Roseannearchy

by Roseanne Barr

  As a child, I paid the cost and bore the burden for everything that ever went wrong in my family; still they called me “selfish,” and I will no doubt be called “selfish” for telling the whole story in this book, too. I was the Barr family symptom-bearer, and honestly, that is what makes a person get fat, I think. Carrying the whole family’s sins around requires a broad back. I was obsessed with authoring the role of a pop culture mother for television who spoke truth to power. I was always upset at the women I grew up with who never seemed to do that.

  I was nursing a grudge against the universe by this time. A lifetime of bitterness about my childhood seemed to surface after I no longer had to work my ass off just to pay my bills and cover the basics. It’s funny how things go. Whenever you think you have it made, look out! It’s always something, isn’t it? If you would have told me as a child that one day I would have my own show and be very rich and very famous, and very unhappy, I would never have believed it. I was sure in my childhood fantasies that fame and fortune would fix everything that had ever gone wrong. During my most famous and prosperous period, upsetting thoughts began to flash through my mind. I thought I had dealt with all the abusive things about my mother and father when my sisters moved in with me and my first husband, back in 1980.

  I got madder and madder, and sicker and sicker. Repeated attempts to reach out to my family about what had happened in my childhood were ignored by them, as they became somewhat embittered that I was still unhappy and angry even though I had become rich and successful. They were also angry that I had married a man who they did not like at all, against their advice, in spite of their warnings and begging me not to, and they retreated from me, and vice versa. After one year of letter writing and asking my parents to verify the things I was dealing with, and receiving no response at all from them, I decided to just drop a bomb on them and the entire family. With unwavering support from my husband, I gave an interview to People magazine, accusing my father of incest and describing other abuses. My parents denied all the allegations against them.

  I was under a therapist’s care at the time, and she rightly recommended that I not do that until my therapy was complete, and I had the chance to confront and work through these accusations with my parents. I had lost all perspective and thought of myself as a commodity, a brand, an example, and an avenger. I was angry that my parents never responded to my requests over a period of a year to meet with me, and to talk about the reality of abuse in our family. I exploded.

  The word incest conjures ideas of sex, but there was never any sex between my father and me. There was violence, humiliation, inappropriate words, “jokes,” and rather grotesque displays that never should have occurred between a father and his daughter, but there was no actual sex. For someone like myself who dealt with words and the power they have, I should have chosen them more thoughtfully, more carefully, but I didn’t really think things through at all, and I was definitely not careful, and I just didn’t care anymore about anything but striking out. I was as miserable then as a person can be. I felt tormented and disconnected, had lost myself totally in an often violent and abusive relationship, and felt under attack from every direction. I felt like I had dealt with my father’s lack of boundaries toward me and my younger siblings for all of my life, and perhaps because I was living with a man who had less than no respect for me, or my boundaries again, I just went ballistic.

  I have attempted to make amends to my family, but it’s quite tricky, still. I entertained the excuse that my family had refused to deal with my charges and my problems, and I, at the end of my rope, just decided to drop a big bomb on all of them, to destroy the wall of denial and semantics forever. Ultimately, though, no excuse worked to let me off the hook. I made a terrible, poorly conceived decision that caused an incredible amount of pain and shame for my parents and siblings. They hired Melvin Belli, who was my father’s hero, as Perry Mason had been Bubbe Mary’s, and they threatened to sue me for libel. Of course, they passed a poly-graph test, proving there was no “incest.” I still wonder what word would have been better to use. It doesn’t seem that there is one that conveys the feelings I had as a young girl in a family that didn’t really much value women’s needs, privacy, shame, or pride.

  I sometimes think that fame turns everything in your life into a photo or publicity op, as it does for many others who are in the grip of the insanity that fame causes. I heard Bill Murray say that everyone freaks out for about two years after they get famous, and there is no way to avoid that or to warn someone about what it’s like. I find that to be so true. I identified with and felt compassion for Britney Spears as she walked through reams of paparazzi and shaved her head in public, breaking down completely before being committed to the mental ward.

  Every newly famous person will lose their mind for a while; it’s just what happens. The brief sojourn to the mental institution provides a most welcome breath of sanity, paradoxical as that sounds! Staggering around under the pressure of unceasing public scrutiny by really hostile people, who really do wish you would drop dead, causes quite a loss of balance. No one is ever prepared to handle the hatred that accompanies being “beloved.”

  A simple thing like starting a song in the wrong key was key to being keyed in to the reality of singing a song by Francis Scott Key, who may still be spinning in his grave. When asked now for my advice to new singers of the National Anthem, I say, “Know your key and don’t start too high and don’t be afraid to simply stop and start over again if you need to.”

  I tried to return to my religion again as a way of rediscovering my sanity and a sense of peace. Attempting to support me in this rediscovery of my Judaism, my husband Tom opened the shower door in our newly acquired Brentwood mansion, where we moved after living at the beach about six months after the unfortunate singing accident, and said, “They said I could convert to Judaism! Then we can have a huge Jewish wedding [our second wedding—the first one being small and only family, with Tom fresh out of cocaine rehab], and apply to join the Brentwood Country Club, too! We will go legit in a big, big way!”

