NOVEMBER 6, 2017
One summer afternoon not long ago, I was sitting in my living room talking to my good friend Rosie O’Donnell, who had come to stay with Beth and me for the weekend. Yes, you heard me right: my good friend. Me putting those three words in front of Rosie’s name would have been inconceivable back in the nineties, when I was constantly attacking her and saw her as my archenemy. Had you told me then that one day I’d not only make peace with her but consider her one of my closest confidants, I’d have said you were crazy, but that’s exactly what happened—and it’s all thanks to Rosie’s kindness.
I was awful to her for no good reason. I was just at a time in my life where I was angry at and jealous of anyone who was having success. I’m reminded of that John Lennon song “Jealous Guy”: “I didn’t want to hurt you/I’m just a jealous guy.” I lashed out at anyone and everyone whose career was prospering, because in some magical way, I thought I should be the center of the universe, and whenever it seemed like someone else was, I couldn’t accept it. This was a case of sibling rivalry, as if the whole entertainment business was my evil, annoying brother stealing the spotlight. The only one who should have been flourishing was me. I wasn’t willing to share the audience with anyone else. I wanted all of the marbles for myself.
That’s a very hard way to live. You walk around in a constant state of anger, and that anger was directed at Rosie and about ten million other people too. It was my mission in life to ridicule and knock them all down. Rosie had done nothing wrong. She simply had a different broadcast style than my own, offered a different kind of entertainment. She wasn’t out to swallow the entire world like I was, and for that I had put her on trial and convicted her in my stupid kangaroo court.
After I spent some time in therapy, I realized how childish this attitude was and how my sense of entitlement, and my inability to say no to myself, was the root of so many of my problems. As I started to think less about myself and more about others, I began to appreciate Rosie, especially when she announced she was gay. That really struck a chord with me. I had an older cousin, Stacy, who came out in the 1950s, when he was thirteen. This was in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn, but my family was very accepting. My mother would set him up on dates, and even as a little kid I appreciated how courageous Stacy was. The same went for Rosie. I couldn’t imagine how much guts it took for her to come out, especially considering the potential risk to her career, yet she did it.
That wasn’t the only thing to admire about Rosie. As we discuss in this interview, she walked away from her own talk show—probably the biggest television show on the air at the time. She said no to more fame, more money, more of everything. Before therapy, I would have thought this was a ridiculous move. Give up a hit show—are you kidding? But therapy helped me see this wasn’t silly, it was strong. It was Rosie being a badass, choosing to follow her own instincts and heart. She didn’t suffer from the insatiable hunger that I did, and rather than hate her and ridicule her for it like I would have prior to therapy, I respected her decision and started talking on the air about how amazing I thought she was.
I can’t remember which one of us was the first to reach out, but we began having a dialogue, and it was easy right from the start. There was no awkwardness. Rosie is so smart and mature that she recognized my issues for what they were. She didn’t take it personally. She quickly became one of the most positive influences in my life. Probably the best example of how supportive Rosie has been to me is the way she encouraged me to pursue painting—one of several passions I developed as a result of therapy, which motivated me to engage with the world in ways I never had before.
Therapy made me realize how most of my life revolved around radio. It consumed me, placed me in a self-imposed quarantine. I didn’t interact with many people outside of those I saw at work. So I decided to rediscover chess, which I had played as a child in Roosevelt, Long Island. Back then, the game helped me cope with the isolation I felt after all my friends and their families had left town as part of the white flight that was happening all across America in the 1960s. My parents refused to partake in this. In the same way they embraced my cousin Stacy’s sexuality, they were adamant about not succumbing to racism. They put their money where their mouths were. While staying in Roosevelt taught me important lessons about tolerance and living by your convictions, it also left me with few friends, and so I spent much of my time outside of school in my bedroom moving pieces across a board against imaginary opponents and reading Bobby Fischer’s regular column in Boys’ Life magazine.
