Rosie O'Donnell

Published Jun 24, 2013, 4:00 AM

This week, Alec sits down with Rosie O’Donnell who says she “never wanted to be a talk show host … I wanted to be on Broadway…I wanted to be a Bette Midler backup singer, one of the Harlettes.”

And for over three decades, Rosie has done a lot of things – she’s been a standup comic, a Star Search contestant, an actress, a talk show host, a philanthropist, an activist, a magazine editor, a blogger, a Broadway and television producer, and above all, a mom to five. The latest child, Rosie tells Alec, "rebirthed" her.

On changes in the acceptance of gay actors during the arc of her long career now, she says, "To think that in my lifetime, in my career, that you can be an out performer/actor playing against type – Neil Patrick Harris playing a womanizer on that show, being out and married with twin boys – and it doesn't hurt your career. It doesn't do anything. So in a way it's the most beautifully astounding, inspirational thing that I can think about in my 51 years of living."

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Rosie O'Donnell has been a stand up comic, a star search contestant, an actress, a talk show host, a philanthropist and activist, a magazine editor, a blogger, a Broadway and television producer, and a mom. Rosie has five kids. Doing it all was a pattern Rosie established early in high school. She was voted Homecoming Queen, prom Queen, Senior class president, and class clown. Rosie O'Donnell is not one to mince words, and she's never shied away from a controversial subject. Her combination of confidence and conviction has led to very public disagreements with celebrities such as Tom Selleck, Donald Trump, and Elizabeth Hasselbeck from the view, but that same combination led to her husually successful talk show, The Rosy O'Donnell Show, where she sat down with the biggest stars of the time and talked about what mattered to them and to her. She earned herself the nickname the Queen of Nice. Rosie o'donnald is nice and grateful for what she has. She might say that has something to do with her childhood when she suffered the hardest blow imaginable. You know, my mother died so ten and they were two younger siblings and two older siblings, right, so that was really hard to everything. Yes, and and it's sort of close to her, not really, I mean I think that she was very irish and reserved like my father. There was no I love using the house. There was no hugging, you know. It was more like like I went to Jackie's house all the time. My best friend still lived across the street when I was a kid, and her mother would say I love you to them, and I remember being struck like cold from that, like you would say that to each other, like no one said that to each other and my family ever until we were really older adults, and even then it was difficult. So I remember when I had my first child, when Parker, who was now eighteen, the I love yous were frequent and fluid. And you know, even now, I dropped my boy off at school this morning and he's thirteen. You know, I'm like Bob Blakey love He's like love you to mom, like casual, nothing, don't even And that was so foreign to me as a child, and I craved it. I craved it. And when a mother dies in a family like that, things turned to disarray because the washing machine, the you know things that my dad just had no clue about, Like he mashed the potatoes in the water. He was trying to make mashed potatoes. After she died, like all of the domesticity went out of the house, and it was so kind of stark and cold and and run down, and you know, the things that a mother's touch generally bring to your life, we're missing. And that's all the all the softness and the and the kind of safety and security to prepare the family for a life without her, Rosie's mother taught each of her five children a different meal to cook. Rosie learned how to make London broil, which she says she still won't eat because of the men raise it conjures. Up in her hometown of Coomack Long Island, not far from where I grew up, Rosie began to plot out her future in show business. You know, I never wanted to be a talk show host. That was never my goal. I wanted to be on Broadway, so you know, I wanted to be a Bette Midler backup singer, one of the Harletts. So when I was, you know, in in Comac High School South in nine nine, and I would take the train in and see Matinee every Wednesday and cut out of school and do standing room. And so my goal was Broadway, and I saw a bet on Broadway and Clowns and a Half Shell one of my first shows ever. You know, I didn't grow up listening to Johnny Carson like every comic tells you. I didn't, you know, admired to be like my mother. You didn't want to stand up either. I never thought of it. My mother didn't like John Rivers. My mother thought she was mean. And I remember my mother telling me Tody Fields was a real comedian, Philis Diller was a real comedian, but that Joan Rivers is not nice. And she said you never go far in self exactly. And Joan was made fun of Elizabeth Taylor, which I think to my mother was sacraseck. You know, so I never like thought of it. So when I was in high school, I would do the play for the seniors, right, everybody makes fun of the teachers and like a Saturday and night life type thing the senior year and I was a freshman and they knew that I was sort of into comedy, and they said, would you write the skits? So I did so I was the only sort of freshman allowed to be and for every year sophomore junior, I was writing these skits. So the last years, my senior year, this guy comes in and and says, hey, did you write all this stuff? And I said yeah. He goes wanted to be a stand up. I'm like, God, I don't know how to understand up, because well, I own a club, east Side comedy club Huntington's near you. Why don't you come and do stand up? Okay, what what year is that? That is nineteen seventy eight? What is a stand up comedy club like in Huntington's in nine seventy eight? Well, I was sixteen years old. I just got my license, but I wasn't really old enough to get into clubs. So I took my neighbor, Dory Norton's license member when they were paper and you could take a little pin and scrape, so I had fake id. Career is built on a crime, actually without a debt. I was impersonated, wouldn't um So I went in and you know, when you're sixteen years old, You're fearless, right. Also, everybody I knew from my high school showed up that night because it was a Saturday night or something, and he let me go on and do a few minutes, and I killed because everybody I knew was in the room, right, So I'd make jokes like Marylyn's going out with Mitchell and Mike doesn't know, and all my friends would be like and made fun of the teachers like common things that. So the owner said, well, that was really good. Why don't you come back tomorrow? So I went back the next night. I didn't know anyone. It was a school night. I bombed like you have never, oh my god, like a horrible death. And I went home and I thought, I don't want to do that anymore. So I'm watching um MERV. Griffin and I see Jerry Seinfeld and I see him doing is that It's all then like