Whoopi Wises Up : After her smash debuts on Broadway and in ‘The Color Purple’ and ensuing roller-coaster ride, she has learned some lessons

STATELINE, NEV. —  Whoopi Goldberg, decked out in black leather and trademark dreadlocks, struts across the Caesars Tahoe stage like she owns it. Most of the jokes are unprintable; many are laced, predictably, with social commentary. From X-rated musings about George and Barbara Bush’s sex life, she segues into the First Lady’s silence about most all issues (except illiteracy) affecting the country. It works: She takes the packed house inside the 1,500-seat Circus Maximus from rowdy laughter to thoughtful pause.

The actress-comedian burst to national prominence in 1984 with her one-woman Broadway show, and she’s returned to doing what she seems to do best: taking a stage and, up close and personal, entertaining and challenging a live audience. With a casual flick of her famous hair, or a subtle raised eyebrow (actually, a shaved eyebrow) beneath black horn-rimmed glasses, Goldberg puts the jokes--and her feelings--across.

It’s clear that at age 34 she’s in top form, in her element--and in control of her career as a stand-up performer.

But outside the theater doors, it’s another matter.

After the flat-out raves and wildfire word-of-mouth that accompanied her New York show, and an Oscar-nominated performance as Celie, the illiterate Southern girl in “The Color Purple” (1985), Goldberg has appeared in a string of generally undistinguished movies--and some outright flops. Once talked about as an emerging superstar, she’s recently turned up on episodic TV, first in the syndicated “Star Trek” (now in her second season) and now on the half-hour sitcom “Bagdad Cafe,” the new Friday night CBS comedy series in which she co-stars with Jean Stapleton.

The sitcom is the latest twist in a perplexing, roller-coaster career that some see as full of miscalculation--the undermining of a unique talent. Underscoring this: the difficulty of maintaining a career in an industry that offers few opportunities for black leading ladies.

“I’ve heard various rumors about my career falling off the side of the road, and about what a comedown it is for me to do a TV series,” admits Goldberg, chugging mineral water and chain smoking during an afternoon interview in her penthouse suite at Caesars. She shrugs. “I find it interesting that anybody would think I was stepping down by working with Jean Stapleton. I mean, come on!”

Yet she concedes that the flow of feature-film offers that followed “The Color Purple” has dwindled.

“I haven’t lived up to the expectations that everybody slapped on me when all of this began,” she admits. “I think a lot of people wanted me to be a female Eddie Murphy.”

The key problem with her film choices, she insists, is that her choices have been limited. “I did the best of those films that were offered to me. And I did the best I could with my roles.

“You know, it’s always sort of funny to me when people say, ‘Gee, why did you do this or that movie?’ And I go, ‘Why? Did you have something better for me?’

“Because if I sat and waited for what was ‘the right role,’ I would never work. ‘Color Purples’ don’t come along that often.”

She admits that she often goes against the recommendations of her longtime manager, Sandy Gallin, because she flat out enjoys working. “It’s not as if I sit at home reading a ton of scripts that have been sent.

“The imagination of the people who are making the movies is somewhat limited for me,” she explains. “Hollywood is bound by these old codes which don’t have very much to do with the art of movie making or the art of performance. For instance, I think you don’t have to mention in a movie that someone’s black. It’s sort of self-explanatory.

“Take something like ‘Ironweed.’ No reason I couldn’t have done Meryl Streep’s part--no reason at all. Those were people in a certain time, and it wouldn’t have mattered what color she was.”

But as Goldberg has learned, Hollywood isn’t color-blind. It’s no accident that her movies largely rendered her sexless--or that the one love scene she filmed, opposite white actor Sam Elliott in “Fatal Beauty,” wound up on the cutting-room floor.

With the scene snipped, the duo was left with an implied romance and the exchange of a chaste kiss. And Goldberg was left feeling insulted.

Goldberg--whose real name is Caryn Johnson--grew up in the housing projects of Manhattan’s Chelsea district, active in children’s theater. As a teen-ager, she got involved with drugs, ultimately dropping out of school. At 18, she married her drug counselor and became pregnant. In 1974, a divorced Goldberg moved with her baby to San Diego, working a string of jobs--including as a bricklayer and a mortuary cosmetologist. She briefly collected welfare.

Theater work led her to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she created her one-woman act, “The Spook Show,” in which she played a mind-boggling parade of offbeat characters. Producer-director Mike Nichols saw the show in 1983, when Goldberg was performing at Manhattan’s Dance Theater Workshop, and offered to mount it on Broadway.

“Whoopi Goldberg,” which opened in the fall of 1984, was SRO at the 700-seat Lyceum Theater. A show album followed--it won a Grammy--and the act was taped for HBO.

Goldberg was an enigma, with a remarkable ability to convey deep warmth, and finely honed performing skills that helped etch unforgettable characters. There was Fontaine, the male junkie with a Ph.D; a little black girl who longs to be blond, blue-eyed and white, like the folks on “The Love Boat”; the surfer chick who chats about the mall, the beach and the time she had to perform an abortion on herself with a coat hanger. And a crippled woman who recounts her relationship with a man who courts her and proposes marriage, realizing that, with some, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

When she made her screen debut in Spielberg’s controversial adaptation of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple,” she was launched further into the mainstream. Typical headline: Newsweek’s “Whoopee for Whoopi.” (As for the typical interview: Goldberg wouldn’t divulge her real name--and padded her age by five years.) People magazine judged her one of the 25 most intriguing people of 1985.