  I know now that he had lost his mind, too.

  My husband was convinced that once I accepted the trappings of fame and fortune, we would be able to bullshit our way to the top of showbiz and hit a payday jackpot. When he started with the “It’s time that you start getting treated like the queen that you are. We will turn this whole thing around, trust me!” stuff, and telling me who I needed to drop or fire or attack because they were not doing enough of that, I loved it. Anger and getting even made me feel alive; in fact, if not for my giving the Evil Eye, I would have felt lost.

  “They are disrespecting you when they disrespect me, and that is not befitting a queen of your importance and your stature! Do you think any of these people would treat Camille [wife of Bill Cosby] the way they treat me? No, because Cosby is treated like a king, and Camille is his wife, his queen. It’s just utter sexism! I used to think you were just a man-hater when you would drag out your women’s lib shit and stuff like that. But now I see you were right, because I am treated so badly by Hollywood, and it’s really because they don’t like you because you are a woman. You will sing that song again at a bigger venue next time!”

  More Klonopin, please, Doc!

  We became obsessed with acquiring status symbols, and not just that, but using the popularity of my show to try to get them for free. Like gambling addicts, we wanted to get something for nothing. I marveled at how smart and daring and devious my husband and I could be.

  All I really wanted was a clothing line for fat women. I was convinced then, and still am now, that size XL is the American norm. And since I had taken all the flack in the world on behalf of fat women in the tabloid press and from hack comedians who, in addition to making jokes about women’s sizes, shapes, and minds, tell marvelously inventive jokes about how our vaginas smell bad, too, I felt I should be the recipient of those revenues reaped directly or indirectly from all that. I figured I would use h
alf of the sum total to start a business, where I would employ other fat and undereducated, underemployed domestic goddesses to sew our own fashions and open our own darling boutiques until I had amassed an army of plump, small-business owners. We would then form our own political party and tear down the walls surrounding the elite, thin forces, who know nothing about insatiable hunger or obsession, or being a woman who gets fat in order to be able to carry more people around on her back and support them all. Then we could begin an American women’s army and, for a change, win the wars we start everywhere, especially if we were fighting against women who were thinner than we were.

  After the Anthem incident, I became my husband’s pet project, and he needed a full staff under him (literally) to rehabilitate my broken and soiled image (“brand”) as a hater of everything decent, family-based, and American; only he could do that, despite the fact that it was he who encouraged me to sing in the first place. The fact that a FATwa had been put on my head by George Bush the elder, who called me “disgraceful,” did not deter my husband from nurturing endorsement deal after endorsement deal. Employing industrial-strength schmoozing and flattery, he was not about to let my abject humiliation prevent him, high on magical 12-step thinking, from succeeding.

  I was a complete lunatic by now, imploding from being pulled in too many directions. Though I had always been the girl who went too far, and was proud of that, the reaction of the right-wing media, starting with Ronald Reagan’s son Michael, San Diego’s less successful version of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, was downright scary as hell.

  At any rate, when my husband proposed converting to Judaism and securing exalted country-club status, I asked him, “Are you going to learn Hebrew, too?” He sweetly replied, “Of course not. If I learned Hebrew and did the actual shit it takes to convert, that would take two years! They say that my wanting to be a good Jewish stepfather and husband counts for ninety percent of the conversion anyway. Then we will have your gorgeous, Jewish, dream wedding, befitting a Jewish queen, and a fantastic bar mitzvah for your son Jake—a bar mitzvah worthy of the son of a queen.” Can bullshit be of biblical proportions? What can I tell you, it sort of worked on me at the time—did I mention the drugs?

  We did, indeed, have a gorgeous Jewish wedding and a fantastic bar mitzvah befitting a queen of my stature. Tom had hired a number of beautiful young women to assist him in the planning of these events, and it never occurred to me at all that he might’ve been cheating on me with any of them. The guy was quite a good actor, too.

  We felt right not-at-home among our A-list neighbors in that lovely enclave called Brentwood, California. What a stellar, diverse group they were: Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, Martin Mull, Harold Ramis, Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, Cindy Crawford and Michael King, Merv Adelson, Phyllis Diller, Marcy Carsey, Robert Iger, all of whom I liked, and others, some too phony and self- absorbed to mention. One thing that seemed to bring them all together, though, including my hubby, was the added pride and privilege they felt as a result of living in close proximity to one Orenthal James Simpson. When we were being “vetted” for membership in the Brentwood Country Club and were allowed to eat a club sandwich in its restaurant, we witnessed “The Juice” golfing on the green. “I would love to play golf with The Juice someday; he is, like, the ultimate businessman,” Tom (the business major from the University of Iowa) gushed reverently. “You are going to get some endorsement deals, I guarantee you, as soon as this whole National Anthem thing dies down. You’ll see. I won’t let you down there, trust me.” I could tell he was sincere; the drool always gave it away.

