In the opening scene of Showtime’s new “American Gigolo” series—a modern-day remake of Paul Schrader’s 1980 erotic thriller about a high-end male escort who is framed for murder—Rosie O’Donnell offers a distraught Jon Bernthal a soda and a stick of gum. Bernthal, in the lead role originally played by Richard Gere, has landed in jail after waking up next to a dead woman with a bloody knife in his hand. O’Donnell, playing the no-nonsense homicide investigator Detective Sunday, is trying to butter him up before coaxing him to confess. Her deadpan Long Island accent adds a touch of folksiness to the scene, but it is clear that she means business. O’Donnell’s run in “American Gigolo” is just one of several supporting roles she has taken on recently in reboots, including as a surly bartender in the Amazon Prime Video adaptation of “A League of Their Own” and as an insecure newcomer in Showtime’s “The L Word: Generation Q.” Her reëmergence as an edgy presence in nostalgic remakes feels like a cheeky nod to her nineties mythos as the Miss Congeniality of daytime television–and to how far she’s migrated from that rosy reputation in the time since.
The erstwhile O’Donnell—the Koosh-ball-tossing, red-blazer-wearing, giggly, gushy host of “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” which aired on ABC from 1996 to 2002—was the one I watched every day growing up when I came home from school. Her effusive “Queen of Nice” persona was arguably the blueprint for a certain kind of aggressively cheerful, unabashedly dorky hosting technique. (You can draw a distinct line from O’Donnell’s hugs and sing-alongs to Ellen DeGeneres’s cringey dancing, or James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke,” or Jimmy Fallon’s aw-shucks party games with celebrities.) O’Donnell’s infatuation with show biz—always a central theme on her show—began early on, when she was a child in Commack, New York, dreaming of being on Broadway. (She ultimately got there, three times.) She lost her mother to breast cancer at the age of ten and threw herself into becoming the class clown. After graduating, she enrolled in college but ended up dropping out to try her hand at a standup career. In the early nineties, she moved from the clubs to the screen. She was a staple sidekick in Hollywood—she played the tomboy Doris Murphy in Penny Marshall’s “A League of Their Own,” and Meg Ryan’s quippy best friend in “Sleepless in Seattle.” Her talk show, where she babbled about her love of Broadway and broadcast her crush on Tom Cruise, rocketed her to another level of fame, and by 2001, she told me, ABC was offering her “insane” money to stay on the air. But, she said, after 9/11 happened she felt that she could no longer pretend to be happy all the time, and she exited her contract. (She also cut ties with the publishers of Rosie magazine, a move that led to high-profile legal battles.)
After leaving the confines of network television, O’Donnell seemed eager to speak openly to the public about her life. She came out as gay in 2002, during a standup set, and started a gay-family-vacations business with her then wife, Kelli Carpenter. (The pair has since separated but has four children together; O’Donnell adopted a fifth, in 2013.) “Celebrity Detox,” a candid memoir about her frustrations with fame—complete with angry poetry—was published in 2007. Since then, O’Donnell seems to have involved herself in one kerfuffle after another as a kind of notorious loose cannon, on both television and social media. She joined the cast of “The View,” twice, and began a feud with her co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck. She got into hot water for expressing anti-Catholic sentiments, for criticizing the Iraq War, and for engaging in a flame war with Donald Trump that continued through his Presidency. She has also found herself issuing a string of public apologies for making offensive offhand comments, including, most recently, in a TikTok video that she posted after meeting the actress Priyanka Chopra and mistaking Chopra’s parentage.
O’Donnell told me that she sees talking without a filter on social media as “a way to live authentically.” It may keep getting her in trouble, but for now she remains logged on. We also spoke about her early days in standup, her talk-show years, and “A League of Their Own” then and now. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
How did you get roped into “American Gigolo”? Were you a big Paul Schrader fan?
