I'll Scream Later (No Series) (19 page)

T
HE
1988 O
SCARS
were back at the Shrine Auditorium, and ironically I found myself in the same position Bill Hurt had been in the year before.

As the Best Actress winner last year, tradition dictated that I was to give the Oscar to whoever won Best Actor. And the nominees were…yes, you guessed it. Bill Hurt for
Broadcast News
, along with Michael Douglas in
Wall Street,
Jack Nicholson for
Iron-weed,
Robin Williams for
Good Morning, Vietnam,
and Marcello Mastroianni in
Dark Eyes
.

I have to admit it—I was praying that Bill didn’t win. I couldn’t imagine how uncomfortable it would be given how awful our breakup had been. I’d certainly moved on in my life, and he had in his, but still.

But what was causing me far more sleepless nights than the prospect of his winning was my decision that I would speak, aloud, that night.

I was tired of people assuming that if I was Deaf, I was also mute, and I wanted to break down that perception. Anyone who knows me well will tell you that’s hardly the problem being around me.

About six months before the show, I began working with Dr. Lillian Glass, a noted speech pathologist who’d also written the book
Talk to Win
.

We had no idea who would be nominated, so we came up with a list of all the potential nominees, and I began work on pronouncing their names. And apologies to the late great Marcello Mastroianni, but I was hoping he wouldn’t be nominated either—that name was going to be almost impossible for me to say!

There is an art to speech that if you’re not Deaf will probably never even cross your mind. Your mouth and tongue must be positioned in so many specific ways to get the sound that you want. And there is inflection, nuance, cadence. When you speak, the emphasis changes with each syllable, again with each word. Entire levels of meaning can be communicated by tone of voice—ask any kid facing an angry mother.

None of that comes naturally to me, or to anyone who can’t hear. To learn it is challenging, particularly since most people pick it up by a sort of osmosis. You hear how other people around you sound. You hear dialogue on television, in movies. You hear lectures in class. You overhear others on the street, in the subway. You learn that a certain tone means anger, another happiness. It’s a whole science that, as someone who doesn’t hear, I continue to study.

The Academy Awards were going to be my coming-out party, but a project was also in the works,
Bridge to Silence,
that called for my character to speak as well. I wanted the entertainment community, from those who created the characters to those who green-lighted projects, to know that I could do more than they imagined.

There was also a new look to showcase.

It’s painful to be dissected so mercilessly by the fashion critics; I think that they’re at their most creative when they hate an outfit you’re wearing. The sarcasm just drips. I wasn’t going to have that happen again if I could help it.

This time I wore an absolutely gorgeous, strapless raspberry sheath with a big kicky bow designed by Chuck Jones. It was short and looked and felt youthful. I wore my hair straight—no baby’s breath anywhere near, no horn-rimmed glasses, though Stacey Winkler worried that I would blink the night away since I was still getting used to my contacts. Walking the red carpet on Ricky’s arm, I felt beautiful. And I got a thumbs-up from the fashion police!

The show started and went on and on. Best Actor is one of the last awards given. Finally it was time.

I walked to the podium. I signed the intro with Jack interpreting. But then it was me, just me, reading the names of the nominees. No Jack, no signs. It went perfectly! Everyone could understand
me, including, most important, Michael Douglas, who took home the Oscar.

All in all it was a good night. Until the Deaf community weighed in….

“OFFENSIVE? D
EAF
A
CTRESS’S
Use of Speech Proves Divisive Among Peers.”

The headline—in huge type—stretched across the entire front page of
Silent News,
the biggest newspaper for the Deaf community. The story took up the rest of the front page, except for a photo of me at the podium Oscar night. Elsewhere around the country the debate was raging.

This is apparently what my speaking, without also signing, the names of the Oscar nominees meant, according to what I could decipher from the media coverage:

Parents of Deaf children should stop teaching their kids to sign.

The only way for a Deaf person to be successful is to speak.

I wanted to insult the Deaf community at large.

I was undermining efforts to have sign language, ASL in particular, considered an original language.

And on and on it went. I was shocked.

Whoopi Goldberg was great, helping me weather this storm. She told me about the time she was on the cover of
Rolling Stone
wearing blue contact lenses. The African-American community was outraged—how could she turn her back on her black heritage?

Her good advice was to stay strong, be your own person, and stop paying attention to anyone who is trying to take you down. Her encouragement meant so much. She could always cut through the BS and get to the heart of an issue. She was as tough as she had to be—I liked that a lot.

