Rosie O'Donnell is plopped in an overstuffed chair in her colorful suite of offices overlooking New York City's Rockefeller Center. She is a renegade in a Yankees T-shirt, shorts and high-tops, and she is telling a story, although loud giggles from her twenty-month-old son, Parker, keep interrupting her. "I'm sitting on the plane, and who walks on but Burt Bacharach," says O'Donnell, her eyes wide and her Long Island accent thick. "I turn to the lady next to me and say, 'Oh my God, that's Burt Bacharach!" And she turns to me and says, 'Oh my God, it's you!"

What exactly does "being you" mean for someone like Rosie O'Donnell? For one thing, it means pulling down a cool $4 million to have her childhood idols — Mary Tyler Moore, Liza Minnelli, Elton John — take turns in the guest chair of The Rosie O'Donnell Show.

It means being best buddies with folks like Madonna or Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson.

It means craving motherhood keenly enough to submit to the rigors of single-parent adoption.

But, more than anything, being Rosie O'Donnell means having a drive born of a sadness so deep that it permeates every aspect of her adult life.

Once upon a time, O'Donnell sang Barbra Streisand songs to her mother, Roseanne, as she cooked dinner every night. Then, when Rosie O'Donnell was ten, her mother died from breast cancer. "My whole life revolves around my mother's death," says the thirty-four-year-old star. "It changed who I was as a person. I don't know who I would be if my mother had lived. But I would trade it all in to see."

Perhaps she never recovered from the tragedy because her family never dealt with it. "It wasn't spoken about in our house. All of my mother's things were removed," recalls O'Donnell. Her father, she says, became "emotionally absent," leaving her and her four brothers and sisters to be raised by neighbors. One neighborhood mom took the preteen to buy her forst bra. "It was traumatic," she recalls quietly. "When a girl gets her period and her mom is not there to comfort her, it's incredibly painful."

To fill that void, O'Donnell relied upon the television shows Eight Is Enough, The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family. "I would watch these shows hoping that my father would meet a Julie Andrews-type who would bring love and life back to our home," she says.

She also took her search for surrogate parents to school, where her popularity (she was voted Homecoming Queen) had a purpose. "I didn't care about the kids," she says, "I wanted to make the adults laugh."

O'Donnell had always loved to perform, from the time she was in kindergarten. "For show-and-tell, kids are bringing in Barbie dolls, and I'm singing 'Oklahoma,'" she says now in a chuckle. "In 1973 I saw Bette Midler on Broadway, and I thought, That's what I want to do. I'd watch Barbra Streisand and think, I want to be her. Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball — I wanted to be the funny women, and when I saw characters like Ethel and Rhoda, I knew, Now there's a role for me."

Her mother's death infused a single-minded sense of purpose in the daughter left behind. "I remember thinking at ten years old, if I was going to die in my thirties, what would I want to have achieved?" says O'Donnell. "It made me strive for my goals with a fervent passion."

The goal she chose--to make people laugh--was a well-worn survival tactic in her family. "After our mother died, if you wanted to express something painful, you could only do it couched in comedy," she explains. Comedy was also a way of emulating her late mother. "One night I was watching my mother at a PTA meeting making everyone laugh," says O'Donnell, with a twinkle in her eye. "I was about five, and I remember thinking, Wow, that's a good thing."

While still a teenager, O'Donnell took her act — personal observations about her life and family — on the road. For a decade she worked the clubs until some TV roles let to her first major break, a plum role in A League of Their Own. Director Penny Marshall says O'Donnell worked hard both onscreen and off: "You could see the thousands of extras getting restless, and she would take the microphone and do her stand-up and imitate Modonna singing 'Like a Virgin.'"

Still, O'Donnell says that she was terrified to meet Madonna. "Totally. Had diarrhea," she admits. But she had just seen Truth or Dare, and caught a glimpse of a kindred spirit. At their first meeting, O'Donnell recalls, "I looked her in the eye and said, 'My mom died when I was ten, too. Your movie reminded me a lot of my life.' And that was it. We became friends right then."

O'Donnell met another friend for life, Nora Ephron, when the director cast her in Sleepless in Seattle. O'Donnell's appeal, according to Ephron, is that "the audience looks at her and thinks, I wish that could be my best friend," says Ephron. "Rosie had that in Sleepless, and it's why her show works. She's a fantastically open person." And Ephron should know. Says O'Donnell, "Nora's a mother to me. She's the one I go to when I have questions."

If there's one thing O'Donnell has never questioned, it's her wrenching desire to become a mother herself. "The same way I knew that I would be an entertainer, I knew that I would be a mother," she says. So, at the age of thirty, she started the two-and-a-half-year procedure of interviews and counseling to adopt. "I would be open to giving birth, but it wasn't in the near future when I started the process," she says, adding, "I have no investment in having a miniature me running around."

Nor did O'Donnell have a gender preference, although she has a theory about why she wound up with a son. "I have a lot of issues to work out about men," she explains carefully. "I had some stuff with my dad that was never really resolved. I think that [the adoption] helps me to connect in a way that I wasn't able to before. I'm so in love with this child, who is a male and his own person.

While O'Donnell has always been a doting aunt for her nieces, her inexperience with boys manifested itself early on. "I told Rosie [that] Parker hadn't been circumcised, even though she insisted that he had," laughs friend Rita Wilson.

"I just thought, Wow it really healed good in two days," remembers O'Donnell, who burst into tears when she realized the mistake (due to a mix-up in the hospital records). Friend Kate Capshaw, the wife of Steven Spielberg, arranged to have the circumcision performed the next day.

