“Well,” I beamed, “I was wearing a silver dress, and at first my feet hurt because I was in those heels for so long, but let me tell you, when you hear your name it’s like you have a second wind! And everybody was—”
“WHAT DID YOU SAY?” he interrupted.
I guess he wasn’t calling me for a fashion recap.
“I’ve been getting some calls,” he said.
“Ugh, not this again,” I said. Here was the shitstorm. At this point, it was like that tornado-measuring rod in Twister. I knew there was a storm a-comin’ but I just didn’t know how high it would measure. Visions of getting fired from the E! channel for the Dakota Fanning business—next chapter, people, hold tight—were swirling in my head.
“E! isn’t going to air your ‘Jesus, suck it’ comment,” he said.
“All right. That’s their choice.”
Then he rattled off the list of people I’d offended, who’d been calling him. Mostly religious groups. I can’t even remember the names now, because I have a no-apology policy with jokes. I said, “Who cares about them? I’d be nervous if I lost my job, but what do I care if some religious group is offended? It takes nothing more than a stiff wind to piss off those fucking phonies!”
That probably didn’t help things.
Then the interview requests started pouring in. I was a hot talk show guest! I did Larry King for the whole hour, Jimmy Kimmel was clamoring to get the first crack at me, and CNN wanted to do a whole debate about my speech! (They wanted me to participate, but I said “Nah, you should work that one out on your own, Wolf Blitzer.”) It was so much fun watching the fallout. I remember being at home one night in my pajamas eating cookie dough and turning on CNN and hearing about how “controversial comedian Kathy Griffin stirs up Hollywood as well as the religious community!” Yay! Sounds like good TV! I turned around as if to call to some imaginary watching buddy—“Hey!”—but there was no one there. I was so excited I forgot I was by myself.
Tiffany, Jessica, me, and Tom backstage at the Emmys, post-win. What is wrong with Tom?
My mom thinks she just won an Emmy for “her” show.
I heard everything in those television back-and-forths, from “How could she offend the Lord?” to “She’s funny and it’s her first amendment right!” Bill O’Reilly made me Pinhead of the Week. My mother’s dream: I was practically on the O’Reilly Factor! There were demands that advertisers pull out of our show, which I thought was hilarious because it’s not like Fortune 500 companies are buying ad time on My Life on the D-List. Seriously, it’s, like, foot powder companies and late-night dial-a-date lines. Big deal. Then a religious group in Tennessee took out a full-page ad about me in USA Today, and quoted the speech. It’s the full-page ad Bravo would never have paid for to advertise the show! I was like, “Hey, I got my ad!” I loved being able to call Eric and say, “Hey, your speech is in USA Today.” I was delighted and so was he. It was like getting an award all over again. Shall I mention the name of the religious group? They were kind enough, after all, to pay $90,000 to promote me and my sense of humor. Nah. Fuck ’em.
Plus, I have to say, my little fake network Bravo that I love to make fun of and have had my problems with, absolutely had my back on this thing. I heard Jeff Zucker was flooded with emails demanding an apology, and he never flinched. For all I know Bravo bitched and moaned behind my back, but never once did they say to me, “How dare you.” I think they were very smart. They knew it was ultimately going to be good publicity, and besides, it fits the tone of the show. This isn’t as if Nickelodeon had flipped out if Miranda Cosgrove from iCarly had said, “Suck it, Allah.” I don’t think I lost one audience member, and I think it gained me several new ones. There’s a market out there for people who are willing to stick their middle finger out in the air to the establishment.
All in all, there really was no downside to my little Emmy broadcast outburst, although I was scheduled to film a commercial for DirecTV, and they called me and rescinded the offer. They actually offered to give me a kill fee, but because they wanted me to sign a confidentiality agreement—basically saying I couldn’t talk about how they asked me not to do the commercial—I didn’t sign it. You know me by now. I don’t usually turn down cash. I could have gotten a nice check. But I knew that would haunt me down the line. I’ll whore myself out, but I won’t censor myself, and especially not in writing.
