Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (12 page)

The first day he was, perhaps, his crassest, because he commented on Kelli, how he’d like to take her. “Rosie’s a bully,” he said to some New York newspaper. “She’s an extremely unattractive person who doesn’t understand the truth . . . She has an extremely low aptitude,” yadda yadda yadda. The strategic beauty and human sadness of remarks such as these is that they confirm in the attacker the very qualities the attacker is so desperately trying to ascribe to the other person. Thus, Trump went down, and down, and down.

The next day, I brought Kelli with me to
The View.
I said little about Donald except that I had Kelli with me because I didn’t want her to leave me for a man with a comb-over. After the show was over we got right into the car, we were surrounded by reporters and microphones and clicking cameras. I rolled down the window and yelled, “Ho ho, Merry Christmas,” and then, vavoom, we took off.

We went to visit Georgette Mosbacher. We brought her McDonald’s because her dog had died and she was a wreck. She couldn’t get out of bed. So we showed up with a huge bag of Mickey D’s. I love Georgette because she loves her dogs, and her McDonald’s fries. She’d already gotten a new puppy, and he was adorable, big floppy paws and more fuzz than fur. It is hard to articulate the love Georgette has for her dogs; it must be similar to what Chelsea feels, and thus her grief was just bottomless. We sat around, and played with the new puppy, and I held her, and she did all the perfect puppy things, which was exactly what I needed. We were in Georgette’s apartment, in Georgette’s grief, three women and a baby animal, and it felt, for a second, so serene, the Donalds of the world so far away. It was wonderful. I pulled the puppy up to my neck and felt her breathe against my skin. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, everything was just as it was—real—an oasis made of milk shakes and love.

I made an effort not to watch TV. It was December, what, 22 or 23, the Trump debacle had barely begun, but already felt as if it had been happening for years, because he just droned on and on.

I did not anticipate, however, that he would be cruel enough to do what he did to Barbara. She should have been left alone.

My friend Jackie came over that night. “Aren’t you scared?” she kept asking me. “Ro, aren’t you scared?”

Jackie comes from a family where the men were powerful, and frightening. When I left my show all those years ago, I realized the freedom that comes from not being famous. How fantastic, to be without a bodyguard. The privacy, the extension of space. The unself-consciousness. The expanded opportunities for reverie. You could leave your door propped open on a summer afternoon. Fantastic. You didn’t need a skyhigh gate and, as a result, you could see the sky. I reveled in it. And I swore I would never have as much security as I’d had when I was famous, whether I needed it or not. The price had been too high. In protecting my life, I had lost it.

That’s the thing about fame. It is a dangerous game, because fame, the drug, can sneak up on you in increments. You don’t notice the increments, that you’re increasing the dosage until you’re so far away from ever making eye contact with another human being and being “real,” that you don’t even know you’re not “real” anymore.

So no, Jackie, I was not afraid. I was getting ready to go on vacation. I was decorating my tree. I was not wounded, or worried. However, what happened next changed everything.

Trump was everywhere. He said that he himself had spoken to Barbara, and Barbara herself had told him that she was not a fan of mine. That he should never get in the mud with pigs. He outed Barbara. A private conversation with him both outed her and probably twisted the truth of what she had said, on air. He dragged a seventy-seven-year-old woman, a living legend, into his fight; he’s a sixty-something-year-old guy, I was a forty-five-year-old woman, and he had to go and drag a septugenarian into the fray, someone who, no matter what her strengths, is in some ways more vulnerable than he is. What a coward. I was thinking all these things. I was packing my bags for Florida. I felt a deep winter chill inside, despite the perversely warm weather. Trump announced he would probably sue me. Go ahead, big guy. The words of Barbara reformulated by Donald kept swinging at me, from the side, now the top, a punch here, now there, duck and cover. I was hurt now. I was wounded. And whatever comfort and appreciation I had started to feel vis-à-vis my place on
The View,
and my potential role in its production—gone. Up in smoke. Trump had wounded two women, and for what? As for me, the worst part of it was that I knew, from the get-go, twisted though he was, I knew in my heart that Barbara had said those things. In one way or another, she had betrayed me. Trumped, I was. Tired.

