Whoopi: Bruised but Unbowed : Goldberg Has New Movie, ‘Corrina, Corrina,’ and New Man in Her Life

It is--after all these years--still a look.

Whoopi Goldberg, who wore a velvet Herrera gown and an Armani tux to host the Oscars, has decided to meet the press for her new film, “Corrina, Corrina,” which opens Friday, in black patent-leather Mary Janes, white knee socks and a plaid cotton schoolgirl dress. Big plastic earrings--cascading bunches of red peppers--are peeking out from her dreadlocks, her eyebrows are shaved, and she wears thin gold bands on her thumbs.

Ten years ago, this was not a look to get a woman ushered past the lobby of a Beverly Hills hotel. As the most powerful black female in Hollywood, however, Goldberg clearly enjoys nudging the assumptions. What’s more, as an African American and a female in America, she also knows not to take anything for granted. “Movie stardom is tough,” she says without bitterness. “It’s a fluke. Listen, I’m a fluke.”

It is days after her Emmy nomination for the Oscar show; “vindicating” is her word for it. “I took a lot of grief for that show,” says Goldberg, who gracefully made both gender and racial history as solo host that night. “For some reason, people assumed I was going to be tactless. . . . The way they talked about it, I guess they thought I was going to pick my nose and eat it.

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“So it was very nice that somebody said, ‘You know what? Whoopi did a good job. She came into a tough gig and stood up to the fire.’ And, you know, I want those pats on the back. I want to know that I’m doing a good job. I’ve taken all the heat I’m going to take for the next couple of years.”

Goldberg is still standing, but she’s far too frank to pretend she wasn’t battered by the year of headlines. She means, first, the heat about Ted Danson, her former lover, who wore blackface at her Friar’s Club roast. This is a subject her handlers have demanded not be mentioned, but which she brings up herself with the candor for which she deserves to be famous.

“I don’t think people jumped us because we were an interracial couple. They jumped us for all the other reasons. It was the big, rich, very sexy man from ‘Cheers’ and Whoopi, who was, like, considered asexual for, you know, the first nine years in Hollywood. . . . you would have thought I’d never had a boyfriend.”

Then there was the heat about her Jewish-American-Princess Fried Chicken recipe in a fund-raising book, which some found anti-Semitic, and the cancellation of her TV talk show, which some found sycophantic. “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” on which she had a regular role as Guinan, the psychic bartender, was canceled. “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit” vanished without a prayer.

Of course, the original “Sister Act” has grossed $300 million worldwide to date--a stunning fact, even to her. And though she had gone dangerously public with her displeasure with Disney afterward, she negotiated $7 million-plus for the sequel. And she had dinner at the White House in June. And she’s in the new “Star Trek” movie, and that’s her voice as head hyena in the king of the summer movies, “The Lion King.” She has a Herb Ross film, “Boys on the Side,” coming out, movies with Kathleen Turner and Gerard Depardieu coming up.

And she’s engaged--another topic we’ve been warned in advance not to bring up--to Lyle Trachtenberg, a union organizer she reportedly met when he visited the “Corrina, Corrina” set.

“Yes,” she says, happily displaying a handsome ring dotted with tiny stones. “He designed this himself. And he’s a union man, so you know it was real money.” And, despite what the fan mags may say, the betrothed--who has been married twice, is a grandmother of Amarah Skye, age 4, and owns homes in Connecticut and L.A.--is not “registered.” “Come on,” she says, shaking her head and grinning. “Like what I really need is another picture frame.”

Now there is “Corrina, Corrina,” a sort of “I’ll Fly Away” with romance, a semi-autobiographical story written and directed by former Mabou Mines actress Jessie Nelson. Goldberg plays a music-school graduate in the ‘50s who takes a job as housekeeper and nanny for a Jewish jingle writer and widower (Ray Liotta) and his small daughter (Tina Majorino). The script was brought to her attention four years ago. “I stayed with it,” says Goldberg, who asked only that Nelson give Corrina a college degree. “I liked Jessie. I thought it was an interesting story. And I wanted a job. You know, I wanted to get this made so I could work.”

