Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (9 page)

L: How so?

R: Barbra is my best self. My ideal. Part of a spiritual practice may be to develop an ideal, which is not necessarily the same as idolizing. Idolization can be blind, but it can also be an expression of your highest hopes for yourself, and a reminder of what you need to strive for. After Barbra’s tour was finished, I flew back to Nyack on the plane. And I was crying. Why was I crying? I was exhausted—doing
The View
, being a wife and mother, all at the same time. I was moved, emotionally. I kept thinking of her seeing my things, my life, the real Roseann O’Donnell, and the world felt less lonely. I used to love hide-and-seek as a kid. The thrill of finding a secret niche while someone counted to ten, waiting, crouched really low down. I was always so good at that game. I developed the strategy of hiding in plain sight, and it was amazing how hard it was for someone to find you when you were right in their line of vision. And I remembered how odd it was for someone to look straight past you, to literally not register you. It’s the same creepy feeling I get when I go into a restroom and use the automated sensor-driven soap dispensers. Sometimes, for me, those dispensers don’t work. It’s like I’m not there. And then I am. The soap spurts out. Or the person suddenly realizes there’s another person in their path, and you are caught. You are got. On the plane, flying back, that’s what I felt. I felt sensed. I felt seen. I felt that this, perhaps, was what I needed to do for those who come to me—simply see them. Simply say, “I found you in your hiding place. You can come out now. Game’s over.”

And maybe they will. I will hold out my hand and do the best I can.

CHAPTER 9

The Sound of Color

I
paint. I started after 9/11, started numbly, mindlessly, driven toward the canvas, toward whiteness I could cover with color. And since then, I have not stopped. Every aspect of painting pleases me, so much so that I want to do it at times over and above anything else. In my craft room I have tubes of Grumbacher oils, of Sennelier pastels, those bound wax sticks that, once pressed to the paper, leave behind a pure path of blue, or yellow. Saying it now, I can feel the color in my throat, behind my eyes, and sometimes at night, before falling asleep, I close my eyes and see the paintings I am not good enough to make—unfair, I can see them so well—the cobalt curls, the cadmium shapes blocked out and perfect. What actually is color? I could look up the explanation for that. But my question is more of the metaphysical sort. Animals don’t see color like we do. Their spectrum is narrower, and they get just these washed-out reds and muddy greens. So maybe, on some other planet, or even among us now, there are beings who can see beyond the spectrum. Maybe we are surrounded by indigos that are more vibrant than we can imagine, or reds that transcend red and are something altogether . . . what? Redder. Something. More.

I don’t need anything more beautiful than what I have now. What is color? I can answer that question for myself. Color, I believe, is God’s way of laughing, the liquid sauce in which he marinated his monochromic creations after he was finished. I imagine the first draft of our world was black and white, and God stepped away from his canvas, scratched his stubbly chin, and thought, “Hmmmm.” He adjusted his beret and took a sip of the merlot he always kept by his easel. Something wasn’t right about the mere mortals he’d sketched out. The faces were flat. The shadows looked like soot. The oceans were too tarry. What was it? He didn’t know. He drew a rainbow, black and white stripes, that, when he sighed with disappointment, suddenly leaped into light, into yellow, into violet—some shadows—and in a snap the world was alive. It was Oz, and, thus inspired, he went on to make Roy G. Biv, the acronym every child learns in school, but they don’t teach you it is much more. The spectrum is the original miracle, the pulse of our planet; it is fractal, fractured, illuminating. It is an utter refusal of flatness.

The Twin Towers had been flattened and the air smelled of smoke. I went to my craft room and squeezed some cadmium yellow onto my canvas. I remember that I was using Winton acrylic paint, pure pigment, devoid of the fillers that cheaper brands use. The paint glopped on and settled. It was thick, almost gelatinous. For a second I was scared. I had not painted in forty years, and as a kid I’d done it mostly out of art class obligation, the stick figures and square houses topped with a triangle.

I lowered the brush and then plunged in. I stroked outward, sudden swimmer, and I could feel the creaminess come right up to my wrists, and the sensation, it is difficult to describe what it feels like to push paint around, how it glides despite the roughness of the canvas, glides but does not melt, as water would, how a stroke starts in a puddle of color and radiates outward to end in a faint spray.

And so it was I started to paint. I had no knowledge, and no fear. All around me there was fear, and just seconds ago there had been fear inside me as well, but as soon as I started to push the paint fear left me and I was Roy G. Biv. I was not Rosie, not Ro, not Roseann, I was the brush plump with madder rose; and each shape I made became, in mere minutes, an object recognizable to me, a flower, a tree, a face, a frown. Hello, world. I can control you. I can create you. Color is definite. It does not die.

The sky can look like a painting. I was on the plane coming back from the last Streisand concert, and when I looked out the window I thought of that first time, the smell of smoke that saturated the air for days after the attack, the Twin Towers falling, how quickly they crumpled. I looked at the sky, its tinges and the Rorschach shapes of the clouds, and I was in my craft room all over again, 9/12/01, making my canvases. And at the same time, in my mind, the sound of Streisand kept coming at me, and it felt as though sound could be chromatic, the red screech of someone’s scream, or the yellow droplets of light laughter. For a moment sound and color merged, and I was overwhelmed. I was exhausted, exhilarated. I started to cry.

