If you are a writer, which she is though she denies it, you can actually lose your mind if you are unable to write every day. And screaming brats put quite a damper on your writing time, thereby inducing insanity in you. My daughter has written some of the best pieces I have ever read, and because I encourage her to develop her great talent, she now says she is “over the whole writing thing.”
To have daughters is to truly know heartbreak. You envision having a relationship with your daughter that allows you to talk to each other as two women friends who let each other be, in peace. But that scenario often doesn’t materialize until you’re both much older. I have had a lot of those kinds of conversations with my mom these days now that she’s in her seventies. The mother-daughter talks we have are soul-satisfying and healing, though I must admit, I always try to hang up right before the subject changes and she starts recounting which of her friends has the lupus now.
My oldest son, Jake, thirty-one, got married on September 12, 2009, two months after his sister. He married a woman who is Native American and Filipino. My younger son, Buck, is going for the darker type as well—he likes the Asian girls. I always thought that both of my boys would marry someone of the Asian persuasion, on account of our Filipino nanny, Linda, who is like a second mom to them, and me. I adore the way Linda says “feanut butter sandaweech.” It reminds me of my bubbes’ immigrant accents in many ways.
Plus, Buck’s dad has married or lived with a couple of Filipino women since our divorce. I have come to see that the Filipino woman is exactly like the Jewish woman in every way, only even more controlling, which is truly a marvel to behold! She seems so nice at first, and then, before he knows it, the man is owned, totally. However, like the Jewish woman, the Filipino woman has the makings of a fantastic mother.
I hope my daughter-in-law and I will get along. She does remind me of me in many ways—she is tall, thin, and has lovely hair and good style. But unlike me, she is a tad bossy and controlling. Hopefully, she will learn to be more gracious after some of my tutelage rubs off on her over time.
In planning the wedding, she and her mother set about creating little corsages for each chair to match colors and plates and did the seating arrangements and invitations and everything else all by themselves, and just sent me a check for half of it. I was pleased to see that my daughter-in-law would be a perfect homemaker—marrying her was one of the few good choices my son has ever made.
I have always thought that having an Asian granddaughter would be quite fun, as we can use the ethnic thing as a wonderful way to excuse our shopping trips to Malaysia and China and Vietnam, the Philippines, and all those wonderful Asian places. Although I do not want to go to any of those places where they skin snakes alive and eat live fish eyes—after all, I am a Jewish woman and I have my limits. My limits are usually anything that requires me to touch an animal (except for Kobe, and a horse I used to have named Buddy) or sweat.
My middle daughter and my oldest daughter have sons. As of 2009, I have five grandsons. I love them very much, but would love to have even just one granddaughter so that I can get the matching ballet outfits made. That has always been a dream of mine, to dress like twins with my granddaughter. It’s very, very Utah, but what am I going to do about it—I am from Utah, after all! Neither Bubbe Mary nor Bubbe Fanny would ever dress as twins with me. I remember those girls from my childhood who used to wear the matching outfits with their grandmas. White gloves always topped off the ensemble. They were all really pale, blond, and blue-eyed. I was jealous of the way they looked, especially at Easter, in their twin outfits with their grandmothers out in the yard having their pictures taken and smiling. But I knew I was smarter than they were, and I knew that I was braver and would live a more interesting life than they would, despite having no waist and a flat ass. The shape of my ass is something I could write whole chapters on—what it was like to have fat everywhere on my body except the one place where it is adored. I was assless in an ass-based economy. That has made me a very angry female indeed!
Anyway, the daughter who ruined every holiday and birthday I have ever had, as well as every vacation, with her drama married a Mexican American who has a job and is a talented graphic artist, who has contributed to my happiness by bringing Kobe over to my house after his grooming sessions, and that is, I have decided, good enough for me. Anyone who pleases me in any way is on my good side. Anyone who displeases me excites me, too, in a way, because nothing is more pleasurable to me than a real good fight where the system of jurisprudence will be invoked.
