There was nothing fun about seeing my picture in the Star. It served as a warning that I’d better watch myself or I could embarrass my family. I’d better watch myself or I could ruin my career. The photo of me smoking upset my mother. She’d much prefer it if people didn’t think I did that, and now there was proof. Was there proof of my homosexuality yet? (Did I even have proof of it yet?) I wondered if the paparazzo was crouched behind the fence, overhearing my side of phone conversations with Ann when I would sit outside and smoke and talk to her about my therapy sessions. I talked to Ann about therapy and other important life-changing things. Ann had recommended I go to therapy and had also recommended the therapist. Ann listened to my panic and my confusion and to most of my dramatic statements like, “If I get into a relationship, if I even try, then people will find out I’m gay!” She replied, “What’s so bad about that?” Which was ridiculous, of course. Everything was bad about that.
The episode with the scene of me in my underwear aired in New York three hours before it would air in LA. So I told Ann to watch it and call me immediately.
“Hey.”
“What did you think?”
“I thought the show was great. You weren’t in it as much this week.”
“Ann! What did you think of the scene? How do you think I looked?”
“Great.”
“What do you mean, ‘great’?”
“Sexy. You know, great.”
“Did I look thin?”
“I thought you looked like a normal, healthy woman.”
Normal. Healthy. Woman.
My mother told me a long time ago that “healthy” was a euphemism for “fat.” She’d say to me, “Don’t you just hate it when you see someone at the supermarket and they tell you, ‘You look healthy’? They clearly are just trying to tell you that they think you look fat.” She’d tell me how she’d handle the backhanded compliment by smiling and pretending she was receiving a genuine compliment all the while ignoring their attempt to be insulting. After all, it’s in the way an insult is received that makes it an insult. You can’t really give offense unless someone takes it.
All of the words Ann used were euphemisms for fat. Normal just meant that I was fat. Since when did anyone ever go to the doctor’s and feel good about being in the weight range that’s considered normal? A normal size for women in this country is a size 12. Models aren’t “normal.” Actresses aren’t “normal.” She may as well have told me that I’d just embarrassed myself in front of 15 million people. If she didn’t want me to think that, she would’ve used words like “overworked” instead of “healthy,” and “girl” instead of “woman.” How could the image of a woman, with her big voluptuous hips and round thighs and big, heavy breasts be applied to me if I was the skinny, straight-up-and-down, shapeless girl I was starving myself to be?
Message received loud and clear, friend.
You can’t give offense unless somebody takes it.
10
I BOUGHT A treadmill and put it in my dressing room. That way I was able to run during my lunch break on the set. I also bought another treadmill and put it the guest bedroom in my new apartment. With two treadmills, I didn’t have an excuse not to work out. Because I had started to bring my Maltese dog, Bean, to the set with me, it was hard to get to the gym after work, and having a treadmill in my dressing room allowed me to run for the entire lunch hour instead of taking time out of my workout to drive to the gym and park. Although I hadn’t had exercise equipment in my dressing rooms prior to Ally McBeal, I didn’t invent the concept. Many of the cast members had them.
I got a nutritionist. Her name was Suzanne. I met her during a routine checkup at my gynecologist’s office. She worked out of a small office in the back a couple of days a week and helped women change their diets to decrease their weight and increase their fertility. My doctor introduced her to me after I’d complained about my inability to maintain my weight. I told him that there were weeks when I’d gain and lose seven pounds from one Sunday to the next. After doing tests for thyroid disease and other medical problems that might have explained my weight fluctuation, he decided that the fault lay with me, that I didn’t know how to eat. I agreed with him and hired Suzanne to be my nutritionist.
I loved the thought of having a nutritionist. It made me feel professional, like I was considering all aspects of my work in a thoughtful and serious way. Before my first session with Suzanne, I made the decision to do everything she said. Like a faithful disciple, I would follow her program without question the way a top athlete would drink raw eggs if his coach told him to. This was the kind of private, customized counseling I needed to be a working actress. Like a top athlete, I needed this kind of performance-enhancing guidance. I needed a coach. But mainly, I loved having a nutritionist because Courtney Thorne-Smith had one.
