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<body topmargin=0 leftmargin=0 marginheight=0 marginwidth=0> <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0 height="100%"><tr> <td valign="top" width=97 BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <B><IMG SRC="a854e6b0.jpg" border=0 width="78" height="107" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></B></div> <bR> <div> <B>MENU</B></div> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Ricki Online"><U><B>What's New?</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id8.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Transcripts"><U><B>Transcripts</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id3.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Biography"><U><B>Biography</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id2.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Filmography"><U><B>Filmography</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id9.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Image Gallery"><U><B>Photo Gallery</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id42.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="The Ricki Lake Image Index"><U><B>Ricki Lake Show Image Archives</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="index.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Ricki Online"><U><B>Ricki Reviews</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id6.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="TV Schedule"><U><B>TV Schedule</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id4.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="About the Site"><U><B>About Ricki Online</B></U></A><A HREF="id4.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="About the Site"><U><B> Site</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id10.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Quiz"><U><B>Quiz</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id5.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Links"><U><B>Links</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="id7.htm" TARGET="_top" TITLE="Copyright Terms of Use"><U><B>Terms of Use</B></U></A></div> <div> <A HREF="http://www.rickiworld.com/" TARGET="_top" TITLE="http://www.rickiworld.com/"><U><B>Ricki World</B></U></A></div> <bR> <bR> <bR> <bR> <div>  </div> <bR> </td> <td valign="top" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#080000"> <div> <TABLE BORDER="1" CELLPADDING="1" CELLSPACING="1" WIDTH="695" BORDERCOLORLIGHT="#FFFFFF" BORDERCOLORDARK="#FFFFFF" FRAME="BOX" RULES="ALL" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" > <tR> <tD VALIGN=TOP HEIGHT= 2617 WIDTH="520"><div> <B>Reign</B></div> <div> <B>or Shine?</B></div> <div> <B>Can you be a rising young actress </B></div> <div> <B>and the queen of trash TV? </B></div> <div> <B>Ricki Lake finds it tough to </B></div> <div> <B>wear two crowns.</B></div> <div> By Anne Thompson</div> <bR> <div> In her frantic New York talk-show-host mode, Ricki Lake is getting ready to tape two shows back to back at the Ricki Lake studio on East 37th Street in Manhattan.  She listens to the Now and Then soundtrack in the hair and makeup room as she gets a qwuick trim of her mod third-season bubble cut.  A publicist announces, "The Dutch are her." "Are you serious?" Lake asks.  She drops her cockapoo, Dudley, and rushed down the hall to a conference room jammed with 10 reportefrs.  As the heavily accented questions begin, she's utterly poised.  What made her want to do a talk show? "I wanted a job," she says, smiling.  Is she worried about the competition? "I wish them the best of luck, as long as we're number two."  On the eightth floor, the audience for the Ricki Lake show is waiting for the woman who will guide them through an hour that virtur scribe William Bennett and his conservative pals have labeled along with other talk shows, as cheap, demeaning, exploitative, perverted, divisive, and immoral.  While Lake gets ready, psychology student Monique La Barbera and hr mother, Francine, sit in the risers, excited.  They've come from Brooklyn to see the show.  "She's the sweetest," says Monique.  "I find her the most sincere."</div> <div> Supervising producer Stuart Krasnow runs onto the stage and reminds the crowd that it's supposed to be "the loudest audience in television history!" Lake's fans roar on cue as she bounces in wearing pancake makeup, red lipstick, a white turtleneck, a brown jacket, leggings, and clogs. "Go, Ricki!" chants the crowd. </div> <div> "How many of you came here today to get on TV?" she asks. They whoop. </div> <div> And now for the important social issue of the day: "Surprise! I Want You to Be the Father of My Baby!" leads off with a pretty young woman who wants her best girlfriend's boyfriend to impregnate her. "Lorraine, what kind of cockamamy idea is this?" asks Lake from the aisle. "You want his sperm?" </div> <div> In the wings, executive producer Gail Steinberg, a small, no-nonsense woman in her late 40s who created the show with former TV boy wonder Garth Ancier, scrawls questions in black marker on sheets of cardboard and holds them up. Lake largely ignores them. As five young men are paraded out to be stunned by each woman's announcement, the audience is caught up in the drama. So, it seems, is the breathless, ever-empathic Lake. "There are other guys out there who