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Outsiders may be surprised that Goldberg worries about getting movies. Even after her career was re-energized with her Oscar for “Ghost,” the highest grossing picture of 1990, she claims roles do not roll in. “The amount of money you make does not have anything to do with what you are able to get done here,” she says, sighing with a mixture of resignation and wickedness. “Unless you stand up in the bathroom.”

Challenged about her uneven movie choices, she once told Time magazine, “Do you think I sit around and say, ‘Here are the great scripts and here are the crappy scripts. I’ll do the crappy ones!’?”

She still feels that way. Even after her remarkable movie debut, and Oscar nomination, in “The Color Purple” in 1985, she had to fight to be considered for roles intended for very different actors. “Jumpin Jack Flash” (1986) was meant for Shelley Long, “Burglar” (‘87) for Bruce Willis, “Sister Act” (‘92) for Bette Midler, “Made in America” (‘93) for Jessica Lange.

Goldberg, who vowed early in her career not to play maids--then played them in “Clara’s Heart” (‘88) and “The Long Walk Home” (‘90)--finds herself defending another one. “I say pay homage to these women who cleaned other people’s houses to put their children through college and make them professors and the great men and women they became.

“Somehow we believe there’s some gene inside of black women that says, ‘I can’t wait to grow up to be a maid,’ ” she says with a rueful laugh. “You never see what happens to Beulah after she peels the grape for Mae West. We don’t know that Beulah is a real estate maven who put her daughter through med school.”

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There are movies she’d like to get made, though she’s fully aware of the hit-and-miss realities of all careers, even those of her white male buddies Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. “This is a world where you can make ‘Boxing Helena,’ but you can’t make a movie about the Tuskegee Airmen (a select group of heroic black airmen who trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Base in Alabama and who fought during World War II). . . . I’ve made movies that have made $100 million, but I guess it’s going to take another couple of years of doing that before it becomes real. And,” she adds daintily, “I’m not in that Julia age.”

In fact, for all Goldberg’s candor, there is more than a little mystery about her age. She says she is 38, but she was reported to be 35 in 1984, when she made her debut on Broadway with a one-woman show. Mike Nichols billed her as “one part Elaine May, one part Groucho, one part Ruth Draper, one part Richard Pryor and five parts never before seen.”

Nichols is her hero. “Mike babysat me and made everybody come and told me I was great. And then he handed me to Steven (Spielberg, director of “Purple”). They told me how people will tell you how much they love what you’re doing, then try to make you do something different. They told me, ‘Stick to your guns because, generally, you’ll find that you’re right.’ And that’s allowed me to keep my hair as it is and keep my nose flat and my behind large.”

She does not call herself African American. “I don’t hear people calling themselves Russian Americans. Everybody calls themselves American. My family and their grandparents and their grandparents built this country. This is mine. Four generations, five generations. I have a huge root that goes to the core. I’ve been to Africa. Completely different culture. This is my culture. And if I am only to be identified by what you see, which part of me are you seeing? The Chinese in me?” she asks, gesturing toward her eyes. “The black?” Her hands go to her nose. “The Indian?” She touches her smile.

When she grew up, she says, “I didn’t see any women who looked like me in the movies. I don’t want there to be a time when there isn’t a face like mine available. I took my granddaughter to see ‘Lion King’--I’m trying to impress her big time.

“You watch all these little kids, little Asian kids, little Spanish kids and they don’t see themselves. Jasmine was the darkest thing Disney did, but she wasn’t dark enough. Kids are much hipper than we were--they know something’s wrong.”

So, even when the roles are not great, “you do the best you can with what you have. You take out your little hammer and chisel,” and “in 40 years, when they’re doing the Whoopi retrospective, and I come tottering out on stage on somebody’s arm, maybe some of these movies that have taken such awful hits will be seen as classics for their period.” Meanwhile, she jokes, “if somebody offers me $30 million to do ‘Ghost II,’ well, ‘I’m not beyond shopping.”