The Sunday Story: The love that shaped Whoopi Goldberg

You're listening to the Sunday story. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Whoopi Goldberg lives her life loudly and unapologetically from the color purple....

I'm poor, black, I may even be ugly, but dear God, I'm here, I'm here.

To the view.

This is the view with Whoopi. It all starts now.

She's a familiar face in entertainment, her work has been widely acclaimed. She's received all the top awards, winning Hollywood's equivalent to the Triple Crown and Egot, claiming an Emmy, a Grammy, a Tony and an Oscar.

And the Oscar goes to.

Whoopi Goldberg.

Beyond movies and TV, Whoopi has also worked with UNICEF as an advocate for children's health globally, and founded a medical marijuana company centered on women's well-being. Rounding out her Renaissance woman characteristics, she's also an author. She's published children's stories and written about her own path, including her 1997 book entitled Book. But up until now, she hadn't shared the details of what her family life was like when she was growing up. In Whoopi's new memoir Bits and Pieces, we get to know her mother, Emma Johnson, and her brother, Clyde Johnson.

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Welcome back to the Sunday story. I'm joined now by Whoopi Goldberg from our New York studios. Whoopi, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I'm so honored to have you here. I just got to get that out the way. And I really, this book touched me so much, so I'm so glad to talk to you about it.

Thank you, I.

I've had friends call me I, you can definitely call me I.

Cool, cool, love it.

So you've written memoirs before, books about your own life, and typically, performers focus kind of on themselves. Why did you want to tell your story through the lens of your relationships with your mother and brother this time around?

Well, you know, I just thought I have to figure out a way to hold on to what I remember. Because for me, having lost both of them now, they were the people who remembered. And I was starting to lose that ability, and I wasn't losing my ability to remember them. But just it felt like I couldn't remember dates of things or when things happened, it just was weird.

Do you look at this book now as a holder of these memories for you now, like, this is the holder now that your mother and brother are no longer here physically.

No, this book for me is an homage, it's an homage to the two of them because I would not be who I am without them. I always understood that I would have to work hard, you know, because I'm just I'm a little bit different, I'm a little bit out there.

Talk to me about that because I feel like in reading this book, I did get a better understanding of, you know, the icon that you are. Because part of when I think of Whoopi Goldberg is that, first of all, there's no one else like you in Hollywood. Like you have been yourself, you have been a Black woman, you have been a woman with your natural hair.

Listen, I was insanely lucky. I was really lucky that I was my mother's child because I was the correct child for her to have. Both my brother and I. You know, we were just odd, we liked different stuff, we were open to many, many things.

And that was a different type of parenting style, because so much of parenting can be about control, right? She really gave you a freedom that it seems like a lot of people didn't have, especially at that point.

Well, I think my mother figured out early on that, you know, we don't have our children forever. So we have to make them really adaptable to the world they're in and teach them how to be themselves. Because you're not going to always be there for them. I don't know if all parents can do this, but my mom was the person who said, You have to know how to be in the world because I'm not going to always be here.

One way that you always stood out was your attitude towards beauty standards. And that comes up a lot in Hollywood, because you know, you look and there's a certain standard. Or this is when you're supposed to be thin, you're supposed to be this or that. And there's a section in your book that I'd like you to read, where you heard your mother talking about your looks.

Let's see, let's see, let's see.

Okay.

One afternoon, my mother was talking to a group of women. I was nearby, and I heard one of the ladies say, You know, Karen's no beauty. She's going to have to find a job and work. I think it probably hurt my mother more than it hurt me because she grew up not being the shiniest bulb on the chandelier. She looked just like me.

And that stood out to me. As a mother, I'm a mother myself, and I would have been, like, my baby, beautiful.

And your baby is beautiful, she is beautiful.

But your mother said something that I think is so important, she said. She looks like herself.

Yeah.

