by Marlo Thomas
Elaine: Can we turn off the tape for a minute?
Marlo: No. Bella Abzug once said, “Real equality is going to come not when a female Einstein is recognized as quickly as a male Einstein, but when a female schlemiel is promoted as quickly as a male schlemiel.” What’s your feeling about that?
Elaine: Well, I think there are probably more female schlemiels in high positions now than when I started, although it’s true that there are no female schlemiels in the highest position. But I think that, in time, there will be.
Marlo: That’s not the point I’m making.
Elaine: It isn’t?
Marlo: No. I don’t want incompetent women to rise to the top. Look, everybody knows how I feel about this issue. How do you feel about it?
Elaine: Fine.
Marlo: You know, I really worked hard on these questions . . .
Elaine: And they’re excellent.
Marlo: Thank you. And I’d like you to work a little harder on your answers. “Yes” and “No” and “Fine” aren’t really good enough.
Elaine: Well, I just gave you some long answers and you didn’t like them.
Marlo: Well, they were terrible. Did you like them? You’ll kill yourself when you read the quote about female incompetents being promoted to high positions in time. And the one where you said it was fun to pick up a smaller person and bang them against the wall? You’ll get letters on that one.
Elaine: Can’t you cut that one out of the interview?
Marlo: No, I can’t. I mean, I could but I won’t. I’m part of the media now, Elaine. See? You’re sitting that way again. You’re all hunched over and you’re not breathing.
Elaine: Can we turn the tape off for one minute?
Marlo: No. What would you like to do next?
Elaine: Eat.
Marlo: No. I mean as an artist. Don’t cross your eyes. Just answer me. See, this is why I won’t turn off the tape or edit it. The only meaty part of this interview is your reaction to the questions you don’t want to answer. Now, I’m going to ask you again—would you like to direct? Write? Act?
Elaine: It doesn’t matter to me.
Marlo: What does matter to you, Elaine?
Elaine: Money. Living forever. And there’s a third thing.
Marlo: Money matters to you?
Elaine: Look, I don’t want to go on with this unless you promise me you’ll cut those answers out of the interview.
Marlo: All right.
Elaine: You promise? You will?
Marlo: You have my word as a reporter. Now let’s go on to another question. Are you working on something now?
Elaine: I . . . uh . . .
Marlo: You’d rather not say? Have I hit a nerve? I know when you shimmy your shoulders like that I’ve made you uncomfortable.
Elaine: Yes, it would be better for me not to say what I am working on now.
Marlo: Well, what’s left? How about your personal life? What’s the most important thing to you, personally?
Elaine: Grooming. Lifestyle. A well-decorated and gracious home.
Marlo: Well, that’s not true. I’ve seen the way you dress and I’ve been to your apartment.
Elaine: Look, you want me to expound on your questions and then you argue with everything I say.
Marlo: But it’s not the truth.
Elaine: Well, nobody tells the truth in an interview. Except people who have never been interviewed. And they only do it once.
Marlo: Elaine, Interview magazine has given me the responsibility of doing this with you. I can’t knowingly hand in answers that I know are lies.
Elaine: Why not? Don’t you tell lies in interviews?
Marlo: Of course I do. But I’m not being interviewed now. I’m interviewing. I’ve been given a sacred trust. For this moment in time, I am the media. And as my friend, I’d like you to help me.
Elaine: I have helped you. Now I’m going to eat.
Marlo: All right. Well, then, I’ll just wind up here. You say you were surprised at “the power of my acting . . .”
Elaine: Yes.
Marlo: Well, at least I got the truth out of you twice.
Chapter 46
The Storyteller—Whoopi Goldberg
It is nearly impossible not to love Whoopi Goldberg, and a good reason for that is because she’s both unusually hilarious and hilariously unusual. That voice that buzzes like an alto sax, those killer sidelong glances. Comic talent is rewarded and awarded in many ways but rarely with an Academy Award. Whoopi vaulted over that barrier when she captured the Oscar for Ghost more than twenty years ago, with her portrayal of a brazenly phony psychic. It was just one of the countless compelling characters she’s been inhabiting for the span of her career. And each one has spoken to our common humanity—our dreams, our fears, our deepest secrets. I’ve never forgotten the little girl Whoopi summoned up in her first big stage show—the one who dreamed out loud about wanting to be beautiful. I knew from the first line that Whoopi was telling me a little bit about myself.
—M.T.
“Normal is nothing more than a cycle on a washing machine.”
—Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi: When I was born, upon emerging from my mom, I found the light and put my face up into it and smiled—half in and half out. I’ve been that way ever since. I live in a very strange and wonderful world in my head.
It all began with my mother and her funny accents. When I was little, my mom and her cousin Arlene did dialects all the time, just to make themselves laugh. They would talk as little, old Jewish ladies, or Spanish guys, or Hungarians. What’s funny is that they’d do these dopey foreign accents, but neither of them had ever left the country. I just loved that. I always wanted to go to the places their accents were from.
I’d hear them pretending to speak French, and I’d think, Oh, I can speak French, too! But when I’d try, they’d look at me like I had four heads.