last? And I remembered is that you know there were no VCRs then? But I remembered, like you know, my car stopped and I opened up the HUD and I'm thinking, what am I looking for? And on off, switch, on off, and I'm thinking hi, And so I remembered it so right, the club owner called me again, Richie and said, come back. Why don't you come back? You were good that first night. And so I come back and I do sign Fells act almost verbatim, and I get off stage and Ritchie and you know, a bunch of other comics are standing around, said would you get that material? I said, this guy named Jerry who was on MERV Griffin yesterday. They go, you're not allowed to do that. Like why not? They go, you have to write your own jokes, and like, wait a minute, strikes and doesn't write her own songs? Did you do? Well? Did the audience like? And they didn't you hear those? Because they were laughing jokes a joke. I have to write the jokes. Nuts, Harold Arlen wrote that song, that stuff, and so you know that. Then I they said, well, why don't you just hang around here, and uh, you can watch? So I started watching, right. I started going there almost every night watching comics, and the crowd like, well back then it was sort of the Heyday was starting with the hey Day, like Eddie Murphy had just gotten on Saturday Night Live. So somebody from our little club broke out to the big time and comic clubs were kind of hot in the eighties. You know, I sort of hit Yeah, I hit the wave at the exactly the right time. Michael said that to me once. He said that when Saturday Night Live started back then in the mid seventies seventy five, he said, they were like six comedy clubs in the United States exactly, and you knew every stand up working. There was a time when I started where I knew every female comments working working in the country, right, and everybody knew each other, and everybody would help each other out. Hey, there's a club Tickles and War in Ohio. I can talk to the guy for you. You wouldn't have to audition because you knew somebody who went there. And a lot of times I'd go to the clubs and they pick you up in the car at the airport and they'd have a sign and they'd be driving you back to the comedy condo and the guy go, you know, you're the fourth girl I had. The last three sucked. If you win, good, I'm never book and a girl again. I was like, no pressure, you know, just my entire gender is writing on this, so um, you know. The k comic called me and said, come back, and then I did. I was hanging out there and then I would do open mic night. So Shirley Hemphill, do you remember what's happening? Big Heavy Black Lady should play? Okay, she was the headliner. Now that was a big deal in night. Right, she's the headliner and she's there are a day earl watching open mic night. I come off the stage. She comes over to me and she goes, little one, little one, come here. I said, yeah, Now, I'm an eighteen year old kid, alec, but I look about fourteen right, and she says, um, you're funny. Come with me. She takes me in through the kitchen to Richie's office and says I want her to open for me this weekend, and he goes, no way, she's too new, she doesn't have any act. She says, I wanted to m C. I wanted to open and do every show. And I want you to pay her twenty five bucks a night. There was a hundred dollars. I was eighteen and in high school. I thought my head was going to exactly, my head was going to explode, and so she really helped my career. I started doing that and then I never stopped and you did that until Star Search was two when you were on. Now, obviously, this idea of the talent search show, this goes back to Leonard Sillman on Broadway years. I mean, this has been forever. And then then of course there's a renaissance of this now with the voice and this in the hand and the foot and the tongue and the show. What was that like back then for you? Well, it was unbelief people, because unlike huge and unlike today where there are so many media platforms and there are so many shows like it, we had four channels, five maybe, And I remember my nana whenever somebody was on, like Tody Fields was on MERV Griffin or the Don Ho Show, which was on in twelve and the I'd have my nana press play and record on the cassette player so I could listen to Tody Fields on the shows that I would miss at school. And I think back about that now and it's kind of trippy. Was the Fireplace? Oh my god? Totally? So what happened was Star Search was so popular and I was on the second season. Comics had two minutes, hundred and twenty seconds to do materials. Do you have a clean routine. Oh yeah, always have a clean routine. Oh no, not in clubs necessarily. But I hadn't, you know, enough stuff. The problem was I kept winning. So I had enough clean material for like five weeks, and then I kept winning and I was like ship. So I called up comics who are my friends, and said, can I use that? Bit about this? Can I use that? And they a lot of them said yes, you know, Jeanette Barber, let me use a lot of bits, Carol Henry, let me use bits. And you know, I had people trying to help me. And so then I lost, and I eventually, but I won like god like. It was like twelve thousand dollars al or like fourteen thousand dollars, and I remember thinking I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. I went for the final, a hundred thousand dollar thing, and I lost, and uh, I remember never being so nervous in my life. You know, TV was so different back then. In they put you up at the Sunset Strip, Right, it was at Sunset and Vine where they filmed it. And I didn't have any money. Right, they give you per diem, but I didn't know to get per diem so I had. All that I had in my pocket was like, you know, forty dollars. So I'd walk every day to Carney's, you know that hot Dog's cheer on Sunset and for a dollar four you could get fries, a small coke, and a hot dog. And that's all I had. So it's so funny. You watch it. You watch me losing weight every single week because I didn't. I didn't really, you know, but I ended up winning all this money. And I went from being an opening act to being a headliner from Star Search overnight, and then you get into the movie business. Then I become a DJ, I do Star Search, and then I do give me a break. What happened was I was at a comedy club and Lauren Michaels was there, was Share and Brandon Tarnikoff and it's called Igby's Comedy Club in Okay, and Dana Carvey was was auditioning to get on SNL and I was the next comic up and the way, this is one of my friends. And they said, we're not dropping the check until after your set. So well, Brandon and they wanted the check because they had seen Dana I was on and I killed right now. It's I had a decade under my belt of doing stand up right, so um. They came up to me after the show, Brandon Tarnikoff, and said, Hi, I want you to call this number at NBC tomorrow. We have a job for you. And I called my sister. Was like three in the morning, New York time. I said, I got on SNL. Oh my god, Brandon Tarnikoff was here with Lauren Michael's and I'm gonna be on SNL. And I walk in the next day to NBC and they said, we're gonna put you on. Give me a