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People Articles - Celebs and Public Figures
Cover: Eating Disorders: A Hollywood History (2/17/92)
Rosen, M., Eftimiades, M., McFarland, S., Benet, L., Gold, T., Johnson, K., et al. (1992, February 17). Eating disorders: A Hollywood history. People, 96+.
For more than two years, large-size model Christine Alt, the 5 ft.10 1/2 in., 155-lb. sister of pencil-slim cover girl Carol, desperately battled the self-imposed starvation of anorexia and then for another year fought the equally destructive binge-purge syndrome of bulimia. Trying to be "a perfect little girl" like her older sibling, she eventually starved herself down to 110 lbs. and a size 4 figure, developing an ulcer and urinary tract problem as side effects.
Still, "when Karen Carpenter died of anorexia [in 1983]," says Christine, "I remember looking at her picture in PEOPLE and thinking, 'God, how lucky she was because she died thin.' I was very envious. I remember saying, 'How can I get to that point -- being really thin without dying?' That's a sick mind. Karen Carpenter was a skeleton."
But to Alt and thousands of other women inspired since the late '50s by the boyishly slender movie star Audrey Hepburn and cover girl Twiggy (neither of whom is anorexic or bulimic), this new type of role model, as distorted and unrealistic as it was for most body types, had become an ideal. In Hollywood, where the camera -- like a binge itself -- adds 10 lbs. before you can say "Twinkie," eating disorders are commonplace.
Jane Fonda, 54, was bulimic from age 12 until 35 and admits that at one point she threw up 20 times a day.
Sally Field, 45, began her three-year bout with bulimia at 20, spurred, she has said, by the perception that "everybody then was Twiggy, except me. I felt immensely unattractive."
Ally Sheedy, the WarGames star who at 11 danced with the American Ballet Theatre, later developed bulimia and wrote a searing 1991 poem, Portrait of a Bulimic, in which she described "the bloat/ the skin/ stretched so tightly/ over her abdomen she fears/ it will rupture." Though skittish about discussing it, Sheedy, 29, has said, "You have to decide that you don't want your life ruled by an obsession. And food is one, whether you're gorging it or refusing it."
One man who has observed the entertainment industry's eating compulsions is film director Henry Jaglom, whose 1990 movie comedy, appropriately titled Eating, featured 38 women discussing their relationship to food. He interviewed 600 for roles, and only four had no eating problems. Yet Hollywood's male stars, Jaglom believes, are mostly immune to such issues. "Men aren't sent the same message," he says. "If a woman is 10 lbs. overweight, she's lost her womanliness."
Appropriately, the actress who uttered Eating's most memorable line -- "I'm still looking for a man who excites me as much as a baked potato"-- knows whereof she speaks. Savannah Smith Boucher has battled the urge to binge for most of her 48 years. As a young adult, "I usually would eat until I passed out," she says. Or she would bake some banana-nut bread "for friends." She would eat the first loaf, then the second, then feel so ashamed of herself that she'd hammer the third "to death" and throw it in the garbage. "The & next morning I'd dig it out and eat it," she says. The 5 ft.7 in. Smith's weight, aided by occasional fasts and enemas, has fluctuated between 118 and 164 lbs.; she is now between 130 and 135, a range she maintains thanks to psychotherapy.
Silence only compounds the shame many anorexics and bulimics feel. Lynn Redgrave, who over a period of 20 years would gorge and then purge, remembers sitting beside the late comedian Gilda Radner during a flight to Toronto at the end of the '70s. Over cocktails, the women shared eating intimacies, and Radner broke down in tears when she owned up to being bulimic. "She had never talked about it before. Nor had I," says Redgrave. "But hearing how out of control she was got to me. I decided I had to quit." Weight Watchers was her solution.
Even as the bulimic sees herself shrinking, her binges often become more titanic. Pat Boone's daughter Cherry Boone O'Neill, 37, says that in the midst of her seven-year siege with bulimia, she would eat "until I could barely stand up." Consuming a box of doughnuts, a bag of cookies, a pint of macaroni salad and half a gallon of ice cream at a sitting -- sometimes four times a day -- was not unusual. Cookies had to be mixed with milk, she says, and ice cream was a favorite because dry foods "didn't come up very well." Boone, who in 1982 wrote the book Starving for Attention about her experiences, reflects that she had always "felt I had value by association [with her family]." But after starting to lose weight, "I was so pleased by the response from people," she says. "I was exhilarated by the control I had over my body." So exhilarated that her weight dropped from 114 to a life-threatening 80 lbs. This prompted Cherry and her husband, Dan O'Neill, who works for a nonprofit relief group, to move from Southern California to Seattle for six months with eating-disorder specialist Dr. Raymond E. Vath. Although the disease took a toll -- Boone's reproductive system shut down for seven years, and the enamel on her teeth eroded due to the stomach acid that came up with her food -- today she delights in the fact that she weighs 116 lbs. and is mother to four children born since her recovery.
Sometimes early trauma is a culprit. The '60s teen idol Sandra Dee, 49, has flirted dangerously with anorexia since age 9. Hers was a desperate attempt to control what she perceived as an unmanageable body and an even more unmanageable life, including a stepfather who sexually abused her. For more than a year, Dee ate virtually nothing but lettuce. Twice as a young teenager she overdosed after swallowing Epsom salts as a purgative. "I tell you, I died," she says. "I saw the white light. If they hadn't brought me to UCLA, I would never have survived the night." The 5 ft.5 in. Dee still fights the disease but has increased her weight to about 95 lbs.
Eating disorders also run rampant in the dance world. American Ballet Theatre prima ballerina Leslie Browne, 34 -- who first won public attention at 22, when she replaced the emaciated, 87-lb. anorexic-bulimic Gelsey Kirkland in the 1977 movie The Turning Point -- claims that while she doesn't suffer from a disorder herself, she suspects that 25 percent of dancers do. "I know one girl who walks around the block for hours to work off what she ate," Browne says. "[The other dancers] want you to get fat so they can get ahead. It's vicious."
Compulsive starvation and bingeing exist in the world of women' s sports as well. Marathon runner Patti Catalano, 38, developed anorexia at 25 and then bulimia, managing to break the U.S. marathon record in 1981 while weighing only 104 lbs. She admits she was obsessed with control but adds, "I wasn't receiving enough love. It was a big void. I filled it with food. M&Ms are my friends, Oreos feel good going down. But they weren't good for my thighs or my sport." In the end, most anorexics and bulimics find that battling with their disease is akin to an endless marathon.
Northern Exposure's Janine Turner, 29, a model at age 3, discovered early the pressure to please others. When she first became anorexic at 17, she carried a mere 99 lbs. on her 5 ft.6 in. frame. "If I weighed 100, it would ruin my day," she recalls. Turner later recovered, only to starve herself again after moving to New York City and living on her own for the first time. Thanks to a regimented diet and the help of a psychotherapist, she has gained weight, and these days she doesn't even glance at the scale. She also refuses to be wrapped up in externals anymore. "As far as I'm concerned," she says, "the soul is what you've got to worry about when you die. You can't take a nice, trim, implanted body to heaven with you."
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Cover: An obessession that doesn't spare (8/3/92)
A debilitating obsession that doesn't spare celebs. (1992, August 3) People, pp. 68.
PRINCESS DIANA MAY NOT YET BE READY TO confess publicly to problems with bulimia, but plenty of other celebrities have. They include:
Jane Fonda, 54, who says she was bulimic from ages 12 to 35: "I would literally empty a refrigerator. I spent most of every day either thinking about food, shopping for food -- or bingeing and purging."
Judy Collins, 53, became bulimic after giving up smoking in the 1970s: "I went straight from the cigarettes into an eating disorder. I started throwing up. I didn't know anything about bulimia, certainly not that it is an addiction or that it would get worse. My feelings about myself, even though I had been able to give up smoking and lose 20 lbs., were of increasing despair."
Elton John, 45, was bulimic from 1984 to 1990: "I'd gorge myself, then deliberately make myself sick. For breakfast I'd have an enormous fry-up, followed by 20 pots of cockles [shellfish] and then a tub of Haagen-Dazs vanilla...If I was eating a curry, I couldn't wait to throw it up so that I could have the next one."
Ally Sheedy, 30, spent her later teenage years as a bulimic: "You have to be willing to change that sort of behavior, and it took me years to beat it. When you have an emotional disorder, you have to decide that you don't want your life being ruled by an obsession. And food is an obsession, whether you're gorging [on] it or refusing it."
Joan Rivers, 59, suffered from bulimia after her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, committed suicide in 1987: "Every part of my life, no matter how minor, overwhelmed me. I was nibbling all day long -- chocolates, pasta, cookies. But I cleverly figured out a solution to the overeating. I went into the bathroom, put my finger with its pretty little $4.50 nail down my throat and threw everything up...One day I found myself in a public toilet vomiting my head off. Dear God, I thought, I'm in trouble."
Lynn Redgrave, 49, a recovered bulimic who was until recently the national spokesperson for Weight Watchers: "[Bingeing and purging] felt like a great discovery, as I suppose it is to most people. People complimented me on my weight, but inside I felt like s--t."
Carling Bassett, 24, who suffered from bulimia while on the pro tennis tour: "It becomes part of your life, like smoking. Or it's like being an alcoholic. It's so easy to get into and so hard to get out of. I hated myself that I couldn't stop."
Cathy Rigby, 39, the Olympic gymnast turned actress, who was bulimic for 12 years from the time she was 16: "I wanted to be perfect in my attitude and in my weight. Inside I was going crazy. I probably consumed 10,000 calories a day or more in fast foods. I can tell you where every McDonald's and Jack in the Box was along the way [to my voice lessons] -- and every bathroom where I could get rid of the food."
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Paula Abdul (6/19/95)
Schneider, K. S., & Gold, T. (1995, June 19). Cover: A brave new song. People, 88+.
After bulimia and a broken marriage, Paula Abdul is putting her blues away.
Welcome to the palace of Paula Abdul, Pop princess. Here, just outside the peach-colored walls of her $3.2 million Spanish-style mansion above Beverly Hills, is a pond where rare Japanese fish flit back and forth beneath a gurgling fountain. Nearby, a winding pool leads to a sun-filled kitchen. And the airy dining room is fragrant with the smell of fresh-cut roses and tulips -- and, Abdul suddenly notices, dog pee.. "Oh, Punky," she moans, scooping up her 1-year old Chihuahua. "What am I doing to do with you?" Then she stops, smiles and says, "Please don't tell anyone my dog doesn't have bladder control."
In fact, Abdul doesn't give a hoot if the world knows her puppy's secret. "Secrecy," she says, laughing. "What is that?" For Abdul, 32, secrecy has at times been a way of sustaining pain. Six years have passed since the former L.A. Laker Girl burst onto the music scene with Forever Your Girl, a debut album that sold 12 million copies, produced four chart-topping singles and turned her into a star overnight. Since then, Abdul has experienced other highs: an Emmy for choreographing The Tracey Ullman Show, a Grammy for her Opposites Attract video, her 1992 marriage to actor Emilio Estevez. She has also endured humiliation and sorrow. In 1991 her record company was sued by a backup singer who claimed that her voice had been used to enhance Abdul's vocals; in 1994 her marriage to Estevez ended in divorce. None of that, however, affected Abdul as deeply as the secret she has, until now, kept from almost everyone: her 15-year battle with bulimia.
"I'd starve myself, then binge, then purge," says the 5'2", 105-lb. singer, wincing at the memory. "Whether I was sticking my head in the toilet or exercising for hours a day, I was spitting out the food -- and the feelings."
Today, she says, her eating and exercise problems are behind her. A monthlong stay at the Laureate Psychiatric Clinic for eating disorders in Tulsa last year helped give her the confidence to work out problems and fears with friends, family members and music-business colleagues rather than with her refrigerator. Head Over Heels, her just-released third album, is, she says, her most honest and personal project to date. "I took all the stuff I was afraid to face," says Abdul, "and put it in my music."
