Celebrity Detox

by Rosie O'Donnell

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Don’t you remember me calling you? We were both at NBC.” (Eddie used to work at NBC, a few floors above where I produced The Rosie O’Donnell Show.)

  I said, “I remember speaking to you on 9/11.”

  He said, “On 9/11, I called you and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And you said, ‘What are you talking about?’ and I said, ‘We’re under attack. We have to leave the building.’ And you said, ‘No, Eddie, I’m doing my show.’ And I said, ‘Roseann, you have to leave the building. We’re under attack; you have to get out of the city. And get the kids . . .’ And then you said to me, ‘No, Eddie, I can’t, I’m doing my show.’”

  Now, I have no memory of the events Eddie is describing and I have no way of finding out whether they are true or not, and it is in some ways besides the point. I’m less interested in that and far more interested in the fact that such discrepancies can occur in the first place. Here we are, two solid, reasonably sane people, and we have two entirely different accounts of the same event. Maybe he’s remembering it the way he is because he has some need to see himself as my big brother, some sort of savior. Or maybe my failure to remember the situation as it was has to do with my inability to accept my vulnerability. I honestly don’t know.

  As it turns out, 9/11 is not the only disagreement my brother and I have about reality. He and I had one of the biggest fights of our life when I said in an interview that I never went to my mother’s funeral. And he was livid. And he called me up, it was years ago, and he said, “You were at Mommy’s funeral, I sat next to you.” I said, “Eddie, I was not. Daddy took me and Maureen to the wake in the back of the blue station wagon, we saw her dead body, everyone started to scream, he took us out the side entrance, put us back in the car, had a panic attack on the way home, told us just to be quiet, made us go to our rooms, and then we were not allowed to go to the funeral.” Eddie was adamant. We had a huge fight. I was sure I knew the truth, sure of what was real, and also, at the same time, I could barely hear a whisper inside me, and this whisper was shaped like a question mark. It is the whisper that makes the world feel always a little wobbly. It is learning to stand solidly while the whisper is whispering that constitutes strength. If you don’t have the whisper, you are arrogant. If you have the whisper and are paralyzed because of how it clashes with what you think you know, you are neurotic. If you have the whisper and stand trembling—or not—despite the steady stream of small sound, you have some courage, better known as integrity. My life has been about going forward despite the curve of the question mark. I am certain I did not go to my mother’s funeral.

  My children go to a school that encourages creativity and common sense. Every child learns to play an instrument; every child learns to sew, to garden, to read, to write, to cook, to add, to subtract, and to sculpt. The school also emphasizes multiple intelligences, and encourages not only language literacy but visual literacy as well. I never learned how to draw, which is one reason why my painting will always be deficient. All the passion in the world cannot replace technique. My daughter Chelsea, on the other hand, can wield a pencil as easily as she wields a fork, and I love to watch her do this, the nimble lines she makes, and how from a seemingly disjointed jotting of slashes and dots, the hindquarters of a horse emerges, and then, look, a leg, a mane, a snout, with a blaze of black running down it. Chelsea draws what she loves, and what she loves are animals. You can feel her love in the soft way she sketches the ponies, and you can see her love in the way, every night, she takes Zoë, her Australian shepherd, to sleep on her bed with her.

  While I can feel so much compassion for people it hurts, I am oddly deaf when it comes to a connection with nonhuman counterparts. Chelsea amazes me for many reasons; she is opaque to me, and beautiful, like stained glass you cannot see through, gorgeous glass whose color refracts back at you, and no matter how hard you stare, you cannot see through to the other side. I think Chelsea sees herself in animals, feels at home in their language-less kindness.

  Early on at The View we did a show on pets. What is the best sort of pet for your family to have? There are dogs, cats, gerbils, guinea pigs. Is this interesting? Do we care? Pick your battles, Ro. This is what I thought. I had enough to do just trying to get them to change their bland beige set into something bold and blue. And besides, this year was supposed to be about learning to accept mediocrity, not always having to strive for the stars.

  No matter how many times it happens, I can never quite comprehend it. The “it” are the controversies in which I have, at various times, found myself embroiled. Here and there the conflicts seem deserving of attention. But more often than not, the hot water I find myself in is truly tepid, but the press brings it to a boiling point.

