Official Book Club Selection Read online

  To which I say, “Good for you. It almost fucking killed me.”

  It was a while before I had the nerve to try plastic surgery again, but in 2003 I approached a doctor who’d been recommended to me with one of my genius publicity trade-offs. Yet again, painful vanity won out over common sense. I said if I could get Entertainment Tonight and People magazine to cover my plastic surgery, would he do it for free? This guy said, “Not only will I do it for free, I’ll add on a bunch of stuff.”

  I took full advantage of his offer and got an upper eye job (slicing your eyelid and taking the fat away, yum!), a lower face lift (half the work, half the pain, only pulling up the bottom part of your head), a neck pull (incision, incision, yank, then feel for a month like someone’s always tugging on your neck), lipo on my arms (I know, I know, but it was part of the package and didn’t require knocking me out, which was where the problems began the first time), veneers on my teeth, Botox, and … who remembers what the fuck I had done, really.

  The thing is, I look back now and have a major regret that I came clean with this whole thing. It’s just been an annoyance. Definitely a publicity gambit that backfired. Every interview I’ve done from then on trying to promote whatever I had coming up on TV ended up being a detailed and embarrassing rehashing of my plastic surgery. If I could redo anything in my career, I would not have gone public with that round of plastic surgery. I should have just paid for it and kept quiet. One time a woman came up to me at an airport and started touching my face, saying, “You don’t look that bad.” I should have just become one of those dames who absolutely swear they’ve never had any work done. I’m looking at you, Hatcher. Instead it felt like my first reality show, in a way. It’s become something I’ve been asked about—and will continue to be asked about—for the rest of my life. Of all the things I thought I’d get out of that experience, getting asked repeatedly about my stand on plastic surgery, or how I felt morally about it, was not one of them.

  My decision to have more surgery was about as deep as, “Maybe I’ll look younger and be in a magazine!”

  And then the big irony: After years of trying to get on Oprah, this was my ticket in. By the way, Oprah, is this the first thing you’re reading in my book, you little scoundrel? I can’t believe you! You just looked in the index, saw your name, and flipped to this page, didn’t you? Gayle, do something! Oh well.

  Anyway, here I was with my moratorium on doing interviews about my plastic surgery, and then my publicist calls and says: “Oprah wants you for a show about plastic surgery.”

  “Can’t I just go on and be a regular interview?”

  “You’re not big enough.”

  “What if I really opened up about my personal life?”

  “No.”

  “My show business trials and tribulations?”

  “It’s a pass. It’s plastic surgery or nothing.”

  “What time does my plane leave?”

  When Oprah calls, you eat shit and you do it. That’s a lesson, people.

  Am I right, O?

  You can skip ahead now, Oprah. Nothing else to see here. I’ll probably move on to writing about Barbara Walters and that black guy she slept with. Gotcha!

  Is she gone? Okay, get this: Do you want to know why Oprah has all that money? She’s super cheap. This was the big time, I thought, but all they gave me was one coach ticket, they refused to spring for my hair and makeup person, and they wanted to put me in a low-end motel. I thought, You’re kidding! Isn’t this a big-budget show where they roll out the red carpet? Isn’t this the woman who lives for lighting and hair and makeup?

  Their warm-up person for the audience? It was the segment producer who did my preinterview. I was perplexed. I said, “Are you a comedian?” She said, “No, I’m just trying this out!” I asked to get a picture with Ms. Winfrey before the show, and they said “No.” I said, “Okay, but I need a picture. I need proof for my gays!” They said, “Well, we’ll take the picture, and then we’ll give it to you.” They took it. They own it. They could probably ask for it back at any time. (It’s why you’re not seeing it in the book. Can’t piss off the big O.)

  In any case, I wanted to look good for my big moment, so I got myself a really expensive black suit. The idea was to keep it simple and look like a million bucks, but not be super-fashiony. When it came time to tape the show, it was ridiculously exciting to hear Oprah introduce me—“COME ON O-O-O-O-O-OUT!”—and then I was on for my little interview. I tried to make her laugh, but she was very dominant and condescending, somewhat friendly. It took her a few minutes to get who I was, and even though we were there to talk about plastic surgery, I got her to chuckle a little. But she’s very alpha dog. You go out there and she lets you know in two seconds, “This is my turf.” I think she peed on me a little. And she got one of her classic nurturing digs in when I mentioned getting liposuction twice, even though the first time had complications. Like the wise scold she is, she asked me if I was ever going to learn. I wasn’t offended, though. It’s Oprah, so it was funny. It’s what we want from her, right?

