by Margaret Cho
I got back in the rental car and cried for a moment. I felt hopeless. I had to get back to the school soon. The show was about to begin. I had lost half my money for the night. I was homeless, tired, hungry. There was nothing left to do but go to the show and throw myself at the mercy of the students. At the campus, I explained my situation to the kids. They apologized profusely, although I think there was no true way for me to convey my anguish. “Sorry” was not enough for me. I wanted some kind of hotel/motel revenge. I wanted them to make it up to me and bring me to a five-star hotel, with butlers holding forth great silver platters full of Turkish Delight, after which I could fall asleep on a stack of mattresses concealing a single pea. All they did was offer correct directions back to the Holiday Inn and a caravan to ensure I arrived safe and sound.
Performing in the cafeteria to a handful of bored students trying to eat their fruit cocktail in peace was not a delightful experience either, but I was comforted that at least it was a hell with which I was already quite familiar. After the show, proper directions to the Holiday Inn in hand, I left the university. No caravan materialized, but I felt confident about finding it, since I had been going up and down that freeway all day. In my excitement, the heady, sweet thought that my search for a home might be over, I got lost trying to find the freeway entrance.
Turning down dead-end streets, driving by trash cans set ablaze and gangs of roving homeless people, I knew I was one of them. I would stop the car at an intersection and they would circle around me, shuffling their Hefty-bag tunics, trying to claim me as their own. I grew dismally aware that this might indeed be my last night on earth.
Fortunately, having had a short reprieve with the awful show, and dying another way entirely, I was determined to live. I would live to see the friendly green sign off the road. I would live to see the clean sheets of the graffiti-and-porn-smell-free room that was my birthright.
The strength of my hope got me to the freeway safely. I found the Holiday Inn just beyond the exit where earlier I had given up and turned around. I had been so close and yet so far. I almost kissed the concierge and ordered a fatted calf from room service just ten minutes before closing.
Slipping between those sheets that night, I felt a deep happiness I think I have never known before or since. Maybe that is why I have not given up traveling, even though things like this are bound to happen at every turn. The rewards are worth it. But back then, all I wanted was a way out.
I hit another low point sitting in a combination gas station/restaurant in the middle of Indiana. I hadn’t talked to anyone for days except for doing the shows. It was six below zero and I’d just gotten kicked out of my motel for asking for another blanket because it was freezing.
The crazy manager of the motel was convinced that I was harboring criminals. It was my twenty-third birthday, and I was determined to celebrate it at the gas station/restaurant. All the farmers stared at me as I sat at the counter in a huge leopard-skin coat and Jackie O sunglasses eating watery chili. Clumsily, I tried to hide my self-consciousness by casually perusing a W magazine, but the huge pages only drew more attention to themselves. It was also depressing reading the society section, thinking about all the people in the world who were having a good time, times I could never have out here in the Midwaste.
I couldn’t hold out for much longer. This was not what I had wanted for myself. I was lonely, tired and disillusioned with my career. I couldn’t get any joy out of being on the road, and when I came home to auditions and casting directors, it just felt worse. Life is so terrible when you think there is nothing to look forward to. I thought that misery was my only option.
Then, something miraculous happened.
I was lucky enough to have a great agent, who not only booked me in all of the colleges I was doing, but who guided me into the world of network development.
Nothing came easy. Trying to get an agent had been a nightmare. I met with one guy who told me that he couldn’t represent me because Asian people couldn’t make it in this business. He assured me he had tried, he had a Chinese client once, and the failure was so painful he vowed never to make that mistake again.
Later, he represented one of the actresses on my TV show and he would come onto the set on tape days and I would be standing right next to him and he couldn’t even look at me. I, of course, stared at him so much I am surprised he didn’t burst into flames.
After all the hideous rejection, meeting Karen was like a dream come true. An agent gets you the jobs, and a manager guides your career. I had a manager already, making decisions with me between gigs that paid very little money. Karen, acting as agent, now brought me bigger and better jobs on the road. She also began working more in a managerial role, to the chagrin of my existing manager, Annie.
Karen told me that I had enormous talent and a very promising future. She understood the business, and her savvy got people talking about me and wanting to meet with me. We had showcases in L.A., where I performed for different network executives. Karen said that my road work was making me a great comic and that I was a sure thing.
I was suspicious of her. I could not believe that anyone would be so interested in me just for my talent. I thought she was lying when she told me I was funny and smart and that I was going to be a big star. It embarrassed me to hear her talk about me to others in such glowing terms. The audiences on the road hated me and the casting people in town hated me and most of all, I hated me. Why was she so different?
She was right, and the showcases we did started a bidding war between all the major studios. I got a deal—a great one. I am sure I would still be trying to audition for things or suffering out there on the road if it weren’t for her.
Right before we did the final contracts for the deal, Annie revealed she had other plans. Annie was worried that since Karen and I were doing so much that Karen would force me to leave her behind. Annie had a tendency to be paranoid because she smoked so much pot. Since I smoked as much pot then, too, I got sucked into the drama.
