M: What would you do?
N: I would never burn the barn down. I was just pushing their buttons. I was always trying to figure out what I could get away with.
M: (Singing in a funny voice) Not a lot has changed. . . .
N: And so, traditionally, my mom would discipline me with a yardstick. Until she broke the yardstick over my butt and we both started cracking up, and then she chased me down. But very rarely, my dad would take me into the mudroom, and he would hold me by—whatever that ligament is connecting the neck to the shoulder—and give me a really low talking-to. And that was so much scarier. He never raised his hand to us, which I have to say I really admire.
M: I can’t believe your mom went at you with a yardstick! That’s surprising. The irony is . . . Well, keep going.
N: That was quite gentle! It was a humane version of the options available to her.
M: Can I just say that the irony is that you were physically spanked with a yardstick, whereas I was only actually spanked once by my father—it was like half of a spanking—but I was emotionally abused 24/7 for my entire childhood? So I guess I would rather have had a few spankings with the yardstick.
N: It’s an interesting dichotomy.
M: Yeah, it’s a real gas.
N: Most of the time I was well behaved. We all had our chores. We had jobs inside and outside of the house, and we were all avid athletes and musicians and all kinds of stuff, but I was always pushing the boundaries of authority, and I don’t know where that came from. It was something intrinsic to me. It wasn’t until I went to college, and was out from under their roof . . . I called my dad pretty early on, a few weeks into college, and said, “I’m sorry I was such an asshole the whole time. Now that I’m balancing my own checkbook and paying my own bills, all of a sudden it all hits home. Thank you.”
I must have been so unbearable. But they were patient and stuck with me. I’d get in trouble for lying about something or ditching school, and they’d say, “You just have to do your work and be honest, and that’s it.” And my life has succeeded, so far as it has, through those incredibly simple lessons.
M: Nobody ever said anything like that to me at home. But I got a lot of discipline at school. I went to the same school for twelve years. It was a great school called Casady. And I was in this ballet company. So between the very strict private school that I went to and the strict, incredibly regimented world of a ballet company, I got a ton of discipline. (Laughs) I’m very thankful for both of those things. My mother overcompensated for my terror-filled childhood by never making me do anything. When I got to college, I got into bed the first night in my dorm room—with my roommate in the other bed—and I got out the next day and looked at it and thought, “Huh . . .” I never fucking even tried. I didn’t even have a concept of how to make a bed. It was a complete and utter mystery to me.
I know how to make a bed now. Now I’m the other way.
N: You’re a goddess.
M: You could bounce a quarter off of our entire house.
N: You CURATE a bed.
Since I’ve known you, there have been . . . one, two, three . . . seven home beds . . .
M: I own a whorehouse! Not a lot of people know that.
N: In the brothel, the beds are immaculate. And that bleach substitute really works.
As your spaces are your works of art, the bed is the focus—I’m sure there’s a cool art term for it—like Mona Lisa’s face. Between the bedding, and the design of the whole thing, and the comfort of the pillows.
M: I feel like we’ve talked about beds a lot.
N: You mean this chapter is not “Beds”?
M: Thinking through all of this right now, it’s so complicated for me to talk about my upbringing because I’ve never spoken about it publicly. I’ve never even mentioned that my father was an alcoholic, much less everything else.
So it’s so interesting to hear Nick talk about his family. And I know his family, but to hear some of the things he said—that seeing his parents have one argument completely blew his mind and he didn’t know that could happen. And that he was disciplined in such a Norman Rockwell–y kind of way . . . Even Norman Rockwell did paintings of children being spanked. I didn’t have that at all. I grew up in a fucking Fellini movie.
My mom put on this face of normalcy and thought she had shielded me from all these things. But she couldn’t have really thought that. I was her accomplice in some of the investigations of my father’s infidelities, and anyway . . . it’s just sad.
Therefore, I’m so glad that not only do I have Nick, I have Nick’s family, who are so normal, but not in the boring way. Just well-adjusted.
N: They’re steady and constant.
M: (Agrees) They’re steady and constant. They’re also extremely warm and genuine.
N: Here’s a hard right. My family—I’m not sure, honestly, I guess Mom’s parents must have gone to the Methodist church, because Aunt Dee and Uncle Dan go to the Methodist church, and our family is Catholic. So it must have been my mom stepping over when she married my dad. But the whole family grew up going to church. I would say that my family members are some of the most exemplary people, living lives that would be considered Christian, but only through their actions. Nobody ever mentioned any church stuff, anywhere, except a possible mention of God or heaven or hell, and in a proverbial way, “If you keep that up, you won’t be going to heaven.” But even that would be super rare.
Today, none of my siblings go to church. It didn’t take with us. We all stopped going to church the minute we left their house.
M: Don’t blow your wad. We have a whole religion chapter coming up.
N: Then I’ll leave it at that. The whole family went to church, even though nobody was demonstrably “churchy” in any way. I learned so much more about decency and how to treat my fellow person from the actions of my fellow family members than I ever did from listening to a priest.