Streisand is an artist of unusual caliber, but there’s more to it than that. The
more
is that she has also controlled her career in a way I want to emulate. Streisand has never allowed anyone to tell her what to do, how to proceed, when to stop, or start. She stopped singing for years and years, despite the pressure from the public and God knows whoever else. She directed movies she was advised not to; she played roles that were “wrong” for her. She heard what she needed to hear, and disregarded the rest. Above all, she has never ceded creative control to anybody else. The result. Her career has been orchestrated by her.

A life lived with integrity.

I had come to understand that the show was not produced in the spirit of art, or even adventure. It lacked a heartbeat. A pulse. Humanity—truth. It lacked a mother’s touch. Perhaps that was because it is run by a man. A man who had a different idea about what made good TV. Could I do
The View
—without being in charge—could I do just enough to get by—to not be embarrassed?

Not now though. I was on fire, in color. And there, on the plane, I thought of something Streisand had told me. Early in her career, she had explained to me, she’d had a hard time accepting her talent and the tremendous power it had over people. Sometimes her talent had even felt like a curse. But now, at sixty-four, now for the first time she said she was starting to feel some acceptance of what she could do, and the responsibility that comes with it. Now, she can love that she is loved, and by so many. I think that means Streisand is coming to see her own spectrum, and finally understanding how much joy her rainbow brings to people. I would say she is starting to see she has the power, the sheer wattage, to illuminate very deeply into our collective night.

Ruthie, my Kabbalah teacher, tells me I am a leader, whether I like it or not. She says in my next life I will probably come back as a dog, certainly as someone or thing with no ability to have an effect, but in this life I am a leader. I have no choice—it is my
tikkun
, a word that means many things in Hebrew, “transformation,” or, in terms of the Kabbalah, “the reconciliation of two seemingly opposite things,” like the desire for fame and anonymity at the same time, the desire to be visible and invisible, to be a part of a community and also to be alone.

“You can’t stay in the craft room your whole life, Rosie,” Ruthie once told me. She is right. I
am
a leader, and sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t. I have a spectrum; I believe everybody does, but for reasons I will never understand, people are influenced by mine, and so I should not compromise it. Ever. This is what I saw on the plane, going home. I was a part of
The View
and
The View
was a part of me, for at least as long as my contract lasted. I needed to try and make it a better show.

I love the landing of planes. I am always happy to touch down. I saw the city appear, its frail lines coming clearer, a photograph in fluid, the landscape beneath evolving from little to life size as we approached the runway. No matter how many times I have flown, I always find it odd to see the world from up high, to see it as a toy town, a Monopoly game board, and to watch as it slowly assumes its real dimensions.

I have also learned, however, that even things you find indisputably real, or obvious, are not necessarily so. Coming down from on high, I saw the Empire State Building as a silver sword, and the George Washington Bridge strung with little lights. How can one argue with facts such as these—the existence of a building, or a certain stream of light? Some facts, you think, are inarguable. But even this is not so.

For instance, 9/11. I remember 9/11 crisply, as most New Yorkers do. And I have written what I recall of it in this book, some chapters ago. I showed my brother Eddie what I had set down here, and he got upset. “What?” I asked him. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t you remember what really happened on 9/11?” he asked. “You have not written it correctly.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Don’t you remember me calling you? We were both at NBC.” (Eddie used to work at NBC, a few floors above where I produced
The Rosie O’Donnell Show
.)

I said, “I remember speaking to you on 9/11.”

He said, “On 9/11, I called you and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And you said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and I said, ‘We’re under attack. We have to leave the building.’ And you said, ‘No, Eddie, I’m doing my show.’ And I said, ‘Roseann, you have to leave the building. We’re under attack; you have to get out of the city. And get the kids . . .’ And then you said to me, ‘No, Eddie, I can’t, I’m doing my show.’”

Now, I have no memory of the events Eddie is describing and I have no way of finding out whether they are true or not, and it is in some ways besides the point. I’m less interested in that and far more interested in the fact that such discrepancies can occur in the first place. Here we are, two solid, reasonably sane people, and we have two entirely different accounts of the same event. Maybe he’s remembering it the way he is because he has some need to see himself as my big brother, some sort of savior. Or maybe my failure to remember the situation as it was has to do with my inability to accept my vulnerability. I honestly don’t know.

As it turns out, 9/11 is not the only disagreement my brother and I have about reality. He and I had one of the biggest fights of our life when I said in an interview that I never went to my mother’s funeral. And he was livid. And he called me up, it was years ago, and he said, “You were at Mommy’s funeral, I sat next to you.” I said, “Eddie, I was not. Daddy took me and Maureen to the wake in the back of the blue station wagon, we saw her dead body, everyone started to scream, he took us out the side entrance, put us back in the car, had a panic attack on the way home, told us just to be quiet, made us go to our rooms, and then we were not allowed to go to the funeral.” Eddie was adamant. We had a huge fight. I was sure I knew the truth, sure of what was real, and also, at the same time, I could barely hear a whisper inside me, and this whisper was shaped like a question mark. It is the whisper that makes the world feel always a little wobbly. It is learning to stand solidly while the whisper is whispering that constitutes strength. If you don’t have the whisper, you are arrogant. If you have the whisper and are paralyzed because of how it clashes with what you think you know, you are neurotic. If you have the whisper and stand trembling—or not—despite the steady stream of small sound, you have some courage, better known as integrity. My life has been about going forward despite the curve of the question mark. I am certain I did not go to my mother’s funeral.