Very suddenly, at a velocity resembling All At Once, she became very big.
It's a week and a half before the Academy Awards. I seem to be the only person in America who hasn't been exposed to what must be referred to as the Whoopi Goldberg Phenomenon. Six months ago I would not have felt so lonely. At that time Goldberg, while an object of cult veneration on Broadway for her one-woman show, was but a peculiar and exotic name to the rest of America, save those who saw her HBO special or popped for her record album on the basis of word of mouth. Now her name recognition is through the roof. Face recognition follows only inches behind.
Her life story, which seems to be repeated by everyone but herself, has taken on a quality so mythic as to sound a little apocryphal: growing from a child with no father in a New York City housing project, to a San Diego welfare mother with a failed marriage and a junkie past; then pulling herself together to build a reputation in Berkeley for improvisational theater and returning home to Manhattan to stun Mike Nichols, the critics and Steven Spielberg. Debuting as a film actor in Spielberg's 'The Color Purple' with a performance acclaimed even by the film's detractors, Goldberg has been nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award. On talk shows like 'Donahue' the audiences rain on her their fascination; love itself may not be too strong a word for it. In New York Laurence Olivier asks if it would be all right to sit and talk with her an hour or so about acting. At dinner Elizabeth Taylor passes along her phone number. Whoopi's public-relations person fondly remembers the day her manager called to say he had found "the Actress of the Century."
The Actress of the Century? Well this is Hollywood, where it isn't enough to be the actress of the hour, or the moment; everyone has been the actress of the moment at one moment or another. But even by the standards of Hollywood inflation, the furor over Whoopi Goldberg, fanned by desperate reminders from the East Coast that New York, after all, discovered her first, is something out of the ordinary. And the Dismantling of Whoopi--that dialectical reaction by which a celebrity-crazed media will turn around to cut her down to size--will probably be out of the ordinary, too, when it comes. In some ways it may have already begun. Her credibility with the counterculture, impeccable up until six months ago, took it's first blows by fault of association with Spielberg ('The Village Voice' called 'The Color Purple' "an Amos 'n' Andy for the '80s") while the mainstream culture mines that same association for stories that magnify every minor disagreement with the director into a full-fledged star tantrum. It's a perfectly familiar irony of the times that the press that tried so hard to make Whoopi Goldberg a star now complains that she acts like one.
In truth, Goldberg, reaching this pinnacle around the age of thirty-six, in many ways resists stardom. But this is that enthralling, potentially lethal point in a career launch when acceleration, gravity and the inaccessibility of higher heavens test the stability of the structure going up; and resistance to the trajectory, attractive as it may be in principle, does not make scientific sense. Whoopi Goldberg, in other words, may now simply be the passenger on her own ride.
FIVE DAYS BEFORE THE ACADEMY AWARDS, GOLDBERG is at her house in San Francisco's Bay Area. She's sitting on a low wall in her back garden, wearing an ever-present baseball jersey with a gray felt hat pulled over her head; her finger is in the mouth of her neighbor's new baby. "You press the finger against the soft upper palate of the mouth and they suck," is the first thing she says to me. "They don't know nothing's coming out." The house has stood in its place nearly a century. Goldberg tells me it used to be a birthing center; her secretary says it used to be a dairy barn. In a century it could have been both. The house isn't to be found in the Tony hills that overlook the bay, where one might expect to find the residence of a star, but in one of the neighborhoods populated by students and blacks and hippies. "I'm still a hippie, you know," Goldberg says. "I still want peace and love in the world, I still want all that stuff." Not so far away is where her eleven-year-old daughter, Alexandrea, goes to school.