M: I don’t know who I learned all that stuff from. The problem with my mom is that I watched her take all this abuse from my dad every day and not leave him. So that’s tough. It’s hard to say, “My mom was across-the-boards amazing!” She is pretty darn amazing, though. And unconditionally supportive, which made up for a lot.
My grandmother, her mother, was the real thing. Salt of the earth. She was born in 1888. She lived to be ninety-nine, and traveled by covered wagon.
N: Even in the ’60s!
M: (Laughing) The jokes, they’re flying!
She was a great example. My mother’s father died when she was seventeen, so I obviously never met him. He, apparently, was pretty great, too.
N: Seems like you came out pretty good, though.
M: (Laughs) I’m still learning. But I have Nick Offerman as my example, day in and day out, and that’s about as good as it gets.
N: (Crisp fart noise)
M: But I’ve had to learn a lot of things along the way. Everything was very compartmentalized for me. I was so together in terms of my creative life. I taught myself to sing by singing along with records. My parents had Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland records. My parents were two gay men, apparently. I would pick one Barbra Streisand song, and I would sing it over and over again until I could sing it exactly like the record. I was just driven to do it. I loved it so much. I must have had some innate ability, coupled with the discovery that I could really express myself emotionally through singing in a way I couldn’t in real life. That probably drove me subconsciously in some way, but I also genuinely loved it. And I do believe that children are born with certain proclivities, and I guess that was one of mine.
So I had honed my talents in all these different areas. But as a human being, I was way behind. I had no idea what anything meant, the important things in life.
I thought that because I knew how to sing and do other creative things, that meant I was a well-rounded perso
n. But I didn’t know about anything else, about how to be a conscious person living in the world.
N: Well, somebody did a very good job. Maybe Casady, your school, had something to do with it? I feel like you have really good manners, and I feel like we are great checks and balances for each other. In different circumstances, we say, “Hey, did you send a thank-you to that person?” I don’t feel like I’ve got anything on you when it comes to being neighborly.
M: (Laughs) I guess I was cheerful and polite. There’s something about Oklahoma City, or at least the area where I grew up, the people there are SO nice. Nick can attest to it.
N: Hear, hear!
M: There is such a generosity, and a neighborliness, and a real willingness to help others. In the middle of urban LA or the middle of Manhattan, you don’t see it as much. It’s a genuine Southern comfort. A selflessness.
N: When we talk about our upbringings, I think that’s what’s most similar. We both grew up in a Midwestern feeling, for lack of a better term. Where everybody had the attitude of “we’re all in this together.”
This is also a good segue to something I really wanted to bring up, which is that, if we’re talking about family, your group of friends continues to be as devoted as any family, which I think should be discussed.
M: I still have a lot of friends who I went to school with in Oklahoma City, many who still live there and a couple of people who live outside Oklahoma City. I’ve known them since first grade in a few notable cases, and others I’ve known since sixth or seventh grade. We all went to school together all that time, and I’ve been friends with them all along. It’s a very solid, core, staunch group of friends. Nick can’t get over it, because he doesn’t have close friends that he’s known consistently through his life, especially from such an early age.
So every time we go to Oklahoma City, we have this great group of friends there, and I think that it’s a testament to my mom. My mom wanted to have ten children. My mom and my father tried for nine years to get pregnant, and they finally got pregnant with me. Then, after I was born, my mom had five miscarriages. So she didn’t get to have the ten children. They had talked about adopting at one point, but decided to get divorced instead.
So this group of friends I have in Oklahoma City now—almost without exception, all of their mothers passed away at a relatively young age. So a lot of these friends are very close to my mom. She’s been like a mother to so many of them, plus a couple of girls from my ballet company. It’s weird that a lot of my friends’ mothers died at a younger age, and my mom—who had so wanted a lot of children—was the mother who was still there.
My mother is still in the same house that she’s lived in for fifty-three years. She’s just there, my mom. She’s still there.
N: The feeling I get from this group of your friends is the feeling I get from my family. It’s moving, what they put out—you call, they come. Even when you DON’T call, they come. They maintain a fidelity with your mom, and with you, that’s really touching.
M: We talk about it a lot, but I’m glad you brought it up. My friends provide more of a balance for me, and make up for some of the lack of family. Melinda and Rhonda and Chip, in particular, they’re like the triumvirate at the center of all that. On any given day, Rhonda could be over there, doing something nice for my mom. I’m not saying my mom asked them to do something—she never would—but they’re over there, bringing her a milkshake. Repairing something that needs to be repaired.
N: Acting like family.
M: Yes, acting like family.
N: When I was growing up, there were five households—my mom and her three siblings, and their parents’ farm makes the fifth. I should add that my dad has a brother and a sister, but we just didn’t see them as much. Maybe on special occasions and holidays. But my dad’s dad, Ray, was the mayor of Minooka.
M: Literally the mayor of Minooka.
N: He was a constant presence. He was instrumental. He would be at all of the Roberts family things.
