Twitter queen DeGeneres readies to host Oscars

BURBANK, Calif. - Since 2011, when The Oprah Winfrey Show ended its run, daytime TV has been on a desperate search for a new supreme ruler, a star capable of delivering more than enormous ratings (Dr. Phil can do that) and acting as more than a moral compass (bless you, Judge Judy). The job requires a person who can do those things while also serving as an arbiter of American pop culture.

Queen Latifah sure doesn’t seem to have it. Bethenny has also been a dud. Katie Couric’s heavily promoted attempt at assuming Winfrey’s throne ended last month with the cancellation of her Katie. Poof. Another aspirant shuffles toward the exit, joining Anderson Cooper, Kris Kardashian and Jeff Probst, to name just a few.

Maybe the New Oprah has been here all along. She’s a quirky lesbian with a soft spot for animals and a brand of observational humor that turned out to be tailor-made for social media. She’s a Cover Girl spokesmodel - at 55 years old. She’s most definitely a “Yep, I’m Gay” pioneer, as her Time magazine cover declared way back in 1997. On March 2, she will become a two-time host of the Academy Awards.

For Ellen DeGeneres, crowning herself the next daytime queen would no doubt be awkward: Winfrey is a neighbor and an occasional texting buddy. DeGeneres, who is more serious in person than you might expect, frowned when I tiptoed toward the topic.

“Oprah is very business-minded,” she says. “I’m just not that way. I’m happy my show is successful. But I am also just content just tobe me.”

Later, she adds, “All of us, whether we are in this business or not, have little voices that tell us we’re not good enough and we don’t deserve it.”

The Ellen DeGeneres Show, now dancing through its 11th season and renewed on NBC stations through 2017, is surging in the Nielsens. Last month, about 4.4 million viewers tuned in each day - a show record. In the fall, she was up about 13 percent compared with the same period last year.

DeGeneres’ detractors (yes, she has them) will quickly snipe that she does not have Oprah-level ratings.That is true. Winfrey was delivering an audience of roughly 6 million when she rode off into cable semi-obscurity, down from a peak of about 13 million in the early 1990s. But a simple ratings analysis may be missing the point. Measurements of influence have changed. Now, power must also be evaluated with social media and online video in mind. And by that standard, DeGeneres has few, if any, equals.

With 24.4 million followers, she is one of the top television personalities on Twitter, where she identifies herself as “comedian, talk show host and ice road trucker.” She also has one of the most-watched celebrity channels on YouTube, where clips from her show have been viewed almost 3 billion times. On average, one Ellen segment a month goes viral. (Iggy the Dog - a media kerfuffle over her giving away an adopted dog - was just the beginning.)

No daytime talk show has more pull among sponsors, in part because the median income for the Ellen audience is 22 percent higher than the average for daytime, according to Nielsen data. Major advertising partnerships have included Burt’s Bees, Walgreens, Huggies, Target, Band-Aid, Best Buy and Swisse vitamins. Cover Girl saw a 55 percent increase in sales of a new foundation after it was featured in a show segment.

“The Ellen impact has been phenomenal,” says Esi Eggleston Bracey, general manager of Cover Girl Cosmetics. “She’s someone I would call a connector.”

DeGeneres is now working on her own branded products.

“It’s not that much of a stretch for me to do a clothing or a furniture or a home line,” she says.

Oh, and she has a parade of new movies and scripted shows in the works. She will voice the befuddled lead in Pixar’s Finding Dory. A big screen comedy co-starring Rebel Wilson has been discussed. DeGeneres’ production company, which backs Bethenny, in recent months has sold other new shows to networks like CW and NBC.

All this from a woman who asserts that she is not all that interesting.

“I’m really pretty boring,” says DeGeneres, who married actress Portia de Rossi in 2008. “It’s actually a problem, because I run out of things to talk about in my monologues. I love my home life. I love Portia. I love my animals. Ilove time off.”

With the Oscars only weeks away, her free time of late has been sparse.

“We’ve been writing and writing and writing,” she says, with a smile, of preparations. “It’s like a soup. You put it all in, and you let it sit on the stove until it reduces to a delicious, flavorful broth.”

