This erstwhile Georgian has been in the midst of her own storm — and searching for an umbrella.
The Butler Said It
In just a few short years, Brett Butler has taken Hollywood by storm. Her ABC sitcom “Grace Under Fire” finished the 1994-95 season as a number four overall, and her comedy performances are total sellouts. However, rumors floated off the set of “Grace” and into the tabloids that she was a temperamental prima donna — screaming and firing staffers at will. Meanwhile, she temporarily separated from her second husband, and constantly had to employ damage control as embarrassing incidents from her past floated to the surface.
Hollywood likes its southern belles to be more like Julia Roberts (who, ironically grew up near Butler, though a decade later): warm, fuzzy, quiescent — and adorable. Butler, by contrast, is emotional and loudly mistake-prone. She is also a blue-collar heroine who has paid dues all over the place and is not going to go down without a fight. Self-educated after high school, she is capable of quoting everyone from William Faulkner to John Larroquette, and she was obviously pleased that this interviewer gratefully accepted a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans’s exquisite record of working people during the Great Depression.
We met in her trailer on the lot in Burbank where she shoots “Grace.” One’s first impression is what a large woman Butler is — a meaty five foot seven. The second is her southernness. Her soft accent, however, doesn’t disguise the fact that Butler is, deep down, about as far from Newt and the Christian Right as she is from her hometown of Marietta, Georgia, today. No, Butler is definitely the student who skipped the pep rally for the winning football team so she could smoke in the girls’ restroom. She could be outrageous in our interview, but it was hard to say whether that was due to calculation or naïveté. For all her toughness, there’s a sweet side to the Butler persona that wants to be pinched and reminded that she’s a Hollywood star today.
Brett Butler on … BEING IN PENTHOUSE
Well, I guess it ends my career in women’s magazines. But women read Penthouse, too. I’m always annoyed that many men’s magazines have a more intellectual constituency and more far-reaching editorial positions than women’s magazines. Women’s magazines aren’t without sin. I was on the cover of one right next to the blurb SEX-911: EROTIC ACCIDENTS YOU WON’T BELIEVE. That was right next to my picture! I was thinking it was talking about something going wrong with the cucumber in the garden. And it was right under COMMON MISTAKES YOU MAKE WHILE GIVING YOURSELF A FACIAL.
‘In the tabloids, you are a new piece of meat until the next one comes along.’
Brett Butler on … HER SHOW
The producers of this show cleared out a space that made it possible for me to fight for dimensions to this character [Grace]. I don’t want the sitcom to be something like a lot of country music where if you hear the first verse, you think you know the next one. We’re trying to become something different. We’re trying to get darker darks and brighter brights. Hell, I sound like I’m pitching laundry detergent.
I get letters from Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, from lesbians in Winnipeg, from little kids in Tulsa. I did stand-up [comedy] on tour this past summer, and people kept coming up to me and saying, “I think you’re really funny, and this audience is not hip.” And I’d say, “Where are you from?” And they’d respond, “I’m from here.” Whatever else, “Grace” appeals to people who seem to believe they’re understanding something really funny and personal. This may sound pretentious, but I’d like our show to have the meaning and texture of “M*A*S*H” and “All in the Family,” with the nuclear explosion of Andy Griffith, who was the original TV parent.
Brett Butler on … BEING AN AUTHOR
Well, I don’t like to talk about it too much, because nobody wants to hear about the habits of a writer unless they’ve fucked a lot. I will tell you I’ve been working on it at full speed. I just turned in 200 pages of the first draft, which isn’t due until May 1996, and my editor tells me that it’s great to be so far ahead. When I was in New York a decade ago, I would stay up late, night after night, and write poems and essays. So I’ve really paid my dues in terms of writing. Writing for me now is very rewarding, though I’m sure it’s boring to hear about.
I’ve had some things happen in my life. Not just the tip-of-the-iceberg stuff everybody grabs hold of when you’re first famous — like, “Wow, she’s got a mouth and her husband beat her up, and she’s on a new sitcom. She’s that unforgettable yet compelling phenomenon in American life: an interesting broad with a past.” It’ll be a lot deeper than that stuff. Someone told me recently two guys who write unauthorized biographies of people said they would write one on me. I talked to my mother and told her it might be ugly. She said, “Screw ‘em.” I paused and thought, and joked that the worst thing they could say about me is that I used to fuck a lot for free. My mom replied, “See … what else can they say?” [Laughs] That’s it.
