I knew Whoopi Goldberg and she’s not nearly as dumb as Reason’s Damon Root implies she is – or that her recent appearance on The View “fearing” the return of slavery under a John McCain Supreme Court might indicate. In fact, she’s quite bright and very well read. Back in the eighties, I worked with her on a screenplay and spent time at her Malibu house (on a private cove beach, inaccessible to the public – natch). That house was piled high with books on all subjects, many of them political, including stacks of dog-eared paperbacks in her bathroom. So I’d bet my house she had a pretty good idea that “slavery was already illegal before the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment,” per Spooner and Douglass, as Root writes.
No, Whoopi is just a fake – quite willing to say and do anything she wants to make a point or, even more, for her own self-aggrandizement. Her attendant disrespect for John McCain – who on other occasions might even lay down his life for her – is contemptible. But it’s typical of her class in Hollywood where extreme narcissism outweighs any sense of reality or decency.
Back when I was working with Whoopi, I found her behavior in equal parts charming and egotistical. (No longer, of course) That was during the Reagan-Gorbachev summit. I was commissioned by Universal Studios to write a script for Whoopi in which she would play a member of the White House press corps. The studio sent me to DC for research where I spent time drinking bourbon and branch with Marlin Fitzwater and flying on the “zoo plane” with, of all people, Brit Hume, whom I then disliked because he was the sole member of the press corps I met who actually seemed to like Reagan (times change, no?). Anyway, the movie was never made. I guess the studio finally never believed Whoopi as a member of White House press corps in those days. Too silly. Nowadays, she is the press corps – or a leader of it, in her own way. So it goes.
[SELF-PROMOTION ALERT: You can read more of this in my memoir BLACKLISTING MYSELF, published by Encounter in January.]
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