Celebrity Detox

by Rosie O'Donnell

  So nothing happens here that I don’t know about.

  Nothing!

  Not a mystery guest,

  SURPRISE BIRTHDAY CAKE

  nothing

  NOTHING happened on that show that I don’t know about.

  I was in control

  I turned on the Today Show, Katie wasn’t saying it

  so that meant it didn’t happen.

  then I hear, “A tiny commuter plane has flown into the . . .”

  “John it was JUST A tiny commuter plane”

  then we see the second PLANE smash into that tower

  live on television.

  Live on television!

  We watched an airplane full of families, people, human souls,

  fly into a building, where hundreds of thousands of people,

  innocent people, were just living their lives!

  We saw it live!

  On TV!

  Well, that’s when I knew,

  “Check, please” I was done. I could not do it anymore.

  I said “no”

  I told them,

  “I’m quitting! I am not going on,

  I CANNOT go on television and do this show

  when these kinds of things can happen in the world.

  I CANNOT do it.”

  I didn’t want to.

  Because I wanted to be somewhere safe with my family.

  I didn’t want to be in the city away from them.

  I didn’t want that to happen again (crying).

  I didn’t want any more planes going into buildings,

  I really don’t but it happens every day,

  every day, and there’s darkness and I have to remember that.

  There’s darkness but there’s light!

  And the darkness is so powerful!

  IT HAD ME IN ITS GRIP.

  I went back on the air and I kept making my journals.

  9/11 happened and I started gluing all the images from it onto canvas. my soul and my heart could believe it was true.

  I was there.

  I watched it happen.

  But I still didn’t believe it!

  I didn’t believe it was true.

  So I kept gluing them and gluing them and gluing them.

  Look!

  I tried to trick my brain.

  Look!

  This is what happened!

  YOU LIVED THRU THIS

  (Phone rings)

  There will always be darkness and

  the trick is not to stay in the light

  but ALLOW the light.

  YOU ARE THE WINDOW

  TRY TO ALLOW THE LIGHT TO SHINE THRU YOU

  I KNOW THIS

  IT IS MY GOAL

  MANTRA

  THE SECRET

  Promise yourself there will be no more wars.

  Promise yourself, start in your family.

  It’s impossible to fix.

  That’s not the way I wrote the script.

  See the way I wrote the script is

  this little girl goes through all this stuff

  then she gets really famous

  and she makes all the pain go away.

  For her self and her siblings

  she made it all better.

  Well I got famous

  and it didn’t make it better!

  And nobody wants to hear that.

  Because it’s a hundred dollars a ticket

  and I don’t fuckin’ blame ’em.

  I should shut the fuck up and deal with it myself.

  9/11 happened so what relevance does all this star stuff have?

  Zero.

  0000000000000000.

  Print that on your page.

  What’s it look like?

  Those are the mouths of people in planes,

  screaming 0000000000000000000

  as they become bombs.

  You can’t change this channel.

  there’s no other show.

  let’s not pretend otherwise, okay?

  (Back to music)

  OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

  For me, there is no pretending with a live audience.

  I felt the energy of the audience that day. I felt very welcomed. I sat in the seat and everything went well. Janette tells me Barbara held my hand as we went onstage. That matters. It also matters that I felt my stage self come back. She had gone missing for four years; or, rather, I’d put her in storage, like you do the Christmas ornaments when the season’s over, except the ornaments you know you can retrieve, while the second self—that’s harder to find in the basement of the brain.

  I was relieved to find her, relieved to lift her out and shake the dust from her clothes, relieved to see that if I turned the key in her back she could still sing and dance. I’m not saying she isn’t real, this second self, this Rosie O; after all, Pinocchio was real. He didn’t need Geppetto to make him so. He was real from the get-go, glowing green, the wood beautiful, burnished. My second self is dovetailed, routed by the best bits, every nail gold. I found her again, and it was as though she had never really left. People laughed. People clapped. Hello, America. I have always loved you.

  Time is a strange thing. It’s really not a thing. It’s a concept. In childhood time moves slowly. My mother’s illness seemed to take forever. In adolescence, time starts to pick up speed, like a lazy horse breaking into a trot, and by old age you’re hanging off the mane as the stallion gallops toward the fluorescent finish line.

  On air, time is altogether different from how one experiences it in any other parts of life. It moves faster than you can imagine, faster than you can feel. The first View, and every other View thereafter, was forty-one minutes on camera, but before you can say boo you are bowing out. I walked offstage. I had the feeling it had gone well.

  Day two, the ratings came in and we were a hit. “Look at those numbers,” I said to Kelli, I said to myself, I said the next day at work. I have no memory of anyone answering me; hello? Hello girls?! Look at those numbers.

  I’m sure they looked. What I’m less sure of is how they felt.

