I got what I asked for. Honesty. I knew my body couldn’t compare to the other girls; I just needed to confirm it. This dumb guy said what all the other guys out there were thinking. And if I were going to have a career, I would need to impress men just like this one. If I couldn’t be the Maxim girl with big breasts and a tiny waist, I could be model-like. Unattainable. I could be elegant. Graceful. Thin.
I would just have to get myself one of those sick bodies.
“Morning, dear. How was your photo shoot?” Vera, the costume designer, looked exhausted and like she really didn’t care to hear the answer. I was the fourth actor she’d seen that morning. But because she was very polite, she added, “What did you do again?”
“I did the cover of Shape.”
“Shape? What’s that?”
I told her that it was a fitness magazine and as I told her how important it was to me because I was passionate about exercise, I sounded like the well-versed liar I had been trained to be. My agent and manager would’ve been proud.
As I slipped into a navy skirt, I thought about my plans for the summer. I created a picture in my mind of me lying by a pool overlooking the Caribbean ocean, the most beautiful girl on the lounge next to mine. In my mind, the girl turned her head and smiled a sleepy smile, her eyes full of love for me. I had an uncanny ability to escape the present moment and into my fantasy world whenever I wanted to. I especially liked to think about other things during a wardrobe fitting. It made the inevitable comments about how the tailor can let the waist out a little, “just to make the skirt more comfortable,” somewhat bearable, knowing that I could choose a happier moment in another place and time. But I was going to be in the Caribbean with the girl of my dreams, so my daydream was borne more from excitement and a little wishful thinking than it was from a place of complete fantasy. Only a few more weeks of wardrobe fittings and my fantasy would be a reality. I held my breath and sucked in my stomach as the zipper closed the gap to the waist. I felt the pinch of the waistband and held my breath again, this time for the conversation between the costumer and tailor that would inevitably ensue.
Go to hell.
As I stood in the fitting room, I almost laughed out loud as I remembered the first words I spoke to Sacha, the girl I was going to be with over summer in St. Barths. It was my first day of Melbourne Girls Grammar School and a stunning black girl who I later knew as Sacha, had left the group in the corner of the quadrangle to talk to me, the new girl. Sacha looked as if I’d slapped her across the face. I didn’t know why. “Go to hell,” was the only thing I could say. She had strutted up to me with no prompting or subtle invitation and said to me, “You have such pretty hair you should wear it down. Take it out, I want to see it.”
The All Girls Grammar School was extremely strict and had a policy about hair, among many other things. The uniform had to be worn with a blazer when off campus, the socks had to always be pulled up to the knees, and the hair must always be neatly pulled back off the face. So you see, she was definitely just having a go at me. She was trying to get me in trouble—or worse. She was trying to get me to pull my hair out of my rubber band and shake it all around like a shampoo commercial so that the pack of girls she was standing with who dared her to come tell me to let my hair down could laugh their asses off at the new girl. I knew girls like that—mean girls. Besides, I was an easy target. I was a model who recently changed her name from Amanda Rogers to Portia de Rossi, so I was prepared for that kind of bullshit. So you see? “Go to hell” was the preemptive strike needed at the time and really the only thing I could say. I can’t really remember what happened after that, or how Sacha and I became friends, but we did. Over a period of weeks, we became inseparable. We would spend weekends at her parents’ home, staying up all night watching MTV and eating loaves of white bread, butter, and apricot jam. We borrowed each other’s clothes. We went out to nightclubs together and flirted with men. For years we were good friends, best friends. Until one day, long after we’d left school, I fell in love with her.
I fell in love with her the day I left home to audition for the movie Sirens. I was nineteen years old when I left law school and flew to Sydney to audition for a career I didn’t even think I wanted. I had spent my life studying to go to law school, and with one phone call from my modeling agency asking if I’d like to do a movie, I was prepared to ditch law and become an actress. By the time I disembarked and collected my baggage at the terminal, I had fallen in love with Sacha. She was no longer just a friend; she was the reason I had to get the movie. If I was successful, I could win her, seduce her with money and power just as Martina Navratilova and Melissa Etheridge had won their previously heterosexual girlfriends. By their actions, these powerful, famous lesbians told the world that straight women were more desirable than gay ones and if you were rich and powerful enough, you could snag one of your own.
Sacha was not a lesbian. But then, neither was I. I just liked to sleep with women.
My girlfriend had to be heterosexual because I didn’t want to be a lesbian. If she was heterosexual, then it suggested that I was also heterosexual. Also, I was scared of lesbians. In fact, I would cross the street if I saw one coming toward me. One time I didn’t cross the street and I ended up sleeping with a lesbian because I felt sorry for her. She had just lost her girlfriend in a car accident and I was devastated for her. Nothing sounded worse to me than losing your girlfriend; that the one precious connection that you had made in your whole life was gone, wasted, lost in a car wreck. It sounded so much worse to me than a wife losing her husband—it was worse than anything. I found this woman to be quite unattractive. She was overweight and had a shaved head and facial piercings. But I had to sleep with her. It was only polite.
