In recent years, Goldberg has become better known as the designated adult on “The View.” She kept the peace when Elizabeth Hasselbeck and Joy Behar were at each other’s throats. She injected common sense and good old-fashioned side-eye when necessary. She has been the constant as the show churns through one ridiculous or ill-fated co-host after another. But in the last six years, Goldberg has ceded ground when it comes to her ability to rise above the show’s reputation for chaos and uninformed opinions.
If there’s anything that’s emblematic of Goldberg’s tattered credibility, it’s the reaction to her recent statements on Viola Davis’s Emmy acceptance speech — in particular a line in which Davis said, “the only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity.”
When BET.com’s Chantal Potter asked, “What are your thoughts on that statement as it relates to your career in particular?,” Goldberg said:
“Well, I’m not sure what it means. Opportunity to do what? Do you know what I mean? I think maybe what she wanted to say she had to couch in that ’cause the truth of the matter is, there’s been plenty of opportunity, you know? I mean, ‘Scandal.’ Let’s just start with that. Kerry Washington is there and she’s working her booty off but they didn’t vote for her. So maybe the question is what do you have to do to get voted on? That’s the thing. It’s not that the opportunity is not there because we’ve had lots of opportunities. But we don’t — if you don’t get the — if you don’t get the pat on the back that says, ‘Yes, it’s okay to hire these women,’ see now, there’ll be more parts, more dramas, cause Viola got an Emmy award. Really, everybody wants an Emmy. The studios, everybody wants the — you know. So they’ll hire more black women.”
It would appear that Goldberg has torched her reputation to the point that when she says something that could be construed as controversial, it simply gets rounded up to Yet Another Crazy Thing that sprung from the mouth of Whoopi Goldberg. Indeed, that characterized the resulting media fracas surrounding the Davis statement. Layered in nearlyevery report of Goldberg’s answer was a scolding, head-shaking how could you?
Of course, said torching did not occur in a vacuum. There’s a backlog of mind-bending Goldberg-isms.
There was her defense of Mel Gibson: “I know Mel and I know he’s not a racist.”
Her defense of Roman Polanski: “I know it wasn’t rape-rape. I think it was something else, but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.”
Her defense of Rachel Dolezal: “If she wants to be black, she can be black.”
Her repeated defenses of Bill Cosby: “He has not been proven a rapist.” And relatedly, her skepticism toward Beverly Johnson, who accused Cosby of drugging her, then spoke about it as a guest on “The View.”
Still, it’s difficult reading Goldberg’s answer to understand precisely what she meant when she was talking about Davis. It’s a mess of a soundbite that leaves you furrowing your brow, aching for a follow-up question.
The fact of the matter is, Davis is the first black woman to win an Emmy for outstanding lead actress in a drama series. Prior to Washington beginning her star turn on “Scandal,” black women were absent as leads in network dramas for more than 40 years. That’s what Davis meant when she said “You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there.”
It’s the assertion that there have been “plenty of opportunities” that made Goldberg sound particularly Thatcherian. It’s true; there have been loads of opportunities for Goldberg as an individual — she enjoys a position in American culture that very few can match — but that doesn’t say much for black actresses as a group.
In 1990, Goldberg herself became the first black woman to win a best supporting actress Oscar since Hattie McDaniel won in 1939 for “Gone With With the Wind.” Goldberg won for playing Oda Mae Brown in “Ghost,” which could easily be seen as a “make-up Oscar” given the fact that she lost the award for Best Actress for “The Color Purple” the year before. Jodie Foster won that year for “The Accused.”
Goldberg was quite the groundbreaker. She remains the only black woman to have won an Emmy, Tony, Oscar and Grammy. Surely she knows what’s going on, right? In a 1997 collections of essays she smirkingly entitled “Book,” Goldberg wrote about the woman who laid the foundation for women such as Washington and Davis:
“And then Julia came along, with Diahann Carroll. I was about thirteen when that show came on the air, and to see this beautiful black woman playing a nurse, a single mother whose husband had died in the war, was a real triumph. A black woman who wasn’t working as a maid! Who didn’t weigh fourteen hundred pounds! Who walked with her head high and her eyes dead ahead! To be represented in a way that was intelligent, and not just playing for laughs, like Amos ‘n’ Andy, you know, was a serious thing. It said, Yeah, we’re out here, same as you, trying to raise our kids and do our jobs. Same as you.”
So, she knew. What happened?
The Friars Club
The first significant controversy for Goldberg was the night her then-boyfriend Ted Danson dressed up in blackface, ate watermelon and repeatedly said the word “n—-” while roasting Goldberg in 1993 at the Friars Club in New York. Wrote Roger Ebert:
“His performance, the worst train wreck since ‘The Fugitive,’ was witnessed by more than 3,000 people filling the ballroom of the New York Hilton hotel at a $250-a-ticket charity benefit by the show biz organization. A blocklong dais featured more than 100 celebrities who sat stoneface through the monologue, including such prominent African Americans as New York Mayor David Dinkins, performers Halle Berry, Vanessa Williams, Anita Baker, RuPaul and Mr. T, and boxers Michael Spinks and Sugar Ray Leonard. A closed-circuit camera showed them looking embarrassed and uncomfortable.”