“I feel pretty good about my looks…. When I got divorced I had a boob removed, and so it’s nothing for me to add one now!”
Brett Butler on … THE PAST
I think people connect to this flawed, asymmetrical person I am. People grab a part of that in the show. People connect to me, the woman I am visually, emotionally, intellectually. It’s a broader definition of a good ol’ girl. Let me tell you a story. A gentleman came up to me after my show in Phoenix or someplace this summer and said, “I was just wondering if all the difficulties you’ve endured in your life have prepared you for the things they write about you in the tabloids.” A crowd gathered as I answered, “In the tabloids, you are a new piece of meat until the next one comes along. I guess I’m the tabloid princess now. But if I hold my head up, next time they lie about someone, maybe it will help that person. It’s not easy, but it will help someone else one day.”
The gentleman then happened to mention that he had one of his legs amputated some time ago, but he still didn’t think he had had it as bad as me. I was startled and said, “Excuse me, sir, but I’ve got both my legs, a swimming pool, a good life.” He said, “No, what I meant was, sometimes I can feel my leg, like it’s still there and not amputated. Maybe that’s like your past. Sometimes it hurts and other times it’s just fine.” That really connected to me and the people who had gathered around us. That guy gave me a great allegory. I feel like my past isn’t there anymore, even though I have phantom pains.
Brett Butler on … MEN AND WOMEN
I’ve never had an act that revolved around, “How come I have to have periods?” Or starting off with, “I can’t get my remote away from my boyfriend watching the football game, so …” I just never wanted to do comedy like that. Now I would occasionally say that men should have periods because they need to bleed on a regular basis, and that’s why they declare war … visceral stuff like that. I’ve been accused of cutting too much slack to the following thought, but I’ve always been empathetic to the load that men carry in society, that men should be stalwart and never cry.
Everything wrong in the world is not men’s fault. That’s why I’ve always been for the E.R.A., because I’ve thought how nice a place the world would be if men were not always holding the world up on their shoulders — if they were not scared all the time. Now, there is a part of me that wants to be taken care of in the conventional, sexist way. I’ve south to fight it, sexually, emotionally, and professionally. I just want to be a mensch, and it doesn’t come easily.
Brett Butler on … SECOND HUSBAND KEN ZEIGER
I don’t really like to talk about him, anymore than I like to talk about my sisters or private relationships. This August we were married eight years. We’ve known each other ten and a half years. We met at “Catch a Rising Star,” in New York. I was performing, and he happened to drop by because he was in a band with the bartender. I didn’t move up to New York to meet someone. As you know, I was married before, and I had had a pretty long and eventually incredible affair with a married man. But Kenny was just there in a way I never thought anybody would be there. We’re so bloody different. He’s laconic, loving, quiet, peaceable. We coexist in a way that I never thought possible. A lot of things I love about him are things I love about my mother — he is unconditionally supportive.
When we separated last year, I felt I had been drowning, and I’d be damned if I’d drown the two of us. Thank God I got to my senses before I lost the most important relationship I ever had. One time I called Kenny when he was in New York. I was working ridiculous hours. I was coming up with real ideas for the show that weren’t liked. I felt jerked around a lot. So I called Kenny and said, “I’m not being petulant, but there’s a part of me right now that would quit, list out house, and go back to New York and wait tables again. I’ll write bad poems and short stories.” Without skipping a beat, he said, “I’m with you.” That really took a load off. Then I realized I’m here because I want to be here.
I had problems feeling worthy of it [success]. Anybody who surpasses the economic and emotional accomplishments of their parents probably has some shit to deal with. You look around and ask plaintively, “Who will help me?” Nobody wrote a book on how to do this. So I took a deep breath and sat down and said, “Nobody showed me how to do comedy … how to walk out of a marriage that was going to kill me. I’ll get through this, too.” I’m one of those old souls, one of that kind that does not learn the easy way. I’m living proof of how hard the human skull is. Sure, I was embattled, but I always have been. And you know what? I figured out that I’m a good, interesting broad in spite of myself.
Brett Butler on … TABLOIDS
You know, Hugh Grant was on “The Tonight Show” after his thing [his arrest on lewd-conduct charges], and I wrote him and said something like, “I had the Mug-Shot Queen-of-the-Year title, and thank you for taking it away from me. Remember, every one of them would change places with you in a second, and remember, you wouldn’t trade places with them in hundreds of years. They are but a cyst on the ass of a beast called talent. Keep your chin up, old fellow.”