break, and I was like now, I was still thrilled to be on TV. And so that was the show. I did about ten episodes of that in the last season after that. That was eighty six and then eighty eight. They were auditioning VJs for VH one and at the improv with Budd Freedman and I went there and I did my set and the guy came out and he said, you're really good, but you don't really look like MTV. And I said, I know when he goes, but we have another station, v H one, and at that time it was reda Coolidge. I don't know if you remember. And so he said, you wanted an audition for that, you'd have to fly yourself to New York. I said, all right, So I flew my play White Wedding like nine times a day, exactly right. And they said, you know you can audition. So I went on camera and I auditioned and went home to l A and then I wrote him a thank you note, Steve Leeds, I said, thanks for the shot. I really appreciate it. And he was so moved that somebody wrote him a thank you note that he sent the tape over to the v H one people. The guy who was hiring is named Ed Harrington, very Irish guy. He saw Rosie O'Donnell and he hired me. So it was a thank you note that got me to that. I did that for about two years. What was that like? It was because it seems like for the person who wanted to the clams on the hashell career, you meander and you here and here where it takes you. What was it like for you to be doing that? Well? Everyone everyone said not to do it. People who were quote unquote advising my career, like Bud Freeman or you know, I didn't even have an agent really any because I knew it was in twenty three million homes. And I thought that it would teach me how to be conversational versus presentational. Presentational is what you do with stand up. You've already prepared it. It's a wrapped package. They undo the bow, they undo the thing, kaboom, there's the joke, right, But this is more conversational. Can you carry on a conversation with a camera and treat it like a person? And I thought it was a skill that would really help me. And I also thought that many millions of people seeing you, you can't say no. Was it also about money? It was a hundred thousand dollars because I don't want to assume, but are you like me where a lot of the decisions I made was about money. Yeah, at that time, I was like, you know, twenty one maybe, and to get a hundred grand because I remember saying to them, I'm giving up a lot of money to not go on the road because I was a good money in the road and you would have to definitely cover that. And so they came up with a hundred grand. So what I would do is it was eight hours a day, but you could film that in about two hours. It was four breaks an hour at two minutes a break, so they would give you the pictures that you had to do, like you know, this is Rosie O'donnald coming at You on v H one Video Hits one. The other music television that was Whitney Houston, her seven single offer debut album, Whitney Houston is doing VH one To Go Go our dance show only here on VH one Saturday nights eight to eleven. But that was about fourteen seconds. Now I had a minute and a half left to fill and there's nobody but me and two cameramen. So my goal was to get the cameraman to laugh so that the camera would jiggle right. So that was that was my goal. I want to go back and see tape, see if I can find that jiggle camera. Bet you can't. I bet I can't. Yeah, And so I did that for about two years, and that's how Penny Marshall saw me. She saw you on VH one. I had just gotten an agent, and I sit next to this woman on a plane and coach and she's very bitchy to the students and she's saying I ordered salad, and I start making her laugh. I'm like, here, take my salad, give me a dessert. You're such a and I put her her luggage. I'm not just making her laugh, right, And so it turns out she's an agent. She's a new agent at William Moore. She's Julie Roberts Agents assistant. Okay, so I'm like, wow, that's pretty big for me. So I start talking to her and she's like, what are you doing. I'm like, I'm going out to audition for a game show and she's like, oh, and good luck. So I don't see her. You know, I dropped her a no to something. And then six months later I sit next to her again on another plane. Is that the weirdest story? And I she said, what are you doing? I said, I got offered wind Loser drawer for kids on Disney. They're gonna pay me fifty thousand dollars a year, five year contract and I'm gonna host that show. And she said, you're not. And I'm now your agent, and we're too close to God for me not to intervene. And it's too weird to sit next to you twice reesa Shapiro of course, and she um becomes my agent. She gets a phone call, Hi, do you represent that VJ? Can she play baseball? She calls me up, She says, can you play baseball? And baseball? I said, if there's one thing I can do better than Julia Roberts, it's base all And so I went and I auditioned for the movie. You had to play baseball to even get a reading, and I, of course, I'm very good at baseball. So um, I went in and got the part. So everywhere you're going, you're showing up, obviously with stand up, and then you're making the guys laughing, jiggle the camera, and there's a velocity and a pace and an energy to what you're doing. And now you're making movies, And does that become a different muscle for you to sit there and go, man, this is slow and boring. Yes, But I love the camaraderie. I love the set of League their Own with all the people playing baseball and oh no, it's the actors, the camera guys and like you know, all of the crew doing the thing where they picked the cards and exactly, and it was so loving and so beautiful and stand up you're alone. You're going on these clubs. You know, for ten years, fifteen years, I was alone on the road. You know, I'd go by myself. I had to get in a plane and I'd fly to someplace in the middle of the country and they picked me up and feel homeless. Yeah, and you feel lonely. And then so when you go to make a league of their own and you get the responsory had made. The movie is a huge success. Everybody loves you, blah blah blah. Do you say to yourself, Well, I mean, which is I'm not assuming you do. But often people sit there and thinking, well, this is it. I'm a movie star and I'm gonna be lighting one off the other for the next forty years. Well, I will tell you this. When they said that Madonna was going to be playing my best friend, you know, we had all been cast, and Penny said that to me, she's going to come in. You have to make a laugh and hopefully she'll do the film. Like I had diarrhea. I thought, Madonna, Madonna, how do you be friends with Madonna? What the hell? Like? You know, in our lifetime, I'm fifty one years old, so we're almost the same age. Right, and to see her at twenty something explode like she did. And I remember she had been friendly with Sandra Bernhard a little bit, and as I was a VJ, thinking how can you be friends with her? How could somebody be friends with like Elvis, like mcdonna? And here I am playing her best friends. So I knew when she was cast in that role that my career was going to take a whole different trajectory because