TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092192/0921520.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 12.6 KB | 247 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 58

The Joy of Being Whoopi


With a new movie and her own TV talk show starting this week,
actor-comic Whoopi Goldberg has left the welfare rolls far behind

By JOHN SKOW - With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles


    She's got a mouth on her. Ooooooh, yeah! Uh-huh! Whoo-pi!
Gives a little grin, lets loose a blast of in-your-face black
street trash, something about yo muthuh. True, child.

    That mouth, impish or hellacious, is where Whoopi Goldberg
goes one up on the world. Twist it, she's a funny little troll.
Smile like the Queen of Sheba, she is the Queen of Sheba, a
knee-weakening beauty (don't doubt it; like Meryl Streep, who's
also less than a stunner, Whoopi can play beauty). Shove out her
jaw, she's a bad-mouth male junkie -- yeah, name's Fontaine,
attitude's his game, what's your problem? Flash that 82-toothed
thousand-watter, time to watch your wallet. Smile shyly, she's
a little kid, you want to give her a glass of milk and a couple
of cookies. Thank you, mister.

    What is needed here is a mouth alert -- THIS IS NOT A
TEST, YOU ARE IN REAL DANGER, LOCAL AUTHORITIES ARE HIDING IN
THE CELLAR WITH A JUG -- because Whoopi, dreadlocks, attitude
and all, is branching out. Quick, what does the world need one
more of? Right, a television talk show. Whoopi's starts this
week on 180 syndicated stations -- making it potentially
available to 93% of the national audience. The idea, she says,
is conversation: one guest and half an hour of talk, every night
and twice on Saturday. The negatives, as they say in politics,
are encouraging: no monologue, no band to tootle when
inspiration flags, no giggling studio audience to which the
camera can pan, and no Dan Quayle jokes unless Quayle himself
makes them.

    The low-handicap Veep has not yet agreed to appear, but Al
Gore, who wants his job, is one of the early guests. So are Bo
Jackson, the retired two-sport flash, white supremacist Thomas
Metzger, and the usual show-biz suspects, including Liz Taylor,
Elton John and Tim Robbins. Violinist Itzhak Perlman is
scheduled, and California senate candidate Dianne Feinstein is
already taped. Whoopi wants to reason together with Pat
Buchanan, who hopes to wall off the Mexican border, and with Pat
Robertson, who believes that feminism leads to witchcraft. (Is
Robertson right? Or does sanctimoniousness lead to prattle? Tune
in and find out.)

    It is, at any rate, hard to go one up on Whoopi. Actor
colleagues in a San Francisco rep company didn't succeed in the
early '80s, when they nicknamed her for a dim-witted
novelty-store joke. "I was very flatulent," she explains with
an angelic smile. "So for a while it was `Whoopi Cushion.' Then,
for a touch of class, `Whoopi Couchant.' So I thought, Why not?
I'll be Whoopi. But Whoopi Johnson just doesn't cut it." (You
figure that one out; her name then was Caryn Johnson.) So she
rummaged among her family names and came up with some
mixed-blood Goldbergs she swears are back there somewhere. "And
when I finally got to Broadway, people expected to see a little
old Jewish man."

    What people saw, in a one-woman show produced by Mike
Nichols, was an astonishing array of characters -- "spooks," she
called them, though the word irritated some blacks -- dreamed
up by Whoopi, and redreamed each night according to how she and
the audience were reacting to each other. Her improvised
characters, done without makeup or costume changes, didn't look
or talk like one another, and the differences were so sharp that
a casual viewer (the show, repeated later for HBO, is available
as a videocassette) might say, "Wait a minute, is this the same
performer?"

    There was the six-year-old black girl who came onstage
with a light-colored shirt draped across her forehead and down
her back. "Dat's my long blond tresses," she said, and went on
to explain that she didn't want to be black no more, cause she
wanted to be on The Love Boat when she grew up, and everyone on
The Love Boat has long blond tresses. "Don't nobody on TV look
like me," she said. And there was the white, 13-year-old girl
surfer explaining in flawless Valley-talk how she happened to
get pregnant and give herself a coat-hanger abortion ("So I said
O.K., and he said O.K., and we said O.K., O.K.?"). And the
Jamaican maid, and the crippled woman who was getting married in
two weeks.

    It was all dead-on perfect, but that was just technique,
mere brilliance. Where genius entered was in what Whoopi saw in
her spooks. Fontaine, the big-mouth male junkie, tells about
flying to Europe, and for a time you get some fairly standard
airplane jokes. Then Fontaine, by now in Amsterdam, is telling
you about visiting the Anne Frank museum. He doesn't break
character, he's still a badass, but now he's in Anne Frank's
attic, thoroughly shaken, explaining that she and her family hid
there from the Nazis, in silence, for month after month, and
that even at the end, Anne still believed that humanity was
basically good.

    Making people laugh while carrying off this kind of thing
without mawkishness is close to impossible, and Whoopi did it.
People left the theater feeling that they had just seen the best
dramatic show on Broadway. Director Steven Spielberg was one of
them, and he cast Goldberg as the farmer's ugly-duckling wife
Celie in The Color Purple. She had never been on a sound stage
before, but her performance turned out to be the best part of
a good film. And in the next few years, in role after role, her
acting was the best part of a succession of bad, mediocre and
upper-mediocre films.

    Such as Sister Act. Waiting for Whoopi's
dangerous-to-your-health mouth to fulminate is the main plot
element -- no, the sole plot element -- of this Disney
no-brainer, one of those renegade-hides-out-with-cute-nuns
movies that Hollywood makes every three years. So Sister Act
(which has grossed $125 million to date) has a touch of class it
doesn't really deserve. So do Clara's Heart, Jumpin' Jack Flash
and Ghost (for which Goldberg got the Oscar for Best Supporting
Actress, though she is firm in announcing that she's an actor,
and never mind the feminine dismissive). She has the ability to
turn a routine flick into a pretty good movie entirely on her
own.

