Out & About: Ellen DeGeneres
By Hilary De Vries
(TV-Guide, Oktober 1997)Her love life is great, and she just won an Emmy. Still, it's not easy being TV's most famous gay woman.
One night last year, Ellen DeGeneres had what she thought was an unremarkable dream.
In it, she imagined she was trying to free a caged bird, only to discover that the bars of the cage had miraculously parted and the bird had escaped. But the dream proved to be prescient. Soon she would open her own cage with a series of dramatic gestures.
"When she told me that dream," recalls Ellen costar Joely Fisher, "I almost started crying because I knew what it meant, and I told her, 'Ellen, that's you, you're free now.'''
Certainly it would seem so. Last April, DeGeneres's ABC sitcom, Ellen (Wednesdays, 9:30 P.M./ET), scored its highest ratings ever with the episode in which her character, Ellen Morgan, came out as a lesbian. DeGeneres didn't stop there: She disclosed that she, too, was a lesbian and appeared on Oprah with her live-in girlfriend, actress Anne Heche.
The controversial coming-out show was greeted with enthusiasm in the gay community, with boycotts by religious groups, and temporary withdrawals by corporate sponsors Chrysler and JC Penney. But like it or not, after three lackluster years, Ellen was not only the most talked-about show of the moment but a history-making one as well -- the first sitcom with a gay lead character. That notoriety, as well as a ratings bump, ensured the series' renewal and helped net Ellen five Emmy nominations, including a first ever win (for best comedy writing). DeGeneres fought back tears as she accepted the award last month: "On behalf of the people -- and the teenagers especially -- out there who think there is something wrong with them because they're gay: There's nothing wrong with you, and don't let anyone make you ashamed of who you are."
Now the 39-year-old former stand-up comic would seem to be heading into her fourth season of Ellen on a new high. The season opener premiered to largely rave reviews, if not overwhelming ratings: It finished a respectable third against tough competition. "The episode is a riot," wrote Howard Rosenberg in the Los Angeles Times, who compared the revamped series to the legendary All in the Family. "Ellen has an opportunity to diminish prejudice on a level not previously seen in TV." This fall, Ellen proves even bolder with an episode in which DeGeneres's character kisses another women. So given all that, why does the blonde in the space-age sunglasses and starched Prada shirt over in the corner of Beverly Hills's fabled Polo Lounge look so tense?
"I just got this new phone, and somehow I've locked it," says DeGeneres, stabbing distractedly at a hinged piece of plastic the size of a man's wallet. "And now I can't unlock it." Frowning, she pokes the phone for several minutes until finally, as if surrendering, it gives a silent shiver in her hand. The phone is apparently the least of it. Despite the momentous events of the past year, DeGeneres is the first to admit she's still not getting through. Even now, when she is at the top of her game, free for the first time in her life -- as she has said repeatedly, "where no one can hurt me now" -- there is a shadow lying across it all.
"I came out for the show, and I certainly don't mind saying that I'm gay," says DeGeneres, who will receive an ACLU award, among several others, later this year. "And for a long time, I had a sense of shame about it. That's what I always thought when I walked into a room -- 'I wonder if they know I'm gay?' It's why the Emmy meant so much, because I never felt like I belonged to the club." But, DeGeneres says, enough is enough: "I never wanted to be the poster child" for lesbianism.
It's why she unexpectedly spurned a $3 million book deal last spring to write about her coming out and why she pressed ABC to pull the plug on Ellen and why she has returned reluctantly for what she hopes will be the show's last season, burdened by what executive producer Tim Doyle calls her "Joan of Arc fears." "After last year, it was impossible to put the genie back in the bottle," he says. "But it's also saddled Ellen with this new role, and all she really wants to be is a performer."
"Now I'm glad we're back," DeGeneres says of the show during a remarkably candid two-hour interview. "But I didn't want to do it. I was hoping I could just move on, because I didn't want to have happen what sort of has happened. Ellen Morgan and I are in very different places in our lives: She has just discovered she's gay, but I've known this for a long time, and believe me, I can go a whole day without having a single gay reference. I can't just be the gay girl all the time." Sounding genuinely frustrated, she adds, "It's only part of who I am."