“Hi! Come on in. Mind the mess.” Suzanne was a tall, thin woman with a sharpness to her movements. She dressed blandly and conservatively and was almost sparrowlike with long, thin arms and bony hands that would dart back and forth. I wondered why a woman like that, who was naturally thin, would be drawn to nutrition. I knew there were reasons to be interested in food other than weight loss, but I couldn’t imagine those reasons being compelling enough to make nutrition your life. Instead of seeing her at the gynecologist’s office where we met, I met with Suzanne at her home in Brentwood. When we’d first met she was wearing a white lab coat, and although the meeting was brief, from behind a desk she seemed officious, judgmental, bossy. But a layer of expertise and officiousness was immediately removed just by stripping her of her white coat and placing her in a different setting, in her home with her child’s toys strewn about, her family in photographs looking at me. They were conservative-looking folk, poised to judge me for being so much fatter than she was. Then again, I felt they were judging her for being so messy. The fact that she was a black sheep made me feel a lot better.
“So from what the doctor tells me you have trouble maintaining your weight and knowing what to eat. Please know that you are one of millions of people who struggle with this, which is why people like me have a job!” Suzanne was no longer a skinny bird poised to judge me. She was caring and concerned. It was off-putting.
“Tell me why you think you can’t maintain a healthy weight.” She looked at me with kindness and openness, but there was a fragility to her that I found disarming, perhaps because I recognized a similar vulnerability in myself. Did she starve and binge and purge, too?
“Well . . .” I was surprisingly nervous. I really hadn’t planned on opening up to someone about my eating habits, and all of a sudden it seemed like no one else’s business. It seemed too personal. It seemed strange and a little idiotic to talk about food, like I was a five-year-old sitting cross-legged in a classroom learning about the five food groups.
“I don’t know. I guess I just never knew of a really good diet that I can do every day so my weight doesn’t fluctuate.”
“Well, Portia. I’m not going to teach you a diet, I’m going to teach you a way of life. We’ll talk about what you like to eat, and then I’ll devise an eating plan that will be healthy and help you lose weight.”
Sounds like a diet to me.
She talked and I listened. She had a lot to say about the kinds of calories one should eat, the value of lean protein, the dangers of too many carbohydrates, the difference between white and brown carbohydrates, and the importance of choosing the “right” fruits without a high sugar content.
“I like bananas. What about bananas?” Bananas were a staple in my “in-between” dieting phase. After starving myself by only eating 300 calories a day, I would often eat a slice of dry wheat bread with mashed banana.
“Well, Portia. Bananas are the most popular fruit, probably because they’re the most dense and caloric of the fruits, so you’ll have to be careful not to have them too often.”
That explained why my “in-between” diet packed on the pounds. Bananas. Of course, the only fruit I
liked was the only fruit this big fat country likes. I’m so typical.
“What are your eating habits now?”
“Now? Well, unless I’m getting ready for something, like a photo shoot or a scene like I just did on Ally where I had to be in my underwear, I guess I eat pretty normally. But you know, with the occasional binge.”
“What do you mean by ‘getting ready’? What do you do to ‘get ready’ for a photo shoot?” She leaned in slightly toward me. What I was saying seemed to intrigue her. I was wrong in thinking that maybe she starved, too.
“I eat three hundred calories a day for a week.” I was shocked to see that her eyes widened with disbelief as she registered the information. It made me angry. She was judging me.
After a pause, she asked, “What do you eat to make up the three hundred calories?”
“Dry bread, mainly. Crackers. Pickles. Mustard. Black coffee.”
“What happens when you’re done with the photo shoot?” She asked like she didn’t know the answer. It annoyed me.
“I binge, I guess. I eat all the foods I didn’t eat while I was dieting, and then sometimes I eat too much and well, you know . . .”
Should I continue? Should I tell this conservative woman who already looked slightly shocked by my eating habits that I vomited? She’s looking at me with anticipation and encouraged me to continue with a slight nod of her head. “I throw up.”