of it. And it did. And for you, that experience of working with her, it was positive, it was positive, and it was sister Lee like you know. Some people have said to me, I thought you guys were lovering. I'm like, are you out of your mind? Like you know something? Even Sandra said to me away from Madonna. Please, I'm such an Irish Catholic girl, like you can count on both hands how many people have been with my entire fifty one years? You know, my friend? I don't. I don't know. It never crossed my mind because I met her the day after I saw Truth or Dare. And in that movie Truth or Dare, she goes to her mother's grave and it's her own name on her mother's grave, and my mother same experience. My mother's name is mining. So when I went to see her grave when I finally got my license at seventeen years old, there I saw for the first time Roseanne O'Donnell. And it's flippy to think to yourself, I know someone else who experienced that same thing. So when I met her, I said, I saw your movie yesterday. And my mom died when I was little, and I'm named after her too, and there and it was like, right away we had a sister thing, you know, right away going on. Now, Penny's in the kind of comedy College of Cardinals. There she did the hit show. She's funny as hell. Was she helpful to you as a director and she just leave you alone? How an actor, she was amazing because she I love to improve eyes, and I come to find out later in all the movies I did after that, not every director likes this. But she would go, you know, okay, somebody got to go over there, catch a bull full and just stay come up with a hot door hope, but doorway. Now, seriously, half the time people didn't understand what she was saying. So I'd raised my hand and she got rosy again. All right, So my part was not really that big, and she kept giving me all this extra stuff to do, and if you got one take, she'd go try it again, like she'd get the grip. The guy played my dad was the grip, and he'd come down and he looked irish and older guy, and she said, okay, put a hat on him. He'll be your father, and let's talk about a steak dinner near the bus go like So it was a lot of improvisation, which for me is great, like doing you know, curb your enthusiasm like you do. I know so well. I love that. I mean, that's to me the most fun because it's like stand up where you can go anywhere and say anything you want. Did you go right into another film before League got released? Yes, I did Sleepless in Seattle, and so I did League and it wasn't out yet, and then my and now a woman who I mean, Penny is discerning, and Penny is you know, well regarded as a director and so forth. But now you go and work with a woman who was the most discerning and who was the most options and who I cast anybody and had anybody, and she chose you. And I'm so intimidated because it's Nora Fron and I've read every single thing she ever wrote in her life, and I knew about her sister and her parents and what they had written. So I go into the app Thorpe, into her big, you know apartment that has a library full of and I'm looking at what book she's reading and I'm you know, and she calls me in and she says hello, and I say hello, and I'm still like happy to be there. And we clicked right away, and she's like wow. She goes, wait a minute, and she goes and gets the script off, the facts that Delia had been working on and pieces of a new scene, and she goes, read this, and I read that, and then I left and I called my agent in the car and said, I got the job. And she said, you know, this is your second movie audition. You don't really understand. You got the first one, but you're not probably going to get this. And I said, no, I got the job. And I did. And the reason Nora told me was that night at dinner, she said, oh, I I interviewed this girl today. I think I might hire. Her. Name's Rosie O'Donnell and her son, Jacob, who was ten at the time, who was a Madonna freak. Was like, oh my god, mom, I know her. And he ended up being a gay man now who was a writer at the the Times, right, a great guy. And and then Nora ended up getting me an apartment in the app Thorpe after the movie, and Jacob used to come over to my apartment and tell me about his being gay and not knowing how to tell his mom, and so I sort of helped. What did you tell him? I helped him come out. His mother knew, but you know, his mother said to me, do you think he's gay? I'm like, yes, I do, right, And he was like ten or eleven. She goes, I think he might be too. I said, yeah, he is. Some nights, I'd come home when he's like fourteen, he's drunk outside. I'm like, come here, you're gonna go up to my apartment. Come with us. I take him up to the apartment. I'd call Nora, I'd go I have him. I'll bring him back in a little while. Right. It was like living in Queens. Everybody knew each other. But he was a great kid. And you know, I have pictures of him playing with Parker. You know, when Parker was a baby, and then I have a tick picture of them when we did Love Laws and what I wore at the opening night Parker six foot something standing next to Jacob, And it's just so weird how life goes like that. I'm not big on the whole gay identity thing in terms of you know that that story, because I'm sure you've exhausted that. But what I'm curious about is how over the ark of a long career, now that's changed for you. And it was being a gay woman, being a gay performer, going back to you know, it is seventy eight and you're at the club in Huntington's on through. Now it's many many years, it's a thirty five years since you were a kid doing this stuff. How's that changed for you? Remarkable the amount of change that's happened just in my lifetime. You know, I was coming out of therapy two weeks ago in Nyack, New York, and I see two high school girls holding hands walking through the parking lot and like I almost fill up with two I stopped them. I said, excuse me, now, they have no idea right there, the there's a cut off. My fame is over, right, now, I know there are people who still but it's not like it was. Right. So I said, excuse me, and they sort of like, what's this old lady's talking to me? I said, I just want to tell you that I'm a fifty one year old gay woman, and as a gay woman. To see you two girls, are you in high school? They're like, yeah, we're in tenth grade. To see you holding hands in the middle of town walking through it just it moves me so much. And they're like, oh really, oh thanks, all right, see you here. I am like, come here. I don't know. You know, people sort of knew that I was gay, in my opinion in show business because I never hit it. It's never like I pretended to have a boy friend or although people say I did that with Tom Cruise, but it wasn't a sexual thing with him. I still have a crush on him, you know, but it's not like I wanted to screw him. I just thought, God, that is a that is something about the breakfast, exactly like to have him, you know, with no shirt on, painting something in my house, you know, and then leaving after he gave me your breakfast exactly right. So anyway, people knew was what I thought, right. But I remember like when Ellen called me up