For Jessica and Christian we had a big fat Greek shower and another Vegas wedding! We decided that weddings are all about the gown and everything else is secondary. My daughter’s gown cost $6,000, and she had to smoke and go on the cookie diet for a full two months to fit into it. I went on the real cookie diet in order to look right at the wedding, too—I gained twenty-five pounds and looked like a fat Latino mother of the bride, and that actually made my daughter very happy. She feared that any female in our clan might look thinner than she on her wedding day, and so the extra weight was my gift to her. (Plus the price tag, which was ridiculous!) Weddings are a Ponzi scheme. If they get divorced, I want my money back!
I beg my daughter Jessica, the writer, not to have children. She is simply not cut out for the job, I can tell. I realized too late that it was not something I was cut out for, either, and I was not really that good at. I would rather drink and party, honestly, if I had it all to do over again. The bitching and the blaming and the abuse I have had to suffer from my kids isn’t really worth the three or four minutes of pleasure they have provided me since they have been able to think for themselves. Now I wish they could use that brain to figure out how to provide for themselves and stop driving up here like I am a human ATM machine.
I like it when very little children think for themselves, because they do not have access to car keys or credit cards or crack pipes, but they have some really funny lines. That is why I love my little grandsons. I tell them all the time, you have to grow up and get a job. I also try to convince them that they should not get married and have children when they are older, because all of that just ruins your life forever. I offer to buy them really cool cars for high school if they will have vasectomies first. I know that these days you can freeze your sperm if you want to, for use later in pies or what have you. I do not want any more little children to have to come to this shithole planet that is run by fucking idiots. But that is just me!
Our family celebrations are the best, though. Bar mitzvahs, wedding receptions, and Passover are a hoot—we always end up getting drunker than your regular college professor’s wife. And it is traditional that our nanny, Linda, and I end up dancing on top of tables, while my boyfriend, Johnny, plays rock-and-roll piano and the little ones do their very special break-dancing hip-hop thing that they do. They are very nimble for Jewish children. And like all Jewish children, pretending to be African-American gangstas is what they like most.
Chapter 16
My Shameless Showbiz Name-dropping
The end of the Roseanne show was really rough. It provided the most sanity and stability I had ever had in my life, and I wanted to keep working. With no job on which to focus my racing thoughts, I was afraid for myself. I got angry at ABC, the network where I worked for more than nine years, for telling me that I could have a tenth year but that I would have to take a pay cut to continue the show. I had gotten used to being paid $1,000,000 per show, and I didn’t see how I could live on half that amount. I had five kids, for God’s sake! How was I supposed to make do on that pittance? (The air is thin when you’re up that high.)
Oddly enough, in the midst of negotiations with ABC, my then-manager, Jeff Wald (Helen Reddy’s ex), who also managed George Foreman and therefore had a hand in the sport of boxing and knew Don King, received a call from Mike Tyson—yes, that Mike Tyson. Jeff said that Mike wanted me to interview him because I was the only person in Hollywood he felt he could talk to now
that he was out of prison for rape.
I just knew that interviewing interesting people was the next step for me in my career, so Jeff set it all up for me. I would be given my own special hour on ABC to interview The Champ, Mike Tyson. I was the loudest feminist (pre–Joy Behar) on television at the time, and Mike was a convicted rapist, so it would make for good TV. Ted Harbert was the president of the network, and he liked me a lot. The deal was done, and it seemed the die was cast for my next career move. That is, until the news division got wind of it. The network canceled the interview after the late great Roone Arledge, ABC News president and Barbara Walters’s boss, called to say that any interview with Mike Tyson on ABC was “news,” not “entertainment,” and all news interviews were to be conducted by Ms. Barbara Walters, who had successfully interviewed Mike before and had a relationship with him. Get your mind out of the gutter; it wasn’t that kind of relationship, although Barbara did fess up to having had a relationship many years prior with a handsome, successful black man who happened to be married. His name escapes me, but I think it might have been George Washington Carver.