It is a hot, late-summer morning, and DeGeneres, looking tanned and relaxed after a summer spent in Hawaii with Heche, stands in the cool recesses of the Ellen soundstage surrounded by buzzing cast and crew and nearly a dozen screaming children. It's one of her first weeks back at work filming what will become the season premiere, an episode that includes a fantasy sequence in which Ellen, frustrated after a blind date with a beautiful but dim-witted lesbian, dreams she is married to an ex-boyfriend (William Ragsdale), pregnant, and mother of this unruly brood. "No, nothing is wrong," she says, pressing Ragsdale's hand to her belly. "Something is very, very right." Although cast and crew have already filmed several other episodes this season, it's clear from the raucous laughter DeGeneres's line elicits that this has touched a nerve.
"Let's send this right over to [Disney chairman and CEO Michael] Eisner," says Doyle from the sidelines.
"We can't just rip it out of the can," counters Vic Kaplan, the series' longtime executive producer.
"No, this really makes our case for what we're trying to do this year," insists Doyle, who joined Ellen this season after several years on Roseanne and Grace Under Fire. "It gets us over the girl-girl thing and into what her life is really going to be about."
What is next for Ellen Morgan now that she's out of the closet? Although the network initially downplayed the series' gay themes -- "It won't be the lesbian dating show," ABC ntertainment
president Jamie Tarses cautioned over the summer. "We're taking baby steps" -- DeGeneres was proceeding full steam ahead with her own agenda. During the summer, she faxed scripts and story outlines from Hawaii, urging the producers to "make Ellen more of an adult, to make the stories more real." If there is any sitcom she is interested in echoing, it's not Seinfeld but Mad About You. "That's one of the best series because it's about a real relationship,"she says, adding with a sigh, "And when I hear 'baby steps,' that makes me feel bad. It's like they're saying, 'OK, you're gay, and we're tolerating this, but don't show us how you really would be, don't kiss a girl on the lips.''' Even the Emmy win, she opines, doesn't mean "we can do anything we want to do. It won't make anybody less cautious."Not that Ellen seems to be all that cautious. From the season premiere that artfully tweaked hetero- as well as homosexual stereotypes -- "What the hell kind of lesbian are you?"Spence demanded after catching Ellen kissing her old flame -- to this fall's episode that introduces Ellen's girlfriend (and includes a chaste, two-second kiss), the series has taken bold, even aggressive, steps.
"Look, the audience that hates Ellen for being gay is never coming back," asserts Doyle, who laughingly describes himself as "the white, heterosexual male who's producing the lesbian comedy." "So the only thing to do is pursue the story, and this year Ellen is looking for love, and that's universal. It's not about her sex life. I want this to be a show my parents can watch."
So far, that approach appears to be paying off.Both DeGeneres and the network are said to be happy, and the series has already undergone several additional changes, on-screen and off, including the newly expanded set, which replaces the old bookstore locale and, with it, Ellen's job. That will give DeGeneres the chance to try different things. Later in the season, she says, she'll become the personal assistant to a bratty child star. Behind the scenes, there is a new team of writers assembled by Doyle.
Perhaps the most significant change is the de-emphasis on the show's supporting cast. With the focus on Ellen's trials and tribulations as a lesbian -- stories that include an ambitious list of possible guest stars including Julia Roberts, Emma Thompson, and Clint Eastwood -- most of the secondary stories have been eliminated, and that has left many of the regular cast members scrambling. "Eliminating all those anemic subplots has reinvigorated the show,"says Doyle, "and the actors seem really cool with it."
That depends on whom you ask. Fisher, who has played Ellen's friend Paige since the inception of Ellen, notes, "We all really feel this is our last year of the show. The coming-out episode was bittersweet because the regular cast wasn't really part of it." The flip side, she adds, "is that this year we get to have more weeks off to pursue our own projects."
Which may be the right attitude given the new girl in town -- Lisa Darr (Abby's lover, Kathy, on NYPD Blue), who has been cast as Ellen's girlfriend, Laurie, a mortgage broker and the mother of a 12-year-old, who rekindles her friendship with Ellen. Darr has only been booked for four episodes, though, so the romance may be short-lived, which is not exactly to DeGeneres's liking. "Ellen pushed really hard for a relationship this fall," states Jamie Tarses. "And we're behind it, but it's premature to say where it's all going."
"I can see why everyone wants to go slow," DeGeneres counters. "[ABC] is a big corporation, and now with all the standards and practices labeling, I'm up against a lot. But it does seem like once you start the relationship, you want to see where it goes."
