A&U America's AIDS Magazine Issue 68, June 2000

Makin' Whoopi!

DANN DULIN

Hangin' with Whoopi
A&U ASKS WHOOPI GOLDBERG A FEW PERSONAL QUESTIONS
Who are your favorite classic movie matinee idols? Bette Davis and John Garfield.
What do you like least about fame? The intrusion.
Who is your all-time favorite comedian? Moms Mabley and Richard Pryor.
What makes you angry? Incompetence.
Out of all the people you have met, who has impressed you the most? My mom.
Who would you like to work with that you haven 't worked with yet? (There is no hesitation when she answers.) Russell Crowe.
How do you relax? When I find out, I'll let you know.
How would you like to die? Happily.
What is your motto? Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.
Descrebe these people you know:
Robin Williams: Brilliant.
Billy Crystal: Sublime.
Mary-Louise Parker: Totally underrated actress.
Angela Bassett: Cool.
Jean Stapleton: Fabulous.
Al Gore: Potentially one of the greats.
Elton John: One of the greats.
Stockard Channing: Incredible.
Rosie O'Donnell: All that! All that

Whoopi! Whoopi! Whoopi! It's fun to say her name. In fact, she initially changed her birth name from Caryn Johnson to Whoopi Cushion. But that didn't quite fit, so she chose Goldberg, which is part of her ancestry. But, with a name like Whoopi, who needs a last name? Whoopi falls into the single name category--like Elvis, Madonna, Sting, and Cher.

      A&U finally pinned this industrious woman down, which was no easy task. At last we capture Whoopi on her cell phone, as she treks the Los Angeles freeways after accepting an American Women in Radio and Television Genii award ("I'm leaning on it as we speak," she tells me early on in our conversation.) Surprisingly, she is clam and as centered as a bullseye. Gabbing with her is like catching up with a pal.

      Whoopi was well-aware of the AIDS epidemic before it even had a name. She was living in Berkeley at the time. "Suddenly folks were getting sick and dropping in horrible ways. And no one could put a finger on what it was and for a long time people just wouldn't speak of it. It was all about...if you'd said, 'Where was so-and-so,' someone would give you a look and you knew what it meant."

      "Hundreds of my friends have died before their time. The most profound effect it's had on me is that when I heard that someone had died from a heart attack it was almost like an elation. It was like, 'oh, okay.' Because you just got to the point where you couldn't take on emore [death]. Couldn't take one more," she repeats for impact, which she does frequently. "People would talk about AIDS like it was divine retribution. Then you heard that it was something that only affected one community, but you knew it couldn't be true. The idea that people could not bring themselves to look at the bigger picture from the very beginning." Thoughtfully, she continues. "If you have something that is ravaging people it stands to reason that eventually all people are going to start seeing it." Wind swirls through the phone and makes a quick deafening sound. Whoopi pauses but doesn't lose a beat. "And that it took so long for anybody to come to terms with it was insane to me. While I applaud everything that people have been doing it's taken a good long time to happen. It took a long time for people to get it together with hospices. It took a long time for us to formulate the fact that we had to get into people's homes to feed them and do home care--all of those things."

      In 1995, Whoopi lost her personal assistant, Ron Holder, to AIDS. "I'm embarrassed to say, but it's something that I had been through a whole bunch of times. I knew that there wasn't anything to be done since the cocktails were only just beginning to come out. He was just at the tip of the cocktails so his going was not as horrific as some of my earlier friends. Still, it was unbearable to think that there was nothing to be done. It was very hard too, because there's nothing you can say. There are just no words of encouragement."

      In order to cope with the grief, Whoopi celebrates the lives of the friends she has lost, acknowledging how blessed she was to have had them in her life--even for a brief time. "You have to always celebrate people's lives, and not their deaths because people in my mind only die when you forget them. I believe that in my heart. I try to always celebrate the memory and keep it alive by talking about htem. Talk about the good stuff and the bad stuff; the good times and the tough times. The times when you were cranky, and the times when they weren't," she laughs in that familiar raspy, down-home voice. "Take all the good stuff you were able to share with each other in terms of learning. The people who die don't want you to stop living. They don't want you to stop experiencing, or feeling. They want you to keep going."

      What is Whoopi's concept of death? "It's sort of abstract unless I'm in an airplane! That's when it becomes really apparent that it's real," she seems to lament with a hint of irony. She hates to fly, and travels coast to coast by bus. "For me really it's about listening and looking for signs of people that you knew." She subscribes to the Houdini theory: Houdind said that when he died he would make contact from the other side so that people knew he was still around. "I call it, listening for Houdini," she specifies as the cell phone crackles eerily.

