“She’s never late. This is so unlike her,” says Karen Taussig, referring to Margaret Cho, the woman whose career she manages. “I just hope she’s all right.”

Taussig goes back into her car and stares blankly through the window, probably thinking about what to do if her client never makes it to the studio where she is scheduled to tape three public service announcements (PSAs) for Korean Americans for Global Action (KAFGA). The organization is preparing to hold a benefit concert (held Dec.14, 1998, which Margaret emceed) at New York City’s Lincoln Center for the victims of North Korea’s famine.

The rain comes and goes, umbrellas get flipped up, pulled back in Taussig intermittently flicks the wipers on her windshield. About 15 minutes later, a black Audi sedan approaches and parks in a space Taussig has blocked off. It’s Margaret, and she’s not laughing.

After a private discussion with her manager, she gets some brief introductions and the troop is off to one of the various sound stages on the premises. Margaret’s expression is as hard as pavement.

Inside, a camera crew has been setting up a basic three-point lighting configuration: key, fill and back light. A make-up artist is ready to begin transforming a bad day into a cheery one. It is a daunting task.

After a couple read-throughs of some cue cards, Margaret smiles into the betacam and conducts perfect take after perfect take. Instantly, in a room that includes both Margaret supporters and detractors, the small group of people watching or working struggle to contain their laughter as the comedian/actor does an imitation of her mother, a mainstay of her comedy and a crowd favorite.

If there’s one thing for certain, Margaret knows how to win over an audience, even if they don’t particularly like her.
 

LOVE AND HATE

“You’re very observant, you should be a journalist,” Taussig quipped to me the next day, in a comedic turn of her own. Recalling last night’s PSA taping and referring to how the room all came together, she said, “Can you imagine living with that kind of ambiguous hostility, day in and day out? You have to be ready, because you don’t know what you’re going to get. If you’re Korean, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’re going to be hostile.”

“Among Asians,” she continued, “Margaret has the most drastic reactions that range from really hating her to worshipping her. I find a lot of people worship the fact that she is an example of how, just because you’re an Asian woman, you don’t have to play the violin, you don’t have to be submissive to your master.

“On the other end of the spectrum, there are people that hate so much that one of the most visible examples of their culture is not an example of their culture. I feel sometimes there’s a fear that people will think all Asian women are brash and censorable.”

Margaret’s biggest support is, and has always been, outside the Asian American community. She remains one of the most popular comedians in the country, as proven by her sold-out shows. Then there are her fans on the fringe, whose support for Margaret goes beyond just wanting a piece of her. In fact, they often claim her for their own. “I love gay audiences,” Margaret said. “I love to play for gay audiences and they always come see me perform. I think it’s great. I’m really part of that tribe, even though I’m not technically, my heart is there.”

Growing up in San Francisco and honing her comedic skills in the gay clubs, Margaret has enjoyed great support from gay audiences as well as the gay press, which is probably why people often speculate about her sexuality.

“I am so grateful to the gay community for giving me such support – an incredible amount of support. It was like everybody was always so great to me and I just owe a lot to them for being so supportive and so loving and so wonderful. But that’s why there’s a lot of speculation because I was very much there and that’s fine.

“You know, it’s so funny because my work is so nonconnected to my sexuality. But I guess you can speculate about any performer. You know, anybody that’s working and is sort of out there, you world want to know somehow and I think that’s great they’re curious. That’s wonderful. But I am not [gay].”

Regardless of what gender she prefers to sleep with (she currently has a Caucasian boyfriend), the gay community not only loves her, it places high demands on her attention. According to Taussig, she recently had a call from an organizer for a day community benefit who would not take no for an answer. Unfortunately for the organizer, Margaret had to be in New York to help raise funds for thousands of starving victims in North Korea.

According to Taussig, Margaret’s performance at the Lincoln Center was the subject of much controversy. For one, many questioned why KAFGA chose her to emcee when the Korean community is, and has always been, divided on how they feel about her. And two, many within the organization have questioned why she was paid when it was a benefit concert.