Blog 12/27/06, Miami

so what happens

when u say the emperor has no clothes

the comb over goes ballistic

via phone to mr king

choices

every minute

every day

everyone

i imagine it is interesting

as celeb feuds tend 2 b

so here r my thoughts

didnt watch

didnt u tube

restrict

i have no time 2 make art now

i am only off friday

which is never enuf

to detox

the pipes get full

bits of sludge

clog the flow

so tiny books

now

express in torn images

my inside

i was raised reading ms magazine

i remember the burning of bras

as women demanded equality

in unison

beauty pageants

where women were paraded around

judged valuable or not

by old white men

it is always old white men

they added a talent portion

and gave away college degrees

they evolved—beauty pageants

and eventually—nearly faded away

for good

remember the seventies

a young girl in nyc

meets a pimp

he cons her into a life of illusion

she works for him

no fun—no fucking—no future

she is owned

when she sneaks out

to party the night away

he freaks

he roughs her up a bit

shames her in front of the others

teaches her to behave

for his own benefit

and just when we lost all hope

cagney and lacey showed up

they cuff the pimp

they free the girl

marybeth and christine

would never

be friends with a pimp

this is reality tv

like it or not

same same same

as vivi says

CHAPTER 11

Thank You for the Show

F
lorida. The state with the prettiest name. Star Island, where we live. My dream house, a reality now. Fragments of Streisand here and there, little notes she left for me, lying where she placed them. I smile whenever I see one. Miami is dazzling, the ocean emerald, a twinkle, as though whisked by some fairy’s wand. Heaven, I imagine looks like this. Inside the house is bright, bleached and clean. The patio with its lounge chairs and the pool looks like an ad in a magazine. The pool is heavenly blue, so clear I could see the silver drain warbling way down by the bottom.

We jumped in. We hugged our knees to our chests and leaped off the concrete edge, puncturing the water’s skin, hearing a shatter like glass, then liquid dreaming up all around us, enclosed in a primal, chlorinated bath where it was warm and safe. Lying, smeared with creamy sunblock, letting the rays have a go at us, our skin baking brown and sweet as the cinnamon toast I used to eat as a kid. Florida, an oasis, I jumped in and went down. I did the best I could. I tried to stay away from the TV, the Internet, just my kids and crafting. And it was lovely. But there was also something heavy in my gut, in the stomach that so disgusts Trump, the stomach that has been handed down to me by generations of Irish women; it is in my genes. My nana always had this flab of fat on her belly. It is what we are: our bodies.

I was hoping Barbara would call. I expected her to call, to reach out somehow, to explain, console, communicate goddamn it. Just communicate. She did not call. This meant—what else could it mean but guilt—a tacit acknowledgment that in some way, shape, or form she had said those words to Trump. Betrayal—the hardest thing to deal with for us humans.

I wanted to contact her. Would I get a response? I looked at my computer keypad, my phone keypad, my computer keypad, my phone keypad. I went to the pool, walked three times around, went back to the computer, typed in some words: “Dear Rosie; From Barbara,” erase. My friends. Who are they? Some are famous; some not. It wouldn’t matter. If any friend, be it Jackie or Madonna, had publicly said the things about me that she had, I would have phoned them. I would not have issued a press release. That’s what Barbara did. She issued a press release from her boat, in some sea: “. . . I do not regret for one moment my choice to hire Rosie O’Donnell as the moderator of
The View
.” The end. Not enough. In real life, not nearly enough.

Well, of course she didn’t regret hiring me. I had helped that show, a lot. What I had done to her private life, now that was a whole other matter. I shook up her society crowd—they were not happy—she doesn’t like controversy of any kind. Still, I expect more of my friends, and, if not my friends, women in general. I believe in simple sisterhood. I believe in a basic bond, unspoken yet understood, that exists among all women.

