Rosie ODonnell - Celebrity detox (the fame game)

Copyright 2007 by KidRo Productions, Inc.

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Grand Central Publishing

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First eBook Edition: October 2007

ISBN: 978-0-446-19993-3

To my mother and yours.

Thanks to:

Lauren Slater

Jamie Raab

Ed ODonnell

Michele Riordan Read

Vivian Polak

Nan-jo

The Two Bs

M y mother loved Barbra Streisand. A lot. She had all her records, plus she watched her whenever she did a talk show or had a TV special. My mother listened to Funny Girl on the blue Victrola cabinet she got at the flea market, a cabinet she stripped and stained herself somehow, alone in the garage. My mom had five kids and her own mother living with her. How did she have time to do anything? I have four kids, a wife, and two nannies, and I am often overwhelmed.

My mother took the time out to fill up on yellow. Yellow is my shorthand for real, for true, for beauty. Yellow means what is good with our world. My mother knew yellow. We watched Billie Jean King together as she beat Bobby Riggs. My mother took us to Radio City to see the Christmas show. My mother pointed out the women who had risen above what it meant to be a woman, back then in the 1960s, and even now too. Streisand, my mother would say, look at her, from Brooklyn, look at her now.

Anything is possible, little girl. My mother told me this, in her own way, usually without words. Irish people are sometimes not so good with words. They are sometimes not so good with feelings. Thats why inside Im a Jew. I want to feel it, talk it, live it, scream it. I want it all out there.

At some point in my childhood, my mother told me about Barbara Walters. Probably she pointed her out to me on the TV. This woman was a weather girl who worked her way up to being co-anchor with Harry Reasoner, who interviewed every world leader, and she did all this at a time when women were told it was impossible. She paved the way for Oprah and Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer and every TV newswoman, every female TV personality for that matter. My mother recognized Barbara Walterss meaning from the get-go.

We used to watch Barbara Walters. My mother recognized that Walters was always imparting two levels of information, the spoken and the implicit. The spoken was the this and that of the days news. The implicit was that it was now possible for a woman to deliver that news. We watched Barbara Walterss phenomenal rise to the top. We watched, more closely still, the wide wake she left, a path I think my mother wanted me to see. Barbra Streisand, she was about the ultimate; she was genius incarnate. She was a goddess to us, while Walters was of this world. What Barbara Walters proved to us was that women could rise in this world. What Barbra Streisand proved to us was that art was beyond gender, and through it one could rise right beyond this world, and get to someplace better.

Several years ago I left my show. Id lost the ability to get to the place Streisand had shown me was possible. Six years of celebrity-hood had left me depleted, and I had to find myself, find my art, and find my family again. I went off the air so I could touch down on the ground. And I did. And the ground felt good. I had my kids backChelsea, Parker, Blake, and Vivi. I had my wife. Kel and I had started up a gay cruise ship business and twice a year we went sailing with other gay families. We filmed it all and made a documentary of what it means to be a gay family. We screened the documentary one night at the New York Arts Center. This was in April 2006. One month prior to this, March 17, had been the thirty-third anniversary of my mothers death. There were rumors, sometime around then, that Streisand was thinking, at age sixty-four, of going back on tour. It was April in New York City, the trees were putting on green sleeves, boats were back on the Hudson, and my movie was finally done.

And so Barbara Walters came to this first screening. She wasnt a stranger to me. Not only had I spent much of my childhood watching her on TV and, more significant still, watching my mother watch her on TV, Id also known her as an adult, in my own right. Id had dinner with Barbara Walters, and shed even been to our home to interview Kelli once. We were friends in the celebrity kind of wayyou know and respect each otheryou have dinner every few months. You dont chat on the phone, but there is an undeniable association, a shared intimacy that paradoxically lacks all intimacy. You are members of an exclusive club where everyone speaks a language very few others have been able to attain. Fame.

A few weeks before the premiere of my documentary, Id been to a party at Barbaras house. This was a party for Mike Bloomberg, and Kel got all dressed up to go. Kel looked beautiful. She always does. I was wearing my standard black pants from Target and my J. Jill clogs, and we went uptown, and we were curious. Wed never seen Barbara Walterss house before. Going there was a fairly big deal. We rode the elevator up and walked into a stunning red room, and there was Barbara, in the center, wearing a beautiful gold lam evening gown, the same one she probably wore to interview some heads of state. Maybe Idi Amin Dada or Prince Charles or even the Dalai Lama. She looked flawless and stunning in her bright red room, a Julian Schnabel painting on the wall, a double piano, the keys as white as teeth, a man in a tux playing. I was, well, I was enchanted, almost flabbergastedthe color, the beauty, the women with their silk sheaths and the hors doeuvres served on trays with scalloped rims. A lot of people might assume thats what celebrities do, go to fancy parties with double baby grands in merlot-colored rooms, but the fact is, I dont. Mostly, especially since leaving my show, Im home with Kel and the kids, eating string-bean casseroles with fried onions on top, Blakes favorite. I remember a waiter whisked by, offering me some flaky layered thing.

At dinner I sat next to Liz Smith. I think it was during the serving of the second course that in walked this woman, gorgeous, I mean, she looked like Ann-Margret meets Jessica Rabbit. She had a Clinton-like charisma. When I asked, Who the hell is that? Liz Smith said, Thats Georgette Mosbacher. Georgette looked at me from across the room. She seemed dreamlike. I said to Barbara Walters, I have to know her. Barbara may not have taken me seriously at first. Look, Barbara, I kept saying, Im enchanted. I dont know if Barbara arranged it or not, but not long after Georgette came over to me. She leaned in real close and said, Im a Republican, dont tell anyone. Im in the closet!

People have questioned me about the way Im drawn to certain people, men and women both. My attractions to other people are not sexual in any sense. That seems hard for people to really believe. There was, for instance, a weekend when Jane Fonda came to visit me. We were in my craft room. I was showing her some art I had made. In one of my collages was a photograph of Madonna. You two were lovers? Jane Fonda said, more of a statement than a question. I said, No, we were never ever lovers. We were sisters from the moment we met. There was never anything sexual about it. This surprised Jane. Her surprise surprised me.