  The best moment for me came during the commercial break. Our show was taping not long after they’d aired Oprah’s insane interview with Barbra Streisand, where the two of them had appeared to go at it like they were in a Mexican cockfight. So during the break I thought, I have three minutes with Oprah, I’m going to take my shot and ask about it. But Oprah, being a very smart woman, took questions from the audience between segments. It’s obviously her way of denying every guest who wants their private time with her.

  I wasn’t having it, though. She took a question and then I just blurted out, “By the way, that Streisand interview you did was off the hook.”

  And instantaneously, I was rewarded. Sassy ghetto Oprah materialized as she turned to me with WTF eyes and said, “You know, she painted my mic white?”

  It seems Streisand had wanted her outfit to match her microphone, so she apparently had one of her minions take one of Oprah’s mikes and spray-paint it white. And it had been eating at Oprah for weeks. Yes! That was my Oprah moment.

  Do you think Oprah is bragging about her Kathy Griffin moment? Me, too.

  When I perform I solemnly swear to swear, so fucking help me God. (Photo: Martin LePire/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank)

  As the millennium turned, my character Vicki Groener mouthed off for the last time when Suddenly Susan ended its run on NBC after four seasons. I was sad for my showbiz family to come to an end and I would miss so many things—eating crappy “pasta surprise” meals at the Warner Bros. commissary with cast members, seeing Nestor Carbonell at the studio gym with his shirt off, and having a little thing called job security—but I was also admittedly excited about my career prospects moving forward. Everybody around me—agents, actor friends, writers—thought I was in a great position. I’d done well on the series, my stand-up profile had increased, and the buzz was that I would now be able to star in my own show.

  “We’re going for the full Seinfeld,” claimed my shooting-for-the-moon agents and seasoned sitcom writers who I met with. “We’re going for a four-camera, million-dollar-an-episode prime-time sitcom called Kathy! It’s going to center on you and your crazy life, we’re going to find two veteran actors to play your parents, it’s going to explore what it’s like for you to be a female stand-up comedian on the road, it’s going to get into your wacky Irish-Catholic family, your home life, your dogs, and it’s going to be as classic as Roseanne was in being based on the person’s actual life.”

  I really was like Rhoda, because Rhoda got her own show! Sidekick makes good!

  Yeah, well those meetings started and ended very quickly. As in, within three weeks. Everywhere I went I heard, “You can’t carry a show.” “People don’t know you well.” “You’re not young and attractive enough.” Even, “Maybe, but we’d need somebody else to play you, someone younger, and you wouldn’t participate in it.”

  A manager named Brian Medavoy, who’s the son of famed studio executive
Mike Medavoy, said to me around this time, “You know, you’re really off-putting. I think that’s a problem for you.”

  When I hear things like that, I always think, How can I spin this to my credit? So after hearing I was “off-putting,” I felt like saying to everyone, “Well … yeah! It’s cause I’m trying to be the Off-Putting Girl! Your network is going to be on the ground floor of the off-putting trend, and no one’s as off-putting as I am right now! Everybody’s dying to be off-putting out there, haven’t you heard? I’ve got the market cornered on off-putting!”

  Let’s see, what else? My voice was annoying. My TV Q score—some bullshit number that’s supposed to indicate your popularity with viewers—was bad. But always—always—I was too old, old, old, old, old. You’d have thought I was on fucking life support. I was forty at the time. You know what they say: forty and fabulous! Or in my case, forty and fucked.

