Ellen takes on America
By Miriam Silver
(Press Democrat, Juni 2000)

Comedian Ellen DeGeneres was worried about her eight-week, 35-city, cross-country comeback tour, but she shouldn't have been.

Her upcoming show next Sunday at the Burbank Center was sold out 30 minutes after it was advertised, with folks lining up at 4:30 a.m. for the noon box office opening. Audiences have been packing houses across the country, "with warmth and love," she says, as the onetime top TV star whose career came crashing down in 1997 after she decided to come out as a lesbian on her namesake sitcom, "Ellen."

Initially, the answer was "No" to an interview with the Press Democrat. Then a few weeks passed, her show hit the road, and across the country - in a bus, no less - she went. A few interviews started turning up, in newspapers and on the Internet. She created her own gig on a Web site, with live, daily video and audio updates, including a rather amusing spoof on the "Blair Witch Project."

With her lover-partner, actress Anne Heche, she is turning the tour into an HBO special, accompanying it with a documentary being made during the tour.

At close to the last minute, word was Ellen (you simply feel like you should call her Ellen, eschewing the hack, newspapery style of last names) would do an interview. So there we were, Monday morning, tape recorder and phone ready, interview set for 10:30 a.m., Pacific time.

I answered the phone.

"Miriam, Hi, this is Ellen."

Easy so far.

"Hi, Ellen."
"You know we are filming a documentary, and this interview right now, so I am going to tape you if that's okay," Ellen says.

Well, I said yes, of course. How could I say no when I am the one always taping other people? Tables turned. Disarming. Smart. No cute Columbo reporter stuff when the world could be watching (listening) on the Web.

"Great, then," I say. "If my tape recorder doesn't work, I can call you back for a copy.
"Where are you?" I ask.
"I am in New Orleans, just pulled in this morning. I did a show last night in Atlanta," Ellen says.

I was told I'd only get 15 minutes. No warm ups for me. Besides, if I ask the questions right, maybe this could be my big break. Forget writing. It's talk shows I want.

"How's it been going?" I ask.
"The audiences have been so supportive and so loving. It is just like a cheering thing that goes on. I can really feel it," she says.

Was she apprehensive?
"I was scared to death. I was scared that I was going to lose my audience that liked me because I was funny and because I was a comedian," she says.

A little bit about the past here. After three successful seasons on television, the character "Ellen" on the show decided to declare her homosexuality in a 1997 episode. At the same time, Ellen - DeGeneres, that is - also announced she was a lesbian. The coming out episode was top-rated, but later episodes saw a diminishing audience. Critics said the show just wasn't funny anymore.

That is not at all how it was supposed to be, says Ellen now.

"I didn't want to be the leader. I didn't mean to do that. I meant to stand up for who I am and stand up for my shame. I didn't mean to turn my career into a political thing."

So, which brings us back to now, why she was apprehensive about hitting the road with a solo stand-up comedy show, the end of the entertainment biz where Ellen, now 42, made her start so long ago.

"I was scared I'd either have that militant kind of thing, people expecting me to do this or that. Everything was happening at once. I was trying to figure out how to write and how to step out. I was scared that reviews would tear me apart. I had been wounded, and I thought I'd be an easy target for people, because it had been seven years (since she did stand up)."

Ellen says she does not read her reviews. But friends and colleagues do. She says she respects people's opinions, but the opinion of one should not have such a great influence on all.

"This person might not have a sense of humor ... (and) they write a column and everybody's reading it and unfortunately it seeps in."

Reviews or not, with more than half the tour (19 cities completed), Ellen says something is working right.
"I know what I feel when I am on stage every night. It is not a fluke," she says. Not everything works, and as the act goes on, she fine tunes, changes, takes out, adds.

"There are actually things I think are really funny that the audience was not going for and I had to take it out. No one got it."

She's talking about the fly thing.
"Anne (Heche, her actress/partner who she said she'd marry if marriage between two women was made legal) was so disappointed. Then Rosie O'Donnell came to see the show and she said "Why didn't you do the fly?"

By the time Ellen gets to Santa Rosa next week, it may well be back in the act. Last week, in Atlanta, the fly was back in and it felt like a hit.
"It is talking abut a fly and when it gets in your house and ends up on the mirror and starts talking and stays for hours. It's a conversation between the fly and what it thinks is another fly. I don't think you have to have too much of an imagination that the fly is literally talking to himself. It is a funny visual," she says.

That's Ellen kind of humor.
"My sense of humor is very subtle, very dry, very out there. I like to paint a picture and it is up to you to see the visual," she says.
"I am getting it kind of honed and tightened. I played a little bit more last night. I ad-libbed. I laid down on the stage for a while. Sometimes you are in these different moods."

