An Open Letter to Catherine O’Hara
Photo by Rich Polk/Getty Images Entertainment / Getty Images
Dear Ms. O’Hara:
The only time I was starstruck during my entire 20-plus years of living in the world’s entertainment capital was when I met you.
I I lived in L.A. for about twenty years. I didn’t work in the business, but I was a creative professional (I worked for start ups mostly) and all my friends, barring only two, do work in the industry. Before our awkward meeting in a Beverly Hills hair salon (and more on that below), I met plenty of famous people. Fame is to L.A. what rain is to Seattle. I saw Rita Moreno’s Oscar sitting on her piano when I was 19 while she asked me if I wanted a soda. Fame, and being close to it, is something you accept about life in the film and entertainment capital, right?
My hairdresser, or more accurately our hairdresser, is a lovely funny guy who grew up in Manchester, England in the 70s. (Did you know he knew the original members of the post-punk group The Smiths?) Let’s call him Chad. Chad is very much a rocker and our mutual interest in music and culture made it that much more fun to sit in his chair. I started going to him in 2001, following him from salon to salon until he ended up with his own shop on Robertson.
After I’d been his client for probably 13 or 14 years, we found ourselves talking about the film Spinal Tap.
Your longtime collaborator Christopher Guest came up because if you’re talking about Spinal Tap, of course he did. Chad asked me if I was a fan of his films.
“Lifelong,” I said. “I think he’s brilliant.”
“Oh, one of my clients is in a lot of his films.”
I’m pretty sure even knowing that Chad’s hand had touched a single head of any of the cast members of Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, or A Mighty Wind set my heart pounding. It was immediately obvious to him that the dorking out had started. I tried to sound cool when I said: “Which one?” Then Chad said your name and I sucked all the air out of the room. He knew me well pretty well by then. He saw me greet a few famous or fame-adjacent actors right in his very salon without incident. (For fuck’s sake, The Smiths was my favorite band as a teenager and I didn’t act like that when he told me he knew Johnny Marr since they all teenagers.)
“Are you a fan?” Chad asked.
“That’s not the word for it,” I said.
I made Chad promise me that he’d tell me when you were coming in so I could prepare myself.
“Dude,” I said, “imagine that, like, Jimmy Page was going to be in the same room as you. Or Ritchie Blackmore. You’d want to know, right?”
“Ohhhhh,” he said, nodding. “I get it. I may even have to tell her this story because she’ll find it…” Then I made Chad promise that he’d never breathe a word of this to you or I’d walk in front of an oncoming car on Robertson.
***
I was raised in one of those households where I needed the shiny promise of icons. I didn’t have enough solid role models around me, so like so many young people in that situation, I mined mine from show business. Funny ladies have been my idols for as long as I can remember.
In those days, the mid 70s, the only women that girls could look up to were actors. Women weren’t elected to public office yet. We weren’t yet commonly doctors, or lawyers, or leaders, or decision makers. Were in not for Barbara Walters, we wouldn’t have been T.V. news people, either. Most of the women I knew, like my mom and my friends’ mothers—if they worked at all—were resentful of the career paths they were forced to go into. Yes, they were professionals, but they were relegated largely to nursing, teaching, and dental hygiene. It’s not that I cast shame on their professions. It’s that these were not professions, or so they told me, that they would have chosen if they had a choice to make.
Funny ladies were the only women in power we, as a generation (I mean X), had to look up to. I worshipped Carol Burnett and Mary Tyler Moore. They both had hugely successful shows, and they were the professional funny ladies who impressed upon me that glamour wasn’t as important as quick or sharp or smart. They had fucking T.V. shows named after them.
I loved those funny ladies because I had this idea that they were women who chose something for themselves. I loved Vicky Lawrence. I loved all the women on Moore’s eponymous sitcom, especially the remarkable Betty White. My parents let me stay up to watch Saturday Night Live and I fell in love with those funny ladies, too.
The first time I saw a women read the news, it was Jane Curtin. I knew it was satire, but the way she held the room, her seriousness, her pure commitment to her stoicism, for a girl in the midwest with a troubled and distracted mother, Curtain’s stoicism, was code for...something important. I knew Curtain knew she was the joke, but she was making fun of the way that women weren’t taken seriously at all. (7 and 8-year-old girls understand that. We don’t need that explained to us.)