and said, I'm going to have my character Ellen Morgan come out as a lesbian on my TV show, and I remember thinking, why the hell is she doing this? She's going to ruin her entire career and her life. It was such a foreign concept. This is pre Will and Grace. Okay, no one had ever even considered it. The only people who were out were rock stars. There was no actor or actress or comedian who was out. You know. I don't remember even Charles Nelson Riley wasn't out. I mean, you know, thurdly gayish people. And I remember thinking, she's making a huge mistake, you know, And then there was that tremendous amount of fall out that happened afterwards. I was like, it was pained me for her. It really did. Now listen in hindsight, Oh my god. The courage that it took for her to do that at the time she did it, in the way she did it was pretty unbelievable, you know. I I did not possess that. And so she did that, and then Will and Grace came on and I remember them telling me at my show, oh, there's a new sitcom that's starting. It's about a gay man living with a straight girl. And I go, that will never work. Remember Love Sydney with Tony Randall. He had his dead partner's picture on the mantel and the Catholic Church was protesting and it was often two weeks. And this was Tony Randolphs right. So I thought that will never work. So and Will and Grace comes on. Not only does it work, it blows up queer eye for the straight guy. It's like the society culture we have changed in such a quick amount of time that people don't even realize it, you know, to think that in my lifetime, in my career, that you can be an out performer actor playing against type Neil Patrick Harris playing a womanizer on that show, be out married with twin boys and it doesn't hurt your career and it doesn't do anything to you know. So in a way, it's the most beautifully astounding inspirational thing that I can think about it in my fifty one years of living now, in the time that you from being a young woman and a performer in this business and you're making your way and you're succeeding and you're a gay woman. Did you ever think about marriage kids, family? Like, when did that polaroid begin to become more in focus. I always knew I wanted kids, you did, always, But I never thought I would get married to a man. I mean I didn't really of course, you know, I would not have turned that down. But I know, I just you know, I dated one guy when I was twenty eight for about a year and a half, two years. His name was Mike. We lived together, great guy, six ft one or six ft two. I had only dated two women before that. I just sort of didn't do it at all. It was just like, you know, whatever, and yeah, I got a career plan and uh so, um, I dated this guy, and I remember thinking, maybe I'm not gay. Look at this, Maybe I'm not gay. But it turned out, you know, I was wrong. So uh that was the only time that I thought to myself, well, maybe I am straight. Maybe this I don't know what this is. Maybe, um you know, because it's it's like what people don't understand about homosexuality. It's not that you can't have satisfactory sex with the opposite gender. It's just that your heart and your soul and your connection and your desire for emotional intimacy is only really served by somebody of the same sets. I've never heard anybody articulated that way before ever. Yeah, I've never heard anyone say that. I mean, but there was a period. Mike was his name. Yeah, you still in touch with him? Um, not so much. We had been for about ten years. It was I'm fifty now, right, so it was half a life ago. But did you leave all those people behind? Did you shed a skin when you became famous and went into the business, Because for me, all my friendships began when I got in this business. It's interesting. I have two friends, Jeanie and Jackie. They're my friends since I was in elementary school and they're still my best friends. And the three of us see each other at least, you know, Jackie probably twice a week, Jeanie probably because she's out on the island at least once a month. And the three of us are like sisters and their family to me. Jackie's mother raised me, you know, after my mother died, I would eat dinner at their house like five nights a week. She bought me my first bra, She bought me, you know, tampons when I needed them as a kid. She was a mother, right, so, and she's still alive Bernis and so I see Jackie like like a sister all the time. But aside from those two, I don't see anyone from high school. I don't see anyone from my old stomping grounds on Long Island. And most of my friends, aside from those two, are friends that I'm out in this business because it's very hard for people to understand. It is lonely, and it's lonely, and it's hard to explain it to someone else because they it's held up as the be all and end all. It's held up as and it it really isn't. The reality of it is very different than what you expected from it. I'll never forget. This is gonna seem mundane, perhaps, but this really defines what I'm talking about. Im I would be sitting like I'm in the Canadian Rocky shooting a movie with Tony Hopkins, and I'll never forget. My assistant would FedEx me my mail and I pick up this thing and it says, you know the dates of the Bacon exhibit at the met and it's going to close and I'm not going to get back there and I'm gonna miss the Bacon exhibit. I felt so awful because I thought, I'm missing my life, I'm missing everything like what I did thirty Rock. People say, why did you love thirty rockets because they would work the schedule with me. When you're in the movie business, they are so punishingly unempathetic because they got ninety days to do it. They've got to get this thing done. Cutting days and cutting costs is what they're all about. Well, I remember when I was on my talk show. You were saying, I really want to get a sitcom. I really want to do a sitcom with me. Remember we were talking about it. He said, we're gonna do Jackie Gleeson and you're Jackie Gleason. And I'm yeah. I said, You're gonna be the brassy, tough character and I'm gonna be your withering husband. Right. So, I remember when people were saying that there was a show thirty Rock and Alec Bolden, and some people are saying to me, he's not gonna do a sick I'm like, yes, he is, you know, because I knew because I had spoke, we had spoken about it, how taxing it is, and I knew what you were craving was some kind of a normal schedule, Like a sitcom is the perfect gig for every actor. If you could get a thirty minute sitcom, I think that you know, one hour drama is just like doing a movie for nine months in a row. It's exhausting. In a minute, Rosie o'donnald gives me the lowdown on what it's like having a baby in your fifties. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing, this is Alec Baldwin. For much of her career, Rosie O'Donnell has created and supported numerous children's charities, from issues like pediatric aids to making sure New York City kids and particularly inner city kids, can see a real play with real actors on a Broadway stage. If you live in New York and haven't been to Broadway, as Rosie says, it's quote like living in Hawaii and not having access to the beach. Rosie realized she wanted children of her own, so at age thirty three, she adopted a baby, boy, Parker. The balancing act between motherhood and career, particularly one in the entertainment industry, took her by surprise. When Parker was a baby, you know, I didn't know anyone who went to nanny. I grew up like you did. There was an unheard of thing. I didn't even know anyone what a babysitter, right. Besides, somebody would come over for three hours when your parents went to you know, red Lobster. So um. I did Harry at the Spy, my first movie after he was born, and he was about three or four months old, maybe five months old, and I took him to Canada to film, and I asked my cleaning lady to come with me to watch him because I didn't have anybody to help. So she came. And the third day that I came home from a twelve hour day on the set, he wouldn't come to me. I would come here, buddy, and he would cry. He wouldn't. He was staying with Maria, and I remember at that moment, I called my agent and said, you need to get me a job that's going to keep me in New York because I don't want him growing up on movie sets. I want him to have his own bedroom. I want him to know his cousins. I want him to have a normal life and So that's the reason I did my talk show was because I wanted you and I it's a mirror. That's why I did thirty Rock and and my daughter lived in l A. But I said to Lauren, he said, what's it gonna take. I will give you off every Monday and every Friday, any weekend you want to go to go see your daughter who was in l A. Which in the beginning I would do. And then as my daughter got older, I mean I stopped going every other weekend because like I would drive out there and like drive my daughter to a party and drop her off. Believe me, I know teenagers and its health. But when does the moment come you're like, let's have the baby, Let's get this pot on the stove and get this thing going. What happens? Well, I did, um all those movies in a row that like the number one movie, three summers in a row, right, So first I did A League, and then Sleepless in Seattle and then The flint Stones. Well that's pretty astonishing, you know, especially because it's like those wasn't a trained actress. I was a comic writer. Didn't even really go to college. I went from one year, so I thought that was pretty astounding, and um, I wanted to do Broadway and Greece was coming out. So I call my agents and I want to go do that. She's like, are you kidding me? You're on this role movie wise? And I'm like, but I really really want to do it. So I'd saved a lot of money, you know, I'd spend wisely. I'm not like a big don't go buy clothes and shoes and stuff. And so I exactly, it's the truth. So I went and um audition for Greece and I got it on Broadway and I said, when I'm done with this run, I'm going to adopt a baby. So I was thirty two. How long a year? And can I tell you, Alec, dear lord heaven, it was like groundhog Day the movie, only without Bill Murray. Oh my god, it was. I couldn't. I would love to do Broadway again, but I would never commit to Yeah, Lord, I know, I'm sorry I missed it, but boy, that's something. That's something. And uh, so I decided I was going to adopt a baby. And it wasn't. I wasn't dating anyone, wasn't like you know, I was. I saw I was seeing a girl who was in the cast of Greece. But I it wasn't like we were gonna have kids together. I was going to adopt this baby, and she's like, well, what about me. I'm like, well, I don't know about you, but this is what I'm doing in my life. And so I adopted. She's like, well what would I be to him? I don't know what you're gonna be there. It wasn't like I was doing a week. I was just adopting a baby myself. And then I went and did Harry at the Spy and said to my agent, I gotta stay in New York. And at the time Cathy Lee was threatening to quit. I said, get me that gig with Reach and they said, oh, she's stanging, but they are willing to give you your own show like that, and I said, well, the only thing I'd want to do is MERV Griffin. I just simply rip off his show. I would do exactly MERV Griffin, a talk show when nobody gets hurt, where everybody's friends, when nobody's gonna embarrass anyone. People in Halee Helium, Balloon's You Got It and fun cooking segments and everybody likes each other. It wasn't like scandalized like right, So I drew the set like I said, this is what I want the set to look like. I drew where the band was supposed to be. I decided I wanted to current like I knew exactly what I did the logo myself, Like I was totally like, here's how you do over. I was just gone, he's not coming down here. Actually he was around then, and he was so sweet to me and Mike Douglas because it was a tribute sort of to both of them and Dina Shore who was gone. But you know, those are the shows I watched as a kid. That's not funny how when you talked before about a world without VCRs and stuff for them When when we were kids, when we watched TV. I'd watch Dina shot me too. I'd sit in my house and be like, I don't know who the hell is brought is, but I'm gonna watch because the point is what else was there? There? Was learned to like those shows or digest them because it's like, what the hell are we going to do? Mcgilla, Garilla the Little Rascals, right, or you know, Kimber the White Lion, remember that speed racer. Yeah. So I did the pilot and then I went to Napty and all of the TV people, which is a convention for television executives station owners, and they came and they said, well, if it doesn't work, are you gonna do like you know Haraldo and Jenny Jones, because those were the shows that were number one at the time. It was, you know, reformat. They were afraid that this wouldn't work because it hadn't been on in twenty five years, right, And they were afraid that I would become just like the other shows where people were punching each other and you know this, I had an affair with him, and that I would change the genre correct and I said I will never do that. I will just walk away before I do that. And they said, all right, we'll try it. So they were hesitant, the station owners. You can I it's not your baby exactly, everybody. Please. I couldn't do that. I really could of how they sleep. I watched Moria is still on. I'm like, thank god, what to seeing Connie talk about at night? Okay? Today I had two treads Best Night Short People, and they had twelve boyfriends. I don't know, how many years do you do the talk show? Six? I told them Initially I had a baby who was one. I said, I'm going to do the show for five years, and then I'm quitting before he goes to kindergarten. I said, I just want you to know before he starts, like first grade, real school, I'm quitting because this is a toxic business. I can't imagine what it would do to a kid. It's too much for me. And I also knew in Success how much money it was. It was an insane amount of money. So I told them from the beginning, I am only doing uh five, I was a four year deal. I said, I'm only doing four years because he would be fun. They said yes. But in year one it was such a big hit that they