No, not at all. In fact, I barely remembered it. I remember that it was cute naked boys, and a lot of sex, which made me uncomfortable in the year 1980. I was graduating high school. I was not a fan. But my agent called me and said that they were doing this with Jon Bernthal—and I am a fan of his work—and that it was being done by David Hollander, and I was a huge fan of “Ray Donovan”!
My agent told me, “You got an offer. You don’t have to talk to the director, you don’t have to read with anyone, you got a straight offer.” That’s the first time that’s ever really happened.
Really?
Yeah. I had to audition for “I Know This Much Is True.” Because Derek [Cianfrance], the director of that, doesn’t make you do the script, but he just wants to talk to you. So I had to sit and talk to the director. But I’ve never had someone call and say, “Here’s the offer.” And it was written for a man, because it was played by Hector Elizondo in the original movie. So I don’t know what deep fans the “American Gigolo” original has, but I may annoy some people. You never know.
It does feel like if you are on TikTok or any kind of social media now, you’re constantly offering yourself up for people to be upset at you.
I can see that. But I think for me it is such a way to live authentically. There was always a problem that I had being on my show, when I’d walk down the street in New York City. Everyone knew me, and I’d look at the magazine rack on the street and I’d go, “Oh, look, Rosie O’Donnell is on the cover of Newsweek.” But I wouldn’t think, Me.
There was a separate Rosie that you felt was a character that you were playing?
No, not a character. It was as authentic as I could be at the time. “Will and Grace” wasn’t on. “Brokeback Mountain” hadn’t happened. So much has happened in thirty years within the L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. community.
I want to go back even further, all the way to Long Island.
Commack, Long Island.
What was it like where you grew up?
It was the suburban American Dream. We were the first families into the houses in 1965. All those houses were built in Long Island with government subsidies, and they all sort of looked alike. My father was raised in a tenement. He used to tell us about the rats crawling up the curtains. And here he was with a piece of land, a quarter of an acre, and a six-bedroom house. We played kickball every night. It was, looking back now, a very innocent time.
And you were popular. Or so I read.
I was popular, yes. I was very funny, and I was very interested in getting the teachers to laugh. I didn’t want the other kids in the class to laugh at the teacher. I wanted to make the teacher laugh, and I did. I got a tremendous amount of love from the teachers in my life. One of them, Pat Maravel, really took me in and mothered me. She died a few years ago of breast cancer, as well as my mom. My first mom died of breast cancer [when I was ten years old].
That must have been hard.
I had one middle-school teacher who didn’t know what had happened or what was going on. My grandmother, who lived with us, was quite sick at this time, too. That teacher asked me, “Roseann, why didn’t you do your homework?” And I just said, “I don’t know. I didn’t have time.” He went, “That’s it. Give me your mother’s phone number.” And silence fell over the class. My heart started pounding, and he’s, like, “What is your mother’s phone number?” and “What is your mother’s name?” I didn’t answer, and he finally stopped asking, but then the kids were passing notes that said, “He doesn’t know her mom is dead.” I saw that and ran out of the school, and I ran home, but the doors were locked. So I went into my neighbor’s house, through the basement window, and I stayed in there until after dark, and they couldn’t find me.
And then I wouldn’t go back to school for a week. The principal of the school, I think her name was Rena Bologna, came to my house and talked to me about how her mother had died when she was younger and she understood, and so I ended up going back. And this teacher, Pat Maravel, heard that story. She was twenty-seven years old, she was a pretty new teacher, and she was engaged to the band teacher. She asked for me to be her student teacher. Every day, I had forty minutes alone with this woman, and she really taught me how to love. She was the first person to say “I love you” to me. We’re not an “I love you” family, or we weren’t when I was a kid on Rhonda Lane.
And when did you start performing? Was it when you were still in school?
In school, they had a show every year where the seniors made fun of the teachers when they were graduating. My brother was a senior, and he said, “Why don’t you ask my sister to write it? She’s really good at doing impressions and stuff.” So I wrote it, and I did Roseann Roseannadanna, Gilda Radner’s character.