I had never intended to become the most famous Deaf person in the world. If anything, I’d worked long and hard to make sure my deafness didn’t become a barrier to my dreams. I fought against anyone using my deafness to define me, to limit me. I was a lot more than Deaf.

Still it seemed unavoidable. I was visible, people wanted to interview me. I was invited to participate in all sorts of public functions. Everywhere I went, Deaf people were always in the audience. I had become the public face of the entire Deaf community, which represents about 8–10 million people in this country alone, who are classified as significantly hard of hearing or Deaf.

When
Nightline
did a special segment earlier that year on the uproar at Gallaudet University on student protests over the controversial naming of a new president, who was hearing, over other candidates, who were Deaf, ABC had me on the show along with the Gallaudet student-body president and the new president to debate the issue.

I very much supported the student protest—that the only university for the Deaf had once again given the top job to someone who not only wasn’t Deaf, but couldn’t sign, was insulting. I refused to believe there were no qualified Deaf candidates. The president would quickly be ousted.

For taking that position, I was widely praised by the Deaf community. Now after reading the nominees aloud at the Oscars, they had completely turned.

I went from being the most well-known Deaf person in the world to the most hated Deaf person in the world, in one night. Apparently when it came to the Deaf community, I had no individual rights. And that I would not accept.

I spoke Oscar night because I can. I spoke because I have a career that would benefit from my ability to speak. I spoke because I always have. In the end, I opted out of the fight. I would hear on occasion that the debate raged on, but it did so without me.

It took me a long time to forgive them for hating me. For not giving me a chance.

Instead, I began to focus on fighting a battle that was truly important to me. And the battleground was Washington.

H
ERE IS WHAT
television was like for me before my uncle Jason got a decoder box for our TV set and a handful of prime-time television shows began offering closed-captioning.

I loved
All in the Family,
but had no idea that Archie Bunker was a bigot. I laughed at the slapstick and tried to read Archie’s expressions—I could tell he was always in trouble.

I watched as President Gerald Ford spoke to the country in 1974. I could tell it was important; he looked extremely serious. My mom tried to translate what was happening, but I didn’t understand why she needed to. Why couldn’t they make television so I could understand it? I wrote a letter to President Ford asking just that question, but never heard back.

Mannix
was one of my favorite TV shows because Mannix didn’t talk much; he was all about action and I could make up a story to fill in the blanks if my dad wasn’t around. Same with
Streets of San Francisco;
it was filled with intense car chases and Michael Douglas was always running.

When
Three’s Company
hit prime time in 1977, the world changed for me. You might not think that a comedy starring John Ritter, Suzanne Somers, and Joyce DeWitt as roommates would be revolutionary, but in my life it was. It was the first closed-captioned show I ever saw.

Suddenly, I didn’t have to guess what was going on. I could actually read the comic bits in the string of words that now ran across the bottom of our television set.

It wasn’t just about the show—it was that I could experience it pretty much like everyone else. I could “hear” all the words, not
a truncated translation by my brother Marc, who did most of the heavy lifting on that front. Though I loved him for doing it, closed-captioning brought me an entirely new level of experience.

Over time, more shows would be closed-captioned, but it was far from being adopted universally. Technology would keep advancing—a chip was developed that could be put into a TV set that would automatically provide closed-captioning in real time. It was a minimal cost for TV manufacturers—an average of $3 to $5 a set, but the industry was dragging its feet on adopting it.

Captioning for movies was nonexistent. When
Children of a Lesser God
offered captioned screening in theaters when the movie was first released in 1986—in ten cities and usually at 10 a.m. on Saturday mornings, but still—it was the first English-language movie to do so. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved foreign films—subtitles!

The first closed-captioned home videos didn’t come along until 1981—there were three,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The China Syndrome,
and
Chapter Two
. But it was hardly a trend.

This became my cause.

I knew how it could change a child’s world, and I also thought of all those Americans who were losing their hearing—and their connection with the world—as they grew older. When you factor them in, the number of people who could benefit from closed-captioning topped 24 million.

There were other benefits, too—it could aid hearing kids learning to read, immigrants trying to learn English as a second language. There just were no downsides to pushing for expanding closed-captioning.

