Official Book Club Selection

by Kathy Griffin

  Dad hams it up even on his wedding day.

  This is me after my second face-lift.

  But get this: When my mother was pregnant with me, it turns out she was on amphetamines. That’s right, speed. This was a time when doctors thought a woman shouldn’t gain more than fifteen pounds during a pregnancy—and when doctors spoke back then, mothers listened—so to keep her weight down they gave my mom amphetamines! She took them while she was pregnant, and after she had me to lose the few pounds she had gained. Plus—I love this—she’s actually guilt-ridden about it. She thinks that’s what made me crazy, or shall we say, the accomplished person I am today. Let’s just take this in for a moment, shall we? In 1960 there were two doctors in Forest Park, Illinois, who were just doling out methamphetamines to pregnant Irish Catholic women with part-time jobs. Where’s my Dateline episode? I like to picture my mom with a baby on the way, bouncing off the walls, scratching her neck, and fiddling with the rabbit ears on the TV set in a frenzied manner. This, by the way, is how I write my act: I get an idea in my head and I run with it. So granted, I was a fetus at the time, but I was there. You can’t deny that. Also, the way I tell it is probably funnier than the way it actually happened. But in any case, she now believes I’m her crack baby.

  I love holding it over her, too. It’s really the only thing I have on her. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t been taking DOLLS all day!” But in my mind, she’s Judy Garland and I’m Liza.

  Really, my mother wasn’t alone about crazy ’60s and ’70s parenting. I remember the excitement about the DDT pesticide truck, how its arrival on our street was a big event. The parents on the block would alert us: “Hey, kids, the DDT truck is coming!” Then we’d all go knock on our friends’ doors, because the truck would come and leave this giant haze that smelled awesome, like incense and Fourth of July. We’d run around in it and yell, “We’re in clouds! We’re dancing in clouds!” Later on I saw Meryl Streep on a commercial talking about the dangers of pesticides, scrubbing fruit vigorously with soap, and I thought, Oh, you mean dancing in the clouds was bad? Meryl, pass me the scrub brush.

  In any case, we were a very typical middle-class household. When I was in kindergarten, we moved from a small house in Forest Park, Illinois, to a bigger house in Oak Park, and I remember my mother thinking our new place was very grand: four bedrooms, a sun room, wood floors, a galley kitchen with a breakfast area. There was a fireplace that may not have been operable but could be made to look like a working fireplace, and that was fine by us. I’m pretty sure my parents got the house for under $30,000, and Mom thought it was the Taj Mahal. They worked hard for it, too. Dad was managing a hi-fi stereo store six days a week, which meant all of us kids each had full-on stereo systems, with woofers, tweeters, receivers, and everything, and that helped us seem cool to our friends. Mom, meanwhile, worked as a cashier at Oak Park Hospital. It was really the administrative office, but back then it was “cashier,” because this was when people would actually pay for their hospital stay in cold, hard dollars and cents.

  Easter Sunday! Candy! Do I have to go to church?

  Obviously I wasn’t around when my parents got married or were starting a family, but I can tell you they were a great couple. They have many stories about singing songs around a friend’s piano, going to block parties, and attending the occasional pancake breakfast at church. I honestly never once heard them fight. They yelled at us kids all the time, but never at each other. My siblings and I joke to this day about how the reason we have trouble in relationships is because we never learned how to fight from our parents. However they worked out their problems, they kept it between themselves. My dad had such respect for my mom, even though she was only the second prettiest girl at Presentation. He definitely taught me the old cliché, that a sense of humor really is the most important quality in a man. That, and how to mix a nice Tom Collins.

  Which brings us to the drinking portion of our show. My parents never thought they were alcoholics, but they sure got used to me calling them that in my act. Drinking was so prevalent in our home, it was a daily thing. Now my parents would argue that it was a different time back then, but as a kid, I definitely remember them having beer and “the hard stuff” on a regular basis. My mom still loves to say, “It’s five o’clock somewhere!” Often at noon.