  Those meetings really took the wind out of my sails. I don’t know if I was ever hot, but that round of talks with pretty high-level network people certainly showed me I was not-hot. People don’t want to touch you when you’re not-hot, they don’t want to breathe in your not-hot stench. They don’t want to have to go to the drugstore to get some salve for your not-hot crabs that jumped off your not-hot vagina. They don’t want you, and they’re not taking a meeting with you. Once this virus spreads through Hollywood that you didn’t get a deal at Warner Bros. or Fox or ABC or CBS—because they all talk to each other and play golf together and go to the same lap dance parties—then it’s as if you’re poison. I had gone from Suddenly Susan to Suddenly Cold. And this happens fast. Because when you have those meetings, they’re usually all happening within a day or two. You’ll pitch your concept to every network in one day, maybe. So if you’re at all the studios on Monday, by Tuesday night you know you’re either celebrating or drowning your sorrows.

  At which point I was left with, “Well, can I be a second banana again?”

  The answer was “No.”

  Thus began my post-Susan year of sleeping till 1 p.m., eating buckets of ice cream, and watching Oprah every day. It was the worst feeling in the world. Sorry, O. Nothing personal, I just need to work. As tired as I was simultaneously doing the sitcom and traveling for stand-up gigs, it gave me purpose. If I don’t have a place to go every morning, I can get depressed after about three days. That’s right, my happiness has a shelf life of two days. Even vacations start not to feel like vacations after about five days: They become the thing that keeps me from working. And now I was on a forced vacation, and it fucking sucked. It’s not that I wasn’t doing okay financially, because I’d been good with money and socked a bunch away, but I hated that I didn’t have somewhere to be every day at 8 a.m. I loved driving to the Warner Bros. lot every day, seeing everyone at the table reads, knowing we taped the show on Friday and that on Saturday I’d be at some college gig, having a schedule that told me when I had to be on and when I got to be off.

  Remember, I’m the daughter of a dad who didn’t think twice about working sixty hours a week in retail, and a mom who held down a job while co-raising five kids. And those are still two of the happiest people I’ve ever met. For me, my ideal situation is when work and play co-exist. I’m happiest when I’m working hard with coworkers/friends around me, and we’re all in it together. Many of my non-showbiz friends criticize me for having so many close friendships and relationships with people who are “on the payroll”: my assistant, my tour manager, my mother because she gets paid for being on The D-List. Well yeah, I want to hire people I like, who I want to be with after I do a show or finish taping. I had a great conversation with Joan Rivers about this once. She said, “Everyone has to understand. You’re the brand, and you’re a business, but it’s a community that we’re all in together.” Think about it in your own life. If you work at a job where you love the people you work with, you love going to work. That’s all I want.

  There was a small problem, though, with my thirst to get back on a sitcom. The traditional soundstage-filmed, studio-audience, half-hour network comedy was on its way out, and soon it was “Hello, Survivor.”

  In the summer of 2000, Survivor became the number one show in the country, and rightly so. It was amazing, edge-of-your-seat TV, a competition but also a peek into some quirky personalities. To this day it’s some of the best television I’ve ever seen. A cheap show to make compared to a sitcom, it was pulling viewers and ratings in a way nobody could have imagined. I mean, there was Survivor contestant Jenna Lewis in her bikini on the cover of Time magazine. That first summer of Survivor, your priorities were clear: Thursday night, 8 p.m., CBS, you had to be there.

  When reality television became, well, the new reality in television—and all the networks started developing shows to capitalize on it—many of my comedy writer friends got bitter, and understandably so, because fewer scripted shows meant creative people were starting to lose their jobs. There was this sentiment that reality was the enemy. But I was all over it, not only as a fan, but as someone who’s been doing her version of reality for years whenever I got up onstage. Think about it: My act isn’t scripted, and here was this new genre that was all about being unscripted. That was me. If sitcoms didn’t want what I had, then I’d come up with my own way to celebrate reality TV, and give myself a job.

  I went to MTV, where I’d had a relationship from years of co-hosting their New Year’s Eve specials or appearing on TRL, and told them I wanted to do a show where I could talk about reality shows, sum them up, interview kicked-off contestants, make fun of them, and just generally tap into this new watercooler TV topic. I said I could do it for almost nothing, I wanted to co-executive produce, and—of course—I wanted my mom and dad on the show, because I thought they were funny.

