Official Book Club Selection

by Kathy Griffin

  We were always naked in class, too. We did these exercises where you’d have to enact your most private moment onstage. You might get somebody popping their zits, but mostly every guy pretended to jerk off, and for girls, it was stripping down and taking a fake shower.

  One of my teachers was Sally Kirkland, who had been in The Sting, and would later get an Oscar nomination for a movie called Anna. She was awesome, because not only was she a very good acting teacher, but she would casually tell us about every famous guy she slept with. She talked all the time in class how she had met, you know what I mean by “met,” De Niro, Pacino, all the hot Method guys. But the amazing thing is, she’d get them to come speak at the school! Pacino came in right after he’d made Cruising. Perhaps to apologize to the gay community. Strasberg would come to the Institute, too. We called him Yoda (his looks had a little something to do with it.)

  The Institute was located in Hollywood, and because I didn’t have a car, I had to take the bus from our place in Santa Monica, which took forever, and categorically sucked. I would jump on the number four bus bright and early in the morning in my unflattering Danskin spandex outfit, and then stay at Strasberg all day till the last class ended at 11 p.m., then catch the number four at 11:22 p.m. to Santa Monica and 4th, and walk eight blocks home. That bus was a funky cross-section of LA personalities, too. Everybody from trannies to drooling kids to surfer dudes to weird guys hitting on you to the occasional nice person. You got a little bit of everything on the number four. As Denise Richards would say, it’s complicated.

  Between dedication to acting classes and the transient nature of Los Angeles, it was hard for me to make and keep friends during this period. I’d be really close to somebody for a year, and then they’d move away. One girl I was friends with got married, became addicted to cocaine, and just seemed to vanish. Another girl in acting classes with me also got married, but she became born again, decided she didn’t like show business, and moved. I was used to a close neighborhood, like back in Oak Park, and the spread-out quality of Los Angeles was a hard lesson in acclimation those first years.

  Me in my first crib. Where was MTV?

  I was also pretty lost during that period when it came to guys. I had sex for the first time at nineteen. Okay, I know I waited a good long while, but I’ve been making up for lost time ever since. I became pretty promiscuous, and not with a whole lot of winners, because as I’ve always said, my vices are junk food and bad men. I screwed a million really gross, sleazy guys. Is a million a lot? I’m surprised I was never killed. I remember being at Carl’s Jr. at La Brea and Santa Monica in Hollywood late one night, meeting some motorcycle gang member, and just climbing on his bike and leaving with him. I never drank, but I’d go to nightclubs and bars all the time to go dancing, then just go home with a guy and think nothing of it.

  One time, a girlfriend and I were in a club—I was probably sporting my mind-blowingly sexy Madonna-inspired crinoline-over-tights look—and she pointed to a pair of guys in the corner. “See those two over there?” she said. “They have matching 280-Zs!” I was like, “No fucking way!”

  They were busboys. And we fucked them. That’s how low the bar was. But remember, I never wanted to get married or anything. It’s not like I put a lot of thought into where these magical interludes might go. I wasn’t exactly looking for love.

  Here was my problem: My type was pretty much any guy who said “hi” to me. That was my type. It’s important to have a type. “Creepy” was another one of my types. This one guy Roland was so weird that during sex his voice altered—as if he were a fucking alien—and he started talking like a baby in a bizarre high-pitched voice. He’d start screaming shit like, “I just want to fuck my baby! I’m your baby! Will you be my baby? Baby? Baby?” For one thing, he couldn’t decide whether he was the baby or the daddy. Make up your mind, freak. I had to force myself out from under him and flee the apartment undressed, clutching my clothes.

  Point of interest: Mr. Baby, or Mr. Daddy, whatever he considered himself, was a donut fryer. I’ll be honest, I’ve probably fucked five donut fryers overall. I love donuts. It’s my happy place. So this was clearly the action-packed sequel to my after-school eating disorder—The Perfect Storm if you will—when having no boundaries about food meets Roland the donut-shop fryer giving you free bear claws at three in the morning. I didn’t wait to get to his apartment, either. I banged him in the back of the donut shop. He waited till he had me in his apartment, though, to unleash his disturbing goo-goo-gah-gah blathering. Not great.

