Official Book Club Selection

by Kathy Griffin

  “No,” I said in disbelief.

  He slowed down his words. “Everybody in the industry is watching your show, Kathy, I’m telling you.”

  Now, I don’t know if the showbiz world was watching it just to see if they were going to be referenced (meaning “trashed”) on it—I did do an entire episode around Renee Zellweger’s chilling revenge gift of a bouquet of roses—but as I ran into more people, I started to get the impression that the show’s viewership numbers were small but mighty. People were really invested in it. Lisa Kudrow pulled me aside at an event during the airing of the first season of The D-List and said, “Hey, your show is fantastic! It really captures the Kathy Griffin that I know.” It felt like such a compliment when an old pal I hadn’t seen in a while said that watching the show was like hanging out with me.

  What also meant a lot to me was hearing from my colleagues and peers how I was striking a blow for the portrayal of women on TV, that I was putting out a comedy series where a woman wasn’t a housewife or a mom. I wasn’t a typical forty-year-old female on television. And at the same time, The D-List was clueing everybody in to how hard I worked as a professional in the entertainment industry. Even better, my world as a D-lister was now on view for everyone to understand, and laugh about. People would come up to me and say, “So is that real, that you can’t get your agent on the phone?” As sad as that fact was, it gratified me no end to be able to reply, “Let’s call my agent right now.”

  Ring. Ring. Ring. Pick up. “Hello, Kathy Griffin calling!”

  Pause. “Well, she’s in a meeting and can’t take your call.”

  I’d hang up and say to the skeptical fan, “Is that real enough for you?”

  Things were about to get uncomfortably real, though, in my marriage. Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List was off and running, but a big part of my life was about to come to a major crossroads.

  Matt and I getting married by his father.

  I never really had a burning desire to get married.

  Actually, as a little kid, I used to think, I’ll get married and divorced a million times! How boring to be with the same person forever! I was never that girl who dreamed of her perfect wedding day, or tried on bridal dresses, or had princess fantasies. The prize I had my eye on was being the girl who got the applause, not the glass slipper. And that feeling was very liberating, too, because I never entered my adulthood thinking I would need a man to provide for me. I was never one of those girls who had to have The Ring to be happy.

  Plus, as my friends started getting married and having kids, they also started getting divorced. So I never had an overly romanticized vision of marriage.

  And yet, to this day, my parents had the best marriage I have ever seen. It’s a running joke among my siblings that my parents fucked us all, because they set a relationship standard so unattainably high that none of us could ever achieve it. I’m not saying they were perfect. But you have never seen two people more in love. Dad never had a sexist bone in his body. He never bitched about changing diapers, never assumed there’d be a hot meal (preferably Hamburger Helper Beef Stroganoff) on the table when he came home, never subscribed to the belief that there was woman’s work and man’s work.

  Mom always laughed about those wives from her era who had to put on a show for their husbands, putting makeup on and a cute outfit for their spouses upon their arrival home. She’d just be in her muumuu, making jokes like, “He’ll have to take me as I am!”

  It sounds crazy, but I’ve never heard John and Maggie Griffin say anything disrespectful to each other. They had this great ability to start laughing during a fight. If they started to bicker about something, at some point one of them would break down and start giggling, and then the little problem became a running joke to them. They never let something become a bigger problem. They knew when to be concerned about real things—like my brother Kenny—and didn’t sweat the small stuff.

  My mom has a great story about later in life telling my dad she just didn’t feel beautiful anymore, and him gently touching her hand and saying, “Oh Mag, you gave it a good run.” Dad could tease Mom about looking like crap one day, then she could throw it right back at him when he was yelling at the TV during a football game. Their message as a unit was of working equally, teasing equally, and mutual respect, and it was pretty unique for its time.