  I was trying like hell back then to fit in with the classy folks whose already morbidly obese self-esteem was pumped up even more for having O.J. Simpson as a neighbor. I also busied myself with having tons of plastic surgery (mostly to get the meds) and contributing vast amounts of charity money to buy our way into the best circles of terrific new friends. It was during a meeting with one of the many shady, rheumy-eyed CEOs who offered me endorsement deals that the guy actually said, “You will be great selling things on this new network, because as women buy more things from TV, they go outside less, and sooner or later they become shut-ins, which is, to put it bluntly, an actual captive audience. And you are someone they trust, so you could sell them anything!” That was the exact moment I decided to flush all my meds and start to become me again.

  Perhaps because of the offensive way some offensive people misinterpreted my interpretation of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the Brentwood Country Club turned us down for membership four months later and our $50,000 was returned. It was a hard blow to Tom, who sought legitimacy and power as a replacement for cocaine. Speaking of “blow,” it was a blow to our three-year marriage, and our seven-year friendship as well. Suddenly, the “you saved me from drugs and made me famous” flattery befitting a queen was no longer forthcoming from Tom. Now, thanks to his stilted sober judgment, it was actually my disgraceful behavior on the baseball field that had prevented us from reaching his goals. In his mind, he was dragging me around behind him, and not the other way around at all.

  In the last part of our marriage, as a way of throwing Tom and me a bone, a competing agency who wanted us to leave Wilhelm Moreless and join their client list asked Tom to read for a new Arnold Schwarzenegger–Jim Cameron movie, called True Lies. He nailed it. He was so happy at the time. He said that this was his chance to come out of my shadow and take over the moneymaking, so that I would be free to retire and get pregnant, and that made me feel so happy! I had already undergone major surgery to undo a tubal ligation. I followed that with major surgery of every kind. I think I did all that to get the medication and a rest from the constant swirling drama of my life, and also because my husband constantly joked about the way I looked, and I felt pressured to do it. It makes me sick to think about how little self-esteem I had then, but that is the truth. In public, though, I was all feminism and business.

  But something was beginning to change for me. Maybe it was because I secretly threw away all of my psychiatric medicine and started to awaken from suspended animation, but watching Tom’s flattery of Arnold and Jim was stupefying for me to watch. I started to think that maybe I was full of shit; maybe I was just an overindulged comic who was lucky enough to have landed a television show, and not the Queen of the World. After Tom and Arnold both started to talk about someday running for governors of California (Arnold) and Iowa (Tom), I started to plan for divorce. I couldn’t believe the kind of bullshit they were slinging around, but I figured it was never going to happen, so why worry about it. There was no way in hell that Arnold Schwarzenegger would ever be elected governor of California, and no way in hell Tom would be elected governor of Iowa, I thought. (Since I have subsequently figured out that this is hell, I am now waiting for Tom to declare his candidacy and, of course, win.)

  Once, during that time, Tom and I were standing inside the Governor’s Mansion with the governor of Iowa, and I was telling the governor a joke when Tom’s foot ground into mine and I stopped, shocked, to hear my husband ask for us to be excused for a moment. We walked away before I got my punch line out, which should have upset me, but I was used to being interrupted by Tom, from the beginning of our relationship, whether it was a phone call on the day I was reunited with the daughter I had given up for adoption eighteen years earlier (to leave her and help Tom get to a hospital before he bled out through the nose after a cocaine bender) or a hundred other equally dramatic interruptions. Every one of which I excused. So when he whispered to me out of the corner of his mouth with a big smile in the middle of telling a joke to the governor of Iowa, I excused myself.

  “Watch what you say here,” Tom, the recovering cocaine addict, advised, after he had taken me aside, in plain view of the governor, as I had always to be put in my place in plain view of those around us. He whispered, “I plan to be governor of this state someday! You’re gonna have to learn how to act in order to be first lady. You need to go to charm school or somethin
g, to kind of refine yourself. You have the funny and ingratiating part down, but you are still kind of rough around the edges.” He smiled, continuing, “You’ll do fine.”

  I said, “Are you out of your fucking mind? I do not want to hang around with politicians!” He ignored me, as usual, in that Asperger’s way he had, while leering at all the thin girls in high heels that he could see.

  He was starting to talk about how inner-city kids need an incentive, and how Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Inner City Games Foundation would supply that for children of color. Like the rich do, he began to mouth all that blame-the-victim horseshit. That’s when I knew my socialist pal had joined the conspiracy. I know I am not an easy woman to understand, live with, or care about. I can barely stay out of my own way most of the time, unless I am meddling in other people’s business and fixing their lives, or seated in front of a computer keyboard. I could portray a character right alongside the one my husband was portraying for a while (which is how I began to see our marriage), in order to bring along some business deal or another for just so long, before the acting became boring, conniving, manipulative, concerned with shadows and lighting, all vanity and pretense. When the reality that you are only acting in a marriage sets in and the accompanying self-loathing for the inherent lack of honest human emotion registers, something has to give. I reached that point, realizing that I was just a prop in somebody else’s story and not mine at all, a perfect codependant. I could no longer resign myself to go on living that way, hoping to hit some jackpot on which everything else was riding. I recognized that I was the same type of gambling addict that my dad and both my grandfathers had been.