It's a pleasant house but, like the neighborhood, not particularly conspicuous. Whoopi hangs on a little to the Time That Fame Forgot--not a time before she was Whoopi Goldberg, because she's been that person for a while now, but before she was having to defend herself on talk shows to callers who think her breezy wardrobe does not do the black race justice, back when she was with Berkeley's theatrical Blake Street Hawkeyes. The house is in the middle of transformation. She hastens to justify every new trapping of her good fortune. "This bathtub," she explains, indicating a large, white, old-style porcelain bathtub, "this is the one bourgeois thing I got when everything started to happen, because I always wanted a bathtub like this." A little while later she points out the new bed. "When everything started to happen, I decided the one thing I wanted was a really nice bed--the kind of bed that needs someone to be in it." She presses down on it: "Air mattress," she adds. Still later, standing in the middle of an upstairs loft like bedroom, she says, "When I got some money the one thing I had to have was just some space," and she passes her hands over a two-hundred-square-foot area of carpet. It's a nice-sized room but hardly mind boggling, except maybe to a woman once used to living in one-bedroom apartments with a child, when carpeting and a decent bed were indulgences; now there's something touching in the way she prizes these things. Outside in the parking lot is a red Porsche. "Nice car," I say. She shrugs almost apologetically. "The one boojzhie thing I went in for when, you know..." Well, along with the bed and the bathtub and the space. It's not exactly going to make you forget Imelda Marcos, though. In the garden are chimes and cats, a small fountain and large Popeye head in the corner. She will stare into the garden muttering, almost inaudibly, "I'm so fucking lucky."
Around town they know Whoopi. We eat at a small fish place where customers either react as friends or, as a courtesy, don't react at all. The specialty here is something called buffalo fish, deep fried, half portions of which will feed two or three people. For a while we watch inchworms move up the walls of the restaurant like Slinkys--the back end must always catch up with the front before the front before the front moves on. "I feel like that sometimes," Goldberg says. Sometime during the course of the meal a young black guy in gym clothes, who identifies himself as Jerome, approaches to quietly as Whoopi about pursuing a career "in the same line of endeavor as yourself." He calls her "Miss Goldberg" and reminds her that he spoke to her the day before; she remembers him. She explains she'll be out of town for a month but if he'll give her his phone number she'll get in touch with him afterward and talk to him. I give him some paper, and he writes the number down and stands far away when he does it; he's afraid he smells bad: "I've been working out and I'm a little funky," he apologizes. Where this guy came from isn't clear; he appeared like an inchworm, out of the wall. His speech has the labored precision of having been practiced, and he has probably waited all day to see that red Porsche out in front of the fish place. He looks at me as though he'd give anything to be sitting where I am. Whoopi neither dismisses him nor humiliates him with I-love-to-help-the-little-people condescension. Later she acknowledges a little sadly that these things happen a lot now: "I know they think I can just say, 'Put this one in a movie...' and you try to explain sometimes and they say, 'Well, you just don't want to help.' You want to be able to do everything for everyone and you can't, and that'll kill you. You can die from this stuff because you feel guilty that suddenly you got the cookie. People think I'm running Hollywood."
When Goldberg goes to Los Angeles this evening, she will begin a period of activity in which she will make a commercial with Mickey Mouse and the Muppets for Hands Across America and the nation's hungry; help present the Comic Relief benefit for America's homeless; put the finishing touches on the much troubled production of her second film, "Jumpin' Jack Flash"; plan for the shooting of her third picture, "Burglar"; and attend "that other thing" the following Monday night. That other thing, of course, is the Oscars. "I think about it and I don't think about it," she says when we're driving. "Mostly I don't think about it because everyone else is thinking about it for me, and they try to keep it in and finally they can't anymore. And then I can't." She laughs. Goldberg is traveling these days in a constant cloud of genuine astonishment, alighting at star functions where she finds herself eyeball to eyeball with Elizabeth Taylor or Garson Kanin or Billy Wilder, "and the scary thing is you get there and they know you. They know who you are! so you'll be coming out of the bathroom or something and someone'll stumble back onto your feet and you're just about to say, 'Hey, look.' And they turn around and it's, like, Gene Kelly. And he goes, 'Oh, Whoopi, I'm sorry,' and it's like..." She puts her hands around her throat and croaks in panic. "And you have this conversation with them and you want to say, 'I can't believe I'm standing here talking to you; I'm dying.'" Walking through her house in the afternoon she'll inspect a "Hamlet" poster of Sam Waterson and point out an inscription: "Sam wrote something here," she says, emphasizing the first-name familiarity not to impress but to say, "Do you believe this, me calling him Sam?" Under a large, framed poster of "The Color Purple," I ask if she ever looks at it with momentary disbelief. "Come here," she says, and waves me into the front room where, on the hearth, there is a plaque certifying her nomination for Best Actress: "You want disbelief?" she says with her face. "This is disbelief."
