Finally facing ruin?
increasingly blurred. She threatened to quit Roseanne during its first season after a dispute with one of the writers (whom she had removed from the show). Three years later she installed husband Tom Arnold as producer and cowriter. She had married him in 1990 just four days after divorcing Bill Pentland, her husband of 16 years and father of her children Jessica, Jennifer and Jake. Their tempestuous four-year marriage was to ensure she was frequently making headlines.
At their wedding reception Arnold declared: “We’re America’s worst nightmare – white trash with money.” But while they seemed outwardly to revel in that status – most memorably in a Vanity Fair article littered with obscenity and featuring the couple on the cover in a pose the magazine later described as “a squirm-inducing portrait in which the two are rolling around in mud amid what can only be imagined as a pig trough for humans” – behind the scenes there were furious rows and allegations of abuse.
In her divorce petition Barr declared: “I now realise that I have been a classic battered and abused wife. Throughout our marriage the respondent hit me, struck me, has thrown objects at me, pinched me and verbally abused me.” URING this time Arnold had also encouraged her to fire her sister Geraldine, who had been her manager. Geraldine promptly sued for $70.3million, claiming Barr had promised her half the earnings of the Roseanne show for helping devise the character a decade before, as well as acting as “writer, organiser, accountant, bookkeeper and confidante”. The case was thrown out and the pair didn’t speak for 12 years.
In 1990 Barr somehow managed the feat of having the most popular show in America… and being the most hated woman in America. Her rendition of The Star Spangled Banner before a televised baseball game between the San Diego Padres and the Cincinnati Reds – in which she screeched her way through the national anthem before grabbing her crotch and spitting – horrified viewers, and even prompted President George Bush to describe it as “disgraceful”.
After the end of Roseanne in 1997 she retreated a little from the spotlight, briefly hosting a chat show and appearing in a cookery programme, before returning to standup and controversy. In 2009 she posed for a photoshoot for the satirical Jewish magazine Heeb, dressed as Adolf Hitler, with swastika armband and holding a tray of burnt gingerbread man biscuits which the article referred to as “burnt Jew cookies”.
Although she insisted she was “making fun of Hitler, not his victims”, the pictures were roundly condemned.
With Twitter, however, has come a whole new means of courting public outrage. In 2014 she was served with a lawsuit by the parents of George Zimmerman, who had been acquitted of second degree murder and manslaughter over the 2012 fatal shooting of unarmed black man Trayvon Martin. They alleged that she had tweeted their home address and phone number, adding: “If Zimmerman isn’t arrested I’ll rt [retweet] his address again – maybe go to his house myself.” And on the very night the first episode of the Roseanne reboot aired to 18.4 million viewers she tweeted a conspiracy theory that suggested David Hogg, a survivor of the February high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, had given a Nazi salute during a March for Our Lives rally calling for tighter gun control laws. The tweet was swiftly deleted – some suggested on the orders of ABC.
If there was a lesson there, it seems it hasn’t been learnt. And perhaps now, after 30 years as America’s self-proclaimed “Queen of crass”, Barr has finally gone too far. “Losing my show is [nothing] compared to being labelled a racist over one tweet,” she said yesterday. It may yet prove fatal to her career.