(3 of 4)
She has a reputation in the film community for being difficult. "I've thrown tantrums," she says with a grin, "but it's always about work. Incompetence makes me mad. It sucks up your energy for what you're supposed to do. But it's never personal, unless you make it personal, and then I will just embarrass you as big as I can." The filming of Sister Act was tension time, she admits. The script wasn't ready and didn't flow logically. "I was crabby because things weren't right."
Whoopi thinks the talk show is "probably not a great career move. I should be riding the crest, doing films." But, she says, she wanted to find out what's on people's minds. Metzger, the white supremacist, told her that separation of the races is important, "and I said, 'Where are you people going, because I sure as hell ain't leaving.' I'm not going to change his mind, but I think as long as we keep a dialogue up, you can see where their hands are. They can't be out in the streets doing the other stuff." One sponsor, a pharmaceutical company, said it wouldn't run its commercials on the Metzger show. "So I had to say, 'Then don't.' "
Politics in Los Angeles means how you feel about the riots (which were, she says, basically former Police Chief Daryl Gates' bleep-you to the city). Goldberg sees some hope. "At least blacks can now say to Korean grocers, 'You are rude when we come into the store,' and the Koreans can say, 'When you come into the store, we're frightened.' " Filming Sarafina! in Soweto last winter (she plays a courageous teacher in the musical, which will be released this week in New York City and Los Angeles), Whoopi was the target of a "declaration of war" by a black group opposed to the project. "We talked it over," she says, "and the problem was more or less fixed. But, yeah, you feel fear. They had issued a license to any nut who wanted to take me out." As usual, death threats or not, she was thoroughly professional for the filming. She arrived in South Africa with her accent down pat, according to Darrell Roodt, 29, the white director. Her acting is wonderfully instinctive, he says, and watching her, he would think, "My God, she's a schoolteacher in Soweto."
Whoopi has been one of the rowdy, trash-talking co-hosts, with Robin Williams and Billy Crystal, of the virtually annual Comic Relief TV shows to aid the homeless. Spend time with her, and you see that the raunchiness isn't part of her act; it's part of her nature. Clowning between takes with a photographer, she improvises a gross-out commercial, drip-drip-drip, for adult diapers. Ghost star Demi Moore reports that things got cheerfully vulgar during the shooting of that film. "She'd say, 'It's coming, I feel it coming,' and then let out a belch. It was so great. She just kept us laughing."