When the car crossed the state line from New York to New Jersey, I thought, What am I doing? I was having big doubts, but I kept them to myself.
I was riding in the back seat with my kid, Alexandrea, who was a toddler, heading to Texas and then eventually to California. In the front seat were two guys, both actors, one that I knew pretty well. He had been in Long Day’s Journey into Night at a theater where my mom was working as a house manager. He was a good guy, and we would hang out together.
One day he said to me, “I’ve got a son about the same age as your daughter. Would you ever consider moving to the West Coast? To California?”
The idea was for me to go with him to be a nanny for our kids while he did acting jobs. I saw it as my way to get to California, a place I had always wanted to go. I was picturing Los Angeles. That was my only plan. I didn’t know how to drive. I didn’t have a place to stay, except with this guy for a while. And I didn’t have any money to get a car or an apartment. So about thirty minutes into our cross-country drive, it started to seem like a crazy idea. But like my mom always taught me, I had to live with my choice.
From the time I left high school, I only wanted to act, but I had no idea what steps had to happen to make that a job. Nobody gave me any information on how to break through into a career, and I would just audition when parts were available.
When you’re a teenager trying to figure it all out, you can fall into some things that you don’t want as part of your life in the long run. Around age sixteen, I became dependent on drugs to make me feel good. It’s no secret how that kind of shit ends.
By some sort of luck, I started hanging out at a youth center on Eighteenth Street. During the day, it was offices for drug rehab counselors. In the evening, it was a place where young people could come together and keep themselves from falling into bad things. I had already fallen in and out of bad things. But I’d show up and listen to people talking about why they did what they did and how they got free of it.
After a couple weeks, I started thinking to myself, I don’t want to do these drugs anymore either. I’d like to clean this up.
I got into drug rehab and that got me into my first marriage. At age eighteen, I married my drug counselor. He was a great guy, and getting married made sense to me at the time, even though I remember my mom asking me, “Are you sure this is something you want to go through with?”
You know, I was young and I thought I was doing what was expected of me. Besides, I had already agreed to it. I didn’t know what being in love should feel like. He seemed to be in love with me, so I didn’t question it.
A year later my mom was dropping me off at the hospital to give birth to my daughter. In the ’70s, you had to go into the delivery room on your own—just you, some nurses, and the doctor. These days, you can have a professional film crew in the room with you, led by a fucking marching band if you want it.
My mother told me, “Listen. You’re going to be up there by yourself. If you need to cry out, then cry out.”
So I thought that I was going to be okay. I knew it was going to hurt. I’d grown up with really bad menstrual cramps, so I thought I was ready.
You can’t possibly be ready for that kind of pain.
I made some noise. But then a nurse shut me down, saying, “Women do this every single day, all day long. What are you crying about?”
There’s a reason I only gave birth once. That should tell you everything about the level of pain I experienced. You have no idea what labor is all about until you’ve done it yourself. They tell you it’s a natural process. Nobody says, “Listen, this entails shoving a ninety-two-inch TV screen through a tiny hole. Good luck.”
They say you forget the birth process in between having babies. Not a chance. That memory has stayed right with me.
I spent two days in the hospital afterward. There was no expectation of sympathy from the “What do you mean you don’t feel good?” nursing staff. Every couple of hours, they would wheel Alex’s bassinet in, and I was supposed to feed her. I did everything I could to get Alex to attach, but she was too busy looking around. She didn’t want to latch on. Then the one time I got it to happen, she bit down on me and didn’t let go.
That was it for me.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ma told me. “There’s always formula.”
A couple years into the marriage, I could tell that it wasn’t for me. I liked my husband, but the “till death do us part” thing didn’t seem like it would happen.
Also, I thought he understood that I would always want to act or perform. He didn’t.
So I went back to my mom’s house, and I told her, “I don’t like being married.”
She said, “Well, maybe it’s because it wasn’t something you wanted to really do. But you did it anyway.”
I said, “Yeah. Maybe. Maybe.” All the while knowing she was right.
She had asked me, “Are you sure?” long before we tied the knot. I thought it would be better if I did it my way. I loved my kid, but I didn’t want to be only a wife and a mother.
When I told my mother that a couple of actors and I were driving across the country to California, she said, “You know, if you go and you don’t like it, it’s gonna be hard for me to get you back here because I don’t have the money.”
I was still thinking it would be better if I did it my way.
I said, “Well, let’s see what happens.”