  Now, that’s not to say they wouldn’t have loved it if I’d married a dentist, since I lived with them till I was twenty-eight. But when they realized I was serious about my career, something shifted in them, and they wanted for me whatever made me happy. Mom understood and would say things to me like, “You want a guy who’s going to be able to handle your career, who knows that work comes first.” My parents supported me by telling me I was all I needed, and never made me feel that I was less because I didn’t have A Man. However, to this day, I have to pay for all of my mom’s dental work. So I do have A Mom.

  But as you know by now, I’d had plenty of men. Often men bearing donuts. But as I got older my promiscuity lessened because I really did want to make it work with somebody. Call it maturity, or career comfort, or just plain being sore. I didn’t have marriage in the back of my head, but I also didn’t want to be a whore forever. As I became more successful, though, my circumstance as a self-made dame started to weed certain guys out. One time a cute guy who was flirting with me visited me at my first house, and he was really dazzled by it. “Wow, this is really impressive,” he said.

  “Thanks!”

  Then he said, “Now you’re never going to get a guy.”

  What he said hurt, but at least he was honest. He was saying he wasn’t comfortable there. He was intimidated, and let me know that most guys’ egos couldn’t handle a woman who made more money or was more successful than them. When I was younger, my friends would tell me, “You need a guy who’s funny!” But what this guy verbalized seemed to speak to what more and more people were telling me after I’d started a regular television gig and bought my own house, and a nice car: “You need a really strong guy.”

  “Because I’m a ballbuster?” I’d say.

  “Yes,” I’d hear, “but in addition, you have better toys than a dude has. And a bigger dick.” Which is true. I have to use Magnums.

  That’s when I started to date younger guys. Younger guys are less likely to have those old-fashioned ideas about gender politics. Plus, the younger ones were asking me out, and men my age weren’t. By that point I had gotten over bad-boy types, too, guys who might be charismatic or funny or exciting, but just not nice. As in, assholes on the first date. Pile up enough of those and you’ll change your tune about charismatic jerks fast enough.

  Examples, you ask? I remember being in a coffeehouse with a guy named Dewey, and somehow the conversation ventured into the topic of abusing women, and he said, “I’d only do it if I really had to.” This was our first date. I don’t think Chris Brown had even been born yet. I had to call a friend of mine to come pick me up. “I don’t want this fucker dropping me off and seeing where I live!” I told her.

  I seemed to be a magnet for guys who would do things like take a phone call from another girl during a first date, or comment on the hotness of other girls. One jerk did that when he was driving around looking for a parking space, and when we parked I just started walking home, which was about four miles. A lack of courtesy was a big problem in guys I’d date, too. I’d be at the dude’s place that sported some gross futon, an Atari with the joysticks, and a couple of roommates, and he’d make me run out at 8 in the morning to put a quarter in the meter so I wouldn’t get ticketed. “Aww, don’t make me get up!” he’d say in a baby voice. I could go on and on.

  But one day I thought, What if I tried an exercise where the number one requirement for the next guy I go out with is that he be nice, not anything else? Well, that decision changed my life. I dated a guy named Andrew for two years, and though the relationship didn’t work out—I fucked it up by being the one who was the asshole—what I took awa
y from it was the nice guy part. I’d made the switch to nice guys, and my relationships from then on improved dramatically. Even when they ended, there was nothing overly dramatic about the breakups.

  By my late thirties I was single and looking for a fun way to spend the break between the third and fourth seasons of Suddenly Susan, so I decided to rent a house in the Provence region of France. It seemed like a thing famous people did, and I had a whole Big Chill fantasy that I’d invite friends, and we’d cook fabulous meals and throw plates at each other and play Motown music, and there’d be a lot of hanky-panky and falling in love and teary late-night confessionals. Naturally I saw myself as the Glenn Close character, and was preparing for when I’d have to cry in the shower for hours. So I booked a seven-bedroom house, and invited ten people. Then, as it got closer to the date, the invitees started flaking. It got to the point where it was going to be me and one other person in a huge house, out in a field, alone for three weeks.