GAINING CONFIDENCE

This time around, however, she is feeling much more confident.

“I used to care so deeply about what people thought of me,” she says later in her dressing room. “I just wanted to be liked. Now, I care that people get me. I want to be understood.”

DeGeneres says her agent had to coax her into accepting the gig.

“I really thought, ‘Why do I want to add that to my plate?’ I’ve done it before, and it’s scary as hell,” she says. “If you do great, the reaction is that you were good. Not great - good. If you don’t do well, they just tear you apart, and they never let you forget it.”

If DeGeneres feels pressure to steady the Oscars following a year when the program’s host, Seth MacFarlane, was harshly criticized for what some viewers saw as offensive humor, she would not acknowledge it.

“None,” she says, a chilly wind suddenly blowing from her direction. “A lot of people liked him.”

“I do think it should be classy,” she continues after an uncomfortable silence. “It’s the Academy Awards. It’s prestigious. It should be sophisticated.’’

To understand DeGeneres and her drive, you have to remember the hole she was in before the debut of her talk show.

After she came out of the closet, viewers abandoned her sitcom, and she felt like a pariah.

‘WASN’T GAY ENOUGH’

“Gay people thought I wasn’t gay enough,” she says. “Straight people thought I was too gay. I remember thinking, ‘There’s an amount of gay I’m supposed to be?’ Suddenly, everyone was making fun of me, or at least it seemed that way. It was paralyzing. I didn’t work for three years.”

With time and a lot of Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra - she now meditates for 20 minutes each morning - DeGeneres started to develop some new projects, including a talk show.

“I had to pick myself up and stop feeling sorry for myself,” she says. “I didn’t have any money coming in.”

The Ellen DeGeneres Show was in some ways a response to the scrutiny and judgment that DeGeneres felt during that time. You can see it in the audience dancing that starts the show. You’re a bad dancer? So what. Nobody here will make fun of you. The show’s celebrate-who-you-are message not only resonated with the daytime audience, it also helped fuel a full-fledged cultural movement, in which bullying is not OK, Glee just wants everyone to be friends, and more states allow same sex marriage.

Her appeal is also based in contradiction. Older viewers (the median age for Ellen is 55) can feel cool or modern for relating to a lesbian who seems to understand technology. But many of her jokes come in old-fashioned, comfy packages: Heads Up!, a popular Ellen segment (and now a hit iTunes app), is essentially charades.

DAILY ROUTINE

One factor in DeGeneres’ appeal tends to be overlooked: Ellen is an exceedingly well-produced show. Rubber hits the road at 11 a.m. each day at Warner Bros. with a production meeting in DeGeneres’ airy, sparely decorated office.

“Everyone is scared to sit too close to me,” she says on one recent morning, as about a dozen young writers filed in and stood mostly at the other end of the room.

Still, the overall mood is jovial. A relaxed DeGeneres drinks a bottle of Smartwater with one sneaker-clad foot on a coffee table, starts by chatting about football and celebrity headlines.

She is handed an eight page draft script for the show, starting with her monologue, and the room falls silent as she put on her glasses and started reading. A producer softly chuckles here and there, but she stays stoic.

“I think we have to be more specific about the phone,” she says without looking up.

“Something other than the current ending,” she says, turning a page. “I think it ends with something like: ‘Don’t think about it. Don’t dwell on it. Just dance.’”

The producers solemnly take notes, and the meeting moves on to other planned segments, including an appearance by Sting.

“Make sure we have enough time for his whole performance,” DeGeneres says, or otherwise, she adds, he would be annoyed.

From 1:45 to 2:15 p.m., she does a run-through of the planned episode, and more polishing is done. At 2:30 p.m., a different set of producers meet in her dressing room and continue to brief DeGeneres on her guests.

“His new CD is about the shipbuilding industry in England,” a producer says of Sting.

“It’s about time somebody wrote about that,” DeGeneres deadpans.

And finally there was the finished draft of the monologue. Once more, the room waited in silence while she read it.

“I accept it,” she says. “Thank you.”

Style, Pages 29 on 01/23/2014

Upcoming Events