What happened after Abdul hit her peak is something she is still struggling to understand. "The confidence I had when I was just plain anonymous Paula eroded," she says. "Suddenly being Paula Abdul was not a very comfortable place to be."
In truth, it never was. For Abdul, who was raised in Van Nuys, Calif., the tough times started when she was 7 and her sense of home and family was shaken by divorce. Her father, Harry, now 62, the owner of a water-bottling company, moved more than 200 miles away to Northern California. Her mother, Lorraine, a onetime classical pianist, moved with Paula and her sister Wendy, now 39 and a homemaker, to a condo in the San Fernando Valley community of North Hollywood. "I didn't understand it," says Abdul of the split. "My mother did a great job of being there, and I saw my dad on weekends. But it was hard."
As a way of coping with the changes, Abdul lost herself in old musicals on TV and dreamed of being the next Ginger Rogers. "She'd watch Gene Kelly and be totally enthralled," says her father. "She was always a ham, and there was always a crowd around her. The bigger the crowd, the harder she'd work."
When she was 8, Abdul started taking ballet lessons and comparing herself to other girls. "My friends were tall and thin," she says. "I was short and round." It didn't help that her instructor used Abdul as an example in a discussion on anatomical variations. "She pointed out that my body was different," says Abdul. "I had such a feeling of shame. From then on I never felt right."
When she was 15, she received a scholarship to a dance camp near Palm Springs. There, in addition to training in ballet and modern dance, she learned how many of her long-legged teachers stayed so lithe. "They were all throwing up their food," says Abdul.
Shocked, she phoned her mother. "That's not normal," Lorraine told her. "Don't do that." Abdul didn't -- for a couple of years. As a student at Van Nuys High School, she reached her full height -- all of 62 inches -- and weight: between 100 and 110 lbs. When she hit the higher end, she ate only salads and drank only diet soda. "A pound or two on a shorter person," she has said, "is very different from what it is on a taller person." Her parents assured her she looked fine. It didn't matter; when she looked in the mirror, she saw someone fat.
One night when she was 16, after eating Mexican food with her cheerleading squad, she went home and did what so many of her friends had long done: she stuck her finger down her throat. "No one thought it was bad," says Abdul. "Once I tried it, I felt it was an amazing way to control my weight."
By the time she enrolled at Cal State Northridge in 1981 with the intention of becoming a sportscaster, she was deep in the frenzy of a bulimic eating disorder. Either she binged and purged or spent up to 4 hours a day sweating off the calories she had consumed.
Her disorder, though, never got in the way of her drive. During her freshman year at Cal State, Abdul tried out for the Lakers cheerleading team. The judges selected her from a pool of some 700, and within three weeks she was the squad's choreographer. She quit school six months later, but her career took flight. Abdul's high-energy, street-funk style delighted fans -- including the Jackson family, who saw her at a game and hired the 20-year-old to choreograph a video for their 1984 Victory album.
Soon she gave up her Lakers gig for a life of creating dance routines for Janet Jackson, George Michael, Aretha Franklin, even Tom Hanks in the 1988 movie Big. "My biggest claim to fame," the actor told Abdul after she mapped out the famous dance number he performed on a giant keyboard, "is that you once choreographed me."
In 1987 she used $35,000 in savings to put together a demo of herself singing. Though her voice was untrained, her moves were magnificent, and in an MTV-driven business, she proved highly marketable. Virgin Records signed her the same year; by 1989 her singles "Straight Up," "Forever Your Girl" and "Cold Hearted" had all reached No. 1 on the pop charts. "It was a magical experience," says Abdul. It was also more pressure than she had bargained for. "I remember, at a rehearsal for a TV show, I couldn't stay focused," Abdul says. "I felt nervous and out of control, and all I could think about was food. Food numbed the fear and anxiety. I'd eat, then run to the bathroom."
Abdul put on a stoic face when, in April 1991, Forever Your Girl backup singer Yvette Marine filed a $1 million lawsuit against Virgin Records, claiming producers had combined her voice with Abdul's without giving credit. Though not named in the suit, Abdul took the charge as a personal affront. Both she and Virgin vehemently denied any wrongdoing. "I do not profess to be any Aretha Franklin . . . but that is my voice," Abdul told the Los Angeles Times. Privately, though, she was deeply embarrassed. For her, the mere suggestion of fraud tainted the release of Spellbound -- which nevertheless went on to sell 6 million copies. "People in every city asked, `Are you singing live? Is that really you?' " she remembers.
But not everything was bleak. Suddenly, Abdul was seeing a man whom, until the spring of 1991, she had known mostly by telephone: Emilio Estevez, then 29. Before him, Abdul's only other serious romance had been with Full House star John Stamos, whom she dated for seven months in 1990. Most of her relationships ended, as Abdul told the Chicago Tribune, for the same old reason: "I'm very career oriented. . . . The guys I was with didn't understand that."
Estevez seemed different. The actor first called her when she was dating Stamos, just to tell her he was a fan. Every couple of months, he would pick up the phone to touch base. Then, when she was performing in Manhattan before her world tour in 1991, she got a message on her phone at the Plaza Hotel. Estevez was staying there too, and he wanted to meet for dinner. "After that he would send flowers or letters to every city I was in," says Abdul. "We would have phone conversations and visit every few weekends. We thought everything was perfect."
Some six months after their first date, Abdul flew to see Estevez in Minneapolis, where he was filming The Mighty Ducks, and found herself in his hotel staring at an engagement ring. "He got down on his knee and said, `I've been in love with you for a long time. I don't want to live my life without you,' " recalls Abdul. "I just melted."
The two were married in a Santa Monica courtroom in 1992. At first their life together was as charmed as their courtship. They spent weekdays in her hilltop home, weekends in his Malibu Beach house, took hikes in the Santa Monica Mountains and went to movies together. Abdul opened up to her husband about her deepest fears and her most private problems. A member of Overeaters Anonymous since 1989, Abdul attended meetings three times a week with her husband's support. "He wanted what was best for me," she says.
Estevez was also an emotional support when the Marine suit came to trial in 1993. Although she was not required to be at the trial, Abdul, outraged, sat in the front row every day for a month. The jury deliberated for less than an hour before returning a verdict in favor of Virgin and, in effect, Abdul.
It was when Abdul wanted to get on with her life, she says, that she realized there was a problem in her marriage: children. Before they married, says Abdul, "I let [Emilio] know that I was very interested in having children." Estevez, already the father of two -- Taylor, 11, and Paloma, 9 -- from a previous relationship with moddel Carey Salley, initially agreed, she says, but later changed his mind. "It was very hard for him to admit that he couldn't handle having kids again," she says. "It was heartbreaking for us both."
After many tear-filled but, Abdul says, civilized talks, the couple filed for divorce in May 1994. Abdul took the split hard. She couldn't concentrate, and for a while she couldn't eat. Then she couldn't not eat. "I was so sad, I just needed to be filled up," she says. "It was like I was trying to fill this big empty hole." Though she stopped herself from throwing up, Abdul knew she was headed for trouble. "I felt totally not together," she says. "I was sad, hurt and frustrated, leaving the recording studio in tears. I knew I needed help."
Two months later, without telling even her family, Abdul checked into the Laureate clinic on the advice of her therapist. Her attempt to deal privately with her problems ended on the third day when she was ambushed by paparazzi and became front-page tabloid news. "I had to call my parents and tell them what was happening," she says. It turned out to be a blessing for them all. "She's my baby," says Lorraine. "You don't ever want to see your kids having trouble. But I was so proud of her."
Her father, too, offered support. When he visited the clinic, he and his daughter confronted for the first time many past issues, starting with the divorce. They even had one unexpected bonding experience. While buying cappuccino together at an outdoor mall in Tulsa, Paula's Chihuahua ran into the street and was killed by a passing car. Abdul was devastated. "It was the first time I'd seen my daughter that emotional," says Harry. They wept together as they walked back to the clinic. There an exhausted Paula went to her room to take a nap. A few minutes later, Harry says, she called out to him, "Daddy, can you come lie down next to me?" He did, and, he says, "we shared a moment we wished we had shared 20 years earlier."
One loving encounter does not, of course, remake a life. Curled up on a velvet sofa in her living room, Abdul says the lessons she took away from the clinic are tools, not cures. "There are three things I commit to on a daily basis," she says. "Exercising for an hour a day, tops. Never skipping meals. And accepting the size and shape I was born with." Keeping those commitments is not always easy. "There have been many times when I sat and clenched my hands and said, `Okay, Paula, you're feeling really upset about what you just ate and it's not healthy. Get over it.' "
Everyone who knows her believes that she will. Yet for all the support she receives, Abdul realizes her health -- and happiness -- are in her own hands. "My life took a difficult turn, and I'm proud to say I survived it," she says. She hopes the future will bring more musical success and someday a husband and children. "I do want to meet a special person and get married again," says Abdul, currently unattached. "I believe I'm well-deserving of that." But whatever comes, she says, she is determined to face it with the strength she feels now. "I have no doubt I'll keep up my commitment to myself. I feel too good. And this is no bull," she adds. "This is my life."
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Paula Abdul (8/19/02)
Gliatto, T., & Wihlborg, U. (2002, August 19). Pop zinger: MTV princess Paula Abdul comes back swinging on the testy set of American Idol. People, 74+.
Ask Paula Abdul the burning question of the day--is the sniping between her and fellow American Idol judge Simon Cowell for real?--and the pop star lowers her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "When we first started the show," says Abdul, "Simon was always telling me, 'You know you want me.' He kept talking about the sexual tension. I just thought, 'Ha! That's never happening.' Then everyone on the set started gossiping, saying we were dating but not telling anyone. After a while we both thought, 'Maybe we should hook up?' So we did. . . ."
She giggles. "Just kidding." Good. On FOX's humongous summer hit, a singing contest for pop wannabes, half the fun is watching these two, the calico cat and gingham dog of reality TV. Cowell, 42, a British recording executive, gleefully rips apart the contestants. Abdul, 40, offers only warm praise and ever-so-tactful criticism, saving her fire for Cowell: "I get p----d off at him. I answer back. Sometimes I punch him. He says he has permanent bruises." Cowell, for his part, told PEOPLE recently, "There are days I cannot stand to be in thesame room with her. She has a bit of 'I'm the one who used to be a singer here, so I'm the only one who knows what the kids are talking about.'"
Abdul did sing and strut her way through some of the slickest videos of the late '80s and early '90s, helping shape the genre. "She came way before J.Lo or Britney," says Idol's third judge, record producer Randy Jackson. "She was a choreographer, a dancer and a singer." During auditions last spring, "the kids were ecstatic to meet her," says cohost Ryan Seacrest. "I thought, 'Hey, they're going to be too young.' But they knew exactly who she was."
This despite the fact that Abdul has been AWOL from pop music since her third album, 1995's Head Over Heels. "Everyone thinks I haven' t done anything in years," she says. But millions, whether they know it or not, have seen her movie choreography. She taught Mena Suvari to cheerlead in American Beauty and staged a Latin dance number for Dana Carvey's new Master of Disguise. "She had these male dancers who have three percent body fat waiting for her orders," says Carvey. "She'd go, 'Roberto, show him the fling-flong and the double-half Betty step.'"
The Van Nuys, Calif., native knew she was destined to fling flong and more when at 5 she saw Singin' in the Rain. "I wanted Gene Kelly to be my second dad," she says. (The first is Harry Abdul, the retired owner of a water-bottling company, now divorced from her mother, Lorraine, a classically trained pianist.) She got her break in the early 1980s as an L.A. Laker Girls cheerleader. Spotted by Marlon and Jackie Jackson, she was hired to choreograph a video for the Jacksons' 1984 Victory album. A meeting with sister Janet Jackson launched her reign as the Agnes de Mille of MTV, with her sexy video choreography for Janet, Duran Duran and even ZZ Top. "But," she says, "I wanted to be a total performer." Forever Your Girl accomplished that: Her 1988 debut sold 12 million copies, led to her own string of dance videos and made her a multimillionaire.