I could see that she was uncomfortable, but I felt compelled to continue. “If I feel like I haven’t thrown it all up, I’ll take twenty laxatives to make sure it’s all gone.” Why would dieting and throwing up be so surprising to her? Really, as a nutritionist, she should have heard all that before. It made me wonder if she was qualified to help me. Maybe she helped really fat people take off a little weight, not someone like me who really needed to be taught the “way of life” that she was pitching. It made me mad because I didn’t want to talk about myself and feel judged, I just wanted to learn about the five food groups like a five-year-old and take home a weekly eating plan.
I knew that I was being overly dramatic and that maybe she didn’t need to know about the purging, but her reaction to my eating habits embarrassed me and that’s what happens when I’m embarrassed. I get mad and I punish. And in response to my aggression, she leaned back in her chair and held a book up to her face, like a shield in between us.
“Have you seen one of these?” She waved it around. “It’s a calorie counter. It’ll help you figure out which are the healthy foods you can enjoy so that you’ll never have to feel like you need to do those kinds of things again.” Her eyes and her voice lowered as she lowered the book, her defenses. “Portia, it’s really important that you understand food and stop this unhealthy cycle of yo-yo dieting.”
Yo-yo is an inaccurate way to describe weight fluctuation. It is not the term anyone would use to describe the highs and lows that were the basis of my self-esteem. Yo-yo sounds frivolous, childish, disrespectful. Yo-yo sounds like a thing outside of yourself that you can just decide to put away and not pick up anymore. It suggests that there are end points, predetermined stopping points where the highs and lows end, because the string of a yo-yo is a certain length that never changes. My “bottom” would always be 140 pounds, my “high” 115. But it isn’t like that. There’s nothing predetermined about gaining and losing weight. Every day of my life I woke up not knowing if it would be a day on the path to a new bottom, a new big number that I’d never before seen on the scale, or if I would have a good day, a day that set me on the way to success and happiness and complete self-satisfaction. Since I was a twelve-year-old girl taking pictures in my front yard to submit to modeling agencies, I’d never known a day where my weight wasn’t the determining factor for my self-esteem. My weight was my mood, and the more effort I put into starving myself to get it to an acceptable level, the more satisfaction I would feel as the restriction and the denial built into an incredible sense of accomplishment.
After introducing me to the calorie counter, Suzanne was all business. As well as teaching me how to count calories, she taught me to weigh my food. She told me that portion size was very important and to ensure I was getting the right portions, I had to buy a kitchen scale. She told me what to put on that scale for which meals. She told me that I should eat six small protein-enriched meals a day. She told me to keep a journal of what I ate.
Chicken, turkey, orange roughy, tuna, egg whites, oatmeal, blueberries, nonfat plain yogurt, steamed vegetables, brown rice, wheat bread, bran muffins, nuts—all weighed and documented—were my stable of foods I was allowed to eat. Most other things were not part of the program.
As I left her house that day I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I had heard that in order to know how to overcome difficulties, you needed the “tools” to do it. Suzanne had given me a program with tools. A no-fail system of calorie counting, weighing, and adding up my daily intake so there would be no guesswork to my weight loss. Now that I had my curriculum in the form of my “allowed” foods, homework assignments in the form of a diary, and weekly exams when Suzanne would evaluate how I’d performed, I could be a good student.
11
I WAS OFFERED the cover of Shape. Shape is a health and fitness magazine that depicts lean, physically strong women. Its articles explain the secret to killer abs and each month it unveils the no-fail diet. On the cover it displays a fit woman, a celebrity if they can get one, who promises to tell you her strategy for weight-loss success. They take pictures of their cover girls in skimpy outfits, like a bikini or spandex shorts, and then interview them about how they achieved optimum “health.” I knew why they picked me. It wasn’t for my lithe body or killer abs, and they certainly didn’t see the underwear scene before offering it to me. I was simply the new girl on the hot TV show. I doubted anyone making the decision had even seen me on the show. Of course, I panicked and gave a million reasons why I shouldn’t do it, but my publicist and manager thought it was a great opportunity. A cover is a cover.
