Roseanne Barr channels her inner goddess
Roseanne Barr never failed to get attention in the sitcom bearing her name. All these years later, she's still doing things her way - in a place about as far away from her TV home as you can imagine. Mo Rocca offers a Sunday Profile:
It's been 23 years since a brash loud-mouth, the likes of which had never been seen on network TV, barged her way into our living rooms.
Today, Roseanne Barr is 58 years old and living on a farm in Hawaii.
No, she has not retired.
"There's the gorgeous ocean. There's my garden," Barr tells CBS' Mo Rocca, outside of her Hawaii home.
"And I thought you came to Hawaii to mellow out," said Rocca.
"It is mellow," says Barr.
The 46-acre macadamia nut farm is the setting of her just-ended reality show, "Roseanne's Nuts."
No longer doing battle with network TV executives, she spends much of her time fighting with wild boars.
"They're like people or something, they only want the stuff that isn't theirs," she says. "They're crazy."
"Are they violent?" asks Rocca.
"Yeah, they can be violent, yeah," says Barr. "They're as bad as a mad dog, and they're tough. I mean, they can kill your grandkids, if they want to, or whatever."
Also on the farm? Goats - and one special sheep.
"That black sheep, that's Roseanne Barr," she says. "That's its name."
She'll tell you she's crazy. But when you sit down across from her, as we did last month at her studio in El Segundo, California, she sounds more at peace than ever.
"How are you enjoying your life, post-menopause?" asks Rocca.
"That's a great question," laughs Barr. "I'm enjoying my life, post-menopause, so much. It's just so great to grow into yourself, and not be bothered with all that tyranny of biology."
"I had no idea how long menopause lasts," says Rocca.
"Mine lasted about ten years," she responded.
"A decade?"
"Yeah, that's pretty par for the course," says Barr.
"Was that a rough ten years?" asks Rocca
"It sure was a rough ten years," says Barr. "I mostly kept myself locked inside. (laughs) I seriously did. I was locked inside for ten years."
Before she locked herself away, Roseanne had become a tabloid staple: her marriage to Tom Arnold, her on-set tantrums, and who can forget her disastrous rendition of the National Anthem at a 1990 San Diego Padres game?
So it's easy to forget that she became famous for being funny. Very funny.
Just a few years after appearing on the "Tonight Show," her smash sitcom broke the mold and went to number one.
"In my mind, it was like a girl version of Jackie Gleason," she says.
Rather than retread comfortable sitcom themes, the show dealt with racism, domestic abuse, and the struggles of a very working-class family.
"The themes of the show, do you think they're pretty relevant today?" asks Rocca.
"They're even more relevant today than they were then," Barr says.
"Were you playing a role or was that you on camera?"
"That was me on camera," says Barr. "The role I was playing was my real life. That was pretty much how my family was."
Except that her upbringing wasn't quite so typical. Born Jewish in Salt Lake City, Roseanne says she was raised half the week Jewish and half the week Mormon.
"What was that like?" asks Rocca.
"It was a lot of time spent inside my room and my head alone thinking," she says.
And she spent a lot of time listening to her mother chat with friends about a certain book - a handbook for the perfect, traditional housewife. This would inspire her very nontraditional comedic persona.
"There's this one chapter called 'The Domestic Goddess,' and it told women how to manipulate men," she recalls. "And it'd say, like, 'Watch your daughter, the way she stamps her foot and shakes her curls, and see how your husband, he just, he just' - oh my God, you don't have it. It's oh my God, oh my God, are you gonna give it to me?" Barr asks Rocca.
"I am gonna give it to you," giving Barr a copy of the book.
"Oh my God. Thank you!" she says. "You got it earmarked. Look at you! Oh my God."
We asked her to read from the book.
"Don't slap men on the back. Do shake hands with men gracefully," Barr laughs, reading. "Do not whistle loudly. Instead speak softly and tenderly. Don't roar at jokes."
"See, I think you do a lot of these don'ts," laughs Rocca.
"I do, too!" she says.
Roseanne would take the domestic goddess label and make it her own.
"So, the goddess part, you were okay with?" asks Rocca.
"I love," she says. "Are you kiddin'? It's true. Women are goddesses."
" Have you gone from being a domestic goddess to a rural goddess?"
"I'm more like a volcano goddess now living here," she says.
And far from the mainland, at home in Hawaii, Roseanne's been able to revisit some of her pat misadventures.
"Did you ever think that the national anthem debacle would become what it would?" asks Rocca.
"Hell no," she says. "It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But, you know, now I say, it was the defining moment of my - kinda my whole life."
Just a few months ago, she got an anthem do-over, for a local girls' softball team.
"Facing, like, the biggest mistake you've ever made, and doing a redo. It was huge," she says. "You can always get better. Nobody can stop you from getting better, and nobody can stop you from trying to make something right."
Her series may have been canceled but the reality show known as Roseanne's life keeps on going.
"Can you still be a pain in the butt?" asks Rocca.
"Seriously, I know I'm a huge pain in the butt to people. I know I am. My kids think I'm a huge pain in the butt. Yeah, all old women are a pain in the butt to somebody. I mean, what else have we got to live for?"
