Celebrity Detox

by Rosie O'Donnell

  But I’m ahead of myself here. I was in a good place when the Trump business began. Zoë was home. Streisand had stayed in my house and lovingly left pieces of herself behind. The View was beginning to open itself up to more and more of my suggestions, not just about the set, or the lighting, or how to usher the audience in; they were taking more risks, slowly, like children stepping into the sea. Joy and Elisabeth did not let go of their IFBs when Barbara left for her extended Christmas vacation, but I was able to be okay with that, able to respect them for knowing what they would and would not do. And I felt they would soon make the leap into spontaneity, soon, but not now; I could sense their loosening. The autism show had been approved; I was going to contact Temple Grandin, whom I had never met before, but it’s opportunities such as these, meeting people such as her, that make my work worth it.

  At home, we were getting ready for Christmas, the tree up, the lights laid out, and when it was over, we would go to Florida, and I would have a week away from the show, a week just to be with my kids, to catch up with them and their lives—essential. The night of December 19, Kel and I were relaxing, watching TV, and on came Trump in a press conference about his benevolence vis-à-vis Miss USA and her expected recovery from an alcohol problem. To say I found it distasteful would be an obvious understatement. I have a problem with the whole notion of Miss USA as it’s defined and enacted by men like Donald, taking twenty-year-old girls, parading them around onstage in bikinis while he and a bunch of other old men give them a score, and if they win—then what? They become Donald’s own doll for a year, his brand for 365 days, because he’d bought the pageant, which means, to me at least, he’d bought the girls, and buying people, especially young nubile ones who probably make you far more money that you pay them to do your bidding— of course I have a problem with this. It’s like watching a pimp and a prostitute. And we’re all participating in it.

  So I was not pleased to find Trump on the TV screen in my bedroom, holding his press conference in which he stood there with a twenty-one-year-old girl he believed had acted inappropriately, and then to see him announce, in an appropriately trumped-up voice full of trumped-up compassion, that he would “give her a second chance,” or some such thing. He would allow her to keep the crown, his tone full of righteousness and factory-made feeling, the whole thing designed to convey to the public the impression he had carefully crafted. It is Trump’s falseness that angers me more than anything. Call it like it is. That’s all I ask. Don’t pretend. If you fake life, then you have damaged the social and biological fabric on which we all depend, for breath and love.

  I certainly hadn’t been planning on imitating him on TV; he wasn’t written into the segment, but he’d been on my mind since I’d seen him the night before, and so when something in the conversation that day on The View reminded me, I brought him up. I spoke my mind. People found it funny. I said he had gone bankrupt twice; in fact, some of his companies had filed for bankruptcies.

  To him I guess it felt like I was saying he had a communicable disease with a bad odor. He took the bankruptcy comment hard, very hard. I honestly did not anticipate the malice of his response; but looking back at it, I can understand it. I assumed Donald believed he had money. I did not assume Donald believed he was money. But apparently he does. The violence of his response suggests to me that money is the means by which he has defined himself, so the bankrupt statement felt devastating to him, and his coins came clattering down. The stuffing of his self spilled out—think of a torn scarecrow, only instead of hay, it’s crisp $100s blowing through the cornfields, spiraling up into the sky. Money was blowing everywhere; he burst open like a birthday piñata and coins came out, and instead of getting to work repairing the rip, he kept spilling and spilling until he was thigh-high in cold cash, gold coins, and rage. On my end, I watched. I caught some of the coins he threw my way. I looked at them, ran my finger round their rim. Interesting, I thought. Very interesting.

  It had been, so far, an abnormally warm December, the warmest since people had begun keeping records in 1852. On Trump day, the weather was fifty-two degrees, and the lilacs were beginning to bud, as were the rhododendrons, their sealed pods loosening at the seams, ruffled bits of pink petals visible. The children loved it—they could play outside without a jacket or a hat, but if you read the newspaper closely and completely you could find the articles that commented on this strange situation, and if you went to certain Web sites you could see, with the aid of visual graphs, the upward spiking trend, or the polar ice caps then and now, the then showing large opaque sheets, the circle of ice radiating far afield, and the now, the ice diminished, wedges of lime green land showing, chunks of melting ice atop which polar bears precariously balanced.

  I was in my craft room looking at polar bear pictures, wondering about the ominous warmth, on Trump day. The world was warming up faster, it seemed, than anyone had predicted, and I was surfing the Web, and I came to a sight that showed polar bears. The text explained the warming, melting ice left them in a strange land where they were slowly starving. I saw one photograph of a bedraggled white bear, his once fluffed fur now matted, and the hull-shaped rib cage showing through, and my own ribs hurt, down deep.

  I was looking closely at the pixilated image, so at first I didn’t hear Kel come in. Then I turned. She stood at the entrance to the room, the door open, so behind her I could see the tips of trees, the branches bare and black, the plump buds a sci-fi green. “They will probably want to talk to you,” Kelli said.

  “Who will?” I asked.

  “ABC,” she said. “The Trump crap.”

