So I stopped eating in front of her. In front of her, I’d eat steamed vegetables. In the back alleys of restaurants, sitting in between two Dumpsters, I’d eat anything I liked. If my mother wasn’t home and lack of pocket money forced me to make do with the food that was in the kitchen pantry, I’d keep one eye on my grandmother as she sat in the living room and hastily get to work on half a loaf of bread and butter with apricot jam. I’d then walk to the supermarket with a butter knife, buy bread, butter, and apricot jam, throw away the few slices of bread to make it look like the untouched original loaf, then use the knife to remove the portions of the butter and jam to make it look like everything was just how I found them. Or I should say, just as she left them.
My mother thought there might be a medical solution to the weight problem in the form of a prescribed appetite suppressant. A drug called Duromine was well known in Australia. It is phentermine, the phen in Fen-phen, and was similarly heralded for its effectiveness in weight control. I was prescribed Duromine after a physical examination by a doctor and started taking the drug.
I lost weight. I lost weight and was thin—bony, even. I was ready for any modeling job without concern and was the envy of my school peers. The only problem with the drug was that I couldn’t sleep. If I took it every morning with a cup of tea, I felt jittery all day long, speedy almost, and that feeling of restlessness and anxiety stayed with me throughout the day and continued into the night. I could take it daily for only a couple of weeks before I felt like I needed a break from it. Instead of being the answer to helping me with consistent, steady dieting, the Duromine became like a yo-yo in itself. It became another wagon to fall off. It was yet another way to disappoint myself with my lack of willpower, of toughing it out. I just couldn’t hack it, just like I couldn’t hack dieting. I’d stop taking it, claiming that it affected my studies and my overall health, but secretly I missed eating. I missed the comfort that tasting and chewing and swallowing gave me. I missed the warmth in my belly and the feeling of wholeness; I was incomplete on Duromine, and on food, I was whole.
I realized during the sessions with Suzanne that it almost didn’t matter who I was talking to, it was good to talk. And while I talked, she listened. She gave me my program for the week, gave me some helpful tips for the upcoming holidays, and sent me back into the world with my homework.
13
I SURVIVED SEASON TWO OF ALLY MCBEAL!
THAT WAS the slogan on a T-shirt that was given out to the cast and crew by a cast member. I survived season two—but barely. Since beginning the show I had felt a constant indescribable pressure, a lurking threat of being fired, even though there was no evidence to suggest that I was displeasing the executive producer. While it was a good place to work and people were generally respectful, there was an eerie stillness and a certain kind of silence to the set that felt like a breezeless summer day, and while there were no insects, there were no birds chirping either. During the last four weeks of the season, every night after wrap, I would get into my car, smile and wave good night to hair and makeup, and like clockwork, I would burst into tears once I made the right turn from Manhattan Beach Studios onto Rosecrans Boulevard. And I would sob, not just cry. I made loud wailing noises that sounded more like “ahhhhhh” than the kind of crying I’d done over other things. In fact, I sounded like Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo when she would cry loudly, embarrassing Ricky to the point where he’d do anything she wanted just to shut her up. No one could hear my wailing, however. I wasn’t doing it for effect. I was doing it to soothe myself, to comfort myself. And I didn’t know why I was crying either. I would cry just as loudly if I’d spent the day performing a wordy two-page closing argument to a jury as if I’d been propped up on a chair in the background of the law office with no dialogue at all.
With the end of the season came the holidays. I had booked the trip with Sacha to St. Barths. While I was excited to realize my dreams of being with her, there was no doubt that I was nervous to see it through. I was worried that by embarking on a romantic journey with Sacha, the journey could come to an end, taking my romantic fantasies with it; the daydreams that lulled me to sleep smiling, the fantasies that filled otherwise empty hours, and the soothing thoughts that took pain and loneliness away would all go with it. These thoughts gave me both anxiety and hope toward the end of the season. Finally, for better or worse, our romance would become a reality.
In St. Barths, however, reality was shocking. It ruined romance like an annoying little brother. It was a pestering ever-present element in our conversations, especially as the conversations featured her boyfriend, Matt, to whom she was considering getting married. Our precious time alone in that tropical paradise was not filled with longing glances and passionate lovemaking, but rather it was spent with our heads stuck in our respective books and in arguments. A conversation about the book I was reading, in fact, ended all arguing, as reality punched me in the face and knocked illusion out cold.