The world is comprised of clubs, and usually people belong to more than one. Walters—she was a feminist, she shattered the glass ceiling, she paved the way, she made the wake wide enough for me; we were in the club of women together. But she was also in the rich money club, the designer gowns and gilded mirrors and yachts in the Riviera club. And when the shit hit the golden fan, she tossed the women’s club aside and cast her allegiance with the wealthy guy. I don’t believe in that world. It has no value to me—at all. And this may be one reason why Trump was so enraged. Not only had I threatened his manhood—me, a degenerate, obese lesbian—to him this is unfathomable—but a woman like me had had the gall to criticize him, to claim he’d been bankrupt, to say he’d made his fortune from Papa, that pageants are innately misogynistic, that he is a pompous idiot. How dare I? As for Barbara, she had to choose. And when she did, the grand illusion, the movie in my mind, the possibility of sisterhood, of bonds that cannot be broken—that movie—ended there, Christmas week.

These are hard harsh judgments, I know. And judgments equally hard and harsh could be made of me. My hypocrisy, for instance, my constant criticism of fame and money and my unwillingness to give either up. My superwoman save-the-day narcissism that says it serves everyone but oftentimes serves mostly me. I know my flaws. I’m willing to admit them or hear them. Every flaw is an essential part of the prism. From one direction it’s a mistake. Tilt it to the right, though, let the sun shine on it now, and it glows with integrity.

Kelli and I took the kids out for dinner. There was a brand-new restaurant that had opened. Vivi was excited; she skipped down the street ahead of us, chanting “out to dinner.” This place had a sports bar feel to it, and there were TVs everywhere, everywhere. I didn’t want to see a TV. That was my only requirement of any restaurant. Spit in the food, burn the burgers; it’s all fine so long as you didn’t have a goddamn TV. The maitre d’ must have seen the look of horror on my face. He said, “I’ll take you upstairs.” So we went upstairs where there were far fewer customers, and only one TV, which was the size of the Great Wall of China, but going low. A sports channel was on. “Okay,” I thought, “we will be safe.”

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but then there we were; we popped up, Rosie vs. Trump. Our faces were huge, and the screen was split, me on one side, Donald on the other, and we were each blown up so big, with a ticker tape running underneath us, and, well you know what I’m going to say. Where, oh where, was the world? I just can’t get my mind around the fact that this is news. Why is this news on a sports channel?! I can only surmise people watch this stuff because it distracts them from knowing the real news, which is just too heavy to handle.

Anyway, Blake looked up at the screen. And he said, “You know what, Mom? Kyle said that you were going to get sued by some guy who has dump trucks and Kyle said the dump truck guy is going to take all your money.”

“No no no,” I said.

Vivi said, “If he takes all your money, we will beat him up!”

“Vivi,” I said, “we are not going to beat anyone up. Beating up is not nice. You don’t beat up people and he’s not going to take our money. He’s just being a bully. You know why, I teased him on TV, and he didn’t like it. He’s a rich kid and he is spoiled.”

“Like Malfoy?” Parker asked.

From
Harry Potter
. Exactly.

Parker said, “I heard he said the ‘f’ word about you!”

In our house, the “f” word is
fat
.

My children know their mama is fat, and that their mama feels bad about this, although I have tried, for their sake, not to hide who I am. They see. They know. In Florida my legs brown only up to my knees, my arms to my biceps. My face turns the color of toast, though, a nice healthy hue; I like my face okay. It feels somehow not connected to my body.

So that Christmas week, Trump was spewing on every talk show out there about how disgusting I was, such a slob, a pig. The result of which was everyone, whether they knew me or not, telling me I looked lovely. I never got so many compliments in my life than that week I was in Florida. People I didn’t know would come up to me and say, “Just so you know, we think you look great!” I’d be walking down the street in Miami and little old ladies would come up to me and touch my cheeks and say, “Honey, you look good,” or “Sweetheart, you know you’re gorgeous.” It touched me, the fundamental urge people have to salve someone who is wounded. It was an urge exactly the opposite of Trump’s, which was to attack. “You’re beautiful,” people kept saying. “Beautiful.” Abundant kindness.

But sometimes there is nothing anyone can do or say that will penetrate the leaden ball sitting in the stomach. It was there. I tried as best I could to be with my kids, because this was my time, a stretch of time, a rare occurrence. I tried. But the heaviness, the anger, I often needed to retreat from. My children wanted to know why Mama was in the craft room so much.