    She grew up in the racially mixed Chelsea neighborhood of
Manhattan, messed around with drugs "the way everyone did then,"
and by her late teens was a high school dropout ("I just wasn't
cut out for it") with a broken marriage and a baby daughter.
Not long afterward she was living on welfare in San Diego. But
her story can't be told that quickly. She looks on her
childhood as privileged. Her mother, a nurse and a Head Start
teacher, was a strong woman ("Still is. She's got her foibles,
but she's amazing") who would say, "Get on the bus, go hear the
Leonard Bernstein concert, go see the children's ballet, go to
the museum . . ." And there were old movies on TV, "though I
didn't know they were old; I liked the idea of seeing Clark
Gable in the war on one channel, and then switching, and he'd
be riding a horse."

    Most magically, there was a glorious children's theater
program at the Hudson Guild, funded by Helena Rubenstein. By age
eight, the not-yet Whoopi was hooked. "I could be a princess,
a teapot [she laughs at the memory], a rabbit, anything. And
in a way, it's been children's theater ever since. I've only
recently begun believing that I've grown up, and acting is what
I do."

    Living on welfare in San Diego was demeaning, for the
usual reasons. Social workers sniffed about to see whether some
man was living on her allowance. When she made $25 from theater
work or a few off-and-on dollars for being a cosmetician in a
mortuary, she would stubbornly report the money to the welfare
people "because I didn't want my daughter seeing Mom lying." The
welfare people would stubbornly subtract it from her next check.
"Of course by that time the theater money would be gone." She
admits that the system did what it was supposed to do: it
propped her up when she needed it. But dignity wasn't part of
the process. "Yeah, I get pissy thinking about it, because it
shouldn't be so degrading," she says now. "But I'm not bitter.
That takes too much time."

    She has a reputation in the film community for being
difficult. "I've thrown tantrums," she says with a grin, "but
it's always about work. Incompetence makes me mad. It sucks up
your energy for what you're supposed to do. But it's never
personal, unless you make it personal, and then I will just
embarrass you as big as I can." The filming of Sister Act was
tension time, she admits. The script wasn't ready and didn't
flow logically. "I was crabby because things weren't right."

    Whoopi thinks the talk show is "probably not a great
career move. I should be riding the crest, doing films." But,
she says, she wanted to find out what's on people's minds.
Metzger, the white supremacist, told her that separation of the
races is important, "and I said, `Where are you people going,
because I sure as hell ain't leaving.' I'm not going to change
his mind, but I think as long as we keep a dialogue up, you can
see where their hands are. They can't be out in the streets
doing the other stuff." One sponsor, a pharmaceutical company,
said it wouldn't run its commercials on the Metzger show. "So
I had to say, `Then don't.' "

    Politics in Los Angeles means how you feel about the riots
(which were, she says, basically former Police Chief Daryl
Gates' bleep-you to the city). Goldberg sees some hope. "At
least blacks can now say to Korean grocers, `You are rude when
we come into the store,' and the Koreans can say, `When you come
into the store, we're frightened.' " Filming Sarafina! in Soweto
last winter (she plays a courageous teacher in the musical,
which will be released this week in New York City and Los
Angeles), Whoopi was the target of a "declaration of war" by a
black group opposed to the project. "We talked it over," she
says, "and the problem was more or less fixed. But, yeah, you
feel fear. They had issued a license to any nut who wanted to
take me out." As usual, death threats or not, she was thoroughly
professional for the filming. She arrived in South Africa with
her accent down pat, according to Darrell Roodt, 29, the white
director. Her acting is wonderfully instinctive, he says, and
watching her, he would think, "My God, she's a schoolteacher in
Soweto."

    Whoopi has been one of the rowdy, trash-talking co-hosts,
with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, of the virtually annual
Comic Relief TV shows to aid the homeless. Spend time with her,
and you see that the raunchiness isn't part of her act; it's
part of her nature. Clowning between takes with a photographer,
she improvises a gross-out commercial, drip-drip-drip, for
adult diapers. Ghost star Demi Moore reports that things got
cheerfully vulgar during the shooting of that film. "She'd say,
`It's coming, I feel it coming,' and then let out a belch. It
was so great. She just kept us laughing."

    Taping 120 talk-show conversations and doing what she
calls the "mogulette number" that goes with the project will
keep Whoopi busy for a few weeks. She has a continuing role as
Guinan, the psychic bartender, in Star Trek: The Next
Generation. But she has no film roles in view, though she is
enthusiastic about Made in America, a comedy with Ted Danson
that she finished not long ago. She does get film offers, but
not as many as one might think. A couple of years ago she gave
a wry answer to an interviewer from Premiere magazine who asked
why she appeared in so many not-so-hot films. "I did the
pictures I was offered," she said. "Do you think I would sit
around and say, `Here's great scripts, here's crappy scripts;
I'll do the crappy ones'?"

    She wants to work in Soweto again, but for now she's happy
to spend long weekends at her Connecticut unfarmed farm, where
it's green and peaceful. She has three horses there, and you can
tell by the names -- Peppy Bell, Shadow and Quisma -- that she
has owned them in her mind since she was little. Does she ride
English style? Course not; she grew up on western movies, so
she's a cowgirl, "but not too good at it." Getting on toward 40,
she has two brief marriages behind her ("They seemed like a
lifetime") and now, she says, lives happily alone. "But I've got
family; I'm surrounded." Her daughter and her older brother work
with her in Los Angeles. "It's a good time in my life. I'm
feeling pretty good about myself these days."