Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) (5 page)

When I remember the summer before the start of
The View
it seems the season was unusually hot. New York City is never a great place in July or August, but those preseason months seemed especially oppressive to me, the heat draped over the city, muffling the skyscrapers, melting the tar so it oozed and stank in the streets. In Nyack, the roses bloomed for a brief period, flared pink and wine, and then the petals flaked off and scattered in the scorched grass. I smeared my kids with sunscreen as thick as mayonnaise but it never seemed thick enough, because the barrier filtering out the harmful rays had been so thinned from CO
₂
that we were all essentially roasting on the racks—that’s what it seemed to me. I was driven from Nyack into the city for these preseason meetings, and I always ran the brief distances between my front door and the cool air of the car, sprinted as though I were being chased by something fierce, and in fact I was.

One of the biggest conflicts, right from the start, had to do with the IFB, a device too tiny for the huge significance it held for us all. The IFB is essentially a gadget that you shove in your ear and that is connected, wirelessly, to the control room. They are used regularly on many television shows, from newsrooms to talk shows—day or night. I find this amazing, disturbing. The general point of an IFB on any television show is that, as you are talking to the audience, the people in the control room can also talk to you, send you suggestions and updates, feed you your lines:

MIRACLE HEALERS

A SPECIAL DATELINE INVESTIGATION

THE PREACHER HEALING THE ILL—

WILLING WANTING TO BELIEVE

INTO HIS EAR

CANCER—LEFT LEG—ARLENE

LOOK AT

RIGHT

THE TELEPROMPTERS SAYS

ARE YOU ARLENE

CANCER, IN THE LEG

SHHHH

THE RIGHT LEG

HOLD

COMMERCIAL BREAK

60 SECONDS

TIME IS RUNNING

RUNNING

RUNNING

SAY IT

ALL

“I’m not wearing an IFB,” I said, almost right off the bat, because this was essential to me.

I CAN’T

I WON’T

I NEVER HAVE

I NEVER WILL

NOT ON LIVE DAYTIME TV

I AM NOT A NEWSCASTER

I AM NOT A PUPPET

NO

The IFB is not a bad instrument per se. It has an important place in broadcasting—IFBs were essential, I’m sure they were useful when the Twin Towers were falling and more information was pouring in by the minute. But in general, I don’t believe it’s a good idea to multitask talk. And as far as I’m concerned, I already have too much incoming. I have always been able to hear people conversing in the green room. I have always been able to hear extraneous chitchat around me; I have always been able to hear the buzz the camera makes when it runs, and all this sound—it is unbelievably tiring.

Barbara, I think, had a hard time with my IFB refusal. My guess is that to her, a former newscaster, not wearing an IFB is a very bad idea. “Nothing real can ever happen when you’re wearing it,” I explained. I don’t think she bought it.

Feud Number 1: Kelly Ripa

Kelly Ripa had Clay Aiken on her show. Now, Clay Aiken, he’s a young man, twenty-six maybe. He was a special ed teacher living with his mom before he became super famous. He’s one of the biggest recording stars in the last twenty-five years, a real American idol. The world loved him. I watched as fame swept him into the pipeline—I was rooting for him. Gay rumors swirled around him—was he? Is he? The fact is, the public doesn’t know what Clay Aiken thinks or feels or is because that’s how Clay Aiken wants it to be. And that is as it should be.

So Clay Aiken went on Kelly Ripa’s show.

What happened when he went on Kelly Ripa’s show? It was clear to me that she didn’t like him, for whatever reason. Some people do not click—they didn’t. He had his Claymates in the crowd, holding up signs and screaming for him, and he tried too hard—and she was having none of it. So during some inane segment he interrupted and he put his hand over her mouth as a joke, as if to say, “Let me get a word in, kid, pass the ball, share.”

And she said, “No, no, no.” She spoke as though he were a child. And then she said, “I don’t know where that hand has been.”

And she took a condescending sip of water while making eyes at the audience.

“Low blow,” I thought.

And Clay, he just crumpled up, like a little boy thinking he had done something wrong.

So I said, on air the next day, that Kelly’s comment was homophobic, and she called in to the show, wanting to have it out with me on air. Which she did. They put her live on the phone. How dare I. I should know better. She has germaphobia. She likes gay people. I am irresponsible. Yes, well, okay. Got it!

But I am just saying that the whole incident looked to me like a gay person who had just had the gay card played on them.

That’s how I saw it.