  Did I ever see my parents wildly drunk? No. They never fell down. They never missed work. They never yelled at me or embarrassed me in front of friends, none of those classic stories. Did they drink every day? Absolutely. It was really my older siblings Gary and Joyce—who would, in typical teenage fashion, have beer bashes—who exposed me to what being visibly drunk looked like. Their keggers were legendary. Just ask the Bowens.

  The funny thing was, we all only thought of my uncle Maurice as the “real alcoholic.” I vividly remember my parents talking about how hard it was for Uncle Mo and his wife, because he couldn’t get off “the drink.” Dad would even take me to visit Uncle Mo in the “hospital.” I didn’t know at the time that that was code for rehab. I don’t think they even called it rehab in those days. He was a Chicago cop—he once worked on the famous Leopold and Loeb case—and the legend in my family is that Uncle Mo is what we used to call a bagman for the Chicago police department. Allegedly. A bagman was a cop who went to the local merchants and collected payments from them to look the other way about certain legal issues. But in any case, for a cop to have to go to “the hospital,” he must have been drinking a lot.

  I saw all different kinds of drinking going on at our house, from my brother John’s occasional beer to Uncle Mo teaching me how to make him a Manhattan when I was in grade school, something my parents never would have condoned. But when Uncle Maurice had me assemble a drink for him in the kitchen, it did make me feel like a grown-up.

  I’m halfway to a bad sunburn, and Uncle Maurice is half in the bag.

  I, on the other hand, have never had a drink in my life. Never. Voluntarily, that is. Once when I was about ten years old, I was choking on something at the dinner table, and my mom yelled, “Give her something to drink!” My dad grabbed the closest thing, which was his stein of beer. I took one big sip, and while it startled me out of choking, it also led me straight into thinking, My throat is burning. This tastes disgusting! Why would anyone want to drink this stuff? That really was my first and last taste of alcohol.

  When my pals in high school were starting to drink, it always looked unappealing to me. I would be at a big party and see one of the popular girls or football players completely wasted and puking and acting a fool, and think to myself, There’s nothing cool about that. I never wanted to be that out of control.

  I had friends who would drink because they were nervous, or they were shy. I wasn’t really nervous, and I certainly wasn’t shy. It’s weird the way many guys over the years have said to me, “I’m going to be the first to get you drunk!” I’d say, “Why? What are you possibly going to gain? I’m going to loosen up more?”

  But I also remember thinking, with so much alcoholism and addiction around me, that I didn’t need to be starting any vices. An inner voice was telling me, “How are you not going to become an alcoholic with all these drunken micks around you? Don’t play with fire. If you have one drink, you’ll be an alcoholic in a week.” I still think that.

  Because both of my parents worked, I was the classic latchkey kid. When you’re in a family with a bunch of kids, you never get quiet time. So when it was just my older brother John and me still in the house—Kenny was married, Joyce was teaching, Gary was at college—I made the most out of this unsupervised time. I would get home from school at around 3 p.m. and have the house to myself for about two hours. I was in fourth grade then and that’s when two things started: my eating disorder, and my love for all things Hollywood, a lethal combination that has skyrocketed many stars to fame, from Tracey Gold to—allegedly—Calista Flockhart.

  We didn’t really use the term “eating disorder” back then. It was just eating. We also didn’t ha
ve the term “BFF.” But I had one, and it wasn’t Paris Hilton. My BFF was a lady named Food. I wasn’t the kid who came home and made a sandwich or had a few cookies. Instead I had a routine that was, I have to admit, particularly sick. Binge eating is all about the rituals. It began after school. On my way home I would stop at Certified Groceries, the mom-and-pop grocery store on Madison, where they all knew me. It was kind of like my Cheers. I would get two staples: Pringles and a blue-and-white box of Jiffy cake mix, with a frosting mix kicker sold separately. Because, when binge eating, I felt very strongly that it was important to combine salty with sweet.

  Food technology was moving at such a rapid pace in those days that potato chips had been remolded to conform to one shape, so they could be stacked vertically in a can. Their scientific name: Pringles. Pringles are not even potato chips. I believe they’re actually called potato crisps. They are to potatoes what McNuggets are to chicken. I had a can-a-day habit.