  She was right, of course. I had learned by now what ABC wants and doesn’t want me to say or do. Probably they would want me to apologize to Trump. I wasn’t going to. I didn’t say anything slanderous or libelous. And this is the job they were paying me to do. I was doing it the best that I could, and I couldn’t do my job if they were going to want me to apologize all the time.

  There’s the rub, as Hamlet once said. The View’s relationship to me was one of fundamental contradiction. They had hired me, and continued to want me on the show, because I had brought them from a faltering position to a top-rated talk show that was attracting new viewers weekly. Great. Great! But they were also constantly trying to tone me down, which made no sense. A toned-down me, a washed-out, Xeroxed version of Rosie O’Donnell would not work. I am successful because I am who I am, this range of color undiluted.

  Trump was their problem, not mine. I told Kelli that, we talked a while, and then she left. I shut down the computer and started to paint, the music cranked up high. I knew what they would do next. I, for my part, was going to do yellow and blue, but I guessed they would call Barbara where she was vacationing on a yacht in the middle of some exotic sea. I pictured it now like moving marble, the boat chiseled from a chunk of pure gold. I pictured her with white-gloved waiters. She was off in the rich people’s club. As it turns out, Donald is a member of that club.

  Now, allow me to digress, for just a moment. Like I said, the issue of money and clubs has been a fraught one for Barbara and me this year. To me, she is clearly rich in a way that I am not and never will be, but when I said this on air, she practically turned the color of cranberry and shot me one of her steely stares. What had I said that so shocked her? I had said that she was wealthier than I, and she had responded as though I had slapped her. I find money fascinating, how full of shame and secrecy it is. Why is money so private? Why, when I talk about money out loud, as I often do, is it perceived by so many as crass? Kelli says that it sounds like I’m bragging when I say “I have more money than a human needs,” but because in my mind money is not really linked to worth, it’s a simple statement of fact.

  However, let me double back on myself, because what I’ve just said is not totally true. I’ve said that in my mind money is not linked to worth. If this were totally true for me, than I would not care whether I was offered a salary of $50,000, $150,000, or $150 million. But when I think
about what I want to do next year, the money figures in. So am I not being honest here?

  The money figures in because I have, like every other American, a tiny whisper of fear that the bottom might fall out, but it’s so tiny as to be almost imperceptible. What really makes the money figure in for me is that I know it’s a reflection of how the other person sees me. Even if I don’t measure by money, the people hiring me sure as hell do, so if someone offers me a low salary, it feels like a blow, because the translation is simple: you suck. What I can say for sure is that if everyone agreed to separate money from worth, if money were truly just money and had no symbolic meaning beyond itself, then I am at a point in my life where I neither want nor need more.

  I talk about these things. I don’t understand why you are not supposed to talk about these things. So when I brought it up that day on The View, Barbara looked ill. What I was trying to discuss: that it isn’t the amount of money necessarily that makes someone rich; there are other intangibles. I might have more money than Barbara. I don’t know, but even if at some point I did, she will always be richer than me. She’s part of high society, a club I cannot ever be admitted to. And when I visit her club, like the time I went to her home for dinner, it is, for me, like visiting another planet. Barbara Walters could lose all her money and she will still be high society, and I could make six times the money I have, and I will always be a working-class kid. I find this fascinating.

  And for this reason I find Donald fascinating.

  When he cracked, Barbara was on vacation, in the ocean, and ABC obviously called her and told her about the “problem.” Before this happened I did not fully appreciate how much Donald is a member of the rich persons’ club. I knew it, but I hadn’t given it much thought. In any case, Barbara wrote a message for the press; I picture her leaning against the silver railing of the ship, her blond hair blowing in the wind, a pen poised above pressed stationery paper, penning her missive like a 1940s film character. She is glamorous. Her message to the press was glamorous, in that it was carefully carved, artfully phrased, because Barbara’s deepest wish in life, it sometimes seems, is for everyone to just get along. On the one hand she has Grace Kelly glamour, but the next moment, flip a switch, she’s a tired grandmother trying to rein in a family feud.

  “Both Rosie and Donald are high-spirited, opinionated people,” she stated, or some such thing. “Donald has been a friend of The View for many years,” and separately she stated that “I do not regret for one moment my choice to hire Rosie,” etc., etc. ad infinitum. The message was short but clear. No chaos, please. Like my nana at the Thanksgiving table. She just wants peace. She’s perfectly happy to be the matriarch of the family and make sure the children don’t fight. And we’re all the children.

  It may be that this is one of the few times Barbara failed to finesse a situation. Donald was not, apparently, appeased by her remarks. What happened next proves that nastiness can be pure, a paradox indeed. Pure nastiness.

