TV

EW Presents...

Continued

Checking In With Kathie Lee

More

Previous Page 2 of 2

[BOLD "KATHIE LEE GIFFORD THEN"] ''When I first started on the show with Regis, the tabloid world was not what it is today. I could talk about my life and not read about it a week later, completely morphed into something that it was never meant to be.''

Skull/Rangefinders/Globe

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: All right, time to share my all-time favorite Regis and Kathie Lee memory. TV Guide put you on a ballot in 1990 where readers could vote for the most beautiful woman on TV. You were so shocked that you were on it that you campaigned on the show and you ended up winning. You remember this, don't you?
KATHIE LEE GIFFORD: By 15,000 votes! I beat Jaclyn Smith!

That had to have been when you realized the reach of the show.
When this thing happened with TV Guide, I remember my assistant called me. She says, ''Well, there's good news and bad news. '' I said, ''What?'' She goes, ''The TV Guide has just announced 50 contestants for the most beautiful woman on television, and you're one of them.'' And I went, ''What?!'' And I said, ''Okay, what's the bad news?'' She goes, ''Well, you're number 49 out of 50.'' I remember thinking, ''Well, I don't who 50 was, but I felt really bad for them. Okay, this is comic gold — I just have to mine this thing.'' I never dreamed for a second that I deserved such a title. But there are going to be people in life that are never going to get the joke — and I don't ever want to be one of those kinds of people that can't enjoy as something silly as that is.

Is that what drives your critics so mad? That you make fun of yourself, too? Because you certainly polarize people.
Anybody that takes a stand in today's world is a polarizing person. And if people are going to like me or dislike me I want it to be on an honest basis. Most people who don't like me, frankly, never even watched the show. They just believed what other people did or said or wrote about me. And I know the truth about myself. I can live with that. What I would never be able to live with is if I was selling some sort of lie about myself. Am I a perfect person? Absolutely not. But was I that person they wrote about? Absolutely not. The lies are what sell. And it's all probably going to come to the surface now coming on to the show again. There are many, many people out there that choose to be ignorant about me and about many other people as well. Because lining up the facts just doesn't fit with what they want to think about me. And so they just choose to ignore it, and you know what? That kind of person, you're never going to change their mind.

Do you ever look at the current culture — which is so fixated on the minute details of the lives of anybody even remotely famous — and think, ''Thank God I don't have to get up and sit on that stool and talk about my life''?
Yeah, I am very grateful that I don't have to make a living anymore talking about my life. Because when I first started on the show with Regis, the tabloid world was not what it is today. I could talk about my life and not read about it a week later, completely morphed into something that it was never meant to be. That was a very big contributing factor to the sense of weariness. I started to edit myself. So at that point, I decided to go in and out of the spotlight when it was healthy to do so. We had been living under a microscope, and that burns everything in its path. It's just too hot. It's too unforgiving. And it's too cruel.

You haven't been on Live in seven years. Are you nervous about returning?
I'm not nervous at all! It's like going home! We've all seen one another through the years and Regis was just at my home in Nantucket. I'm just honored and delighted to be a part of it. We're just gonna do a lot of reminiscing, they're going through all the archives — I mean, the tapes, the mountains and mountains of tapes! I'm going with the exact same expectation that I had every morning that I got up here in Connecticut and drove in to New York to do the show. I'm expecting to have a ball. Because for most of the mornings I did that show — I think I had one sick day in 15 years, I came back after five weeks after both children — most of the days that I was there were fabulous. Of course we had our tough days, who doesn't? People tried to make it a huge thing about my relationship with [Live's Michael] Gelman all those years, and think about it: We had one executive producer for 15 years. If we had hated each other's guts, believe me, that would not have been the case. We just disagreed occasionally on something, and we were honest with each other about our feelings. But there was always mutual respect there; I was doing my job and he was doing his. I think Rosie had something like five to seven executive producers her first year on her show. It's a hard thing to find someone that sort of shares your vision. And Gelman has stuck it out and he's done a great job.

Okay, so final question — and this one's a little personal. You're writing musicals and aiming for Broadway now. The EW offices are in the Theater District and a lot of the gay bars around here have special musical nights where they welcome some stage star onstage. You need to do that. Trust me — there's a whole generation of younger gays who grew up with you on their TV. I think they'd eat it up.
Oh, thank you! It's interesting — in all the years that I was on the show, I had a very strong gay following and I always cherished that, you know? That they didn't think that because of my faith that I was some sort of intolerant, condemning, self-righteous person. I never got that from them. I got a lot of criticism from the faith world, believe me, for the choices I made through the years. I think people are sometimes afraid of somebody who's different from themselves simply because they don't know it. I think anybody that can only stay in their own pew, people who think and act and believe every way exactly the same, I mean...you want to talk about living a boring life. So I've always sensed tremendous support from the gay community and I'm very, very grateful for it, so I'm going to take your advice and I thank you very much for it. I'm supposed to do a show right now in Queens — how perfect! If I do it, I'm going to call you back and you give me the name of the best gay bar in New York and I'll do it.