Celebrity Detox

by Rosie O'Donnell

  L: Good luck. I doubt you’ll get very far.

  R: Maybe not. But you asked. In these years, that’s what I want to do, plus paint. And I’ve begun a blog, which is a whole new medium to explore.

  L: You didn’t answer my question: do you think you’ll ever go back?

  R: I honestly don’t know. I do know I’ve been off air for four years now and I’ve changed a lot. That thing I said about fame being a tattoo. It’s right but it also isn’t right. Because the other day, you know, I was in Target, and this woman came up to me. She kept kind of circling around me, making me uncomfortable, and I thought, “She’s going to ask me for my autograph.” But she didn’t ask. She just kept staring. Viv was with me, and I pulled her just a little closer to my side. And we were just about to leave the store.

  “Hey,” the woman said.

  “What’s up?” I said.

  “Didn’t you,” she said. And then she paused. It seemed a long time before she spoke again. “Didn’t you used to be someone?”

  I smiled and said, “No. You have me mixed up with someone else.”

  She turned and walked away.

  Blog 3/15/05

  This is from a book I wrote but decided not to publish

  Celebrity detox was/is the title

  I am getting paid 2 million dollars for this book.

  That’s a lot of money.

  Lauren Slater, the un known and un named one who is the brains behind my first book.

  She turns a scrap of bread into a four course meal.

  And without her there never would have been

  “find me.”

  I called her up. I did.

  Out of the blue—

  Lauren Slater—

  who wrote books that spoke directly to me—

  a poet whose yellow is blinding beautiful

  well this was my chance I thought—

  the magazine—she will be the literary weight

  she is how I want to write

  I can learn from her

  I dialed

  she has never heard of me—

  her kitchen is noisy and a mother is there—

  but I knew from her books that her mother was not a mother

  so who was this mother and why was she at the home of Lauren Slater—

  a woman I had never met

  yet was sure would never have her mother in the kitchen

  Somehow it worked.

  I trusted and she did—and push pull—

  I was right—I get her—she gets me.

  Her crazy is familiar and welcoming

  with her I am not alone.

  She has one currency

  truth—the most important one.

  She needs to bathe more

  I need to lose some weight.

  Anyway Lauren doesn’t think I should tell you about the money—

  cause you reading the book—do not now—nor will you ever be paid 2 million dollars for anything—

  and it will come off sounding cocky or arrogant.

  It is an unreal life I lead.

  Eminem would rap it.

  Cause he writes what he lives—

  faults acknowledged—irony cherished.

  I am rich.

  Richer then I ever thought I could be.

  it feels odd

  It makes my life so much easier in every practical way—

  but it doesn’t change anything.

  And I can hear it

  “screw you bitch

  I would gladly trade places

  You think it is tough

  And blah blah bah”

  But folks—if I was you

  and not me—I would want to know

  From someone who has been there n back

  you have it better—you do

  It has been one year since my show ended—

  I went to goosetown day school fair and ran the button booth—

  and I was the field trip mother at the children’s museum

  with my 5 yr old—

  and I know I have it as good as it gets.

  So much help.

  When I have had enough I go into my studio and paint.

  I do

  For hours sometimes

  When my kids write their books

  “MOREMAMA DEAREST”

  There will be a whole section about my daily absences

  from their life

  I told kelli last week that the reason I became this successful—

  I now think—

  was cause I knew it was the only way I could parent.

  With everything at my disposal—

  I wanted ziplock bags—dixie riddle cups and lava lamps.

  or I couldn’t do it.

  I am not that brave.

  So I left my show.

  I was offered 50 million to stay

  unreal

  everyone told me I was being an ass—

  except kelli

  And my life is better.

  And my best friend is still Jackie and always will be.

  I am happier then I have ever been. I am adjusting

  I talk too loud in a group—

  I cannot parallel park—

  I try to control things I shouldn’t—

  I worry.

  Celebrity is a drug

  It is held up as the answer and never turns out to be.

  ask joni—ask marshall

  peace

  CHAPTER 3

  King Midas and Me

  The day after the premiere, Barbara Walters called me up to see if I was serious. Would I consider being the fourth host on The View. “Yes,” I said to her. “But I can only do a year because I don’t know if I can handle it.” What I meant by that: I’ve built something solid here, something with Kel and my kids, something that has to do with daily life and the moments no one could ever put a price on, and I don’t want to lose that. What I meant: I’ve spent the past four years in my own private cocoon, with my own ideas, blogging them and giving them away for free on the Internet. This has been my own private channel. For the first six months, before anyone knew I was doing it, it was especially glorious, because people would come and leave me comments. The dedicated ones found their way through the maze to get to the place where I had planted a tiny seed and it was starting to sprout for all the most fervent gardeners.

  So why would I want to lose these private places, these webs that were my own? I thought one year would be a way to strike a balance. I remember calling Elizabeth Birch, the CEO of my foundation, For All Kids, and telling her about Barbara’s offer. And when I told her she said, “Ro, that’s fantastic. That’s absolutely the perfect stepping-stone back in. It’s what you’ve been looking for and a one-year deal is perfect.”