The Kelly Ripa Feud was about many things for me: fairness, trust, respect. Would the Kelly/Clay incident have gone any differently if I was wearing an IFB? I say “no”—some say “yes.”

Barbara I’m sure thought the Kelly Ripa Feud would have been avoided had I been wearing my IFB. I don’t want to go through a long explanation of why that’s not so. It suffices to say that Barbara just doesn’t get it, my IFB hatred. She doesn’t have to get it. She doesn’t have to learn how to do improvisational comedy at seventy-eight or eighty-one or however old she is. She’s a broadcaster, and when you’re a broadcaster you use an IFB.

“What’s it stand for?” someone asked me the other day. “IFB, what’s that stand for?”

God, I don’t know. I didn’t know. I thought about it for a minute. And all I could come up with was this:
Inter Fucking fearing Bureaucratic bullshit.

This is, of course, just in my opinion.

“Like dogs sniffing each other.” This is how my own producer, Janette Barber, describes the dynamics on the first day of the show. I can’t say I experienced it that way, but I can say there was, perhaps, an element of cautiousness to the whole encounter. These women, after all, had been doing this show for what—nine years now—doing it their way, day in and day out, and then one day in walks the new kid on the block but she’s not an ordinary new kid. She’s the kid who comes to school in a Mercedes, the kid who is prince of some small island—you get it.

My intent was never to steal the show, my intent was to enhance it, but not all forms of help are experienced this way. These women had their own routines and ideas; I had mine. I’ve never done anything halfway. My own show won many Emmy Awards. I told Barbara
The View
would
too. I am not sure she believed me. As for me, I don’t have to have the prize but I absolutely must have the desire to win it—to set the standard and then maybe even go beyond. Without that desire, your limbs shrivel and your soul gets small.

A major conflict for me now, is how
not
to let my soul get small while doing mainstream television. Whether it’s my own show, or whether it’s a show I’m a guest on; whether it’s here or there or everywhere, mainstream television has its limits, which is one reason why I sometimes think I should leave it, break out, and go fully into cyberspace, where there’s a kind of radical freedom that frightens me as much as it appeals to me. On regular daytime TV, or nighttime too for that matter, the topics can lack heft. Girth. Weight. Who cares about Paris Hilton when what’s happening in the world is happening? The fact is, the rift between television and the real world is often just so large that it’s part of what drove me to quit in the first place. Here’s my image, how I would paint it if I could: a pink and white room. Makeup artists swooping rouge on cheekbones powdered pale with talc. Topics that are at best irrelevant, at worst obfuscating the real situation we are in. My idea of television is that it reveals, not conceals.

My desire for fame was ignited in me when my mother got ill and died. I was ten years old then, and she died. She died first in our living room, lying on the couch in our house. She died later, and for good, in a hospital, alone, and she never ever came back home. Cancer. It grew in her body, cells swapping and dividing, but the details I have never learned; they were hidden from us. So much was hidden from us, for protection, for etiquette, the truth went up in coils of smoke from my nana’s cigarette, surrounding her, and finally erasing her, my mother. This is one reason why, I think, I long for the truth, and more. I want to broadcast what’s real, send it out in waves—silver sound waves lapping all over the globe.

How to pick a pet for your children. How to make chocolate mud fudge sticks using Swiss Miss. Why Celebrity A hates Celebrity B. Why Celebrity B loves Celebrity A. What Celebrity C thinks of Celebrity A and B. Hot topics. Things that burn. Burns that scar the skin, peel away pink and underneath is new and too tender to touch. So much hurts here. Shhh. Don’t say this. Shhh.

I found this just the other day—a fragment from an interview I gave, to whom I can’t recall, but they, the reporter I guess, must have sent me the transcript, and here it was, all of a sudden, in a file I can’t recall filing. Sometimes you see your face in the mirror and it seems shocking to you. So too, your
voice on tape or worse, pasted onto the page, where it freezes in its own hysteria, but there’s some truth there, in the rambling:

I’m gonna start with 9/11.

Oh my God, 9/11 happens.

I was at the makeup chair

John McDaniel came in and he was crying

and he was telling me that

a plane had crashed into the Twin Towers,

AND STOP I HEAR STOP

and they know it’s true

I can’t believe him and I stand up.

Because if I stand up it’ll change the reality

because I’m in control there, at 30 Rock

I’m the boss,

it’s the Rosie O’Donnell show and I am, 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