And like so much of the time we hear from, you know, in memoirs or people talking about their mothers. They'll say that my mother pressured me to be thin and have straight hair and this and that. But it seems like your mother did the opposite, and she let you define your own standard of.

Beauty Well, yeah, I mean, let's face it, you know, the standard of beauty when I was a kid didn't include me. So, you know, I knew I was never going to live up to anybody's standard of beauty except my own. And I've never had any trouble, you know?

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Welcome back to the Sunday Story. I'm speaking with the renowned Whoopi Goldberg about her memoir Bits and Pieces, where she shares stories about her mother and brother. Talk to me about your brother, Clyde, who was also your protector. And then there's a very, you know not to give too much away. But after his passing away, you talk about all these women that showed up at all his memorials.

We had like four different services for him because my brother loved to travel. So when he passed, I did a memorial in Berkeley, I did a memorial in L..A. I did a memorial in New York, and then I did a memorial. Just in general. When I tell you that two or three women per memorial, okay, per memorial, would come up and say, Oh, I don't know if you know. Clyde and I, we were going to move in together and it's like, Oh, cool, cool, okay. And then, you know? 12 minutes later, here's another one saying, Oh, I don't know if you knew, but Clyde and I were together.

Each other.

I'm telling you, he was not only was he remarkable, he's a really great man, you know, he's the standard of man that you want. You want somebody who can hear you, you want somebody who has a sense of humor, who is not hung up on what you're not. And my brother, I realized as we went through all these ladies because they were all different, all different colors, all different sizes, all different types. And they all loved him, and he loved each and every one of them.

Well, in the book, you give advice to readers about how to deal with grief, and I think it is so important. You know, you point out that if someone hasn't lost their mother, you know, I haven't lost my mother. You know, they're not going to know how to talk to you about that. But you also give advice, and I noticed that the advice that you were giving was some of it, it was your mother's advice. Yes, when you talked about how, you know if you're going to have a day and it's going to be rough, pull down the shades, fall out on the chair, make it really dramatic.

Well, I don't know if I've become like my mother, but I am adjacent, you know what I mean, because I am still I'm me. But her thought patterns make sense to me, like she was a wonderful head start teacher. And one of the things that was fun for me over the years was to watch her in class. Because my mother always wanted children to feel like there was no question they could not ask, and so sometimes children don't understand things like death.

You were very frank in this book, which a lot of people, I think it's very difficult to do about. How, as a mother yourself, your daughter had some anger with you because you had to work a lot, you weren't always there physically because you were working to support her. I wondered, did writing this book the homage to your mother in particular? did it make you think about your motherhood journey in a different way?

Me and my kid talk about me and our relationship all the time. What I realized is that I had done to her the same thing, except in a different way. I chose to go to work because I was offered this amazing life on a silver platter. My mom had a nervous breakdown and ended up in the hospital for two years. And that's why I didn't see her when I realized that I had in a funny way.

I had to look that up.

And it must have the brush with it, she was adamant. It has to have the brush with it. I said, Okay. She said she wanted an Ermine coat and she wanted to be able to go around the world as often as she wanted to until she got tired.

That sounds so grand, though, that's so grand.

That's what she wanted, that's what she wanted. Because I think my mother, in her deepest soul, didn't realize that she, in fact, was a grand dame.

Well, I want to just end things out because you say such beautiful remarks at the end about grief. And there may be someone may have had this loss, and I guess, what would you say to them?

We mostly mourn our loss. It's a huge one, it's a huge one. It's the first person who gazed at you. This is my recommendation.

That's Whoopi Goldberg, The Icon, The Egot. All of that. Her new memoir is bits and pieces. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you, it was terrific talking to you.

That was Whoopi Goldberg. You can find her book Bits and Pieces wherever books are sold. This episode was produced by Hazel Feldstein and edited by Jenny Schmidt, Abby Wendell and Liana Simstrom. Our engineer was Gilly Moon, Emily Bogle is our visuals editor.

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