Monday, Sep. 21, 1992

The Joy of Being Whoopi

By John Skow

SHE'S GOT A MOUTH ON HER. OOOOOOH, yeah! Uh-huh! Whoo-pi! Gives a little grin, lets loose a blast of in-your-face black street trash, something about yo muthuh. True, child.

That mouth, impish or hellacious, is where Whoopi Goldberg goes one up on the world. Twist it, she's a funny little troll. Smile like the Queen of Sheba, she is the Queen of Sheba, a knee-weakening beauty (don't doubt it; like Meryl Streep, who's also less than a stunner, Whoopi can play beauty). Shove out her jaw, she's a bad-mouth male junkie -- yeah, name's Fontaine, attitude's his game, what's your problem? Flash that 82-toothed thousand- watter, time to watch your wallet. Smile shyly, she's a little kid, you want to give her a glass of milk and a couple of cookies. Thank you, mister.

What is needed here is a mouth alert -- THIS IS NOT A TEST, YOU ARE IN REAL DANGER, LOCAL AUTHORITIES ARE HIDING IN THE CELLAR WITH A JUG -- because Whoopi, dreadlocks, attitude and all, is branching out. Quick, what does the worldy night and twice on Saturday. The negatives, as they say in politics, are encouraging: no monologue, no band to tootle when inspiration flags, no giggling studio audience to which the camera can pan, and no Dan Quayle jokes unless Quayle himself makes them.

The low-handicap Veep has not yet agreed to appear, but Al Gore, who wants his job, is one of the early guests. So are Bo Jackson, the retired two-sport flash, white supremacist Thomas Metzger, and the usual show-biz suspects, including Liz Taylor, Elton John and Tim Robbins. Violinist Itzhak Perlman is $ scheduled, and California senate candidate Dianne Feinstein is already taped. Whoopi wants to reason together with Pat Buchanan, who hopes to wall off the Mexican border, and with Pat Robertson, who believes that feminism leads to witchcraft. (Is Robertson right? Or does sanctimoniousness lead to prattle? Tune in and find out.)

It is, at any rate, hard to go one up on Whoopi. Actor colleagues in a San Francisco rep company didn't succeed in the early '80s, when they nicknamed her for a dim-witted novelty-store joke. "I was very flatulent," she explains with an angelic smile. "So for a while it was 'Whoopi Cushion.' Then, for a touch of class, 'Whoopi Couchant.' So I thought, Why not? I'll be Whoopi. But Whoopi Johnson just doesn't cut it." (You figure that one out; her name then was Caryn Johnson.) So she rummaged among her family names and came up with some mixed-blood Goldbergs she swears are back tsn't break character, he's still a badass, but now he's in Anne Frank's attic, thoroughly shaken, explaining that she and her family hid there from the Nazis, in silence, for month after month, and that even at the end, Anne still believed that humanity was basically good.

Making people laugh while carrying off this kind of thing without mawkishness is close to impossible, and Whoopi did it. People left the theater feeling that they had just seen the best dramatic show on Broadway. Director Steven Spielberg was one of them, and he cast Goldberg as the farmer's ugly- duckling wife Celie in The Color Purple. She had never been on a sound stage before, but her performance turned out to be the best part of a good film. And in the next few years, in role after role, her acting was the best part of a succession of bad, mediocre and upper-mediocre films.

Such as Sister Act. Waiting for Whoopi's dangerous-to-your-health mouth to fulminate is the main plot element -- no, the sole plot element -- of this Disney no-brainer, one of those renegade-hides-out-with-cute -nuns movies that + Hollywood makes every three years. So Sister Act (which has grossed $125 million to date) has a touch of class it doesn't really deserve. So do Clara's Heart, Jumpin' Jack Flash and Ghost (for which Goldberg got the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, though she is firm in announcing that she's an actor, and never mind the feminine dismissive). She has the ability to turn a routine flick into a pretty good movie entirely on her own.

She grew up in the racially mixed Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, messed around with drugs "the way everyone did then," and by her late teens was a high school dropout ("I just wasn't cut out for it") with a broken marriage and a baby daughter. Not long afterward she was living on welfare in San Diego. But her story can't be told that quickly. She looks on her childhood as privileged. Her mother, a nurse and a Head Start teacher, was a strong woman ("Still is. She's got her foibles, but she's amazing") who would say, "Get on the bus, go hear the Leonard Bernstein concert, go see the children's ballet, go to the museum . . ." And there were old movies on TV, "though I didn't know they were old; I liked the idea of seeing Clark Gable in the war on one channel, and then switching, and he'd be riding a horse."