With a second hit album, Spellbound, came disenchantment. A romance with Full House star John Stamos was followed by marriage to actor Emilio Estevez in 1992. They split amicably two years later, in part because both were caught up in their careers. From there she lurched again into headlines: In 1994 she checked into a eating-disorders clinic for a month to deal with the bulimia that had wracked her since 16. "But you can get past it," she says now. She no longer weighs herself. "I'll always have days when I feel bloated or not at my best. But I can say, 'I exercised 40 minutes, had my three meals, a little dessert and that's fine.'"
She weathered one more mess with her 1996 wedding to clothing manufacturer Brad Beckerman. Their 1998 divorce left her so bitter, "I don't even want to say his name," she says. The lesson: "I rely on myself," says Abdul, who also underwent neck surgery in 2001 for an old dance-related disc injury. "Baby Paula is Adult Paula."
Actually, babies are still on her mind. "I thought I'd be a mom by now," says Abdul, who shares her L.A. home with three long-haired Chihuahuas. "But do I have a partner, get married, be a single mom?" Whatever option she picks, none will involve the man she's currently linked to in the public eye. "Is there anything I like about Simon Cowell?" she asks. "Yes. I like when he goes back to London."
Illustration/Photos:
COLOR PHOTO: DOROTHY LOW [T of C] 74 IN THE SPOTLIGHT "I've learned to rely on myself," says American Idol's Paula Abdul (at home with her Chihuahuas).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOROTHY LOW "I have always been driven," says Abdul (at her home in Los Angeles). "I may not be the best, but I have the ability to make the best of what I got."
COLOR PHOTO: R. MICKSHAW/FOX "My job is to keep the kids' dreams alive," says Abdul (with pitiless Simon Cowell).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOROTHY LOW "I decorated this house myself," says Abdul (in her bedroom). "It' s a very peaceful house.
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Maria Conchita Alonso (8/21/00)
Berestein, L., & Alonso, M. C. (2000, August 21). Coping: A conquering heroine. People, 69+
High Noon's Maria Conchita Alonso waged a decade-long battle with bulimia.
In 1985, Maria Conchita Alonso's star was rising. After only three years in Hollywood, the Cuban-born, Venezuelan-bred actress was getting raves for her performance as Robin Williams's Italian girlfriend in Moscow On The Hudson and had received a Grammy nomination (the first of three) for Best Latin Artist. Yet the former beauty queen (she was Miss Teenager of the World 1971) wasn't satisfied. A boyfriend's harping about her weight undermined Alonso's fragile self-esteem. She began dieting, then slipped into the self-destructive syndrome called bulimia nervosa, prompting Alonso to eat uncontrollably when stressed, then vomit to avoid weight gain. "I didn't want him to put me down anymore," she says.
Alonso worked steadily in film and TV over the next decade, but she continued to struggle with the condition, damaging her esophagus and, eventually, her teeth. But now, with the help of a balanced diet, exercise and a physician specializing in eating disorders, the outgoing 44-year-old entertainer (she stars opposite Tom Skerritt in the Aug. 20 TBS remake of High Noon and is recording a new album) has learned to control her condition, which is generally regarded as incurable. She hasn't had a relapse in five years. Alonso calls on friends, family and her boyfriend of a year, model and actor Adnan Taletovich, 32, to alert her when she falls prey to overeating.
In hopes of helping the millions of people in the U.S. afflicted with eating disorders, Alonso spoke out about her bulimia at length for the first time at her airy Beverly Hills home. "I see people around who lie about bulimia, or hide it," she told correspondent Leslie Berestein. "But you can die from it."
All my life I've had a weight problem. As a child I loved to eat. I would hide from my mother and drink whole cans of condensed milk in my room. When I was 12 my parents opened the first private women's spa in Caracas. My mother would say, "What a shame to have a chubby daughter. You have to represent us well." I didn't pay attention to her. I know that did not contribute to my bulimia. But I always wanted to be respected for who I am, not for what I look like.
In 1975, when I was 18, I represented Venezuela in the Miss World beauty pageant. I entered because I knew that would open the door for me in the entertainment industry. But in the 10 days before the contest, I ate every meal and nibbled at cocktail parties. I went from a size 7 to a size 9. I had to wear a bigger gown and bathing suit. I ate my way out of the contest.
During the next 10 years, my weight fluctuated from 119 to 145 lbs. But it wasn't until 1985, after I moved to California to pursue acting, that my bulimia started. My boyfriend always told me I was fat, even though I realize now that I was never fat. At the time, I wore a size 7 dress and was doing jazz and ballet every day. But after he told me this, I stopped eating and dropped at least one dress size.
After a few months of dieting, I was in Mexico promoting my album Maria Conchita and found this huge bag of chocolate in my hotel suite. I hadn't had chocolate in so long, so I ended up eating the whole bag. Afterward I went crazy. I thought, "I can't gain any weight!" That's when I went to the bathroom and threw up. I had no idea there was a disease called bulimia. I thought, "This is so cool. I can eat something and then throw it up! Wow." I had no idea it could hurt me, so I started throwing up once every two or three days. Then it became once every day, then a couple of times a day. I was always in the bathroom.
When you're doing promotion, you have interviews all day long. Sometimes you feel like you're suffocating and don't want to see anybody. To calm my nerves, I would eat. Then, feeling anxious, I would throw up. I used to eat a lot, throw up, then sometimes eat more. I felt bad remembering the image of me throwing up. It lowered my self-esteem. This went on for nearly 10 months.
Then one day in spring 1986, I was in New York City doing promotional work with a radio station. I had to have lunch with fans and dinner with more fans. After each meal, I threw up. That night, I looked at myself in a magnifying mirror and noticed little red dots all around my neck. They were exploded blood vessels. During the previous few days I hadn't been able to sleep lying down. If I tried, I felt a very strong pain, like a knife cutting me through the chest. I had to prop myself up with a pillow. I finally called a girlfriend and said, "I'm dying. Come help me." She came to my room and gave me the name of a doctor in L.A. When I returned to California a few days later I went to see him, and he asked me, "What did you have for breakfast?" I told him, "Coffee." He said, "Go eat! Have a piece of toast." I gasped and said, "Toast? Oh, no!" I wouldn't eat it because I was afraid to have carbohydrates.
I told him about my bingeing and purging and the pain in my chest. He diagnosed me as bulimic and said that as a result of vomiting so much, I had torn a hole in my esophagus. That was the worst time. Luckily, after about a month the hole closed by itself. The doctor also prescribed a mild tranquilizer to calm the anxiety that pushed me to eat.
I saw the doctor for about two years, first about three times a week, then twice a week, then once a week, then every few months. He gave me a balanced diet--proteins, plus toast and vegetables, things I had avoided. But he was also like a psychiatrist for me. He made me feel good about myself, made me understand that I was able to eat a little bit of everything as long as I controlled it. Slowly I started eating healthy things.
After a year and a half, my bingeing and purging started to slow down. I don't know how, but I never allowed the bulimia to get in the way of my career. And I don't think Hollywood pressure to be thin caused the disorder. For me, the most important thing besides my family has been my career. I did not want to do anything to mess it up.
In my case, personal problems usually triggered the relapses. I've always been more in control of my professional life than my personal life. Although I'm a strong woman, when I fall in love I just give myself 100 percent. I become secondary. Maybe being Latin, the ups are very high and the downs are very down. So the bulimia was more about not getting what I wanted in my love life than about not getting a part.
I stopped seeing my boyfriend in 1986. I still had sporadic bouts of bingeing and vomiting over the next 10 years. My worst relapse was while working on the soap opera Alejandra in Venezuela in 1994. There wasn't any healthy food on the set, and I started eating and gaining weight. I started throwing up again about once a week. But I never was late for jobs or canceled anything. The men I dated never knew unless I told them. I often had bad breath, so I always ate mints. I told some friends and family members about my problem, but although I was skinny I still weighed enough that it never showed.
My last relapse was in the spring of 1995, about a half hour before I was to go onstage in Kiss of the Spider Woman on Broadway. I'd just had a huge lunch and felt full. I threw up in the bathroom in the theater. That was the first time I had ever vomited before a performance. When it happened, I felt very bad about myself. I thought I could harm my career if I continued. It opened my eyes.
Also around this time I ended up having lots of dental surgery. I think it came from throwing up so much over the years. They had to open up my gums, which were infected, and operate on them. I had to have four or five root canals because some of my teeth were so damaged on the inside. I'm lucky I didn't lose my teeth.
I still don't know how I became bulimic. But bulimia is like alcoholism; you never get rid of it. I can seldom eat greasy pastas, pizza and fried foods--which make me want more and more. Now when I see pizza on the set I wait until there's one piece left, so there's no more to eat. I talk to my boyfriend and family. You feel relieved when someone else knows about the problem. Hiding things makes you go crazy. Right now the disorder is under control, but it's something I always think about. When I sit down at the table, I have to watch what I eat. I'll live with it forever.
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Justine Bateman (6/26/00)
Where are they now?: Family ties 1982-1989. (2000, June 26). People, 113+.
With room at its kitchen table for two ex-hippie parents, a Valley girl and Michael J. Fox as the decade's iconic yuppie, Family Ties bridged the '80s generation gap. "We had a new kind of family," says series creator Gary David Goldberg. "Audiences started to see themselves in those characters."
Michael J. Fox
ALEX P. KEATON "He was flawless," declares Meredith Baxter, "totally self-involved, a real mercenary at times and very shallow." In other words he was Michael J. Fox playing her TV son, the redoubtable Alex P. Keaton. But in Fox's hands, Baxter notes, the ultimate Reagan youth "had a warmth and depth. Who wouldn't connect with that?" Very few, it turns out, as ratings soared and the show, originally centered on parents Baxter and Michael Gross, was retooled to focus more on Fox, now 39.
"People had to make adjustments," admits series creator Gary David Goldberg. "It wasn't going to be the show everyone signed on to do. We had the magic of Michael. That was just luck."
And hard work, says Gross. "When I first met him, I saw ambition, in a very positive way. I thought, 'He just wants to swallow this whole.'"
Fox was tapped in 1985 to star in the first of three wildly successful Back to the Future movies, filmed at night around the Family Ties schedule. "Even when he had the No. 1 movie and a No. 1 TV show," says Goldberg, "he never asked to have his parking space moved or his dressing room enlarged. He was the first one to show up and the last one to go home."
Sadly, in 1998 the star and co-executive producer of the current hit Spin City announced that he has Parkinson's disease. Last month, Fox left the show to spend more time with his wife of 12 years, actress Tracy Pollan, 40, and their three children at their Manhattan home. He also plans to raise money for Parkinson's research. Amid an outpouring of sympathy, Fox remains optimistic.
"Michael is very much a person in the present," says Gross. "He doesn't obsess about the dark side of the future."
Tina Yothers
JENNIFER KEATON Her band is called Jaded, but she's not. "You can bash childhood acting all you want, but it was a great experience," says Tina Yothers, 27, who became the Keaton clan's towheaded tomboy at age 9. With them she found a role model in her TV sister Justine Bateman ("I wanted to be like her so bad") and plenty of inspiration for her current gig as lead singer and co-lyricist for her band, which released its own CD, www.jadedonline.com, last year and will tour this summer. "Family Ties taped next door to Solid Gold," says Yothers, who lives in L.A. and dates Las Vegas club owner Robert Kaiser, 35. "So I got to see every Top 40 act coming through. I'd miss rehearsals and get scolded."
But not by her TV dad, Michael Gross. "Tina was a gas," he reports. "We used to play tag. When we ended the show in 1989, I tagged Tina last. So she's been 'it' for 11 years now!"
Justine Bateman
MALLORY KEATON It was all an act--a good one. As a ditsy, shopaholic teen, Bateman's Mallory "was more a departure from her real self than anybody else on that set," says her TV dad, Michael Gross. "Justine was no airhead."