“She actually had a call from her mother!” said Taussig. “Someone had called her mother, and her mother called her and said, ‘Oh, you can’t take money for this show.’ To which she said, ‘If I get one more of these calls, I’m just not doing it.’” Taussig added that “it was important to me that they do pay her the absolute minimum. It keeps it on more of a business level and they’re able to get exactly what they need from her.”

As for the reasons why KAFGA chose her, the most important one is the fact that people outside the community recognize her as the biggest Korean American celebrity, thereby increasing awareness (read: donations) to the famine relief effort.

The bottom line? Even if the Korean American community can’t make up its mind on how it supports Margaret, she has millions of fans in the greater Asian American community, the gay community and mainstream America.
 

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY

In Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Lights, Big City, a Midwesterner finds himself in the heart of New York City living a string of disappointments, only no one seems to be aware of it. Is it a lie he has created for himself, or has he been swept up by the illusion and can’t get out of it? Turning to a life of decadence – drugs, alcohol, a nightlife with people he couldn’t care less about – he eventually hits bottom, losing everything.

When Margaret first arrived in Hollywood, the narration may have been something like: You arrive with high expectations, only to be shot down by the first manager you meet. He tells you, among other things, you’re too ethnic, so pack up your bags and go back home. Determined, you grit your teeth, grease your elbows, and begin a life that is as cloudy today as when you were living it.

Mature for your age, you tell yourself you’ve already seen it all and waste no time proving it. At 25, you get your own show. It airs on network TV, primetime. You fire your manager. Hollywood types tell you what to do. The community turns on you. You can’t figure out why.

The network dumps your show. Depressed, you turn to drugs and chase them down with alcohol. One day, you wake up covered in vomit, but can’t recall if it came from you or the stranger passed out next to you.

“All-American Girl” represented both the high point and the low point of Margaret’s young career. At 25, she was on top of the world. A year later, she felt like the world was on top of her.

“I went through a couple of years of, like, depression, a lot of really bad stuff in my personal life,” she said. “It’s awful. And then you know, a lot of people that I thought were my friends would drop me. People I got to know through the whole network process – people like actors and people that I’ve worked with, like the executives that I’d become very close to – wouldn’t talk to me anymore because everybody was really freaked out ‘cause they thought the show would keep going.

“Even though it wasn’t really a failure, it wasn’t really a bomb, it did kind of OK in the ratings. Like if it was now, it would’ve been a hit. But then it was on a more of a demanding kind of thing. So, I mean, it was hard. It was really hard.”

In retrospect, “All-American Girl” really wasn’t a bomb. Far from it. According to an Entertainment Weekly (June 2, 1995) analysis of Nielsen ratings for the 1994-95 TV season, AAG placed 43rd out of 141 scheduled series. In fact, it place above 33 shows that were renewed the following season: “Coach,” often considered a hit show, placed 52 that season and “The Marshall,” also renewed, placed 87. Both shared the same network as AAG.

And remember Will Smith’s hit comedy, “Fresh Prince of BelAir”? It tied that season with AAG at 43.

AAG’s average weekly draw was an estimated 15.8 million viewers, a half million viewers above such current hits as Fox’s “Ally McBeal,” which litigates in 22nd place, and 1.5 million more viewers than NBC’s “Just Shoot Me,” flashing around 27. NBC’s “3rd Rock From the Sun” (53) and “Newsradio” (60) don’t even come close.

“It’s very surreal,” said Cho, about the whole chain of events. “It’s true what they say about Hollywood – that it’s, like, one week you’re at the top and then you’re down at the bottom. It happens in a flash.

“You know, fortunately I already had low self-esteem so I didn’t have that far to go, but it’s really ... it was awful. It was awful! And it took me a couple of years to get out of it. Like I had to get out of the problems I was facing, also, that was caused by all this trauma and I had a very difficult personal life and very terrible relationships that were happening. You know, very abusive situations that I just thought I finally had gotten out of it.”

Taussig, however, can’t recall ever witnessing Margaret having drug or alcohol problems.

“Comics have to do comedy because they’re in pain,” Taussig said. “I really believe that. And when they can’t be on stage, they look for other things to deaden the pain. Pretty much most of the time she wasn’t with me, she says she drank a lot through that. While she was drinking, she was still maintaining a reputation of being one of the best stand-ups in the country. But I personally don’t think she’s an alcoholic.”