Most magically, there was a glorious children's theater program at the Hudson Guild, funded by Helena Rubenstein. By age eight, the not-yet Whoopi was hooked. "I could be a princess, a teapot ((she laughs at the memory)), a rabbit, anything. And in a way, it's been children's theater ever since. I've only recently begun believing that I've grown up, and acting is what I do."

Living on welfare in San Diego was demeaning, for the usual reasons. Social workers sniffed about to see whether some man was living on her allowance. When she made $25 from theater work or a few off-and-on dollars for being a cosmetician in a mortuary, she would stubbornly report the money to the welfare people "because I didn't want my daughter seeing Mom lying." The welfare people would stubbornly subtract it from her next check. "Of course by that time the theater money would be gone." She admits that the system did what it was supposed to do: it propped her up when she needed it. But dignity wasn't part of the process. "Yeah, I get pissy thinking about it, because it shouldn't be so degrading," she says now. "But I'm not bitter. That takes too much time."

She has a reputation in the film community for being difficult. "I've thrown tantrums," she says with a grin, "but it's always about work. Incompetence makes me mad. It sucks up your energy for what you're supposed to do. But it's never personal, unless you make it personal, and then I will just embarrass you as big as I can." The filming of Sister Act was tension time, she admits. The script wasn't ready and didn't flow logically. "I was crabby because things weren't right."

Whoopi thinks the talk show is "probably not a great career move. I should be riding the crest, doing films." But, she says, she wanted to find out what's on people's minds. Metzger, the white supremacist, told her that separation of the races is important, "and I said, 'Where are you people going, because I sure as hell ain't leaving.' I'm not going to change his mind, but I think as long as we keep a dialogue up, you can see where their hands are. They can't be out in the streets doing the other stuff." One sponsor, a pharmaceutical company, said it wouldn't run its commercials on the Metzger show. "So I had to say, 'Then don't.' "

Politics in Los Angeles means how you feel about the riots (which were, she says, basically former Police Chief Daryl Gates' bleep-you to the city). Goldberg sees some hope. "At least blacks can now say to Korean grocers, 'You are rude when we come into the store,' and the Koreans can say, 'When you come into the store, we're frightened.' " Filming Sarafina! in Soweto last winter (she plays a courageous teacher in the musical, which will be released this week in New York City and Los Angeles), Whoopi was the target of a "declaration of war" by a black group opposed to the project. "We talked it over," she says, "and the problem was more or less fixed. But, yeah, you feel fear. They had issued a license to any nut who wanted to take me out." As usual, death threats or not, she was thoroughly professional for the filming. She arrived in South Africa with her accent down pat, according to Darrell Roodt, 29, the white director. Her acting is wonderfully instinctive, he says, and watching her, he would think, "My God, she's a schoolteacher in Soweto."

Whoopi has been one of the rowdy, trash-talking co-hosts, with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, of the virtually annual Comic Relief TV shows to aid the homeless. Spend time with her, and you see that the raunchiness isn't part of her act; it's part of her nature. Clowning between takes with a photographer, she improvises a gross-out commercial, drip-drip-drip, for adult diapers. Ghost star Demi Moore reports that things got cheerfully vulgar during the shooting of that film. "She'd say, 'It's coming, I feel it coming,' and then let out a belch. It was so great. She just kept us laughing."

Taping 120 talk-show conversations and doing what she calls the "mogulette number" that goes with the project will keep Whoopi busy for a few weeks. She has a continuing role as Guinan, the psychic bartender, in Star Trek: The Next Generation. But she has no film roles in view, though she is enthusiastic about Made in America, a comedy with Ted Danson that she finished not long ago. She does get film offers, but not as many as one might think. A couple of years ago she gave a wry answer to an interviewer from Premiere magazine who asked why she appeared in so many not-so-hot films. "I did the pictures I was offered," she said. "Do you think I would sit around and say, 'Here's great scripts, here's crappy scripts; I'll do the crappy ones'?"

She wants to work in Soweto again, but for now she's happy to spend long weekends at her Connecticut unfarmed farm, where it's green and peaceful. She has three horses there, and you can tell by the names -- Peppy Bell, Shadow and Quisma -- that she has owned them in her mind since she was little. Does she ride English style? Course not; she grew up on western movies, so she's a cowgirl, "but not too good at it." Getting on toward 40, she has two brief marriages behind her ("They seemed like a lifetime") and now, she says, lives happily alone. "But I've got family; I'm surrounded." Her daughter and her older brother work with her in Los Angeles. "It's a good time in my life. I'm feeling pretty good about myself these days."

With reporting by Patrick E. Cole/Los Angeles