  And I remember saying to her, “The show is over by noon. I could be in the car by twelve-thirty and be able to pick up my kids from school every afternoon.”

  “It’s perfect,” Elizabeth said again. “It’s the perfect balance of family and work.” And it seemed it would be. A mid-morning show, four days a week, someone else’s signature on it. A show that didn’t belong to me—it would give me a certain distance, and the freedom necessary to raise my family. I think this is close to every workingwoman’s dream. It’s the fantasy that somehow you’ll land a gig that allows you to explore your talents without shortchanging your children, a job both big and small enough to allow you to exist in all your dimensions—domestic, corporate, maternal, artistic. In the beginning, for me, The View, or even the possibility of The View, was many things: a stepping-stone back onto air, a credible compromise between work and parenting, and maybe, above all, an experiment, the kind they used to do with alcoholics. Sober them up, wring the ether out of them, and then give them a small cup of scotch to sip. The question: could they sip or would they slug? The View—I thought I could sip.

  Perfect. What’s perfect? I have always chased perfection in everything I’ve done, and of course I’ve never achieved it. Perfect exist
s way out there, in infinity, and I’ve lived long enough to know that the stretching is what strengthens you. If perfect were a bird, it would die in domesticity. I was not searching for perfect—I didn’t expect perfect—I was open for the adventure, to find out what I was made of—or not.

  What I remembered: the studio lights, the audience, the seventy-year-old woman from Florida who waits in line in the middle of winter to see your show, and when she gets to meet you, takes your hand in hers, and her hand feels leathery, and also loving. Those women—strangers—so giving, so full of love; for me, it is hard to take in. I’d been cocooned away for four years and the thought of being on air, in air, it was appealing. But it also frightened me.

  Myths

  King Midas has riches, is propelled by greed and keeps craving more. A god of early Greece offers to grant him a wish, so Midas, who desires beyond desire, wishes that everything he touches turns to gold. He touches his child and is horrified to find she goes from girl to garnet, from a living child to a high-karat concept—his loss irredeemable, his grief living beyond language. I get the point.

  Look at all the other artists, entertainers, who had had enough and then tried to take a second helping, only to have it all fall apart. I had so much, made so much, a nationally known figure of pop culture, and to hold out my hand and try to take more, it seemed innately dangerous, even rude. I was way out there where few surfers get to surf, and then I made it back to shore, put my board in storage. And now I was thinking of paddling back into that surf. What is the definition of crazy? This.

  Supposedly there are some things you never forget, like riding a bike, or swimming. Some activities are so engraved in a person’s gray paste that you can have a massive stroke and lose more or less every ounce of sentience, and become for all intents and purposes a breathing vegetable made nevertheless of meat, and need a wheelchair and a feeding tube, but if you’re tossed in the old YMCA pool, you can still swim the butterfly, if you once could, way back when before your brain got busted. I’m not making this up; there are all sorts of stories about people losing all their faculties and abilities except for those they didn’t: the deep abilities that could comprise what we’d call character. I know if I snapped a synapse I could still swim, but I didn’t know that if I stepped off the stage I could remember how to go back on. Maybe I’d accept The View’s offer, and go back to TV, and find I couldn’t do it anymore.

  “No one in television gets a one-year contract,” my agent said to me when I called her. “You can’t do that, Rosie.”

  Agents really are in bed with the studios. They can’t protect you fully because they have other clients who also need work on that same network. I told my agent once that I felt like the hooker, she the pimp.

  Round and round we then went. I went round and round and Elizabeth went round and round with ABC. Understandably, television networks do not like to sign one-year contracts with people, because if the show works, they’re left after twelve months holding the bag. This makes sense to me, but my intent was always my own. One year. It seemed to me to put parentheses, or parameters, around the gross excesses of celebrity-hood.

  My own TV show started June 10, 1996. Around July the TV character Arthur came to open the new mall in our town. Parker, still in diapers, loved to watch Arthur, so I took him to the mall. Everyone there was looking at me and I remember thinking, “God, this is odd.” A little bit of panic started. Arthur was late. People kept coming over to me as I stood there with my son, waiting for Arthur, and all the people were whispering and pointing and coming up. This sort of thing hadn’t ever happened to me before, and the panic kept coming, so I left. I left with Parker, which was fine, because he wasn’t yet two and had no idea Arthur was coming anyway. We went home and had mac and cheese and he went down for his nap. As soon as he was asleep I heard the gate ring. And when I went to look out the window I saw the top part of Arthur’s head and his fuzzy seven-foot ears peering over my fence. “Hi! We heard that Rosie and her son tried to see Arthur at the mall but they had to leave so we came here!”

  I was stunned. “Well,” I said, “um, Parker is sleeping right now, but thank you anyway.” It was awkward and I felt almost afraid, unsure. Something had shifted. No denying it.