I guess I’m angry, but I know what it’s like to be the target of smarmy stuff. And after I wrote Hugh Grant that note, I realized I had made quite a lot of peace with this stuff. I still have to deal with my ex-husband appearing on tabloid shows and such. As a joke, one of our writers put a tabloid headline on his forehead: MY NIGHTMARE MARRIAGE TO BRETT BUTLER, A FOUL-MOUTHED, BEER-SWIGGING NAG WHO CLAIMS SHE SLEPT WITH 200 MEN! I said, how dare he [her ex-husband] diminish my sexuality that way. How dare he say I merely slept with 200 men. I fucked that many, and nobody had time for sleep.
A woman asked me a couple of years ago, “Do you ever wonder why they come after you and not Candice Bergen?” I answered, “Well, she’s beautifuI and attractive, and I’m not to the manner born.” It’s one of those phenomenon things. When I was in clubs, people would come up to me and say, “You’re great. You should have your own show.” Now I have it and … [pause]. It’s human nature — though, thankfully, not all human nature.
“Anybody who surpasses the economic … accomplishments of their parents probably has some shit to deal with.”
Brett Butler on … HER FAMILY
My family has always been different for its time in the Deep South. My mother told me that when she was 16, the good ladies from the Baptist Church nearby came to her house, and when they found out my grandmother was giving my mother’s old clothes to a “colored” church, they said, “We feel they’re so pretty. A white girl ought to have them.” My grandmother never set foot in another church unless one of her kids was getting married.
My grandfather contributed to the outspoken woman I am. I sent campaign money to [Senator George] McGovern when I was 14 years old, and this old, white, southern man told me, “I don’t care what you stand for as long as you have an opinion.”
I talk to my mother five times a week. She really had to suffer a lot, being an eccentric, Bohemian, southern woman at a time when that really wasn’t done. My mother has had a hard life. She got pregnant from a date rape when she was in college on a voice scholarship. She was the only divorced woman on the street for a long time. I watched her decry rampant racism. She didn’t even suffer the little things. When Lester Maddox was governor of Georgia and passing out ax handles, she picked up the paper and said to me, “But there’s Ralph McGill. There’s Gene Patterson [liberal former editors of The Atlanta Constitution].” She’s been amazingly supportive. She keeps saying, “Help other people.” I used to see her submerge herself into myself and my four sisters to the point where I wondered how much she had left.
My father was a batterer. He left my mother when I was a little girl, and I never saw him again after the age of four. I never heard from him, and he never sent us a dime. But I accept him, and I gratefully accept what I got genetically from him. I know I inherited his demons.
Brett Butler on … PERFORMING
It was an amazing feeling when I got onstage at the age of eight. I had never felt anything like that. I did some George Carlin that I hear my sister repeat. Everyone just looked at me with wide eyes. I knew it was funny. [My influences have been] Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. I’ve always connected to the comedy of minorities. Since I was a minority in Marietta, Georgia, it shouldn’t be too difficult to understand why.
Right after I moved to New York, I played a club there. I had been so thrilled to move to New York. All my life I had watched things in New York on TV. And here I was. And I was onstage, and somebody in the audience yelled out, “You’re stupid!” I started shaking, and my voice became plaintive and girl-like. I don’t know why. I yelled, “Fuck you! It’s really cold up here, and I came all the way from Georgia, and damn if I’ll put up with folks like you. You’re an asshole, and you probably never left your basement in the Bronx before, you pinheaded little shit!” And everybody started laughing along with this big baby onstage — even though you’re never supposed to reveal who you really are and what you’re thinking. I couldn’t stop myself: “I can’t hardly find a place to stay, and this is my first gig in two weeks. And what do you do? Cut the heads off fish?”
I guess you could say I’m an emotional person, and every once in a while, when things aren’t working, I feel like crying onstage, which I never really have done except that night.
Brett Butler on … TOPLESS BARS
I was the first woman to work some of them in Atlanta. They’re decent places, for the most part. First of all, we know why the audience is there, so let’s not kid each other about the moral high ground or one’s esoteric needs. I myself had a need for money and to hone my craft, and, more often than not, the give-and-take with the audience was good-natured.