She lapped it up, cruising the party and benefit scene with a vengeance, usually in funky attire irresistible to paparazzi . The frequent “Whoopi sightings” ultimately led to guffaws in the press.

“Someone even wrote that I’d go to the opening of an envelope,” recalls Goldberg. “That hurt very deeply. I guess no one realized how new all of this was to me.”

The movie vehicles that accompanied Whoopimania at first capitalized on Goldberg’s flair for hip, streetwise comedy--complete with casual use of four-letter words--and action.

First off was the 1986 20th Century Fox action-comedy “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” in which she played a perky computer operator who turns heroic after making contact with a British spy trapped in the Eastern Bloc.

Originally conceived for Shelley Long, the film went through an army of writers and got a new director--Penny Marshall. There were battles between filmmaker and star. “We disagreed over a lot of things--including the tone of the comedy,” says Goldberg. “Penny wanted it big and broad. I like subtlety.”

Still, her performance in the mostly big and broad “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” charmed most critics--who thought she was better than the material. It had ticket sales of $26 million--a modest hit.

Next: the 1987 comedy-mystery “Burglar,” directed by Hugh Wilson (“Police Academy”), based on a mystery series by novelist Lawrence Block. Bruce Willis was set to star as the paroled cat burglar who’s blackmailed back into the business, with Goldberg as his poodle-grooming sidekick. When Willis dropped out, Goldberg took the lead role, with Bob Goldthwait grooming the poodles. The Warner Bros. film grossed $16 million, and wasn’t highly praised by critics.

“Fatal Beauty” (1987) was originally intended as a gritty, anti-drug tale about a beautiful undercover cop--to be played by Cher--who sets out to find the source of a deadly drug called Fatal Beauty that’s hit the streets. When Cher nixed the project, MGM considered other actresses, including Tina Turner. Meanwhile, Goldberg expressed interest in the project.

“The movie was written with a beautiful woman in mind, and they resisted me (at the start),” she says. “When they finally did come to me, they had to pay an ugly woman’s price.” (Reportedly $2.25 million.)

Once Goldberg was cast, the script’s hard edge disappeared. The reason: “Beverly Hills Cop II,” was in release, and making a fortune. “That’s what ‘Fatal Beauty’ looks like,” laments Goldberg. “It looks like a really crappy version of Eddie’s movie, right down to the poster.”

The critics thought so too. The Hollywood Reporter’s Kyle Counts dubbed the film--which grossed just $11 million--”Beverly Hills Coppette.”

Then came a trio of dramas--”The Telephone” (1988); “Clara’s Heart” (1988), for which she received strong notices, and the recent “Homer and Eddie”--which all bombed.

Of “Homer,” she says: “When I saw the first cut of this movie, I thought, I’m not going to talk about it--ever! I don’t want to know from it. I mean, it sucks. I don’t know why they ever released it.”

Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky (“Runaway Train”) for Kings Road Entertainment, the “road” picture cast Goldberg as Edwina (Eddie) Cervi, an escaped mental patient who has a brain tumor and one month to live, opposite Jim Belushi as a mentally retarded dishwasher.

Lamented the New York Times’ Janet Maslin: “Whoopi Goldberg remains one of the great unclassifiable beings on the movie screen.”

Goldberg has her own laments--and they have to do with the notion that an actor is somehow responsible for the way their movies come out. With a nod to the reviews for “Homer and Eddie,” she exclaims, “I ate it. I ate it! Like I wrote it and directed it and put it up there. And I just thought to myself, (expletive) you all!”

From the beginning, she resisted the “black actress” label, with all its creative and career limitations.

In 1985, she told Ebony magazine: “I don’t want them to say, ‘Oh, she’s a black actor, we can’t use her.’ I want them to say, ‘Oh, here’s a great role. Call Meryl Streep. Call Diane Keaton. Call Whoopi Goldberg.’ ”

In the Ebony interview, Goldberg also claimed that she wouldn’t play domestic help. But she’s since played two--in “Clara’s Heart” and “The Long Walk Home,” in which she stars opposite Sissy Spacek. Due this fall from New Visions, it’s a period drama, set in 1955, with Goldberg playing a maid who becomes involved in the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott.

Currently, there’s not a single black actress of leading-lady stature, with Diana Ross, Cicely Tyson and, now, Goldberg, fading from the spotlight. Goldberg knows that if she waits for scripts to come to her, she could end up with no film career at all. So, of late, she’s been going after roles on her own.

Which is how she wound up on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” in which she co-stars as the intergalactic barkeeper, Guinan. (The syndicated series airs Saturdays at 7 p.m. on KCOP, Channel 13.)