  I once told a therapist the following story from my childhood. My older brothers Kenny, who you now know went on to be quite deranged, and Gary thought it would be fun to take turns holding each other outside the upstairs bedroom window upside down by their ankles. It became a tradition, and it happened with my brother John, too. I’m not kidding. We called it being “dangled.” I was always whining, “When am I gonna get dangled? This is ridiculous! Just cause I’m a GIRL I can’t get dangled?”

  So one day my brother John says, “I’ll dangle ya.” Yes!

  We opened the window, I climbed out, and my brother got me by the ankles. I’ll never forget the feeling of being upside down, bouncing against the stucco wall, and giggling. I was having the best time. He’d say, “I’m gonna drop ya!” and I’d yell, “Don’t!” Over and over, that was how it would go.

  Now imagine that you’re walking down a back alley, looking up, and you see a kid holding another kid upside down by the ankles, outside a second-story window. If YouTube had existed back then, my parents probably would have lost custody of us. Well, a neighbor finally caught us. He ran to tell our mother, who then bolted upstairs in her muumuu and screamed, “What the CHRIST are you GAHDAMN kids doing?” John freaked out enough that he let go of one ankle, and I’m just like, “Johnny, cut it out!” But he pulled me up instantly and everything was fine, except for our being punished, of course. Actually, I think John got punished, not me, which is a shame because he was a pretty darned good dangler. I think he had to spend an hour in the garage. Or, as my mom calls it when I asked her about it recently, “Oh, we got after him. We gave him heck.” I feel kinda bad that he got “heck” and all. John, I love you and I forgive you. You’re not a damned good dangler. You’re the best dangler I’ve ever had.

  So when I told that little nugget of childhood roughhousing to this therapist, she said, “Well, don’t you think that’s kind of what you do with the men in your life? You let them dangle you out a window and you don’t really know it’s dangerous?”

  I’d never made the connection. “So dangling was a bad idea, huh?” I said.

  I always thought of it as the equivalent of parents throwing their kids up really high and catching them in their arms. But there was a big difference. It’s not like I was running to Mom and saying, “Will you get John or Gary to dangle me?” So I knew it probably wasn’t right. But that was the problem. I liked being dangled.

  Immaturity and low self-esteem also played a part in my less than stellar relationships with men back then. But I wonder if my attitude toward sex and men also had something to do with how career-driven I was. Was I unconsciously choosing guys who I knew would end up being only interested in silly affairs that would never lead to anything permanent because I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my career track? Like my calculated decision never to touch a drop of drink or get mixed up in drugs, I might have intuited that marriage was another impediment, and that a crappy one-nighter wouldn’t deter me from my true love: performing. And since a guy was going to come second, anyway, maybe that led me to men who were clearly never going to be number ones in anybody’s book.

  It would take me a while, however, to realize that nice guys were better than bad boys. There I was in a crazy situation with a baby-talking donut fryer, and not ever saying to myself, “Um, maybe things aren’t working out so well for me. Maybe I could find someone better.”

  Instead it was, “Okay, back to acting clas
s tomorrow!”

  So on the one hand, while I wasn’t too concerned about who I slept with back then, I was pretty consumed with my weight and my continued binge eating. Since childhood, I had developed a rigorous cycle of bingeing and starving, with an erratic schedule of compulsive over-exercising on top of that to really fuck me up. After a bender of a toxic combination of junk foods, I’d feel so shitty the next day that I could barely function: nauseated, unable to fit in pants I’d just worn yesterday, consumed with self-loathing, and unwilling even to look at food until evening. That would then put me on a cycle of having my first meal of the day at 6 p.m., and my last meal at probably 3 a.m. Really healthy, Kath, when you have to get up for your temp job in El Segundo at 7:30 a.m.

