Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (3 page)

Truth. The truth. What is it and how much can you compromise it before it goes? I thought I told the truth on my show. Year one and year two I did, at least to me. Enough truth to allow me the yellow. And it was there; the show was a hit. I spoke of my dream to see Tom Cruise and Barbra Streisand—I believed in their yellow; I saw it quite clearly. Here I was, an outcast, a fat Irish tough gal from New York, invited to the palace ball. And when that was real, the public responded. They got yellow from me, and I felt yellow giving it to them and it was all good. I was canonized the Queen of Nice. I was universally loved and praised and at first it felt good, but soon thereafter it began to change. You can develop a taste for worship.

It started to show then, on my face and body. I became bigger and sadder, starving for yellow, filling it with food, madder still at my expanding girth.

Since the yellow comes from living, the constant working makes creating that color impossible. What could I share with others when my truths were becoming more and more unreal? I fell in love—with a woman—yellow, a life-changing level of love, and then I forced myself to deny it. I reasoned with myself—I won’t tell but I won’t hide. And Kel came places with me and the press knew and it was printed but I never commented. I thought that was okay, but it wasn’t, and the yellow we had together lost something by never being let out.

So, why am I leaving my show? It took my yellow. I wanted it back. Without it I can’t live. The gray kills me.

I thought the greatest thing about leaving my show would be growing closer to my kids, Parker, Chelsea, and especially Blake, because he was just a toddler when I left, and he didn’t talk very well. He wasn’t acquiring language as fast as we would have liked, and I knew it had to do in part with my absence in his life. And I missed him, which was weird—it’s weird that you can miss someone you don’t really know, but I believe children can get almost immediately past the place where there are barriers, and that a relationship with a child is maybe the one, the only kind of sudden click, or instant intimacy that’s possible. After I had finally freed up my life I took him to Chuck E Cheese’s and we played Skee-Ball. We went to the park; we went skateboarding, and he started to find words:
water, tree, see.

Last year, before I started
The View
—before I was even asked to—Kel, me, and the kids went to the US Open. The stadium was named after Billie Jean King—feminist superhero, sister, friend—amazing. We sat in the stands with her. I was rather unfamous, so I was free, free to watch the ball, free to see my kids, free to talk to Billie Jean, whom I just love, truly.

Billie Jean is the real deal. It’s like befriending your teacher in a way—no matter how familiar she becomes to me, I will always be slightly mystified that I am near her. And being near her, and thinking of her now, as I write this, I think (and thought) of all the women who went before me in the surf and inspired me to try.

Billie Jean King inspired me to try, for sure, walking onto the court with Bobby Riggs, a loudmouth old man tennis player who hated everything Billie Jean was. He called her names, taunted her, teased her; he challenged her to a game of tennis. There was no way, he claimed, she could beat him.

He was her Trump, Billie Jean’s Trump, only Riggs had actual talent; Riggs could play tennis. He played. She played. Lights, cameras; everyone I knew was watching that match. Out she walked with a baby pig, because that’s what Riggs was, a male chauvinist pig.

And out she came, clutching that squealing baby pig. The crowd roared. The animal ran around the court. I remember this now. I remembered it then, there, sitting next to King. They started. And she had his ass all over the court. The woman beat the man. This was the beginning of everything for me, as a woman.

Billie Jean King was mobbed that day at the US Open, with everyone asking for her autograph while I just sat there and watched. And it was a great day, a great thing, to be the observer, not the observed. I could almost feel my eyes, like lenses, open up and take in light, and color. I could tell you all the details, the fluorescent yellow of the balls smacking back and forth, the wind-whipped hair, Blake’s new baseball hat, the plane overhead, its fuel scarring the sky in a line. I felt free and also tethered, finally, to the right place, to the right time; here. Now. These people mine.

Chelsea was less interested in the tournament than she was in the athletes. Blake and Parker were watching the tennis, and Chelsea, who was sitting next to me, got up and went on her own to the box suite, where there were all these amazing women gathered, tough-assed ladies in their seventies, sports enthusiasts, some golfers. Chelsea apparently held court there for the entire time the match was going. She wound up sitting next to this beautiful blond woman who was showing her a book about female athletes. After a while I came over to see. “Who’s this, and this?” Chelsea kept asking, and the woman was explaining who each featured athlete was. Amazing gymnasts, tennis players, and figure skaters. And they turned to a page in the book where there was a picture of a woman who had no legs—she was running with steel springs, her blond hair flowing behind her. The book explained that this woman was a champion. And Chelsea said, “What happened to her?”

And the woman said, “Well, that’s me.” Chelsea looked at the woman, and then back at the picture, and then back at the woman, her mouth partly open with surprise, concentration. And then the woman said, “I had my legs amputated when I was a child.”

“Can I see?” Chelsea asked.

The woman said, “Yeah.”

She pulled up her pant leg and showed my daughter where the prosthesis attached. They talked about why her legs were gone and how it felt.

It was a gift to watch this. It was a single moment, a moment so real you wish you had a camera to capture it, knowing somehow that if you did, you would taint it. I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that.

Maybe what it means to be an artist is knowing you are doomed to fail, that you can’t capture your “it,” because sometimes the feelings are so huge they go beyond your medium, and so you are left standing there, staring: your girl, one leg, two women . . . on and on the story goes, so much faster, and smarter, than you will ever be.

The woman, Aimee Mullins, ended up giving Chelsea the book and inviting her to a dinner of the Women’s Sports Federation, where she serves as president. Chelsea was so excited. The tournament ended, the great day was over, and we went home and ate dinner at our local Mexican restaurant and then went to bed, but it was like the sun hadn’t set yet and the good things kept coming—my life as a used-to-be, a washed- up woman, like the glass on the beach, beautiful glass, blue and green. Its edges softened from the sea.

And the sun didn’t set on my day. It went on, in part because Chelsea could not stop talking about Aimee and all the women she had met at the US Open. All she wanted was to go to this dinner and be with these women. We went. They asked me to present an award. I said, “No, I’m going with my daughter. I’m going to sit down with my daughter and watch these women.” And this is what I did. I watched and watched . . . for the whole four years I took off I exercised my eye, and tried to focus from angles I hadn’t even known, or had forgotten existed, and the experience was a little like geometry when you suddenly see how shapes might come together, can come together, when the measurements are exact. I did a 180-degree U-turn and I wound up in a new place that was also, weirdly, a very familiar place where I was at once old and young, where I was who I used to be but also something new, and if I had to give this place a title, I would have to call it home.

I was with Kelli in Times Square when I saw the announcement go up: Rosie To Co-Host The View.

“Well, that’s nice,” I thought. “I’m glad I was the first to know.” The one-year contract was still an issue, but it seemed we were going forward; it was clear we were. I saw the billboard in Times Square, and it was real. Inside, my thoughts:
“Prepare for reentry.”

I knew I had to hold on to the purity of my intent. I knew my intent was not to gain status, or money, or fame this second time around, but to be . . . groundbreaking.