In 1987 I became the celebrity spokesperson for the National Captioning Institute. I talked to anyone who would listen about how I longed to fully experience popular movies such as Woody Allen’s
Annie Hall,
classic movies such as
Sunset Boulevard,
and I could if they were closed-captioned. I set about trying to mobilize Hollywood and created the Friends of NCI. Roughly a hundred celebrities signed on, including Bob Hope, Bill Cosby, Lucille Ball, Robin Williams, Rosie O’Donnell, and Richard Dean Anderson.
Elizabeth Taylor declined, but nicely; she was worried about shifting any focus away from her AIDS charity efforts—which I totally respected.

In February of 1987 when I went on
Nightline
to discuss Gallauder University’s controversial Deaf President Now movement, the show was captioned for the first time. Anchor Ted Koppel used most of the intro to explain to the audience about the captioning they would see—technically, open captioning, since anyone could see it—interpreters they would hear, signing they would also see.

It was 1987 and the U.S. public was getting its first primer on how a significant number of their brethren couldn’t hear and how closed-captioning—treated as if it were an exotic bird—could help.

That same year, I would receive an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Gallaudet. I was so honored and I understood the importance of being given one, especially from the only Deaf university in the world. I was thrilled to stand there in a cap and gown and be handed the diploma for, as Provost Catherine Ingold said, “sharing the message that Deaf persons are individuals who have pride in themselves, their accomplishments, and their deafness.” That doctorate is like another Oscar to me.

But as always, whether I wanted it to or not, controversy seemed to shadow me. Some of the students protested I was “just an actress,” turning their backs when I was given this honor—the ultimate insult in the Deaf world, the one way to close someone out. Thankfully they didn’t disrupt the ceremony, and I didn’t even hear about it until afterward, and I’m glad. Otherwise I might not have gone. I try to let those sorts of things roll off my back, but back then I was still just a kid. It hurt.

I remain an avid supporter of all the work Gallaudet does, and in 2007 I was named to the university’s board of trustees—yet another honor that meant so much to me.

O
PRAH
W
INFREY
,
WHO
has been a leader on so many fronts, was an early adopter. She just immediately got it. She knew all about barriers, that those barriers have to be broken down—anyone needs access to live, to make a living, to stay alive.

In 1986,
The Oprah Winfrey Show
became the first daytime talk show in the country to be closed-captioned. I was so pleased to present Oprah with NCI’s first Humanitarian/Media Leader Award a few years later. And we also teamed up that day to donate decoders to twenty needy students.

I started pressing for any TV show I appeared on to offer captioning. Others were beginning to step up, too. Arsenio Hall, my great, wonderful friend, made sure his nighttime talk show, which premiered in 1989, was closed-captioned.

Because of my relationship with NCI, I knew about the technology that could dramatically expand the availability of closed-captioning. I wanted to go to Washington. I wanted to talk to Congress, to the president if I could.

On June 19, 1990, I was at the White House, talking with First Lady Barbara Bush, who was active in supporting anything that could advance literacy in this country, and we knew closed-captioning could. NCI president John Ball was going to present her a decoder and demonstrate how it would work. I talked more personally about what it could mean. I knew firsthand.

Mrs. Bush was wonderfully warm and funny. After our serious work of showing her what the technology could do, she took Jack and me on an impromptu minitour.

As we passed a set of windows, she motioned us over, saying, “Come look, I want to show you something.” We looked down on a group being led in for a tour of the White House. Mrs. Bush knocked on the windows and waved at them, and they all waved back wildly. I really liked that she got such a kick out of that small spontaneous connection with real people.

The next morning I would be testifying before a Senate committee along with Emma Samms. The aim was to get Congress to pass legislation that would require new TV sets to be equipped with closed-captioning circuitry. Too many of the estimated 24 million Americans classified as either Deaf or hard of hearing—a figure that has now risen to about 30 million—were essentially being denied access to entertainment, news, and educational opportunities because they couldn’t afford the expense of the set-top decoders.

Senators Tom Harkin of Iowa and John McCain of Arizona were behind the legislative initiative. The response we got that day was overwhelmingly supportive. On August 2, the Senate, by unanimous consent, passed the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990. The House would follow suit on October 1, and President George Bush, the elder, would sign it into law.

So in 1993, all TV sets sold in the United States that were thirteen inches or larger came with decoder circuitry. Now any remote can, with the press of a button, put captioning on a TV screen. Most DVD releases—of both movies and television series—are closed-captioned now.

Every day, the world opens up a little more for those who can’t hear. I’m grateful that I’ve been a part of making that happen.