Brett Butler on … HER EARLY CAREER
My first gig on “The Tonight Show” — Lord, that has to be one of the most extraordinary gigs anyone can have, especially someone bitten by the showbusiness bug. I just killed [excelled]. Meanwhile I was doing “Hollywood Squares,” and I did “The David Brenner Show.” But I went back to Georgia and New York then. I told my agent the last thing I wanted to do was be a writer or performer in a sitcom. It seemed like artistic or mental death. What I was having was real bad growing pains.
As they say, there ain’t any accidents, I guess. I went back to New York and worked on my comedy, and got people to laugh more. That’s when I started writing late at night, and began to type out my one-person show on a computer my husband gave me. I had sort of made peace with the fact I’d never be famous, but I knew I was going to be an artist. I was painting more, happy at home, still doing comedy, and working on a one-woman show.
My manager called me one day before a performance and said there were going to be important people at the club. And I went, “Yeah, yeah.” And as I started to go onstage, the manager whispered, “Don’t try to be political.” And, hell, I was going to do political anyway, so I did. But it wasn’t going well. So in mid-show, I looked at the audience and said, “God, I wish I could bust loose.” And they loved it, and the show was great.
The next day, I called my agent from 64th Street on a pay phone on my way to an audition. “Y’all need me?” I asked innocently. She said to rush over to the Ritz-Carlton. “Those Hollywood people loved you last night.” So I went there and found out that the executive producers of “Roseanne” and half of everyone else in Hollywood were doing a show about a single mom and had been looking everywhere for talent. It just blindsided me. I asked, “Oh, you want me to play a wacky neighbor?” Incredibly, they wanted me to play Grace.
I was a diamond in the rough, I guess. They’re good at finding them. They took something raw and interesting and let it happen. They let dirt mix in with good clay.
Brett Butler on … NEWT
A slimy, land-water … oh, you mean Newt Gringrich. I’d say “interesting.” It seems like I always find myself apologizing for politicians from my home state, except for our esteemed ex-president, that is.
Brett Butler on … CLINTON
When I think of Bill Clinton, I realize that the day after the inaugural ball, when the smile is still on your face, they must pull you into a room and tell you something that must be really, really wrong and awful and you are never the same. It screws with you so bad, whatever this horrible thing is, that is causes you to digress from every previously held tenet you ever had. I’d like to know what it is they show you.
Brett Butler on … BREAST IMPLANTS
I am greatly amused at the interest other people have in [my impants]. As I’ve said in my comedy routine, it’s sort of new and different. It’s like … well, when I got divorced, I had a boob removed, and so it’s nothing for me to add one now! Actually, I feel comfortable with my physical appearance now. The wardrobe woman on the show told me I could have the scowl line on my forehead snipped and it would look fine. And I told her, “You mean this muscle that lets people know if I’m mad or if I’m thinking? No thanks.” Actually, I feel pretty good about my looks — like I’m all right.
Brett Butler on … BEING RICH AND FAMOUS
Dave Thomas [an actor on her show] asked me one day last year, “If you had $50 million, what would you do?” and I thought and answered, “I’d be here doing ‘Grace.’” I wouldn’t change anything, though I have bought a car [a Volvo] for the first time in my life. You realize that you should be careful what you pray for. You might get it. When you’re really famous, it’s a hologram. It’s so tragic when the stars and fans buy into it at a certain level. People think they own you in different ways. I remember I was getting into a car at the airport one night last year, and some tabloid photographer aimed his camera at me and yelled, “Smile — you owe it to your fans.”
And I yelled back, “Fuck you! You’re not my fan. You’re really not. Shut up!” People who are really fans know what I’m saying.
On the other hand, I know I play a character who touches people, and I’ll take credit for some of that. I appreciate it. But I’m not “actress on a plate.” I’m different. I’ve lived such a wild and dangerous life, it’s funny. I used to swim so far out into the ocean I’d scare everyone. I put this in my book: “I was flying fast, low to the ground, and brakeless for a long time.” So now I strap myself into my Volvo.
Admittedly never even having seen a rerun of “Grace Under Fire” to allow comparison between person and persona, we feel confident in saying that Brett Butler never suffered from a lack of opinions. Naturally, we love that in a person (regardless of those opinions, actually). To the extent that we could find them, it seems like Ticketwood might have the best coverage of tour dates as they appear for Ms. Butler. If nothing else, we plan on using that link ourselves. Seeing a live show sounds like an excellent time.