  After Danny DeVito came on, I made a comment about how many people, worldwide, were talking about his apparent inebriation. Because it struck me then and it strikes me now. So I said, on The View, I said they were talking about it in Turkey, in Kenya, in Lebanon; I said people were talking about it in China and then I tried to imitate a Chinese accent, which is what I try to do all the time—imitate people, black or white, here or there. Capturing other voices and styles fascinates me. Sometimes, when people speak, I cease listening to their words and zoom in instead on the cadence, and it can seem lovely, and at other times absurd, all this verbiage, these seemingly random consonants clattering on the string that is sound. My use of the words ching and chong were meant largely to illuminate what can occasionally seem to me like random strings of sound.

  I honestly did not intend to offend anyone, which is why I was surprised to learn that Barbara Walters was receiving phone calls, letters, and e-mails from top Asian community leaders. If I had to summarize their various points, it might come out as this: How can Rosie O’Donnell insult Asian people and act in a racist way when she posits herself as a champion of human rights, and so avidly works and speaks against prejudice, especially concerning gays?

  My point is not to defend myself; my point is simply to say what it is I feel. I felt tired. I know I am not a racist and made that comment with no ill will. I come, as I wrote in the statement I later released, in peace. I tried to say so but it is hard, once the media machine gets going, to make your voice heard, even for a loudmouth like me. People pressed me to apologize.

  I was now at the point, with the show and in my life, where I didn’t have time to even paint, and painting is a necessity for me. I had no time to think through the whole episode, so I was therefore not ready to make an apology. Because before I apologize, I want to have some understanding of what it is I have done. This is essential for me. Apology without understanding is useless. Here was my dilemma. I could not reflect on the meaning of the events because my mind was perversely consumed with replaying the forbidden words.

  I wound up apologizing not because anyone pressured me to, and not because I was slowly going crazy. I apologized because one person, a hairdresser, with a few simple words, broke the brain lock and let me understand. The hairdresser I am referring to is Asian. I have always liked to watch her work when given the chance. When I was a little kid, my mom would wash my hair, and it sometimes felt too rough, her fingers kneading my scalp as though she were willing it to rise; she worked the suds into my skin and then hosed out the lather, streams of water, sometimes scary, galling over my upturned face, that soap sting in my eyes.

  This Asian woman though, when she washed people’s hair she was so light in her touch, so precise and careful. Even her lather seemed contained and fragrant, and tiny bubbles seeded her hands. And one day, a week or so after the incident, while I was watching this Asian hairdresser, I asked her, “Were you offended?”

  The hairdresser put her hands up in the air, like, mensa mensa.

  “Seriously,” I said. “Seriously, you were offended?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “When I was a little kid they used to say to me ching chong chinaman, and it was very derogatory, and it did sort of hurt my feelings
a little bit when you said that.”

  And suddenly, zap! No amount of scolding or demanding or even rightful raging did it. What did it for me was one woman’s simple truth, told person to person. Me to you. Understood. I’m truly sorry.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m apologizing!”

  And so I apologized. I called my publicist and issued a statement. “Listen,” I said. “I never meant to hurt anyone’s feelings. But if even one person who knows me took it that way, then it’s not okay. That was never the intent of the joke, but if someone took it that way then I would want to correct it.” I also said something else that looking back on it I see undercut the apology a little bit, something to the effect of “this is just the way my mind works and I may do it again.”

  Now why did I say that? Some lingering feeling of resentment I suppose, resentment over feeling so profoundly misunderstood. Now, in retrospect, I wish I had been a bit more pure in my public apology, because that’s what I expect of myself—purity, or at least the intent. I want for myself a near perfect performance, a voice, a song, a self in precisely the right key.

  There was a snowstorm. It started out soft and fluffy, for about two seconds, and then a warm wind blew in and the flakes turned to needles of ice, they came clattering down on the world and by midnight the trees were glass. People were saying, “Well, maybe after all we will have a white Christmas,” and Manhattan was lit up the way it always is, lights and wreaths swinging from wires. There were Salvation Army people ringing their bells and motorized dwarfs bowing in bay windows. Barbara Walters was planning on going away for vacation, and there was quite a lot of talk about what to get the staff for gifts. I wanted to suggest to Joy and Elisabeth that while Barbara was away, they go without their IFBs. That could be their gift to me. In turn, I wanted to get the staff—every one of them—a neat present, unusual, some swerve.