said, please give us two more years. Please, We'll give you, you know, the Oprah deal. So I agreed to do six. Now in my fifth year, they said, please sign up. That's when I begged you to do the Jackie Gleason s off. And you turned to me and said you you leaned into me very comming. You said, I Aunt, I'll never figurt that you'd lean to me. And you said, I can't. You said, I'm about to sign a deal. I'm gonna make quote that sick Oprah money exactly. I remember seing the going, fuck, it was money. It was sick Opra money. Yeah. So I signed on for two more years, and then you know, in the fifth year, they kept saying, you know, at one year left, come on, we're gonna offer you this. Honestly, I like the truth is I felt, if you have a hundred million dollars in the bank and you think you need a hundred million more, you're missing your life. I had three children at the time, right, I had three kids under the age of five, and my mother died at forty. I was thirty nine. My show ended right when I was forty. I thought, any day they're going to diagnose me with breast cancer. I'm gonna be gone. I wanted to go spend the time raising my children the way my mother didn't get to. So there was no amount of money. They kept upping the money and upping the money. And you know, Dick Robertson, Dick Robinson has said, to me, who's still around the older I used to work at Warner Brothers. He said, never in his life did he see somebody walk away from that much money? He said, he still doesn't believe sometimes he thinks about that moment, you know, because he walked in and he's like, I've been authorized to present you with this, you know, and thinking I was gonna go, well, okay, but when you walked away from that, because this is something that I wrestled with. Sometimes you want to be more proactive and involved with your kids. I mean that that's I don't I don't dispute that. I mean, that's obviously very very important. I made a lot of my choices around them as well, and continue to now that I'm having another baby. Like, like, beyond this thing of not wanting to have money control your life, was it also did you become someone you said, I'm sick of her and I'm sick of that, like that's Rosie in one stage of the rocket Ship, and now I was time to walk away from them. Yes, I had morphed into a different person, right because at the beginning of that show, the concept of knowing Barbara streisand of knowing Tom Cruise, of knowing you like I had worked with the actors I had worked with, I knew those people and I was friends with them, but that didn't mean that I felt I was part of the show biz community. But when that show took off and I had literally interviewed everyone from Walter Cronkite to you know, Joan Plowwright like to, you know, everyone was happy to be on your shop exactly, and it was, you know, it was the first one of its kind. There's a lot of them now. And you know, Ellen has has done it amazingly well. And she had all of my same producers, she had Jim Terratory, she had the same team, and she went and she did it. And I think she's very good at it, you know, I really do. But I know that I could not have done it any longer than I did it. I knew I was not a marathon. And then when you stopped what happened, I was, um. I felt free. First of all, I had just sort of come out right. I had written my first book and it talked about my being gay and all of the struggles that I had with how to how to announce that. And I did it in conjunction with an A C. L U case about Forster care because I was a Forster parent and blah blah, blah. So I didn't want it just to be about hey, like, let's talk about my sex life and sexual preference. You know. I wanted it to be about something more. So there was a case with the Loft and Crew too case down in Florida, two men who had adopted this children and they ciril converted from HIV positive to negative because both men were nurses, and they wanted to take the kids away after they ciril converted. So I actually, there's there was a law at the time in Florida that gay people could not adopt, even the force to chieve children they raised. So I went through this lawsuit and well the book came out three months after nine eleven, so it was sort of like nobody really cared. Nine eleven happened. And thank god I was off the following May because I did not think and I think there was some you know, intervention from above that I was off during the Bush administration. I think I would have probably lost my mind on national television, you know, when I could not believe when my show was off and we were going into war, going to Afghanistan, like and Phil Donahue was on again, and you know, I a spray painted no War on the back of my denom jacket. I could Oh yeah, I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't believe now aproposal that I mean, obviously you like me, you don't hesitate to speak your mind. Now. You went from being ubiquitous the show so forth, and do you enjoy that now where you don't you're not out there and you're not an opinion maker. Yes, but the fall between one and the other extreme was intense and sharp and shocking. Well, you know, I when I was on the cover of Newsweek, you know when my show premiered, said the Queen of Nights, I remember holding it up on on live TV and saying, this is going to bite me in the ass one day, because you know what, I'm not that nice. If you ever saw my stand up act, I go after people and issues that I find abhorrent and repulsive, and I present them in a comical way that makes you laugh and yet think. So I knew that that was never ever the totality of who I was. So um, I was not you know, naive enough to think that I was going to slimply glide slowly down towards the anonymity you know uh, but it was very very harsh, and it was very very quick, and it was a very big shock. Also, I was sued by the magazine company. And when you're sued by a corporation, right, I was sued for three million dollars right by this corporation they I when my show was ending, I was convinced to do a magazine like Oprah did with my name on at Rosie, and I was totally had creative control and they had the sales kind of control. What happened was after my show ended, the guy who worked there said, well, you signed a stupid contract and your lawyers weren't good and I owned the show and I'm gonna do what I want and fired the staff. And UM wanted to do like thin or thighs and thirty days and all the things that are not me. And I said, well you can't do that, and he said, well, you didn't see this loophole in the contract. So I remember saying to UM, my friends are to some learned people I knew who is the toughest and the best female lawyer in New York. And they said Mary Joe White and Mary Joe White, who brought down the first bombers at the nine eleven the college Killia whatever his name, and she has just been appointed with the Obama administration. She's like a huge mockey. Mark Well. I went into her office on a Saturday. She had shorts on and a T shirt, and I gave her the contract and I said, now I want to ask you. Am I right? Am I wrong? She said, well, you're right, and I said, She goes, but I don't know that that