Parker has provided a joyful priority in O'Donnell's life. "He's taught me to value my time with him more than anything else," she says. "I leave work by three o'clock every day and turn the phones off until he goes to bed." Not that every moment of motherhood has been, well, delicious. "I picked him up and was like, 'Hi!'" she says, opening her mouth wide do demonstrate, "and he vomited an entire jar of baby squash right in my mouth!"

Still, it's all because of Parker that The Rosie O'Donnell Show even exists. When O'Donnell was filming Harriet the Spy, she came home to a little boy who hadn't seen her in so long, he wouldn't go near her. The next day, O'Donnell called her agent and said, "That's my last movie." That was when the comedian came up with the idea for a chat show that would be "a Merv Griffin for the nineties," she says. "And I knew it could work because I used to watch Merv and Dinah every day after school with my grandmother."

To say the show works is an understatement--its success is, in fact, unprecedented. Just four months after its debut, the show's one-year contract was renewed until the year 2000 for the largest fee increase in television history. O'Donnell has certain ironclad rules to make it work so well. First of all, The Rosie O'Donnell Show is friendly to the famous. Rule number two: O'Donnell keeps Parker out of the act. "I don't want him to become like Chastity Bono or Cody Gifford where his name and experiences are public record." Rule number three: She will not willingly compete with Oprah. "People say to me, 'How do you feel that Barbra Streisand is doing Oprah and you can't get her booked?' I say, 'If I were Barbra, I'd do Oprah, too,'" she explains.

The admiration is mutual. "I adore Rosie," says Winfrey. "She and I have the same gift, which is the ability to be ourselves in front of the camera. The truth of who we are comes through, and that's what people like."

Critics agree that The Rosie O'Donnell Show's success has everything to do with the down-to-earth host, who really is as big a fan of her guests as any audience member. Take her on-air obsession with Streisand. "When my father removed my mother's things, her records were the one thing he left," says O'Donnell. "So Streisand was a connection to my mom."

O'Donnell's fun-loving spirit is also reflected in her home, which is decorated in Big Kid chic — primary colors and toys. "It's like a kid's playroom, except adult size," says Rita Wilson. "She has her collection of McDonald's Happy Meal toys on the shelves of her living room. Her enthusiam comes from creating a fun childhood in her adult life."

Despite the accolades, it does not seem likely that success will spoil this star. "I still wear Gap," says O'Donnell, whose reaction to her Newsweek "Queen of Nice" cover story seems typical Rosie. "You know how you can get your picture on a fake magazine cover?" she says. "Every time I saw [the magazine] on a newsstand, I thought they'd put out a fake Newsweek that week."

Oddly, the star feels just as disconnected from her physique. "Whenever anyone tells me to lose weight, I always laugh, like I could, but I'm just keeping it on because I like to!" she cracks. "But when I'm at my thinnest, I never really feel thin, and when I'm at my heaviest, I'm always surprised at how I got there. So I'm disconnected from my career and my physical self. Two things I have to work on. Like Oprah's book says, make the connection. I have not made the connection."

If there is one area where O'Donnell needs no fine-tuning, though, it's her principles. Some examples: She will never work with Woody Allen because of his relationship with his stepdaughter Soon-Yi. She declined to be photographed for Madonna's 1992 book, Sex. On the set of Now and Then, she gave her food money to a homeless mother. "I said, 'Great, now she's going to find drugs,'" says Wilson, one of the films co-stars. "And Rosie said, 'Maybe. But maybe this will change her life.'" And now O'Donnell is setting up a foundation to help working moms. "Basically, I'm going to ask rich women to give one million dollars each to subsidize day-care centers in inner cities," she says. Adds Wilson, "If The Celestine Prophecy ever had a human manifestation, it's Rosie. The more she gives away of herself, the more it just comes back to her."

Sometimes those huge returns come in pint-sized packages, like the one scampering around O'Donnell's office. "Before him, I was a little depressed and I didn't know it. I knew I wasn't as happy as I thought I should be, based on my success," she says as Parker comes to rest his head on her knee. "But when I'm with him, I feel true joy."

O'Donnell seems in no rush to wrap up the interview, but the tuckered-out tyke has his own agenda. Leveling his gaze at the visitor, he yells one of the few words he knows, "Bye-bye!" cutting off the conversation with comedic timing that even his old lady couldn't beat.

[Sidebar:]
ROSIE'S RULES: How this nice girl finished first
Be Friendly to Everyone
She landed her first acting job, a role on the sitcom Gimme a Break, with the help of a cocktail waitress she befriended at one of her regular comedy gigs. Because O'Donnell had always been nice to her, the waitress refused to give a table of NBC executives their check until they'd seen O'Donnell's act.

Mind Your Manners
After her VJ audition tape was rejected by MTV, O'Donnell still wrote the producer a nice note. He was so impressed by the gesture that he hooked her up at VH1, where she landed a coveted VJ job. "A thank-you note got me that job," she says.

Play Nice
The comedian will only tell jokes about somebody that she would feel comfortable saying to them — exceptions being O. J. Simpson and Woody Allen. "If I'm morally offended by somebody — if your accused of murder or you sleep with your stepdaughter — you're open game," she says. "But I've never been interested in mean-spirited comedy." An audience-pleasing move, considering her show is the highest-rated debut of daytime talk shows in the last decade.

Forgive and Forget
When Donny Osmond made a fat joke on her show, he was booed off the stage. Still, the host invited him back to apologize. "I made him put on a puppy-dog suit and sing 'Puppy Love,'" she says. "It was the highest-rated show ever."

[Cutlines:]
Hugging pal Madonna in A League of Their Own
With Richard Dreyfus and Emilio Estevez in Another Stakeout
Crying with Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle
Dominating Dan Aykroyd in Exit to Eden
As Betty Rubble in The Flintstones
With her Now and Then co-stars
In Beautiful Girls
With Michelle Trachtenberg in Harriet the Spy

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