved, artfully phrased, because Barbara’s deepest wish in life, it sometimes seems, is for everyone to just get along. On the one hand she has Grace Kelly glamour, but the next moment, flip a switch, she’s a tired grandmother trying to rein in a family feud.
“Both Rosie and Donald are high-spirited, opinionated people,” she stated, or some such thing. “Donald has been a friend of
The View
for many years,” and separately she stated that “I do not regret for one moment my choice to hire Rosie,” etc., etc. ad infinitum. The message was short but clear. No chaos, please. Like my nana at the Thanksgiving table. She just wants peace. She’s perfectly happy to be the matriarch of the family and make sure the children don’t fight. And we’re all the children.
It may be that this is one of the few times Barbara failed to finesse a situation. Donald was not, apparently, appeased by her remarks. What happened next proves that nastiness can be pure, a paradox indeed. Pure nastiness.
He went on seemingly every show, spoke to every media outlet that he could. He groaned in a strange way, almost salivating over the words: “I look forward to taking lots of money from my nice fat little Rosie.” Totally creepy. He was sadistic in a deeply disturbing way, and I watched him from afar. It was like seeing a specimen squirming on a slide in high school science class, hmmm. Poke here and it lashes its tail. Add this salt to the brine and it shrivels up. Donald, for some reason, also reminded me a lot of the garden slugs we used to get on our front steps when we were kids. They’d come in the late spring, after rains, gelatinous, goopy slugs, some five inches long, sleek and wet, leaving sticky trails in their wake. The strangest thing about these slugs: if you sprinkled salt on them then—poof. It was like magic. They shriveled up so small and desiccated, they practically disappeared. I could write one small comment on my blog and Donald would predictably distend, flowing forth with a torrent of insults—
fatuglydegenerateslobfatass
—and then, in another second, he’d appear on some talk show looking wrinkled and old and empty, with a Jell-O orange comb-over.