  He went on seemingly every show, spoke to every media outlet that he could. He groaned in a strange way, almost salivating over the words: “I look forward to taking lots of money from my nice fat little Rosie.” Totally creepy. He was sadistic in a deeply disturbing way, and I watched him from afar. It was like seeing a specimen squirming on a slide in high school science class, hmmm. Poke here and it lashes its tail. Add this salt to the brine and it shrivels up. Donald, for some reason, also reminded me a lot of the garden slugs we used to get on our front steps when we were kids. They’d come in the late spring, after rains, gelatinous, goopy slugs, some five inches long, sleek and wet, leaving sticky trails in their wake. The strangest thing about these slugs: if you sprinkled salt on them then—poof. It was like magic. They shriveled up so small and desiccated, they practically disappeared. I could write one small comment on my blog and Donald would predictably distend, flowing forth with a torrent of insults—fatuglydegenerateslobfatass—and then, in another second, he’d appear on some talk show looking wrinkled and old and empty, with a Jell-O orange comb-over.

  The first day he was, perhaps, his crassest, because he commented on Kelli, how he’d like to take her. “Rosie’s a bully,” he said to some New York newspaper. “She’s an extremely unattractive person who doesn’t understand the truth . . . She has an extremely low aptitude,” yadda yadda yadda. The strategic beauty and human sadness of remarks such as these is that they confirm in the attacker the very qualities the attacker is so desperately trying to ascribe to the other person. Thus, Trump went down, and down, and down.

  The next day, I brought Kelli with me to The View. I said little about Donald except that I had Kelli with me because I didn’t want her to leave me for a man with a comb-over. After the show was over we got right into the car, we were surrounded by reporters and microphones and clicking cameras. I rolled down the window and yelled, “Ho ho, Merry Christmas,” and then, vavoom, we took off.

  We went to visit Georgette Mosbacher. We brought her McDonald’s because her dog had died and she was a wreck. She couldn’t get out of bed. So we showed up with a huge bag of Mickey D’s. I love Georgette because she loves her dogs, and her McDonald’s fries. She’d already gotten a new puppy, and he was adorable, big floppy paws and more fuzz than fur. It is hard to articulate the love Georgette has for her dogs; it must be similar to what Chelsea feels, and thus her grief was just bottomless. We sat around, and played with the new puppy, and I held her, and she did all the perfect puppy things, which was exactly what I needed. We were in Georgette’s apartment, in Georgette’s grief, three women and a baby animal, and it felt, for a second, so serene, the Donalds of the world so far away. It was wonderful. I pulled the puppy up to my neck and felt her breathe against my skin. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, everything was just as it was—real—an oasis made of milk shakes and love.

  I made an effort not to watch TV. It was December, what, 22 or 23, the Trump debacle had barely begun, but already felt as if it had been happening for years, because he just droned on and on.

  I did not anticipate, however, that he would be cruel enough to do what he did to Barbara. She should have been left alone.

  My friend Jackie came over that night. “Aren’t you scared?” she kept asking me. “Ro, aren’t you scared?”

  Jackie comes from a family where the men were powerful, and frightening. When I left my show all those years ago, I realized the freedom that comes from not being famous. How fantastic, to be without a bodyguard. The privacy, the extension of space. The unself-consciousness. The expanded opportunities for reverie. You could leave your door propped open on a summer afternoon. Fantastic. You didn’t need a skyhigh gate and, as a result, you could see the sky. I reveled in it. And I swore I would never have as much security as I’d had when I was famous, whether I needed it or not. The price had been too high. In protecting my life, I had lost it.

  That’s the thing about fame. It is a dangerous game, because fame, the drug, can sneak up on you in increments. You don’t notice the increments, that you’re increasing the dosage until you’re so far away from ever making eye contact with another human being and being “real,” that you don’t even know you’re not “real” anymore.

  So no, Jackie, I was not afraid. I was getting ready to go on vacation. I was decorating my tree. I was not wounded, or worried. However, what happened next changed everything.

  Trump was everywhere. He said that he himself had spoken to Barbara, and Barbara herself had told him that she was not a fan of mine. That he should never get in the mud with pigs. He outed Barbara. A private conversation with him both outed her and probably twisted the truth of what she had said, on air. He dragged a seventy-seven-year-old woman, a living legend, into his fight; he’s a sixty-something-year-old guy, I was a forty-five-year-old woman, and he had to go and drag a septugenarian into the fray, someone who, no matter what her strengths, is in some ways more vulnerable than he is. What a coward. I was thinking all these things. I was packing my bags for Florida
. I felt a deep winter chill inside, despite the perversely warm weather. Trump announced he would probably sue me. Go ahead, big guy. The words of Barbara reformulated by Donald kept swinging at me, from the side, now the top, a punch here, now there, duck and cover. I was hurt now. I was wounded. And whatever comfort and appreciation I had started to feel vis-à-vis my place on The View, and my potential role in its production—gone. Up in smoke. Trump had wounded two women, and for what? As for me, the worst part of it was that I knew, from the get-go, twisted though he was, I knew in my heart that Barbara had said those things. In one way or another, she had betrayed me. Trumped, I was. Tired.

  Blog 12/27/06, Miami

  so what happens

  when u say the emperor has no clothes

  the comb over goes ballistic

  via phone to mr king

  choices

  every minute

  every day

  everyone

  i imagine it is interesting

  as celeb feuds tend 2 b

  so here r my thoughts

  didnt watch

  didnt u tube