Celebrity Detox: (the fame game) by Rosie O'Donnell Read Free Book Online Page A

this:
Inter Fucking fearing Bureaucratic bullshit.
    This is, of course, just in my opinion.

    “Like dogs sniffing each other.” This is how my own producer, Janette Barber, describes the dynamics on the first day of the show. I can’t say I experienced it that way, but I can say there was, perhaps, an element of cautiousness to the whole encounter. These women, after all, had been doing this show for what—nine years now—doing it their way, day in and day out, and then one day in walks the new kid on the block but she’s not an ordinary new kid. She’s the kid who comes to school in a Mercedes, the kid who is prince of some small island—you get it.
    My intent was never to steal the show, my intent was to enhance it, but not all forms of help are experienced this way. These women had their own routines and ideas; I had mine. I’ve never done anything halfway. My own show won many Emmy Awards. I told Barbara
The View
would
too. I am not sure she believed me. As for me, I don’t have to have the prize but I absolutely must have the desire to win it—to set the standard and then maybe even go beyond. Without that desire, your limbs shrivel and your soul gets small.
    A major conflict for me now, is how
not
to let my soul get small while doing mainstream television. Whether it’s my own show, or whether it’s a show I’m a guest on; whether it’s here or there or everywhere, mainstream television has its limits, which is one reason why I sometimes think I should leave it, break out, and go fully into cyberspace, where there’s a kind of radical freedom that frightens me as much as it appeals to me. On regular daytime TV, or nighttime too for that matter, the topics can lack heft. Girth. Weight. Who cares about Paris Hilton when what’s happening in the world is happening? The fact is, the rift between television and the real world is often just so large that it’s part of what drove me to quit in the first place. Here’s my image, how I would paint it if I could: a pink and white room. Makeup artists swooping rouge on cheekbones powdered pale with talc. Topics that are at best irrelevant, at worst obfuscating the real situation we are in. My idea of television is that it reveals, not conceals.
    My desire for fame was ignited in me when my mother got ill and died. I was ten years old then, and she died. She died first in our living room, lying on the couch in our house. She died later, and for good, in a hospital, alone, and she never ever came back home. Cancer. It grew in her body, cells swapping and dividing, but the details I have never learned; they were hidden from us. So much was hidden from us, for protection, for etiquette, the truth went up in coils of smoke from my nana’s cigarette, surrounding her, and finally erasing her, my mother. This is one reason why, I think, I long for the truth, and more. I want to broadcast what’s real, send it out in waves—silver sound waves lapping all over the globe.
    How to pick a pet for your children. How to make chocolate mud fudge sticks using Swiss Miss. Why Celebrity A hates Celebrity B. Why Celebrity B loves Celebrity A. What Celebrity C thinks of Celebrity A and B. Hot topics. Things that burn. Burns that scar the skin, peel away pink and underneath is new and too tender to touch. So much hurts here. Shhh. Don’t say this. Shhh.
    I found this just the other day—a fragment from an interview I gave, to whom I can’t recall, but they, the reporter I guess, must have sent me the transcript, and here it was, all of a sudden, in a file I can’t recall filing. Sometimes you see your face in the mirror and it seems shocking to you. So too, your
voice on tape or worse, pasted onto the page, where it freezes in its own hysteria, but there’s some truth there, in the rambling:
    I’m gonna start with 9/11.
    Oh my God, 9/11 happens.
    I was at the makeup chair
    John McDaniel came in and he was crying
    and he was telling me that
    a plane had crashed into the Twin