      Officially, Whoopi was born in 1955, although her age seems to fluctuate somewhat depending on the source of the information. A recent news item clocked her at fifty. She grew up in the multicultural Chelsea projects in Manhattan. She claims she had a healthy childhood, even though her father deserted her mother, Caryn, and her brother, Clyde. Her mother raised and provided for the kids with a liberal, cosmopolitan outlook. Whoopi loved the movies, but didn't watch much television. At the age of eight she was performing in children's theater. She attended parochial school for eight years, dropping out during her freshman year of high school. During the tumultuous sixties, she experimented with drugs. Eventually, she became bored with them and entered a drug program. She married her drug counselor, had a baby (Alexandrea), divorced, and then split to San Diego. Whoopi was barely twenty.

      In San Diego she worked in local theater. She took many odd jobs including dishwasher at The Big Kitchen restaurant where she was employed for four years. The popular eatery proudly displays her photo to this day. Finding it tought to meet expenses, she went on welfare. Whoopi then moved to San Francisco, continuing to hone her stage persona by creating a stable of characters that became known as The Spook Show. The show was booked in New York City where it caught the attention of director Mike Nichols, who contacted her to do a one-woman show on Broadway. Whoopi was on her way!

      The show was later taped for an HBO special. Steven Spielberg saw it and cast her in The Color Purple, for which she received an Oscar nomination for her outstanding work. Whoopi told the Los Angeles Times in August 1994, "Mike [Nichols] babysat me and made everybody come and told me I was great. And then he handed me to Steven [Spielberg]. The told me how much people will tell you how much they love what you're doing, then try to make you do something different. They told me, 'Stick to your guns because, generally, you'll find that you're right.' And that's allowed me to keep my hair as it is and keep my nose flat and my behind large."

      In 1991, Whoopi received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of the loony Oda Mae Brown in Ghost. Whoopi has appeared in over thirty movies and some were actually hand-me-down roles, which she gratefully acknowledges: Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986) was originally meant for Shelley Long; Burglar (1987) for Bruce Willis; Sister Act (1992) for Bette Midler; and Made in America (1993) for Jessica Lange. In 1995, in recognition of her many contributions to the entertainment industry, Whoopi preserved her handprints and trademark dreds in cement at Hollywood's legendary Chinese Theatre.

      Whoopi recently made her mark as an executive producer for the upcoming feature The Piano Man's Daugther, written and directed by Kevin Sullivan and starring Stockard Channing (A&U, April 2000) and Christian Campbell (Trick). Whoopi has completed roles in More Dogs than Bones, Monkey Bone, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and Golden Dreams, and is currently filming Disney's Kingdom Come. Whoopi can currently be seen alongside Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie in Girl, Interrupted.

      To date she has made two AIDS-themed movies, In the Gloaming directed by Christopher Reeve which costarred Glenn Close and Bridget Fonda, and Boys on the Side, appearing opposite Drew Barrymore and Mary-Louise Parker (A&U, October 1999). On television, she appeared for five seasons on Star Trek: The Next Generation, costarred with Jean Stapleton (Edith Bunker on All in the Family) on a short-lived sitcom, Bagdad Cafe (based on the cult German film), and in the early nineties hosted her own late night talk show. She received Emmy nominations for being host of the 66th, 68th, and 71st Academy Awards telecasts. Presently she's center square on Hollywood Squares.

      And she is currently in several crusades around the country. The dyslexic Whoopi and Rosie O'Donnell are on a campaign for "Get Caught Reading," sponsored by the Association of American Publishers to encourage people to read. And since she is lactose intolerant, her mug can be seen in a campaign with that familiar milk moustache, but with a slight twist--she advertises for lactose-free milk. In 1992, she made her debut as an author with the children's book, Alice. And in 1997 her second literary adventure, Book, was an instant New York Times bestseller.

      Whoopi has garnered numerous awards for her tireless humanitarian efforts, having raised money for many causes including the homeless (the Comic Relief trio, where Whoopi, Robin Williams, and Billy Crystal raised over forty million dollars), the battle against AIDS, substance abuse, human rights, and eve hurricane survivors. As Goodwill Ambassador for the American Health Foundation, Whoopi is a spokesperson for health education initiatives, including Child Health Day. She has been quoted as saying, "I believe I'm here for a reason. And I think a little bit of the reason is to throw little torches out to the next step to lead people through the dark."

