Before June Diane Raphael got her big break as an actress, she was a waitress in New York and often relied on guest tips.
“I don’t remember the biggest tip I received. I remember the smallest, and it was from someone who was quite famous, [and] his name was Mr. David Bowie,” Raphael, 44, exclusively told Us Weekly at the One Fair Wage event hosted by Chrissy Teigen on Thursday, September 6. “It’s the truth.”
Raphael used to work at a dining establishment in the New York City neighborhood of SoHo, where Bowie “used to come have lunch every day.” (Bowie died in 2016 at the age of 69 after a battle with liver cancer.)
“I used to serve him all the time and he just didn’t tip,” the Grace and Frankie alum recalled on Thursday. “He’s also from England. There’s a system here [in the United States] that also doesn’t make sense to other people because they’re like, ‘Aren’t you paid?’ And then you have to explain like, ‘No, I’m actually not. I’m only paid by tips.’”
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Despite Bowie leaving minuscule tips, Raphael asserted that the music icon was “such a lovely person.”
“[Just] a terrible tipper,” Raphael quipped. “But, he did sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me on my birthday. That was not a monetary exchange, but it meant a great deal.”
Raphael’s experience in the service industry inspired her to come out to support One Fair Wage.
“Well, like so many of the other actors and writers and people who’ve shown up, we got our start working in restaurants for tips, and so this is an issue that we understand,” Raphael told Us. “We understand how volatile the industry is when you’re working for tips. … It’s often an incredibly sexualized environment where you are encouraged to flirt with customers, you’re flirting with the bartender to get your drinks to the customers, and then often there’s a lot of sexual harassment that goes on. So if that’s the first job that women have, how does that change how we think about the workplace and what is allowed in the workplace?”
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She added, “Then, of course, there’s just the issue of money. Once people really think about the idea of a subminimum wage, which is it $2.13? That’s utterly insane. You cannot survive.”
With reporting by Carly Konsker
