HOLLYWOOD—
There is no way around it. To get to Margaret Cho’s house in the hills,
you have to drive straight toward the Hollywood sign.
The road to Cho’s stops short of the big “H,” which is a good thing. Like the town itself, the Hollywood sign looks better from a distance. But there was a time when Cho could not put enough space between herself and the town that almost swallowed her whole.
“I went through this period where I was so disillusioned with everything in my life and everything in my career, that I started thinking my real purpose in life was to leave it all,” the 31-year-old Cho said. “I had this idea that I really wanted to get married, move to New York City and spend the rest of my days taking care of my family and ordering leather armchairs out of the Pottery Barn catalog.
“I just wanted to lead this domestic life and have my kids say things like: ‘Did you know that Mom used to be a comedian before she met Dad? Isn’t that weird? She’s not funny at all.’”
There are no leather armchairs in Cho’s split-level house, and no kids or husband, either. But there is a bright-red couch, a big friendly dog named Ralph, and a woman whose outlook on life is almost as serene as her canyon view.
Margaret Cho never left Hollywood, but she did survive it. The good news is, her jokes are still funny. The better news is, she’s still around to tell them.
“I used to feel like I was just biding my time,” said Cho, who tomorrow brings her one-woman show, “I’m the One That I Want,” to the Spreckels Theatre. “I drank a lot, I did a lot of drugs and I felt like that was another career. I had this idea that if I died, drag queens could impersonate me because I was so tragic. It was a strange and ridiculous fantasy, but I kind of got into it.”
The circumstances that pushed Cho to the edge—and a bit beyond—were also strange and ridiculous. Not to mention humiliating, surreal and dangerous.
It was 1994, and after spending a few successful years on the stand-up comedy circuit, the San Francisco-born Cho landed the dream gig. At 26, she was going to star in “All-American Girl,” an ABC sitcom based on her act. Like Cho, the sitcom’s heroine was a young Korean-American woman with a smart mouth and an eccentric family. Unlike Cho, the all-American girl the network visualized was thinner than the real thing. A lot thinner.
“The network has a problem with the fullness of your face,” a producer told Cho. Mortified, Cho stopped eating. She exercised twice a day, popped diet pills as if they were Junior Mints and threw in a load of diuretics and laxatives for good measure. She went on the mother of all crash diets, and then she crashed. After losing 30 pounds in less than a month, Cho landed in the hospital with kidney failure.
“I really, really wanted to do that show,” Cho said, as Ralph (pronounced “Rafe” after his namesake, actor Ralph Fiennes) deposited another drool-coated chew toy at her feet. “I was having a hard time traveling, so I didn’t want to do stand-up anymore. And I didn’t want to go to auditions anymore, because I never looked right for the parts. So I felt like finally, I’d been given this golden opportunity, and I didn’t want to blow it.
“Some people, usually men, will say, ‘Why did you care that much?’ But for women, weight is an incredibly loaded issue, and it has a lot to do with how we feel about ourselves. It was especially hard for me, because I had just never thought about it. I thought because I was a comedian, I was exempt. But I wasn’t.”
As soon as Cho got out of the hospital, she went back to taping the show. She also went back to diets, diet pills and compulsive exercising. But when “All-American Girl” debuted in the fall of ‘94, the show that almost killed Cho was dead on arrival. Shunned by Asian-Americans (who complained that the humor was stereotypical) and slammed by critics (who didn’t see any humor in it at all), “All-American Girl” was canceled after just one season. By the middle of 1995, the show was over, and Cho was doing a real good job of canceling herself.
Cho had been abusing drugs and alcohol long before the sitcom fiasco, but now she had more time on her hands and more reasons to feel bad about herself. So she drank until she couldn’t stand up, took diet pills until her hair fell out (“I didn’t stop taking the diet pills,” Cho said with a grimace. “I just took hair vitamins along with them.”) and fell into relationships that didn’t do anybody any good. She did this for almost four years, and then she stopped. She’s not even sure how she did it. She just knew it had to be done.
“I got to a certain point, and then I was done,” Cho said simply. “I realized that I would keep doing it and die, or I would stop. It made the decision very easy somehow.”
Dressed for comfort in a rust-colored sweater and dark track pants, Cho has the kind of breezy confidence that comes from surviving a scary trip in one piece. Judging from the obvious charge she gets from giving her demons the boot, you get the feeling Cho would be perfectly happy if the story had ended there. But instead, it got better.
The turnaround
Last year, Cho wrote “I’m the One That I Want,” a one-woman show that combined elements of her stand-up act with barbed show-business commentary, nuggets of post-recovery wisdom and a feel-good message that turned out to be more universal than Cho could have dreamed. A stint in a small New York theater was greeted with resounding cheers and rave reviews, some of which compared the bawdy, unsinkable Cho to Bette Midler, Sandra Bernhard and Cher. A national tour followed, and a show in San Francisco was filmed for theatrical release. The movie will be out later this year, and Cho’s autobiography will be published in 2001.
“It’s really strange to think your career is over, and then turn around and find bigger success than you’ve ever known. But I also feel like all of that is really irrelevant. I like doing the show because I like what I’m saying to people.
“Women’s culture is so filled with self-loathing,” continued Cho, sparking to the topic. “You cannot pick up a fashion magazine without hearing about diets or what makeup you need to correct the way you look. For me, that need to improve myself when I was younger led to very dangerous circumstances, so I’m really urging people to feel self-reliant and self-loving without all that stuff.
“As women, we should be allowed to feel beautiful and attractive and perfect as we are. There is nothing we need. That’s a real outlaw statement, which is why I like the fame now, because it allows me to say it.”
She meditates now, and after years of avoiding it, Cho is rediscovering the joys of sensible exercise. There are cookbooks on top of her refrigerator, Tae Bo videos by the television, and a dog whose need to give large doses of unconditional love will not be denied. Margaret Cho is in a groovy space right now, but not so groovy that she can’t look back with a flash of righteous indignation and a big laugh.
“If ‘All-American Girl,’ had been successful, then I probably would have stayed in the state of arrested development that I was in forever. I would probably be collecting residuals and doing golf tournaments every weekend.
“I think that’s a fate worse than death,” Cho said smartly. “So I’m really glad all of this happened.”