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For a star, he gives very few interviews, perhaps because he feels that he has no reason to explain himself. "1 know where I'm at," he says. "I was running before, and I didn't know it. I want to have the rich full life a young man in my position has the opportunity to have. But if anything happens and I'm not able to continue my career, I won't be sorry. I've had my chance, and I gave it my best shot. I have never met a better man than me. There's no one else I'd rather have been. I may not be better than you, but I'm goddam equal."
When he does give an interview, he turns off the moment that the questions get around to his offstage life—to the pretty girls who are special guests in his dressing room on taping days, often a different one each week; to his apparently estranged relations with Blondell; to his early life and his family back in Jersey City.
Flip is known to fly to Miami several weekends a year to visit Blondell and the children: David, 11: Kevin, 9; Tammy, 5, and one-year-old Stephanie. They live in an expensive house in a predominantly white neighborhood on the city's northwest side. The children also spend part of the summer with their father in Hollywood. Blondell seems to share Flip's passion for privacy. Neither she nor the children mix much with the neighbors, and recently she went so far as to call the police when a reporter sought to interview her.
Standing Offer. Flip quietly returns to Jersey City fairly regularly too, looking up old haunts and visiting with his brothers and sisters. Many of them have succumbed to the ghetto syndrome of poor jobs, welfare and—in two cases—jail. Like any other family with such a history, they sometimes reflect a mood of bitterness and envy. Perhaps inevitably, that mood can occasionally focus on Flip, producing a complaint that he is not doing all that a rich and successful brother should do.
But the evidence is not all against Flip. A few years ago, an electrician named Leroy Taylor, who had served as a father figure for Flip and several other kids in the neighborhood, learned that he had terminal cancer and committed suicide. Flip made a special trip to attend the funeral and paid all the expenses. He also sends money to his family, and has made a standing offer to underwrite any niece or nephew who wants to go to college. One who will take him up on it is Wilbur Wilson, a senior at Jersey City's Lincoln High School and an all-county and all-state linebacker. "He's concerned about us," says Wilbur. "He seems like an emotional person. When he comes home, he likes to sit down and talk to someone. It seems like it relieves him."
Whether it does or not. Flip will not say. Of the true nature of his family ties, or his feelings about his past, or even whether he has another 15-year plan for the future, there is no telling. "My show is my statement," he says. "What I have to say is on the screen. My life is my own. I don't want to talk about my private self. Why should I?" It is the same with Flip as with Geraldine. What you see, honey, is what you get.