Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (10 page)

On Gaga’s last tour, there would be a bus parked out front of each venue and she put therapists in there, for kids who were unhappy or being bullied. It’s all well and good for a vulnerable young person to go and have fifteen minutes or half an hour’s chat with a therapist, but where’s the follow-up? I felt it was just a publicity stunt.

Perhaps the next time she has one of these mobile counselling stations, she should go in and ask the therapist for advice on setting good examples for her fans.

6

Talking with Friends

Comparing diamonds with Joan Collins on
The Talk
.

A
nyone who was a fan of the ground-breaking US comedy series
Roseanne
will remember Roseanne’s deeply sarcastic daughter, Darlene. She was played by a very talented actress called Sara Gilbert, who I first met when she came to a book-signing of
The Osbournes
in 2002, specifically to meet us. She was really lovely and very straightforward, just the kind of person I get along with. So, years later, when she called me to ask if I was interested in doing the pilot for a new show she’d come up with, I said yes immediately.

The concept was a simple one: a panel of five women of different ages, all with children, filtering the day’s stories or issues through a mother’s eyes – a similar idea to
Loose Women
in the UK. Barbara Walters has hosted a hugely successful show on ABC called
The View
, which has been running for seventeen years. But we weren’t in competition.
The Talk
is much less political. Sara had originally come up with the idea because, when she was pregnant, she joined a mothers’ group which got together each week and would discuss whatever issues arose around raising kids and families generally. There are no qualifications for mothering, and most of us come to it completely cold, inexperienced and unprepared. In these days of nuclear families, few of us have access to a network of aunts and grandmothers who, in earlier generations, would have been the main source of advice. Sara said she had found these sessions really interesting and helpful. The show would just be a bigger version of the same thing.

The ethos was very much focused around the five women talking in an organic, natural way about ordinary things that affected us all as parents. Having seen
The Osbournes
, Sara naturally felt I might have the right experience to bring to the table. And of the five proposed panellists, I was the only one with older children. The other women’s children ranged from one year to age fourteen. The show hadn’t been commissioned at this point; it was just a pilot for CBS. If they liked it, they would take it. If they didn’t, it would end up in that same toilet where five episodes of
Osbournes Reloaded
were blocking the U-bend.

The original line-up was Sara, me, news anchor Julie Chen, whose husband is CEO of the network, actress Holly Robinson Peete who I had done
Celebrity Apprentice
with, and
The King of Queens
actress Leah Remini.

Although the show got commissioned, the first season felt really uncomfortable. It just didn’t gel. Backstage, everyone was arguing constantly, unable to agree on the topics for discussion, and it felt like everyone was jockeying for position. Who was going to be the funniest? Who was going to do the craziest thing? Who could shout everyone else down? Yuck.

I had really been looking forward to working on
The Talk
because I imagined it would be a friendly, fun thing to do. How wrong you can be. I remember sitting in the morning meetings, thinking, Fucking hell, what’s going on? It wasn’t what I expected at all. I got on well with Sara, and Julie was a real pro. She had done CBS news for sixteen years in New York, and she also hosts
Big Brother
. But Holly and Leah were another matter.

Our day would start at 8 a.m. with a morning meeting, to chat through potential topics with the producer. It proved surprisingly hard to find issues to fit with the mothering format. We would all chip in with various thoughts, give our slant on whether we were for or against a point of view, then head off back to our respective dressing rooms to get the warpaint on.

We would have a second meeting at 10.15 a.m. to finalise the content, before going live at 11 a.m., and always either Holly or Leah would never seem happy with what had been chosen.

Holly had been in two hit sitcoms, one in the eighties and one in the nineties. She was an actress who wasn’t used to working without a script, so it was difficult for her. Unless you’re an over-the-top personality, or a writer, or a stand-up comedienne, it’s extremely hard to be engaging and witty on tap five days a week, particularly on live TV. Holly is mother to four gorgeous children, and in addition she is a philanthropist who’s done great things for Parkinson’s disease and autism. She works tirelessly for her causes. But I never felt she was at ease in this situation, though we never spoke about it.

As for Leah, she was a strange one. A very tough lady; a Scientologist. And that was the elephant in the room. Everybody knew, but it was never discussed. I honestly don’t know what the fuck Scientology is. Is it a religion? A philosophy for life? I know it’s got something to do with spaceships. The truth is, I didn’t give a fuck what she believed in. It was none of my business. Whatever turns you on. I’ve heard that she’s since left them. But at the time it was like a secret sect that the rest of us were excluded from. Leah’s crassness intimidated everyone around her – particularly the crew. I understood that for Leah, as for Holly, this show was a different animal because she usually worked with scripts. In my experience the majority of actresses – and actors, there’s nothing gender-specific in this – are so used to playing roles that they find it hard just to be ‘themselves’. And that’s what was needed on our show. The irony was that
The Talk
was supposed to be about celebrating women – their differences, their warmth, their spontaneity. I never found Leah to be either warm or cuddly, and certainly not the kind of woman you’d feel comfortable telling your innermost secrets to.

Women are often portrayed very badly on American television, particularly in those ‘housewife’-style reality shows where everyone is fighting and back-stabbing. On air, we were the antithesis of that, but it would have been nice if we’d replicated that off air, too. Unfortunately, it rarely felt that way. Sisterhood, I’m afraid, had packed her bags and left the building.

At the end of the first season, we were on hiatus for five weeks when I got a phone call from one of the team to say that Leah and Holly’s options had not been picked up.