As an adult I hadn’t played in probably thirty years, and so I began receiving lessons from a brilliant guy named Dan Heisman, who lived in Philadelphia and would instruct me over the computer. I got better and better, and eventually I reached a rating of 1800, which is fairly good for a guy who didn’t really start until late in life. (To give you an idea of what that means, at his peak Fischer’s rating hovered around 2800.) But then I would go play games in person at the legendary Marshall Chess Club in Greenwich Village, and I would get annihilated. Even twelve-year-olds were kicking my ass. I couldn’t stop obsessing over what I did wrong. I would take a walk with Beth, and she’d say, “You’re not paying attention to me. You’re playing that game over and over in your head.” She was right. Rather than enjoy the moment with her, I’d be thinking, “I can’t believe I made such a dumb move. How did I lose?” I saw chess as the ultimate standard for intelligence, and when I got outplayed I felt diminished and stupid. This was not a game but a statement about my self-worth. I stuck with chess for three years, but finally I had to give it up because I went insane. Eventually my compulsion to be the greatest crept in and strangled the fun out of it.
So my passion shifted to photography. Once again, I studied with a veteran practitioner, an excellent photographer named Doug Gordon. I spent hours poring over books on lighting, learned Photoshop, invested thousands of dollars in equipment. I got good enough that I shot Beth for several magazine covers. Then suddenly after three years, it dawned on me: “Any idiot with an iPhone can take a beautiful picture.” Just like with chess, I couldn’t be leisurely about photography. I had to be the absolute best. Eventually my perfectionism crept in and strangled the fun out of it.
I gave up photography and decided to pursue painting. I had no idea where to start. I couldn’t draw a straight line. And here’s where Rosie came in: I knew she was into crafts, so I asked her if she had any advice. I was hoping for a tip or two, and I knew she was busy so I didn’t expect to hear from her anytime soon. Right away she sent me a long, exhaustive email showing me all the materials and equipment I would need and where to find it—with links and everything. It was an amazing outpouring of information. She went above and beyond, and her generosity and encouragement meant everything me. It touches me so much when someone extends themselves like that, because I’m not used to that kind of love. I’m just not.
Once again, I bought all the supplies, read a small library’s worth of books, studied under several fantastic teachers, including an exceptional watercolorist named Rick Brosen. It’s been four years since I started doing watercolors, and I’m still painting like crazy. I’d be lying if I said those old demons don’t creep in. I’ll think, “Why can’t I be as good as Caspar Friedrich or Eugène Boudin?” Never mind the fact that those guys didn’t have to spend hours every day putting together a radio show. I have such high standards. I talk about it constantly with my therapist. I know I can’t be great at everything, but damn if I don’t try.
One thing I realized after reviewing this interview with Rosie is that it isn’t necessarily chess or photography or painting that interests me; it’s learning, being taught, getting that kind of devoted one-on-one attention. Rosie was a child when her mother died, and she describes here how she would break bones in her hands so that she could go to the doctor and get the kind of affection and doting from nurses that she was missing at home. While I didn’t lose a parent, I still felt such tremendous loneliness growing up, and I suppose having a teacher gives me the attention I’ve always desired. I don’t know if Rosie realized it when she sent me those e-mails about art, but that day she took on the role of a teacher, which has become so important to me.
It is that kind of honesty and wisdom I value so much in my friendship with Rosie. If the situation had been reversed all those years ago, and she had been the one trashing me, I don’t know if I could have been as forgiving. When we were sitting in my living room that summer weekend, I remember thinking, “How stupid am I? How could I have missed out in my life on someone so special because of some dumb posturing on the radio?” I’m so grateful for her graciousness.
Howard: Rosie O’Donnell is here. She’s in a [Showtime] project called SMILF.
Rosie: Turn on my mic, Howard.
Howard: So unprofessional. You look great, by the way.
Rosie: Thank you so much.
Howard: People don’t realize, you were like the most popular girl in high school. Weren’t you like prom queen or something?
Rosie: And homecoming queen. And senior class president.
Howard: You were the kid who lit the world on fire.
Rosie: Well, you know, when you have a hard life at home . . . I really loved the attention from the adults. I wanted the teachers to love me, and they did. They were these public school teachers who took an interest in our family with no mom and a dad that was not really qualified. They really raised us. So I was very interested in doing well.
Howard: I think it is so phenomenal and worth reminding people that at, like, sixteen you go and try stand-up comedy. All your friends from school and teachers are there, so you killed the first night.
Howard: You were so good. And then the next time you went up, none of them were there and you tanked.
Rosie: Tanked beyond words. Like the worst of my career. Dead silence.