Annie convinced me to take a meeting with a big agency behind Karen’s back. It was doubly treacherous because Annie was staying at one of Karen’s employee’s apartments, blowing pot smoke out of the sliding glass doors.
I loved Karen, and I felt bad betraying her like this, but I didn’t know who to trust anymore. Getting a good deal was so important. Besides, Karen’s confidence in me was almost a liability because I had none in myself, and the more she praised me, the more I felt like a fraud.
The meeting with the big agency was unremarkable. They were interested, but they weren’t jumping through hoops the way people did when Karen and I were in a conference room together.
Somehow, Annie let it slip about the meeting, and we were caught, agent-handed. But Karen had a plan of her own. I was in New York at the time doing a show for Comedy Central. Karen sent in Greer, a new manager from a hot firm that she knew would impress me.
Greer convinced me to leave Annie and sign with him. Karen would still be my agent, and together, he promised, we three would have the world. He took me to a swank restaurant in the Village, a place where Madonna had been recently spotted. We talked late into the night about where I would go and what I would do, now that we were together. He seduced me, not sexually, but in an emotionally intimate way. He was going to be my manager in shining armor, and I felt rescued in every sense of the word.
This was a brilliant move on Karen’s part. She must have known that her words would make a deeper impression on me when spoken by a man. It is horrifying to acknowledge the sexism within yourself, because then you see the enemy is not in front of you, but behind your own eyes. The reason I didn’t feel worthy of the love and support Karen gave was because she was a woman, and I couldn’t trust her. I had grown up with the idea that while women may make strides without men, they could only do the real work with them. Even though Karen really did everything, she had to make me think it was Greer’s work that was making such an impact.
I fired
Annie on the telephone while she was at a New Age retreat. She started crying but was grateful for my timing because it would give her the opportunity to “share it with the group.”
Greer brought me back to L.A. He seemed to work wonders on my behalf, but actually it was Karen who was making all the important decisions.
My big network deal was closing, and it seemed like things were finally starting to look up.
11
MIRACLE?
The television deal pushed me ahead of the pack. It was like I didn’t have to compete anymore in a situation where I felt I was out of my league.
Even though I had no real ideas for a TV show, I thought I could be a development person of leisure, jumping from network to network, accumulating contracts and six-figure salaries, the perpetual next best thing. Greer convinced me that if it didn’t work this time, we could try again and again, that there was no such thing as failure and there was no reason to be afraid of anything. He was so wrong. He just wanted the money from his big commissions. My career didn’t matter to him at all, he hadn’t been working on it from the beginning like Karen. He would tell me anything just to keep me happy, knowing that he could drop me if the show didn’t make it, knowing that he could completely cash in on it if it did.
I called him “Dad” when we talked on the phone. I was using him, too.
I chose ABC for their historic programming—Battle of the Network Stars, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island—the channel that ruled the nights of my childhood. TV was so important to me growing up. One of my earliest memories is the day I realized I was not white, and therefore not like the people I saw on TV. I was looking in the mirror and saw for the first time that the reflection was me. Who was this odd-looking creature with the black hair and small, black eyes? Why wasn’t I like Cindy Brady? I felt like her much of the time. Why didn’t my hair split neatly into blonde braids? Why were all the people on TV who looked like me foreign or ancient or fortune-tellers or servants or soldiers? Was that what people like me were supposed to grow up to be? What was the ancient Chinese secret?
It was the most alarming thing. I was really shocked that I did not look the same as my friends on the screen. I think maybe I never quite got over it—not only that I wanted to be white, but feeling that I had to correct the situation somehow.
I had a big meeting with the television executives at ABC in Century City. From the conference room windows, I looked out at the L.A. dusk. The pink clouds were dusted with orange light in the smoggy brilliance of 6 P.M., Pacific Standard Time.
Many people in the meeting hugged me and kissed my cheek warmly. I had no idea who they were. It made me tired to be the center of so much attention. I sat there while the executives droned on and on about how we were going to create this amazing hit TV show by finding the right writers and the right actors, etc., etc., etc. All I could think about was the traffic I would have to face going home. My feeling was “Why do we have to talk about it? What is there to say? Why can’t we just do it?” This sitting around and theorizing about comedy doesn’t make it funny; you need to be down there, in the trenches, working it out.
Plus, the executives were the most humorless, dry, intimidating people I had ever met. They were the kind of people in an audience who wince instead of laugh. We were trying to talk about comedy, but nobody laughed once in the meeting. I had bad feelings about them all; they didn’t seem very nice.
But they wanted to do this show, this Asian-American family sitcom, and they wanted me to star in it. They said they loved me, that this was going to be a great show. I have to admit, I kind of felt like a child prodigy, like the Dalai Lama in a way. It was the miracle I had been waiting all my life for. I hated myself, but I thought that this show would somehow rectify that. If I got love from millions of people, then how could I still hate myself? Maybe I could be happy. Maybe this would do it for me. Maybe it was okay that I wasn’t white, tall, thin, blonde, gorgeous, or a guy. Maybe my ship was coming in. Maybe I would make it okay for Asians to be on TV. Maybe I’d really be the first to do it.