  The kids were scrubbed, the book bags packed, and Chelsea came up to me, near tears. “I can’t find Zoë,” Chelsea said.

  “I’m sure she’ll make her way up to your bed whenever she is ready,” I said. I looked up at her from the book I was reading and was struck, as I often am, by her loveliness. She was the one, of my four, whom I had the hardest time with as a baby, but she is now, of my four, the most gracious.

  Chelsea looked concerned. “Zoë always comes when I call her,” Chelsea said, and then, to demonstrate this fact, she called—“Zo-ëeee”—her hands cupped around her mouth. We waited for a moment, maybe two, and we could not hear the clicking of toenails that was the usual response.

  Nick, our lemon yellow Lab, slept peacefully in a pool of lamplight. Both dogs wander outside, and although our property is gated, they always ran free.

  “She’ll be back,” I reassured Chelsea.

  Chelsea padded off in her slippers, slid open the glass doors leading to the deck, and peered out into the night. I stretched, heard the bones in my back crack. I looked at my daughter looking for her dog. It was 7:00 p.m., the dinner dishes stacked on the counter, Parker cross-legged on the floor, drawing with his Magic Markers. The light from the room made Chelsea’s hair look more golden than it really was, and her form was lined with night, edged with inky black.

  Something occurred to me then. I was here. I was busy, I was tired, I was overworked, but I was, indisputably, here at my home with my children, before bed, one of whom was looking for a lost dog. What could be more normal, and also more significant? When I was doing my own show, even these small but crucial family moments were totally lost to me; I was consumed. I rarely got home for dinner. Now, I was home almost every night, cranky, yes, but home.

  When I had my own show, I could never call in sick, but sitting there, watching my daughter feel fear, it occurred to me I could call in sick tomorrow if I needed to; there were three people other than me holding this big ball.

  “Mom,” Chelsea said. “Zoë’s lost.”

  I was starting to think she was right. Zoë is an anxious, obedient animal who comes when called, and who sticks close to familiar territory. I wondered if Nick, the Lab, had led her out beyond the fence, and then not bothered to lead her back.

  “Honey,” I said. “She’ll be fine. She’s maybe down by the water.”

  Chelsea began to cry. “We need to find her!” she said.

  I was tired; Kelli was in the city; it was me and four kids. The last thing I wanted to do was pile my brood into my car to drive around looking for a dog. I called Geraldine, our nanny, who came and took Chelsea and Parker out in the car while I stayed home with Viv and Blake. I put them to bed. I lay down next to Blake. There was a shadow on his wall, and it looked like the yin and yang symbol. The curve of darkness cupped in the curve of light. I’ve never known, or asked, what it stood for. It seemed, suddenly, that I knew. It meant you could be two in one. You could be both dark and light, good and bad, tethered and free, brilliant and not. I was striving for excellence on the set, but I could also not show up on that set if my kids were sick, if the dog died, on a bad day—if need be. I was a celebrity, but I was also a plain mom lying with her five-year-old in a bed, like millions of other tired mothers all across this country, right now. I fell asleep.

  An hour or so later Geraldine brought Chelsea and Blake back. Zoë could not be found. Chelsea was devastated. She slept in my bed that night, my girl, and somewhere, hopefully not far from here, her dog was figuring out the maze she was in, slowly scenting her way home.

  I had not slept well because Chelsea had not slept well; she had sobbed half the night, and kept getting up, tapping on the window, hoping to see some shadow of her dog. Jane Goodall. She had talked about the connection between people and animals. And Temple Grandin had recently written a book about animal minds, and how they share some similarities with the way autistic people think. Why not a show on, no, not pets, but on animals and what the bond between us and them is made of? Why not a show about how autistics share similar cognitive capacities with nonhuman species, or, for that matter, why not a show on autism itself? Or on foster care? Or on cults? Or on psychics? Or on depression? A whole one-hour show. Not a segment, but a whole devoted hour. The idea excited me.