Howard: Then you said, “Oh I have an idea. I’ll take Jerry Seinfeld’s material and I’ll perform that.”
Rosie: It wasn’t even that thought-through. The guy who owned the club, Richie Minervini, goes, “Don’t worry that you bombed. Come back tomorrow.” I’m like watching Merv Griffin, and there’s Seinfeld, and I’m like, “All right, I’ll just do that.” I think that a joke is a joke, right? Streisand doesn’t write any songs. Bette Midler doesn’t write any songs. Why do I have to write a joke?
Howard: Right, why can’t Jerry Seinfeld be my writer?
Rosie: Exactly. He was pretty good.
Howard: And then the other comedians were like, “Hey wait a second, you’re stealing Jerry Seinfeld’s act.”
Rosie: I said, “Yeah, he was on Merv Griffin yesterday.”
Howard: You weren’t hiding anything.
Rosie: No, it wasn’t a big secret.
Howard: In a sense, you’re like an actress. You said, “Tonight, I will be doing Jerry Seinfeld’s material and my interpretation of it.”
Rosie: Yeah, exactly. “This is a scene from Hello, Dolly!” I didn’t really get it. And so then I was so depressed. I thought, “Well, how the hell am I going to write material?” That same guy Richie Minervini, who owned the East Side Comedy Club in Huntington, he said to me, “Why don’t you be the emcee? So you can go on every night and you just get used to talking to the crowd and used to doing it.” I was doing that and Shirley Hemphill from What’s Happening!! was the headliner that weekend. She was there a day early. She came to the club and she said to [Richie], “You’re going to book her. She’s opening for me.” And he’s like, “She’s new. She’s sixteen. She can’t.” Shirley said to him, “Little one is going on or the big one is not.”
Howard: Wow, she loved your act, and you didn’t even have an act.
Rosie: I didn’t have an act. My act was Ms. Pac-Man. That was my act. [makes Ms. Pac-Man sound]
Howard: That was the act?
Rosie: Pretty much.
Howard: You did a Pac-Man routine.
Rosie: Well, when you’re sixteen, you take from your own life.
Howard: Unbelievable. When you started to act, I think for three summers in a row you were in the three biggest movies of that year. I’m talking about A League of Their Own, Sleepless in Seattle, and then the Flintstones movie. Three in a row.
Rosie: I know, right? Crazy.
Howard: I just figured you’d work full-time as an actress.
Rosie: I wanted to. And then I had the baby—Parker—who is now twenty-two.
Howard: That was the reason you went to the talk-show business? Because you wanted to stay home?
Rosie: I wanted him to grow up with his cousins. I wanted him to be in his own bed. And I hadn’t had a nanny until I did the movie Harriet the Spy.
Howard: Do these kids realize what you sacrificed for them?
Rosie: They do not, and I’m still pissed off about it, Howard.
Howard: Was your agent at the time really pissed off that you were not going to continue with movies, and do a talk show? Because talk shows are really tricky.
Rosie: At the time they said that they didn’t think it was a good idea. But I knew three number-one movies in a row, three summers in a row—there wasn’t a lot more places to go as the funny friend, right?
Howard: Man, did that thing take off or what?
Rosie: Yes, but it was also timing. It’s like when you catch the wave, who else is on it? I was on ABC at a time when there were three channels, maybe five. There were not a lot of options. At that time, remember, somebody was killed [after appearing] on Jenny Jones, right before I went on. People were getting beat up every day. All of these horrible, negative shows every day. Here was a show with an entertainer who liked people and wanted all the guests to thrive and be good.
Howard: You’re right, there wasn’t much like that on the air.
Rosie: No controversy. If somebody said in the pre-interview with the producers, “I don’t want to talk about my divorce. I don’t want to talk about this,” I would say, “Fine with me. I don’t care what you want to talk about. Let’s just have fun.”
Howard: That was really a formula for success. In a way, I feel like what Ellen’s doing now is a continuation of what you did, am I correct?
Rosie: Totally. It’s the same exact producer. It’s the same executive producer. It’s the same staff. It’s the same show. She doesn’t owe that to me. I took from Merv Griffin. It’s just a formula.
Howard: SMILF is “Moms I like to fuck” or something. What is it?