  Now, on to the sweet. Oh, Jiffy cakes. Jiffy used to have these cake mixes that came in little boxes. They weren’t Duncan Hines big, but they were really for people who essentially want to eat their own cake, even if the package claimed to serve four.

  On these specially designated days after school, I would run home with my stash, turn on an afternoon movie on the tube, and start with the Pringles. When I had finished off my last Pringle, the Jiffy box on the counter would catch my eye. My favorite flavor was white cake with chocolate frosting. Yellow cake was okay, but I thought the white cake was better. I put a lot of thought into it. I can tell you, there were tense times when Certified ran out of white cake, and I had to get the yellow with chocolate frosting. That made a great day into just an okay day. Keep in mind, a Jiffy cake was one layer. That’s what made eating an entire one in a single sitting seem normal to me. Believe it or not, in my mind, it would have been really weird to bake myself a two-layer birthday-style cake five days a week. However, you’d have to be a pussy not to be able to comfortably slam a Jiffy cake a day. Right, fellas? Who’s with me?

  Even though I didn’t have a name for this ritual, I knew it was wrong, because I would never throw away the garbage from my private feast in the kitchen wastebasket, or even our garbage can in the alley. I knew a savvy CIA operative like my mother would have nailed me. So I actually gathered the hollow Pringles can and the empty Jiffy boxes, put them in a bag, walked down the alley, lifted the metal lid of the Schumachers’ garbage can, and placed it in there. I owe the Schumachers an apology. If Mrs. Schumacher was any bit as astute as my mom, one of those poor kids probably got grounded for nothing.

  Looking back, I know I was “filling the void,” as a psychologist might term it. Part of it was surely the feeling that in a house with five kids, I could have this thing that nobody could take from me. My own secret. When I’d go to somebody’s house, and there’d be a cake made a day or so earlier with only two slices missing, I’d say, “How is that still standing?” At our house, we’d turn into a pack of dogs. We’d be lucky if the plate wasn’t lying in shards on the floor after we were done with it. But I’ve always had a low tolerance for loneliness, too, and binge eating was maybe a result of that loneliness.

  The photographer asked me to say “cheese,” but my word was “cake!”

  Thankfully, I was a skinny kid, so nobody really noticed these indulgences. I didn’t barf it up, either. The binge eating was definitely symptomatic of my not knowing when to stop, though, an affliction I still suffer from today. Verbally, that is. I wish this was one of those stories that ended on a self-help note, kind of a he’s-just-not-that-into-you tale about cakes. But it’s not. I was and am into them. I’ve dealt with food issues my whole life, and eventually I acquired the tools to deal with them, as you’ll find out later. But I’ll admit it, last November 4—I reveal with no small amount of shame—I asked my friends for one thing for my birthday: my own cake, one that they were not allowed to touch, eat, or look at. That’s right, last November 3, I could barely sleep because I knew the next day I was getting my own cake that said “Happy Birthday, Kathy,” that I could eat with one fork while watching Oprah. I was even tempted to put the empty cake box down the street in Forest Whitaker’s or Drew Carey’s garbage can. By the way, did I mention they’re my neighbors? Snap. I’m famous.

  When it came to the dinner table of my childhood, though, or family parties, it was probably more important to be full of knowledge and snappy comebacks than food. The great thing about growing up Griffin was that you had to have all your ducks in a row to keep up with everybody’s rapier wit. All of my family members were smart, and they all read the Chicago Times, the Tribune, and the Daily News. They watched all the television news programs. At dinnertime, they would wipe the floor with you if you didn’t know which alderman was on the take, what was going on in the country, state, city, or neighborhood, or what the leading religious issues were. I don’t recall a single relative from my immediate or extended family—and that’s a lot of people—who wasn’t up on everything. And that includes Hollywood stuff. I have an eighty-five-year-old aunt Florence who can name all the Jonas brothers, plus the release date of their next album. She just likes to keep up with it all. So I may have been into The Brady Bunch like every other kid, but I also wanted to watch John Lennon and Yoko Ono on The Dick Cavett Show, and every minute of the Watergate hearings. It was fear of the dinner table that got me hooked.