When you have five households, which is now ten or twelve, you never have to go to a restaurant. For birthdays and holidays, you just switch houses. So Christmas this year is at Aunt Dee’s house. Or we’d have coffee Sunday—whoever is available on a Sunday gathers at the designated house to get the news. And so it was a HUGE deal when we would go to a fucking McDonald’s, never mind a real sit-down restaurant, which would be like somebody won the Olympics or something.
And so that really gave an element of fantasy to when our families would go to the movies—which was a huge deal, because you had to drive to another town to do it. Let alone go to a Cubs game, which was the pinnacle of our year.
M: Going to Chicago was like going to Bali or something.
N: It was insane! And it turns out it’s, like, forty-five minutes from Minooka to Lake Shore Drive. It’s like a trip to the grocery store in Los Angeles.
It was that quality that, when it came time to look at colleges . . . Financially, it only made sense, since I got good grades and I qualified for a scholarship, it was much cheaper for me to go to state schools. I wanted to be an entertainer, so I thought, (Musing) “I believe people go to this city called New York. There’s also this Los Angeles place . . .” But the thought of one of those would be like going to the moon. It would be completely unheard of for anyone in Minooka.
M: And conversely, I spent two summers in Manhattan studying at the School of American Ballet, which is New York City Ballet’s school. It’s in the Juilliard building, but it’s not part of Juilliard. And it’s next door to Lincoln Center.
My mom went with me both summers, because I was only sixteen and seventeen. We rented an apartment with another girl from my ballet company in Oklahoma City and her mom. My mom would take me to museums, to the ballet, and to see Broadway shows. So from the time I was sixteen, I got this incredible cultural education. I can’t tell you how many times I saw Baryshnikov dance, and Gelsey Kirkland, and Nureyev. All of the greats, and all of the Russian dancers.
My mom was unstoppable. One morning in the New York Times there was a review of a new little show called A Chorus Line. It was a rave review, on the front page of the Arts section. Just this huge, amazing review. My mother said, “We have to see it tonight.”
So, right then and there, we get in the elevator, hail a cab, and she takes me down to Times Square, to Shubert Alley, marches up to the box office and says, “I need two tickets for the show tonight.”
The guy behind the ticket window burst out laughing. “You can’t get a ticket for this show—this show is sold out until the end of time.”
My mom—who was the real actor in the family—says, “I have brought my tiny, small daughter all the way from Oklahoma to see this show, and if you can’t get her a ticket, then you will personally be ruining this child’s life.” I think she basically intimated that I might be dying of something.
And suddenly we were front row center in the balcony for the first show after opening night.
N: She got you dope house seats!
M: She got me the producer’s house seats. There were a few times my mother managed actual tears to try to finagle something for me. She did that a few different times. It’s some kind of trick she learned on the mean streets of Greater Tulsa.
So I had all this exposure to culture. But New York was dangerous then. Seventy-second Street—it was like Beirut. Nobody EVER went that far uptown. Central Park was completely off-limits. You couldn’t set a toe in Central Park, even in the daytime. It was just discarded needles everywhere and crazy shit going down. One time a guy chased me down 66th Street between Columbus and Central Park West at three o’clock in the afternoon. We were at a full sprint. I finally ducked into the ABC building and asked for help. And this sounds like a joke, but it’s not: Ten years later I shot my first television show—The Ellen Burstyn Show—in that same building.
But I did get thi
s great exposure to dance and theater. It was amazing.
N: It was amazing. I think if my parents had taken me to see Baryshnikov . . . then I could have had a career in ballet.
M: It’s not too late!
N: It was stolen from me.
M: (Laughs) I was also allowed to watch a lot of television, which I loved, and I still love. My mom and I watched shows like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and that show completely blew my mind. Nothing like that had existed previously. I can’t believe they even showed it in Oklahoma City. It was very avant-garde, not bright and shiny like other shows at the time. There wasn’t even a laugh track. And the crazy soap Dark Shadows, which was totally nuts and I was completely obsessed with. It was a sort of dark-comedy soap opera about a vampire, next to, like, General Hospital, in the middle of the afternoon. It was insane.
Also, the music that I would sing along to—when I hear songs from the ’60s and ’70s now, I think, “Oh my god, these songs are so filthy!” But I had no idea that they were at the time, and I was singing along in the car at full blast with my mom. Either she thought it was funny or she didn’t get that they were dirty—I don’t know. But I remember singing “Fancy” about a thousand times, which is a song about a mother who sells her daughter into prostitution, but everything works out great! So I guess it’s the perfect Mother’s Day anthem.
She wasn’t conservative with me. I had a deal with her when I was really little. I loved Carol Burnett, who was on CBS on Monday nights at nine, which was my bedtime. So on Mondays I went to bed at eight, and I slept for an hour, and then my mom would wake me up, and I would watch Carol Burnett, and then go back to sleep.
I really studied everyone on and everything about Carol Burnett and also Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, that first really weird comedic TV show. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have thought my mom would have liked shows like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman because she dressed like Nancy Reagan and was pretty mah-jonggy, but I think ultimately my mom had really good taste when it came to pop culture. We also watched Laugh-In religiously. That was a more mainstream show but super groundbreaking for the time.
The Greatest Love Story Ever Told Page 4