“What’s that book you’re reading?”
“Ellen DeGeneres’s mother, Betty, wrote it. She tells her story about what it’s like to have a gay daughter.”
“Who’s Ellen DeGeneres?”
Her having a fiancé in Australia didn’t deter my quest to make Sacha my girlfriend, but not knowing who Ellen was two years after she made international headlines for coming out on her show suggested to me that being gay wasn’t even on Sacha’s radar, despite her willingness to make out with me on a dance floor from time to time. From that moment on, I knew that I was alone without my imaginary life to keep me company. So I swallowed my disillusionment in the form of cream sauces, piña coladas, and pastries, served up to me by the private chef I’d hired to help me seduce Sacha into a life of lesbianism. Now the chef’s role was to reward me for my hard work on Ally for the season. I ate my way into relaxation in St. Barths. And I got really fat.
The fact that I got fat was unfortunate as I was scheduled to shoot the cover of Rolling Stone Australia two weeks after my vacation ended. I went back home to Melbourne to my mother feeling more like a deserter than the war hero I had dreamed of. I thought I’d be paraded around Camberwell, the town where my mother lived, as the American TV star triumphantly returning. To be honest, there was still some parading, some walking up to the Camberwell shops with my mother to talk to the shopkeepers about my adventures overseas, but it felt wrong. The pounds were evidence of the pressure. Heaviness overshadowed the levity of talking about what I wore to the Emmys or what Calista was like as a person. People could sense my depression and discomfort, and that really ruined the fun for everyone. So my mother dutifully hid her chocolate-covered cookies, and I starved and cried and went back and forth to the gym I used to go to for aerobics classes back in the eighties.
ROLLING STONE AUSTRALIA. ISSUE 566, OCTOBER 1999
There are two rumours about Portia de Rossi . . . So which rumour would she like to address first?
“Oooh, I love this,” the 26-year-old says in her peculiar LA via Melbourne accent. “It’s just like truth or dare!”
OK, the first rumour is about the hair. We know it’s real. We know she’s a natural blonde because her mum has shown us the baby photos. Even as a four-year-old her white-blond hair was worn long and girly. So that’s that out of the way . . . The second rumour is that De Rossi was spotted in clubs around Melbourne recently cosying up to other girls. So does that mean she’s bisexual? A lesbian? A long, delighted squeal comes down the telephone line. “Ooooh, how fun! I love that question!” she says, shouting now . . .
“Let’s just say every celebrity gets that rumour and now I feel like I’ve joined the club. Hooray!”
Hooray indeed. Not only were they “on to me,” a phrase that my mother would use when my secrets were being pried out of their vault and into pop culture, but the photo shoot exposed another terrible secret, possibly worse than being gay. It told the world, or at least the people of Australia, that I was fat. I tried as hard as I could to get the weight off,
but whittling down from 140 pounds in two weeks proved to be too much of a feat even for this crash dieter. If only Sacha had fallen in love with me, none of this would’ve happened. Now I was on the cover of a magazine, fat and looking like a hooker in a chainmail boob tube and leather hot pants. Over the previous six months, I was told that I had ranked highly in the polls featured in men’s magazines as being “hot,” mainly because of the icy, untouchable nature of my character. Nothing was more of a foil for my real, gay self than to appear on the cover of men’s magazines as a sexy, man-eating young actress. Another difficult role to play, I was discovering who I was while desperately trying to convey the image of the woman I wasn’t.
When Portia de Rossi looked at the clothes we’d chosen for this month’s cover shoot—leather hot pants, chainmail boob-tube, handcuffs, G-string, she only had one thing to say: “Oh fuck!” Several cigarettes later and a few soothing words from her mum and her aunt Gwen (also at the shoot), she was happily admiring herself in the sexy clobber. “Mama, do you think it’s too kinky?” she asked. “No,” her mum replied. “You look very pretty.”