  At this point, I got less discriminatory and started going through my address book. I eventually assembled a fun group, which included a girl I really only knew tangentially from running into her at the Warner Bros. lot. Her name was Rebecca, and she was an assistant editor on The West Wing. During one of our chats she mentioned that she was going to be at the Cannes Film Festival with the filmmakers of an animated short film she’d edited, and it fell right in the window of time when I’d rented the house. I invited her and her friends on the spot, and it helped make that Provence trip what I’d hoped it would be: a good time with all of us shooting the shit and having fun.

  At one point I was bitching about how I couldn’t meet guys, and Rebecca said, “You should meet my brother. I think you’d really like him. He’s really, really smart, and he’s really, really funny, and he’s just gone through this transformation where he lost a bunch of weight, he’s running marathons and wants to change his life and maybe meet somebody.”

  “Where does he live?” I asked.

  “Washington, DC.”

  “I don’t really want a long-distance relationship,” I said. “Those are really tough.”

  “Well, he’s moving to LA.”

  Now it sounded better. Rebecca said his name was Matt, and that he was going to be visiting LA for a couple of weeks and thought we should meet up. I agreed, suggesting she bring him over one night to watch some silly television show and eat takeout. Shortly thereafter, Matt and Rebecca came to my house. What I liked about him was that he was really laid back, and seemed like a nice, mellow guy. He was quietly witty, and overall a pretty cool customer, without a trace of arrogance.

  The meet-and-greet went well, and sure enough, Rebecca joked that I should babysit Matt when she had to go to work. “Be his tour guide,” she said.

  I could do that. So I took him around showing him what I thought was fun about LA. We went to a taping of a show, I drove him around beautiful residential neighborhoods, and we ate at this landmark LA Mexican restaurant I loved called El Cholo. All the while I’m going through a checklist in my head. He’s charming, funny, and smart. Check. He’s a computer IT guy for a small graphic design company in DC, so he has a full-time job. Check. He wants to be more responsible in life. Check. He seems to get me and my showbiz situation and not be freaked out by it. Check.

  “What’d you think of my brother?” Rebecca asked me the next day.

  “I really, really like him, but living in DC is a problem. So I guess I’m going to have to look for the LA version of your brother, instead.”

  “I really think he’s going to move out here,” she said. I wasn’t convinced as I hadn’t heard him tell me this himself.

  Nevertheless, I saw Matt a lot during those two weeks he was visiting in LA, and had a good time with him, but no moves were made, and I wasn’t sure if we were friends or what. Then, after he returned to DC, we started corresponding by email and phone, and after a while he confessed that he felt his DC life had run its course and that he was open to moving to LA, possibly in a month or so. Suddenly this seemed like it wouldn’t have to be a long-distance relationship. Maybe I’d found my Caucasian Marion Barry, minus the coke and hookers.

  Then I landed a role on an independent movie starring Dominique Swain called The Intern, which would be shooting in New York and required me to be there for a month. I called Matt in DC, told him about my gig, and said, “Do you want to jump on the shuttle and spend the weekend with me?”

  He said yes, and when I finished work on the movie on a Friday night, I took a taxi to LaGuardia and met him there. We spent a great romantic weekend together, walking around Central Park holding hands, going out to eat, nothing super fancy, just really enjoying each other’s company. So the next weekend I went to DC, and I booked a nice hotel and we stayed there. Then the following weekend he came back to New York. It was on that trip that we went to eat at a restaurant on Seventh Avenue, and during the meal I could tell he was clearly uncomfortable. As in visibly sweating.

  “I have to tell you something,” he said.

  “Okay, what?”

  “I can’t afford this place. I can’t really afford any of this.”

  “Well, what do you mean?” I said.

  “I had to borrow money to buy my plane ticket here.”