But unbeknownst to her castmates, Bateman battled an eating disorder during her Ties days, a revelation she made to TV Guide in 1996. "There were all these feelings that I never let myself feel," she said. "And all that builds up, and it never had a release." She has credited her recovery to a 12-step program she joined in 1993. Today, Bateman, 34, a born-again Christian who is single and lives in L.A., keeps a low profile. Her appearances have been limited to local poetry readings, the first season of 1996's Men Behaving Badly and roles in indie movies, including the not-yet-released romantic comedy Say You'll Be Mine.
"She's terribly gifted," says Mine coproducer Michael Corrente. "I think she turns down more work than she accepts. She should be working all the time."
Brian Bonsall
ANDREW KEATON When 4-year-old Brian Bonsall joined the Keaton clan in 1986, his TV sister Tina Yothers was thrilled. "I was no longer the little one. I Ioved it," she says. So did Bonsall--for the most part.
"Michael J. Fox taught me how to dive in his swimming pool," he says. "And he always listened to me." The downside: "I was with adults all the time and had to be patient like they were, and I'm not really patient."
When Bonsall would refuse to do a scene, says creator Gary David Goldberg, "the guy who was able to bring him back was Michael Fox."
Bonsall, now 18, who quit acting when his family moved to Colorado in 1994, has just graduated from high school. A guitarist, he's focusing on his hardcore band, the Late Bloomers. "Even if the band doesn't work out, I want to be associated with music somehow," he says.
From a distance, Keaton matriarch Meredith Baxter can't resist some motherly fretting. "To think he's a punker," she says. "Just don't pierce your tongue, honey. That's all I ask."
Michael Gross
STEVEN KEATON "It was about a family who could and did disagree without breaking up," says Michael Gross, 53, explaining why Family Ties touched such a nerve. Truth be told, the character of Steven Keaton at first got on Gross's nerves. "He seemed ridiculously sane and responsible, a knee-jerk liberal who always did the right thing and did it easily," says the Yale drama school grad, whose favorite episode had Steven contemplating, and deciding against, having an affair. "I was not nearly as patient, kind and understanding as he was." Oh, posh.
"He was my best friend for seven years," says his TV Mrs., Meredith Baxter.
"He played with me more than anyone else did," says his TV daughter Tina Yothers.
Gross, adds series creator Gary David Goldberg, was also "very gratified that Steven was revered by his kids, but they weren't afraid of him."
While on Ties, Gross stepped into a ready-made family of his own when he wed Elza Bergeron, now 59, one of the show's casting directors, in 1984. "With Family Ties came a wife, two children, my first house, my first car, a dog," he says. "I was reeling from all the changes." After some time spent painting in the Southwest, Gross--who has made several appearances on the TV-movie crime series In the Line of Duty and last month played a therapist in Michael J. Fox's final episode of Spin City--now lives in Manhattan and is appearing as Ross in Macbeth. "I'm doing Shakespeare on Broadway," he says. "I'm exactly where I should be right now."
Meredith Baxter
ELYSE KEATON It happens all the time. In a restaurant recently, "the young man who was waiting on us came up and said, 'Excuse me, I just want to say that I always wanted you to be my mother,'" says Meredith Baxter, 53. So did much of America.
In fact, Ties creator Gary David Goldberg wrote the part of unflappable Elyse Keaton with Baxter in mind. The actress had already spent four years on ABC's Family and "was a known quantity," says Goldberg. "She set the tone from the beginning."
Ties was also a stabilizing force for Baxter. By the end of the run, her 15-year marriage to actor-director David Birney, with whom she had three children, was on its last legs. "Doing the show saved my life," says Baxter (who has two grown children from a first marriage and is newly separated from screenwriter Michael Blodgett). "I had a place to go."
Baxter, who has appeared in some 40 made-for-TV movies (including last month's Wednesday Woman), launched a skin-care line in 1999 ("I use it, and my skin looks nice for an old broad," she says). She also played Fox's mom in two 1997 episodes of Spin City and last year reunited with Gross to perform onstage in Love Letters. Taping Family Ties' last show was "heartbreaking," Baxter says. "We just stood there and wept in each other's arms."
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Kate Beckinsale (6/4/01)
Miller, S., Ryan, T., Davis, C., Finan, E., & Fleeman, M. (2001, June 4). Battle ready: Pearl Harbor's Kate Beckinsale has conquered anorexia and other demons. Next quest: Hollywood. People, 71+
Never mind the Yank accent, the bombs bursting in air or the sight of gore-soaked extras limping through the smoke. For Kate Beckinsale, one of the biggest acting challenges in the making go Pearl Harbor came when she returned to her trailer--and her 2-year-old daughter Lily. "When we had bloody days," she says, "we just pretended that Mommy had been painting with her hands."
There's nothing make-believe about Beckinsale's potential for Hollywood stardom. After eight years of small-budget, critically acclaimed films--including the 1995 BBC production Cold Comfort Farm and this year's Merchant-Ivory offering The Golden Bowl--the 27-year-old Brit has hit the big time with a bang in the $140 million epic Harbor. "Kate would get up in the morning and look outside her trailer and couldn't believe what was going on," says producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who cast her as a nurse who captures the hearts of two Army pilots (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett). "She was running from real explosions. I'm sure she's never done that before."
Not that Beckinsale is any fragile English rose. She has admitted she once urinated into the thermos of a director who browbeat her into doing a nude scene in one of her early films. While starring in a BBC adaptation of Emma in 1997, she caused a flap by publicly declaring Gwyneth Paltrow's take on the role in the 1996 Hollywood version "cowardly" for being too likable. Then there's her penchant for language that is, shall we say, not exactly the Queen's English. "Her sense of humor is quite crude," says Glynis Murray, producer of 1997's Shooting Fish, "more so than you'd imagine from someone so sweet and pretty."
She has also coped with more heartache than many. Kate was 5 when her father, Richard Beckinsale, a star of the popular English sitcoms Rising Damp and Porridge, died of a heart attack in his sleep at 31. "It stayed with me, the incredible shock and huge loss," she says. "I started expecting bad things to happen, that friends will leave, that loved ones will die. It kept building until I had a nervous breakdown when I was a teenager."
That breakdown took the form of anorexia. Around age 15, Beckinsale withered to only about 70 pounds. "You don't believe your eyes for an amazingly long time," says her stepfather, Roy Battersby, 65, a TV director who moved in with Kate's mother, actress-turned-casting director Judy Loe, now 54, a few years after Richard Beckinsale's death. When he and Loe realized Kate had become "concentration-camp thin," he says, they agreed to Kate's unconventional idea for treatment--Freudian psychoanalysis, which lasted several years. "It opened my eyes to things, not to be afraid of facing these fears," explains Beckinsale, who says she fully recovered from the anorexia. "I at least understood what they were and where they had come from."
After high school Beckinsale headed to Oxford to major in Russian and French literature. But in her freshman year she won an audition for Kenneth Branagh's 1993 film Much Ado About Nothing, and after two more years of study she dropped out to focus on acting. One early role was in a touring play with Welsh actor Michael Sheen, 32, who became her boyfriend and eventually Lily's father. "He is as intense as I am, and we did a lot of yelling in the beginning," says Beckinsale, who was 20 when they met. "Our honeymoon period has come later."
The actual honeymoon is still pending. "We got surprised with the baby and simply haven't gotten around to the marriage thing," says Beckinsale, who enlisted her mother to help care for Lily on the Pearl Harbor set. Certainly her career won't be slowing down anytime soon (next up: the romantic comedy Serendipity with John Cusack). But Beckinsale has neither time nor inclination to ponder the impact of fame. "I spend most of my time when I'm not working up to my ears in a sandbox with Lily," she says, "and she doesn't care about who I am. I'm not a big star on Barney or Teletubbies."
Illustration/Photos:
COLOR PHOTO: ERIC CHARBONNEAU/BEI SCREEN Kate Beckinsale, Pearl Harbor star and young mom, says she hasn't "gotten around to the marriage thing." [T of C]
COLOR PHOTO: FIROOZ ZAHEDI/JANET BOTAISH GROUP Beckinsale (in L.A.) "has always been witty, even during the worst times," says her stepfather. "She has always been a joy."
COLOR PHOTO: DAVID BUCHAN/WENN Having Lily "put things in perspective," says Beckinsale (in 2000).
B/W PHOTO: (C) EXPRESS NEWSPAPERS Beckinsale (with her parents in '79) was shaken by her father's death: "When you're 5, it colors how you see the world."
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Karen Carpenter (10/26/87)
Calio, J., & Adelson, S. (1987, October 26). Sequel: Four years after his sister Karen's death, singer Richard Carpenter makes his debut as a solo act. People, 139+.
Richard Carpenter, the male half of the successful brother-sister singing duo, the Carpenters, still looks the same: 6 ft. tall, 160 lean pounds, a boyish smile.
But at least two things have changed since the tragic day four and a half years ago when his sister, Karen, died, the victim of a heart attack brought about by an eight-year battle with anorexia. On the professional front, Carpenter released his first solo LP, Time, last month. But it's the home-front news that has Carpenter most excited: Eight weeks ago, at age 40, he became a father for the first time -- and simultaneously a bowl of mush. "He was never real interested in having children," says Mary, 30, his wife of three years. "But when we decided to get married, I told him I really wanted to have children. He said yes, so we started trying last year. Now that Kristi Lynn is here, he adores her. He was in the delivery room. He saw her before I did, changed her before I did. He's a real good father." Record business wisdom would have Carpenter go out on tour to support his new LP, but he plans to stay home for a while, he says, "because I don't want to leave my baby yet."
The album is a departure for Carpenter, who in the past always sang backup to Karen's lead vocal on such hits as Close to You and Yesterday Once More.
That pattern continued in two Carpenter LPs released since Karen's death: Voice of the Heart, which used vocals that Karen had recorded from 1980 to '82; and a Christmas album with material left over from their 1978 Christmas album. On the new LP, Richard sings lead on six of the 10 songs. Lead vocals on the others come from Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield and a 16-year-old newcomer named Scott Grimes, who remembers the Carpenter hit We've Only Just Begun as "the very first song I sang publicly, at a wedding when I was 7."
"My intention was to get back into my music and create something new," says Carpenter. "I loved working with our older music, the Carpenter things, remixing them for CDs and all that. But I'm very much into the future too." Still, the past was hard to forget, especially when Carpenter started to record alone for the first time. "It struck home anew that Karen was no longer with us, and I found that very upsetting," he says. "Here I was, working alone when we had always been a team, working with the same engineer, the same musicians and in the same studios, and no Karen." In Love Alone, recorded on the new album, was written in 1982 especially for Karen by Richard and lyricist John Bettis, but she didn't live to hear it. "We'd invited Karen to a Christmas party we were having here so we could play it for her," says Richard. "But it was pouring pitchforks, and she didn't want to drive all the way from her apartment. I never really saw her by a piano after that where I could play it for her. She died the following February."
Says Warwick of singing In Love Alone: "It was probably one of the hardest things I've ever done; listening to it is still difficult. But I'm thrilled Richard has gotten himself together and is making pretty music again."
A little over a year after Karen's death, Richard and Mary decided to get married, after a long, roller-coaster courtship. They first met in 1975 when Mary's brother, the Carpenters' former road manager, brought her backstage in Las Vegas.
"We hit it off at that very first meeting," says Mary, "so I decided to move out here from Baltimore. I got a job in a bank, and we stayed together. He wanted to get married when we first met, but I didn't because I was only 18, and I wasn't ready. Then when I was ready, he wasn't. We went back and forth like that for quite a while." Nine years later, after Mary had moved back to Baltimore to live with her parents, Richard visited at Christmastime and proposed. They tied the knot on May 19, 1984. They now live in Richard's comfortable but unassuming home in Downey, Calif., just minutes away from his parents, who take every opportunity to visit their only grandchild.