She says everything with her face, and her voice: not the words of the voice but its sound, and the mouth that speaks it. The mouth looks to be from somewhere other than her face, as though it arrived later and decided this was face, after all, that would never upstage it; it is generous of energy, and harbors poltergeist tendencies. On the day I meet her, Whoopi is wearing contact lenses of an utterly disconcerting blue, but her face is so otherworldly, as defined by this mouth, that one almost believes for a moment the blue is hers, too, a nomadic gene that settled in the cornea. And the voice is from somewhere several registers lower than one expects from such a face--bluesy and genderless and elemental.
There are two remarkable scenes in "The Color Purple," in many ways the most remarkable scenes of the film, which might never have worked at all but for that face and that voice. One is in the juke joint when chanteuse Shug Avery (Margaret Avery) sings to Celie (Goldberg), the story's much-abused central character. In the picture's single best bit of acting, Goldberg simply watches Shug, one emotion after another bubbling to the surface of that face, each bursting the emotion that came before and then waiting to be contradicted by the next. "That was the first scene we shot," Goldberg says. "It also was the first time I'd ever been on a soundstage." The other scene--at the dinner table when the women square off against the men, and Celie, of all people, becomes the one to speak for them--was one of the last filmed: "I'd spent two months not hardly saying anything, and I was so ready to talk, and [Spielberg] purposely--which was great, you know--he built it up and, boy, when he said, 'Roll it,' it was like, 'Yes! I'm ready to talk now and I don't give a shit!'" In many ways this scene encapsulates everything that has moved and angered people about the movie: it's undeniably powerful, but it also throws into the sharpest contrast the film's portrayal of the sexes: the women are paragons, and the men either monsters practically drooling into their meals or contemptibly harmless goofs like Harpo, the son of the story's incarnate male-demon, Mr. (played by Danny Glover). It's Goldberg's voice that retains control of the scene, a flowing, rageful mix of experiential pumice and psychic hot springs that persuades us, in a way neither Alice Walker's book nor Spielberg's direction ever quite does, that this set-upon woman is capable of such an insurrection, that such an insurrection was always in her, from the first.
By this time, of course, I'm no longer the world's most underexposed Whoopi Goldberg audience. By this time, I've taken the Whoopi Crash Course, I am steeped in Whoopi: I have seen the movie, I've heard the record of her Broadway show many times, I've watched all the tapes; and it always comes down to the face, the voice. Not that the immaculate body language of characters like Celie and Fontaine the junkie and Surfer Chick and the Jamaican mistress and the Crippled Woman aren't all significant parts of the performances. But it's the face and the voice that own Whoopi Goldberg's best moments, apart from any reading she might give to any particular line: one thinks especially of the way her voice uncoils itself as the body of the Crippled Woman transforms into something "normal" in her dreams. Given this and her accurate self-identification as a character actor, it's remarkable to discover that there's also a face and voice all Whoopi's own, in contrast to those actors who so give themselves to a role that they have no identity at all when removed from it. Goldberg isn't really much like Fontaine or the Jamaican mistress or the Surfer Chick; she's even less like Celie, though she shares with Celie "a kind of shyness, a kind of naiveté," she says, "that I don't like copping to." Goldberg is direct and stripped of affectation, remarkably without bitterness; it she's wary and self-possessed, she also betrays little calculation. She's serious more often than funny, and in the time I knew her she seemed to me one of the least phony people I've ever met. It's fair to say she knows what she wants and assesses her talents accordingly, if not always prophetically; when she first read Walker's novel, she wanted to play the strong, relentless Sofia and argued with Spielberg's decision to cast her in the lead. "I figured Sofia would be a nice little part, a nice little way for me to break into the movies. And when he said, 'No, first of all you're too small to play Sofia as we see her, and you're better suited to play Celie,' and this wall along Alice's idea, I kind of said, 'Oh, I don't know.' And then I realized that Steven Spielberg's sitting there trying to convince me to be in his movie. And it was like"--she slaps herself on the face--"'Wake up, stupid. Say yes.'"