I have nothing but a grudging respect for Ms. Walters, as she has done what almost no other woman in show business has done, and that is, of course, outlived the competition. Most women in showbiz die by the time they are fifty-five, due to either the drinking, the drugs, or the payback of one criminal or another, who was stepped on and screwed on the way to the top of the middle.
I had already grown a bit leery and distrusting of Walters since, when in my home, interviewing me for the second time around, she and her producer asked to take a picture of my baby, Buck, and I said no, that I wasn’t comfortable with that. My baby nurse came in, interrupted the interview, and said, “Mrs., can I talk with you?” I excused myself and was led into the nursery, where I caught one of her producers directing a camera at my newborn son against my wishes and behind my back. I shooed him out and stationed my huge bodyguard husband at the nursery door.
Barbara sees what she wants to see, and hears what she wants to hear. Meeting her in an elevator haphazardly, as I did one fine morning at the Four Seasons, where I had taken my son and grandson to swim in the pool for a few days and shop around Beverly Hills for the darling little-boy outfits that Jewish grandmothers are always on the lookout for, I could see she was surprised to see me, and she asked, “What are you up to?”
I answered, “I am spending the weekend with these little guys. This is my son and my grand—” She cut me off, completely uninterested, and said, “No, I mean careerwise.” The fact that she missed saying hello to my godlike offspring and the godlike off-spring of my godlike daughter, was shocking to me at first—the callousness of it—but later, when I thought about all the pins that have been stuck into that poor woman’s voodoo effigy by every young female journalist who wants her job, I felt empathy for her struggles and triumphs.
She is not like the rest of us. She created television’s first smart and sexy Jewish woman. She interviewed Anwar Sadat at one time, which was flawless. She showed the world that a woman can go toe-to-toe with a powerful man and ruin his image and get him assassinated by his own people, who were mad that he talked to not only a cursed woman but a Jewish one at that.
When Mike Tyson caught wind of ABC’s decision to give the interview to Barbara, he stuck with me instead, and Jeff Wald got King World to underwrite our interview and commit to airing it on one of King World’s syndicated news programs. The King brothers and Jeff promised me that I could have a blank check to do exactly what I wanted to do for the interview. Elated, I flew to Las Vegas to talk to Mike.
I fell in love with him immediately upon listening to him talk about Hannibal, as man and metaphor, while we sat poolside next to a too-small statue of the man in his backyard. Mike is so sweet that he kept the statue, imperfect as it was, and didn’t make a stink about it’s size, because he didn’t want to hurt the sculptor’s feelings.
Mike is a king for sure. We taped for five or six solid hours, and talked about everything: Islam, Judaism, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, racism, mental illness, prison, Allah, mortal and moral strength, the nature of love, black history, white tigers, child abuse, heartbreak, interior decorating. We did not talk about Don King, who took us to lunch at the Forum Shops at Caesars and shouted to everyone in there shopping: “Ladies and gentlemen, Roseanne Barr, Mike Tyson—let them hear it! Please give it up for two American legends, and move out of the way so they can shop at Versace!” The entire crowd parted, as I followed Mike into the store and watched him buy $25,000 worth of towels and bracelets. I wished that I was young and had a big butt so that Mike would want to marry me, but I was already married, I reminded myself, and snapped out of it. It was the wildest and most exciting of all previously exciting days I had ever spent.
Standing just behind Mike, I got to see the faces on the kids who looked up to him. I was pretty famous, but Mike was an idol, like Elvis. Somehow, being seen or acknowledged by your idol can change your life forever. I saw people who looked like they had received the answers to heartfelt prayers approach him, breathless, and say, “I love you, Mike!” And Mike would reply, “God bless you, sister. I love you, too, and Allah is love!” Mike was a regular Mahatma Gandhi, I thought. He seriously means that much to a lot of people. He is nice, and conflicted, and I bet I could write a nice part for him in a movie if I ever finish this fucking book.
