THE HAPPY LIFE OF WHOOPI GOLDBERG
Comic, actress, talk-show host and great-grandmother feels good
Like so many, Whoopi Goldberg didn’t predict the two major political upheavals last year: Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump as U.S. president. “On both sides of the pond, people were caught with their pants down.”
The enduring icon who won an Oscar for her role as an eccentric psychic in the 1990 film Ghost says she will take to her grave the recollection of Barack Obama becoming president of the United States.
“I so clearly remember my mother saying that she never thought she’d live to see a black man in the White House.”
Which must have made Hillary Clinton’s defeat at the hands of Trump a bitter pill to swallow.
“It was, but I’m giving him a chance. What else can I do?”
Throw herself off the Empire State Building? “No, because that would mean I wouldn’ t be around to pay attention and to scream and rail when things go wrong. It’s like everything: If you take yourself out of the equation, you can’t complain.”
Goldberg, 61, has the luxury — she says so herself — of appearing regularly on talk show The View. “So I’m dealing with this stuff every day. It’s a forum. I’ve talked many times about Trump’s attitude to women and to black people, two subjects on which I feel entitled to speak.”
And when Goldberg talks, people listen. To many, she’s a pioneer. “I never think like that,” she says. “I look in the mirror and I still see me. I honestly don’t feel ‘iconic’ or like I broke any glass ceilings. My guiding principle has been always to do and say what I’m interested in.”
She’s been doing just that for more than three decades now. In 1983, Goldberg — whose real name is Caryn Johnson — created the one-woman Spook Show, comprising different character monologues. Director Mike Nichols offered to take it to Broadway, where her performance caught the eye of Steven Spielberg. He was about to direct The Color Purple and offered Goldberg the leading role.
It was quite a step-change. In her early 20s, she had been young, homeless and addicted to heroin. “I’d dropped out of high school and got into drugs. This was the ’70s. It was a rite of passage.”
With the help of a counsellor, Alvin Martin, whom she went on briefly to marry, she beat her addiction and set her heart on becoming an actor.
But, first, she worked as a bricklayer and then as a beautician — with a difference. “I did dead people’s makeup,” she says. She won’t easily forget her first day. Called to her boss’s office, she sat alone in the room surrounded by giant cabinets that contained the recently departed. To her horror, one of the drawers slowly started to creak open and a man sat up and waved at her.
It turned out to be the boss — a joker who said nothing that bad would ever happen to her again and she shouldn’t feel spooked by her new job. “And he was right. I was fine after that.”
Happily, her life was soon to take a different path. Solo performer, actor, campaigner, talk-show host: Goldberg’s has been a seamless career, one success following another. But the same has not been true of her private life. That early marriage to Martin produced her only child, Alexandrea, now in her 40s and a mother of three children, one of whom had a small daughter of her own in 2014 — making Goldberg a great-grandmother aged just 58 at the time.
She married and divorced twice more — to cinematographer David Claessen in 1986, and to union organizer Lyle Trachtenberg in 1994. There have been romances along the way, with actors Frank Langella and Timothy Dalton. But the great love of her life, or so it is said, was Ted Danson, best known as Sam Malone in the sitcom Cheers, and about whom the otherwise voluble Goldberg will say not one word.
As it is, she’s been single for many years, and she isn’t complaining. “I recently wrote a book entitled If Someone Says ‘You Complete Me,’ RUN! It’s about what I feel is wrong with relationships. My experience over the years is that a relationship requires that you commit to caring what somebody else thinks.
“But the truth slowly dawned on me that I don’t want to work that hard. I have many relationships — with my daughter, my grandkids and now my great-granddaughter — and they come first. It took me some time but I realized that trying to turn myself into something I wasn’t for a man wasn’t his fault. It was mine. My marriages failed and I was the common denominator.
“My commitment was never that strong. I can say now that I was never really in love. I shouldn’t ever have got married. That realization freed me up. I love men and men love me. I’m lucky that way. I just feel bad that it took me this long to realize that I wasn’t meant to be in a relationship.”
And Goldberg — a multimillionairess, still stimulated by her work — couldn’t be happier.
So, when she does want a treat, what does she choose to spend her money on?
“I’m not big on indulgences,” she says. And then stops herself. “I do like audio books, though. I’ll wake up in the night and listen to one of them. But then I always liked stories.”
Especially, it would seem, ones where the leading lady makes her own happily ever after.
I’m not big on indulgences. I do like audio books, though. But then I always liked stories.