After the photo shoot, I went to the airport. I had to fly back to Los Angeles to meet with executives from L’Oréal to discuss being their new spokesperson for a hair product. I knew that people thought I had nice hair. I knew it was special because I was often told that it was the reason for my success. The fact that I played the title role in the Geelong Grammar School production of Alice in Wonderland, for example, was because of my hair, according to all the girls at school. Occasionally, on modeling jobs I was singled out to be featured in a campaign because of my hair, and on Ally McBeal toward the end of my first season, my hair acted out more drama than my character did. It went to court to showcase how women use sexuality to get ahead in the workplace, it indicated when my character’s walls were up, and it even performed a few stunts, notably when John Cage “wired” my hair to remotely shake loose from its restrictive bun when he wanted me to “let my hair down.” So the fact that my hair had garnered some attention from people who sell hair products wasn’t surprising to me. In fact, it was the only thing that had made sense for quite a while. The fact that I didn’t like my thick, unmanageable hair was irrelevant.
I didn’t write letters to Sacha in the airport terminal. I ate. There was nothing left to say, no fantasies I could act out on paper of how we would be happy together in a tropical paradise, so I ate. I ate English muffins with butter and jam. I ate potato chips and cookies and gulped down Coke. I threw up. I left the first-class lounge to shop for food in the terminal. I ate McDonald’s burgers, vanilla milk shakes, and fries. I threw up again. Then I got on the plane.
“Can I get you a drink, Ms. de Rossi?” The American stewardess had a lipsticky mouth and overpronounced the syllables, as Americans tended to do. It was strange to hear the American accent after being in Australia. It reminded me that I had an accent, too. It reminded me that Australian-born Amanda Rogers was now American-seeming Portia de Rossi. If magazines didn’t say otherwise, I could definitely pass as a Yank. My dad had called Americans Yanks. I thought it was funny when I was a little kid. He’d also sung me to sleep with a passionate, out-of-tune rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun.”
“Baileys Irish Cream, if you have it.” Of course I knew they had it, it just sounded more polite, more whimsical. I was aware that the stewardess would think that an after-dinner cream liqueur would be a ridiculous drink to order before dinner, and I needed her to know that I knew it was ridiculous, too, so I said: “I’ve been looking forward to some Baileys. I always have it on planes.” That made it better.
When I refused dinner and asked for my sixth Baileys, the stewardess got weird again. Of course, she served it to me; I was a first-class passenger after all, but I could detect concern in her pour, more than just the concern that comes with pouring liquid into a narrow-rimmed glass on a moving vehicle that is subject to bouts of turbulence. She was judging me. She looked disgusted. She was worried for me. She had reason to be worried, I guess. I had spent a lot of the plane ride quietly crying, as I often do because I hate hovering between one place and another. “Neither here nor there” was an expression my grandmother would use to describe confusion and displacement, and it is a disturbing place to be. This state of hovering during the fourteen-hour journey was once filled with fantasy scenarios of being Sacha’s obsession or having a beautiful body on the cover of a major magazine. Now I had no choice but to fill the time by bringing a glass of thick, creamy liquid back and forth to my lips. I was neither in LA nor in Melbourne, neither straight nor gay, neither famous nor unknown, neither fat nor thin, neither a success nor a failure. My Discman played the soundtrack for my inner dialogue—rare recordings of Nirvana and so here we were, Kurt Cobain and I, displaced, misunderstood, unloved, and “neither here nor there”—he being neither dead nor alive, both in his life and in his death. It occurred to me as I listened to lyrics like “and if you killed yourself, it would make you happy” that if I were at the end of my life, I wouldn’t have to keep running the race. If I were really old and close to dying, I wouldn’t have to do another season, another magazine cover. I could be remembered as a successful working actor, a celebrity, even. I had been given the challenge of life and beaten it. The pressure I had put on myself to excel in everything I did made life look like a never-ending steeplechase. The thought that I had fifty more years of striving and jumping over hurdles and being the one to beat in the race was enough to make me order another drink.