Rosie: Single mom I’d like to fuck. It’s an acronym that the kids are talking about nowadays. I had not heard of it either. When I first heard it I was like, “Smurf? What is this?” Then I watched the short film that [series creator and star] Frankie Shaw did and it’s—you would love her, Howard. Smart, sexy, funny.
Howard: What do you play?
Rosie: I play her mother. She’s mentally ill. She’s, like, bipolar—untreated. Childhood trauma.
Howard: You love that shit, right?
Rosie: Are you kidding? This is mother’s milk for me.
Robin: She can act this with her eyes closed.
Rosie: I know this role.
Howard: How do you prepare to be a mentally disturbed mom? What do you do?
Rosie: The first thing I did was I asked if we could shoot with no makeup for me. Self-care is one of the first things to go when you’re suffering.
Howard: You don’t care how you look.
Rosie: No, and it’s been a challenge for me. Sometimes I go through Wikipedia images of me, and I go, “Wow, I was at an opening with my hair not even blow-dried and sweatpants?” I have major depressive disorder. Luckily, I’m medicated and—
Howard: What do you take?
Rosie: Effexor. It’s a very hard one to get off of. I tried to get off it once, and I will never do it again.
Howard: What happened?
Rosie: Within a week and a half I was in the bed crying, couldn’t get up.
Howard: You said, “Look, I’ve been on this stuff long enough. I want to get off this drug.”
Rosie: I went on right after Columbine. The last week of April 1999. I could not work. I couldn’t stop crying on live TV. I couldn’t find the reason. The doctor said, “You must go on medication.” I went on Prozac. I was on it for about four years, and then I had what’s called the Prozac Poop, where it sort of stops working. They switch you. Since about 2003, I’ve been on Effexor. It’s been really great for me. I know it’s not for everyone, but for me, I knew I have to participate in my mental health.
Howard: Do you think your issues are a result of not having a mom—growing up, essentially, an orphan? Your father was not equipped to be a dad. Do you think that’s where it’s from? Or do you think it’s a biological, chemical imbalance?
Rosie: I think it’s both. Because there’s a tremendous amount of people who suffer in the way that I do, in my father’s family. I’ve met aunts who tried to kill themselves. One who did. Some who had ECT, Electric Convulsive Therapy, which Carrie Fisher had toward the end.
Howard: Like a shock therapy, right?
Rosie: If you’re at a place where nothing else has worked, that’s what they recommend. Thank God, I’ve never gotten to that place.
Howard: Was the impression of the doctor that while everyone was upset about Columbine, you were excessive? You were over the top and couldn’t even recover from it because of your illness, right? In other words, yes, you were thinking about Columbine, but it’s also you’re thinking about your own children. It just puts you down so bad.
Rosie: I couldn’t believe that I lived in a country where children were being shot in the high school. And then the constant viewing of that. It was bad after 9/11, but after Columbine, they showed over and over the bloody bodies jumping out the window. I couldn’t get it out of my— I thought, “How can this be America? How can this be America?”
Howard: Did you become suicidal as a result? Have you ever been suicidal?
Rosie: I think I have suicidal ideation.
Howard: What does that mean?
Rosie: It means you think about it. You don’t ever make the plan, necessarily, of how you’re going to do it, but sometimes you think—there’s a great lyric in Hamilton: “Sometimes it’s easier to just swim down.” When you feel like there’s no chance you’re going to get to the surface again. I’ve had that probably three times in my life, all as an adult.
Howard: All over big tragedies.
Rosie: Yes. All over world events. Columbine was the first one. 9/11 was the second one. Katrina was the third one. And Mr. Donald Trump has been the fourth one.
Howard: Yeah, talk to me about Trump. I haven’t seen you on the show for a couple of years. A lot has happened since I last saw you, including the fact that there was a debate during the election. It was Hillary Clinton, as we know, and Donald Trump. In the middle of that Megyn Kelly, if you remember—
Rosie: I remember.
Howard: Megyn Kelly asks a question and he really singles you out. “I don’t make fun of women, just Rosie O’Donnell. She deserves it, and everyone hates her, and I’m the one who blah blah blah.”
Rosie: Then the crowd laughs, and Megyn Kelly does not defend me. She says, “No, not only Rosie O’Donnell.” As if there’s anyone you could put in that equation who would deserve that kind of treatment.