Well, yeah, so other people lie down sometimes, and no one thinks they're very funny.

"What makes you funny?" I ask.
"I have no idea."

Interview nightmare. But, certainly as nice a person as she's always seemed, after a slight, uncomfortable pause, Ellen saves me and volunteers:
"My sense of humor, the physical comedy is across the board funny. When I did TV, I did the physical comedy. I don't think I am necessarily a mainstream person."

But she says the mainstream likes her. Deer hunters, for instance, who she actually made fun of, laughed with her.

Ellen doesn't really like to talk about her routine, and we are well past the 15-minute interview limit. But she will say her humor is never the cruel kind. She found herself the target of enough of that kind of humor when she came out as a gay woman.

"I talk about everything from fashion to dressing rooms from going to the store to buy cheese and there is no cheese. I talk to God again. It is a very positive, nice clean funny act."

What or who convinced you, I ask, after all this time, to go on the road?
"It was me. First of all nothing else was going on I decided to do an HBO special that would focus everybody and myself on my creativity. I did it mainly to get focused on my art and to have an outlet ... and also for a livelihood."

Ellen talks willingly about the depression and anger she felt after "Ellen" was canceled, and about becomimg a public joke. Is she sorry she did the coming out thing?
"I am not sorry about anything. I love everything that happened, even the hard times. I love the depression, love what it taught me," Ellen says.

"I know what it feels like to be at the bottom. I was there. I hit a depression that was devastating to me and it was painful and lonely and isolating, but it gives me compassion."

"What were you so angry about," I ask, somewhat naively, thinking, here is this always funny famous person, with a famous, successful movie actress partner, and I wasn't sure where all this anger came from. Don't TV shows always get canceled? Isn't that just the way things work in Hollywood?

For Ellen it was not just that.
"I was angry that the show was not embraced, that the ratings dropped, that it was a public humiliation," she says. People did not get it, she says, looking back on what she admits as her own naiveté.

"How can people not see that I am trying to do a subject matter that is not an easy subject to make funny? I am trying to give a group of people out there ... give them a voice. Now I see there had to be a digestion period, that people don't understand. That it is still a scary thing for them. They don't understand it. I was angry people stopped watching the show," she says.

Ellen doesn't buy it, that the show stopped being funny.
"I thought it was still funny. So what if it wasn't the same kind of funny. It was different," she says.

Ellen was mad, too, like any other regular Joe losing his or her job, that when her show was canceled, no one from the network even told her it was happening.
"I did not even get a phone call. I read it in the trades," she says.

It was indeed, an odd time, for her, Ellen says.
"I didn't have anywhere to go everyday. I didn't have a routine. I had been a workaholic since I started doing standup ... so suddenly there was nothing and on top of it -- what was so weird -- I was raised to not speak up and not give my opinion, to maybe get a job selling cars or real estate because I was good with people. How did I end up in this position, in being this controversial political person that a lot of people hated all of the sudden?"

Obviously, she agrees, it was in part homophobia.
"Yes, and I was dealing with my internal homophobia," Ellen volunteers.

Let me think, any more personal questions I can come up with? Oh yes. "Are there children in your future?" I ask.
"I would say, yes, there will be children in our future," she says.
"When, this year? Soon?"
"I am not sure I would tell you that," Ellen says.

Fair enough.

So what's it like, running around, from city to city, in two giant buses?
"You are sleeping on top of a motor. It feels like you are going 200 miles an hour."

Ok, why the bus routine?
"I am scared of flying. I thought it would be fun, because we'd all be together. It definitely is the experience of a lifetime we will never do again. We are making it fun. Last night Anne and I are sitting outside, the breeze is going through the windows, and we are reading to each other. We pulled in at 6 a.m. in New Orleans."

Sounds pretty lovely, actually.

So, what's in Ellen's future, when the tour finishes up in New York City in mid-July?
"I shoot the HBO special, then go right back to L.A. and start working on the new show."

That is a variety show, "putting nice comedy back on television," Ellen says, a show modeled in part after one of her TV comedy heroines, Carol Burnett, who has agreed to appear on the show. Ellen's got a commitment from CBS for six episodes.

Then maybe a movie with Meg Ryan. Then, the voice of a fish in one of Pixar's new animated features.
"You know Pixar, the guys who made "Toy Story?" ...but that doesn't come out until 2002. Those things take years."

And then?
"I don't know. Maybe I'll write a book. I know now there are no limits and no one can stop me. It's up to me."