And this kid in my class had a brother who was older than him by fifteen years, who was opening a comedy club in my town. And he said, “Why don’t you come down and do some standup?” And I said, “I don’t want to be a standup comedian. I want to be a Broadway star. I want to be an actress!” And he’s, like, “Well, why don’t you come and try it?” I was sixteen. I went to his club, and he put me on, and the first night all my friends from high school were there because it was a weekend, and I killed. But I said things like, “Mitchell doesn’t know that Mary Lynn is also going out with Billy Shear.” I didn’t have any jokes. I was just talking about all the gossip among all the high-school students.
The next day, they said, “You have to come back tomorrow and try it again.” And I said, “O.K.” And I came back the next day, and none of the students were there. . . .
So your student material did not land.
I didn’t have any material! Imagine the hubris. I’m sixteen years old, up there in front of thirty-year-olds who worked all week. I bombed. But they said, “Well, you can keep coming. You can sit in the back and watch, or you could be the hostess and learn how to be on the stage.” So I was the hostess. Shirley Hemphill from “What’s Happening!!” was performing there, which to me was a huge thing.
She came to an open-mike night that I was on, and she walked up to the owner and said, “She’s opening for me this weekend. You pay her fifty dollars a set or else I’m not going on.” He said I was too green. But Shirley Hemphill saw something and championed me in my career for a very long time. She helped me get my manager, Bernie Young, who did my show and then ended up doing “The Wendy Williams Show.”
So in those early days, when Shirley was giving ultimatums to get you onstage, do you remember if you had a joke that killed?
Well, it’s so bad that I hardly even want to tell you it.
Now you have to.
I think I said something like, “So I just got a water bed. When the alarm goes off, I have to catch a wave just to turn it off.” O.K., it’s not even a joke.
It’s funny when people say that they want to start doing standup. I’m, like, “Well, do you have ten or fifteen years to put into the road?” Because that’s what it takes. Standup for me was always a way to get to acting on Broadway. I never looked at Joan Rivers and thought, Oh, that’s what I want to do. I looked at Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand and thought, That’s what I want to do.
You wanted to sing?
And I can’t. I mean, I’ve been in three musicals, and the pianist has to really hit the note I’m supposed to start on, so loud that it distracts the orchestra, just for me to try to get close. I know what good singing sounds like, and I know when I go to Broadway and I get those hairs standing up on my arms. That is my dream, to one day have the voice of Streisand or Kristin Chenoweth or somebody who can really belt. But I’ve been lucky, because I’ve been cast in things that are not that hard and people kind of give me slack because it’s me. I usually come in at the end of a run so that they can still sell a few tickets.
I will say that when I was young, your talk show was the way I got to experience Broadway.
Then I did my job. Whenever anyone tells me that, I think, That was the reason I was there. Like, I think about Abbi Jacobson as a young woman watching “A League of Their Own” and feeling there was something missing, but she didn’t know how to articulate it yet. That’s queer filmmaking, mind and soul. And then everything comes together, and she takes that original source material and is able to translate it into a more honest, beautiful view of it. And I think, I was part of that.
How did you end up doing a cameo in Jacobson’s new “A League of Their Own” series?
I met Abbi Jacobson through Natasha Lyonne. We had dinner one night, and I found her so intelligent, so smart, so beautiful. And when she told me she was going to try to do this, I remember thinking, Wow, is she going to be able to? I loved her on “Broad City,” but to take a movie that everybody agrees they love and has nostalgia for and that’s on all the time and to play with that? Look what she did. She knocked it out of the park. Pardon the pun. . . . No, not a pun, but whatever. I was so moved to be an elder stateswoman in the scene, like an older lesbian, helping the new young girls who were just coming into it.
The show has been updated to include queer narratives. Does the fact that you’re involved feel as if it’s a part of the correction of the record?