Howard: Where were you during it?
Rosie: I was at opening night of Hamilton.
Howard: You’re kidding.
Rosie: That was the opening night. When I walked out, there were a lot of press groups going, “What do you think?” I’m like, “This is the best musical I’ve ever seen in my life.” They’re like, “No, not about that.”
Howard: At that point, I’m sure most Americans thought Trump didn’t stand a chance of even winning.
Rosie: No. In fact, when he came down that escalator with all that paid crowd, I was laughing my ass off.
Howard: At what point did you start to get nervous about Trump’s candidacy? Was it like by the time Jeb Bush gets out, and then Marco Rubio gets out, and he starts to narrow the field?
Rosie: When he got the nomination, I think that’s when I was shocked. I went and met with the Hillary Clinton campaign and offered my services in any capacity. Because I knew what he was capable of. I also knew, from fighting him for a decade, how to fight him.
Howard: How did the fight start? What happened? You spoke about him on The View?
Rosie: Right. Because right before we went live, he did a press conference. Tara Conner [winner of the 2006 Miss USA pageant, then owned by Donald Trump] was down in the Village drinking, and she kissed a girl, and it was on the cover of the Post. He held a press conference where he announced that he had forgiven her. I was like, “This is like an orange Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch. He’s like the pimp telling everybody, ‘This girl misbehaved and you better watch it.’ ” I was saying how he’s not the moral arbiter of twenty-year-old behavior. “Who does he think he is? He doesn’t own this girl.”
Howard: You were critical of him.
Rosie: Correct. Then I pulled up some facts, easily accessible on Wikipedia, and announced the truth. Which was that he’d been bankrupt four times, that his father gave him all his money, that he notoriously did not pay contractors, and that he’s generally a sexual predator.
Howard: That set him off.
Rosie: Like you couldn’t believe, Howard. He went on every show. Every show allowed him. He went on Matt Lauer and David Letterman.
Howard: Blasted you.
Rosie: Not only blasted me. Said, “She’s a degenerate. I’m going to take her wife. She’s a pig. She’s horrible.” Things that I thought the National Organization of Women would be like, “Hold it. Foul—that’s a foul.” Nobody did anything, really.
Howard: Now he could potentially be the president of the United States and be your number-one enemy. I’m sure there was a fear factor there for you.
Rosie: No, actually, there was none. That’s the weird thing. Even before I went out that day on The View to talk about him—because we had a little morning meeting—Joy Behar said, “You’re not really going to say that.” I said, “Yes, yes.” She goes, “Aren’t you afraid?” I remember thinking, “Afraid of what?” I’m not going to be afraid of this schmucky guy.
Robin: He’s a private citizen.
Rosie: A private citizen who’s a phony. He’s a phony. I wasn’t afraid of him at all. I never even thought of it. Now people are saying, “Well, aren’t you afraid because he’s the President?” I’m like, “No.” He doesn’t have any kind of real power. Everybody with an IQ of over 100—he loves the IQs—can understand that he’s an idiot.
Howard: On Twitter, when you had your heart attack, Trump did wish you well.
Rosie: I know. Which was crazy. “You must be trying to kill me, because I almost died of a heart attack reading you being nice to me.”
Howard: I imagine you being in the middle of this is a weird sort of fame that you’re not looking for. You probably just want to extract yourself from the dialogue if you could.
Rosie: But I can’t, because it’s been over a decade at this point. I was target number one for him, and God knows there have been many—and many much worse than me that he’s done it to. I do really feel like he is the clear and present danger to the world and to life itself.
Howard: Do you think that Trump is going to make it through his presidency?
Rosie: No way on God’s green earth.
Howard: You think Bob Mueller—
Rosie: I don’t think. I know it with every cell in my body. I know it.
Robin: But you don’t know it for a fact.
Rosie: Robin, you might not know it, but I know it.
Howard: Rosie knows that. You would have sex with Bob Mueller, I believe.
Rosie: Listen, I would do whatever Bob Mueller needs. I would talk to his wife, make sure it was okay.
Howard: For the good of the country, if they said, “Listen, Bob Mueller is all backed up. Rosie, we need you.”
Rosie: I would look at Bob and say, “I’m here to serve my country, as you are, sir. I’m sure there’s somebody more attractive who could do it better, but if this is what you need, Bob, let me know.”
