One of the forces that helped propel Donald Trump to the White House was the belief, shared by many of his supporters, that America is run by a Washington elite that is promoted by spoilt Hollywood liberals. For those who hold to that viewpoint, the sight of President Obama awarding Medals of Freedom last week to a starry cast of A-list celebrities must have seemed like a full-blown invasion of their safe space.
Not only did the president pay tribute to such unreconstructed pinkos as Tom Hanks, Robert De Niro and Bruce Springsteen, he also made a moving speech celebrating the courage of the comedian Ellen DeGeneres that really should have come with a trigger warning for social conservatives.
It was Obama at his finest: full of emotional power, oratorical grace and leavening wit. At one stage, he joked about choking up. And with good cause, because he described a personal struggle that was so critical you had to remind yourself that he was talking about a daytime talkshow host.
But DeGeneres is not just any daytime talkshow host in the US. It’s not only that she’s hugely successful – she is said to earn $75m a year, and has more than 63m Twitter followers, which is roughly the size of the UK’s population. Of course, those numbers are impressive. But Obama wasn’t waxing tearful about her ratings. No, what really sets her apart from all the other famous talkshow hosts who clog up American TV is that she played America’s first prime-time TV character to come out as gay and was, almost simultaneously, America’s first primetime TV star to come out as gay.
In April 1997, her eponymous sitcom Ellen featured an episode in which DeGeneres’s character, Ellen Morgan, came out to her therapist, played by Oprah Winfrey. And then, just to maintain the postmodern sense of fictional leakage, Degeneres herself came out on Oprah’s show.
DeGeneres apparently decided to go public after dreaming of a caged bird that found there was space enough between the bars to get out. “Jesus Christ,” she said, “do I have to have it spelled out?” It was a decision that created huge news. Behind the scenes, there was a great deal of anxious debate. Ellen’s network ABC was owned by Disney, whose then CEO, Michael Eisner, was resistant. Although the character wore chinos and flannel shirts and steered well clear of men, Eisner clearly felt that middle America’s gaydar was not sufficiently developed to prepare it for the shocking revelation that Ellen was a lesbian.
But DeGeneres was determined, history was made and pink America celebrated with “coming out” parties. At first, everything seemed OK. The world did not explode. The tele-evangelist Jerry Falwell called DeGeneres Ellen DeGenerate, but then, as Christopher Hitchens once put it, he was so full of crap that if he had an enema you’d be able to bury him in a matchbox.
Then advertisers started pulling out, ABC cut back on promotion, ratings fell and the following year the show was cancelled. For the next three years, DeGeneres’s career was stuck in reverse. She became the butt of jokes on TV and a laughing stock in the media. She was, she later said, “really, really depressed”. And then her girlfriend, the actress Anne Heche, left her and went off to the Californian desert, where she was found in her underwear, talking about extraterrestrials.
What she had intended to be a personal and professional liberation had left her afraid to go out in public and unemployed. Life outside the gilded cage suddenly looked grimly imprisoning.
What saved her from drowning in oblivion was an optimistic fish whose motto was “just keep swimming”. She landed the voice part of the determined but forgetful mother fish Dory, in the animated film Finding Nemo. She also hosted the 2001 Emmys, delayed after 9/11, telling the audience: “I think it’s important for us to be here because they can’t take away our creativity, our striving for excellence, our joy – only network executives can do that”, before going on to ask the rhetorical question: “What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?”
There was also a short-lived sitcom, The Ellen Show, before she found her feet on a talkshow, The Ellen Degeneres Show.
Plenty of celebrities get a bite at a talkshow, but usually the conversation doesn’t last very long. When DeGeneres started in 2003, her rival start-up talkshow was hosted by Sharon Osbourne and was deemed to be doing better. But DeGeneres knuckled down and toured the country, reassuring nervous affiliate stations that she did not have a “gay agenda”.