Yeah. Listen, the early nineties was a different time. I don’t think a movie like that would’ve been made. I remember my show was on for a year or something, and they said, “There’s a new show. And this woman, Debra Messing, is going to play the straight best friend to a gay guy.” And I said, “Well, that’ll be cancelled in four weeks.” In a million years, I didn’t think that America was ready to have that show or to have the explosion of gay culture that we’re now in. It’s been a wild ride since I was a little girl at ten years old, who knew she was gay and who wanted to only wear boys’ clothes.
When did you know you wanted to go full time into comedy?
I didn’t want to go to college at all, but my father insisted. He was the only one in his family who went to college. When I dropped out to do standup, he was not happy, but he wouldn’t necessarily tell you that. He’d just say, “You know, Roseann, if you don’t have anything to fall back on, doll, well, what will happen to you?” I’m, like, “Well, I’m not going to fall back. That’s why I don’t have a backup plan, Dad, because I’m not going to fall back.” But I had a certainty that I would be doing this before I was even ten. When I was little and I was listening to Barbra Streisand’s “A Happening in Central Park,” singing all the words, making my mother laugh, I knew that somehow this was part of my destiny, which sounds so unbelievably hokey.
What are the chances that a little, chubby, gay girl from Long Island, tough talking, with no mom, would grow up and be me? Every single time when people say, “Oh, that could never happen,” I’m, like, “ ‘Never happen’ happens to me a lot.” I knew I would be friends with Bette Midler when I saw her when I was twenty-two, doing “Star Search” at Planet Hollywood in the Beverly Center mall.
Didn’t you win “Star Search”?
No, I lost! But it was a huge deal. Back at that time, there was no cable, so there were four or five channels. That’s it. And there was nowhere to get on TV if you were a female standup comic. Johnny Carson rarely booked females. I think he felt that he had supported and mentored Joan Rivers’s career, and he was done. It wasn’t like they were looking for the funny women. Every time when you were doing standup, they would put up on the marquee “Female Comic Night!” It was such a rarity. A lot of times, the club owners used to say to me, “If you are not good, I’m never booking another woman, because the last two sucked.” It was so misogynistic. It was so unbelievably a male-dominated profession.
When did you finally meet Bette Midler?
I met her at Marc Shaiman’s house. We were going to the wedding of Charlotte [Crossley], who was one of her backup singers. It was right after the Rodney King riots. We were all dressed up, and I went, “Are we going to go? We’re going to be late.” And Marc said, “We’re waiting for Bette.” And I said, “You’re telling me Bette Midler is going in the car with me to this wedding?” It was a huge limo with a really long couch and then two short couches on the end. So she was right behind the driver. The rest of the seats were all taken, and I was opposite her, with a good twelve feet in between us.
Then somebody said, “Let’s all tell our favorite Bette Midler story!” And she went, “What could you possibly know about me? Oh, well, this might be fun. Go.” And everyone started telling a funny Bette Midler story. But these were all her friends. I was the new person. So it got to me, and I said, “I’d like to pass.” And she said, “Why?” I said, “I don’t want to scare you.” She said, “You couldn’t scare me. What could you possibly know about me?” And I said, “O.K.” And I started to recite the first few pages of her children’s book.
“Baby Divine”!
The skies were ablaze with disorder that night,
the planets aghast in a quiver.
The delirious moon had the brass to be full
when it should have been only a sliver.
She was stunned. She was, like, “Oh, my God.” So that was the first time we met.
That’s true diva behavior, though, to have everyone tell stories about you in a limo while you’re present.
Listen, when you’re Bette Midler or Joni Mitchell—these are the legends, right? I mean, Joni Mitchell, to see her come back from that aneurysm and to see her at the Newport Folk Festival—I couldn’t believe it. I was so happy.
When did you start listening to Joni Mitchell’s music? I know she’s really important to you.
I think it was right around the time my mother died. My older brother Eddie was listening to it and then I started taking the albums. When he went to college, it was a big fight over “Court and Spark” and “Miles of Aisles.” She’s the poet of my lifetime. She is the poet that I respond to the most. I think she’s our best living artist currently and has been for a very long time.