Dear Old Dad (Photo: Michael Grecco/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank)
My feeling is, keep your money, DirecTV. I’d rather be able to put it in the book!
That Emmy win was a glorious time, but there was one person who wasn’t around to share it with me: John Patrick Griffin.
We were all nervous as filming started on season three, because Dad’s health hadn’t been good. The two mantras for that season had been me as a divorcee, openly going on dates with D-list celebrities for the purpose of getting publicity, and the evolution of Jessica into someone closer to me than just an assistant.
But it was Dad’s congestive heart failure that was the pervasive issue everybody had to deal with. Questions of scheduling and shooting were always fraught with the tension of: What happens if we all have to go to the hospital suddenly? Can we even include Mom in things? Do I go out of town? We’d shoot Dad where we could, usually at his and Mom’s condo so he could sit comfortably in his favorite chair. And the one thing that I was very touched by was that he really seemed to perk up for the show. I know he enjoyed it, and the thing I’m perhaps most grateful for when it comes to The D-List is that it’s given my family the greatest record of my dad’s final years. They always captured the best in him, his humor, his charm, his sweetness.
The last night my dad was completely his old self—lucid, talking, being funny—was when the crew went without me to Mom and Dad’s place for an hour-long sit-down interview, the kind that gets used as interstitial bits between the action on the show. He had his arm around my mom, and he was making her laugh—which he did every day of their sixty-five years together—and now that uncut hour is something we’ll always have. Later that night he didn’t feel well and made one of his then frequent trips to the hospital. He never went home again. He’d really only been ill the last year of his life, and was an unusually healthy guy for freaking ninety. He probably exerted too much energy that night. But I’ll bet he forgot about his problems for that hour on film.
It was touch and go for months after that. My family wanted the shooting stopped, so I had to have an important talk with my producers, because John Griffin was such an integral part of The D-List. I wasn’t going to infringe on my family during this difficult time, but I didn’t want it to seem like my dad disappeared into thin air. We had to come up with some way to deal with his imminent passing that was sensitive and realistic. I just couldn’t shoot a show where I’m crying when the cameras are off and then acting like everything’s fine when the crew follows me to get Botox or do a gig in Des Moines.
My brother John agreed to be taped visiting Dad in the hospital. Mom was off-limits because understandably she just wasn’t up to it. Same with Joyce and Gary, who also justifiably didn’t feel like it.
Funnily enough, one of my last conversations with Dad was him joking, “Where are the cameras? Where are the cameras?” I know he was kidding, but I felt a lot of guilt during those times because I was working out of town so much. None of us knew which day would be his last.
I was on a plane to Miami to go do Rosie’s cruise again and when I landed, I got the message from my sister that Dad had passed away. By the end, Dad had also gotten multiple myeloma—which is a cancer of the plasma cell—and that’s what really killed him. I turned around and flew right back, and I told the crew they could tape me getting the house ready for his wake, but that they couldn’t film my family, or the memorial service at the church. Nobody would be mic’d, either. But I allowed them to tape the outside of the church. And then the producers did the most wonderful thing: They put together a reel for my dad’s memorial, and
it was beautiful. By that point Mom had gotten fed up with The D-List show in general because in her opinion they were keeping me too busy and away from the family—she obviously had different things on her mind—she didn’t want to be on the show anymore, and the show should stop forever because she’d never get over the loss of her husband. But I think she had a change of heart when she saw what the producers had done with all that footage of Dad. It was old commercials, family photos, some great Irish music laid over it. Then I talked to my family about doing a good-bye-Dad episode, which they agreed to, and we arranged for Team Griffin to go to Ireland to bury Dad’s ashes at one of his and Mom’s favorite places in the old country. I’m very proud of that particular show.
