What I learned about Whoopi Goldberg
An exercise in creative parenting inspiration
Good morning and welcome back to Creative Parenting Club. We hope you’ve had a nice week!
Today on CPC, we wanted to try something a little bit different.
About a month ago we published a guest essay from violinist, parenting advocate and loyal CPC reader
, who is currently writing a book on the family life of the legendary composer Johann Sebastian Bach.
As a tandem to his essay, Alexander shared an exercise over in our Creative Parenting Chat where he encouraged parents to open Wikipedia and research the “personal life” sections of prominent creatives we admire.
Over the last month, do creative parenting exercise has been an unfinished item up on more than one weekly to-do list. This week, I’m pleased to say that I finally got around to it.
I found the experience so inspiring that I decided to turn it into today’s post.
Whoopi Goldberg, mortuary cosmetologist?
When I was doing my research, I tried to focus on creative parents who were parents before they became famous. I ended up landing on one of my favorite actors (she prefers the non-gendered term), whose personal life I previously knew nothing about.
Whoopi Goldberg’s filmography is prolific. Beginning in the mid-1980s with The Color Purple, she’s known for her leading roles in the Sister Act movies, Ghost, and for supporting appearances in many, many more.
As a lifelong fan of the New York Knicks, to me she’ll always be Eddie.
For as long as I’ve been alive, Whoopi Goldberg has been one of the most recognizable and beloved figures in American public life.
But imagine being the future Whoopi Goldberg in the year 1979. You’re a single mom with a 5 year-old daughter, working odd jobs, chasing dreams in acting and entertainment but still years away from your first big break.
This was the version of Whoopi Goldberg that led me down an internet rabbit hole this week, one where I learned for the first time the very origins of the name ‘Whoopi Goldberg’.
Where it all began
Before she was Whoopi Goldberg, she was Caryn Elaine Johnson, growing up in what were then the multicultural public housing projects of New York City's Chelsea neighborhood. She made her performance debut at age eight, through a local children’s theater.
Caryn dreamed of being a performer. But as a teenager, she fell into bad habits. She dropped out of high school and even became addicted to heroin. A group of friends eventually intervened and brought her to rehab. One of her counselors there, Alvin Martin, would become the father of her child. In 1974, she gave birth to a daughter at the age of 18 and got married to Alvin in the same year.
The family moved to California, first to San Diego then Berkeley. The marriage didn’t last. By 1979, Caryn was divorced, a single mom at 24. She was raising her daughter while stringing together odd jobs: bank teller, bricklayer. The future Whoopi Goldberg was so good at bricklaying that she was invited to join the Bricklayer’s Union after her contributions to the construction of a new brick wall around the San Diego Zoo.
She also got her beauty license and put it to creative use: working in funeral parlors as a mortuary cosmetologist. Later on, after her first big opportunity landed her on Broadway, Whoopi spoke colorfully of her experience as a beauty mortician in a 1984 Vanity Fair profile:
“When you work in a beauty parlor, you can’t talk back and you can’t talk mean. Dead folks, you can have conversations with ’em and tell ’em how you really feel: ‘I’m glad you’re dead. I think you’re a bitch.’ You can grab their head and go, ‘Hey, come on. Sit up here. Let’s try the Joan Crawford look on you. Nah, that doesn’t work. Let’s try Lucille Ball.’ ”
Never stop never stopping
Throughout her first 9 years as a parent, Caryn Johnson struggled financially. When the money from her various jobs was not enough to support herself and her daughter, she relied on public food and welfare assistance to make ends meet.
But she never stopped creating. She continued to do community theatre and joined the improv group Spontaneous Combustion, where she first adopted her stage name1. In San Francisco, she produced a one-woman performance called The Spook Show, a collection of comedic monologues and sketches that drew from her own life experiences. It became her ticket to fame after it caught the attention of the legendary director Mike Nichols.
When the show was transferred to Broadway in 1984, things advanced quickly. Her exposure on Broadway helped get her an audition with Stephen Spielberg the following year for his film adaptation of The Color Purple, where she was cast as the lead actress and would earn an Oscar nomination. Suddenly, her career was off and running. At the Oscars in 1986, she noted that she’d still been receiving public assistance just two years before.
Today we see the name WHOOPI GOLDBERG: one of the most successful entertainment figures of the past generation.
We don’t see the setbacks and the self-doubt she must have experienced more than once in the late 70s and early 80s, with a life full of responsibility and a dream that may never have been realized.
We don’t see the determination that could just as easily have felt irrational, misguided, hopeless at times.
