Ellen DeGeneres is arguably one of the most popular and influential celebrities around.
But the path to success for this media mogul and LGBTQ+ trailblazer hasn't been an easy one.
From experiencing heartbreak to being shrouded in scandal,
these are some of the tragic details about DeGeneres.
When DeGeneres was just 16, her mom, Betty, received a devastating diagnosis from her
doctor - she had breast cancer. Betty underwent treatment while living in a small Texas town,
and as DeGeneres recalled in an interview with USA Today,
her mom insisted that the family keep the whole thing under wraps. DeGeneres explained,
"Everything was a dirty little secret back then."
Ultimately, a mastectomy was required, and the teenager became her mother's
de facto caregiver during a very tentative time. DeGeneres added,
"The fact that she had a mastectomy was not spoken of. She tried to shield me from it a little bit,
but she needed my help with recovery and physical rehabilitation. It bonded us even more."
Recalling how much her famous daughter helped her through those difficult days,
Ellen's mother agreed that the experience brought the two closer together. Betty told USA Today,
"It's a very special relationship that I do not take for granted.
We've been there for each other."
DeGeneres' parents split up in 1970, according to People magazine,
with the future comedian's mother eventually remarrying. Years later,
DeGeneres revealed in a 2005 interview with Allure that her stepfather assaulted her when
she was a teenager, after she had helped her mother recover from breast cancer.
While opening up about the experience on David Letterman's Netflix series,
My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, in 2019, the TV star explained that it wasn't until
years later that DeGeneres finally told her mother. She told Letterman,
"And then she didn't believe me and then she stayed with him for 18 more years."
Looking back, she admitted that, all those years later,
it still makes her angry when victims aren't believed. She added,
"We just don't make stuff up."
"I wish I would've been better taken care of, I wish she would have believed me."
While DeGeneres has been openly gay for decades, coming out to her parents wasn't easy -
particularly her father. As she told Oprah Winfrey in her now iconic coming out interview in 1997,
"He's very religious, and I thought he would have a hard time with it. But
he's the kind of guy [who says], 'I love you for whoever you are,
but I don't understand it, and let's never talk about it again.'"
Explaining that her dad had remarried after her parents' divorce, DeGeneres
revealed that her father and stepmother's ignorance at the time about homosexuality
led to an unfortunate decision. She explained,
"They asked me to move out of the house. [...] [My stepmom] had two
little girls [and] they worried that it would influence them."
However, her relationship with her father and stepmother didn't change significantly after
coming out. While being asked to leave understandably hurt, DeGeneres said,
"I understood it. I understand people not understanding. I'm fine with that.
I can't change anyone's mind."
When DeGeneres was 20 years old, she and her then-girlfriend were living together,
but broke up after an argument. However, DeGeneres revealed on Oprah's Master Class in 2015 that the
split wasn't intended to be permanent. When they ran into each other at a club,
DeGeneres blew off her girlfriend's attempts to convince her to come back home. She explained,
"I was planning on moving back in. I was just trying to teach her a lesson."
Her girlfriend ultimately left the club on her own, and when DeGeneres and her friends were
driving home that night, they passed a horrific car accident. It wasn't until the next morning
that DeGeneres learned her girlfriend had lost her life in that very wreck. DeGeneres admitted,
"That, of course, made me feel like I should have gone home with her that night. [...] I
should have stopped. [...] All kinds of things [...] A lot of guilt. In an instant,
she just was gone. [...] It was really hard, but it shifted my entire focus and my life."
"I think it made me realize how fragile, how easily you can lose somebody."
In an interview on the Armchair Expert podcast,
DeGeneres recalled that experience leading her to think,
"It would be amazing if we could pick up the phone and call up God
and ask questions and actually get an answer."
Channeling her grief into that idea, DeGeneres wrote the seminal stand-up
routine that brought her to The Tonight Show four years later, launching her comedy career.
In 1997, DeGeneres sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry
when she came out as lesbian in a Time cover story. At the time,
she was starring on the ABC sitcom Ellen, and her character also came out.
"I'm gay."
With The New York Times reporting that some advertisers - who became squeamish
about seemingly endorsing homosexuality - had pulled commercial spots from her show,
the series was ultimately cancelled in 1998.
This was a dark time for DeGeneres, who told Out magazine in 2016 that she,
quote "wasn't sure if [she] was going to work again," admitting,
"I was at rock bottom and out of money, with no work in sight."
Of the subsequent coming out backlash and cancellation,
the comedian revealed on Armchair Expert,
"It hurt my feelings. [...] I was really depressed. [...] I was looked at as a failure
in this business. No one would touch me. I had no agent, no possibility of a job, I had nothing."
Ultimately, DeGeneres' confidence had been shaken. She explained to USA Today,
"Whenever you carry shame around, you just can't possibly be a confident person."
It wasn't until she realized she had nothing to be ashamed
about that she regained her confidence, saying,
"Depression eats away at your confidence and you get lost in that."
Depression and the fear that her career was over weren't the only things that DeGeneres had to
worry about after publicly coming out and dealing with the ensuing backlash. As she later told
AdWeek in 2018, her Time magazine cover also led the comedian to fear for her life. She revealed,
"When I came out, I had death threats and there was a bomb threat [targeting my show],
but they misjudged the time of the taping."