We were told that it was ‘a creative decision’, that the bosses felt the vital chemistry they place so much emphasis on in the world of TV just wasn’t there. The network doesn’t get involved in who doesn’t like who behind the scenes; the executives would just go on what came across on screen and the results of any audience research. If you don’t get on in
front
of that camera, you can’t wing it.

When I went back after the break, I was apprehensive. I wasn’t sure if there was still going to be bad feeling, and, if there was, I didn’t know if I could take it. Everyone wants to spend their day in a job that’s enjoyable, where you all get on. Was that too much to ask?

I needn’t have worried. Two new women had been brought in as replacements for Holly and Leah, comedienne Sheryl Underwood and actress and stand-up comic Aisha Tyler, and right from day one they were amazing. We all clicked in an instant and, from then on, it has become the best TV job I have ever had.

But, of course, as has happened so many times in my life, just as things were looking up, something jumped up and bit me.

When one of her Twitter followers asked Leah why she was no longer on the show, she tweeted back, ‘Sharon. She had us fired.’ She followed it up with, ‘Sharon thought me and Holly were “Ghetto” [her words], we were not funny, awkward and didn’t know ourselves.’ She was referring to an interview I had given to the famously outrageous radio host Howard Stern, where I had said that to be successful on the show you had to know who you were, and that Holly and Leah clearly didn’t.

I tweeted back: ‘Leah knows that I have never been in a position to hire or fire anyone on the show. That being said, my only wish is that Leah would just stop all this negative, unprofessional and childish behaviour.’

Much as I would like to say that I am that powerful, I’m clearly not. I have trouble getting myself hired most of the time, so how the fuck could I get someone fired? I learned the lesson the hard way while working on
The X Factor
that in a ‘she goes or I go’ situation, the answer was… I was not on the next series of
X Factor
. Lesson learned.

Regardless, I was the bad guy, apparently. But really it was just an excuse. No one in TV wants to say their options weren’t picked up because they didn’t come out well in audience research, do they? They wanted a scapegoat. But, seriously? If I had that much fucking clout at CBS, I’d have my own bloody talk show!

In public, Holly maintained a dignified silence about Leah’s claims, but she sent me a couple of unpleasant emails, making her feelings very clear indeed. Also, her mother wrote to my make-up artist, Jude Alcala, who has been with me for thirteen years, saying that he should know that he worked for an ‘evil’ person. Obviously he showed me what she wrote, and while it’s not pleasant being referred to in those terms, it didn’t upset me one jot because I didn’t even know the woman. What I felt was anger that she had involved poor Jude. What the hell did she think
he
was going to do about it?

So I called her straight away.

‘Hey, missus, call or write to
me
, you know where I am. You live down the road from the studio, you could have come in to see me.’

I said that Jude had been with me for a long time and that she shouldn’t place him in that awkward position; that she had made herself look like a fool.

‘Right, so now we’re on the phone to each other, tell me what your problem is.’

She started off with the whole ‘you got my daughter fired’ nonsense, and said that when she went into her local grocery store, everyone was telling her how much they missed having Holly on the show. That’s just great, I said, but seriously, it has nothing to do with me.

In many ways, my heart went out to this woman. I understood why she had done it. She was a mother defending her daughter, just as I would do with mine. But it was based on a lie, and I wasn’t going to take it lying down just to make her feel better.

So I told her that she only had her daughter’s side of the story, that TV was a tough game and that Holly probably hadn’t researched well, which is why she wasn’t picked up. I pointed out that all these shows do market research and that you can be the bitch from hell but if you come across well on screen, it will keep you in a job. That’s all it comes down to, I said. Nothing more sinister than that. I wasn’t going to be anyone’s scapegoat.

It was Sara’s show; she was the producer. Julie is married to the boss of the network. And Holly and Leah thought it was little old me that got them fired? I was just a hired hand with a big mouth. Don’t pick on
me
, ladies.

For season two, the premise of the show changed. We were still five mothers, but we could talk about whatever we wanted. That was manna from heaven for me, with one small problem. It’s live, and I sometimes forget myself. As we all get on so well, it’s easy to think I’m sitting round a dinner table and chatting to my mates. And in situations like that, we sometimes say things we think are funny, but which we don’t really mean.

Luckily, given my propensity to swear, we are on a seven-second delay and have the lovely Kingsley, whose job it is to hit the big red cut-out button every time one of us – admittedly, mostly me – lets a rude word slip out. Kingsley is English and has a great sense of humour, so I walk past him each morning and say, ‘Fuck, shit, fart,’ to get it out of the way, and he raises his eyes heavenward at my naughtiness.

But Kingsley’s job is only to hit that button for swear words. After that, we’re on our own, and one or two of my off-the-cuff quips that
I
thought were funny at the time have got me into trouble afterwards. It’s usually something glib that just pops into my head, and when I analyse it the next day, I think, Why did I say that? It’s about finding that balance between speaking your mind, even if your view is controversial, and saying it in a way that isn’t offensive to viewers.

In July 2011, a Californian woman called Catherine Kieu cut off her estranged husband’s penis and threw it in the waste-disposal unit because he had reportedly started seeing an ex-girlfriend.

Before I knew it, I had opened my mouth and uttered the words, ‘I don’t know the circumstances… However, I do think it’s quite fabulous.’

Obviously
, I don’t think it’s fabulous at all and, to this day, I don’t know what possessed me to say it. It just popped out. Luckily, Sara counteracted it slightly by saying that it was sexist to joke about it because if it was a woman’s breast that had been cut off, we wouldn’t be making light of it. Quite right – I was completely in the wrong.