  People often ask me why I decided to leave my show. Well, Arthur rang my bell . . . that’s what I wrote in my last book, the one I didn’t publish, because I couldn’t. Too early. Too true, and also not true enough. That book, which I also called “Celebrity Detox,” was wrapped up with a red bow on its pretty packaging, when real life is scraps, held together by Mod Podge, messy at its edges. When I read through the pages now though, I see some things worth repeating:

  Chapter One

  People ask me why exactly I decided to leave my show, and I give them one reason: yellow.

  Fame stole my yellow.

  Yellow is the color you get when you’re real and brutally honest. Joni Mitchell is my yellow. Bruce Springsteen. Cyndi Lauper. I have been soaking in them lately.

  Yellow is with my kids—with Parker always—the boy who first handed me my own piece in human form—himself. The bundle of bright yellow warming my very core, formerly frozen and uninhabitable. Parker.

  Fame stole my yellow, my time with my children, my true voice.

  Broadway shows—they were the never-fail yellow station for me—“fill her up, high test,” and in it would go as the orchestra tuned itself and the lights started to dim; yellow, glorious, life-altering soul fuel the life force yellow. Yes. Always on Broadway.

  And then, in year three, I started to notice something was missing from my opening nights. The attention on me ruined it somehow. I started watching who was watching me, waiting for their response. I was no longer alone in the velvet seat—in the world of theater—I was being looked at. People watched me watch a show. It changed everything.

  When I got too well known, then the joy of just watching people anonymously on a street corner was gone. The joy of finding the perfect cotton Gap pullover—size twenty-four months on the sale rack—no longer there. Playing with my son in the park while people stared—ruined. All of my yellow places started to fail me.

  If you are good at stand-up, and I think I was—you make yellow. Chris Rock does. So does Ellen DeGeneres. They tell life’s common experiences from their own truth point.

  Truth. The truth. What is it and how much can you compromise it before it goes? I thought I told the truth on my show. Year one and year two I did, at least to me. Enough truth to allow me the yellow. And it was there; the show was a hit. I spoke of my dream to see Tom Cruise and Barbra Streisand—I believed in their yellow; I saw it quite clearly. Here I was, an outcast, a fat Irish tough gal from New York, invited to the palace ball. And when that was real, the public responded. They got yellow from me, and I felt yellow giving it to them and it was all good. I was canonized the Queen of Nice. I was universally loved and praised and at first it felt good, but soon thereafter it began to change. You can develop a taste for worship.

  It started to show then, on my face and body. I became bigger and sadder, starving for yellow, filling it with food, madder still at my expanding girth.

  Since the yellow comes from living, the constant working makes creating that color impossible. What could I share with others when my truths were becoming more and more unreal? I fell in love—with a woman—yellow, a life-changing level of love, and then I forced myself to deny it. I reasoned with myself—I won’t tell but I won’t hide. And Kel came places with me and the press knew and it was printed but I never commented. I thought that was okay, but it wasn’t, and the yellow we had together lost something by never being let out.

  So, why am I leaving my show? It took my yellow. I wanted it back. Without it I can’t live. The gray kills me.

  I thought the greatest thing about leaving my show would be growing closer to my kids, Parker, Chelsea, and especially Blake, because he was just a toddler when I left, and he didn’t talk very well. He wasn’t acquiring l
anguage as fast as we would have liked, and I knew it had to do in part with my absence in his life. And I missed him, which was weird—it’s weird that you can miss someone you don’t really know, but I believe children can get almost immediately past the place where there are barriers, and that a relationship with a child is maybe the one, the only kind of sudden click, or instant intimacy that’s possible. After I had finally freed up my life I took him to Chuck E Cheese’s and we played Skee-Ball. We went to the park; we went skateboarding, and he started to find words: water, tree, see.

  Last year, before I started The View—before I was even asked to—Kel, me, and the kids went to the US Open. The stadium was named after Billie Jean King—feminist superhero, sister, friend—amazing. We sat in the stands with her. I was rather unfamous, so I was free, free to watch the ball, free to see my kids, free to talk to Billie Jean, whom I just love, truly.

  Billie Jean is the real deal. It’s like befriending your teacher in a way—no matter how familiar she becomes to me, I will always be slightly mystified that I am near her. And being near her, and thinking of her now, as I write this, I think (and thought) of all the women who went before me in the surf and inspired me to try.

  Billie Jean King inspired me to try, for sure, walking onto the court with Bobby Riggs, a loudmouth old man tennis player who hated everything Billie Jean was. He called her names, taunted her, teased her; he challenged her to a game of tennis. There was no way, he claimed, she could beat him.

  He was her Trump, Billie Jean’s Trump, only Riggs had actual talent; Riggs could play tennis. He played. She played. Lights, cameras; everyone I knew was watching that match. Out she walked with a baby pig, because that’s what Riggs was, a male chauvinist pig.

  And out she came, clutching that squealing baby pig. The crowd roared. The animal ran around the court. I remember this now. I remembered it then, there, sitting next to King. They started. And she had his ass all over the court. The woman beat the man. This was the beginning of everything for me, as a woman.