Essence Magazine January 1997 By Bebe Moore Campbell

Since 1985 Whoopi Goldberg has starred in a whopping 23 films. She has also been the whipping girl of Black leaders and fans alike. Here the Oscar-winning actress shares the joys and pain of just being Whoopi.

Whoopi Goldberg never does what we expect her to do. In the studio of the Leeza show, the audience looks for her to enter onstage. Instead she descends from the top of the bleachers and is engulfed by a tornado of applause, yelling, stomping--more like hysteria than appreciation. As Whoopi passes through the crowd she smiles and shakes outstretched hands, floating through the cacophony of frenetic adulation.

She's dressed for floating, clad in her trademark loose sweater, loose pants, loose shoes--all the better for hanging loose. She seems to drift through the clapping, the smiles, the noise, the worship, absorbing it all with no indication that she's even aware of it other than a wry smile, a nod of her head. Is this, I wonder, what a little Black girl named Caryn Johnson dreamed of?

Whoopi Goldberg is an unlikely star. Too everything to make it to the Big Time: too dark, of course; hair too nappy; looks too unconventional, according to the naysayers, the dream crushers. But somehow Whoopi dodged those big bullets and kept getting up. the little 8-year-old who started out performing in New York with the Helena Rubinstein Children's Theater grew into the young woman who did improv and comedy.

She dropped out of high school and got sidetracked by drugs and an early failed marriage. She was on welfare for seven years and was a struggling single mother in her twenties with an infant daughter in tow when she moved to the San Francisco area. There she joined an experimental theater troupe, the Blake Street Hawkeyes. That stint led to the solo act that brought her to the attention of directory Mike Nichols, who produced her one-woman Broadway show.

From that lofty trajectory, a clean and sober Whoopi was catapulted into the starring role of Celie in The Color Purple, for which she won a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination. Her powerful debut also launched a career that has included more than 23 films in 11 years, ranging from the quirky (The Telephone) to the critically acclaimed (The Long Walk Home), from the Oscar-winning Ghost to the box-office blockbuster Sister Act.

And the films keep coming. Last fall she starred in Eddie, Bogus and The Associate. "It was a Whoopi fall," she quipped on Leeza. Come February, Goldberg will replace actor Nathan Lane in the male lead role of the Broadway hit A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
This month, she'll portray heroine Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of civil-rights activist Medgar Evers, in Ghosts of Mississippi. The film centers around Evers's 30-year struggle to bring the murderer of her husband to justice. "I never thought of Whoopi playing me," admits Evers-Williams, "but she's a fine actress. I hope she captures the spirit of Myrlie, a very angry, determined woman who didn't let anything turn her around."

Goldberg says she feels honored to play the role. "People like Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Medgar Evers fought for me," she says. "They are part of the reason I feel I can be whatever I want to be in this country."

If The Color Purple was the beginning of a stellar filmography, it was also the start of the kind of internecine controversy that has hovered over her like a vulture ever since. Not unlike the prophet who is without honor in his own country, Goldberg is viewed with ambivalence by some Black people, who feel she fails to live up to their expectations of what a Black star should look like, act like, think like and say to the press.

"I'm Black," Whoopi tells me after she ushers me to her dining-room table. "I don't have to prove it. I've been Black all my life."

Her house is big and beautiful, with enough art to open a museum but not so fabulous that it's not a home. She lives in the same type of affluent community that most Black stars with sizable bank accounts reside in (which is to say that the area is predominantly White). Goldberg moves through her house with assurance. She says please and thank you when she asks her maid to bring us water. She has clearly grown accustomed to the trappings of wealth and doesn't apologize for having them. But her pure sister chuckle reminds you that race isn't determined by either geography or money and that being successful doesn't mean you've handed in your skin.

"When I run into individual Black folks--male and female--they don't seem to have a problem with me," Goldberg muses. "They tell me they appreciate me and my work. It's only when I seem to bump heads against the Color Establishment..." Her voice trails off.