It must have been surreal to have her on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show.”
She loved it. I knew [her publicist] Liz Rosenberg from Madonna. I said, “You have got to get me Joni. You don’t understand.” Then I closed the show to the orchestrated “Both Sides Now.” She’s solace to me. My kids go, “Oh, Mom, with the suicide music.” And I go, “It’s not suicide music. The score of Mommy’s life is in this lyric here.”
Leaping back to the nineties again, you’re doing standup and then all of sudden you’re making your film début, in “A League of Their Own.”
I was working as a v.j., and my agent called and said, “Can you play baseball?” And I was, like, “Can I play baseball? Yes. I can really play baseball.” So I went to the batting cages, I saw every starlet in Hollywood there, like Heather Locklear. It was like a big cattle call on Broadway, where everybody had to come and play baseball and you had to hit.
About two weeks into rehearsing, Penny [Marshall] called me in and said, “Madonna is coming tomorrow. If she likes you and likes me, she’ll do the movie. Try to be funny.” I was, like, “No pressure!” I had just seen “Madonna: Truth or Dare” with my boyfriend at the time, believe it or not. And he said to me after the movie, “I bet if you ever met her, you would be really good friends. You have so many similar things that happened to you in your childhood, and you have Catholic families.” And I said, “This is not how show business works. A comedian doesn’t get to go hang out with the most famous woman in the world.” Two days later, Penny was telling me she’s coming in. Having just seen the movie, I said to [Madonna], “Listen, I saw your movie, and I’m also named after my mother, and I went to her grave and laid on the ground like you did, and it was my name on the gravestone.” And she got kind of choked up and gave me a hug, and from then on in we were like family.
Did you have any sense that Doris was—not a queer-coded character but a butch, essentially? Was it something you could talk about with Penny? Was it just verboten to speak of it?
Well, Penny knew about me and my relationships, and that I was with Kelli [Carpenter], but I had a boyfriend during a lot of the filming of “League,” and so that must have been confusing. He was the first guy I ever dated. I knew that I was gay. I knew that [Doris] was a tomboy butch and that she was in love in a crushy way with Mae, but butch, masc-presenting lesbians—you don’t see a lot of them on television, right? I think that of all the characters on “A League of Their Own,” mine was definitely the gayest. But it wasn’t gay in a way that it is today. It was gay in the way of 1991. Just getting a film made about women’s sports was a big coup.
I think about your style back then, too. It was a little tomboy-esque, but you had such a flashy self-presentation back in the early nineties.
Yeah, the backward hat.
And all your little brimmed hats and giant earrings. Your blazer budget must have been insane.
Well, I have so much trouble with clothes in general. I really do dress like a boy. I wear T-shirts and baggy shorts in my real life. And so whenever I have to do anything it’s the panic of my life. So going to events, wherever you’ve seen me, know that I’ve struggled with whatever I’m wearing, to put it on and to figure out if it was right. But I always loved the way Katharine Hepburn looked. Just khakis and an oversized men’s white shirt.
Did you find that Nora Ephron, who you worked with next on “Sleepless in Seattle” and several times over the years, had a lot of opinions about what you should wear and how you should do your hair and all those things? That was her big thing.
Yeah. She liked to have me try harder. That’s what she said. She said, “Sometimes, Ro, it looks like you’re not trying.” I did her play “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” with Natasha Lyonne and Tyne Daly. And we were reading the play the first day, and Tyne and I were dressed up. We’re both a little round, and we were both wearing Eileen Fisher, which is one of the go-tos if you are size 18. So we both were so appalled when this line said, “Let’s face it, when you start wearing Eileen Fisher, you might as well give up.” Tyne and I looked at each other, and we both went, “Hmm,” and everyone laughed.
When the prospect of a talk show was presented to you by NBC, was there a sense the studio gave you that you had to look a certain way, act a certain way, or be a certain way?