Asked how he has changed, Carpenter, who is about as laid back as Carpenter's music, replies, "Not much -- I'm still working with the same people. I'm still in the same house, still near my parents." Yet when the talk turns to marriage and fatherhood, he gets darn close to gushy. "Everything my friends and parents told me about having a child is true," says Carpenter. "It's absolutely wonderful. We definitely plan more, two or three. This is great."
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Sandra Dee (3/18/91)
Dee, S., & Gold, T. (1991, March 18). On the cover: Learning to live again. People, 86+.
A former teen queen shakes free of her humiliating past to end years of self-hate and loneliness
She wasn't sultry or even particularly sexy; Madonna would have had her for lunch. But when it came to budding femininity and doe-eyed vulnerability -- the kind of pom-pom cuteness a boy would ask to the prom -- no actress, past or present, could ever compete with Sandra Dee.
During the late 1950s and early '60s, Dee was the teen ideal, Hollywood-style -- saucy yet virginal, vivacious yet demure, Doris Day writ 20 years younger. A successful model from the time she was 10 years old, she parlayed her nubile poutiness and the sweetest smile on the beach into instant stardom. As the perky headliner of such romantic comedies as Gidget and Tammy Tell Me True, as well as the guilt- ridden good-girl-in-trouble of churning melodramas like Imitation of Life and A Summer Place, Dee was a guaranteed box office draw.
In 1960 she eloped at 18 with crooner Bobby Darin, 24, whose own career was soaring thanks to hits such as "Mack the Knife" and "Splish Splash." Her storybook life seemed complete. The reality was nothing that the America of that time could imagine, or that Hollywood would have wanted to know.
Here, for the first time, Dee candidly discusses the daunting, dark side of her private life, which led to a decades- long plunge into anorexia, drug-and-alcohol addiction -- and her eventual disappearance from the public eye.
As a child, she was sexually abused by her domineering stepfather; her overbearing, self-protective mother, Mary, never acknowledged the abuse -- and even added to Dee's self-loathing by encouraging her daughter to bind her prematurely developed breasts to keep her looking childlike. At age 9, in a desperate attempt to gain a measure of control over her life, Dee became defiantly anorexic, a condition that more than once nearly killed her.
Although her marriage was basically a happy one, she says, "It ended with a suddenness I still can't explain." She drank heavily following her 1967 divorce and more heavily still after Darin's death, at 37, in 1973.
But it wasn't until 1988, when her mother died, that Dee hit bottom and was eventually hospitalized. With the help of a psychotherapist and the love and support of her son, Dodd Darin, 29, Dee is making a personal comeback. Although still physically frail, she has never felt more free -- or more courageous. In her light-filled, two- bedroom condo in Beverly Hills, she spoke with correspondent Todd Gold about the pain and shame her once-flawless image had hidden.
"I don't know how people are going to feel about me talking about all this," she says. "I hope they aren't disappointed. At least they'll know the truth."
Although I've been out of the limelight for more than 20 years, I still get dozens of autograph requests every month. About six months ago, though, I received a letter that read, "If only I could live your life..." That's when I decided enough was enough.
The Sandra Dee I was promoting was a creation of Hollywood. It was a lie I no longer wanted to support.
I was born Alexandra Zuck in Bayonne, N.J., in 1942.
My real father was a drunk. My mother, who was only 18 years old when she had me, divorced him before I turned 5. I never saw him again. My mother worked as a secretary, and everything was great until the third grade, when something freaky happened to me. I developed a bust. Within a couple of years I was a size 34D, and I was mortified. My mother suggested taping myself up. I realize now that she never wanted me to grow up. So she dressed me in little velvet dresses with my chest taped underneath.
In 1950 my mother married Eugene Douvan. He owned buildings around New York City and was 40 years older than she was. He used to say, "I'm not marrying your mother. I'm marrying both of you." I loved that man, but he was like two people. While my mother was dating him, he began fondling me.
After they got married, it got worse. I went with them on their honeymoon to Atlantic City. After a movie we went back to our hotel, and we all got in bed together. He had me sleep in the middle. That became the routine. My dad got me to have sex with him. I didn't understand what was going on. I was a child. By the time I was 11, I knew it wasn't right. But what could I do, tell my mother? I figured she knew.
The shame I felt was awful. I used to tell myself, "That's a stranger who's doing this to me." That's how I rationalized it. I said it didn't matter, that I didn't care.
But it does matter. And I do care. It just took me 30 years to feel the full impact and confront the truth.
One day not long after they were married, my mother and dad and I went out for breakfast.
Afterward my dad patted my stomach and said, "Whoops, too many pancakes." I was horrified. My dad's remark was said in jest, but it bothered me. I was already sensitive about the way I looked, and I suddenly thought I wasn't perfect in his and my mother's eyes. From that day on, I did everything I could to destroy my body. I ate almost nothing but lettuce one entire year. The next year I had nothing but broiled shrimp. My mother tried to get me to eat.
We had screaming, tortured fights. But I was adamant. If I couldn't control my body or my brassiere size, I could control what I put in my mouth.
When I was 10, we moved from Long Island to Manhattan. Because we traveled a lot, I was enrolled in the Professional Children's School, made up mostly of kids who were performers, which let me have a flexible schedule. After school the kids used to go out on auditions, and they urged me to tag along. The first time I went out, a woman asked me to appear each month in the Girl Scouts magazine. Soon after, I signed with a modeling agency. I worked all the time. One year, when I was 14, I made over $70,000. In 1956 my stepfather died during surgery to correct a heart condition. I was devastated. A few days later, in the middle of his wake, I got a call from my agent that producer Ross Hunter wanted to meet me. I traipsed over to the interview in jeans and a sweatshirt, all black. I didn't care. I didn't know who he was. I read a few lines of a script and thought I would never hear from him again. But six weeks later, he had me flown out to Hollywood to test for The Restless Years, and my movie career was launched.
Universal Studios signed me to a seven-year contract, and my mother and I moved to California. I was immediately loaned out to MGM for Until They Sail. I got to work with stars like Paul Newman and Jean Simmons. It turned out to be one of the best films I ever made. I was already anorexic when I arrived in Hollywood. I was 5 ft.5 in. and weighed about 90 lbs.
The studio worried about me. They'd always ask, "Did you eat?" But I wanted to be thin. Then someone told me that I could eat and not get fat if I went to this woman, an exercise teacher, in the Valley. She told me about Epsom salts. Eat food, drink a little Epsom salts and throw up. I started with two ounces of salts.
When that stopped working after a few months, I increased the amount. Finally one day I took eight ounces. My mother found me unconscious on the bathroom floor. I was rushed to UCLA Medical Center in cardiac distress. It turned out that the Epsom salts had depleted my body of potassium. My anorexia caught up with me again before I finished at MGM.
During rehearsal one day, I was sitting on a chair and suddenly my pants were splitting. I couldn't bend my knee. Within hours I went from 90 lbs. to 105 lbs. It was severe edema caused by a lack of protein. My mother and a doctor fed me red meat around the clock. After I was married I suffered six miscarriages.
A doctor later told me that they were due to the horrible way I treated my body. My first year and a half in Hollywood I did three films. Then in 1959 I was in Gidget, Imitation of Life and A Summer Place. After that I was a star. It was fun. But it was my mother who really loved all my acclaim. She was in her glory -- until I met the dreaded Bobby Darin. It happened in 1960 in Portofino, Italy, on the set of Come September, which paired Bobby and me with Rock Hudson and Gina Lollobrigida. Right after we were introduced, Bobby made an announcement. He said, "I'm going to marry you someday." I wanted to die. I truly didn't like this person. The director worried about my being able to work with him and spoke to my mother. She forced me to go out with Bobby. On our first date he rented a horse-drawn carriage, and we rode around and talked. I got home at 9:30. My mother was livid. She didn't figure on my having a good time without her. It turned out Bobby was bright and a whole lot of fun. By the end of the picture, eight weeks later, I knew the relationship was serious.
We were an odd couple. I was mature but naive, and I'd never dated before. He was almost six years older than I was, a swinging bachelor. He liked my looks and the idea of protecting me. But we were in love. When I returned to New York City at the end of October, Bobby gave me a ring, a flawless seven-carat diamond. When my mother found out we were planning to get married, she was furious. She scooped up my two dogs, my only friends, and zoomed away. I didn't hear from her for two months.
She went back to her family in Bayonne. She wasn't at our wedding, which took place around 3 in the morning on Dec. 1, 1960, in the home of a Camden, N.J., night judge. I wore a purple velvet dress and an otter coat, and the judge's family threw bagels.
During our courtship, being close with Bobby was easy. I thought I had blocked out the abuse, but on my wedding night it all came back. I was scared. I sat on the couch for 12 hours in my coat. Bobby finally went to bed. I didn't tell him about my stepfather until after we were divorced. I didn't want him to look at me as if I were dirty. He didn't. When I told him, he cried. Before we were married, Bobby sent me 18 yellow roses every day. He even wrote a song called 18 Yellow Roses. As soon as we were married, the roses stopped. There was no lover anymore, just a husband. We honeymooned in Palm Springs in a home Bobby bought so he could be near his buddy Jackie Cooper. After three days I had to go to work. I'd fly back on weekends, wanting to see my husband, and he'd be playing poker with the guys. The third time that happened, I threw my ring at him. Then he begged forgiveness, and all was fine until the next time. My life had changed so abruptly. I had to learn about marriage, career and managing a house that seemed always to be filled with Bobby's band and entourage. I had no friends of my own. I was completely isolated. Then, to complicate matters, I became pregnant. I lost the baby, but the experience brought my mother and me together again. She moved back to California. A month later I became pregnant again, and on Dec. 16, 1961, our son, Dodd, was born. I had no intention of going back to work. I wanted to be a mother. But my mother, Bobby and Universal had other ideas. They all knew that if they put Bobby and me in the same movie, he'd convince me to do it, which is exactly what happened. We were both cast in If a Man Answers. On the set, I looked like hell. I felt worse. I was depressed about returning to work. I called my doctor and said, "I don't have the energy to move. Give me a happy pill." The pills, dexa-somethings, made me feel so good I zipped through the day.
When I got home I didn't want to take care of the baby, I wanted to go out. The only thing that would bring me down was a drink. That cycle went on for 2 1/2 years. It never interfered with my career, but to Bobby I was different. Finally, he got so mad he took the pills to a pharmacy, found out they were speed and threw them out. I continued drinking to get off the speed and then as a way to deal with the dissatisfaction of our marriage. I've always had a problem saying what I feel for fear of having someone dislike me. So I took a drink and got the guts. In 1963 Bobby quit show business. He idolized John F. Kennedy, and after his death, Bobby didn't see the meaning of performing anymore. Instead, he ran his music publishing company. He started Wayne Newton off, and he continued to write songs. I had a clause in my contract that got me home by 7 o'clock. His entourage was gone. I grew up a little more. It was a good life. But Bobby had a cold streak in him. He could turn you off like a light switch. After nearly seven years of marriage, he did that to me. I remember it clearly. It was April 23, 1966, my 24th birthday. We were at a party, and I was talking to Warren Beatty about our doing a film together. It was all very nothing. But it was the first time Bobby observed me with a handsome man who had a reputation in Hollywood. Bobby saw me as a woman capable of making decisions on my own, and I think he got scared. When I got home from work the next day, his clothes were gone. I didn't know what happened. A few days later a friend called to say Bobby wasn't returning. The divorce became final in December 1967, but Bobby kept coming back. And always with an illness. They were never serious -- just an excuse to stay over, I thought. That's why I didn't believe him a few years later when he got so sick.
He'd had an irregular heartbeat that developed because of childhood bouts of rheumatic fever.
Finally, in early 1971, he had heart surgery to replace two valves. His condition began deteriorating again in October 1973, and in December he was operated on for congestive heart failure. He never recovered.