There was no question as to whether I’d go back to work or not. I was shooting the day after the memorial—which was a week after Dad had passed—and then I wanted to honor my contract to perform at Mandalay Bay for two live shows. A lot of people think that’s cold and calculated, but know this: My dad was a workhorse. He was a sixty-hour-a-week retail guy who had five kids and shared child-rearing duties. Probably the last conversation I had with Dad, which was via scribbles on paper, because he wasn’t able to talk, was me telling him I’d finally booked Carnegie Hall. He struggled to wave his arms, making a circular motion like he had a New Year’s Eve clicker in his hand. He couldn’t say “Wooo, Dolly!” like he would have whenever he’d share in someone’s good news, but I knew he meant it. Then he took a long time writing something on a pad of paper. It was, “Next time, Shea?” As in, the stadium. I still have that piece of paper. My dad’s last words to me were about work! Dad got me. And I got him.
I was grateful for the support I got from those shows in Vegas. The news about dad’s passing had just gone up online, so I told the crowd, “I’m sure a lot of you know that your beloved John Griffin, my dad, passed away. I just want to thank you guys, because if it wasn’t for you here tonight getting my mind off it, I don’t know what I’d be doing. Probably just be sobbing. So let’s just laugh as hard as we can.” I did the show, took a break, then did the second show. One foot in front of the other.
What did my dad mean to me? This may be my favorite story about him, one that exemplifies how important he was to who I became, as in, someone who gets fired, stirs up trouble, and gets debated about on CNN for saying bad things on awards shows. One way to look at it is this: Who I became is really his fault. See, my mom and dad have very different senses of humor. My mom is funny because she’s a character and doesn’t know it. She just naturally says funny things. My dad was more like a comic, and was able to be funny on cue. It was the perfect combination.
Dad and I sticking to our “never pose seriously” policy.
When I was a little kid, maybe eight or nine, my dad was constantly working around the house fixing up stuff, being a real handyman. He had a knack for it, but mostly Mom was grateful that it saved us money. One of the other families on our block, the Gillians, had about eight kids. Mr. Gillian had just finished fixing up their rec room. He was proud of his work, and wanted to show it off to my dad, handyman to handyman. So one Sunday after church, my dad brought me over to the Gillians’, and they were all there—from the little kids to the parents—sitting in the rec room that was the dad’s pride and joy. Mr. Gillian asked my dad, “So, John, what do you think?”
I was standing next to my dad, facing the Gillians, waiting for my dad to say something like “Nice job, Sam!”
Instead, he blurted out, “Wha-a-a-a-t a SHITBOX.”
His delivery was dry, his timing was impeccable. It was perfection. The whole room laughed. Mrs. Gillian didn’t yell at him or tell him he was inappropriate. He didn’t get fired from the block. He didn’t get banned Barbara Walters–style from their house. He just taught me that swearing plus shocking plus good timing equals funny.
He killed, and that’s when I knew I had the coolest and funniest dad in the neighborhood.
Backstage with my co-presenter Don Rickles, a legend, at the 2008 prime-time Emmys.
“Kathy, you’re so mean.”
“Oh, Kathy, can’t you be funny without swearing so much?”
“But Kathy, David Hasselhoff is so sad, why do you have to make fun of him?”
“Come on, Kathy, how can you say that about that sweet Halle Berry?”
And my favorite: “For God’s sake, Kathy, Angelina Jolie has children!”
Welcome to a typical day in the life. Unfortunately, these are things I’ve never said to myself. I don’t have to. Other people say them to me constantly. I keep it simple. My number one job is to be funny. I try to be funny more than mean. To me, there’s a world of difference and it’s perfectly obvious what “the line” is. However, sometimes when I’m trying new stuff out, I end up moving the line a few feet and then crossing it. Oh well.
Now, for all you celebrities who want to be in the act, it’s very simple: Do something crazy, preferably in front of me and a few other people. When Whitney Houston came up to me backstage at the Billboard Music Awards and waved a finger dangerously close to my face, saying, “Don’t ever make fun of me,” how does that not go into the act? She obviously wasn’t afraid to do it in front of people, because there were three other people who saw it.
I once asked the great Don Rickles how he’s dealt with this issue over the course of his fifty-plus career making people laugh and pushing the envelope. What would he do if a celebrity came up to him and said, “Don’t talk about me in your act again”? And of course he said, “Put ’em in the act.”
I couldn’t have said it better, Mr. Warmth!
