Correction Appended
Rosie O'Donnell, who spent most of the last five years extricating herself from public life, is back, though in a post-celebrity sort of way. Ms. O'Donnell, former K Mart spokeswoman, former talk show host, former magazine editor and publisher, and former Broadway producer, has a new title: blogger.
Ms. O'Donnell's Web log, "formerlyrosie," began appearing late last month and is described as at the top of the page as "The unedited rantings of a fat 42-year-old menopausal ex-talk show host married mother of four." Ms. O'Donnell apparently got the hang of the Web's approach to discourse fairly quickly. She once had a cuddly relationship with millions as the warm and hilarious television personality with a visible crush on Tom Cruise, but she complicated her public image by quitting her show, announcing she was a lesbian, starting and then quitting her eponymous magazine before producing a Broadway musical starring Boy George. In the end, Ms. O'Donnell ended up with a measure of privacy, but she began to drive her friends crazy with all of her opinions.
"One of them finally said that I should start a blog," Ms. O'Donnell said in a telephone interview from her home in upstate New York. "I have had offers to do books, but what I do is too rough and raw for them. They always want it to be more linear than I think. This way I can just put it out there."
The blog - which can be read at the slightly bereft address onceadored.blogspot.com - is part journal and part political rant. It offers a plain view of some rococo mental architecture. Written in a style that eschews trifles like punctuation and narrative, Ms. O'Donnell has used her unlimited space to riff on Howard Stern, Boy George, the television show "Fat Actress" and the serial killer David Berkowitz. A dispatch posted on Tuesday veered quickly and precipitously from "The Nanny" to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to Scooby-Doo:
she should go to washington next
put condie rice in the naughty chair
she scares me condi
i expect her to unzip her skin
and have dick cheneys twin brother step out laughing -
like on scooby doo
Jessica Coen, the editor of Gawker, a media-centric blog that is based in Manhattan, said Ms. O'Donnell's version of blogging is distinguished by voice if nothing else.
"I don't know if she is doing some form of haiku or a terrible Faulkner imitation, but I'm not surprised she is doing it," Ms. Coen said, noting that celebrities as diverse as the rocker Fred Durst and the occasional actress Barbra Streisand have penned blogs. She added, "It is really kind of cool that she and others want to speak to the public without the precautions of their publicists."
Not everyone has been thrilled to see Ms. O'Donnell back in the public eye, even though she is hidden behind a keyboard. Soon after she began blogging, her site's comments section began filling up with the kind of hate mail Ms. O'Donnell has been subjected to ever since she came out as a lesbian and began addressing political issues. Ms. O'Donnell switched off the invitation to reply for a time, but has again reopened the two-way feature.
"I know I am a big, fat, lesbian short-hair," she said in the interview. "I plead guilty."
But online yesterday, she reminded readers who has the keys to the kingdom at formerlyrosie, explaining that she had hit the delete key on a few of her respondents' messages of hate.
i clicked and poof -
you are gone but not forgotten
your words resonated and were felt
you hate me
stranger
In an era of celebrity in which all incoming invective has generally been treated as spitballs against a battleship, it is worth recalling that Ms. O'Donnell has always taken abuse personally. There is no veneer to her, no stage-smile, just-meat-and-potatoes amazement about how angry she makes people.
This may not be a great fit with the flame-throwing culture of the Web, but it served her well in her recent legal proceedings, when she was sued by Gruner & Jahr USA for walking away from the magazine called Rosie. Ms. O'Donnell tore into her former partners for what she saw as a kidnapping of her magazine, and by extension, of her identity.
And though the judge found that the company - which sued Ms. O'Donnell for $100 million- did not deserve a dime, her feelings are still very close to the surface, as they have always been. Much of the important evidence in the trial came in the form of Ms. O'Donnell's prolix, idiosyncratic e-mail messages, a modality of communication that may have foretold her step into the blogosphere.
Things have not been easy for Ms. O'Donnell since. "Taboo," the Broadway musical she sank nearly $10 million into last year, closed after three months, a near-total loss. Ms. O'Donnell said that the diversion was worth the price. "It was worth every penny," she said. "I am very proud of that play."
Ms. O'Donnell, who will be appearing on a Hallmark Hall of Fame drama on CBS in May titled "Riding the Bus With My Sister," said that the blog is, "just another totally artistic thing." One of many, she hastened to add. Since retiring from her talk show and leaving the magazine, Ms. O'Donnell has created hundreds of paintings, some of which she has sold, with the proceeds going to charity. And she has founded a cruise company to serve what she calls nontraditional families, with last year's cruise pulling in 1,600 people.
None of which will preclude this former talk show host from thinking about dropping the former from her identity.
"I watch Jon Stewart every night and I am proud of what he is doing, and it has me thinking about what might be possible," she said in the interview.
On her blog, Ms. O'Donnell addressed the same issue less directly, but more vividly:
i am thinking about going back on tv
how when with who
details....
Correction: March 11, 2005, Friday:
An article in The Arts yesterday about Rosie O'Donnell's Web log misidentified the television show to which she alluded in a posting that mentioned "the naughty chair." It is "Supernanny," not "The Nanny."