“How did you learn all these languages?” I’d ask.
“What languages?” my mother would say.
What’s funny is that my mom is very straightforward and deep. But somehow, when she got together with Arlene, they’d become two of the silliest people I knew.
“I used my imagination to make the grass
whatever color I wanted it to be.”
—Whoopi Goldberg
As a child, I wasn’t very fast, and I was kind of quiet—but I could act. I remember when I was about eight or nine, I told my mother, “I’m going to Hollywood to become a star!” And I believed that could really happen—I had seen it on The Little Rascals ! But what I really wanted to be was Jean Harlow, coming down that enormous staircase in Dinner at Eight. That is my first cognizant movie memory. I wanted to have that effect, floating down the stairs—where everything in the room just stops. But I didn’t become that actress. All I did was tell great stories.
When I was a little girl, I loved to hear my mom read, and then I would make up the most wonderful tales—about fairies and dragons and princes, all sorts of magical people. I’d also have full conversations with inanimate objects, or animals, which is something I still do. I like to give voice to animals because I truly believe I can see what they’re thinking. My cat is a Russian Blue—he’s gorgeously grey—and I have these great conversations with him. I do most of the talking. He just looks at me and sort of sucks his teeth. But I know what he’s thinking.
“I don’t have pet peeves, I have whole kennels of irritation.”
—Whoopi Goldberg
I didn’t go to high school. Like many comedians, I was sort of a disciplinary problem. My mother would try to drag me to school, but somewhere along the line, she recognized that school just wasn’t for me, and that it was better to know where I was than to have me hiding out.
So we made a deal: She wouldn’t make me go to school as long as I kept myself occupied with something that interested me.
So I would go to museums, or hang out at home and listen to Richard Pryor or Moms Mabley. Moms made
me laugh, just insanely. And Richard would tell these great stories.
I also liked watching old movies. Back then, movies were on TV all the time. You had the Million Dollar Movie, The Early Show, The Late Show, The Late, Late Show. And then there was that great program in the middle of the day, hosted by Gloria DeHaven. She’d come on-screen to introduce the movie, wearing a caftan with her hair coiffed. She looked amazing.
But it was always hard for me to figure out what I was as a performer. I didn’t want to do stand-up comedy because, in stand-up, you have to be really brave. When you’re a storyteller, you can be semi-brave.
So when I was 25, I wrote a show to demonstrate what I thought I could do. One of my characters was the little girl who wanted long hair. I’d always wanted to be a Breck girl, because I dreamed about being on the back of a magazine. But it was pointed out to me, fairly early, that I was perfect—except for one thing. I thought, Oh, so if I had blond hair maybe . . .
So my little girl character wore a half-slip on her head, tossing it around, as if she had long, beautiful hair.
When I started doing that little girl in my act, I discovered something interesting—that lots of girls felt like that, whether they were white girls with straight black hair, or straight blond hair, or curly hair. It didn’t matter. Everyone wants something they don’t have.
“I am an artist. Art has no color and no sex.”
—Whoopi Goldberg
I had a life-changing experience on a trip to Amsterdam that I wanted to share on stage, but I couldn’t figure out the best character to tell the story. It was about the Anne Frank House, and traveling on an airplane, and the crazy stewardesses that I’d had. So I decided to be a junkie and have that person tell the story—because who’s the last person you’d ever expect to have that kind of an experience?
It’s all about trying to convey bits and pieces of information that I’ve discovered in the world in an interesting way. Whether it’s the little girl, or the junkie, or the surfer chick who ends up giving herself an abortion because no one will talk to her about what’s happened to her, I’ve kept doing it.
For me, this is an evolutionary process that I’ve been building from the age of five or six. I’d hear adults say things that I thought were interesting or fun, and they laughed a lot—mostly at themselves.
And that’s how it started. I wanted to be in that conversation.
“We’re here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason
is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark.”
—Whoopi Goldberg
Chapter 47
Against the Odds
From my dad’s first foray into TV in the early Fifties, with the Four Star Revue variety show, he and Mother got red-carpet dressed and attended the Emmy Awards every year. Dad had won a few of the coveted statues himself, and his production company produced many winning shows—Make Room for Daddy, Dick Van Dyke, Gomer Pyle, Andy Griffith, The Real McCoys and Mod Squad. So he was an active and upstanding member of the Academy.
But in 1986, when my brother Tony’s show The Golden Girls was nominated for Best Comedy Series and I was nominated for Best Dramatic Actress in a TV movie, Nobody’s Child, my parents decided to sit it out. The odds were against both Tony and me taking home Emmys, and they just couldn’t bear the thought of one of us winning and one of us losing.
So Mom and Dad made the decision to put on their pajamas, open a bottle of wine and, for the first time, watch the show at home.
The program had just begun when they got a call from their neighbor and pal Ted Mann. Ted owned the Mann Theatres, so he was one of the first in the neighborhood to have a satellite dish with an East Coast feed. He was already in the middle of the show, while my parents and everyone else on the West Coast were only seeing the start.