  You can’t get breadth or depth in a seven-minute segment.

  Whole-hour theme shows was not what The View had been about. I was not trying to take it over. That had honestly never been my intent. My intent was to make a show that would allow every single one of us with our particular talents to shine. My intent was to make a show that was excellent and that still allowed me to have a family.

  I didn’t know that The View would expand its views and allow whole-theme shows on autism, foster care, depression, shows that refueled me and that I loved. I didn’t know how angry I would get at Barbara, nor how much capacity we both have for forgiveness. I didn’t know that Zoë, Chelsea’s nervous dog, had in fact not run away, that the whole time we’d been looking for her she’d been locked accidentally in the family van, where she’d been riding with us the day before, sleeping in the backseat, out of view. The View. I could never have guessed a single syllable could hold so many contradictions.

  I left that day with an inexplicable sense of hopefulness, excitement. I felt there were opportunities for me, yins and yangs, this’s and that’s, mother and worker, famous and anonymous, excellent and banal. Bill Geddie had intimated that my theme segments were very possible. I pulled into our driveway. Chelsea had been crying for almost twenty-four hours straight and still no sign of Zoë. The plan was to make Lost Dog signs and post them around town. Geraldine went to get a stack of papers from the family van. I could hear, from the kitchen, the door slide open, and then, in her lovely Irish accent, “Holy be Jesus,” and an excited, exuberant overwhelming yapping—there was no doubt. That was Zoë!

  We ran outside. Zoë was running in circles, trembling, jumping, peeing, pooping, rolling over, scuttering to a stop, running again; she was saved. Saved! Chelsea scooped the dog up in her arms, buried her nose in the mottled fur. We brought the now-freed Z
oë a bowl of water. We could not believe we hadn’t heard her bark through the windows. Maybe she had only barked for a while. Maybe, as hours passed, she’d given up hope, curled into a corner.

  Much later on, toward evening, after everyone had calmed down, after Zoë had been debriefed and untraumatized and Chelsea had had time to comb the snarls and comfort her hound, I knelt down and cupped Zoë’s bony chin in my hand. No one was around to see me. I’d never studied the dog up close. I saw, this close, that she had very pale whiskers sprouting from her snout, and that her eyes were the color of melted butter. “Zoë, Zoë,” I said. And for the first time I felt a little love for the yappy, nervous dog. I felt grateful I’d been around to see her lost, and then found. I had The View to thank for that, for a schedule that was flexible enough to let me live a family life. Things were coming together. “Yes they are, Zoë,” I said. I scratched her chest. And for a brief moment, I felt a kinship with this little beast, so different from me on the one hand, but so familiar on the other. You can see it in the eyes, the similarities. And at the same time, you can see it in the eyes, the differences. The bottom line difference is maybe this. Animals are indisputably and always themselves. They cannot lie. They cannot cheat. They cannot act. “Zoë, Zoë,” I said. I stroked the small skull.

  CHAPTER 10

  Trumped

  So, Donald. Donald Trump. I have in my home office, on my window ledge, several pieces of true Trump merchandise: Cologne, vodka, bobble head, each piece packaged in royal purple wrappings, gilded gold bows, bottles sprayed silver and embossed.

  All throughout those trying Trump days, the merchandise reminded me that this was not a man who was spewing such ugliness—my little fat Rosie can’t wait ’til I sue the degenerate fat ugly third rate fatassfatlittlemyRosiedegenerateuglyfat . . . he just kept going. I started to feel somewhat sorry for him. I also started to see that he was not a man. He had once maybe been a man, or a boy, but that human spirit seemed to have gotten lost to a mechanical repetitive meanness, a push button person with its circuits askew. He’d been on the Today show with Meredith Viera during his rampage and she had said something like, “How about saying, right now on the Today show, ‘I’m not gonna bring up Rosie again’?” And he sat there for about two seconds and then he was sucked straight back into this maniacal rant. I kept Trump products in my office because they reminded me that my “attacker” was not a human being but a windup toy with Tourette’s, a man who had allowed himself to get pulled so deeply into capitalism that he had turned his entire being into a product with a price tag on it; he was gift wrapped and stuffed with Styrofoam.