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When I started doing that little girl in my act, I discovered something interesting—that lots of girls felt like that, whether they were white girls with straight black hair, or straight blond hair, or curly hair. It didn’t matter. Everyone wants something they don’t have.

“I am an artist. Art has no color and no sex.”

—Whoopi Goldberg

I had a life-changing experience on a trip to Amsterdam that I wanted to share on stage, but I couldn’t figure out the best character to tell the story. It was about the Anne Frank House, and traveling on an airplane, and the crazy stewardesses that I’d had. So I decided to be a junkie and have that person tell the story—because who’s the last person you’d ever expect to have that kind of an experience?

It’s all about trying to convey bits and pieces of information that I’ve discovered in the world in an interesting way. Whether it’s the little girl, or the junkie, or the surfer chick who ends up giving herself an abortion because no one will talk to her about what’s happened to her, I’ve kept doing it.

For me, this is an evolutionary process that I’ve been building from the age of five or six. I’d hear adults say things that I thought were interesting or fun, and they laughed a lot—mostly at themselves.

And that’s how it started. I wanted to be in that conversation.

“We’re here for a reason. I believe a bit of the reason

is to throw little torches out to lead people through the dark.”

—Whoopi Goldberg

Chapter 47

Against the Odds

From my dad’s first foray into TV in the early Fifties, with the Four Star Revue variety show, he and Mother got red-carpet dressed and attended the Emmy Awards every year. Dad had won a few of the coveted statues himself, and his production company produced many winning shows—Make Room for Daddy, Dick Van Dyke, Gomer Pyle, Andy Griffith, The Real McCoys and Mod Squad. So he was an active and upstanding member of the Academy.

But in 1986, when my brother Tony’s show The Golden Girls was nominated for Best Comedy Series and I was nominated for Best Dramatic Actress in a TV movie, Nobody’s Child, my parents decided to sit it out. The odds were against both Tony and me taking home Emmys, and they just couldn’t bear the thought of one of us winning and one of us losing.

So Mom and Dad made the decision to put on their pajamas, open a bottle of wine and, for the first time, watch the show at home.

The program had just begun when they got a call from their neighbor and pal Ted Mann. Ted owned the Mann Theatres, so he was one of the first in the neighborhood to have a satellite dish with an East Coast feed. He was already in the middle of the show, while my parents and everyone else on the West Coast were only seeing the start.

“Tony just won the Emmy!” Ted shouted into the phone.

Mom and Dad were so excited that they put their coats on over their PJs and ran over to Ted’s house to watch the rest of the show. They got there just in time to hear the nominees being read for my category—Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, Gena Rowlands, Mare Winningham . . . and their little girl. They could hardly breathe as Tom Selleck opened the envelope. And guess what—it was me.

My parents were bowled over and did what any ecstatic mother and father of two Emmy winners would do. They ran home, took off their pajamas, put on their tux and gown and drove to the party.

Brother and sister winners. I said in my acceptance speech: “Someone’s going to have to go to our parents’ house and pick them up off the floor.”

Chapter 48

Legends of Comedy

Well into their seventies, Dad and two of his best pals, Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, teamed up to form a new act called The Legends of Comedy. Exactly what the title implied, the show was a celebration of the careers of three men doing what they did best—entertaining people. And now for the first time they were doing it on the same bill. I went to see the show in Atlantic City and sat in the audience more spellbound than I would have thought. I had seen them all perform countless