  In addition to sweet-and-salty binge eating, television dominated my life. I was into total pop culture consumption, but I have to say, when it came to my passion for showbiz, Mom was not only a great enabler, but an eager and willing participant. Back then we weren’t aware of any studies that said kids shouldn’t watch eight hours of television a day. Mom openly talks about the advent of television and how wonderful it was to just stick the kids in front of it. And I was happy to oblige.

  I lived and breathed movies and television. Rona Barrett was the big entertainment gossip columnist of the day and we always had her magazines around. Kitty Kelley’s scandal-packed books, too. Mom was the ideal audience for Hollywood dish. To this day, her dream gift for Christmas is some kind of juicy, unauthorized biography, preferably about Princess Di or any of those damn Kennedys. Uncle Maurice had a joke that he hated the Kennedys so much, he wanted to go to Washington, DC, and pee on the Eternal Flame until it went out. Can you believe it? Irish on Irish crime. Oh, Uncle Mo, how you loved the drunk tank.

  But I digress. I remember one night at home when Mom and I watched the movie Suddenly Last Summer, that outlandishly dramatic Tennessee Williams adaptation starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. Mom kept a running commentary on the stars’ lives.

  “Did you know that Monty Clift had a gorgeous face? And then he was in a car crash, and poor Liz Taylor was in LOVE with him, and kept making sexual advances? But he was one of THOSE men!” My mom really felt like this had happened to one of her friends.

  “Really?” I said.

  She’d set the scene for you, clearly putting herself in Liz’s shoes. “Can you imagine being as beautiful as Liz Taylor, with that tiny waist, and Monty Clift just turns you away in the bedroom? Can you IMAGINE?”

  “Um … no?” (Gays weren’t on my radar yet.)

  We loved to watch medical shows together, too—Medical Center with Chad Everett, and Marcus Welby, M.D. with Robert Young—and again, what she’d read would dribble in as we were transfixed by all the on-screen illness and healing. “Did you know that poor Robert Young cannot sleep at night because as big a star as he is, he’s afraid his show is gonna get canceled?”

  Me, again, entranced: “Really?”

  “That’s right. So just think about that, when we’re watching Marcus Welby next week, and Consuelo comes in with the appointment sheet, that Robert Young didn’t even SLEEP last night.” Then, because she knew where my career interests lay: “That’s how cold show business is. Be careful, Kathleen. Be careful of the biz.”

  Mom’s a hypochondriac, too, so the bes
t part was that every week she would get the disease that the medical shows were dramatizing. I’ll never forget, they did an episode on sickle cell anemia, which as far as I know, is almost exclusively an African-American affliction. But Mom was convinced she was the first white person to get it. It’s not like we could just Google it in those days and clear her mind, either. She would just walk around until the next week’s episode, thinking, Aaugh! I got this sickle cell and it’s really wearing me down. I gotta call Lena Horne about this.

  Mom thought she had debilitating diseases, but I wasn’t immune to delusional thoughts, either. Yes, I had my television crushes, like every starry-eyed girl. But they weren’t obvious ones. Dark, brooding, and handsome Rod Serling from The Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, anyone? Mom would make fun of me for that one. “Who the HELL wants to marry that crazy Rod Serling? He looks like a SERIAL KILLER!” But I thought Rod in his leisure suit was the sexiest, most badass thing I’d ever seen. Actually, I was torn between him and David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, that poor, innocent victim of blind justice on the classic chase series The Fugitive. I didn’t really get into trouble as a child, but when I did, it was usually for staying up late because The Fugitive reruns were on at 1 a.m. I would drag my sorry, tardy ass into school the next day because David Janssen had me up way past my bedtime.

  Excuse me, but I had priorities. The three things I still live my life by: television, insomnia, and delusions of grandeur.