  Blog 9/5/2006

  We went to a skateboard park

  Finally

  They have been asking for months

  Saturday morning

  Almost empty

  Spray painted walls

  Chain link fences

  Ramps and lights

  Thrilling

  We paid for green bracelets

  Padded up and headed out

  Camera in hand

  My deflector shield

  One small boy

  Maybe 7 zipped around

  Curly hair glasses skinny adorable

  Alone

  His dad watched on the bench

  Handsome boston college smart

  We said hello and talked as parents do

  Of r kids and their struggles

  Which r ours

  After

  All

  Half pipes r scary

  U r sure u will fail

  His boy

  Showed mine how

  Step down hard

  Lean forward

  Believe

  Drop in

  Dream and go

  U can

  Blog 9/10/06

  week one down

  nobody got hurt

  the ratings r up

  on we go

  my torso is so long

  i look like gigantor the spaceage robot

  next to ms walters

  they cut 3 inches off the chair

  by day 2

  parker finished 3rd

  in a 10 mile race 2 day

  i cried as he bolted thru the finish line

  youngest runner they ever had

  words fail me

  tomorrow

  5 years since

  hard to imagine still

  30 rock evacuated

  we ran

  souls shaken

  as the city blew up

  i
n front of disbelieving eyes

  world sympathy poured in

  the killing of innocent people

  denounced by all

  as evil

  where r we America

  the time is now

  speak up

  CHAPTER 5

  $$$$$

  The changes came right away. It was like flipping a switch. One minute I was a “didn’t you used to be someone” someone and the next minute my face was spinning in cyberspace.

  A few days after the first View aired, I turned on my computer and there was my face, on the front page of AOL, right next to a survey they were doing on whether or not something I’d said on air was ridiculous. There’s a war going on, countless Iraqis are dead, and environmental scientists are predicting that the great polar ice caps are melting at a rate faster than they’d originally predicted. And what does this mean? This means, according to the experts I’ve been reading, that by the year 2100 flooding will be so severe many of our coastal cities will be washed away. And even before that, researchers predict, within the next decade we’re going to see super hurricanes, like Katrina, fueled by greenhouse gases and pissed as hell, come barreling at us from out of the blue while walls of water suck human souls straight out of existence. And this is real. And this is true. And the Bush government—along with think tanks funded by fossil fuel companies—are launching campaigns to question what science has definitively proven: that we are alive at a unique historical period, and what we do from this point on will affect hundreds of thousands of years and the future generations consigned to life during those years—our children. Our children’s children.

  The government doesn’t want us to know these facts. They want the pennies in their pockets now, and they’re addicted to oil in a way that makes the sickest heroin junkie look healthy. What I feel in my bones is that the earth is at a true tipping point. I know people have been saying this since Homo sapiens became bipedal—it’s the end of the world; Christ is coming; it will rain birds and bats; a great gap will open up and the sinners will burn, etc., etc. I know prophesies of catastrophe are as common and inevitable as drizzle in Seattle, but this is different. This is science. This is math. Dead Iraqis are a fact. Global warming is a fact. It is a fact that those of us alive in this slice of time stand at a fork in the global road, and many of us will live long enough to see the start of the devastation, if we haven’t already. I have four children, and what mother could not but imagine their faces in the walls of water?

  We have work to do. So when I see my face on the front page of a major news source and conduit of public information, next to a survey about some silly joke I told, I feel bad. Stop staring at me, okay? Why are you taking up so much space? And why are we talking about this when we should be talking about this?

  So I could see, immediately, that my life was going to radically change. It was like flipping a switch and, boom, I woke up in Oz. But unlike Dorothy, I’d been there before, I’ve dreamed this before, and the lion, the scarecrow, the tin man, they’re old friends of mine. Hello, fame. The chill, and the thrill, of déjà vu.

  And that was the hardest part for me, plus how Kelli felt about it, even though she supported me at every turn. My children? Thank goodness they’re not adolescents. What they know is that Mama is on TV; everyone knows Mama; wherever we go people want only to talk to Mama; we are not noticed, Mama is. They know she is a big mama. I worry that that, in turn, must make them feel so small. Which is fine when you are young, but it becomes less fine as you emerge into adulthood.

  I know Elisabeth and Joy felt it too. Of course it was all over the papers: “Elisabeth and Rosie Fighting at The View,” “Backstage Distress,” etc. This was true, but only to a point, and that point ended far earlier than the media reported. But in the very beginning, yes, I felt as though Joy had her claws out; she was ready to pounce, and she did. Joy is older than I am, Streisand’s age, and she didn’t start as a comedian until she was forty, and she’s funny as hell, I truly think that, so I have only admiration for her talent. But in the beginning she didn’t know this.

  Elisabeth, antiabortion, pro Bush, pro war, believes in everything I don’t, and I believe in everything she doesn’t. She’s as slender as I am fat, as restrained as I am vociferous, as polite as I am frank. She’s the Emily Dickinson poem incarnate, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant/Success in Circuit lies,” while I’m the Dylan Thomas poem incarnate: “Do not go gentle into that good night . . . Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Elisabeth. I can tell you this. Right from the start I could see in this slip of a girl so different from me, I could see something fierce, a fist in the frill, and I liked that. But we had no language in common.

