Whoopi’s not waiting for her Prince Charming
What’s Whoopi Goldberg ’s view of relationships?
“If someone says ‘You complete me,’ run!” says the star, who’s happily single.
It’s also the title of her new book from Hachette, which sports the subtitle: “Whoopi’s Big Book of Relationships.”
The plain-spoken funny lady isn’t afraid to tell the world what she thinks. (Her 2010 book, Is It Just Me? Or Is It Nuts Out There?, enumerated several hundred pages’ worth of pet peeves.) Her new self-help book offers anything but typical “how to get and keep a man” advice.
“I think a lot of what is wrong in relationships, a lot of the reasons we have divorce in the world, is because people get into relationships for the wrong reasons,” Goldberg, 59, says in a backstage chat after her daytime talk show The View has wrapped.
In If Someone Says ‘You Complete Me,’ Run!, she writes that she’s made mistakes (she’s been married and divorced three times and had relationships with Frank Langella and Ted Danson) and wants to share what she’s learned.
If somebody throws that famous line from Jerry Maguire at you, you’re in trouble. “If someone completes you and they drop dead, do you become half a person? You have to be a complete person when you start a relation- ship,” she says.
Love songs and films make us believe Prince (or Princess) Charming is going to come along and “make everything perfect like it is in the movies,” she says. Goldberg starred in one of those romantic classics, 1990’s Ghost, with Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore.
She laughs. “It’s a wonderful film, but it got people nuts! Peo- ple were trying to get their boyfriend or girlfriend to sit with them and make pottery, and it’s just like, come on! This is not the real world.” (She adds she never had an amorous encounter at a pottery wheel.
For Goldberg, what’s romantic is “someone who can have a conversation with you, laugh with you, tell the truth. Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”
She thinks single women should be able to have sex without being judged. (“After a certain age you’re not going to get pregnant, go get laid!”) And she doesn’t understand people who are afraid to be alone.
The greatgrandmother likes hanging out at home, listening to audio books (she’s loving a “wonderful” comic vampire novel called Undeath & Taxes by Drew Hayes), walking her dog and playing Diablo. “I dance a lot, I laugh a lot. And I talk to my kid and her kids.”
And she has her career. (Gold- berg has won Grammy, Oscar, Emmy and Tony awards.) She guest-starred last week on Law & Order: SVU and moderates The View, which is back for the fall season with several new cast members and a returning Joy Behar (“it’s nice to have her back”).
Goldberg also is costarring in the new movie Big Stone Gap. She plays Fleeta Mullins, who works with Ashley Judd at a pharmacy and sports an Afro that threatens to overtake the screen.
“It’s a wild wig, it looks like I ate most of the cast,” Goldberg jokes. Fleeta is “a wonderful character. She’s very odd and very curmudgeonly and kind of funny.”
She says author Adriana Trigiani wrote the part for her, and she’s happy the movie got made from the novel after 12 years of trying to bring it to the big screen.
As for another go at romance? Is Goldberg — who writes that she’s busy just trying to figure out what her “evil” cat Oliver wants — open to it?
“I’m sure something may come along, but I’m not looking for a relationship that way,” she says. “I’m not looking to live with anybody. I’m not looking for someone to make me feel better. Because I can do that myself.”