After the sudden death of her mother in 2010, Whoopi Goldberg and her older brother secretly scattered her remains at Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” attraction. “We didn’t get caught, but I confessed it later to a park employee,” she confides in her new memoir. “They weren’t surprised, and they certainly were not happy about it.”
The View cohost and Oscar winner’s relationship with her mother, Emma, and brother, Clyde, whom she lost in 2015, are the centerpiece of her new memoir, Bits and Pieces: My Mother, My Brother, and Me, set to be released on May 7. “I’m not raving angry, but I resent the fact that my mom and Clyde aren’t here anymore,” says the star, 68, who admits that from her earliest days, her mother and brother were her anchors. Recognizing the combined loss “was the first time I felt like an adult, totally on my own,” she says.
Born Caryn Johnson in New York City, Whoopi recalls her early childhood as happy. Emma shielded her children from their family’s financial hardships and helped her daughter to deal with her dyslexia by reading to her. She saved up to create wonderful Christmas celebrations for her kids, complete with gifts under the tree and a trip to see the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. “As a little kid, I always felt secure and loved,” says Whoopi. “I thought everything would come out OK because my mom was in charge.”
That changed suddenly. Whoopi arrived home from elementary school one afternoon and found her mother in the midst of a mental breakdown. Whoopi likely saved Emma’s life, but she and Clyde wouldn’t see her again for two years. When Emma finally returned, she didn’t recognize her children due to the electroshock therapy she’d undergone. “This woman in our living room looked like my mom and sounded like my mom,” Whoopi relates. “But it wasn’t her.”
Whoopi’s Long Road
In Bits and Pieces, Whoopi also takes a long, hard look at her own life. She admits that she succeeded as a performer — becoming the first Black woman to become an EGOT recipient — at the expense of others. Her relationship with her only child, daughter Alexandra, has been complicated. “It occurred to me that I had kind of done to Alex what had happened to me in my childhood when my mom was hospitalized,” says Whoopi. “I often had to be away…. When you’re 8 or 9, you just want your mom around.”
Today, Whoopi is a mom, grandmother of three and great-grandmother. However, the three-times divorced star is done searching for a romantic partner and admits she’s happiest on her own. “Some people are not meant to be married, and I am not meant to,” she has said. “You have to really be committed to them…. I don’t have that commitment. I’m committed to my family.”
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