Whoopi Goldberg for Public Service. Goldberg serves on the national council advisory board of the National Museum of American Illustration. Goldberg has been married three times — in 1973 to Alvin Martin (divorced in 1979, one daughter); on September 1, 1986 to cinematographer David Claessen (divorced in 1988); and on October 1, 1994 to the union organizer Lyle Trachtenberg (divorced in 1995). She was romantically linked with actors Frank Langella, Timothy Dalton, and Ted Danson, who controversially appeared in blackface during her 1993 Friars Club roast. She has stated that she has no plans to marry again, commenting "Some people are not
Whoopi Goldberg to go into the bathroom and close the door. So if you get a little gassy, you've got to let it go. So people used to say to me, 'You're like a whoopee cushion.' And that's where the name came from." She said in 2011, "My mother did not name me Whoopi, but Goldberg is my name, it's part of my family, part of my heritage. Just like being black." Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his book "In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past", found that all of Goldberg's traceable ancestors were African Americans,