Howard: Speaking of attractive . . . Since your heart attack—we haven’t talked about this because you haven’t been back in a long time—you had the stomach stapling. What percentage of your stomach is out of commission?
Rosie: Yes, this is called the gastric sleeve, so probably they’d leave about a quarter of your stomach, the size of a banana.
Howard: You are now tiny.
Rosie: I’m fifty pounds less than I was.
Howard: I mean, this has got to be fantastic for you. Did you go out and shop? Did you get a new wardrobe when you lost the fifty? You don’t give a shit about that stuff.
Rosie: No. And you know what else? I can’t see the difference. I can in a photo. If I look at a photo, I go, “Oh, wow.” But I can’t look in the mirror and go, “Oh, I look different.” I have that sort of body dysmorphia.
Robin: You can’t appreciate it.
Rosie: I don’t know. I can’t see it almost.
Howard: I sense you got sad when you said that. Why? Because you can’t see the beauty, or you can’t see how attractive you are?
Rosie: I think it’s just more of a disconnect. I think it’s what your body does to protect you if you were a kid who was sexually abused, which I was.
Howard: Right.
Rosie: You disconnect from your body. You dissociate and you almost don’t pay attention to it. You don’t want to love it because it’s kind of betrayed you in some way. I remember when I was very thin. My thinnest as an adult was probably like 160. I was 160 at some point and I was going to work at the Improv in LA, and I stopped to get gas. And these two very handsome, nice guys in their twenties came out and helped me with the self-serve. On the way to the Improv, I stopped at Baskin Robbins. I didn’t even notice it. I didn’t even realize that’s what I was doing. It was only in therapy six months later that I realized I felt scared by the attraction of these men, and I wanted to make my body something that would not get them out of the little area where they sell candy to help me.
Howard: Do you proselytize for this operation? Do you tell people who are overweight to get the operation, or did you have some negative effects from it?
Rosie: I had zero negative effects. I wish I had done it ten years before; however, it wasn’t available ten years before. Now, listen, you only have this surgery when you’re near death.
Howard: Which you were.
Rosie: I should have died. The doctor said, “There’s no reason you survived this heart attack. We don’t know why you did. We don’t know how you did. But you will not survive another one.”
Howard: You described when you were having the symptoms of a heart attack, you just looked it up online and you took some Bayer aspirin.
Rosie: Exactly. I thought it had to be worse. It hurt—my arms hurt—but you’ve seen people, mostly men, on TV get a heart attack, they grab their chest, they fall down, right? I thought to myself, “This can’t be a heart attack.” Because a heart attack would, like, knock me out. Yolanda King, Martin Luther King’s daughter, had the same heart attack on her fiftieth birthday, which is when I had mine, and she was dead before she hit the floor. I’m very lucky. It’s called the widow-maker. I had 100% blockage of my LAD. That’s one of the three main arteries that carries most of the blood to all your body.
Howard: You tweeted the other day that we all knew about Kevin Spacey, meaning the Hollywood community. Did you really know about Kevin Spacey?
Rosie: Yes, because I’m a person in Broadway. He’s been a Broadway guy for a long time, and he is notoriously handsy. Did I know he was trying to rape children? Of course I did not know that. I also didn’t know that Harvey Weinstein was actually raping women.
Rosie: Well, okay, allegedly. I knew that Harvey Weinstein was a guy who used the casting couch and was, like, a big bragger about everyone he took to bed. I knew that Harvey Weinstein was a horrible man when he called me a cunt to my face.
Howard: When was that?
Rosie: The first movie that Night Shyamalan—
Howard: M. Night Shyamalan?
Rosie: Right. The movie Wide Awake was his directorial debut. It was a Miramax film. I was in it with Dana Delany and Denis Leary. He finished the film, turned it in, and Harvey didn’t like the cut. So Harvey recut his film. The kid was only twenty-six. He called me, crying, and said, “Could you go with me into the meeting?” I went with him to the meeting. He and I were in this meeting, and I said to Harvey, “You don’t tell Picasso, ‘More blue.’ You’re the guy who frames it and sells it. You’re not the artist here.” At that, he said, “You fucking cunt. You fucking talk-show-host wannabe piece of shit.” I said, “Well, this will be our last conversation, sir.”