He died on Dec. 20. I hadn't been interested in working for years, but Bobby's death took the wind right out of me. Afterward I didn't even want to be seen. Dodd looked to me for support, but I was weak myself. I wanted to be a child, and my mother was only too willing to take care of me. We lived in separate homes, but she spent virtually the whole day with me. She'd get jealous when her friends wanted to spend time with me. After a while I got to the point where I was suffocating. I loved my mother, but it was just hell to be her child. To combat my misery, I drank. Wine and scotch. By myself. I had panic attacks. I couldn't eat. I should have gotten help, but my mother wouldn't let me. She lived in fear of people discovering the truth. No one ever did. In public I never drank more than a glass of wine. But when I was alone, it was a different story. Only my mother and my son ever saw me drunk. One night I couldn't control the pressure any longer. My mother and I were at home with a few of her close friends, and she started eulogizing my stepfather. I was slowly getting more and more irate. Finally I said, "Mom, shut up. A saint he wasn't." My mother started defending him, and I said, "Well, guess what your saint did to me? He had sex with me." My mother was shocked, then angry. I knew I hurt her. I wanted to. I had so much anger toward her for not doing something to help me. But she ignored me, and the subject never came up again. I realize now that my mother erased the abuse from her own mind. It didn't exist, so she didn't have to feel guilty. In December 1988 my mother died of lung cancer. I died too. I couldn't function. I didn't know how to write a check. I didn't know where the phone company was. I'd been sheltered beyond belief. All the people I loved were now gone. I was mad, angry and, most of all, sad. I missed her. So I drank. I could put away a quart and a half a day easy. My mother had asked to be cremated. During her service, I was at home, drinking. I didn't go outside for nearly four months and lived off my savings. I subsisted on soup, crackers and scotch. My weight dropped to 80 lbs. I couldn't walk. I was afraid to get out of bed. My mind was completely fragmented. Dodd pleaded with me to get help. When I started throwing up blood, he got a doctor who forced me to go to the hospital. I stayed a week. The only reason they let me out was that I promised to see a psychiatrist. I've been going ever since. I haven't had a drink in a year now. I've wanted to, but the urge gets less and less. My kid calls me every morning. He lives in L.A. and owns an educational book publishing company. He's a nice boy. I couldn't have made it without him. I'm feeling better. My therapist has been the key. When I faced him, it was the first time in my life I'd said anything to a stranger about the abuse. I was sober.
Goddamn, if I didn't feel relief. These days I live like a nun. I work out. I still weigh only 88 lbs.; I'm trying to put on 12 more. I'm also learning how to get along on my own. For three years I barely left my house.
Now I have a checklist of things I want to do. I haven't been out to dinner for three years. I'd love to do that. But I'm still scared of what will happen if drinks are offered. I also want to do a television series. Why?
Because I want a family. I can have that if I'm part of a show. In real life I have my mother's sister, Aunt Olga, and my uncle Peter, that's it. I'd never told them my story, but I knew I would have to before I went public. So a couple of weeks ago I called them. After I told them what I was going to say, Aunt Olga said, "Sandy, you haven't done anything wrong. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Hold your head up high." For the first time, I'm realizing she's right. I'm no longer living for the studio, my mother, Bobby. Not even for Dodd. I respect myself now. And I no longer have to be frightened of what other people are going to think of me.
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Sandra Dee (11/14/94)
Cerio, G., & Feeney, F. X. (1994, November 14). Kin: This boy's life. People, 121+.
Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee's son Dodd looks back in regret -- and some anger.
Some people with long and unabridged memories may recall a golden moment at Los Angeles's Coconut Grove nightclub in 1966: With his wife, Sandra Dee, beaming in the front row, headliner Bobby Darin hoisted their son Dodd, 5, onstage for a hug. The boy, clad in a tiny tux, said into the mike, "I love you, Dad." The audience sighed, then cheered this perfect showbiz family: the smooth, scrappy crooner; the blonde onetime teen star who had starred in the original Gidget -- and their adorable only child. How could their life not be perfectly fabulous? It wasn't -- and the family's painful past still resonates today. Bobby Darin, who died of heart disease in 1973 at 37, was, by many accounts, a bully and a womanizer; his marriage ended only a year after that appearance at the Coconut Grove.
Today, Dee, 50, who last appeared on the big screen in The Dunwich Horror (1970), talks about a comeback of sorts but continues to struggle with alcoholism and anorexia. According to Dodd, now 32 and a real estate broker and radio talk show host in L.A., the 5 ft.6 in. actress currently weighs 95 lbs.
Darin can look back on times with his mother and confess, "She has put me and everyone around me through such hell." The story of their complicated relationship -- and what it was like growing up as Bobby Darin's son -- can be found in Dodd's new memoir, Dream Lovers (Warner Books). Though written, he says, with "my mother's blessing," the book plays a harsh light on the lives of the two stars, particularly Bobby. The younger Darin, who was 12 when his father died, supplemented his memories by interviewing, with coauthor Maxine Paetro, his father's friends and family. He describes Bobby as "an egomaniac" who verbally abused his wife and as a groupie-groping "swinger" who, before he wed Dee, participated in menages a trois with his own stepfather. Yet Dodd also saw Bobby's vulnerability.
His heart weakened by rheumatic fever as a child, "my father knew he wouldn't live long," Darin says.
"He was trying to pack a lifetime of ambition into what little time he had." And, his son reveals, Bobby learned a devastating secret at age 32: his 49-year-old "sister" Nina was really his mother. Stunned by this, his son suggests, Bobby tried -- despite his career, the divorce and his egotism -- to be an attentive father.
Behind his father's "coarser sides," Dodd says he saw "his love for me shining through." His mother's life -- and their relationship -- Dodd admits, is an often- stalled work-in-progress. "I love my mother," he writes. "But I'm angry at her." While owning up in the book to his own adolescent bout with booze and drugs, he says he is "furious" about having to deal, over the years, with Dee's denial, relapses and need for special attention. He does say, though, that he softened certain passages about his mother after "she pointed out that she was taking the brunt of the criticism, and I realized she was right." Darin traces Dee's ills to her early years, adding texture to revelations she first made in PEOPLE three years ago.
Dee was a top model by age 10, but growing up in Long Island and Manhattan was misery. Her stepfather molested her daily. Her mother, Mary Douvan, was obsessive about food. She often spoon- fed her daughter a soup of oatmeal, eggs and meat, doubtless contributing to Dee's eating disorder.
Dodd says his mother's alcoholism started after she met Bobby Darin on the set of the film Come September in 1960. The Bronx-bred Bobby was witty, inquisitive, charming. When they wed that December, Dee hoped finally to have a real family life. But when he wasn't touring, Darin hung out with his musician pals. Feeling neglected, Dee, says Darin, "fell apart under the stress. Her coping mechanism was alcohol." Dee, who says she has been sober for the past year and is dealing with her anorexia with psychotherapy, admits that "reading the book was very hard -- but he told the truth. It's exactly what Dodd and I wanted. The book is done and out now, and I can breathe." She says she will soon market a perfume called Summer Place, after her 1959 movie with Troy Donahue. Dodd, meanwhile, will be serving as a consultant on director Barry Levinson's planned movie about Bobby Darin's life and is getting good ratings as the moderate "anti- Rush," he says, of KTMS radio. Last year, he married his childhood sweetheart Audrey Tannenbaum, 33, a costume designer for NBC's Mad About You, though the couple had gone through some tough times, Tannenbaum says, when Darin seemed to be consumed by his mother's problems and his own anger. The book, friends feel, may be a milestone for Darin. "It's been a catharsis for him," says Bobby's manager Steve Blauner. "He needed to do it to become his own man."
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Delilah (10/7/02)
Cheakalos, C., & Boone, M. (2002, October 7). Easy listening: With comforting words and soothing tunes, Seattle radio host Delilah makes the night less lonely for millions. People, 153+.
At 7:30 on a Thursday night, 18-year-old Stacey calls The Delilah Show to dedicate a song to her 26-year-old boyfriend Chad. "He's away dealing with his past," she says. Asks the host: "Is he dealing with his past in a place where he has to eat food he doesn't like and wear clothes he wouldn't choose?" "Yes," says Stacey. Her beloved is behind bars.
Many talk-jocks would scold, scoff or psychoanalyze. Delilah, 42, who uses only her first name, has earned a place as America's No. 1 nighttime radio emcee with a kinder approach. After all, she has suffered her own share of self-inflicted misery over the years, ranging from addiction to anorexia. Newly divorced, she is now experiencing what she wryly calls "the challenges" of rearing eight children--four adopted and one a foster child. Delilah has never harangued her listeners and isn't about to start. Instead, she offers compassion, humor and a tune--at times with an impish edge: For a caller whose beau had a 23-lb. benign tumor removed, she played Ambrosia's "Biggest Part of Me."
"This isn't like Dr. Laura, where people get lectured," says musician John Tesh. "They feel comfortable talking to her about personal things." Tesh, Madonna and other brand-name guests have done spots, but the real stars of this Seattle-based, nationally syndicated program are its 7 million listeners. About 100,000 call in during each five-hour show, and 30 make it onto the air. Whether the caller is celebrating a birthday or, like the Manhattan nurse who dialed in after last year' s terrorist attacks, grappling with tragedy, Delilah offers soothing words and musical commentary. "Mostly, though," she says, "I just listen."
Even when callers give her an earful. "Some have said, 'You preach about the sanctity of marriage and then you do this,'" says Delilah of her decision to divorce Doug Ortega, her husband of nine years and the biological father of two of their children. "I don't pretend to have a perfect life," she tells listeners. "I just do the best I can."
She learned about family troubles early. A native of Reedsport, Ore., Delilah Luke was the second of four children. Her engineer father, Dick, drank, and her homemaker mother, Wilma, "was the classic codependent, " she says. (Both are deceased.) Wild but smart, Delilah won a speech contest in junior high by reciting the Gettysburg Address. Wowed by her velvet voice, the judges, who owned a radio station, gave her a part-time job reporting school news. She was hooked.
After her father kicked her out of the house the day of her high school graduation for coming home an hour late, Delilah moved to Eugene, Ore., and went to community college on a scholarship. But she left for Seattle at 21 to become a full-time deejay--with a puckish nod to her folks. "She was writing letters that said, 'Thanks for the name,'" says her sister DeAnna Luke-Huey, 38. "'It's great for fame.' "
When Delilah brought her African-American fiance to meet her parents in 1982, she says, her father came to the door with a shotgun. They wed the following year and soon had a baby, Sonny, now 18. But 1985 brought trauma: Delilah's husband left her, and her brother Matthew and his wife died in a plane crash. The downward spiral deepened. The suddenly single mother battled an eating disorder and a diet-pill habit. In 1986 her station changed formats, and she lost her job. Bereft, she prayed, "God, if you exist, I nei*Aed to know." The next day, returning from grocery shopping, she found a Bible inscribed "Jesus loves you" on her windshield.
Inspired, Delilah turned her life around. She began attending church and Al-Anon meetings, followed the job market to radio stations in Boston and Philadelphia and in 1993 married Ortega, an assistant youth minister eight years her junior. When her show went national in '96, she returned to Seattle, where Ortega became a stay-at-home dad to their then-six children--including two brothers and a sister adopted from two different foster homes. The hectic menage strained their marriage. The couple separated in August 2001 and divorced this month. "I had been a parent for many years," says Delilah, who this year took in a foster child and adopted a toddler. "I was used to paying mortgages and going to PTA meetings. I thought he'd catch up, but after nine years he didn't." The split was less than amicable. "Delilah and I exchange information about picking up and dropping off the kids, " Ortega says. "But communication beyond that just isn't possible right now."
Despite all her heartache, Delilah's theme song remains Edwin McCain' s "I Could Not Ask for More." "I spend days with my family and nights with my best friends--those in the studio and those who call in," she says. "How could it get better than that?"
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICH FRISHMAN Delilah swings with her family: (bottom, from left) Shaylah, Tanginique, Thomas ("T.K."), Emmanuelle, Zach; (top) Trey, Joshua and Sonny.