The most amazing thing about the interview was that as we were sitting in his bedroom, Mike told me that the judge said his sentence would be suspended if he would admit that he raped that girl. Mike even showed me the transcripts from the trial to verify it. But he chose to go to jail instead because he would not admit to something he did not do—not to a white judge in Indiana, the birthplace of the KKK. I was stunned since I had never heard this before.
The interview aired, and we were both very happy with it. It caused a lot of controversy in feminist circles and in African-American circles, too. Mike has had a lot of problems in his life—with women, with circumstances, and with the bad people around him who stole every dime he had—and I have a soft spot in my heart and soul for him, and always will. I told him that I saw him someday gathering all the children who grew up like he did, helping them figure out a better way to make things right for themselves and the world. I see Mike as having that power in him still.
I was there the night he bit off Holyfield’s ear. It was right after the interview aired, and when they introduced me from the audience on the Jumbotron, I was soundly booed by the entire audience. I was already used to being booed by large crowds, due to my musical rendition of some song I sang once, but I was pissed at them for booing me for liking Mike when they were all there because of him. I was so worked up by the time Mike went in for the bite that I was screaming, “Kill him, Mike! Get him, Mike!” when my then-husband, Ben Thomas, put his hand over my mouth and escorted me out of the auditorium, as the crowd poured out all around me. I hadn’t noticed that they were running for their lives at all, because I was too upset that Holyfield had gotten away with head-butting my buddy!
I was also there the night another buddy of mine, Tupac, was shot and killed after the fights. Tupac Shakur and Ice-T once sang a duet on my late-night Fox show, Saturday Night Special, where Kathy Griffin made her television debut. (The Fox network did not want her on the show because they thought she wasn’t “pretty” enough—as if that has anything at all to do with comedy—ugh. I made that point, and offered myself and my looks as proof.) Tupac thanked me for putting him on the show, as he, too, had just gotten out of prison for sexual assault that week. He said, “It was very brave of you to put me on, and my mom is really happy to be able to see me on your show.” I have no idea whether he was actually guilty or not, but like Mike, he was charming and sweet to me, and had survived the mean streets and the prison-industrial complex of America, where they train the guards for Blackwater.
Anyway, because of Mike, I got offered my own talk show for King World
, Oprah Winfrey’s distributors. I figured I would be making Oprah money, so I told ABC to F off—another of my genius moves! Even though Oprah has never been married, has no kids, and is a billionaire, she has made a career of giving advice to the average woman and still manages to make women cheer for her and to feel that her success is their success, too, by placing toasters under her audience’s chairs during sweeps. I was a guest on Oprah’s show nine times and was graciously invited back all the time—until I pissed her off, which was bound to happen someday. She was also gracious enough (after faxing a fifty-page document telling my producers what could be asked of her and what was taboo) to consent to an interview with me as a guest on The Rose-anne Show. And she did tell me that my interview of her was the best one she had ever given. We talked about how we hate to look at ourselves in profile in the mirror, and Oprah good-naturedly admitted to having peed in a swimming pool at least once.
However, at the end of the hour, she and I arm-wrestled for a million dollars to go to the charity of our choice. Oprah cheated! It is right there on the tape. You must keep your elbows on the table, as everyone knows, but she stood up to get more leverage, and that is not allowed. After she declared herself the winner, I demanded a rematch, refusing to give her the million bucks for her angel network until she capitulated. But she wasn’t having it. I called Roger King personally to complain, asking him to talk to her about a fair rematch. But he told me to drop it, noting that Oprah had flown from Chicago to guest on my show and was not amused by my insistence that she cheated (even though she did), and that I should focus on figuring out how to get some higher ratings instead. I told him there was no better way to get higher ratings than to accuse Oprah of cheating, show the tape, and get her back on again. But he was done with the whole million- dollar bet.
Roseannearchy Page 17