I ended up in Lubbock, Texas, for two or three months while the two actors did a dinner theater show. Then after it ended, the one actor I knew best said we were heading to California next.
When we got there, I said to him, “Wait. This isn’t LA.”
And he said, “It’s San Diego. This is where we’re going to be.”
I knew Hollywood. I knew Los Angeles. I had never heard of San Diego. But that was where I was going to live. My friend was associated with an upstart theater company called San Diego Repertory Theatre, which was in its first year. I fell in with that group, at first helping backstage and then getting cast in plays. It eventually became one of San Diego’s premier theater companies with three stages and art galleries. In 1977, though, we did shows wherever space was available.
After a few months, I knew I didn’t want to keep sharing a house with the actor. I kept my mother abreast of my situation but didn’t say I had no idea how I was going to manage. I had to figure it out. All I knew was that I had a kid and you don’t get to fall apart when you have a kid.
Some people I met in San Diego said, “Since you have a kid, you need to go on welfare.”
I was appalled. I thought it was the worst idea. My mother had never ever taken assistance.
They encouraged me, “Things are different now. Listen, you need the money to take care of yourself and Alex and have some medical insurance. Besides, you paid into it with your other jobs.”
I applied because I knew they were right. I ended up getting $127 a month and some food stamps. And that’s how I figured it out. I had other small jobs on the side, but I had to be careful because whatever I made, they would take it out of the next welfare check.
My mom would ask, “How are you doing?”
I finally told her I was on welfare.
I knew my mother didn’t like the idea of it. And I was feeling really, you know, dodgy about doing it.
Then my mother, in the same way she always did, said, “Stop thinking about what I’m thinking. It’s what you have to do. You have a kid to take care of, so you will do what you need to do.”
In those days you could rent a pretty great place for little money. And somebody recommended that I meet an interracial couple who lived near Balboa Park and had three small separate places on their property. They had twins who looked like Alex, and living close to each other would be a great situation for their kids and for Alex. They rented one of the little houses to me. It was really nice, and it looked like a gorgeous tree house because it had two giant tree trunks coming through the deck. It was a tiny place, only a bedroom, a little front room, a bathroom, and a kitchen, but it was the first place I ever had to myself. I would sit with Alex out on the deck and feel like I was so lucky, mostly because folks extended themselves to help me out. I was offered a scholarship to learn cosmetology and how to do hair. And I managed to get myself a used moped and a driver’s license, and I would take Alex off to preschool before I’d go to my hair-cutting classes.
I’d do hair by day and work with the San Diego Rep at night, and I figured out how to get by with some food stamps and about thirty welfare bucks a week.
Years later, my mother told me that she had felt concerned, but she said, “There was nothing I could do. I didn’t have any money either. I had no way to rescue you. So, you know, I figured you would figure it out.”
After I had made a couple of movies, I sent a check back to the state of California, repaying them for the welfare assistance they had given me. It got me through a rough time. It gets other folks through. It’s needed.
Once I started getting parts in plays, I wanted a name that sounded more interesting. Caryn Johnson wasn’t it. Some people at the Rep called me Whoopi because I would sometimes let loose with a fart. I added “Cushione” to it, with a French pronunciation. Then, I got a review written by journalist Welton Jones. It was a good one, so I sent it to my mother.
Later, when we talked on the phone, she said, “What is this Whoopi Cushione?”
“Well, it’s kind of my nickname. It’s like ‘whoopee cushion’ with a little French accent.”
She said, “Well, I picked that up. But why? Why Whoopi?”
So, I explained to her the whole farting thing.
“Well, if you’re going to change your name and want people to take you seriously, you need a more substantial name,” my mother advised me.
I said, “Oh, really, great namer of the stars? What do you think it should be?”
She said, “Well, you should take one of the names from the family tree. How about Goldberg? That has a nice ring to it.”
That became my name. Only my family and a few people who knew me early in my life still called me Caryn.
Through the San Diego Rep, I met a very creative guy, Dave, who had come down from Berkeley to do a show. He was a member of an avant-garde theater group called the Blake Street Hawkeyes, and he thought I should move north and act with them.
For a woman who wanted to get to Los Angeles, it still wasn’t happening. I went from San Diego, bypassed LA, and went straight to the San Francisco area. I left San Diego as Caryn Johnson and arrived in Berkeley as Whoopi Goldberg. I really dug Dave. He was cool with helping parent my kid and she liked him, so we got together as a couple.