Sadly, people in DeGeneres' orbit were also hit with backlash. Actress Laura Dern, who played
DeGeneres' on-screen love interest during the Ellen episode in which her character comes out,
subsequently revealed that she was also targeted. Even though she only worked on
the episode for 10 days, she told Vulture that the ramifications would last a lot longer, admitting,
"We all spent the next couple of years really struggling in work and safety. It was radical
to experience that. It was the only time I ever experienced having to have full security detail."
DeGeneres took another aspect of her personal life public in 1997 when she revealed that she
and actress Anne Heche were a couple. However, by 2000, the pair had split,
saying in a statement to the New York Daily News,
"Unfortunately, we have decided to end our relationship."
They described their split as "amicable," but it proved to be both devastating and
humiliating for DeGeneres. Soon after the split, Heche became romantically involved
with a cameraman she'd met while he worked on a documentary about DeGeneres.
In a 2001 interview with the Los Angeles Times,
DeGeneres revealed it was Heche who ended things. She explained,
"She walked out the door and I haven't spoken to her since. I feel betrayed."
Opening up even more to Allure in 2005, DeGeneres admitted,
"Anne broke my heart into a million pieces. When Anne left, I'd wake up in the morning,
and my eyes would just immediately fill up with tears, and I would start convulsively crying."
The helicopter crash that took the life of NBA icon Kobe Bryant and 13-year-old daughter Gianna
in January 2020 devastated basketball fans. The news also proved to be tough on DeGeneres,
who was a close friend of the former Los Angeles Lakers star.
In her show-opening monologue taped the day after their passing, DeGeneres expressed her
gratitude to viewers for tuning in. The day of the accident, she recalled, was her birthday,
as well as the date of the Grammy Awards. Her eyes filling with tears, she said,
"Yesterday was supposed to be a celebratory day, and then we got tragic news about Kobe Bryant,
and everything changed in a second. And that's what I want to talk about."
Reiterating her message that "life is short,
and it's fragile," DeGeneres told her audience to "celebrate life." She added,
"If you haven't told someone you love them, do it now. Do it. Tell
people you love them. Call your friends. Text your friends. Hug them. Kiss them."
Rumors started to swirl around Hollywood that DeGeneres may be, as a New York Post article
declared in 2020, quote, "not as nice as she wants you to believe." Those sparks caught
fire in March 2020, when comedian Kevin T. Porter took to Twitter and offered a deal:
in exchange for anecdotes confirming his belief that DeGeneres is, quote, "notoriously one of
the meanest people alive," he'd match each one with a $2 donation to the Los Angeles food bank.
The floodgates opened. According to Insider, Porter received close to 2,000 responses,
although he acknowledged it was impossible to verify them. Still, allegations seemed to gain
credibility when a July 2020 report from BuzzFeed News quoted former employees of
The Ellen DeGeneres Show, who shared claims of a toxic work culture. As one ex-staffer alleged,
"That 'be kind' bulls--- only happens when the cameras are on. It's all for show."
These allegations, according to Variety, ultimately led WarnerMedia to undertake an
investigation. Meanwhile, DeGeneres was compelled to write a memo to her staff
addressing the ongoing controversy. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she wrote, in part,
"[I have] relied on others to do their jobs as
they knew I'd want them done. [...] Clearly some didn't."
She vowed to, quote, "correct the issues [...] [and ensure] this does not happen again."
If the hope was that DeGeneres' memo and the investigation into her show would quell the
controversy, it didn't quite work out that way. In fact, while some celebs expressed
support for the talk show host, further problems stemmed from a July 2020 tweet
from comedian Brad Garrett. Responding to a report about her staff memo, Garrett wrote,
"Sorry but it comes from the top. [...] Know more than one who were
treated horribly by her.⁩ Common knowledge."
Meanwhile, actress Lea Thompson concurred with Garrett's allegation, simply tweeting out,
"True story. It is."
Even more dirt was dished by The Ellen DeGeneres Show's original DJ,
Tony Okungbowa who said in an Instagram post,
"I did experience and feel the toxicity of the environment."
Around this time, yet another potentially damaging anecdote emerged.
Australian TV producer Neil Breen revealed that when he was coordinating an interview
with DeGeneres on Australia's Today show, he was told by her producers,
"No one is to talk to Ellen. So, you don't talk to her,
you don't approach her, you don't look at her."
According to Page Six, DeGeneres responded to this rumor directly, calling it "insane," and saying,
“It’s crazy, just not true, I don’t know how it started.
[It’s] not who I am. [...] Please talk to me. Look me in the eye.”
In early July 2020, DeGeneres and de Rossi's California mansion was burglarized on the Fourth
of July, according to K.E.Y.T. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office told the news outlet,
"The home appears to have been targeted because of the owners' celebrity status."
According to a subsequent report from TMZ, both DeGeneres and de Rossi were actually home at the
time of the robbery, though neither were harmed, thankfully. However, the "point of entry" appeared
to be a back door, with the thief - or thieves - managing to evade being caught on camera.
DeGeneres and de Rossi allegedly decided to invest in some heavy-duty security upgrades. As a result,
they turned the home into what TMZ called "a fortress," with a new security company,
armed guards, and additional security cameras, as well as laser sensors.
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