I stopped being tired of the attention and brightened up. The traffic would be hell going home, but who cared? I was going to be a fucking superstar.
The network deal made me think my life had been saved. I had paid my dues—and then some. The endless road gigs that exhausted and depressed me, the lackluster homecomings, the rejection at auditions, these were now all behind me. I looked at a future so bright I had to wear shades.
With the deal finally in place, things started to heat up fast. I got a publicist who escorted me to countless photo shoots and interviews. I took meetings with writers, all guys from the Valley wearing puffy new Reeboks and baseball jackets from other TV shows they’d worked on. The Life Goes On guy blended into the Wings guy. I couldn’t tell one from another.
We’d meet at Maple Drive or some other expensive lunch place, and they’d tell me they loved my tape, they wanted to do a great show, they had a girlfriend/friend/niece/manicurist/fuck who was Korean. They knew what it was all about. They would call my management. They went to school/played racquetball/Vegas/shared hookers with Greer. They wanted to get in bed with me and the network and the studio so we could have a three-way all the way to the bank.
Greer, who greeted me every day with smiles and long hugs and baskets of muffins from Fancifull, set me up with Gary.
“He’s just come off Empty Nest and he’s hot!” Greer said. As far as I was concerned, anybody would have been fine. I just did not want to return to my old life.
Gary was really nice, a man with innocent charm. He was different from the other writers because he wasn’t a sleazy, cigar-smoking story editor from the Valley. Gary was asthmatic, older, and lived in Beverly Hills. He said, “I get up at four every morning and write until ten.” He spoke with such gaunt solemnity, I believed him. His jeans looked like a size twenty-four.
He took me to a cheap diner, not a trendy Beverly Hills bistro. He ordered a house salad with the dressing on the side and got to work. He tried so hard.
The waitress came by and before refilling his coffee cup asked him, “More hot?” He started giggling like a maniac, then that giggle turned into a cough, then came the grand finale of a huge throat-clearing with a nose-blow encore.
It’s not his fault that he wasn’t funny. As he pumped me for information about myself, I wasn’t sure what to tell him. I really had no idea who I was. I just said whatever came to mind, made stuff up, none of which he used anyway.
He cranked out a pilot from five minutes of my standup, a sunny expose on what it was like to grow up a rebellious daughter in a conservative Korean household. I spared him the real story. The truth was that I lived in my parents’ basement when I was twenty because my father couldn’t stand the sight of me, and therefore banned me from the rest of the house, so that I peeped at the family through the cracks in the door under the stairs like Bad Ronald. I was unemployed and trying to kick a sick crystal meth habit by smoking huge bags of paraquat-laced marijuana and watching Nick at Night for six hours at a time. Now that’s a sitcom.
We were going for prime time—a family show in the 8 o’clock time slot. We would be the first Asian-American family on television, which gave us a lot to consider. How were we going to portray ourselves? It had to be wholesome, even though I had no idea what that meant. The closest I ever got to that was being a hole to some. I’ve never been wholesome in my life.
I just went along with it. I thought they all knew what they were doing.
I THOUGHT THEY ALL KNEW WHAT THEY WERE DOING!!!!!!!!
There was a screen test for me set up at the studio. It was on the Home Improvement stage. I dressed up that day in a miniskirt and a midriff sweater with a long vest. I looked great. Success suits me, I thought.
The stage manager and the cameramen were so nice to me. I stood on the set and walked back and forth as the cameras rolled. I arrived home feeling like a tired hardworking actor, after a long day of sho
oting.
Then I got a panicked phone call from the producer of the show, a woman named Gail, whom I had really grown to love and trust. Gail liked to smoke cigarettes with me in secret. If Greer was my dad, Gail was my mom. She was the head of the production company slated to do the show and very powerful in a world of men. This impressed me to no end. After meetings, she would hug me hard with her solid arms, and my fears about everything, my insecurity about myself, even my self-hatred, would melt away.
When Gail called, her voice had neither the friendliness or the warmth I had come to associate with her. She was all business.
“We need to do something. . . . I have to tell you. . . . The network has a problem with you. They are concerned about the fullness of your face. You need to lose weight. I don’t care what you have to do. We have two weeks before we shoot the pilot. I am so sorry but there isn’t any way to make this nice. And far be it for me to say anything. . . . But this is for you, for your future. If you want your own show, if you want to be a star, you’ll do it. We will do whatever we can. There is another test set up for you in a week. We told them you would lose some weight by then. And please, please, please do not wear anything that bares your midriff.”
One “please” would have sufficed.
How do you keep going when someone tells you there is something wrong with your face?
“The network has a problem with you. They are concerned about the fullness of your face.”
I will neer forget it, as long as I live. I don’t think Gail wanted to tell me. I knew the network executives were making her, because she was closest to me at the time, because she was a woman.
She was just trying to do her job, and I do not hold anything against her for that. Still, the “fullness of your face” was not even a kind euphemism. It was in no way subtle or tactful. What hurt most was that it was not a body part I could hide. There was no girdle or minimizer for your face. It is the part of you that cannot be changed or denied or altered. It is the very essence of you. How did I not want to hide my face forever?