W hatever the future of that relationship, DeGeneres's off-camera life continues to generate a lot of interest. Despite the largely positive response to her coming out -- the Emmy, a slew of job offers she declines to specify -- DeGeneres feels she's caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, she has found great personal freedom by disclosing her lesbianism, but she also is angry at some of the reaction, like the drunk who recently harassed her at a concert, calling her "an embarrassment to Jesus," and "the potshots" she sees in the media, from the tabloids to Esquire.
"Maybe I'm just naive, but now that I've said, 'You can't scare me because I'm being truthful,' it's all they hold on to," DeGeneres says, rankled by the focus on her sexual orientation instead of her work. "I'll be the first to admit Idefinitely want acceptance. It's why I went into comedy -- comedians for some reason lacked enough attention growing up. But then I look at when Melissa Etheridge came out, and suddenly she was the Lesbian Rock Star. That was her title for a long time. I think [the label] will go away with me. I hope it will, because that's my goal now. Imean, just look at Anne's career. She was attacked, and now she's just getting movie after movie."
DeGeneres finally drops her guard and trades her nervous frowns for expansive smiles when her relationship with Heche comes up. "No one knows what we have together, no one," she says, offering her hand to display three diamond rings, two of them worn on her left ring finger. "She surprised me with this one four days after we met," she says pointing to the antique solitaire. "She wanted to make the point that she wasn't joking around."
Although DeGeneres had been in long-term relationships with women before, it wasn't until she met Heche in March 1997 at Vanity Fair's Academy Awards party and Heche moved into her house that she "learned the difference between love and being in love. I always used to be so envious of married people. Now this is it for me, for both of us, forever."
DeGeneres has no doubts about their relationship, despite media scrutiny, despite the jokes, like last spring's Saturday Night Live sketch satirizing their appearance together on Oprah. "We heard about that, but we ignored it like we ignore everything," she says easily. "Anne's taken a lot of flack for what she's done, but in 25 or 30 years, when we're still together and out of this business, we can look back and laugh. Maybe it's a horrible thing to say, but Anne and I both had the same reaction when Princess Di died, that she had just found the man of her dreams and then he died, and how could you go on living after that without that person? If Anne goes, I want to go, that's how strongly I feel."
DeGeneres's feelings are equally clear on the subject of a baby, something she and Heche have discussed lately. "For a long time, I wanted a baby," says DeGeneres, who is godmother to Kathy Najimy's 10-month-old daughter, Samia. "But right now, I'm too selfish. I just can't." Heche, on the other hand, has told DeGeneres she wants to be the one to bear their child. "Yeah, Anne usually gets what she wants," DeGeneres says with a laugh, "but what you don't know is that I'm the boss of this relationship."
Not that everything in her life is smooth sailing. She moved last year from Laurel Canyon to a $3 million home in Beverly Hills after her address was published on the Internet and people starting coming to her house. "I needed to find some place more private and a lot more secure." She no longer works out in a public gym in Brentwood, she hides at home from maintenance workers, and she even removes photographs of herself when repairmen are expected. "It's hard to be that paranoid," she says resignedly. "You can only hide so much."
She is also still coming to terms with the reaction of her family, especially her divorced parents, about her coming out. Her mother, Betty DeGeneres, who lives in Los Angeles, has been openly supportive, even making a yearlong commitment to serve as a national spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign's National Coming Out Project. Her father, Elliott, an insurance salesman who lives outside San Diego, remains another matter. "To this day, my dad comes to the show every Friday, but he still doesn't say, 'You're so funny or good,'" she says ruefully. "He'll say a line is funny or someone else is funny, but he never compliments me, so you can imagine him dealing with my being gay."
She seems intent to move on with her life and eager for others, particularly ABC, to let her go forward too. Eisner, she notes, didn't call her after her Emmy win. "But I know he's a busy guy," she cracks, "and as soon as he's done calling Gillian Anderson and offering her a deal, he'll probably send me a box of crackers or some bath oils." She has a movie coming out next year, "Goodbye Lover," in which she plays a cynical homicide detective. And while she has doubts about a full-fledged film career -- "I really like the schedule of TV" -- she is eager to have people see her outside of Ellen.
"Right now, the jury is still out on my career," says DeGeneres. "Let's see if I can accomplish what I want to accomplish, which is getting over stereotypes." She turns suddenly wistful. "I still think in 30 years we'll be dealing with homophobia, and it would be nice to have Ellen on Nick at Nite along with Mary Tyler Moore, someone that [gay] kids could identify with. I have a tendency to diminish what I do for a living, but I also know I'm going to leave here, and I won't be somebody who just had a sitcom but someone who helped change people's minds."
(Reprinted without permission)