Roseanne: It was a dream. All these comics were coming to Denver headlining, and I’d open for them. There was a Denver “Laugh Off” thing and it was me and fifteen guys—and I won. Everyone was like, wow. That was a big accomplishment. It was an accomplishment that all the guys were rooting for me, too. That was fucking mind-blowing after all the shit I had to do. I forgot what you asked me.
Judd: How long until you got on The Tonight Show?
Roseanne: Oh, so everybody goes, “You need to let Mitzi see you at the Comedy Store.” And so, you know, I planned it with my husband, the whole thing. I went there on a Monday night. It was like a fucking dream. Came off the stage after my first five minutes and Mitzi was like, “Go do twenty in the big room.”
Judd: Immediately?
Roseanne: All the waitresses told me she had never done that before. So I went in the big room—this is all happening in one night—and I come offstage, and there’s George Schlatter. And he’s like, “I’m producing a show”—it was Funny Women of Comedy or Funny Gals or some shit—“and it’s for NBC and I want you on it.” And I’m like, “Fuck, I don’t even live here, but yeah, I’ll come back.” So I came back in a month to rehearse for that and a guy comes up to me and he says, “I’m Jim McCawley from The Tonight Show, and I want to put you on Friday night.”
Judd: You didn’t even know he was in the crowd?
Roseanne: No. You know, with my gruff thing, I was like, “Get in line.” And he’s like, “No, no, I’m Jim McCawley, and I want you on.”
Judd: How did your husband handle your success?
Roseanne: I was really a housewife. And then suddenly, I’m like eighteen weeks on the road without my kids and my husband—he didn’t know what to do. He slept in a lot of mornings and they missed school. You know, he’s a guy. I came home after like six weeks—
Judd: He was working at a post office, right?
Roseanne: No, he had quit. He quit after I started to tour. So I went and got the kids. They lived with me in a one-room apartment on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. I’d bring them to the Comedy Store and they’d just have to sit up there. It was hard.
Judd: How old were they at the time?
Roseanne: They were all under twelve.
Judd: So the two older ones kind of know what’s happening?
Roseanne: Yeah, it affected them. I wasn’t there to crack down on them as much. So they went wild. We all fucking went wild. You know, it’s just so consuming, it’s eighteen hours a day, and you turn to your husband or your sisters or family to help you but nobody can do it as well as the mom. So it’s just suffering guilt every fucking minute until you’ve got to do drugs to handle the disappointment that you’re causing your kids.
Judd: It’s the aspect of show business that most people don’t think about—the circus aspect of it. Whenever I see some famous person get married to another famous person, my first thought is, How can that work?
Roseanne: I know exactly how it works. You just talk on the phone and they’re living in a world that doesn’t exist like you do. I just always tried to stay in as much as I possibly could. It was really hard because, you know—you don’t want to work, but you don’t know when you’re going to get your next job.
Judd: It could all end tomorrow.
Roseanne: And everybody’s like, “You’re fucking rich,” but they don’t get it. They don’t get that you have to fucking do it. It’s not about if you’re rich or not. Because it’s what you love. You have to do it because that’s the only thing you know how to do.
Judd: And it keeps you sane, but it also creates all—
Roseanne: All the problems. But then it’s so worth it when you’re getting those laughs. It’s like, This is what I do, what I love. It’s the whole fucking reason I’m alive.
Judd: Was it possible to have balance when you were doing the TV show?
Roseanne: No.
Judd: So when you were working, you were so split off—you focused on the work so intensely that you couldn’t be present in the other parts of your life?
Roseanne: Correct.
Judd: It’s funny because I used to scream at everybody at the beginning of my career. I’d get really emotional. I’d project all my issues about my parents and safety onto the executives so every conversation where they gave a note was life or death and they tried to destroy me. You don’t love me. You don’t get me. And so it was really hard. It took me a very, a very long time to understand that I need to find people that understand, who like what I do, who get what I do. I need to find people who I respect so I can respect them, and they’ll like being respected so they’ll respect me and that’s like a marriage. But early in my career, you’d get bad notes from someone who didn’t appreciate what you were doing, and you would resist them. I would fight and we would always get canceled. But you had a different situation because your show was so successful that that battle of wills never ended—or was it resolved in some way?
Roseanne: Once the show was number one, it was like, “Don’t ever come down here again, motherfuckers. Don’t fucking come down here.” I felt shut down when they’d come and stand there. I’d be like, “Nobody with a suit is allowed on this stage.” They’re just judging and you feel the weight of them. They’re looking for a flaw. They’re waiting to hurt you.
Judd: How much of that, in retrospect, was bad management or treating talent like a piece of meat or a commodity?
Roseanne: It was treating talent with contempt—and it wasn’t just me. It was just the way it was then. I’m glad to see people are taking more control of their product these days, but back then it was like, whoa, they just, they didn’t respect talent. They had to humiliate and belittle people who had talent.
Judd: That’s how they controlled things.
Roseanne: It’s a pimp mentality.
Judd: How did you take control of your show?
Roseanne: I’d be standing there during the filming, crying. I got a woman manager after every fucking guy would say the same shit: “Shut up and take it, you’re getting paid.” So I got, like, Diane Keaton’s manager, and she was very well connected with Freddie Field and people like that, so she had power. And she was like, “Your star is in tears on this comedy. Do you even notice that at all?” She hooked me up with the lawyer Barry Hirsch. And I told him, “I’ve got to get off. I’m going to die. I’ve got to quit.” There was one big day on set where I was sitting on the bed and the director and the producer were like, “Say the line as written.” And I was like, “I’m not going to say the line as written,” because Barry Hirsch had told me you can say, “I’d like a new line, please.” It’s a Guild thing. They were like, “You’re not going to get it.” But then their lawyers would tell them, “You can’t force somebody to say a line.” So Barry gave me the language to say, “I’d like a line change, please.” And it ended up they made me do it for six hours, and then they came back with some legal shit on the loudspeaker with the cameras on. And then that shit gets back to the network and they’re like, “Look what a pain in the ass she is. She needs to go.” So they asked all the cast if they’d do the show without me, and John Goodman said no. If he had said yes like a lot of other fucking people in show business, I would have been off there in a heartbeat. And I was like, Fuck that. I made it for this? All this way to have my fucking act stolen and be beaten down and disrespected?