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICH FRISHMAN "I tell people up front that I don't have all the answers," says Delilah.
COLOR PHOTO: COURTESY DELILAH Delilah's celebrity fans include Lionel Richie (on her show last spring).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY RICH FRISHMAN Delilah cherishes time with Zach and T.K.: "They're only going to be young a short time."
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Kate Dillon (5/8/00)
50 most beautiful people in the world 2000, The: Kate Dillon, model. (2000, May 8). People, 173.
Few adolescent agonies sting more painfully than the puerile nickname, as Kate Dillon, 26, learned in the seventh grade.
"Kids would jump up and down on the school bus and chant, 'Overweight Kate,'" recalls Dillon, who currently graces ads for Gucci and Liz Claiborne. "It was horrible."
At 12, she shed her nom de shame, and too much of her weight, after watching a TV movie with an anorectic teenage character. "I thought, 'She's cute, good idea,'" says Dillon. "The fact that the girl died in the movie didn't seem to deter me somehow."
Five years later, in 1991, a severely underweight Kate was discovered by a photographer in her hometown of San Diego. She came in third in Elite's Look of the Year contest, winning a $75,000 contract. The 5'11" Dillon was soon slinking down Paris runways and appearing in Vogue and Glamour.
Yet by age 19, her lifestyle, sustained by a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit, had taken its toll. "I just couldn't keep starving myself," she says.
Dillon visited a nutritionist and quickly added 15 lbs. but lost her modeling cachet. "I was only a size 8, yet I was told I was huge and disgusting," she says.
After gaining another 15 lbs. ("I'd discovered food for the first time in seven years and wanted to eat"), Dillon quit the business and returned home to her parents, Tom, 56, a scientist, and Carol, 54, a retired preschool teacher.
In 1996 she moved to New York City to study elementary art education. There she followed a friend's suggestion that she try plus-size modeling. Just two weeks after meeting with Susan Georget of the Wilhelmina agency, Dillon was booked for the Spiegel catalog.
"She is everything plus-size models should be," says Georget. "Like real models, just fuller." Dillon's pal and modeling peer Emme, 36, agrees: "She has beautiful skin, great, full lips and wonderful curves. There's a reason why she is working so much."
The unmarried Dillon, who has two tattoos on her left ankle and three on her lower back ("the big one is based on a symbol that means eternity," she says), also lectures nationwide about eating disorders and is the founder of Echo, a nonprofit organization benefiting art programs for children.
While she limits her beloved steak and french fries to once a week, the now nonsmoking Dillon keeps fit with regular runs and black-belt training in martial arts. She says she still worries about her weight--sort of.
"My goal is to stay right where I am, forever," she declares.
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Kate Dillon (7/2/01)
Dam, J. K. L., Stoynoff, N., & Baker, K. C. (2001, July 2). Making it big: With Emme leading the charge--and the fashion world in hot pursuit--plus-size models redefine what it means to be beautiful. People, 125+
Model Emme Aronson vividly remembers her first assignment, in 1990, with a big-name fashion photographer. "I was getting made up," she recalls, "I was all excited"--until she overheard the photographer complaining. "He said that he didn't want to shoot a quote-unquote 'fatty,'" says the 5'11", 190-lb. Aronson. "The ad agency had to talk him through it. He was nasty."
A decade later Emme--as she is known, a la Cindy, Naomi and Gisele--is getting her revenge. With more than 20 magazine covers, a six-figure Revlon contract, a well-received autobiography, her own clothing line and four seasons of the E! Entertainment Television show Fashion Emergency on her resume, Emme, 38, has proved plus-size can pay off.
The lesson hasn't been lost on the fashion world. In the '90s, top agencies like Click and Wilhelmina have created divisions devoted to models size 10 and up. Designers such as Tommy Hilfiger and Liz Claiborne have launched lines tailored to bigger builds. Fuller figures are even snagging plum assignments outside the plus-size sector: Curvy British model Sophie Dahl, 24, has appeared in print ads for Yves Saint Laurent and Versace, and 5'11", 170-lb. Kate Dillon, 27, is a Gucci girl. And traditional fashion glossies, from Marie Claire to Seventeen, are rounding out their pages by putting plus-size models alongside the more typical size 4's.
"The industry has to expand to keep the concerns of the consumer in mind," says LaVelle Olexa, senior vice president of fashion merchandising at Lord & Taylor department stores. "They have to take [the plus-size market] seriously. There's potential for massive growth."
Granted, even most plus-size models are on the slim side compared to the 50 percent of U.S. women size 14 and above. (The national average is 5'4" and 152 lbs.) But their success is applauded by those who believe the fashion industry has held women to unhealthily thin standards for far too long. "Can we have voluptuous, full-figured women again as our sex symbols? Yes we can!" says Dr. John Mead, codirector of the eating disorders program at Chicago's Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's Medical Center. "Big can be beautiful--and healthy."
Emme has long been proof of that, but these days she is joined by up-and-coming beauties like Mia Tyler, Tami Fitzhugh-Thompson, Audra Marie Perkins and Allegra Doherty. Instead of trying to diet down to the single-digit sizes required for the cutthroat fashion demimonde of Paris, Milan and Vogue, they are earning from $1,500 to $15,000 a day in the plus-size world. "Every day I wake up, I am amazed at my life," says Fitzhugh-Thompson, 27. The Ford model--who is married to hairstylist Marcus, 28, and has a 10-year-old daughter, Victoria--went from working in customer service at Montgomery Ward in Chicago to modeling lingerie for the department store in 1998. Now she has a six-figure contract with Lane Bryant.
For those who have flirted with mainstream modeling, the main benefits of working in the plus-size field are emotional rather than financial. "It was such a negative experience," Dillon says of the teen years she spent starving herself as a size-4 model. "Now, I love it that I'm presenting an alternative image of what beauty is."
Another novelty for Dillon: In this part of the industry, eating is actually encouraged. "If a model lost too much weight, I'd have to let her go," says Chris Hansen, an executive vice president at Lane Bryant, which hires only models size 14 and larger. "Really, there have been times when I've said to a girl, 'Come on, have a few milk shakes!'"
That's a comfortable environment most would be loath to leave. Says the 6'1", 200-lb. Doherty, 21, who posed with three mainstream models for the May cover of Italian GQ: "I've had makeup artists say to me, 'You could totally do straight modeling.' And I'm like, 'I could, but I don't want to.'"
But plus-size fashion didn't always have that appeal. "In the past, the clothes were made more to cover than to celebrate a woman's curves," says Lane Bryant's Hansen. "It was fashion two seasons after the people selling regular-size clothing had fashion." And donning those dowdy togs for catalog shoots didn't hold much glamor. "At first I didn't know what the heck full-figured modeling was," says Emme, who had a career in marketing before deciding to try her luck at a New York City agency in 1989. Working in the not-yet-flourishing field meant keeping her day job at a real-estate company. "I'd jump into a cab, take out my makeup bag, put on thick studio makeup for the shoot," says the model, who is expecting her first child with husband Phillip Aronson, 38, her manager, in July. "When the shoot was done, I'd jump back into the cab and put on my natural makeup for my marketing job."
Then, in the late 1980s, the plus-size fashion industry began to blossom. Since then, annual sales have risen steadily, reaching $19.7 billion last year. Linda Larsen German, an industry consultant for the Emme collection, who helped launch the Elisabeth line for Liz Claiborne in 1988, recalls that "women would grab me on the sales floor and hug me and kiss me and tell me, 'Thank God for you.'" With the boom in sales came a boom in opportunities for women like Emme, who by 1990 was supporting herself exclusively by modeling. In 1998 she signed a one-year deal with Revlon, becoming the first plus-size spokeswoman under contract to a cosmetics company. "Now," she says, "full-figured modeling is huge, huge business."
So huge, in fact, that it has even become a launching pad to Hollywood. Mia Tyler, 22, daughter of Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler, 53, and half sister of actress Liv, 24, first tried modeling in 1998 and quickly landed spreads in Teen and Seventeen magazines. The success brought the 5'8", size-12 Tyler a fame independent of her illustrious family's. The Elisabeth line "just called for her and we explained that she couldn't show up because she was on tour with her dad," says Susan Georget, director of Wilhelmina's division for sizes 10 to 20. "They said, 'Who's her dad?'"
The exposure also helped Tyler win small parts on TV shows, and she just finished her first lead role, in the movie A Little Bit of Lipstick, due out in January. "It's a love story that shows you don't have to be a size 2 to be a leading lady," says Tyler, who lives alone in Manhattan. "When you read a script, it shouldn't have to be 'Jennifer, size 6.' It should be about who can play the part right. The same for modeling."
High-fashion model Sophie Dahl has brushed aside such typecasting. The granddaughter of children's-book author Roald Dahl and actress Patricia Neal, she was signed in 1997 by Storm, the London modeling agency that also represents Kate Moss. Though at size 12 she was curvier than the norm, she quickly became a mainstay on the top runways as well as in the gossip columns. (She recently dated actor Griffin Dunne and has been linked with Mick Jagger.) "She is voluptuous and not a typical skinny-jeans advertising model," designer Donatella Versace, who signed Dahl to replace Gisele Bundchen in her company's ad campaign last year, told Britain's Sunday Times. When Yves Saint Laurent creative director Tom Ford tapped her for an Opium perfume ad in which she wears nothing but baubles and stilettos, he told Women's Wear Daily, "I wanted someone who looks like she's had too much of everything: too much food, too much sex, too much love. I mean, this is a woman who does not deny herself anything."
Now based in New York, where she is filming a movie with Al Pacino, Dahl--who recently dropped two dress sizes--shies away from carrying the plus-size banner. "It's a cause I never asked to belong to," she told the Sunday Times. "I find it incredibly wearing the way people are so interested in my body. Actually, it drives me mad."
Others, though, proudly call themselves plus-size. "I would never be embarrassed about being a full-figured model," says Kate Dillon, who lives in a bachelorette pad in Manhattan. "I want people to know there is freedom that comes with liking yourself and your individuality. Being a plus-size model is inspirational to me. And I want to be an inspiration to others."
Body-image experts say that's exactly what these models are. "I keep Mode magazine in the waiting room," says Page Love, an Atlanta nutritionist who works for the Renfrew Center, which treats eating disorders. The fashion-and-beauty magazine, devoted to plus-size women, has "a wonderful impact on girls," says Love. "They tell me that when they look at the plus-size models, they feel so much better."
The founders of Mode were aiming for just that. At the first shoot, which director of photography Bill Swan oversaw for the magazine in 1997, "there were tears of joy," he says. "We felt we were doing something historic. We just wanted to make a place for everybody."
In four years, the magazine has cultivated a loyal readership of 3.5 million and prompted some mainstream magazines to move in the same direction. When Patrice Adcroft became editor-in-chief of Seventeen in 1999, she says, "we began imposing the rule that, in every story, we try to include one, if not two, larger-size models." Though readers immediately noticed the new mix and wrote letters overwhelmingly supporting it, enforcing the rule wasn't always easy. "There was a lot of resistance by everybody from photographers to stylists to makeup artists to other models," Adcroft says, adding that some contributors ended up parting ways with Seventeen. "I told them, 'Look, work your magic! A bigger girl can look beautiful too, not just the coat-hanger girls.' And I showed them the letters from the girls."
Girls not unlike Georgia native Audra Marie Perkins, 18. "I used to think, 'How in the world am I going to model, being the size that I am? I can't be a size 2,'" says Perkins, a 6-ft. softball player who was discovered at age 15 in a local modeling contest. Since then, Perkins, who just finished high school and lives with her parents in Swainsboro, Ga., has commanded $4,000 a day. As a size 12, she's on the slim side in her field. But she's comfortable as a plus size and sees no reason to try to be anything else. "It's not like you're missing out on anything just because it's another category," she says. "You don't have to be skin and bones to be thought of as pretty."