“It was the hardest show we’ve ever had to launch in the history of our company,” said DeGeneres’s boss, Hilary McLoughlin, then president of the Warner Bros subsidiary Telepictures.
While late-night TV in America is the natural home for right-on liberals, daytime television is not the place to indulge in subversion. Its audience profile has a substantial overlap with Trump voters. DeGeneres was interested in alienating them. “I think it’s important to recognise that mine is not a political show,” she said. “I’m aware of what… people are comfortable hearing about and knowing about. And I respect that. I’ve learned my lesson.”
And sure enough, there is nothing to frighten the horses and even less to concern the celebrities who appear on the show. DeGeneres doesn’t do awkward questions. For all her quirkiness, she makes Alan Titchmarsh look like Jeremy Paxman. The show is a safe haven for anyone trailing bad publicity. Indeed, such is its clean image that she has faced down a boycott campaign from the anti-gay group One Million Moms and even regained advertisers such as JC Penney, which abandoned her after she came out.
Obama spoke of DeGeneres’s ability to “bind” people together and what was forgotten by fearful advertisers and affiliates is that the gay comedian knew her audience. She did not come from some bohemian quarter of New York. She was born and raised in Metairie, Louisiana, the child of Christian Scientist parents, one a speech therapist, the other an insurance agent.
Growing up, if she was ill or injured, her father would pray for her rather than seek or administer treatment. She says her comedy was born of appreciating the absurdity of her situation. But her life took a darker turn when her parents divorced, her mother remarried, got breast cancer and moved with DeGeneres and her new husband to Atlanta, Texas, where the stepfather began molesting the teenager. As she later recalled: “I was trying to help my mother but he was abusing me, so it was a terrible time in my life… But I think it’s what empowers me to speak out for women who stay silent.”
She dropped out of the University of New Orleans after one term, took a series of a menial jobs and turned to standup. She started by performing at friends’ parties, doing a comic nerdy turn. Then she graduated to clubs and, after winning a talent competition, she was named, a little hyperbolically, the funniest person in America.
In 1986, she landed an appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. It was probably her religious upbringing that inspired her routine, about being on the phone to God. Carson was an instant fan, inviting to stay on for an on-screen chat after her set, which made her, incredibly, the first female comedian he interviewed. Thereafter, it was a steadily rapid climb upwards until the moment she came out. “It’s easy to forget now,” said Obama, “… just how much courage was required for Ellen to come out on the most public of stages almost 20 years ago and just how important it was not just for the LGBT community, but for all of us.”
He spoke eloquently of the social progress made in that time and DeGeneres’s not inconsequential part in hastening it along. We live now, as he noted, in an era of gay marriage and DeGeneres herself married her girlfriend, the actress Portia de Rossi, in 2008. It’s hard to imagine Obama’s successor ever speaking with such compassion, sensitivity and wisdom; DeGeneres was not alone in welling up as he placed the ribbon holding the Medal of Freedom over her shoulders.
But as DeGeneres knows from experience, progress is not a straight road. Sometimes it takes real commitment, as Obama said, to push in the direction of justice. DeGeneres has that. And a sense of humour too. Both will be required in the coming years.
THE DEGENERES FILE
Born 26 January 1958 in Metairie, Louisiana, the daughter of Betty, a speech therapist, and Elliott, an insurance agent. She has a brother who is a musician.
Best of times Last week must have scored pretty highly on the lifetime achievement meter. And the last decade, which includes her marriage, has been one long success story.
Worst of times Being molested as a teenager by her stepfather while her mother had breast cancer was undoubtedly her lowest point, but the three years in the wilderness following her decision to come out on TV was also a very bleak period.
What she says “But when it really came down to it, you don’t hear straight people saying, ‘Nobody needs to know whether I’m straight or not.’ The only reason you don’t tell people is because you are ashamed of it. Shame stifles you, whether it’s your sexuality or something else.”
What others say “There are comedians who people laugh at but don’t like. That’s not Ellen. When you see her, you like her and you want to laugh” Jay Leno.