Goldberg defended the performance in the press, saying that she’d dared Danson to do it, she suggested his makeup artist and that she wrote most of Danson’s routine. Google “Ted Danson blackface” and you’ll be met with pictures of a smiling Goldberg, gazing at Danson with adoration. While some dispatches noted that Shari Belafonte, Natalie Cole, Jasmine Guy, Vanessa Williams, Anita Baker and “other black celebrities present were howling at the proceedings,” some, such as Montel Williams, were mortified. (Goldberg called him out for his comments during her set for “Comic Relief VI,” the annual fundraiser for the homeless that she, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal hosted for 20 years.)
Miraculously, by today’s standards, the whole thing mostly blew over. There was closed-circuit footage of Danson’s act that night, but it never leaked, giving us few clues as to whether Danson’s routine veered more toward “Tropic Thunder” than Al Jolson. Danson’s career continued without issue and Goldberg’s continued its ascendance. The next year, she became the first black woman to host the Academy Awards, a gig she took three more times in 1996, 1999 and 2002.
Comic Relief
Goldberg wasn’t just a funny woman; she was a funny person who traversed with ease between characters and genders, like she did in her 1985 one-woman show, “Direct From Broadway.” When she was still performing it early in her career at the Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea, it was called the “The Spook Show.” She had an extraordinary capacity for soliciting empathy while also making you laugh.
In a 1984 Vanity Fair story on Goldberg (the one accompanied by Annie Leibovitz’s portrait of a young Whoopi chilling in a bathtub filled with milk), Susan Mingus, widow of the jazz musician Charles, called Goldberg a “philosopher” and a “saint.”
She was sharp, too. Her comedy had a personal, political edge that was just as evident when Goldberg resurrected her street hustler character Fontaine in 2005 and used him to critique then-president George W. Bush during a 20th anniversary performance called “Back to Broadway.”
Before Goldberg joined “The View” to replace Rosie O’Donnell as moderator, she enjoyed a decade as one of the funniest, most popular figures in American entertainment. She was everywhere and she played a range. She was sister Mary Clarence in “Sister Act.” Her movie “Corrina, Corrina” was delivered on DVD with boxes of Papa John’s pizza. She was the center square in the reboot of “Hollywood Squares.” She was the Cheshire Cat in a TV movie adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” that also starred Ben Kingsley, Martin Short and Gene Wilder. She played Queen Constantina in a race-blind TV movie adaptation of “Cinderella” in which Victor Garber played her husband, Paolo Montalban played their son, and the singer Brandy was Cinderella. She had a short-lived eponymous NBC show. Slim Fast enlisted Goldberg to help them sell diet shakes. She was a superfan-turned-basketball coach of the New York Knicks and a businesswoman who got ahead pretending to be a businessman. Even in “Rat Race,” the 2001 ensemble comedy starring Rowan Atkinson, Kathy Najimy, John Cleese and Jon Lovitz, Goldberg was a scene-stealer.
At a time when the prevailing standard of beauty for black women in Hollywood was a light complexion and long, straight hair, Goldberg spent her heyday as an outlier. Black women with natural hair, much less dreadlocks, simply weren’t as ubiquitous and celebrated in the way that they are today. In quite a few of her roles, Goldberg was sort of suspended in sexlessness, but she carried movies anyway on sheer talent. It was inspiring and at the same time refreshing to see her be chosen, be celebrated and be wanted in a film like “Corrina, Corinna.” It was important.
In a 2014 piece entitled “When White Men Love Black Women on TV,” Virginia Commonwealth University sociology professor Tressie McMillan Cottom explored why the types of relationships shown on shows like “Scandal” and “How to Get Away with Murder” feel significant. Referring to showrunner Shonda Rhimes, she wrote: “[Rhimes] single-handedly created two universes where desiring a black woman publicly is not deviant, funny, or abnormal enough to warrant an entire storyline. That’s a type of progress but it is fragile.”
Arguably, decades before ShondaLand existed, Goldberg was waging this war on the big screen — and winning. In “Made in America,” she played a single mother who had a daughter via sperm donor who turned out to be the unlikeliest of uncouth white guys, played by Ted Danson. Danson’s character ends up falling for Goldberg’s. The movie, which cost $22 million, grossed nearly $105 million.
But the credit that we ascribe to Rhimes and to Davis largely escaped Goldberg. There was no Twitter and there were no blogs to parse the large-scale meaning of Goldberg’s dominance in the entertainment industry. It came and it went.
Not built for TMZ
There’s a familiar rhythm to Goldberg controversies. The central conflict involves the fact that whatever she’s saying tends to paint her as a traitor, either to her race, her gender or both. It’s often confounding, in part because of Goldberg’s positioning on “The View” as The Reasonable One, but also because there’s a good bit of material, either that she’s performed or written, that suggests that Goldberg should know better.
At 59, Goldberg is not of the TMZ generation, but she’s been swept into it anyway. It’s disquieting to see Hollywood aunties like her being subjected to questioning better associated with the likes of Chris Brown or Ariana Grande, but here we are.
Goldberg finds herself in a celebrity culture for which she wasn’t made and couldn’t have predicted, and she and her contemporaries have struggled to keep up as the chains of progress have moved down the field (see also: Jerry Seinfeld, Matt Damon and Chrissie Hynde, among others).
“The View” was supposed to provide one of America’s favorite comedians with a dignified second act. Will it end up undoing the legacy she built in the first one?