means you're gonna win. I said, but I am right. What I'm saying is right that this man cannot take what I've worked for for twenty years, my name and what it represents and reform at him because I signed a contract and made me into Susanne Summers correct or who actually like and think is very more more like make me into a Cosmo girl. Right? And she said, no, you're right, and if you're tough enough, you'll win. But they're gonna put you through hell. And they did. I was like on the cover of the Post like ninety three times. And when you came out of it, you prevailed, Yes, but it was exhausting, expensive and painful litigation. It certainly now we're going to run out of time. So I want to say two things, and I want to say this carefully because this is not about personal animus or somebody who pisched you off. What's one thing you were involved in that you went to the mat cause waw or something or an event, something you really went out there and was the most outrageous, the major, the most indignant. You know, I think it would probably be um the right of gay people to adopt in Florida. We actually did a canvassing of of the state of Florida back in you know, in the nineties when my show was on, because I thought, if we're gonna fight this, we're gonna lobby, let's try to see what the what the temperature is of the state and found a surprising amount, like disproportionately large amount of people would prefer that children had no parents than gay parents. That was at the time in the nineties. Now look how things have changed now, right that the ruling has been overturned, and you know, gays are allowed to adopt in pretty much every state I think at this point, and we're allowed to get married and we're allowed so a lot has changed since then. But that was quite disheartening at the time. I think also, you know what, my saying that I do not believe the official story of nine eleven has brought a tremendous amount of angst into my life. And I don't accuse anyone specifically or say that I know any answers. I simply say it defies the laws of physics, or mean, we're here, we are. It's the fiftieth anniversary of JFK's association, and people still don't want to talk about that. Well, and that's when when people come over to me and say, I want to talk to you about nine eleven, I said, before we have the conversation, I just want to ask you one thing, who killed John Kennedy? And if they say Lee Harvey Oswald, I said, then we're not going to have a conversation. But if you know, because honestly, you either have the benevolent father image in your mind and you can't sam right. It's the cognitive dissidence. Right. You can hold two opposing ideas in your brain at one time. You can love the United States of America right, and I love my country and therefore I want to seek exactly right. And therefore democracy demands dissent. And if you have questions. That's part of being and I shared that we're people doubt our patriotism because we're critical. I mean, if you look at my Twitter feed, I'm going to go off Twitter. Yes, it's too much negativity, and it's too much negativity that I don't get in real life. I can walk anywhere even to like, you know, my son goes to a military school. These are all Republicans. These are you know, hello, miss o'donald, thank you. You know, like unbelievably crying people in the world of my experience the unanimity of Twitter correct And that's what it is. It's like standing on a stage in a dark and comedy club and people throwing shit at you and you're still trying to do your act. I want to close with one thing, and that is I watch people who are virtuosic musicians. I mean, I do this announcing for the New York Philharmonic. I just went to Long Longs benefit on Monday at Carnegie Hall. I have this tremendous, tremendous, almost insatiable appetite for the classical repertoire and the people who play it well. And I think to myself, you know, where is that and what we do like acting. The people talk about Olivier and Kevin Klein and you know in Colin Firth and all they're really really beautifully etched actors of their day. And then I think about you, and I think about to be able to talk on a talk show and be able to communicate the way you did. You remind me in the conversational mode of a classical piano player, because you can touch, you can do anything, you can play anything. You are funny as hell, you're if you're smart. You are so many things. You could have done anything. You're so tenacious and you're so smart. If this hadn't worked out for you, what was among the fallbacks? What might you have done with your life for you didn't do this. I never had a fallback on purpose, and my dad used to say that all the time, you need a fallback, But I knew that this career was so difficult to succeed in that if you had a fallback, you would fall back. So I didn't have one. However, I know I would have been a teacher, because it was teachers who saved my life. We were in an abusive all. My dad had some issues after my mother died and even before, and it was teachers in the public school system who saved my life. Literally, I don't think I would be here. I don't think, you know, when my grandmother died, who had lived with us after when my mother had died, you know, when she died when I was in high school, all the teachers came to the funeral, all the like we were. We were five orphan children pretty much who were embraced and taken in by the teachers in our communities. And I definitely would have been a teacher. I love kids. And congratulations because you know, way do you see what it feels like doing it at fifty versus doing it at thirty. Honey, it's a different gig. Oh my god. First of all, it's so much calmer. You're so much more relaxed. You're enjoy every moment so much more like this baby. First of all, she's a dream. She she wakes up and she goes to bed at nine o'clock after bottle, wakes up at six, give her a bottle, and she sleeps in the bed with us till about every night. That's what you know. And Michelle, my wife, this is our first kid, goes let's get another one. I'm like, you're out of your mind. They don't come like this, girm. No, She's just it's a dream and I feel younger because of it. I feel like that my design, oh my god, al like it like turned on every creative. It's just it rebirthed me. It rebirthed me in a way that I was not expecting, and I'm so thankful for There's something about this experience. Uh, that's very different from the other kids. You know, when you your first baby, because you only had one, so your first baby. I always say, the other kids never get what that first kid got. And I'm not the first kid in my family, right my brother Eddie is, so in a way, this baby feels like the first kid all over again. Rosie O'Donnell entertainer, activist, philanthropist extraordinaire and above all a mom to five. Imagine the hand me downs in that house. Thank you for doing this, and I love you and I love you too, and I'm sending you so many baby things. Don't buy everything because I have a lot of extras. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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