Howard: Wow.
Rosie: So I knew he was a bully creep. But I never thought he was raping women. You know, being fifty-five, I grew up when the feminist movement was just beginning, and I really had this idea that we were going to continue to get power and equality. What Frankie Shaw—when I saw that she wrote, directed, stars in, produced [SMILF], I thought, “This is feminism come to birth in two generations later.”
Howard: Being in movies, though, was that the highlight of your life? When you’re hanging with Madonna in A League of Their Own, then you become friends, and the biggest star in the world is sort of like your buddy.
Rosie: Yes, it’s weird. I remember she was friends with Sandra Bernhard and I was a veejay going, “How do you be friends with Madonna? How’s that possible?” And then cut to, it’s me.
Howard: Are you guys still close?
Rosie: Yes.
Howard: It would seem to me you would be, because you both have a bunch of kids. Are we done having children? I think it’s enough.
Rosie: My therapist said to me recently, “You have overinvested in the mother narrative.” I was like, “Correct.”
Howard: Is that because you want to save every child out there? Do you think there’s some of that?
Rosie: I think it’s because I didn’t have a mother. I really wanted to have a mother. Every child, I think, wants to have that one person who’s going to be your forever person. I used to take my friends’ moms and totally be the kiss-ass nice. My friends were like, “Will you stop talking to my mom.” You’re supposed to hate your mother when you’re fourteen or fifteen, right?
Howard: Yeah, you didn’t get to go through that.
Rosie: No. And so when my kids went through it—and some are still, I took Parker to therapy. I was sobbing in therapy for like forty-five minutes. He’s just looking at me—he’s fourteen—and the therapist says to him, “Is there anything that you want to say?” He goes, “Yeah, do you think you could adjust her medications?” I was like, “You bastard. You bastard.”
Howard: I don’t think we ever talked about this, but were things so bad as a kid that you would break your own bones?
Rosie: Yes.
Howard: Why, Rosie? What was going on there? How would you break your own bones?
Rosie: Usually with a very heavy wood hanger. Remember when we were kids, they had those very thick wood hangers?
Howard: My mom used to hit me with one of those.
Rosie: Correct. Those things. Or when it was bat day at the Mets stadium, they had these little wooden bats.
Howard: How old were you when you would hit yourself?
Rosie: It started right after my mother died when I was about eleven. I would repetitively hit something, usually on my hands, and it would get so numb. And then I would know when it was broken and then I would stop. I think what I liked—what I’ve learned through years of therapy, now as a fifty-five-year-old adult woman—similar to cutting, when the pain on the inside is so intense, you just want a way for it to stop. Your brain literally can’t handle the physical pain and the emotional pain. One of the receptors turns off. So when you feel like you’re drowning by all of the emotional stuff . . . And there was horrible stuff going on at my house at night. That’s something that scars you in a way, that unless you’ve lived through it it’s hard to articulate.
Howard: Do you think it was a cry for help? Because when you broke a bone, you got to be taken to a doctor, right? People knew you. At some point, did anyone think to say, “Gee, Rosie, why are you always coming in with broken bones?”
Rosie: No. That was not the time, in the seventies. They do that now. Today it would. But I liked going to the doctor because there were nurses who would put the warm cast on me and talk to me and—
Howard: Mothering.
Rosie: Correct. Then when you go to school, you’re not the kid with the dead mother. You’re the kid with the cast and everyone signing it. I don’t know. It took me till I was about twenty-two to stop doing it.
Howard: How many bones do you think you’ve broken in your body?
Rosie: Boy, I don’t know. It’s mostly my hands, but I’d say at least a dozen times in my life.
Howard: If you saw Donald Trump drowning, if he fell off a boat, would you jump in and save him?
Rosie: That is a really interesting question. I don’t know that I would jump in. I might throw him a floatie. If he was drowning, I have to say, I probably would. Which I hate about me. I’m such a bad hater. I don’t want him to die. Do I want him to spend the rest of his life in jail? I certainly do.
Howard: By the way, earlier in this interview you said that you would service Bob Mueller.
Robin: Has he called in?
Howard: Robin, he’s waiting outside to be serviced.
Rosie: Robin, come with me. I know you’re much better at it.