Gene Roddenberry, the show’s executive producer, recalls his surprise when Goldberg’s management approached his office in the spring of 1988. “I knew she was a star, so I didn’t quite understand why she would take a secondary role on a series.”

Goldberg, it turns out, is a longtime Trekkie, who recalls watching the series as a child “and being so happy to see that a black person (Nichelle Nichols, as Lt. Uhura) had survived into the future.”

She likewise went after the supporting role of the spiritualist in “Ghost,” Paramount Pictures’ romantic comedy starring Patrick Swayze due in July. This, after her name didn’t come up in discussions.

“I didn’t want the role to be a vehicle for anybody,” explains director Jerry Zucker. “Based on her earlier movies, I definitely had a preconceived notion of her as this kind of funny, crazy person. But, that wasn’t the role we were casting.”

Then he met with Goldberg, “and I was surprised, because she had a warmth I hadn’t realized was there before.”

A professed workaholic, Goldberg fervently believes that an actor must “keep the machinery oiled. . . . Work is work--the idea is to make it as good as you can.”

Which is one reason she grabbed at the chance to do “Bagdad Cafe.”

“It allows me to exercise. It’s like doing a weekly play. And I needed a steady gig--I need to stay put, in California, for awhile. Plus I’m working with Jean Stapleton. Plus I’ve been told that I can be involved in some of the writing, if we get picked up next season.”

Goldberg plays Brenda, the harried owner of a desert cafe/motel, who forms an alliance with stranded tourist Jean Stapleton. The series is adapted from the 1988 cult film of the same title, which filmmaker Percy Adlon originally wanted to make with Goldberg. (Adlon wrote Goldberg several letters--which he later learned she never received. “She was a very big star at the time. My movie was obviously an art film. I think whoever was getting her mail did not think the movie would be big enough for her.”)

If Goldberg had done the film, Adlon says, he would have made her role more comedic. Which is what the show’s producers have done. The series, which debuted March 30, was ranked No. 18 out of 84 shows in its first week (it got a 27 share, which means 27% of the TV audience tuned in), but dropped to No. 37 its second week (and a 23 share). It was No. 46 (with a 19 share) in week three.

If a weekly series grind isn’t enough to keep her well-oiled, she’s got numerous other ventures cooking, including:

* “Comic Relief 1990,” which she will again co-host with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams on May 12 on HBO. This is year No. 4 for the benefit for the nation’s homeless. (A list of Goldberg’s other charitable and activist associations fills two typed pages.)

* The tentatively titled, “Roshon Brown--Class Clown,” a comedy/drama special for Nickelodeon, starring Goldberg as guardian angel to a boy with low self-esteem and failing grades. It’s one of two projects Goldberg’s helping to develop and produce for the network.

(A hit with the pint-size set, Goldberg has thrice been named favorite movie actress in Nickelodeon’s “Kids’ Choice Awards.”)

* “Whoopi’s World,” an animated series featuring a little kid Whoopi--and humanistic messages--that she’s been shopping around with Hanna-Barbera. It follows the adventures of a group of racially diverse inner-city kids, including one in a wheelchair.

* “Living on the Edge of Chaos,” Goldberg’s latest one-woman show (which picks up where her first one left off). She takes it to Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania beginning in late May.

Then there’s that series of print ads for the Gap clothing chain that’s been appearing in tony magazines. One ad, in the May issue of Vanity Fair, features a four-generation portrait--by superstar photographer Annie Leibovitz--of Goldberg; her mother, Emma; daughter Alexandria, 15, and teensy granddaughter Amarah Sky.

Goldberg herself came up with the idea for the picture--after learning that the tabloids were in search of the baby’s picture.

“The first time anyone saw Amarah was under wonderful circumstances!” declares Goldberg, whose deep brown eyes flash when she recalls the tabloid coverage of her daughter’s pregnancy. “I was hot when they went after my family. If someone wants to find crap, let them look for it on me. I’m the public figure.”

Twice divorced, now living with camera operator Eddie Gold, Goldberg says that Alexandria discovered sex at a young age, failed to protect herself and became pregnant at 15, opting to have the baby. (Alexandria is no longer involved with the baby’s father, but he checks in on the child.) Goldberg didn’t share in her daughter’s decision to have the baby. “But she came to me first. And that means everything to me. But, it’s a lot to deal with. It’s going to be tough.”

She says she and her daughter are in phone contact at least several times a day--Alexandria lives in Northern California--and that she gets regular Polaroids of Amarah, “who’s just found her toes,” and who happens to share the same birth date as Goldberg.

“It’s been quite an education,” says Goldberg of her heady Hollywood odyssey, with “some emotionally expensive” lessons.

The costliest: “That art and business are two different things. They really truly are. It was only art for me until the business stepped in. The business aspects can be wonderful--because it means you can make more money. But there’s a price--you lose control of things.”

Still, Goldberg is optimistic. “I have very high hopes, and very high standards. I want to do ‘The Lavender Hill Mob,’ with Paul Newman and Sean Connery, and I want to do ‘It Happened One Night,’ with Timothy Dalton--but I’ll do the Clark Gable role. He’ll be a member of the royal family. And I also want to do. . . .”