Just a Coupla Pals Sittin’ Around Gabbing
When Rosie O’Donnell set out to make her mark in daytime talk, she modeled “The Rosie O’Donnell Show” after the chat fests of daytime pioneers Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas.
An unabashed fan of all things television, O’Donnell, 35, grew up enthralled with Griffin’s Emmy-winning show, which was seen in syndication and on CBS from 1965 to 1986. Griffin, 72, also created the long-running game shows “Jeopardy!” and “Wheel of Fortune,” and he recently opened the nostalgic Coconut Club nightclub at his Beverly Hills Hilton Hotel.
With O’Donnell taping her New York-based show this month at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, it was the perfect opportunity for the talk-show giants to get together privately and do what they do best: interview each other.
It was all warm hugs and kisses last week as O’Donnell greeted her idol at her expansive bus-trailer on the Warners lot.
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Merv Griffin: I would have a problem doing a show today because I am used to sitting down, schmoozing and getting a guest comfortable before you really go for the meat of the interview. You can’t do that anymore.
Rosie O’Donnell: You get seven minutes, and it’s really bad. We have, like, four guests and seven minutes [each]. What happens is like yesterday with Drew Barrymore, who was adorable and so funny. She just talks. We went, like, 14 minutes, so we ended up moving the last guest. We post-taped him and moved him to another show. I think that’s better.
M.G.: You know what killed it for all of us?
R.O.: What’s that?
M.G.: Remote controls. You click your life away. When I first started, my God, it was nothing to do 14- or 15-minute interviews. Then, maybe, you had to bump somebody and that’s sad, but they’ll always come back.
R.O.: Roberta Flack was telling me that you used to call her up if a guest dropped out and she’d come down on the train to Philly and then do it for you.
M.G.: New York! I never did that show in Philly. That was [Mike] Douglas.
R.O.: Oh, yeah.
M.G.: Do you have a stable of players. . . .
R.O.: That we rely on? Yeah. Roberta Flack is somebody that, if anything goes wrong, you call her up.
M.G.: Are you developing newcomers, people the audience doesn’t know who are bizarre and funny? Monte Rock and Tiny Tim and all the crazies.
R.O.: We haven’t really, truthfully. I would love to be able to do that. But you know how it is nowadays too, everything is about the numbers. What is the Q [popularity] score? They did that when I wanted to put on Broadway [stars and shows] at the beginning.
M.G.: Do you really believe those TV Qs are important?
R.O.: No, I don’t. With the show now, Warner Bros. has sort of agreed if Rosie is passionate about it, book it. But they still want you to go for the Q scores.
M.G.: Is [booking] competitive for you?
R.O.: Not only is it competitive, but it gets redundant. People come to New York on press tour. They do Letterman the night before, then they do our show the next morning and then run over and do “The View” and they do Regis, and it’s like it perpetuates itself. It’s not unique. I love when people come on and they don’t have anything to promote.
M.G.: Do you see your guests before the show?
R.O.: Sometimes I do. If I don’t know them sometimes I go greet them if they are nervous or the producers will say to me, “She’s a little worried.” But on the whole, I like to keep it for the show--keep it fresh.
M.G.: Yeah, whatever is going to be said, say it out in front of the public.
R.O.: I didn’t meet [Barbra] Streisand before she came on, which I think was very important. If I had done that off-camera, I don’t know what there would have been to show anyone.
M.G.: You let all the emotions out when you finally did see her. That was really important.
R.O.: For me it was.
M.G.: Isn’t that great? Why do you think it was?
R.O.: Well, my mother loved her very much and it was sort of the impetus which turned me on to become a performer. People you saw in movies didn’t talk like that. They talked like middle America without an accent. So here is this girl who looks like she could have been from around the block, getting up there. Also that part, “Funny Girl,” is what every girl ever dreamed who was not gorgeous, who wanted to be a star and discovered and fall in love and have all of those things happen that happened in that film.
So my mom loved her so much and we used to make dinner listening to “Happening in Central Park” and “Call Me Barbra,” all of those records. Then my mom died, and my dad took everything of hers out of the house thinking that it would be painful for us, but he didn’t take her records because he didn’t know that while he was at work, we did this whole little Barbra Streisand thing. So she reminds me so much of my mother.
When I was doing the show and saying, “Barbra, can you hear me?,” I never thought she’d do it, Merv. I never did just because why would she? She doesn’t have to do my show. So I never really expected it to happen.
M.G.: I don’t know anybody who would turn you down unless they were afraid for themselves. See, certain people are born for talk shows, and you are born for a talk show because you can open your mouth and trust yourself and it’s going to come out right. The audience adores you, anyway.
R.O.: The hour that I’m on there every day, it’s fun for me. The other part is hard. People don’t realize it. When you are the producer, you get involved in every single aspect of the show, where the camera angles are and the lighting.
M.G.: I couldn’t do that.
R.O.: They told me that you did that.
M.G.: No, never. I got involved in the aspects of the interviews, who was coming on. I read stuff about them before the show and then my trick was always to go and do the show and never have to go to their notes. That something would trigger [during] their entrance to get them so comfortable, you’d lock eyes with them and they would tell you anything because they trusted you. You have that too; you’re trusted. Nobody would go on your show and think, “She’s going to hurt me.”
You have the best of everything. You are able to do the show and talk to anybody in the world. You also get to do your nightclub act and play Vegas, but you yearn to be home with the two children [Parker and Chelsea].
R.O.: It’s better for me when we are in New York because they have their routine. We get up. I take them to work with me every day. We have breakfast, lunch and dinner together. His nursery is right on the eighth floor with me. My life works smoothly with them. When I am out here, everything is chaotic for him, and I think kids like stability. That’s why I took the job doing the talk show to begin with, because on a movie set, it’s like doing this. For four months you’re here, two months you’re there.
M.G.: What do you do when you see all of these other shows like Jenny Jones, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer? They pull these enormous ratings. Do you watch them?
R.O.: No, I don’t really. Everything has the right to be on. I don’t particularly watch wrestling. A lot of people watch wrestling. They know it’s fake, but they watch it. That’s sort of what Jerry Springer has become--wrestling. They know they are going to see a fight and somehow they feel a little better about their lives, that they are not as pathetic as the people on Jerry Springer.
M.G.: Would you ever do a “Rosie on the Road”? One week you leave your live studio audience and just talked to all of those [non-celebrity] people you have always wanted to talk to?
R.O.: That would be a great segment to do. That is a good part of the show when we get to have real people on. We don’t get to have it enough. We try to do the human interest segments. We try to make them as plentiful as we can. But whenever a story breaks, like the little boy who had a collection of 95 vacuums, by the time you call it’s been in the newspaper and every other show has called them.
Now, next year there are going to be more celebrity shows with Roseanne, Donny and Marie, and Howie Mandel. So all of these celebrities are going to have all of these shows to choose from, so we are going to have to make ours a little bit more distinctive, I think.
M.G.: You’re amazing. Are you one year yet in the talk-show business?
R.O.: June 10 will be our second-year anniversary. Hard to believe, huh?
M.G.: It’s not hard to believe. The minute they announced that Rosie O’Donnell was going to do a talk show, I said, “Born for talk shows.”
R.O.: It’s from all the years of watching you. It’s the truth. You don’t take it in because you are you, but it’s true.
M.G.: Now I’m going to love you and leave you because you got to go to work.
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On the Web
Hear the conversation between Rosie O’Donnell and Merv Griffin on The Times’ Web site. The address is https://www.latimes.com/interview