It was hard to argue with my publicist and manager. My publicist and manager knew better than I did. The cover of Shape complemented the clean-living, fresh-faced image they were trying hard to create. They had subtly written a character for me to play in public, gently coercing me to play the role of an ingénue, fresh but glamorous and with an ounce of naïveté. They guided me into the character by favoring romantic dresses over sexy dresses for red carpet events and to most questions about the show or my life, they smiled with approval when I answered that my journey from law student to Hollywood actress was “a dream come true.” It seemed effortless and surprising: a Cinderella story. I understood their reasoning. I needed an image to sell; the truth of who I was needed to remain a secret and Portia, the young, heterosexual, self-confident Australian actress needed to emerge. Besides, most of the successful, leading-lady actresses had graduated from this rite of passage. However, the ingénue was a difficult role for me to play—more difficult in fact than a commanding, self-assured attorney. Even if I ignored the fact that I was gay, at twenty-five I was too old, too cynical. I played the ingénue once in Sirens when I was twenty, and even then I felt more like Dorothy Parker than the character of Giddy, the gullible artist’s model.
I didn’t know how to play that character for the Shape interview. With neither health nor fitness being of interest to me, I didn’t know what to talk about. How could I possibly explain my weight maintenance when it was attributed to starving and bingeing?
SHAPE: Portia, tell us how you stay in shape?
PORTIA: I eat three hundred calories a day for as many days as I can before a photo shoot. The rest of the time I binge and purge.
SHAPE: What’s your favorite workout?
PORTIA: I’m afraid to work out at all because I’m worried that muscle definition makes people look bigger. I hate the look of fit, muscular women. I prefer the long, waiflike look of models who are most likely just as sick as I am.
Suzanne had stopped me from crash
dieting. It was a cycle of loss and gain, she explained, that once started, could never be stopped. It was true. After shooting the scene in my underwear I had gained a lot of weight. Reluctantly and fearfully, I put my new diet into practice for the week leading up to shooting the cover of Shape. I was extremely nervous that because I’d not starved myself the way I usually did before a shoot, my body wasn’t really in good enough shape to grace the Shape cover. Walking into my trailer that was sitting atop a hill at the location they’d chosen for the shoot, I felt unprepared and anxious. I had weighed in at 125 pounds that morning—not a number on the scale I was used to seeing the morning of a photo shoot, much less a cover shoot wearing a bikini. I had already eaten, too, another abnormality before a shoot. I had eaten my individually packaged oatmeal sachet with antioxidant blueberries and Splenda, a sugar substitute that Suzanne said was so healthy she gave it to her baby. Although I knew that I was being a good student and following the only program that had a chance of actually working for me, the guilt and unworthiness I felt by not starving myself in preparation for the shoot were unbearable. I was embarrassed to shake the hands of the picture editor and the executive editor of Shape. I was ashamed that even though I had a gym membership, I rarely used it. Although I’d never really liked the “fit” look, I wished that I could drop my robe to reveal muscular arms and legs and a defined abdomen and waist. I was dreading dropping my robe and showing them the exact opposite of what I knew they were expecting to see. During the shoot, and in a fit of insecurity, I asked one of the photographer’s assistants, an unattractive guy who looked sandy and sunburned, like he’d spent the morning surfing, how my body compared to the other girls who’d modeled for the cover. I’d been watching him all morning, not because he was interesting, but because he looked so bored, so uninspired by working on photo shoots, or perhaps this shoot in particular. He was the perfect person to ask because I knew he’d answer with complete honesty. He wouldn’t care if he hurt a girl’s feelings. His expression changed the second I asked the question, as if the question were like a plug inserted into his brain that reanimated him and sent energy flooding to his face. With a big, dumb smile he responded slowly, giving more weight to each word than was necessary to make the point. “We photograph some women with really sick bodies.”
Unbearable Lightness Page 8