  Matt’s ten years younger than me. He was twenty-eight then, so when he said that, I began to think about my life at twenty-eight. I probably didn’t have a lot of money, either, at that age. And we weren’t exactly in a diner, or an inexpensive restaurant. This was a mildly upscale place where even if you ordered a burger—which I did—it was $17. I started justifying Matt’s situation, and came to the conclusion that I’d rather he lay his cards on the table than put himself into debt.

  “Okay, tell me what you can afford and just be honest about it,” I said. “I don’t want you borrowing money from friends in order to date me. Let’s say you pay for what you can afford. I’m more than happy to go to a seven-dollar burger joint. So when we go to those places, why don’t you pick up that tab, and when I choose to go to a nice hotel or more expensive restaurant, or if I feel like going to a concert or a play and the tickets are two hundred dollars, I’ll pay for that because I’m choosing what we’re doing.”

  The great Joan Rivers is a close enough friend that I can always ask her for advice about my relationships. (Photo: Joe Kohen/WireImage/Getty Images)

  That was the arrangement we made that day. I could see that it bothered him that he couldn’t pick up the check and take care of me that way, and I thought it showed sensitivity, that he wasn’t being cavalier about it. Early in our dating, I had a conversation with Joan Rivers about Matt, and I said to her, “I’ve started seeing this guy, and I really, really like him. He’s a good guy, but he has no money. As in no money. Meaning, I think I might be about to embark on a relationship where I’m going to be footing the bill 99 percent of the time. What do you think about that? Should I just look for guys with money, regardless of whether or not I like them, or follow my heart?”

  She said something I always remembered. “You know, we all make our own deals.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Look, nobody knows what happens in a relationship except the two people who are in it.”

  What Joan was saying was, tailor the relationship to the needs of the people in it. Who said it had to conform to a conventional template where the man paid for everything, or the woman had to act like a doormat, or each person had to be taken care of in certain, established ways? We all bring different things to the table.

  In my case, I didn’t need to be taken care of financially. I didn’t need a boyfriend to buy me a necklace. Matt was offering me something I desperately wanted, which I thought was love. He had many obvious qualities: He was smart, funny, and easy to get along with. But what separated him was that he genuinely seemed to be deeply in love with me. More than any man had ever been. I thought, I’m someone who very much needs to be taken care of emotionally, I need someone who’ll put up
with my moods and my crap and be a good guy who’s there for me because of the pressures of what I do. Now, I don’t like guys who are cheap, but I feel like if a guy is hardworking and poor, that’s not a crime. I’m okay with that. If paying for things was a way for me to fulfill a certain role, then I believed it was a deal worth making to be with a guy I considered an emotional partner. Plus, there were probably areas where I didn’t meet every one of his criteria. Maybe he’d wanted a tall blonde, or someone younger, someone more book-smart—Matt was certainly brighter than I was—or someone who worked in a field less demanding or chaotic.

  Most important, though, we had a good, open conversation about things. He told me what he couldn’t do. I told him what I could do, and what I was hoping for in a relationship.

  Ironically enough, after our talk, the waiter came over and told us there was an Oklahoma family at a nearby table who were big fans of mine, wanted to pick up our check, and just had. I turned to Matt and said with enthusiasm, “And sometimes that happens!”

  Matt moved out to LA, and though he spent nearly every night at my house, I felt comforted by the fact that he had his own place, a shared rental with his sister and her boyfriend. As we got closer, it was evident he could handle himself well in all sorts of situations, from being on the Suddenly Susan set with me, to going to tedious work-oriented press or network events, to hanging out with my friends. Best of all, at the end of the day, when it was just us, we could share a pizza, laugh at the ridiculousness of showbiz life or something on television, and just be a real couple. I thought he did a great job of being in my world, but allowing me into his world, too, meaning when he’d talk about the things he was interested in, I felt I could just listen to him forever. It was never just all about me. If we had to travel somewhere because of a work engagement, we’d turn it into a vacation where we would go on runs together, eat at someplace wonderful, stay up late to watch movies in the hotel.