“Tony just won the Emmy!” Ted shouted into the phone.
Mom and Dad were so excited that they put their coats on over their PJs and ran over to Ted’s house to watch the rest of the show. They got there just in time to hear the nominees being read for my category—Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Gena Rowlands, Mare Winningham . . . and their little girl. They could hardly breathe as Tom Selleck opened the envelope. And guess what—it was me.
My parents were bowled over and did what any ecstatic mother and father of two Emmy winners would do. They ran home, took off their pajamas, put on their tux and gown and drove to the party.
Brother and sister winners. I said in my acceptance speech: “Someone’s going to have to go to our parents’ house and pick them up off the floor.”
Chapter 48
Legends of Comedy
Well into their seventies, Dad and two of his best pals, Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, teamed up to form a new act called The Legends of Comedy. Exactly what the title implied, the show was a celebration of the careers of three men doing what they did best—entertaining people. And now for the first time they were doing it on the same bill. I went to see the show in Atlantic City and sat in the audience more spellbound than I would have thought. I had seen them all perform countless times, but never side by side. It was an amazing experience—like attending a one-night, crash-course comedy school—as these veterans of the craft tore up the stage, each in his own unique style.
Milton came on first, exploding with energy—banging out one-liners, walking on the sides of his feet, making faces, crossing his eyes, prancing and dancing, licking his hand to slick back his hair, and all with a look of sheer delight on that rubbery mug of his. He was a marvelous rat-a-tat clown—a master of Berlesque burlesque—who the audience adored and he adored back. As I watched him, I could almost see the six-year-old boy standing up in his parents’ living room, making his whole family double over in awe at this precocious and genuinely funny kid.
Then came Dad, Mr. Sleek, in his pressed black tuxedo with his red satin pocket hanky. He strode to the mike and good-naturedly welcomed his audience. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” They immediately quieted down to hear what he would say next. Dad adored making an audience laugh, but he also loved bringing them to a hush. He used to tell me that a good storyteller knows how important the silences are, and is never afraid of them. Dad controlled his audience like an orchestra conductor. He was Mr. Cool.
I remember once being with him in the dining room of the Sands Hotel when a young comic approached our table.
“Mr. Thomas,” he said nervously, “I’m just starting out as a comedian, and I’m having the hardest time beginning my act. I never know what to say when I first come out. Can you give me some advice?”
My father looked up at the young comic.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ll give you, free of charge, what I open with.”
“Oh, my God,” the kid said. “Would you really? What is it?”
Dad said, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.”
Third on the bill was Sid Caesar, who couldn’t have been more different from his two friends. No rat-a-tat, no gentlemanly welcome to the audience. Instead, Sid came out in character—a German professor—then gave us another of his characters, and another, and yet another, all from different countries, all with different accents. The audience was transfixed.
And it was interesting knowing where all those voices came from. Sid had told us the stories of growing up like my dad, as the son of immigrants, in the same kind of melting-pot neighborhood. His father owned a small restaurant in Yonkers called the St. Claire Buffet and Luncheonette. When Sid was a boy of nine he worked there—for a quarter a day—clearing tables after school. As he went from table to table, he’d hear the customers chattering in a smorgasbord of accents—French, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, Hungarian, Russian and Yiddish—and he liked to mimic them. He picked up the rhythms, the intonations, the musical nuances of each dialect, then he’d talk to each group in his own double-talk version of their language.
At first the customers thought Sid was actually speaking to them in their la
nguage, but soon they realized that this little pisher was faking it. They loved it—and Sid loved making them laugh. He couldn’t wait to get there after school every day. He had found his way into a comic device that would become a signature of his career.
Milton, Dad and Sid, always together, this time on stage.
On stage that night in Atlantic City, we never saw the man, Sid Caesar, until the final moments of his act, when he bid us “Good night.” But he was brilliant. He gave us not only a cast of colorful and funny characters, but also a touch of the rich cultures that came along with them.
In their brief but memorable engagement as a team, Milton Berle, Danny Thomas and Sid Caesar painted a remarkable picture of the distinct ways in which a comedian can approach comedy. They also made it clear that each one of them was destined to do it his own way. And it was certain, as you watched them up there on that stage, that they were also destined to spend their lives making us laugh.
SID’S MOST MEMORABLE JOKE
I asked Sid Caesar if he remembered the first time he got up in front of an audience. He told me that he made a speech at his Bar Mitzvah, and though much of it had to be serious, he did manage to slip in a few jokes from the pulpit.
But the real headliner that day, Sid remembers, was the rabbi, who told a joke that still makes Sid laugh. —M.T.
There were mice running all over the synagogue, and everyone was in a panic. Women were terrified, kids were hiding and the men didn’t know what to do.
“Don’t worry,” the rabbi announced. “I’ll take care of it.”
Sure enough, the next day all the mice were gone. The people in the shul were astonished! An older gentleman stood and asked, “Rabbi, how did you do it? How did you get rid of all the mice?”
“Easy,” the rabbi answered. “I Bar Mitzvahed them. And as everyone knows, once they’re Bar Mitzvahed, they never come back.”