Gilda was a unicorn. If Carol Burnett felt like a mother figure, Gilda was a fairy godmother. How many little girls in the mid to late 70s were running around their houses doing lousy Rosanna Rosanna Danna impressions?
As a little girl, I recognized that funny ladies were all defined by their sexuality. Consider that the other women on TV were on shows like Charlie’s Angels and Three’s Company. At some point, even when you’re in grade school, you know that there’s no earthly way that you’re ever in a zillion years going to grow up to be a leggy blonde like Farrah. But maybe you could be smart and funny writer...like Gilda.
My childhood best friend and I became SCTV obsessives in the very early 80s. By then, the original cast of SNL had moved on and without the original ladies (and, sure, Belushi, Akroid, and, the evergreen favorite from those years, Bill Murray) : I frankly wasn’t into it anymore. But my appetite for funny ladies lingered.
Enter SCTV.
It was a very adult show in its way, because you and the rest of the cast made very adult references to very adult things. We laughed at the Perry Como bit even though we didn’t get it. We loved Bob and Doug McKenzie. We loved Joe Flaherty’s Guy Caballero. I think we would have been happy just watching Eugene Levy talk because I’m reasonably sure that every time he opened his mouth, we started laughing.
The real reason we tuned in, though? You and Andrea Martin. You two quickly eclipsed every other funny lady to become my two favorite.My best friend used to walk around shouting, “I wanna bear your children.” I still watch Martin’s send up to second wave feminism, the “I'm Takin' My Own Head, Screwin' It On Right And No Guy's Gonna Tell Me That It Ain't!” bit and hurt myself. My parents didn’t introduce me to SCTV so your performances and the show felt like something I’d discovered on my own. Maybe that’s it’s still so special. It could also be that you and Martin are two of the great heroes of modern comedy. Yeah. Let’s go with that.
Your stellar run continued throughout my life, and while to many people you were the “mom from Home Alone,” I remember your absurdly funny turns in Beetlejuice and After Hours.
Christopher Guest’s films introduced you to a new legion of fans in the mid and lat3 1990s. I was in my mid 20s when Guffman came out, and your performances in them remained an affirmation of everything I’d always adored about your next-level skills. If you were a relatively obscure character actor before those films, you weren’t afterwards.
***
It was my birthday (an early 40-something which I can’t specifically remember) and I was spending part of it getting my hair done. Chad had just put the color on my roots to cover my gray and he walked away to leave the color simmering under plastic. When I looked up, the first thing I saw was your reflection in the mirror. You were sitting under the dryer in a chair against the back wall facing me.
Here’s the thing. Yes, I’d seen famous people and actors and musicians and celebrities many times. I’d never, until that moment, seen one of my idols. I’m sure if I had ever been in the same room with Gilda or Ms. Burnett or Prince or Stevie Wonder or David Bowie, I would have done the same thing. As it was, the first idol I was ever in a room with (when that idol wasn’t performing on a very, very large stage) happened to be you.
Our eyes met and I had the feeling that others call starstruck. It’s all true, what they say. You feel helpless and a little stupid. You hope both beyond anything else that this stranger who isn’t really a stranger speaks to you in some meaningful way but also completely ignores you because there’s no way you’re going to be able to put sentences--actual words--in any coherent order.
You saw all this in my face instantly and formed a patient smile. Your expression said, “I see you.” I smiled back like “I’m really not insane” and then you went back to your magazine and I went back to feeling like an idiot.
Chad introduced us after your time under the dryer was up. I tried telling you how much you meant to me, and that…did not go well. That whole adulation thing was (is?) clearly awkward for you. There was no way for me to make that interaction less awkward. The more I talked, the worse I made it. You politely went to sit while Chad turned finished my haircut.
Of course, I was mortified. He thought it was hilarious.
“I’ve never thought of you as someone who was short on words,” he said.
“I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN,” I said and by then, everyone (including you) was laughing. We didn’t speak again and when I left I sped past you and pretended like it was all normal.
***
It’s been quite a journey to watch you on Schitt’s Creek. When I watched the pilot, Moira instantly felt like a throwback to Mrs. Powell from Gilligan’s Island, but in a good way. Both of those characters are women of a certain age accustomed to lavishness who become shipwrecked. Moira Rose isn’t trapped on an island, but she is certainly marooned and forced to make the best of it.
