WASHINGTON — Kathy Griffin, the comic queen of red- carpet fabulousness, is puttering about her Ritz-Carlton Georgetown suite. It’s late afternoon, and there’s no hair and makeup dude performing her maquillage as she readies for the evening’s show in Richmond, Va. As she crows over her Emmy win days earlier, Griffin painstakingly applies individual lashes to her big baby blues.
There will be no limo awaiting downstairs to whisk her to the theater. It’ll be just her and Tom Vize, her long-suffering chief assistant, humping it to the venue in a rental car.
This is not life on the D-list, but rather life when a longtime D-lister is fairly swiftly upgraded to at least B-plus status — yet the same old luggage is still in tow.
Since last year, Griffin’s celeb-snarking, bottom-feeder routine has seemed to board a freight elevator to the penthouse. Last fall, she sold out the Kennedy Center. Three seasons in, her reality show, “Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List,” remains one of Bravo TV’s most popular shows — and has brought her two Emmys in 13 months. And she’s got the fervid love and devotion of a core Bravo demographic: the folks whom she affectionately refers to as “my gays.”
Griffin, 47, is not willing to scratch her name off the D-list just yet. “You are welcome to walk through any airport with me,” she says, “where someone will ask me, ‘What’s your name again?’ Just when I think I’ve jumped lists, there’s always something to smash me down.”
All this is tricky business: making a living skewering celebrities when your own celebrity is on the rise.
The Griffin mouth famously lobs insults at the pretty and the pretentious. She spares no one — whether they look divine or are worshiped as divine. (Her famous 2007 Emmy acceptance speech, when she mocked Jesus, caused a notable brouhaha.) Oprah Winfrey is both her obsession and her target. (“I am totally supportive of her and her boyfriend Gayle.”) Lindsay Lohan is a frequent source of material — Griffin comments on her lesbian relationship (“I love Lesbian Lindsay. She didn’t go ‘lipstick’ “).
“Hollywood is like high school,” she says. “The celebrities I make fun of are pretty much the mean cheerleaders in high school or the mean jocks.” Griffin grew up conflicted in a family of alcoholics in suburban Chicago. (Because of that, she says, she has never taken a drink in her life.) The nuns in elementary school did damage, she says, but that was nothing compared with the mean girls in high school. She is the ugly duckling turned surgically enhanced swan.
She started doing improv with the Groundlings comedy troupe in Los Angeles, then moved to the little screen, with guest spots on “ER” and “Seinfeld” before landing a recurring role on the Brooke Shields sitcom “Suddenly Susan.” Along the way, she did the occasional HBO comedy special and four specials for Bravo.
It was in the world of reality TV and its quasi-truth, though, that she found her true calling. She won the competition show “Celebrity Mole,” then landed hosting gigs with the NBC reality series “Average Joe” and the MTV series “Kathy’s So- Called Reality.” In 2005, “D-List” was launched. Living under the constant surveillance of a TV crew was at times more than she bargained for: She married and divorced; her father died last year; and she struggles with her aging mom, Maggie.
“I never thought I’d get divorced,” she says, “and I never thought I’d get divorced on TV.” But all in all, she’s “having a ball.”
She’d like to create a small Kathy Griffin empire, with a late-night talk show and comedy specials.
And after multiple excursions to the land of plastic surgery, she says she is done with that for good. Overhauling her looks didn’t make her any happier — she didn’t turn into Jennifer Aniston, she says, so what was the point? In Richmond, the Landmark Theater is a packed house. Griffin runs onstage, and her rabid fans are on their feet.
“I won my second Emmy,” she tells the audience to wild applause.
“Just the (revenge) factor is huge.” Or not so much, she says, adding that she was only up against “Extreme Makeover,” “Antiques Roadshow” and “Intervention.”