would make great fathers," she earnestly tells one crestfallen woman. </div> <div> "If I were you, I'd be freaked out," she says to one Alaskan hunk. </div> <div> "I am freaked out," he replies. </div> <div> At show's end the would-be couples line up. "My husband and I have been married a year and a half," Lake informs the group, "and we are still not ready to have kids." </div> <div> "Go, Ricki!" chants the audience. </div> <div> "CHEZ RICKI," says the door to Lake's office, a tiny room cluttered with posters for John Waters' Hairspray (her 1988 debut film) and Melrose Place. But before you enter, you can spy, on the anteroom floor, a stack of labeled videotapes that display the show's confrontational topics: "Back Off, Boys, I'm a Lesbian--You'll Never Have Me!"; "Yeah, I'm Only 13, But I'm Going to Have a Baby!"; "You Have No Friends and Today I'll Tell You Why!"; "You Think It's Okay to Hit Me, But Today the Abuse Must Stop!"; "Today I Nominate You the Worst Boyfriend in America!" </div> <div> Between shows, Lake curls up on the small sofa. "There's an empowerment to doing the show," she says. "It's just manic. The audience all wants to say something. In the beginning, they're giving me a standing ovation, and by the end, they're all pissed at me that they didn't get their question asked. Beyond that, there's keeping the guests straight, making sure they don't talk on top of each other, getting the purpose of the show out, plus watching for the cues to go to a commercial break." </div> <div> One wall in Lake's office is dominated by a large framed reproduction of a Monopoly "Get Out of Jail Free" card, a gift from buddy Krasnow following her much-publicized arrest with her husband, artist Rob Sussman, in November 1994 for trespassing and criminal mischief during an anti-fur protest. She loves showing the picture of herself with the jail official who frisked her and then said, "You're so tiny!" Replied Lake: "You think so? Thanks!" (Lake and Sussman pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct and received a sentence of community service: four days feeding AIDS patients.) </div> <div> "It was probably a lot how Hugh Grant felt," she says. "Every channel was waiting outside the jail. I truly didn't know how famous I was. I wouldn't do it again." Lake did her scheduled Letterman appearance right after 25 hours in jail. "Rob and I took showers in the dressing room and put on Late Show T-shirts," she recalls. "I didn't realize I'd have to defend myself on national television. Letterman was the most terrifying hour of my life. I was shaking. It was a nightmare. We couldn't go home. We had to stay in a hotel that night." </div> <div> IT SHOULD SURPRISE nobody that Lake's favorite TV show is Melrose Place; hers is a Cinderella story for an age of hyperactive plot twists and short attention spans. Lake started out a funny fat girl from Westchester County, N.Y., who dreamed of acting. She landed her first starring role at 18 in Hairspray as the hip, hefty daughter of the drag queen Divine, dancing with camp abandon and winning raves. She quit Ithaca College to move to Hollywood, grabbed some small parts in studio movies, bought a house, and scored a recurring role on the TV drama China Beach. </div> <div> But after her Beach stint, Lake couldn't get arrested. She weighed 250 pounds. She lost her 3,500-square-foot home and could barely make the $550-a-month rent on a guest house in the Valley. Her agent wouldn't return her calls. She was stuck taking roles in straight-to-video projects like the cheezoid thriller Skinner for director (and ex-Heidi Fleiss beau) Ivan Nagy. </div> <div> After a two-year hibernation, Lake reemerged, having shed nearly 100 pounds, and flirted so effectively (by her own estimation) at an interview with Ancier and other execs for a new daytime talk show that she landed the job. She moved to a modest two-bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village and began to stage a major comeback. </div> <div> Ricki Lake now airs in 216 markets, wins a large portion of the prized daytime audience of 18- to 34-year-old women, and is second only to The Oprah Winfrey Show (and sometimes third, behind Jenny Jones) in the overcrowded talk-show wars; Ricki Lake occasionally beats Oprah in England. Ricki's average of 4.5 million viewers inspired a raft of wannabes (see sidebar) and attracted the wrath of conservative watchdogs. But unlike most of her rivals, Lake herself--and not her no-holds-barred topics--drives the show's popularity. </div> <div> At 27, the size-8 baby mogul, says one Lake confidant, could earn as much as $10 million this year--all for doing the thing that she started to do only because she couldn't do what she really wanted: act. So forgive her the very mixed emotions with which she greets her success. "I really like what I do, talking to the 200 people who come in every day, who genuinely care about me," says Lake. "But it's not what I imagined myself doing when I was a kid. I've done a lot of these shows three times now. We've done 'My Boyfriend Is Cheating on Me' in 20 different ways. So it's a constant challenge to remain interested." And when she can't? Well, as she races off to tape her second show, one can't help but feel that Lake's acting skills may be getting a workout after all. </div> <div> BURLY SECURITY guards flank the exits for the second show, "Woman vs. Woman: Ricki, Please Help Us Settle Our Neighborhood Catfight." Lake, wearing a new jacket, fastens her seat belt. "Racist pigs," a jaunty Mexican-American calls two haughty young white women. "These Caucasians think white is right." </div> <div> The audience boos the white women, who hurl back epithets at their attackers. Lake can't wedge a word in. "One at a time," she begs. </div> <div> Next up: Two foxy babes, one a stripper, compete over outfits and men. Lake plays to the crowd: "Which one of you is the hootchie mama?" </div> <div> "Both of them!" the audience yells. </div> <div> When a young man stands to tell one overweight female guest, "You gotta go on a diet," Lake grimaces. She puts an arm around the woman and reassures her that no, that comment will not appear on the broadcast</div> <div> Outside, after the show, three middle-aged women head home. "I told you Ricki Lake was trash," declares one. </div> <div> "Her topics are stupid," pronounces another. </div> <div> "No," insists the third. "She's real." </div> <div> LAST SUMMER, LAKE took a step toward her own desire to return to the movies. Thanks to her slim figure and mass audience, she's carrying a major studio film, playing the title role in TriStar's Mrs. Winterbourne--once played by Barbara Stanwyck in 1950's No Man of Her Own and later developed for Madonna--opposite Brendan Fraser and Shirley MacLaine. "She goes with the punches," says Lake of her character. "And through it all, her dreams come true." </div> <div> On a glorious day in Boston's North End, Lake, pretty in pink, stands next to Fraser, shooting a stroll down a cobbled street for director Richard Benjamin. Between takes, she perches on a director's chair, her heels replaced by sneakers. She distances herself from her ingenue-in-pearls character. "I bite my nails," she says, popping gum in her mouth and displaying her stubby fingers. "I'm over my black-nail-polish phase--now I'm into basic pink." </div> <div> Lake's character, 18-year-old Connie Doyle, starts out pregnant and abandoned on a Boston-bound train. She meets another pregnant young woman who is going to meet her husband's parents for the first time. When the train derails, the couple is killed, and hospitalized new mother Doyle, mistaken for the young Mrs. Winterbourne, goes along with it. "She's trapped in an impossible situation," says Benjamin, "trying to be something she's not in this environment she knows nothing about." </div> <div> If the title While You Were Sleeping has occurred to you, it's only natural; in fact when Sleeping raced into production while Winterbourne was in development, TriStar sued Disney and the filmmakers for copyright infringement (the case was settled out of court). But the similarity underscores the strangeness of Lake's budding film career. One hundred-odd pounds ago, she was like nobody else. In Hairspray, notes her director pal John Waters, "The fact that she started and became known as a fat girl made her a heroine to many types of outsiders." But now Lake is a trim, pretty young woman in an industry that's brimming with them; she's one of a dozen actresses who'd love to be the next Sandra Bullock but don't have her resume yet. </div> <div> Casting Lake as a romantic lead was not Benjamin's idea, but that of TriStar production executive Michael Besman. "We were looking for someone who could pop," he says. "It's not a siren role. It's about a wonderful, appealing person. Ricki has always had a guy--gorgeous guys, too. She's a very sexy girl." </div> <div> Lake was up for several ugly-duckling roles but held out for the ingenue. "It finally came to pass," she sighs. "This was a role Marisa Tomei or Winona Ryder could play. This wasn't one for Janeane Garofalo. This is breaking into a different category for me. The insecure ugly girl is so easy. It's scarier believing that I am a pretty girl. She is beautiful--she is a winner." </div> <div> Having continued to slim down for 4 1/2 years, Lake went the extra mile and hired a trainer to help her lose a final 17 pounds for the role. For the extended Winterbourne sequence that finds her in a wedding dress, "I never looked better, ever," she says proudly. "I wore a corset so my waist was as small as it could possibly go--24 inches." Lake's attention to her waistline is "constant for me. I study my behavior. It's all in my head. I [eat when I] have a bad day, feel disgusting, down on myself. I know I'll never be fat again. I'm so over talking about it. That's it. I seem to have it under control." She says it again. "I seem to have it under control." </div> <div> Producer Dale Pollock admits to some calculation in casting Lake. "Her doing the TV show is not a terrible thing for her visibility," he points out. "Her audience is precisely (Continued on page 24) the audience for a romantic comedy. What won us over was the charm of her personality. No one's pretending she's Julia Roberts, but she has lovely skin, great eyes. She glows on film. This is the first role where she is the star--she's not playing a fat girl or sidekick. That other person she lost." </div> <div> When Lake started Mrs. Winterbourne, she was far from sure that the person who was left could pull off a romantic lead. The first weekend of shooting, she expected to be fired. "I was terrified, in tears," she remembers. "For me it was all coming true, I had this part. And I felt more insecure than I've ever