At the Blake Street theater, I was around creative people who gave me stage time and a chance to improvise and develop some characters. I had about eleven or twelve characters that I had come up with. I started performing, building various characters, trying them out on stage. After a while, I had enough material to do a solo show. I called it The Spook Show because the audience would never know which characters might appear in a show. People started showing up to see me on stage, and I was having a good time. Dave also had a solo show, and we even took off to do them in Europe for a couple months.
After all was said and done, things started to happen for me. One night Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer of The Color Purple, came to see the show. I met her afterward when she came backstage. She told me that they were thinking about turning her book into a movie.
I said to her, “I know I’m here doing my thing, but if they do that, I’d play the washbowl on the counter. I’d play the dirt on the doormat. You name it. I’d love to be part of it.”
The National Endowment for the Arts was becoming more supportive of experimental stuff, and soon I got a letter from the artistic director of the Dance Theater Workshop in New York, David White. He wrote that they were doing a series of one-person shows. He had my show highly recommended to him by a colleague who saw it, and so he was inviting me to do it in New York during their series. He said there was an itty-bitty stipend for me, but that I’d have to figure out where I could stay. He wanted to know if I would be interested in doing the series.
I called him up. “Listen, your theater is on Seventeenth Street. I grew up on Twenty-Sixth and Tenth. Hell yeah, I’ll be there.”
I talked to my mom. “I’m coming to New York because these guys at the Dance Theater Workshop want me to do shows there, stuff that I’ve written for myself in the last couple years.”
She was happy about it. I had not seen my mom face-to-face in about four years. I stayed with her in my old apartment in the projects. She was finishing up her master’s degree and teaching full-time at the Head Start preschool.
She said, “Do you mind if I come with you to the shows?”
I told her, “I’m just gonna let you know, I don’t know what to expect.”
Like I thought, for the first week of the show, only about six or seven people came. My mom would scan the audience and report to me if she saw someone she recognized. Little by little, more people came.
One night, when the audience only had twenty people, my mother told me, “Oh, my God. One Potato, Two Potato Barbara Barrie is here.”
Most people know her as the wife on the TV show Barney Miller. She’s an incredible stage and film actress and was the white lead in One Potato, Two Potato, a 1964 film that featured her in a relationship with a black man, played by Bernie Hamilton. It was a big deal, especially in 1964.
Then, about a week later, there was a review in the New York Times by Mel Gussow that changed the course of my whole life. He liked the show. A lot.
Suddenly, the seats were filling up. You couldn’t get a ticket.
Burt Bacharach, the big-time composer of hits like “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” and “Walk on By,” came in to see the show one night. Designer Norma Kamali was there another night. Every night there was another famous face that my mother recognized: Anne Meara, Jerry Stiller, Bette Midler, and even Oscar Hammerstein’s wife.
One night before the show, my mother came backstage and said, “I just want to tell you something, but I don’t want you to get overexcited or nervous.”
I said, “You’re making me nervous. What’s happening?”
“I just want you to know that Mike Nichols is in the audience.”
“You mean like The Graduate Mike Nichols?”
“Yes. He’s directing two shows on Broadway now. The Real Thing, a Tom Stoppard play with Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons, and he’s doing Hurlyburly.”
I went out on stage, and I did my show. I didn’t know what Mike Nichols looked like, so I just did what I do and didn’t think about it.
At the end of the show, I went back to my dressing room and sat down. My mother said, “Did you see him?”
Right then, there was a knock on the dressing room door.
My mother went to answer the door, and she said, “Mike Nichols is here.”
I went to meet him, and he was standing there with tears in his eyes.
The first character I did in the show was a drug addict named Fontaine who goes to Amsterdam. He sees Anne Frank’s hiding place and her quote about how she believed in the goodness of people despite everything. He sees Shelley Winters’s Oscar that she donated to the museum. It all becomes very real to Fontaine, and it changes him.
That piece of the show really got to Mike.
“I don’t know how to explain this to you,” he said. “But I was on the last boat leaving Germany in 1939 before they no longer allowed Jews to leave.”
Quite a few characters in the show tore Mike up, like the thirteen-year-old who has to do a coat hanger abortion on herself after her family kicks her out, and the disabled woman, trapped in a wheelchair, who sleeps and dreams she is a dancer.
Judith Ivey, the actress currently starring in one of the plays Mike was directing, Hurlyburly, had brought him to see the show. He had no idea what to expect. There was a lot going on in the show that he loved.
He said, “Could we have a conversation soon?”
I said, “Of course. Sure.”
“Would you ever consider doing your show on Broadway?”