  I could never barf, by the way, although God knows I desperately wanted to be bulimic. One time I ate a whole pie—not too much pie, cause “too much” implies there’s some left, it was an entire fucking pie—and I went to the bathroom I shared with my parents in our little Santa Monica apartment and tried sticking my finger down my throat like I’d seen drunk girls do after a crazy night at the bar. I had no girlfriends with me to hold my hair back, though. Well, it was just too disgusting. I couldn’t do it. I can honestly say, with complete disappointment, that I have never purged in my life, because I have what I call a barfing disorder. Every time I puke, even when I’m sick with the flu or from food poisoning, I think I’m going to die. Weird, I know. No disrespect to you, Mary Kate. Rock on.

  “Do you have a to-go box?”

  But it’s certainly not as if starving was a sane alternative. After a bad binge, I might do crazy things I’d read about in so-called women’s magazines, like spend all day drinking only water with five lemons squeezed into it. Everything’s going to be okay now! I’d think, and then of course I’d be starving the next day. The problem is, when all you’ve allowed yourself are clear soups or elixirs as a corrective, it’s not like the craving for pie goes away. My eating habits were so shitty that even when I could suspend the cycle and eat okay for a week, I’d never develop a craving for healthy food. I remember once when I realized the healthiest thing I’d had all week was a pint of Häagen-Dazs, because in my mind, it was part of the dairy food group.

  Diet pills never worked, either. They made me lose my appetite for maybe two hours. But I did try speed for three weeks! (I blame Mom, from her wild-eyed amphetamine freak days whilst I was in utero.) And may I say, you don’t know how proud I am to have this revelation in a genuine celebrity tell-all memoir. Let the bidding war begin between Tyra, Oprah, and Maury (just to get the price up) for the Kathy Griffin exclusive. I promise to sob on air. I’m crying right now.

  A-a-a-nyway, what happened was, a guy I was dating named Phil—okay, I just banged him twice—got a bag of “black beauties” and “speckled eggs” for $40. I don’t even know if anybody makes those anymore. I’m pretty sure people jump straight to crystal meth now. Anyway, my trial period with speed didn’t work, either. They were basically jacked-up diet pills, and all they did was make me jumpy and irritable for a day, followed by me being three times as hungry afterward. I ended up going to a doctor, who gave it to me straight, albeit in the context of me asking, “Um, I have a … friend … who’s, um, having trouble with her weight, and might take ‘black beauties’ and ‘speckled eggs.’ What would the health implications be?”

  She calmly replied, “Tell your …friend … the reason diet pills and amphetamines don’t work is because all they do is put off your hunger. Your body just stores your fat for a day, and then you wake up the next day twice as hungry. You’ll never be able to keep up with the speed.”

  All right, all right, so much for speed. It was back to plan B. As I couldn’t afford Bally’s Total Fitness and I had a desperate need to over-exercise, I realized I was in luck because the YWCA was much cheaper. Do you remember a little phenom called step aerobics? If you do, then you know how crazy it was to take two ninety-minute classes in a row. It’s incredible that I didn’t die from a blunt injury to the back of my head from slipping on my own pool of sweat.

  I was much clearer-headed when it came to what was working for me in my life, and that was my career. After two years of plugging away at acting classes, it was pretty obvious that I was never going to be a serious thespian. I knew that the Groundlings were my calling, so I started taking classes there as I was finishing up at Strasberg.

  I could immediately tell that what I was learning at the Groundlings would undo everything I learned at Strasberg. For one thing, at the Groundlings I was never naked. Bra, maybe. But not naked. The big difference, though, was that at Strasberg it was about reaching deep down, and at the Groundlings, it was about whatever got a laugh, and if that meant superficial characters, so be it. Fine by me.

  I started in the basic class, which is just improvisational training. But I was going to the main company’s shows all the time to soak it all in, and because the instructors were also cast members, I could see what they were teaching in action. These people were stars in my eyes. The hot names in the group back then were Laraine Newman, from the original cast of Saturday Night Live; Paul Reubens, who had just left, but who’d become the biggest star in LA since taking his incredible Pee Wee Herman show to the Roxy on Sunset; Cassandra Peterson, who was Elvira, Mistress of the Dark; and Edie McClurg, who had gone on to do a lot of John Hughes movies. But once I was familiar with all the members, I’d go to something like a Cheech and Chong movie and recognize Groundlings people in small roles, and get excited about what lay in store, possibly for myself. So being at the Groundlings, I just wanted to hang out as often as I could and get backstage to mingle with the actual troupe members.