been. I was questioning my ability. Can I do this acting thing, carry a movie? I've been doing this talk-show thing for so long." </div> <div> Lake will have to wait until Mrs. Winterbourne's April 19 opening for the answer to that question, but her talk show will keep her busy until then--and with five years left on her contract with Columbia TriStar Television, as Waters points out, "she doesn't have much choice." </div> <div> "I have to bring home that bread," Lake says ruefully. "It's grueling. Nine months a year. Two to three shows a day. I'm feeling a little ambivalent." </div> <div> That may be putting it mildly. One of the paradoxes of Lake's flowering movie career is that the more successful she becomes on the big screen, the more her alter ego as the human face of trash TV becomes an unsightly professional blemish. In October, Connecticut senator Joseph Lieberman and William Bennett lashed out at Ricki Lake as "one of the worst offenders" among daytime TV talk shows. </div> <div> And even within the TV industry, Lake's show is respected more for its clout than for its class. Paul Kagan Associates' media analyst Larry Gerbrandt, who forbids his 12-year-old daughter to watch Ricki, thinks that because the show clicks with the MTV demographic, producers could afford to "clean it up a bit and make it more appetizing to advertisers." But with topics like "What Kind of Mother Are You? Stop Stripping and Get a Real Job!" that's unlikely to happen. "There are lots of lines we don't cross," insists exec producer Steinberg defensively. "We have ethical rules. We have real stories, real guests. Besides, young people are more comfortable with confrontation." </div> <div> While Lake says she's tired of having to "defend what I do," she candidly admits her discomfort with the program that has made her a brand name. "Yes, you see a lot of disturbing people on our stages," she says. "There are moments when I'm a little tweaked about stuff we do. I deal with people I probably wouldn't deal with in my everyday life. I don't know if I'll ever get used to it. I would like to get to the point where people see us like they see Oprah. </div> <div> "Lately we've been doing more upbeat, positive shows," she continues, "because we're under a microscope. We never went as far as a lot of these shows--a lot of the finger-pointing was unfounded. But we're being extra careful. It's my intention to do more upbeat shows, but in all honesty it's a mix." </div> <div> She's not looking forward to taping three shows in a row the next day. "Oh, it feels bad," she sighs. "It's like school vacation coming to an end. It's tough." </div> <div> Later this year, it's going to get tougher; Lake will face what may be stiff competition from a show hosted by comedian Rosie O'Donnell, whose flip outsider persona is, ironically, similar to the Lake of the Hairspray era. For now, though, she makes the best of things. "I'm probably one of the luckiest people I know," she says. "The show affords me the freedom of never having to take a job for money. I'm financially stable, my family is taken care of--quite a luxury. That's what I have to keep in perspective." </div> <div> Lake and her husband plan to start a family after she shoots another film during her summer hiatus. They're looking to buy a roomier Manhattan apartment and are collaborating on a children's book for Pocket Books, Sophie's Revenge, about a little fat girl who becomes a winner. And Lake has just signed a deal with ABC to produce two TV movies: "I don't want to produce sitcoms, I want to produce important things--do something good." </div> <div> When her contract expires--assuming Lake doesn't try to find some legal wiggle room before then--she'll be 32 and plans to retire from TV. "I want to go back to school to study architecture," she says, "be a mother, live in some other country somewhere." But it's hard to imagine her out of the spotlight for very long, especially since she's already proved herself so adept at finding it. "Everything's about a gimmick," she says wryly. "What salvaged my career was losing weight. Changing my physicality opened people's eyes to me again. Last year I'm in...now suddenly in Esquire I'm out. I probably am overexposed. I just wonder if there will be a day when they're sick of me, sick of the sound of my voice."</div> </tD> <tD VALIGN=TOP><NOBR><div> <IMG SRC="0a96f960.jpg" border=0 width="111" height="150" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="0aa96790.jpg" border=0 width="150" height="121" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="0ab60960.jpg" border=0 width="96" height="150" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="0ac6d960.jpg" border=0 width="109" height="150" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="0ae96850.jpg" border=0 width="150" height="133" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="0b0966f0.jpg" border=0 width="150" height="111" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="0b296740.jpg" border=0 width="150" height="116" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="0b496700.jpg" border=0 width="150" height="112" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <div> <IMG SRC="0b696820.jpg" border=0 width="150" height="130" ALIGN="BOTTOM" HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0"></div> <bR> <bR> </NOBR></tD> </tR> </TABLE></div> <bR> </td> </tr></table></body>