  MTV gave me six episodes that started airing at the beginning of 2001. The show was called Kathy’s So-Called Reality. (My name was in the title! Like a big star!) It only lasted for those six episodes—they didn’t pick it up for more—but I have to say I loved that job. I would start with a monologue, usually about whatever happened in reality TV that week, which was always hard because we taped on a Thursday and therefore couldn’t talk about that week’s Survivor, so by the time my show aired on Sunday, we were a week behind with events. Also, it was impossible to get clips from CBS—even though MTV shared a parent company, Viacom—so I usually corralled my mom and dad into performing Survivor reenactments from transcripts. Then we’d have guests. Eden’s Crush, the manufactured girl group from the WB’s Pop Stars, performed on our show. (I don’t exactly remember you, Nicole Scherzinger, but I’m sure you were very nice.) Elsewhere we had hilarious difficulties booking reality show contestants, an early indication in my mind that these plucked-from-nowhere people were beginning to imagine themselves as A-listers.

  Bad ratings got Kathy’s So-Called Reality canceled, but I’d like to think it was ahead of its time in tapping into everyone’s burning desire for this new type of show. Now you have entire networks like Fox Reality devoted to reality TV, and the dude from Jon & Kate Plus 8 on the cover of US Weekly. Well, I was there first, motherfuckers. Not only that, there are elements to Kathy’s So-Called Reality that acted as precursors for The D-List, from featuring my parents to mining humor out of the fact that I’m not a beloved personality. One of my favorite things to do on the MTV show was read aloud my hate mail as a way of doing the opposite of what Oprah would do, offering testimonials as to how some episode she did changed lives. “Dear Big Nose Bitch,” one of my letters read, “get off my TV, I hate you.” Another one I read to my parents aloud on the air: “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Griffin, why aren’t you in a home?” They thought the letters were hysterical. And so did I.

  After So-Called Reality, it was back to being in career limbo, not sure of where to go or what to do next. I was in a weird place where I was a little too well known to go sit on folding chairs with totally unknown girls at auditions—and certainly not for two-line parts anymore—but I wasn’t famous or successful
enough to be packaged as part of a series.

  Me on stage at the Laugh Factory, ready to debrief an enthusiastic crowd about whatever crazy celebrity run-in I’d had that week. (Photo: Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank)

  But there was always stand-up. And just like when I devised Hot Cup O’ Talk, if I could find a club and grab their worst time slot—not try to squeeze myself into a high-expectation, traditional Friday or Saturday lineup—then maybe I could come up with another show to make my own. My stand-up agent said, “Try Jamie Masada at the Laugh Factory.”

  I called up Jamie, the club’s owner, pitched him, and said, “What’s a time when nobody comes in?”

  “Wednesday nights are usually pretty slow,” he said.

  Without even waiting for him to accept me, I said, “I’ll take it.”

  The Laugh Factory is a castle-shaped comedy club at Sunset Boulevard and Laurel that, like the Improv and the Comedy Store, is one of the premier showcases in Los Angeles for comedians. It was a place that catered to couples and straight guys—not exactly my best crowds—and its roster was heavy on male comics and theme nights like Chocolate Sundays (as in, not for Whitey) or Latino Night. It also has a fantastic L-shaped marquee, one side facing Sunset Boulevard and the other facing the cross street, which means you’d have a hard time not noticing who’s playing there as you drove past or sat at the stoplight nearby. The club itself is pretty standard, but a two-sided marquee on Sunset can fill a room.

  If I was going to play there on Wednesday nights, just me, no opener, not part of some lineup so that people coming to see Dane Cook, for example, had to like me, too, then I was going to have to sell the shit out of that show. In addition to the marquee with my name on it, I thought it might be helpful for my assistant and me to stand at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue—tourist central with Grauman’s Chinese Theatre nearby—and hand out flyers personally to people walking by. I was enough of a name to get booked on morning radio shows, but I wasn’t able to land TV appearances. I didn’t have a publicist at the time because they were expensive and I didn’t have a steady job. Instead, Jamie would act as a de facto publicist for those live shows, making calls to the LA Times or anyone who’d take his call to try to get a writeup in print. I’d also call the LA Weekly—so helpful in publicizing the Groundlings shows—and beg to get into their listings calendar. Lastly, there would hopefully be that crucial intangible: good word of mouth.