But I do get asked a lot, how do I determine who’s fair game?
Britney Spears is an example of someone who may never be out of bounds, she’s such a delicious font of crazy. I’ve met her a couple of times, and I can safely say, she’s dumb as a stick. I wish I could say there was a side of Britney you don’t know about, that really she’s a Rhodes scholar who hides her love of classical music and French literature because it doesn’t go with her image. The truth is, she’s a complete moron, and I’m surprised she can even function.
And what stood out when I met her is, she carries no shame about being an idiot. That’s what makes her funny. I mean, if I’m caught not knowing something, at least I feel guilty or embarrassed about it. But this girl, with her gum-popping and malapropisms, has no concept of thinking the way most of us would. That interview with Matt Lauer, the one she did without any publicists to guide her, was proof positive of her cluelessness. She’s sitting there popping that gum, her fake eyelash is falling off, she’s wearing the prerequisite denim mini with her gut hanging out, weird shit is coming out of her mouth, and I’m thinking, Okay, not so much a victim, Britney.
And if you’re going to go on the Video Music Awards and lip sync your new hit with crazy dirty hair extensions and not know the dance moves, Bingo! You’re in the act!
I can hear it now. “You can’t make fun of her. She’s a mom!”
Really? Well, can I make fun of someone who barely appears to be conscious most of the time?
But I will say, when the reports came out that she was on suicide watch, I backed off. If someone’s in real danger, it’s just not funny to me. But many of the stars who go into rehab and clearly don’t take it seriously, and you know who you are, they’re fair game. Most of those, by the way, have the last name Lohan, and they reside on Long Island.
A couple of examples of my set lists, which I use as topic points when I perform.
Anna Nicole Smith exemplifies how I feel about boundaries, since she was a tabloid figure who was fun to razz until it clearly wasn’t fun anymore. When Anna Nicole had her reality show, she was the kind of loopy train wreck you couldn’t not talk about. The gays loved her cause she was a big girl and beautiful and sexy and had that mixture of crazy, drug-induced Texas twang and garden-variety stupidity. I’ll never forget getting to go to her Christmas party, the one they shot for her E! show. What a juicy hub of ins
anity that was: That troubled female ex-wrestler Chyna was there, Rip Taylor was helping in the kitchen, and Anna Nicole herself was like a whirling dervish. I was actually pretty impressed at how she was filming and running around and getting drunk and being ridiculous and yet actually spearheading an authentic Southern meal. The food was fucking delicious. She was really cooking it, too, the turkey, ham, stuffing, and what she called “puh-taters.”
When things started to get really nuts with her toothless cousin Shelly flying off the handle and getting into an altercation with the makeup girl, my friend and I decided to split. As much as I love a good scene, this one got too crazy even for me. I can observe all day long, don’t get me wrong, but I have no desire to be immersed in crazy in a way that’s scary or threatening. That’s why I’d never do something like The Surreal Life in a million years. It’s not fun for me to get into a screaming match with Omarosa, and even if I wanted to, I’m not sure I could even track down her crazy ass at this point. Now, in the case of the Anna Nicole holiday wingding, if I could have gone across the street with some FBI surveillance equipment, I would have watched the goings-on all night long. But I don’t think my audience wants to hear about how I manufactured a scene. They’d rather I take notes on what I experience, then comment on it.
Anyway, Anna Nicole was someone I’d had a few experiences with over the years, and though she was almost always out of it, she was also always nice. The claws came out with her attorney Howard K. Stern, and my personal belief is that while the general perception is that he was some Svengali who had her under his control, from my observation she was calling the shots, putting him in his place, and yelling at him, while he followed her around like a puppy dog.
I heard about Anna Nicole’s death when I was on tour, as I was pulling into Cleveland and checking into a hotel. I went to lunch and the news was on television in the restaurant. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know why, but it hit me like a ton of bricks. I remember the bartender saying to me, “Now you’ve really got to go for her in your act!” I thought that was interesting, that this guy assumed I would gun for her harder. Somebody else that day said something similar to me, and I replied, “You know, I knew her. Not well, but I did know her.”
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