  When you reach the intermediate class, you start to develop characters. Some people would do composites of types, maybe by imagining, “What if Abraham Lincoln was a punk rocker who worked at the Mall of America?” Or “What if the Heisman Trophy winner was ten years old and had a facial tic?” Or today, it might be, “What if one of those Twilight freaks could actually form a sentence at an awards show and didn’t have gray skin?” I was better at playing characters that were simply based on people I knew. So my first characters were Mom and Dad. I worked as a bank teller at the time, so when the exercise was, “Play someone you know, but as a different gender,” I’d think of all the characteristics unique to my dad—sarcastic wit, eye-rolling, and strategic swearing—make him a woman, and put her in a bank. My sister Joyce was another character, a negative preacher of doom and gloom who also loves the Ronettes.

  Moving up at the Groundlings was about getting through the levels of classes, and then hopefully making it into the performing groups. There’s the Friday and Saturday group featuring the main players, and the Sunday show they’d call the B company, or farm team. Getting into the Sunday group is one thing, but you needed to get voted into the Friday-Saturday gang. It’s a really touchy line they walk with that policy, because it allows for criteria other than pure talent (i.e., jealousy) to determine who gets in. If you were a main company player, maybe you’d think a really funny farm-team guy or gal would steal your spot. The trick, therefore, was trying to dazzle the Friday-Saturday people, but not threaten them. Sometimes you’d tell them, “If you vote for me, I’ll write scenes for you.” You’d try anything you could. But ultimately if you were the one getting the most applause, the biggest laughs, they couldn’t deny you. That quality trumped everything.

  This is from the Groundlings days. That’s Mindy Sterling of Austin Powers fame on the right. And apparently I’m fighting the power. (Photo: David Siegle/Courtesy of the Groundlings Theater and School)

  Well, once I got into the Sunday group, I was parked there a long time, as in two years. The normal run in the Sunday B company is six months to a year before moving on to the Friday-Saturday group. But my problem at the Groundlings was I wasn’t a chameleon. I was always a variation of myself. The people from my peer group who had a kind of unstoppable popularity and moved quickly to the next co
mpany were Jon Lovitz and Mindy Sterling, actors who were great at coming up with a million different faces and voices. Jon originated the liar guy and his Master Thespian bit—characters he made nationally famous on Saturday Night Live—back at the Groundlings. Mindy, meanwhile, who went on to play Dr. Evil’s fraulein in the Austin Powers movies, had this great rubbery face and pliable voice that she could adapt to any wacky part. Me, I was stuck with this face—okay, former face—and one inescapable voice.

  My two strongest characters at the Groundlings then were what I do now in my stand-up act: some version of myself, or my mom. You did well at the Groundlings if you were the biggest and the broadest. But I would make the stupid mistake of writing a skit for three characters, and I kept casting myself as myself—because usually it was about something that had happened to me—and then I’d ask Julia Sweeney or Jon Lovitz to play the other larger-than-life, crazy characters I couldn’t do. I gave myself the straight person in my own skits. That wasn’t the way to get noticed. I didn’t know it then, of course, but that whole time what I was doing, being myself, was more appropriate for stand-up.

  So while I didn’t exactly help myself gain access to the Friday-Saturday company, it also didn’t help that I had a series of B-company directors who just didn’t think I was funny. And if a director doesn’t think you’re funny, you’re not in the show as much, and then how are you going to prove to the main company that you’re worthy of admission? If you’ve watched Saturday Night Live over the years, it’s the same thing with that show’s reigning monarch, Lorne Michaels. If he doesn’t like someone, they’re just not in the show, or they’re only doing small parts.

  In my case, it really felt like I was part of a blackballed clique. I was friends with a guy named George McGrath, who could be a diva, but I thought he was really funny. Well, this one director hated him. And because I was always trying to do sketches with George, you could say I backed the wrong horse. (George would go on to win an Emmy co-writing Pee Wee’s Playhouse, incidentally, so if anyone deserved to say “Suck it” before me on an Emmy telecast, it was George.)