No. I told them before I signed the contract that I was gay. I didn’t want them to find this out as a surprise. They were investing a lot of money. At the time, they paid me a lot up front, and then I did exceptionally well with the deal that I got, thanks to Oprah, because we all learned from Oprah. And they never told me one thing about how I should look or what I should do.
Now, toward the end, when I was talking about politics, they didn’t love it. And I was lucky that I got off right after 9/11, because it took a while to recover from the changes in our world. It was not a great time in my life. And I was really happy that I didn’t have to be on television every day during the Bush years and the wars that were happening. So I think I was fortunate to be done the time I was done. It was like God sort of said, “We’re going to give you a little cocoon to feel better in. You’re going to come back down to earth, and you’re going to remember what it’s like to live as a normal person, but it’s going to take a couple years,” and it did.
Did it feel limiting, though, to have this persona, even in the time when you were given free rein? To be so cheerful? You were dubbed the “Queen of Nice” in the nineties. All Koosh balls and hugs.
Listen, so many comedians come across that way, but their innate disposition is . . . for me, I have major depressive disorder, right? It’s hard to get to the surface sometimes. Now, what helps me? The sun, the water, my children, my family, working, having to be accountable to someone. Maybe that’s what TikTok does as well—who knows what place it fills? It also is funny that you don’t need a publicist anymore, which my publicist will probably be furious at me for saying. I’m just saying that it’s almost become an antiquated business form, because, if somebody says something about you, you can just go, “Well, here’s my response to that.” It feels like an authentic form of free speech.
I do feel as if the character you were playing on your show—or maybe it was really you—was this person who seemed to authentically be an enthusiast about things, which felt fresh at the time.
It was real. I was a huge fan! I had never met so many of these people. Barbra Streisand was a dream. Tom Cruise was a dream.
Oh, God. The “Tommy, Can You Hear Me?” button. The sound of my youth!
Some people have said to me, “Oh, you were pretending not to be gay because of Tom Cruise.” I’m, like, “I said every single time I told you I loved him, I wanted him—not in my bed but mowing my lawn and getting me a lemonade.” I love the guy. I think he’s a really fantastic human being. And he’s been so unbearably kind. He sends me flowers every year on my birthday, and on Christmas. And I know maybe it’s his assistant, but still. A lot of people give me shit because they’re, like, “Well, he’s in Scientology.” I’m, like, “Well, I wish he wasn’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t love him.”
But I don’t think I was playing a character. I was myopically focussed on show business my entire life, and to be in the midst of it, and to be able to meet the people that you admire and respect, was overwhelming. And, once it was no longer authentically exciting to me, I knew I had to go, because I couldn’t pretend.
And then Barbara Walters called and said, “We want you to go on ‘The View’?”
I had done a documentary with Sheila Nevins about the [gay-family] cruise that Kelli and I did, and Barbara came to see it. She said [puts on a Barbara Walters accent], “Rosie, would you ever want to be a panelist on ‘The View’?” And I said, “With you, Barbara, of course I would,” and the rest is history. And then I did it again, and I had to leave because it was too hard to do in the times we were in and with the resistance that I got the second time. I don’t know. My heart doctor said, “I watch you, and they have a closeup of you, and I can see your carotid artery.” And I had a heart attack at fifty, so this doctor was, like, “Do you think you need this stress? I mean, do you need the money?” I was, like, “No, I don’t.”
Are you talking about the stress of your feud with Elisabeth Hasselbeck?
No, this is more about the second time. With Hasselbeck, I made a vow that I was going to befriend and love her, regardless of her political positions. And it really worked until we had that fight on the air like two girls in high school. I mean, she would come to my house and swim in my pool, and I took her and her kids to see a Broadway show. I bombed her with love, and then what happened happened on the show. You can watch it and see for yourself. It lives forever.
Do you feel that your career has been sort of in two parts, where Rosie plays by everyone else’s rules and is a good girl of the NBC system and then breaks out, or do you not see it in such stark terms?