After my seventh Baileys I threw up. I made myself throw up, but it took a long time to do it, and because I was drunk, it was sloppy. I’ve never liked airplane toilets. They’ve always disgusted me, so the unclean, smelly toilet made me nauseous and the nausea made me think there was more food and liquid in my gut to get rid of. A lot of dry heaving and coughing followed. My fingernails had cut the back of my throat where my gag reflex was and I was throwing up saliva, maybe bile, and a trace of blood. Several times, I heard knocking on the door. I ignored it. It didn’t bother me at all, actually. I deserved to be on this plane and in this bathroom just like they did. By the time I had unlocked the door, there was a guy in a uniform waiting for me. He looked officious and slightly angry, which made me angry. There are other toilets on the plane, for God’s sake.
“There’s some concern that you’re not feeling well. Is there anything I can do to help you, Ms. de Rossi?”
“No. I’m fine.” The purging session had given me a colossal headache. So I added, “Maybe some aspirin.”
As I walked down the aisle, I noticed a contraption in the way. It was in the aisle blocking access to my seat. It was silver, and looked like a cylinder on poles with wheels attached. The stewardess stood next to it and as if reading my mind she replied, “Oxygen. I think it’ll make you feel better.”
Something shifted. As I looked into the face of the stewardess, I no longer saw expressions of judgment and disgust. I saw concern. The once angry, officious-looking man in the uniform returned from getting aspirin for my headache and gave it to me with a smile. I looked at my two uniformed nurses, and their caring, nurturing expressions, and quietly sat in my seat and attached the oxygen mask to my face.
When I woke up to the plane preparing for landing in Los Angeles, the silver contraption, and my headache, were gone. I was in Los Angeles.
My name is Portia de Rossi. I’m an American actress about to embark on my second season of a hit TV show. I am here and not there. I am here.
14
THERE ARE a few places in Los Angeles where art meets up with commerce for a drink and the Four Seasons bar is one of them.
As I walked in from the lobby, I saw little plays being acted out at nearly all the tables—the actor, writer, or director presenting himself as something to invest in, the producer or executive sizing them up before deciding to purchase or pass. Sometimes, like a chaperone, the manager or agent will be present at one of these sales meetings. The manag
er tends to lubricate things with friendly, ice-breaking conversation. Also, the manager orders lunch or drinks for the table and plugs the awkward silences by asking after the producer’s kids. Most times, their kids play soccer together. Or attend the same school. Hollywood is a club. And with the help of a couple of referrals, I got to fill out my application.
I walked through the bar to the assortment of floral lounge chairs that would serve as the site for my success or failure. I was meeting with the L’Oréal executives. I was a potential new product. I approached them in the dress and heels I’d agonized over wearing for a week. Did the dress convey respect and excitement and downplay desperation? Or did it somehow expose the truth: that my self-esteem hinged on their decision? Was it too low-cut or too high-cut? Was it too tight? Did it display my wares in an attempt to arouse interest in a cheap, throw-in-everything-you’ve-got way? I led with my hair by running my hand across the nape of my neck to scoop up the thick blond “product” and dumped it over one shoulder for inspection: cheap, but effective.
“Hi. I’m Portia.”
Handshakes all round. They looked interested. They looked like they liked what they saw. I prayed that it would go well. I prayed they would pick me.
I really needed that campaign. My ego needed it. During the course of my first season on the show, I felt like I was blending into the background. The initial thrill of writing for the new character, Nelle Porter, had given way to the thrill of writing for an even newer new character, Ling Woo. I really couldn’t believe what happened. Instead of introducing one cold, calculating woman, David Kelley had split one character and given it to two people. He’d given us half a character each. If Nelle was given one cutting comment, Ling would take the other. Nelle would romance one boss at the law firm of Cage and Fish, Ling would sleep with the other. As always I had to wonder if it was something I had done wrong. Maybe I wasn’t vicious enough? Maybe my vulnerability shone through the austere exterior? Maybe I wasn’t sexy enough for the kind of nasty-in-a-good-way attorney he had in mind? Maybe I was just nasty in the bad way because no matter how hard I tried I didn’t give off a flirty, sexual vibe. I’d signed up to play an intelligent professional, not a sex kitten. And when I’d tried to break through the icy veneer to find the sex kitten, I tended to just look like a kitten: vulnerable, fragile, in fear of abandonment, and needing to be held.
Unbearable Lightness Page 10