My girlfriend would have to be someone I already knew, someone I could trust. The last thing on earth I needed at the end of my first season on Ally McBeal was to be outed by some girl who just wanted to date me because I was on TV, who just wanted to sleep with me so that she could tell people that I was gay. The career that I once didn’t think I wanted was now something that I couldn’t live without, and a rumor that I was gay would be enough to end it. As it turned out, I loved acting. During the filming of Sirens I discovered that while in character with the camera rolling, I couldn’t do anything wrong, that there wasn’t a right way to deliver a line, merely a different interpretation. I loved interpreting meaning from words. My happiest moments of learning in school or in college were spent deciphering poetry, reciting John Donne or Shakespeare using inflection with my voice to convey my interpretation of the poem’s meaning. I discovered while filming Sirens that acting was transformative. I discovered that you could be someone other than who you were and get attention for it, be applauded for it. And all of that was very appealing to me—especially the part about being someone else.
I had planned this vacation for us years before I could afford it, when I began to travel and thoughts of an island and Sacha and I together living on it, if only for a short time, kept me company. Over the years, each time I was away from home, I would write her long, romantic letters that explained my feelings, what our lives would be like together, and how I would take care of her. When I lived in London to complete postproduction after Sirens and then hung around to try to find a reason not to go back to law school—like a play in the West End or another movie—I would go down to the coffee shop in the morning to begin writing, and I’d finish the letter in the evening, sitting alone at the corner table of the local pub just off King’s Road in Chelsea, close to where I lived. Writing to her, I was no longer lonely. I had someone waiting for me across the world in Australia. I could tolerate anything as long as I had a notepad and a pen and could pour my heart out to her in these letters. In airport lounges, thoughts of her would engulf my senses to the point where I’d almost miss planes, and in Los Angeles, thoughts of her would numb the pain of losing a job, of hearing no after an audition. My fantasy life with Sacha was as helpful to me as it was adjustable. Fo
r when I was in a relationship with Mel, or had a crush on Kali, Sacha would again revert to being just my best friend. Sacha also had relationships of her own, long-term, serious heterosexual relationships. Because of that, I never sent her any of the letters that I had written. But she knew how I felt about her. I’d told her that I loved her after long drunken evenings of partying and making out with her on nightclub dance floors. I knew that given the chance to move to Los Angeles and be with me, she would no longer want to be tied down by these demanding, serious boyfriends. So none of that really mattered to me.
Besides, I had a boyfriend, too. His name was Erik.
Erik was Kali’s ex-boyfriend. He became my boyfriend when I invited him to be my date at a Hollywood event. Although he didn’t see why it was necessary for me to hide the fact that I was a lesbian, he assured me that he would play the role of my boyfriend to the best of his ability, so I made Erik my permanent beard. The fact that he agreed to be my beard proved his affection for me. Hollywood events were something he had no interest in attending, and in fact, as a budding novelist, he had expressed contempt for the whole industry. His idols were Hemingway and Vonnegut, not Cruise and Gibson.
I had adored Erik from our first meeting at Kali’s apartment in Santa Monica. He was deeply thoughtful, attractive, and intelligent. If I could have, I would’ve slept with him just to show him how much I adored him, but on the one occasion when he crashed in my bed and sex had crossed my mind, the smell of him took the thoughts away. He didn’t smell bad. He just smelled male. All men do.
Although Erik quickly learned his role, our first public outing as a couple was nerve-racking. I had never walked a red carpet with anyone before and his attitude toward the media was not helping to quell my nerves. To Erik, a television camera was an opportunity to be a wiseass. (He had told me that if he were to ever appear on Letterman, he’d give a shout-out to all the black people in the audience.) As usual, I’d left nothing to chance. I had memorized answers, this time to the right questions: What was I wearing? What are my workout tips? What is my must-have beauty item? In the rented stretch limousine on our way from my apartment to the event on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Erik and I rehearsed answers to possible questions the two of us might be asked.
“So, if they ask something like, ‘How long have you been dating?’ just say something vague like, ‘just a few months.’”
“I think it’s funnier if I say that we just fucked for the first time on the ride over here.”
“Erik! This is serious! Don’t be a dick.”
It was all very funny to Erik. There was nothing on the line for him. He wasn’t gay and trying to appear straight. He could attend the event like a spectator, listen to Bocelli, observe this weird Hollywood charade, and drink wine and eat food without concern of getting fat. He wasn’t going to have to face the press and pretend that all this was real; he just had to say one easy thing or nothing at all.
“Please say nothing at all.”