      Among her AIDS benefits, she reprised her one-woman show at Carnegie Hall in 1996 for Mike Nichol's Friends In Deed organization (A&U, December 1998 and January 2000), and she appeared in a stage production of Sweet Charity, a one night performance for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (A&U, May 1999). That same year, she designed a Whoopi T-shirt for Planet Hollywood and the proceeds from sales where donated to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. In 1997, she replaced Nathan Lane in the Broadway cast of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, playing Pseudolus, but as a woman. During many of her curtain calls, she would enthusiastically make a plea for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS and eventually raised $233,000 for the AIDS charity. "She would go on about it for ten minutes and then entertain the audience. She would sign autographs of videos of her films or Hirschfeld caricatures, and she would sell them to people coming backstage. Her appeal was like nobody else's," said Tom Viola, executive director of BC/EFA in a previous interview.

      Whoopi's also brought her fervent spirit to Project Angel Food (A&U, January 2000), where she is cochair with Jimmy Smits for its 10th Anniversary Fund comemorating ten years of serving free meals to those living with HIV/AIDS throughout Los Angeles. Last December, at the Divine Design fund-raiser--an annual fashion and design event--Whoopi served as master of ceremonies. "Whoopi is personally committed to the agency because it served so many of her friends and she's totally involved for the right reason. We are honored to have her as our cochair," says John Gile, executive director.

      What propels this hip grandma to be an activist? "I don't know. It's not something I think about. If it's there, and needs to be done, I recognize it, then I try to do something about it. It's one thing to live in ignorance because that's a natural state. But to live in knowledgeable ignorance is wrong. If you don't have the information, that's one thing; if you have the information and do nothing, that doesn't fit well for me. It's just something that has to be done and I do it," she states matter-of-factly.

      Indeed, AIDS and STD prevention, the liberal use of condoms, and sex in general were all tossed around candidly in the Goldberg household, which included her daugther, Alex, now twenty-six, who has a ten-year-old of her own, Amarah Skye. "Oh, yes!" Whoopi exclaims. "There was no way not to discuss it. We talked about everything openly. And AIDS was something she was seeing firsthand because these were all dancers, writers, painters, and performance artists that she was growing up with. And suddenly people leaving at times when they shouldn't have been leaving surrounded her life. They were way young! And so it became a part of her life."

      When asked what advice she could give the younger generation about HIV, she replies, "I would say this to anyone, disease and death don't care! They don't care who you are, how old you are, your economic status, your color...if the disease is out there and you put yourself in its path, it's going to take you. So the idea of not doing everything you can to keep yourself out of harm's way is really flirtation with death," she says poignantly. "It's going to take the school system, us as individuals getting over the fact that we're talking to teenagers about sex. We have to get past that so we can really educate them correctly about what can happen. Once young people understand that anyone can get AIDS, it will be a lot easier. But, I don't think it's something that's discussed as openly as I would like it to be discussed."

      As the cell phone breaks up slightly she continues, "Today young people know that life can be very, very short. They see it with their generation. And they've adapted to that idea, whereas I think people our age are having a much harder time with it. These kids nowadays view the world so much differently than we did when we were growing up. They're in a different mindset."

      Whoopi expressed her passionate support of our youth when she spoke at the 1997 University of Vermont commencement:

Make sure you remember who you are, and all the stuff that made you laugh and dance and jump around. And in the dark times when, you know, stuff ain't going right, you have something to hold on to, which is yourself, you'll survive it.

      Does Whoopi feel that government is coming to the call of the AIDS tragedy sufficiently? "I don't know what they can do anymore. I would like to think that the Food and Drug Administration could move a little quicker, but maybe it can't. Maybe they have to do all the tests that they do. I think that the government has finally come to understand that it's not going away. I don't know what more we can do but to wait for the researchers to isolate how it works, like they're doing with all the gene therapy now." The wind ripples over the receiver again. She briefly cuts out. "The battle is not over. The cocktails don't necessarily mean longevity for everyone. It's like cancer in a way, you don't know what's going to work on any given person and so you have to keep experimenting. And I think that's the phrase we have remind people, is that we're still experimenting."

      When lauded for her steadfast work with the AIDS charities, Whoopi sounds appreciative and responds, "We're not even scratching the surface yet, but it's getting better." She takes a breath and adds, "And onward." Being in sync, Whoopi arrives at her destination the same time I am finished with the interview. "Thanks for talking to me," she says graciously. "Thank you for a delightful encounter," I reply. It sure was fun taking a cruise in her backseat--makin' Whoopi.