The Night Roseanne Sang at the Grand Old Game

The San Diego Padres have been the coldest team in all of professional baseball during the last month, so having America’s hottest TV star sing the national anthem before a home game Wednesday night seemed a natural act of desperation.

Baseball, after all, is the most superstitious of all sports; before you strangle a cat, rub a penny or order your players not to wash their underwear until the slump ends, why not bring on Roseanne Barr?

The problem, of course, was that when Barr began to sing, it sounded as if a cat were being strangled, and thus began the summer’s greatest scandal. Fans at the game reacted as if Barr had just popped up on a 3-0 pitch in the bottom of the ninth and left the tying run on third. They jeered and booed throughout her screeching one-minute performance, and Barr, no stranger to heckling, rewarded them with the sight of a woman spitting on the ground and tugging at her crotch. (It could have been worse. She has been known to moon folks.)

Now, these gestures are coveted traditions of the Grand Old Game. Baseball players spit and tug for a living; you can watch them do it on TV. And at the right time and in the right place, it’s OK to make fun of them for it. I saw the movie “The Naked Gun” in San Diego and the audience laughed uproariously at both Lesley Nielsen’s screwing up of the anthem and at a scene where players, their wives--even the visiting Queen of England--join in a little pre-game spitting.

But that was in a movie theater, it was make-believe, and no offense was intended. Barr’s performance, on the other hand, was a live-action faux pas, so ill-conceived and badly timed that you have to wonder what possessed her.

Did she think Americans are so smitten with her lovable slob image that they’d enjoy the national anthem scratched on a blackboard? The song doesn’t sound very good when it’s sung well, and dogs have inadvertently taken a better whack at it than Roseanne. As Jose Feliciano, Bobby McFerrin, Marvin Gaye, Willie Nelson and other real singers discovered when lending their own personal style to the anthem, Americans only want to hear it done one way. Who can sing along when you’re going “doobie-do-wah” after “the twilight’s last gleaming?”

The reaction to what has already been dubbed “The Barr-Mangled Banner” was swift and--to temper this national crisis with fairness--monstrously out of proportion to her offense. Bad judgment, bad taste, bad voice, yeah, she’s guilty as charged. But botching the national anthem, or mimicking the disgusting habits of baseball players, hardly warrants the hanging party being arranged. I don’t think a star has had this kind of negative attention since Jane Fonda rode a tank in North Vietnam.

You can always tell when people are overreacting; their behavior gets uglier than the behavior they’re upset about. The front-page teaser headline in the San Diego Union on Thursday said, “The Fat Lady Sings (Poorly).” ESPN’s Larry Burnett, filled out the news report of the event Wednesday night by saying, “Americans have better things to do than listen to a fat lady with a tattoo on her butt running down the national anthem.”

Barr, whose pre-TV career had been built on outrageous behavior on the comedy club circuit, clearly miscalculated her audience for Wednesday’s appearance in San Diego. If she was there to entertain the crowd as the star of “Roseanne,” singing the anthem in character and sounding like America’s suburban Everywoman, she was acting on the poorest PR counsel money could buy. If she thought people have come to admire her Genghis Mama comedy style so much they’ll accept anything she does, she is seriously deluded. People who admire her on stage, or in her TV show, do it by choice. The poor baseball fans were just there for a double-hitter between the lowly Padres and the league-leading Cincinnati Reds.

It may be that Barr’s success, which is disproportionate to her talent or any lasting appeal, came too quickly. TV and film do that to people, shower them with so much money, power and false adoration that they feel invulnerable, above reproach.

Barr may be about to learn what many others have learned before her, that a star never owns the mortgage on fans’ loyalty; that it’s all on loan. As fast as fame sometimes arrives, it can vanish just as quickly.

For me, Roseanne Barr has been a major over-achiever. I saw her in the Comedy Club years before her TV success and said then, “Here’s a natural for the ‘Hollywood Squares.’ She’s glib and wry, good for a giggle every time she opens her mouth.” I could see her in the “Hollywood Squares” Hall of Fame, with Paul Lynde, Wally Cox and Phyllis Diller.

That she became the nation’s leading TV star required timing, luck and more talent than I had noticed. She still strikes me as an acquired taste, like ketchup on white bread, but it would be weird if her career loses its orbit because of one bad night at a baseball game.

Besides, after Roseanne sang, the Padres won two in a row.