Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (10 page)

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.