I don’t see it in such stark terms. I see that more, like, with Jim Carrey. I just saw a picture of Jim Carrey with his full beard, holding a rabbit and saying that he doesn’t spend so much time with people anymore, that we are the real savages. I thought, Now, that’s somebody who’s broken out and gone. I felt like the show was restricting me in ways where I couldn’t figure out a way to merge my private life and my public life. In my private life, everyone knew I was gay because I was the mother of children at a school that I would go to with my wife. And I sat next to her at every Emmy Awards when I won, and she was with me all the time. And it was a common, very unkept secret in the industry, but you have to understand: no journalist asked me about that. No journalist—and I did a lot of press—ever said to me, “Are you gay?”
Like when Ellen [DeGeneres] came on on the show and said that she was “Lebanese,” and I said, “Oh, I’m ‘Lebanese,’ too. I like baba ghanoush,” or whatever. And anyone who’s gay knew what the hell we were talking about, and that was the way that people kind of conversed and could get away with it, kind of the wink. But it was a live show. People could have asked whatever they wanted. But nobody did. It was a different time.
It’s interesting when you say that you didn’t know how to merge your public and private lives, because, for at least the last decade, it seems as if you’ve been really adamant about making yourself known in public, and on social media. There’s always a new headline about something you said or did.
To me, if you don’t stand up against the fascism that is occurring here in our nation, under our nose, what good are you? Every historian is saying, “We’re on the precipice of disaster,” and there are people who are in a cult that was started by Donald Trump and Mark Burnett. Mark Burnett, who did “The Celebrity Apprentice” and lied to people that [Trump] was a successful businessman—he hasn’t paid in any capacity for this. I don’t understand why you’re allowed to create a fiction about someone and have that fiction manifest into the cult that it is today.
Very few women have a platform at all. So if two million or so people want to listen to my ramblings on TikTok while I’m sitting here with my kid, waiting for her to get home from camp, I don’t know. I think it also normalizes celebrity in some way.
Sure. But it does feel like you have to do a lot of apologizing.
Sometimes the trouble I do make myself. The Priyanka Chopra thing was an example, right? And I didn’t know how to answer other than to say, “I was an idiot. I was anxious, and I messed up.” If I had never said anything about it, of course she never would’ve, so why did I have to say anything about it? I work with that on my therapist.
Even the thing with Anne Heche. I was so devastated by the tragedy. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And I was saying this on the days that she was in the hospital and watching her movies, and, just then, they said she was going to die. Then she dies, and then somebody sends me a tape from a podcast from a year ago that she did, talking about me and obviously very hurt, and something that she’s carried for twenty-five years.
Right, she said that she felt you had pressured her not to talk about her relationship on your show.
I felt heartbroken that she would’ve felt that all these years, when I would’ve called her up and said, “Hi. Let’s talk about this.” I would never say that to anyone, ever, and then expect them to come out and be jovial on my show. It doesn’t make any sense. And I don’t doubt that people gave her shit for that, and she suffered a long way with her being with Ellen. But Ellen came out on my show. And, the time that [Anne] was on, we did talk about Ellen, and she and Ellen came to my house in Miami and had lunch.
I don’t know how to make that O.K., and I guess there’s no way to do it.
Is there anyone that you consider to be a personal hero, still to this day? Obviously, we talked about Joni, but in terms of how they’ve handled themselves as a person who became a celebrity or well known with grace?
I think David Bowie really did. He was a very gentle soul and an artist through and through. He hated musicals, but I took him to see “Rent.” I was, like, “This is supposed to be great, David. I know you’re going to like it.” After twenty minutes, he leans over and says, “I’m going to kill you.” What he did to get back at me was he took me to Nobu with Iman. I didn’t like sushi. He said, “We’re going, and you’re eating everything I order for you.” And it was the most delicious meal I’ve ever had in my life, and it remains my favorite restaurant, and when I go I order the David Bowie menu. ♦
An earlier version of this article misspelled Pat Maravel’s name.
Sourse: newyorker.com
