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Kathy Griffin Is Trying to Get Back on the D-List - The New York Times
Jan 19, 2022 4 mins, 9 secs

Ever since her Trump joke went wrong in 2017, Griffin has been seeking a professional rebirth, and wondering who among the canceled gets a second chance.

Kathy Griffin in her home in Malibu, Calif., where a portrait of her by Erik Menendez is prominently displayed.Credit...Chantal Anderson for The New York Times.

When Kathy Griffin met last summer with a surgeon to discuss the removal of the upper lobe of her left lung, and the cancer in it, she got right to the point.

She played the snarky second banana to Brooke Shields on the NBC sitcom “Suddenly Susan” from 1996 to 2000 and was the star and an executive producer of “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List,” which aired on Bravo from 2005 to 2010.

She was rebuked by figures like Chelsea Clinton (“this is vile and wrong”) and her (now-former) close friend Cooper (“I am appalled by the photo shoot Kathy Griffin took part in”).

“I wasn’t canceled,” Griffin said, in her Malibu, Calif., home a few days after she “hate-watched” Cooper and Andy Cohen, the new co-host of the New Year’s Eve show that she was fired from amid the 2017 brouhaha.

Magazine covers and promotional posters adorn the walls in the front entrance and around the house, including one for “Kathy Griffin: A Hell of a Story,” the 2019 documentary she produced and financed in the aftermath of the Trump photo.

At the kitchen table, eating chocolate chip banana bread made by her husband Randy Bick, Griffin was biting and regretful, irreverent and chastened, angry and vulnerable.

(In her home office sits a framed transcript of a conference call led by her erstwhile CAA agent, in which he told her “This is why your career isn’t more successful” and that he hopes she will “go back and die at William Morris.”).

“​​I honestly never had a desire to make enemies,” said Griffin, dressed in a blue pajama set and sneakers, her four dogs (Olivia Benson, Elliot Stabler, Maggie and Mary) scurrying about.

Zucker “got very offended,” Griffin said.

I’m Kathy [beep!] Griffin, Jeff, that’s who I am.” She then said to him, “I would really feel a lot more comfortable showing up if I got paid what I deserve.” Zucker took that as a threat to bail on the show, and in a call to Griffin’s lawyer, fired her.

“It sounds like she is acknowledging that, insofar as Kathy Griffin acknowledges she has ever done anything wrong,” he said.

In late May 2017, Griffin was at home, on a break from a stand-up tour.

About a week later, Griffin gave Shields the OK publish the picture.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in security and legal fees later, Griffin was exonerated.

The director and producer Judd Apatow said that if America is still mad at Griffin, its priorities are messed up.

The day I spent with Griffin in early January, social media was filled with chatter about CNN’s New Year’s Eve show and Andy Cohen’s comment about Bill DeBlasio, who was serving his final day as mayor of New York.

Griffin and Cohen have been feuding for years since their days overlapping at Bravo.

In October 2017, after being named to co-host the New Year’s Eve gig with Cooper, Cohen was asked by TMZ if he had talked to Griffin about taking the job.

Cohen declined to comment, but a Bravo publicist pointed to an interview he gave to Howard Stern in 2018 in which he said of Griffin, “I got the job that she had on CNN, I’m on Bravo all these hours, I get it.”.

Cohen, he said, “made a mistake.

One of the comedians who reached out to Griffin in the early days of her crisis was Jim Carrey.

By the end of the year, Griffin and Bick were back home.

She and Bick began to fight, even temporarily separating, and Griffin said that a dependence on pills turned into a full-blown addiction.

Borrowing from recovery adages, Griffin said pills went from “magic to medicine to misery.”.

On June 25, “I wrote a note to Randy and then I took a bunch of pills, and I just thought I would go to sleep,” she said.

(Griffin said her lung surgery was a success and no further treatment has been recommended by her doctors.).

“She is very grounded, sensitive, smart and thoughtful in her approach,” he said of Griffin

“I was just afraid they would say I couldn’t do it if they knew,” Griffin said

A few months ago, Griffin confided in Sia about one of her most shameful memories, something you wouldn’t have been surprised to see on “My Life on the D-List.” Back in 2017, she told Sia, she had asked Apatow if he would go with her to Craig’s, a West Hollywood restaurant that is a favorite of paparazzi

“I just need one good picture out there besides those that say, ‘Kathy Griffin is a jihadist,’” she said she told him

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