Moira’s wall of wigs is one of the best visual gags I can think of in recent memory from any comedy. What isn’t funny are those outfits. You and the costume and hair team serve you up looks that are the perfect balance of elegance and camp. Dressed exclusively in inherently gorgeous and sometimes avant garde clothing, Moira becomes legitimately other worldly.
You and the show around you found the balance of making her a stranger in a strange land that she also graces with her presence. You inhabit a woman who floats through a world she’ll never understand. Her neighbors humor her and welcome her because she is, beneath it all, lovable.
You know who else Moira reminds me of?
If there’s two more women who I’d also metaphorically trip over myself in front of: it’s Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley of Absolutely Fabulous fame. (Lady Saunders, if you’re reading this, know that if I’m ever in a room with you, I will repeat the same blundering introduction I did to the subject of this letter. You’ve been warned.)
I read an interview with Saunders during the height of Ab Fab’s international popularity, and she was quick to remind everyone that while her looks were played for laughs (squeezing herself into the most ill-fitting and inappropriate sparkly fashions is one of the show’s super powers), Lumley’s Patsy Stone was always the very picture of elegance. I wish I could find the quote, but Saunders said something along the lines of Lumley had the dual burden of being funny and look like a supermodel at the same time, which made her performance all the more extraordinary. She could have said the very same thing about you.
Like Ab Fab, Schitt’s Creek is moored to fashion. Fashion is the one indulgence the Roses can’t let go of. The audience isn’t told that. We see it. We don’t know where those outfits come from (How can they still afford them? Did they pack all of them in the rush to get out of New York? Are David and Moira just really, really attentive Poshmarkers?). But the Rose family has a look that they can’t, or won’t, let go of.
Can we also just talk about those looks for a hot minute? On what other sit com could an actor like Dan Levy rock it in Rick Owens? How about how Annie Murphy looks enviably good and on trend and how as her character evolves, so do her clothes? Oh, and kudos to whomever suggested that Eugene Levy exclusively sport those modern Mark Jacobs-y suits. Good lord. The man is in his 70s and he is donning skinny suits suitable for awards season every damned week.
(Speaking of Eugene: are there ever moments where the two of you, who have worked together so much that you are by some definition a comedy duo, just have a laugh that these two Second City Toronto alumns who made names for yourselves on a Canadian T.V. show are wearing Channel and Armani in your 60s and 70s?)
That visual story has given you the opportunity to showcase career-setting glamour that makes me happy to be alive to have seen it. As a lifelong superfan of both you and your on-screen husband, you’re showing us middle-aged X-er women (me) how to do age. I hope you know how important that is to a lot of us.
A few months after our awkwardness, my husband and I rented an SCTV DVD anniversary set which includes a mini doc about the making of the show. You lament during an interview seated next to Martin that the two of you weren’t we paid as writers and performers like the boys were. I didn’t know until that interview that one of my female heroes had faced such blatant sexism and discrimination.
It’s important that all your fans, especially the younger ones who discovered you from Schitt’s Creek, know that both you and Andrea Martin--the very reasons that legions of other girls my age tuned in to watch that show--were only paid as actors. That cannot be another one of history’s fucking footnotes. I doubt for a second that anyone, including your fellow SCTV alums (Martin Short, Levy, Dave Thomas, Rick Moranis, and even John Candy were he still alive) would argue that you were less funny or less deserving of a writer’s paycheck than they were.
(You probably know this, but my readers may not. Carol Burnett, even as the executive producer of her landmark successful television show, was not allowed in the writer’s room. Nor was she allowed to give any of the writers notes because she was a woman. Even though it was her own show. No notes. To her writers. Who literally worked for her.)
***
A few months ago in a St. Louis bar after I saw a friend’s play, a drunk girl a kabillion years my junior walked up to me and said, “You know who you look like?”
She messed with her phone and held up a recent photo of you.
“My boyfriend thinks I’m crazy but I swear you look JUST LIKE THE MOM IN HOME ALONE. Do you watch that TV show Schitt’s Creek?”
Here’s the thing: I look absolutely nothing like you. Objectively, I mean. We look nothing alike. When that young drunk woman saw me, though, I was standing around a group of people making them all laugh, talking in a loud boomy voice that I learned from you (and Gilda and Carol and Mary and Tina and Amy and Jane and Lorraine and Bernadette and Jennifer and Joanna and Madeline) is nothing I should never, ever be ashamed of. You were all the ones who taught me, in your own way, that if I wasn’t being heard, I should just talk louder.