Taussig maintains that if Margaret were an alcoholic, she would’ve told it to her audiences by now.

“She’s got nothing to hide, absolutely nothing. I mean, she was on stage talking about this guy who practically raped her, an uncle that molested her. You can’t get any more out there than that. She uses the audience to figure out how she feels about things. Sometimes she doesn’t really know how she feels about stuff. She uses the audience for that, she doesn’t use individuals for that.

“I sat and talked with her and said, ‘You know, that’s really uncomfortable, that whole routine there, ‘cause do you realize you were practically raped?’ I don’t think she realized it.”
 

SUNSETS AND FLOWERS

Steve Martin writes in his book “Pure Drivel” about how Zoloft, a Prozac-like antidepressant, is killing the New York art scene. Suicidal artists with names like “Shelf Head 3” now prefer to go by “Jeremy.” Instead of the usual gloom and doom, they paint sunsets and flowers.

With Margaret, there once was a time when she used every chance to talk, whether onstage or off, as a form of therapy. She would have told a complete stranger – especially a strange journalist – her life’s troubles, perhaps in hope that someone out there listening or reading would pick up the pain through her words. These days, however, there is a decidedly different air about Margaret.

“She’s still in rare form,” insisted Taussig. “Last night, she said things I could never say.”

Thank goodness for her fans, her stand-up still contains the honesty true to original form. For instance, before she was in a relationship, she used to say that she ought to put a vacancy sign on her vagina because it was never being used. But beyond the stage, Margaret is noticeably – dare we say it? – happy.

At 30, Margaret Cho is a little older, a little wiser. She wakes up at around 5 a.m. and goes to sleep by 9 p.m., unless she has a show to do. She owns a dog and is in a steady relationship. She says she doesn’t touch a lick of alcohol, nor any recreational drugs for that matter, and has become a vegan – which is a vegetarian, only more so.

“When I was 15 years old, I really left home quite early. I was pretty much on my own when I was about 16 years old and I was, like, out of the house and onto my career at that point,” says Cho. “So I was so very, kind of, independent and I wanted to find out what my life was gonna be about really soon, but you know, I realized that I kind of missed those things.

“Now I’m going back and reestablishing a closer relationship with my family. Because I wanted to break away so early I didn’t get a lot of things that I needed, that I realize now that I needed. I’m not sure I can say exactly what those things are. They’re really hard to articulate. They’re like emotional things, kind of like structure, too. The need to be living with people you know, that know you very well. And to be intimate with others and so I’m learning more about that now.”

Getting work has never been a problem for Margaret. She is very in-demand as a stand-up, and manages to win enviable movie and TV roles, the biggest of which came in John Woo’s “Face/Off” with Nicholas Cage and John Travolta. She’s done three films that have yet to be released, and a few upcoming television appearances, including “The Nanny,” “Dr. Katz” and continuous airings of “Pulp Comics” and her HBO Special on Comedy Central.

As for a future TV series, Margaret has been working on a few concepts with fellow writer and performer Karen Kilgariff. The duo currently performs a live workshop at “Uncabaret” at Luna Park in West Hollywood on Monday nights, continuing through the end of February, and perhaps longer. Prior to this interview, talks were underway with a cable network to develop the show into a series. But at press time, those talks have apparently stalled. The problem? The same as with “All-American Girl” – not enough creative independence.

Explains her manager, “If you want to be on TV more than anything, then you’re going to be subjected to the same thing that Margaret was subjected to for ‘All-American Girl.’ They (executives) will have the leverage, and if they tell you to do something, you’re going to have to do it. And if they tell you to wear something, you’re going to have to wear it. Because if you want it that badly, they have all the leverage.

“It’s more important to us to maintain our integrity than to be on a sitcom.”

This time around, Margaret is wise enough to know better.

Margaret Cho and Karen Kilgariff perform “The People Tree” at L.A.’s Improv every Monday night in February. Larry J. Tazuma has been a KoreAm staffer since 1994. His past articles featured Olympic gold medalist Dr. Sammy Lee and actor Sandra Oh. He can be reached at kdnypnch@aol.com.