America has been saying yes to Spielberg for so long that it wasn't going to stop just because he transplanted his instincts for sentiment and fable to antoher kind of creature, the black woman, in another kind of suburb, the South. One watches 'The Color Purple' trying to imagine what it would have looked like without big musical numbers and portentous scenes of African spectacle, shot instead in the grit of black and white and liberated of Quincy Jones' unctuous score. More to the point, for a film about transformation, the motivations of emergence and redemption are sidestepped if not exiled from the picture altogether. It would be entirely legitimate that Spielberg decided the lesbianism between Shug and Celie was secondary to bigger themes, except that in the Walker novel it is precisely this passion that finally breaks Celie free of Mr.'s grip, and without it Celie's rebellion seems the invention of a movie rather than a reality of character. Finally, fatally unmotivated--and a figment not of the novel but rather of Spielberg's--is Mr.'s sacrifice at the end, made on behalf of reuniting the woman he's so badly abused for so long with the family he went to such lengths to keep from her.
Its cinematic flaws thus stated, the political rap against the movie seems trendy at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. People who never had a beef with Alice Walker's depiction of black men are suddenly insulted by Spielberg's, which is basically true to Walker's except in the way it's been softened by Mr.'s last nobel, albeit inexplicable, gesture. For the same reasons that only Steven Spielberg, of all people, could have made 'The Color Purple' a hit with Middle America, there was never the slightest chance of his finding credibility with those who now protest the film's alleged racism. When I ask Whoopi Goldberg if any director other than Spielberg would have engendered this kind of controversy, she replies, "If he had been white, probably. If he hadn't been white, probably not." She will defend Spielberg to the end. "He has a wonderment about the world....A lot of people complain, the movie doesn't have enough lesbianism, it doesn't have enough this or enough that. And it is very cute in places. But it's necessary, because in Idaho an din Nebraska, it makes it easier to ingest. It takes it out of the realm of a black movie into a people's movie. [Spielberg's] this open kind of guy: 'I don't know everything, you know some stuff I don't know, I know some stuff you don't know, let's do this together.' It's like we all made this baby. I don't think it will ever be like that again, it will never be that new or that glorious...I'd marry him if I could. But he already did that.
"I thought this furor over the treatment of black men in 'The Color Purple' was a pile of shit. Because here you have this movie, 'Purple Rain'....Prince is a great musician, he's the best of Jimi Hendrix and the best of Little Richard mixed into one person. You can't take talent away, [even though] you may not like someone's politics....But here you have this movie, 'Purple Rain,' where women constantly get smacked around, thrown in trash cans, told to go topless in a lake, I mean, dumb, dumb shit. Nobody said a word. I don't understand it....'Police Academy 3' has this guy [Michael Winslow], who does all these great sounds, who I love--but this cat looks like Stepin Fetchit. You know, like this..." She widens her eyes and curls back her upper lip. "Nobody says a word. Every TV show, every time you see a black man, with the exception of Philip Michael Thomas, he's a pimp. How real's that?...It's not like ['The Color Purple'] is a lie where Steven Spielberg said, 'Oh yeah, I'm going to ruin it for black men and write this...this stuff happened.' And I resent that people use this movie as a way to get publicity for a bogus issue."
Nonetheless, the movie's hit status with Middle America, its rejection by the tastemakers of the counterculture and her own exponentially increasing popularity, all rush Whoopi Goldberg to the brink of an anomalous distinction: the Rising Black Star of the Regan Era. Goldberg sees herself in no such terms, of course; if her politics refuse to be codified ideologically, they have long since infused her art in the broad manner of a humanist: at home she's reading Isabel Allende, a biography of Madame Mao and Primo Levi's 'Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity'. Her interest in Holocaust literature in particular suggests her name change goes deeper than the standard elusive jokes ("I saw a burning bush in my backyard"), to a fundamental affinity; and about America she expresses hope framed by skepticism, or perhaps it's the other way around. "The funny thing about America is that the down-on-the-bottom beliefs are right, they're good things," she says. "The Bill of Rights, these are good things. They're things Ronald Reagan says he's into, but he's not; he's into a different kind of America....People would like the United States to be what we're told it can be, without realizing that the price has gone up--the price, you know, of human dignity.
"Homelessness in America is disgusting. It's disgusting that we could have this big, beautiful country and have families living in dumpsters. It makes no sense.