I said, “Yes. Of course I would.”
I looked over at my mother, and she was sitting there, all poised, listening to Mike talk, rather blasé, as if this was something that happened around her every single day.
Mike got up to leave, saying, “Let me have your phone number. I’ll have to figure out how to do this and I’ll call you.” He hugged me and then turned and gave my mom a hug.
My mother closed the door behind him, and we both screamed silently because we knew Mike was still nearby.
A couple weeks later, I wrapped up the show. My mother and I had a great time together, laughing a lot. I told her I loved her and flew back to Berkeley.
About a month later, I was home cleaning up the kitchen when the phone rang. “Ms. Goldberg, this is Mike Nichols.”
I said, “Yeah, I recognize the voice.”
“Well, I found the theater,” he said. “And my partner and I would like to bring you to New York.”
“Seriously? Really?”
“Yes. You sound surprised.”
“Yeah, I’m surprised because I thought you were kidding. I didn’t think you were actually going to do it.”
He said, “No. I wasn’t kidding and we are going to do it.”
About five months went by, and then I went back to New York to rehearse for Whoopi Goldberg at the Lyceum Theatre. Mike got an apartment for me to live in while I was doing the show, a really cool old brownstone. So I had my mom move in with me since Alex was staying in Berkeley with Dave so she wouldn’t miss out on regular grammar school.
Mike and I went to rehearsals together, and my mom would come and sit near Mike. He really liked my mom, and they had a great time together, talking, laughing, and smoking cigarettes. To me, they were very much alike. I never told Mike about what had happened to my mother and her hospitalization. They’d both been kids who had nothing, who had to look to find their place in the world, and then, you know, became the people they were meant to become. Both were self-made people.
We had been rehearsing for about a week in a Broadway theater, and one afternoon I was doing my thing on stage. And Mike started to shift in his chair.
“Can I stop you?”
I said, “Yeah.”
And he said, with a big, deep sigh, “Does this story have an end?”
“Yeah, yeah, it does.”
“I’m so glad you know that. Because you came to the end of the story quite a while ago.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m not listening to myself because I’ve done this a lot. I know it all so well.”
Mike came to the edge of the stage. “You can’t be on automatic like that. You have to keep yourself ready for anything that happens because you’re an improviser. There’s no reason to let it get old. You don’t have to nail your own feet to the floor like that.”
I apologized and admitted that I was bored with the performance.
He said, “If you’re bored, do something about it. Think about it. You have to pay attention to what you’re doing. Because if you’re not paying attention, I’m not going to pay attention.”
He started calling out topics, and I’d have the character shift and start off in a different direction, talking on the topic. Then Mike would say something else, and I’d switch and have the character follow whatever he was talking about. It was great for me because it kept me present.
After that, over the course of a couple of days, we had a great time, and the show got better and better. Mike gave me permission to fly on stage.
Even off the stage, Mike always let me feel like I belonged where I was. Not like a newcomer. He always invited me along to whatever he had going on. If my mom was there, he included her.
One day Mike said, “Come with me. I’m having lunch with Carl, Paul, and Steve.”
I said, “Okay. Will they mind if I go?”
He shrugged it off. “No, no, no. They won’t mind.”
I was thinking about how I was being invited to meet his friends. I mean, I know people named Carl, Paul, and Steve, too. Regular folks.
I headed over to this lunch place to meet up with Mike, and he waved me over to his table, where he was sitting with Carl Reiner, Paul Simon, and Steve Martin. He introduced me, even though I knew exactly who they were.
I kept telling myself, Okay. Just keep breathing. Breathe. It was pretty amazing.
And that wasn’t the last lunch or dinner with show business greats. I got to meet other actors, directors, and producers at the very beginning of my career that I would have never met on my own, all because of Mike.
The best part, for me, was taking my mom along on these lunches. Mike would treat my mom like she was a queen who had graced us all at the table. Even though she was shy, she loved meeting these people we had watched or listened to for years and years.
The day before my show opened on Broadway, I was walking down Seventh Avenue with Nan Leonard, a publicist working on promoting the show. We were talking, and she stopped me.
“I want you to just savor this moment,” she said.
“Being on Broadway, you mean?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “Savor the fact that nobody knows who you are right now. Because after today, that’s all going to be different. That’s going to change.”
I thought she was, you know, waxing on.
She said, “Soon, even truck drivers are going to know Whoopi Goldberg. People will recognize you.”
I didn’t believe it could happen. But she was right. What she told me came true.