We don’t see the love that went into Whoopi’s decision to continue performing and chasing her dream.
As the Washington Post wrote in a profile in 1986:
“Hers is one of those show business stories that seemingly was scripted in Hollywood itself, the complicated odyssey of a woman long on energy and talent but short on breaks who suddenly is discovered by the right people at the right time.”
Probably every parent here has had some moment lamenting the difficulties of staying creatively active amidst everything else we’re doing. After all, that’s why we started this community.
But to imagine doing this under even more difficult circumstances?
It’s an inspiration to keep showing up and trying our best. If for no other reason, then for it’s own sake.
Generational talent
It’s interesting to think about the perspective of Whoopi’s daughter Alex Martin, who was there through all of it.
Alex followed her mother’s footsteps into the entertainment world. She appeared as a child extra in The Color Purple, had a small part in Sister Act 2, and later starred in a few films of her own. She also worked as a producer on short films and co-created a brief reality series called According to Alex in 2015, with Whoopi as executive producer.
But for the first 10 years of her life, she would have grown up watching her mother work multiple jobs while building something that didn’t yet have a name or paycheck attached to it. What’s that like?
Alex has spoken publicly about the years of struggle that eventually led to her mother’s breakthrough career:
“I know what it’s like with the food stamps, because my mom has her [Welfare] cards framed. Seriously … I remember that. I remember we had the one room space and we slept in the bed together.”
One of the goals of this community is to celebrate creative parents and the hustle it takes to keep going. But it’s just as important to consider how that hustle comes across to the people closest to us. What does it mean for a child to grow up next to a parent who’s still chasing something? Our kids are watching, and what they see will shape how they move through the world, too.
Put another way: the way we show up for our own dreams sets a powerful example for how they will eventually think about theirs.
In 2016, Whoopi welcomed Alex onto The View as a guest. It wasn’t a publicity tour or a promotional appearance. Alex had come on the show to give her a Mother’s Day present.
At one point during the interview, Whoopi was asked why she considered her daughter her best friend. Her answer was simple.
"Because she is one of the most trustworthy and loyal people I know. She is somebody who makes me laugh, like 'bwaha!' laugh, and we can talk to each other at any time of the day or night."
Final thoughts
To state the obvious: it’s very likely that nobody who is still reading this essay will go on to become as rich or famous as Whoopi Goldberg.
There’s a good chance that our kids won’t, either.
There’s a temptation with inspirational stories like these to make it about the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Work hard, keep going, and eventually you too will achieve your dreams.
But that’s not really the point.
What I find inspirational about Whoopi Goldberg’s story isn’t that there is some kind of rags-to-riches, “she can do it and you can too” lesson to be learned here.
It’s simply imagining the daily life of someone raising their kid while continuing to do what they love. Whoopi could have gone on to become ‘nothing more than’ a bricklayer with a passion for community theatre, and still lived a full life inspiring creativity in her daughter and achieving creative satisfaction for herself. Success takes many forms.
Whatever your creative medium looks like, and whatever creative success might mean to you, there’s always something worth learning from those who’ve found a way to keep making things while showing up every day and building a strong emotional connection with their kids along the way.
It’s not about the pot of gold. It’s about following the rainbow wherever it leads.
Your turn
Thanks again to Alexander Hettinga for recommending this exercise. If you haven’t done it for yourself yet, I highly encourage you to!
For some inspiration, you can check out Actors Who Were Already Parents Before They Made It Big (TheThings).
If you find a creative parenting story that inspires you, share it here in the comments or in our Creative Parenting Chat, where we also have a new discussion prompt about managing the emotional and practical sides of role conflict as a creative parent.
That’s all for this week. Thanks for being here.
Have a lovely weekend, and see you next Friday for our next creative parenting interview.
Just in case you thought we were going to end this post without telling you the origins of the name Whoopi Goldberg: according to Goldberg, the stage name “Whoopi” was originally a joke about her flatulence on stage. "When you're performing on stage, you never really have time to go into the bathroom and close the door. So if you get a little gassy, you've got to let it go. So people used to say to me, 'You're like a whoopee cushion.' And that's where the name came from." Whoopi has claimed that the surname “Goldberg” comes from prior generations of her family — a claim which does not appear to have any basis in fact. It seems more likely that she just liked the way it sounded.
Creative parents: what's your favorite Whoopi Goldberg movie?
What a wonderful piece! So glad you learned something meaningful about a famous creative parent and shared it with us. Some really great thoughts in here for us all.