I was in there gluing things together. The glue felt good. I liked the tacky feeling on my fingers. I liked to press the pads of my coated fingertips together, wait a moment, and then pry them apart, watch the half-dried Elmer’s stretch its clear coating before snapping in half. I glued boxes inside boxes inside boxes, a world collapsing to a cube so small it could barely be measured; that’s what I was making. I glued plastic fighting figures, soldiers on a ledge with a flag draped behind them, the red not stripes but scrawl, the stars van Gogh-ish, hypnotic hysterical swirls of silver and white. I could not stop gluing. I used Elmer’s and Mod Podge and Krazy Glue. I glued a block to the ceiling, standing on a step stool for the requisite half hour, giving the glue time to dry. It was the embodiment of how I felt. Precarious. Dangerous. About to fall. But not.

It was January now, back East the days gray, the trees stark and nude, but in Florida every day was a soft balmy blue. Why could I not feel it, appreciate it? This hurt me, the fact that I could not be hurt, that somewhere inside I was numbed out and automatic. And despite the distance between me and Barbara, she on her yacht on the other side of some sea, and then back in Manhattan ready to resume her seat on the show, while I was here, “vacationing” with my brood, despite the distance I felt in some weird way like Barbara was with me, almost literally
on
my mind. I swam in the pool. I carried on long elaborate conversations with Barbara; I told her about my childhood; we talked politics; I explained to her how much it hurt, her carefully crafted truce attempts, her palm not out in the form of giftgiving, but up, like a policeman, his white glove a blank mute
stop. Stop!
What would have stopped it for me was her start, her offer to step to my side, sisterhood, the mutual need to preserve and protect. For some reason, as I swam, or walked, or sang my kids to sleep, I kept recalling a dinner we had well before
The View
started. So it must have been—what—that summer before September 5, or even earlier, in the spring. Barbara asked Kelli and me out to dinner, this while the contract negotiations were probably going on, and we went. Of course we went. Kelli looked as Kelli always does look, simply, cleanly, casually elegant. Here’s the thing. Usually I care not a whit about clothes. I dress the way I need to, and when I don’t need to, I dress in whatever’s comfortable. But that night, getting ready to dine with Barbara, I thought about what to wear. I stood in front of my closet and fingered the pants, the cotton shirts. I wanted to look right for Barbara, and what would that mean? A sequined gown, a high-end suit? No. Not me. At all. In the end I chose khakis and J. Jill clogs. I chose clothes that at once reflected who I was but that would also appeal to her aesthetic: tailored; tasteful. From the very beginning, I think, I have wanted to both be who I am and who she wanted me to be.

Why am I so young, even as I age?

What was I doing on January 3, 2007, at 11 a.m. eastern standard time? I don’t know. I was definitely not watching the television; that much I know, because the last thing I wanted during my vacation was more media. Maybe I was taking a walk with Vivi. Maybe I was in our boat, in the Floridian bay, looking for seahorses with Blake. Blake is the most magical of my children; everywhere he goes he finds unlikely objects: a copper key, a tiny crystal car, a perfectly preserved sand dollar. Lately he had been interested in seahorses, searching for them everywhere, and I went with him. I looked up seahorses on Google; maybe I was doing that on January 3, 2007, at 11 a.m. eastern standard time, typing the word
seahorse
into the search box and seeing scroll down my screen the mythical miniature beast with its curved blade of a body. Seahorses, I read, that day or sometime soon thereafter, seahorses are some of the animal kingdom’s most venerable males. After the females lay their eggs, the fathers take them into their mouths, gestating them there for the time it takes, holding their young in their soft sealed maws until they hatch. I wasn’t sure of that fact; didn’t the males hold the eggs in pouches? Hadn’t I learned that somewhere? It didn’t matter right then, what mattered to me was the image of females roaming free in the ocean while the males toil for the newborns, gently spitting them into the sea once they hatch, so they are cradled in the waves. I like seahorses. They make Homo-sapien males, like Trump, at the least less inevitable. If men were like seahorses, maybe Barbara and I, maybe all women, would not have such tangled, tough relationships.