He shot me an unnerving wink from underneath his mop of blond hair as he got out of the limo, straightened his jacket, and stood with his back to me like a statue, offering his arm like the gentleman escort role I had asked him to play. Despite the fact that he was a smart-ass in my ear all the way down the red carpet, he managed to obscure his disdain from the photographers, and my little plan worked. I was asked if he was my boyfriend and I decided that by answering coyly (“We’re just friends”), I would pique their interest more than by announcing that we were dating. Plus it carried the added benefit of being the truth. Because of him the event felt less like work. As someone who wasn’t particularly smitten with the world in which I lived, he gave me perspective on my job as an actress, served up with a drink and observations that made me laugh. The women at work assumed he was my boyfriend, and I did everything in my power to keep that assumption alive.
I had a boyfriend called Erik. He was smart and handsome and tall, and he was mine. Except Erik had a girlfriend. Erik left me for a woman who would have sex with him because he didn’t smell strange to her. He left me because I was never his to leave. It was a devastating breakup.
12
COME ON in, Portia. How have you been doing this week?” Suzanne was holding an unwashed dinner plate in her hand as she opened the door. I assumed she’d noticed this dirty plate on her walk from wherever she was, through the living room and to the front door. She was surprisingly messy for such a thin woman. I said hello to her, but in my mind I was thinking how funny it was that I would equate thinness with cleanliness. That observation triggered a memory of being in art class when I was asked to describe how Kandinsky painted and to explain why I didn’t like him. “He paints like a fat person,” was all I could think to say at the time, as his painting was messy, nonlinear, disorganized, as opposed to Mondrian, a painter who worked in the same period and used colors sparingly, modestly, and who stayed within the lines. He was orderly, clean, and thin.
By the time I left art class in my head and joined Suzanne, I was on the couch. I was beginning to trust her despite my initial fears and wanted to talk to her about my past. From my first session, I had become more aware of the abnormalities of my eating habits as a kid, and it felt good to talk about it out loud. I had considered going back to the therapist who had helped my husband and me realize that our relationship was doomed to failure, but food and eating seemed to be more of a nutritionist’s area of expertise than a couples’ therapist’s, so I told Suzanne everything. I no longer cared whether she was shocked.
I told her that from the age of twelve, starving and bingeing and purging had been the only way to reach my goal weight. That starving was easy because there was always an end in sight. Junk food was around the bend just after the photo shoot or the round of go-sees. But by the age of fifteen, I needed to devise a plan to not only lose weight but to maintain my weight loss. At the end of the school year, I’d convinced my mother that the strict girls’ grammar school I attended was “getting in the way of my education” and that I needed to take a year off to model, make some money, and then enroll in a more progressive private school the following year. The fact that I needed to lose weight was nothing new. Ever since I’d begun modeling, I’d always needed to “get ready” for a photo shoot. Me losing weight before a job was like an athlete training for a competition. But if I was going to take a year off school to model, I had to figure out a more permanent solution to the weight problem. I couldn’t starve and binge and purge like I had always done. By the time I was fifteen, the purging and the laxatives had become part of my everyday life, and although I wasn’t concerned about the possible damage it could cause to the interior of my body, it was a drag to have to spend so much time in the bathroom. Plus, there was only one bathroom in my house.
I told Suzanne that I had asked my mother to help me. Every time I was booked for a job that I had to drop pounds quickly for, I’d beg her to help me the next time so I’d never again be in the predicament of having to starve before a job. I’d say, “Please don’t let me eat chocolate.” And, “If you see me eating too much of anything, just remind me what I go through every time.” This request bothered my mother because, like an addict, when I was in the throes of eating, I could get quite angry and yell at her if she commented on my habit. “You don’t want to eat that,” was the most common thing she’d say as I was stuffing a chocolate-covered cookie in my mouth. She was wrong. At that moment, eating that cookie was all I wanted to do and I told her so in many different ways over the course of that little experiment. In sober moments, I’d apologize for my hurtful words and plead with her to continue to help me. I told her to hide the cookies. Then when I found them underneath the living room sofa, I’d angrily eat them, saying that all she cared about was how thin I was. That she didn’t really care about me. That all she cared about was my modeling career.
“That sounds like a difficult situation for both you and your mother.”
“It was.”
Using my mother�
��s watchful eye as a deterrent to bingeing was probably the worst thing I could have done. While I’d always binged, it had never disappointed my mother as much as it did during this time. It had worried her greatly that I had left school to model, and if I wasn’t thin enough to book jobs, then leaving school didn’t serve any purpose. Since I’d asked her to help me maintain my weight, we were in it together. We had a problem that we could overcome together. The list of taboo foods got a lot bigger, too. In the past, while I may’ve hidden the occasional chocolate candy bar, now eating any food that wasn’t diet food sent the message that I was not helping myself. That I’d given up. It was simply heartbreaking to see the disappointment on her face as I sat the plate down on the dinner table piled high with the same food she’d once encouraged me to eat to make me big and strong. It disappointed me, too. Because a simple meal that my brother, mother, and grandmother would eat was never something I could eat. Models don’t eat mashed potatoes with butter. And as my mother kept pointing out, I was the one who wanted to be a model.
Unbearable Lightness Page 9