  If we had a language in common, perhaps we would have found our way to a connection sooner than we did, but I doubt that. Because, personality differences aside, there was always the fame problem to contend with. There was always the sense that by introducing me into The View’s configuration, you were shifting the pyramid’s building blocks, giving it a point it hadn’t had before. Fame is the ultimate expression of hierarchy. And hierarchy is the ultimate structure on which anger, jealousy, and humiliation hang. How, therefore, could this have been easy? I know what it feels like to feel less than. No matter how great, how rich, how brilliant, how fat, there will always be someone else with more. This, perhaps, is the hurt we humans have never learned how to hold.

  The Dream

  I might have been eight or nine, at that age when your dreams are so vivid you sometimes fear falling asleep. The age of night-lights and worlds beneath the bed. And one night I went to bed and I had a dream that has stayed with me forever, a dream so palatable I could practically taste it on my tongue when I woke up.

  My mother was sick and I knew it. While my father hadn’t ever actually told us the nature of the illness, I knew she was dying. It was then when fame came to me as not a possibility but a necessity. With fame came money and with money came cure.

  My dream was more like a picture than a dream, because the images are so still, so defined, so Crayola bright. I saw a swing set, entirely unoccupied, each swing moving with the wind, suggesting sadness, and spirits. I saw the sky, enamel blue and perfect. I saw the grass, every blade just barely curved, and the grass too was moving. I was there, kneeling by the sandbox, scratching in the sand with my fingers, feeling before seeing the coolness of coins buried there, sweeping the grains away to find handfuls of silver and copper coins—money! A lot of money! The distinct feeling of muchness, because this wasn’t just one or two pennies, this wasn’t a stray nickel or dime, this was a gaggle, a flock, a brood, a litter of little coins that were now mine. I felt indescribably lucky. I felt the way you would feel if you were a miner trapped underground for hours or days, and suddenly you see the first crack of light when the stones are moved to show the sky, a helping hand. I felt reprieve. It was not greed. I felt relief, which is the best, most powerful, most intoxicating emotion there is—not joy, but the long longed-for absence of pain or fear.

  That dream has stayed with me and is emblematic in my life, the hook on which I hang the explanation for many of my pursuits. Part of me has always wanted to make art, but then also part of me has longed simply, and primitively, for money, because it equaled from a young age the possibility of life over death. And you don’t have to have a mother dying from cancer to make this equation. You don’t have to have anything except citizenship in the United States of America to learn the lesson that money does not grow on trees; in our country money is the tree itself. If you have money, you have life, you have air, you have leaves and shelter and wood and the possibility of being a planet, a star in the sky.

  A significant percent of lottery winners are broke within four years. Something like 75 percent of them develop an addiction or a mood disorder, like depression, that they never had before they won their loot. I’m not here to say money is the root of all evil; it has allowed me to live a kind of life that is so incomparably ea
sier than it would have been had I, say, been a schoolteacher, and for that I’m very grateful. I see all it’s done for me. When I know that if any family member or friend is sick I will be able to get them the care they need. When I know I will never have to worry about retirement, or whether my kids can go to college. When I know I don’t have to worry about paying my bills or getting that loan. When I know that if I get the flu at the same time as my kids, I won’t have to do what almost every mother in America has probably had to do at one point in her life, puke in one bowl while she holds her kid’s head as he pukes in another. Sometimes I can’t imagine how people do it, real life, and I believe perhaps it’s good that I have the money, because maybe God knew I didn’t have the mettle to make it through without.

  That said, I also know money is not the tree of life. It doesn’t take away from the bottom line. There are too many things in the world that are just immutable to money. You can throw all the money you have at these things and they don’t flinch. Money doesn’t touch depression. It doesn’t alter shame. It doesn’t trump death. There’s a researcher who did a study on how money affects people’s happiness. He spent years studying this subject. What he found is that up to a certain point, money influences quality of life. Rank poverty lends itself to problems in health and education. But on the other end of the spectrum, he found that very wealthy people have actually more mental illness than people who are middle or working class. My question: why? Does the money make them mad, or are they so mad to begin with that they operate under the misguided notion that money can solve the problem of their own mortality. In my case, the answer is both.

  My face was on AOL, next to a survey, while the world was warming and the war was going on. Kelli got her hair cut, and I saw her eyes in a new way. I went from being a slacker artist who spent all day painting in shades of yellow, to a prodigal celebrity who had to be up at six and out the door by seven. In the flick of a switch, yes. People began calling, writing. Some I knew. Some I didn’t. Some were in trouble; some I had already helped in the past, and those it seemed to me I’d already saved; in my mind I’d done enough and what happens is people still want more; it can feel boundary-less, and you say to yourself, “Wait. Wait a minute.” But I don’t feel angry in the face of people’s needs, or even demands. It just confirms for me that everyone has the same misguided fantasy that out there there is some person, or green bill, that’s going to change everything and set it all straight.