"You can't talk about embracing a world," she says, "when you don't embrace your own people." Such public alignment with social causes has yet to be figured into Middle America's infatuation with her. While Goldberg has such a basic faith in people's good intentions ("I want to believe that if you present something that's reasonable, people will at least think about it") that she doesn't worry about it, it' s an open question just how many of those who loved her so much on "Donahue" have seen her Fontaine the junkie, for instance, which opens with a strung-out rendition of "Around the World in Eighty Motherfunkin' Days," or the whole of the famous Surfer Chick sketch, which ends with a coat-hanger abortion and a guaranteed childless future before the girl is fourteen. If it's true that Goldberg is probably not Ronald Reagan's idea of a movie actor, it's also safe to suppose the era will conspire mightily to make her exactly that; and over buffalo fish and beneath the inchworms it occurred to me in a flash that, if she continues to be as lucky as she thinks she is while contemplating in her garden of chimes, then she will not win the Academy Award five days later.
The Academy Awards capture the attention even of people who know better. In Los Angeles, perfectly intelligent disbelievers will stop to watch its rituals in the manner of non-Catholics stopping in the streets of Rome to read the white smoke over the Vatican that indicates a new pope. Probably people pay attention because every once in a while the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lurches to a decision that smacks of something like integrity, honoring a gutsy or ingenious bit of work by Francis Coppola or Woody Allen, maybe even something really off the wall like a Warren Beatty picture about communists. One can never be sure what these wacky Hollywood people will do. By the time Goldberg arrives in Los Angeles the weekend before the ceremonies, the balloting for the awards has closed, and following the worst year for American movies in memory, the competition is wide open. Whatever else is true about Steven Spielberg's flawed movie, its controversy and Spielberg's own non-nomination for direction have framed the debate: the question around town is not whether "Prizzi's Honor" or "Out of Africa" will win but whether "The Color Purple" won't. In the actress category, bets are on either Goldberg or Geraldine Page, and it's the kind of matc the Academy loves: long-time veteran, oft nominated and never anointed, providing the Academy its last chance to do so, against the brilliant newcomer in whose light the Academy can bask while it's at its brightest; one never knows, after all, if the light will continue to burn or nova out. The veteran has the odds, and when the night arrives, Goldberg's luck holds out and the veteran wins. Later, presenting the award for best editing, Whoopi thanks her mother anyway, in the best non-acceptance speech of the night. "The Color Purple" wins no awards at all.
"This star business," Whoopi says. "It's kind of, like, no one's quite sure what to say about me and where to put me, so they made me a star and figured that'll cover whatever comes down....It's just a real blessing to be a working actor. A real blessing." With few exceptions, her greatest inspirations have been working male actors: Spencer Tracy, John Garfield, Jack Lemmon. "Those are the guys I watched, those are the guys I wanted to be. They did stuff I always wanted to do. I never saw any damsels that looked like me, but I could always imagine that I could be swinging through Sherwood Forest." Among contemporaries she cites John Heard, Dustin Hoffman, Robert De Niro. "I look at De Niro and I want to be hm." Her popularity notwithstanding, she's not found herself exactly drowning in offers: "I'm choosing things I want to do and going to the studios and saying, 'Hey, what about this?' Because if I wait," she says, laughing, "I'll be doing hookers and mammies and abused women for the rest of my life." Asked which three roles in movie history she would most like to have played, she names Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny", Billie Dawn in "Born Yesterday", and anything in "Rashomon". "A tree I would have played in 'Rashomon.'"
Of the many characters Whoopi Goldberg has created herself, the one to which she's most similar, the only one, really, that seems much like her at all, is, interestingly, the Crippled Woman of her Broadway show, who waits for that core of the night where she finds that core of herself that's something like a damsel, and for whom nothing is darker than a harsh, awakened dawn. In the manner of most "overnight" sensations, where the night in question is twenty anonymous, unpitying years, Goldberg has found in this particular dawn that the dream of the previous night hasn't gone away; it keeps on going. It's a little terrifying. Not that many people want to hear about the night. It scares the people she thought were her friends, and the others want to believe that "you wake up and there's Mike Nichols at the front of your bed, saying, 'Baby, I'm going to make you a star.'" She shrugs. "Maybe it gives people a little hope....You look at me and you say, 'Yeah, this is not the face of a pinup.'" In the current life and times of this face and voice, the dawns and nights are interchangeable, the former marked by realizations one can not only accept but embrace; the latter by a darkness in which every star in the sky knows who you are.