If Ricki Lake could have anyone she wanted on her new daytime talk show, who would it be? Jacqueline Onassis? Michael Jackson? Heidi Fleiss? Hardly.
Richard Simmons and Chelsea Clinton.
“He makes me cry!” says the 25-year-old Lake about the hand-holding, fat-fighting guru. “I know a lot of people think he’s phony, but he’s not. He really cares.” And Chelsea? “I’d surprise her (by bringing on) her best friend. We’d find out what it’s really like to be her.”
What it’s really like to be Ricki Lake these days is to be into the subject of weight loss. The actress has shed more than 115 pounds since she danced through John Waters’ 1988 nostalgic teen-movie satire “Hairspray.”
This is the ’90s and Ricki Lake is Talk TV for Generation X, those in their 20s who are too old for, say, the Sassy magazine crowd and too cool for Baby Boomer stuff. Producers of the daily one-hour show are counting on its young, hip, offbeat but oh-so-sensitive host becoming the generation’s ambassador of chat.
When the show premiered Sept. 13 on 140 stations nationwide, including a noon air time on Chicago’s WPWR-Ch. 50, Lake joined a plethora of daytime talk shows all hoping to keep their personality-driven shows afloat. Last checked, there are 17 national talk shows wading across the airwaves this fall. Chevy Chase’s late-night show has come and gone. So what gives Lake a chance in this sea of talk TV?
According to the Nov. 22 issue of Broadcasting & Cable magazine, Lake’s show has increased the amount of women between 18 and 34 watching the show during the daytime.
Curled up on the sofa in her new office at MTI Studios in Manhattan, where her show is taped, Lake reflected on what led to this new, whirlwind lifestyle-taping 40 shows in eight weeks, conducting interviews and-evidenced by the too-big black pants she’s wearing-steadily and happily dropping weight. “They say it’s the likability factor,” says Lake. “They say I’m empathetic, I’m relatable, I’m not off-putting. I’m the girl next door.”
Lake was chosen from among 100 women (many of them actresses and models) to host the show created by former Fox TV president Garth Ancier and Gail Steinberg.
“We needed someone with a sense of humor who was at the same time not standoffish,” says Steinberg, who spent 15 years at “Donahue” and an ill-fated season with Jane Pratt’s talk show last year. “We also said she has to be someone who’s young but someone who has enough of a world view to bring some understanding to a range of topics,” Steinberg adds. “When we met Ricki, we felt all of that immediately. We were just charmed.”
Lake, a Westchester, N.Y., native, says she has had a privileged life with “a housewife mom who was there for me.” Still, the young actress notes that she has been living on her own since age 18.
“I’ve lived a lot for someone who’s 25,” Lake says. “And I’m extra-sensitive because of being overweight for so much of my adult life. I’m always hoping not to offend anyone.”
To prepare for her new job as TV host, Lake says spent several months in therapy to be absolutely sure she was as comfortable with the new, size 8 woman she’d become as she was with her old self. Handling pressure was the easy part.
“It goes back to my first job in `Hairspray,’ ” says Lake as she sips from a bottle of Evian water (the new figure is maintained via a low-fat, gallons-of-water diet). Yes, she was only 18 at the time, yes she was 250 pounds and yes, it was her first acting job in a feature film. No sweat.
“I was comfortable with who I was,” says Lake. “I made people feel comfortable with who I was. The character I played in `Hairspray’ was really me.”
Lake has also appeared as a regular on the ABC-TV series “China Beach,” but for the last two years she has been out of the limelight, busily shedding the excess pounds. Co-producer Steinberg insists they didn’t even know Lake had lost any weight when they contacted her to audition for the job.
If all this talk about weight loss and talk show hosting sounds familiar, the similarity is not lost on Lake. “I wanted to follow in Oprah’s footsteps,” she admits. “I felt like we were soul sisters, so to speak.”
In fact, when Lake appeared on Winfrey’s show to promote “Hairspray” five years ago, she told the queen of talk that she wanted to be the next Oprah.
Winfrey told her to go for it, she recalls.
And so now she has.
Lake has studied her role model well. And she’s not alone. Winfrey’s phenomenal success has taught talk TV producers that audiences respond to a host who’s disarming, totally herself and empathetic toward her guests because, after all, she’s been there.
“She is who she is. What you see is what you get,” says Lake about Winfrey. “I’ve learned a lot watching her. The highest compliment that someone could say to me is that I possess the qualities that she has.”
But is Lake prepared to expose herself to millions of viewers the way Winfrey has?
“I think it goes with the territory,” says Lake. “I’m sure my personal experience will come to play a part. My biggest fear is that I’ll gain the weight back. But because I am out there and it is me and it is the `Ricki Lake Show,’ I have a responsibility to viewers to be honest.” Lake, who lives in Manhattan with her two cats and a dog, pauses and sips her water. “Like today’s taping. I revealed to the audience that I’m single. And that’s a big deal for me.”
This came during the middle of a show called “Surprise Engagements” during which no less than five couples became engaged during the course of the hour. One man rode in on a white horse, one woman proposed to her mate, still another man sang a song to his beloved before popping the question. Tissues were passed around during commercial breaks for teary-eyed studio members.
At other times as host, Lake can be irreverent, funny, even opinionated, as seen in her comments during a recent show about “man stealers.” Women whose men had been “stolen” got into a screaming match with those who had done some stealing.
“Excuse me, everybody, remember me” said Lake to bring her bickering guests under control. “We’re sitting here blaming other women and the men are just as guilty. It takes two to tangle,” she said to vigorous studio applause.
“There comes a point when I have to play devil’s advocate,” Lake says. “But, you can’t be a hypocrite either. Or off-putting.”
It’s a fine line.
“I think she needs more energy, more spirit, says Fran Bevy, 31, of Northport, N.Y., after sitting through a taping.
“She seems like she’s hip,” insists Emani Hinson, a 25-year-old singer from Brooklyn who sat through the same taping. “She has that air about her, like she’d be able to relate. She seems like a `home girl.’ “
The show’s creators are banking on the latter opinion as they appeal to the 18- to 34-year-old crowd they believe wasn’t watching talk shows before now.
To help attract that crowd’s remote-control-happy tastes, there’s a funky set designed by “Saturday Night Live” production designer Eugene Lee to resemble a cozy but trendy New York loft. The show’s theme music pumps MTV-style, studio audiences are filled with a multi-ethnic mix of mostly young (but not all) New Yorkers. It’s not unusual for four or five guests to appear on one show.
With a nod to David Letterman, the format also includes cuts to man-on-the-street interviews that correspond to the day’s topic, most of which are relationship-based. Recent topics have included “Telling my girlfriend I’m gay,” “My boyfriend loves sports more than me” and “Everybody hates my interracial relationship.”
And what does Lake think about her own performance thus far?
“I’m not Oprah. I haven’t been through a lot of what what she’s been through, but I’m getting better at listening, at storytelling.” She pauses, sips from that Evian bottle. “And we are completely different from anything around.”