The people around me and her weren’t sure how to respond to her drunken declaration, probably because of the age thing. Women are trained to react negatively to it, and maybe those people who surrounded me thought I’d be insulted that a drunk woman a kabillion years my junior told me I looked like a woman nearly 20 years my senior.
I said, “She’s one of my heroes. I take that as a huge compliment.”
Congratulations on your final season of Schitt’s Creek. Congratulations on your Emmy nomination. I hope you’re enjoying this ride as much as the rest of us are.
With respect and admiration,
Rachel
For Further Reading
In the actor’s own words about her journey playing Moira Rose (Los Angeles Times).
SCTV is getting its own documentary! (Hollywood Reporter)
O’Hara Performances That You Must See Before You Die
SCTV’s years were spread between several executive producers, one of whom was SNL EP Lorne Michaels. As such, the digital rights are complicated so it doesn’t currently have a life as a streaming property, which is a tragedy.
You can buy the disc collections. (I know. Who buys discs anymore?) Still: if you never give yourself the chance to see one of the greatest ensembles in the history of TV comedies, you’re missing out. You’ll also meet a young Eugene Levy and other breakout stars like John Candy and Martin Short.
O’Hara SCTV Moments
1970s television in America was still defined by the variety special, so SCTV got a lot of mileage from spoofing them. Enter O’Hara’s Dusty Towne and her Sexy Holiday Special. (She’s so excited, and she’s happy, too!)
A note for young millennials: Solid Gold was a real show, it had real dancers and Martin’s send up of those dancers is so accurate, it barely qualified as parody.
O’Hara’s go-to character was the incredible and often pathetic Lola Heatheroton. This clip happens to be one of my favorites. Around the three-minute mark, Levy enters as his one of his best recurring SCTV characters, the also (sorta) washed up Bobby Bitman.
Another note to the millennials: no, they’re not fat shaming anyone. They were lampooning the entertainment press that was, at the time, torturing Elizabeth Taylor for her weight gain. If anything, they were shaming the press for their merciless fat shaming of Taylor. (Seriously, Taylor couldn’t do any live interviews during that time without someone, usually a man, reminding her of how much weight she’d put on.)
You haven’t lived until you’ve seen her do her impersonation of famed, late T.V. evangelist Tammy Fay Baker, which she did often. The context of the impression in a note-perfect mascara commercial parody is priceless.
Oh, and here’s that interview where O’Hara talks about chauvinism and fighting for representation in the writer’s room.
O’Hara’s Stellar Film Moments
Beetlejuice
Her turn as Winona Ryder’s hysterical, materialistic stepmother is required viewing. An internet hero pulled this moment from the film and threw it up on YouTube because he cares about all of us.
The Films of Christopher Guest
Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, A Mighty Wind. See them, quote them, sing them. Oh, how about that one time that O’Hara and Levy performed a song from A Mighty Wind on the Academy Awards? In character. Yes. That happened. You’re welcome.
Waiting for Guffman Trailer:
Best in Show Trailer
A Mighty Wind Trailer
Six Feet Under
Six Feet Under was not a funny show, although it always rode a strict line between melodrama and black comedy. The producers smartly squeezed O’Hara into its third season as Lisa’s (Lily Taylor) demanding boss, Carol Ward. Ward feels a lot like O’Hara’s other classic characters (insecure, wounded, attention-seeking), but this is one of the first roles where she had the opportunity to demonstrate what a skilled and reliable actor she is. All comedians will tell you that what they’re doing is what any other actor is doing, it’s just that the film or show around them that’s funny. O’Hara’s Ward is just as over the top as anything she’s ever done; in this context, though she is tragic, piteous, and, at times, hilarious.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Funkhouser’s cray cray sister Bam Bam is a fucking tour-de-force guest star appearance. It doesn’t even matter if you have the context for the story or the other characters; just watch this episode for her and her performance alone (2009, “Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister”).
Temple Grandin
HBO’s 2010 movie about animal rights activist Temple Grandin brought with it a lot of awards buzz that year, including a Best Supporting Actress Emmy nomination for O’Hara (her first). Based on Grandin’s book “Emergence,” the story follows her life from a young woman diagnosed with severe autism to her professional success. O’Hara’s Aunt Ann is probably the most straight role she’s ever played. The film is worth watching for other reasons, but O’Hara’s performance is careful and thoughtful. It’s hardly surprising she got a nomination for it.