In 1984, Whoopi Goldberg was featured in one of her first televised interviews on Late Night with David Letterman. The two comedians started their conversation off by talking about Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway act, The Spook Show, and the different characters she played in it. Within a few minutes, they switched gears and discussed what Goldberg was doing before she got into show business. Letterman brought up the fact that Goldberg was once a cosmetologist, which she quickly confirmed, adding one minor detail that he’d left out: The type of cosmetology she used to engage in took place in a mortuary.
“It’s a lot of fun,” Goldberg said of her previous profession. When Letterman asked her if it was the job that she’d wanted, she responded, “Well, yeah. It’s like playing with dolls, you know?” Goldberg went on to explain that if you work in a beauty salon, you have to deal with a lot of ridiculous requests from women, only to have them yell at you when you don’t work miracles for them. “In the mortuary,” she continued, “they don’t care!”
While Goldberg denied being put off by working on dead bodies, she did share the worst experience that she’d had in the business. One day, the mortician invited her to lunch with him in the basement of the funeral home. She waited for him in a room that also contained large drawers where bodies were kept. As Goldberg sat patiently, she began to hear a drawer opening behind her. Then, when she turned around to see what was happening, a body sat up from the drawer and started talking to her.
In an episode of Oprah’s Master Class from 2014, Goldberg said that it scared her so much that she ran right into a door and knocked herself unconscious. It turned out to be her boss playing a prank on her. After she came to, he said to her, “The worst thing that you could imagine has happened. That’s it.” From that point on, according to Goldberg, her fears were gone.
Being a funeral home beautician wasn’t the only weird pre-fame job Goldberg had, either. On a 2011 episode of The View, she revealed that at one time, she was a phone sex operator. When her co-host, Sherri Shepherd, told her that those days were in her past, Goldberg fired back, saying, “How do you know? You don’t know what I do at home.” Goldberg also mentioned that the job paid pretty well. However, nowadays, she said, people would likely recognize her voice.
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