Until very recently our Black leaders have been virtually all male. In 1985 a segment of the Color Establishment deemed The Color Purple anti-Black male (which, rightly or wrongly, often translates into anti-Black people in a way that being anti-Black female rarely does). Like Ntozake, Alice, Terry and the other Black female artists who have been attacked by the testosterone-fueled culture police for creating politically incorrect Black male characters, Whoopi was pinned with an anti-Black tag that continues to shape our perceptions of her.

Other detractors claim, however, that Goldberg did insult her own people when, at the infamous Friars Club roast, she and then-boyfriend Ted Danson dressed up in blackface and spouted N-word-laced zingers, from a script penned in part by Whoopi. More recently, she was criticized for hosting the Oscars in the face of Jesse Jackson's almost boycott of the event. And many sisters and brothers deem her choice of White men as husbands and lovers a slap in the face to the race.

Goldberg doesn't flinch at the race issues. She considers Reverend Jesse Jackson's decision to protest the 1996 Academy Awards ceremony ill-timed. "There aren't enough of us in the industry," she concedes. "No one knows that better than I do. Yes, there was only one Black person nominated. But I was hosting it and Quincy Jones was producing it. So why attack this ceremony when there was such a major Black presence?"

About the Color Purple debacle she says forthrightly, "Mister didn't represent every Black man. Still, we were attacked by the NAACP, who then attacked the Academy because we didn't win any awards. That's schizophrenic! To this day, I feel that there is a sour taste in the mouths of Academy members as far as Black projects are concerned because of the NAACP stance." There is indignation in Goldberg's tone, but there is also vulnerability.

"The NAACP hurt my feelings," she says softly.

She insists, however, that when she wrote that Friars Club skit she was attempting to satirize the hate mail she and Danson had received. She claims she was exercising her artistic freedom by using the word nigger. "I was trying to take the power out of that word," she explains. "It's controlled Black people for too long. I mean, any White person can say nigger and we react to it. That's not good."

Whoopi may well be a woman ahead of her time, but she clearly misread the mood of Black people if she believed they were ready to have a White man in blackface instruct them on how to neutralize their feelings toward the N word. She realizes that now. "Black folks weren't ready for that," she says of the skit.

Carolyn McDonald, who is co-executive producer of Danny Glover's production company, has worked with Goldberg and feels that the actor is often misunderstood. "It's really sad that some of our people don't embrace her," she says. "She's on a whole other wavelength. She and Angela Davis could be on the same podium. She's a free spirit."

Truth be told, Whoopi never agreed to represent "us" in the first place. It is Whoop's talent and skill as a performer that most of us, regardless of race, appreciate about her. And if the Color Establishment has come down on her, they have lauded her enormous gifts as well. She has won the NAACP's Image Award multiple times, and she received the Essence Award last year for her screen accomplishments and generous charitable contributions.

Black people also respect her as a potent force in Hollywood. Yet, Goldberg, who is only the second Black actress to win an Academy Award in 51 years, hedges when asked if she feels she has clout in Tinsel town. "No," she says at first.

"Do you get top billing?" I ask.

"Yes."

"Can you choose your directors and producers?"

"Sometimes."

"Are you paid top dollar, commensurate with how much your pictures earn?"

"Yes."

"You have power," I say.

Goldberg smiles a bit and shakes her head. "Power to me is being able to walk into a room with the big boys and say, 'I want to make this movie,' and everyone says, 'Yes.' Clint can do that. Redford. Arnold."

But Whoopi has arguably come much closer to that kind of A-list primacy than any other African-American film star in history. If she hasn't climbed to the very top of the Hollywood mountain yet, she certainly has the guts to get there.

"Whoopi has confidence in her own instincts," says casting director Reuben Cannon. "She's the closest thing to genius I've ever seen. We were doing The Color Purple, and it was the scene where Shug is introducing Celie to herself. There's a very intimate, important part where Shug shows Celie her face in a mirror. Spielberg yelled, 'Cut!' and whoopi said, 'Not yet! There's another moment.' And she was right, because Celie and Shug needed to give each other a look. That was her first film, and she didn't hesitate to tell Spielberg exactly what was on her mind. She has confidence in her own instincts."

She also has a reputation for not giving up. "She's talked herself into many roles," says Bill Duke, who directed her in Sister Act 2. "She's a fighter. She's had to deal with the you-don't-look-like-a-leading-lady syndrome in a system that's designed to recognize people who are her opposites. She has tenacity, will and faith in herself."

Perhaps it is this faith that has sustained Goldberg in her quest for a meaningful relationship. Yes, she has had her share of well-publicized husbands and boyfriends, but at the moment she's pleased to be settled in a relationship that she describes as rewarding and fulfilling. She is currently living with Frank Langella, a well-known White Broadway actor who costarred with her in the film Eddie. "This man came to me fully formed," she says. "He's got his own thing going on. And he's fine."

Still, Whoopi wants to put to rest once and for all the rumor that she shuns the brothers. "Listen, I was married to a Black man; he is my daughter's father. Before I met Frank, I went out with five different men. And two of them were Black. That didn't make the papers because that's not news. I've always gone out with the people who ask me out."

"She has the right to put on her arm whoever makes her happy," says her friend, actor Jenifer Lewis. Adds Lewis, "Black people: Let Whoopi live her life as she sees fit."

For her part, Goldberg is more concerned about the quality of her relationships than the color of her lovers. "My life is so chock-full that it takes a lot of adjusting for whomever I bring in it," she says. "My relationships haven't always been successful, but when they haven't worked, it's been for lots of different reasons. Sometimes it's the fame that surrounds me. It takes a lot of work to be a child, a family member, a lover of mine."

Whoopi now finds comfort and companionship in her relationship with her 22-year-old daughter, Alexandrea, and her two granddaughters, Amarah Skye, 7, and newborn Jerzey, although she is the first to acknowledge that her daughter's search for her own identity was often quite painful. Whoopi, however, was determined to try and see things Alexandrea's way. In one interview, she reflected that her daughter "got pregnant because she did not feel that, individually, she was enough. She didn't have safe sex because she wanted a baby. She wanted to get pregnant, and I figured if she was old enough to make that decision, I had better damn well be there for her."

Whoopi admits now that Alexandrea went through a period during which she was extremely angry with her mother. "It got rough," she says. "My kid felt overshadowed by Whoopi Goldberg. Every kid wants to do better than her parent. When you're Whoopi Goldberg's kid, that's hard to do, especially when the kid hasn't found her path yet. My daughter's search for self was so extraordinary. She needed to learn how to communicate. She finally learned that it wasn't me she had to battle, but outside forces."

She says that putting Alexandrea in the cast of Sister Act 2 paved the way for their healing as parent and child. "I made her come to work with me everyday," she explains. "When she saw the way I had to fight for what I wanted, she began to look at me with different eyes."

Today Whoopi, too, looks at herself with more accepting eyes. She calls her no-frills sense of style "low-maintenance." "The first person I ever saw with dreads was Rosalind Cash, and I remember thinking she looked incredible, but I didn't consider it for me then," she says. "I was wearing my hair in a little natural and I used to braid it. And then one day, much later, I just got tired and I said, 'You know, I'm never taking these braids out.' But for so long my particular package was alien to everybody. Today when I see dreads, braids, plum lipstick and women wearing flats and sneakers, I know part of that is because of me."

Whoopi is also keenly aware of what she does best. "Acting is my life's blood," she says. "I'd be in an institution if I weren't in the arts." If little Caryn Johnson didn't dream of crowds and applause, she certainly yearned for recognition and appreciation. Now Caryn Johnson is all grown up, and as Whoopi Goldberg, she has brought the house down. "It's been great," she says of her career. "Even when I wasn't making any money, I always knew I was good."