That's the mantra that helped Natalie Laughlin, 37, get her first break--and it's one she still preaches to the hundreds of young girls who send e-mails to the Web site she cofounded, OnlyReal.com. A struggling model in 1995, Laughlin was so outraged when she saw uberwaif Kate Moss on the cover of Vogue yet again that she wrote a letter to six fashion magazines to complain. "I said they need a wider representation of women on their pages," says the 5'9", 180-lb. native of Trinidad. "I said that I suffered from eating disorders when I was young and so do so many women." In response, Glamour asked the single Manhattanite to write a first-person article and appear in a four-page photo spread. It was the first time a mainstream fashion magazine had featured a plus-size model.
Laughlin and her sisters in size have come a long way since then. But she has an even greater goal in mind--a day when models won't be categorized by weight at all. "They'll just be models," she says. "In different sizes. You'll open a magazine and see somebody like Kate Moss on one page and me on another."
"Big can be beautiful--and healthy"
"I want to be an inspiration to others"
Illustration/Photos:
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERICA BERGER "We are all beautiful, and it's celebrated," says Allegra Doherty (top left, with, clockwise, Emme, Mia Tyler, Natalie Laughlin, Tami Fitzhugh-Thompson, Audra Marie Perkins and Kate Dillon).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERICA BERGER "He has supported every move I've ever made," Emme says of husband Phillip (at home in Closter, N.J.).
COLOR PHOTO: JENNIFER GRAYLOCK/FASHION WIRE DAILY The Emme collection is "a feel-good line," says the model (in her showroom in '00).
COLOR PHOTO: GREGORY PACE/CORBIS SYGMA "I'm proud of my body," says Kate Dillon (on a Lane Bryant runway last February).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERICA BERGER Once anorectic, Dillon (at home with mother Carol) says, "I want to enjoy food."
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERICA BERGER When she saw her first Mode cover, "I cried," says Doherty (at home in Brooklyn).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERICA BERGER "I stay away from scales," says Perkins (center, with pals Ashley Williams, Emily Warren and Krista Atkins).
COLOR PHOTO: GREGORY PACE/CORBIS SYGMA "At home, I'm in sweatpants," says a glammed-up Tami Fitzhugh-Thompson (right, with Perkins at a Lane Bryant show).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERICA BERGER "I'm happy with me," says Tami (in New Jersey), who works out three times a week.
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERICA BERGER "When I'm in front of a camera, I get a fire," says Mia Tyler (with beau and Lipstick crew member Chris Coburn on the Connecticut set last November). "It's time to perform."
COLOR PHOTO: ANDREA RENAULT/GLOBE PHOTOS "It's hard work, but it's fun," says Tyler (at a '99 runway show).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERICA BERGER Reading e-mail from women with weight worries, says Laughlin (at home), "brings me right back."
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Elisa Donovan (12/2/96)
Lang, S. (1996, December 2). On the move: Forever Amber. People, 71+
After beating anorexia to get there, Elisa Donovan is in clueless--again.
As soon as the producers of ABC's new series Clueless laid eyes on the dolls that Mattel toys had created based on the show's characters, they knew something was missing. "They showed us the Cher and Dionne dolls," says Twink Caplan, the show's co-executive producer, referring to the series' two stars, "but we were like, 'Where's Amber?' She has the cool hairdo, the wild clothes. She has a definite attitude."
If, as Caplan predicts, Amber is one doll little girls will want to toy with, the moguls at Mattel have Elisa Donovan to thank. Reprising the role of fashion victim and Cher nemesis that she originated in the 1995 hit movie, the 24-year-old actress can sport a Judy Jetson spacesuit or a dress covered in road signs, accessorized by a hard hat and an orange street-cone, and still exude "a certain Ann-Margret quality," says Amy Heckerling, who wrote and directed the movie and is co-executive producer of the series. "She's funny and sexy, somebody who's willing to jump into something and go whole hog."
Like Amber, in fact, but not exactly. Showing up at a West Hollywood diner looking decidedly untrendy in baggy jeans and an oversize sweater, her green eyes under a shock of tousled red hair, Donovan downs a breakfast of grapefruit, toast and coffee as she compares herself to her alter ego. "I love that Amber says what's on her mind," she says. "I'm much more careful about what I say and wanting to please everyone." As for being a slave to style, "I love clothing and how different outfits make you feel," she says, "but I'm not obsessed with it. I'm not willing to go to the extent that Amber would to look good."
Sadly, that wasn't always the case. For the first time, Donovan is going public in PEOPLE with the fact that, from 1993 to 1995, she was a hard-core anorexic. For most of those two years, her daily diet consisted of coffee, water and a few grapes. Every few days she would eat a little sushi--but just the fish. By 1994 the 5'6" actress's weight had dropped to 90 pounds, 30 pounds less than she had weighed four years before in high school. Still, she says, "I never saw it. I was certain I was eating enough."
Her career didn't help. "In this industry you're praised for looking good, and nobody cares how you get there," says Donovan. "People in my life were like, 'You're gonna die. You look awful.' But people in the business would say, 'You look so good on camera.' "
Even a medical crisis couldn't make her address the problem. Dehydrated and on the brink of starvation, Donovan began having heart palpitations one night in January 1995. "I couldn't breathe," she recalls. "I was dizzy, and my heart was beating out of my chest." Jennifer Maisel, a former roommate, rushed her to Midway Hospital Medical Center in Los Angeles, where Donovan was rehydrated but refused to accept psychiatric help. "She wouldn't talk about something she couldn't see," says Maisel.
About a month later, Donovan realized she needed help and started therapy. Working with a nutritionist and a psychiatrist, she eventually gained 20 pounds--and insight into her behavior. A dancer and gymnast as a child, she believes she had long been predisposed to anorexia. While growing up in affluent Northport, N.Y., the youngest of three children of Jack Donovan (a former AT&T vice president) and his wife, Charlotte, she says, "I always had body-image problems and obsessions with food."
A more positive fixation--with acting--took root in her teenage years. After appearing in plays at Northport High School, Donovan moved to Manhattan in 1991, where she took acting classes and bartended before landing a part on the now defunct ABC soap Loving. Three years later she moved to Los Angeles and was cast as Joey Lawrence's girl friend on Blossom but quit after a few episodes to begin filming Clueless, the movie. More than a year after it wrapped, Donovan learned she'd be playing Amber again on TV.
While putting in 12- to 14-hour days on a shooting schedule she calls "manic," Donovan works equally hard to keep her disorder in check. "I have really difficult days," she says, "and days where it's fine." Her new boyfriend, interior designer Dodd Mitchell, 29, is a source of support. "I think it helps to have someone to talk to," says Mitchell. "Before, it was such a secret."
"My anorexia was a way to feel successful," Donovan says. "It gave me tremendous satisfaction because it was something I was the best at. Now I try to feel successful through my talents and my intelligence as opposed to my physical appearance. Anorexia stays with me, but it doesn't define who I am. I won't allow it to."
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Stacy Edwards (8/24/97)
Introducing: On the right track. (1997, August 24). People, 66.
Newcomer Stacy Edwards gets raves as the duped innocent in 'In the Company of Men', about two nasty, nasty guys with loco motives.
Landing a leading role in the disturbing new film In the Company of Men was the biggest break of Stacy Edwards's career. Still, the director had to postpone shooting last year so that Edwards could star in an even more important production: her wedding. It was doubly urgent because her mother, Patty, was dying of breast cancer. "She wanted to be there," says Edwards. "She really fought hard for that, and she won."
Edwards, 32, is at peace with her mother's recent death because it meant the end of her suffering. But after a series of journeyman roles on such shows as the late soap Santa Barbara, she laments that Patty didn't live to see her success as a deaf secretary whose heart is deliberately broken by two cruel businessmen in Company. An award winner at January's Sundance Film Festival, the acclaimed film was shot in 11 days--one-fourth the time the actress spent studying the deaf to prepare. "Everyone has some connection to betrayal," Edwards says of the film's success.
The daughter of Air Force officer Preston Edwards, 58 (now retired), the military brat and her brother John, 29, lived on bases on Guam, in Belgium and on several in the U.S. Gene Kelly sparked her performance gene when she saw That's Entertainment! in third grade. But dancing came at a cost: anorexia, fed by "tons of laxatives. It's a living hell--so hard to shake," says Edwards, who ditched both anorexia and dance to study acting, winning the part on Santa Barbara in a 1986 audition.
Edwards met her man, actor Eddie Bowz, 30, in 1993 while catering a Beverly Hills party between acting jobs. Bowz, a waiter at the party, wooed her with the soft shoe. Given her weakness for Gene Kelly, says Edwards, "I knew this was the man for me."
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Sally Field (7/8/91)
Sporkin, E. (1991, July 8). She likes herself! Her problems with food and men long past, Hollywood power Sally Field fearlessly faces fortysomething. People.
WHILE OTHER PEOPLE HAVE MIDlife crises and revert to adolescence, Sally Field is happy not only to act her age, but also to ridicule her character's fear of aging in the summer soap-opera spoof, Soapdish. Playing almost-over-the-hill TV queen Celeste Talbert, Field delivers one zinger after another. "I look like Gloria f---ing Swanson!" Celeste shrieks when the costumer puts her in a turban. "I'm 42 years old! I don't want to be dressed like a dead woman!"
Field, who at 44 is two years farther than that down the slippery slope of middle age, is comfortable being the butt of jabs equating aging with career obsolescence -- and with good reason. Still girlish-looking, she hasn't yet started drooping in all the wrong places. And to ensure professional longevity, she has carved out a spot for herself as one of Hollywood's most powerful women. One of her lesser-known offscreen roles this summer: coproducer of the Julia Roberts tearjerker Dying Young.
Her self-esteem, shaky through most of her youth, has only firmed up with maturity. "I never thought I'd be 44," she says. "When I was 24, 44 seemed like 104! But my strengths now come from experience. I feel like I've come into my own."
Field now commands at least a few million per picture, but getting to the top of the heap -- and staying there -- left some scars. In 1967, while living with the pressure of being TV's Flying Nun, Field privately fought an obsession with food and weight. The bubbly little girl who was the very embodiment of American apple-pie cuteness as TV's irrepressible Gidget was in fact filled with self-loathing about her body image. "There is a time in adolescence when women naturally gain weight," she says. "You wake up one morning 20 pounds heavier. Everybody then was Twiggy, except me. I felt immensely unattractive."
When she was 20, a family doctor prescribed diet pills and diuretics, and Field says she began a three-year cycle of pill popping, starving, then stuffing herself. "I would lose 10 or 15 pounds in a week, eating nothing but cucumbers and working all day," she recalls. "My hands would shake all the time, and sometimes I'd pass out. But then I would go on these enormous binges. I lived alone and was very lonely. I made myself spaghetti dinners and chocolate cake and ate the whole thing, then tried to throw up because I was in such pain. But I couldn't. My body would be so swollen the next day that it would hurt to touch, and my eyes would be little slits."
She began to conquer her problem, she says, when she became pregnant with sons Peter, now 21, and Eli, 19, during her five-year first marriage to Steve Craig, her boyfriend from her days at Birmingham High School in California's San Fernando Valley. "Being pregnant forced my body to ask me to eat the right things," says Field. "Having children -- the running around -- helped my metabolism." Yet, though she has relied on the same therapist since she was 18, Field says that she didn't stop turning to food in times of stress until she fell in love with Alan Greisman, 44, whom she married in 1984. "When Alan and I got together, it resolved itself," she says. "I don't know why."
But Field isn't one to dwell in the past. "Onward and upward," she is saying to Sam, the couple's 3 1/2-year-old son, as she towels him off after a swimming lesson at the family's house on a quiet cul-de-sac in L.A.'s tony Brentwood section. In the background, a construction crew is hammering away, completely renovating the 7,000-square-foot home, while Field, Greisman and Sam have temporarily moved to a Spanish-style rental house two miles away. "We decided to redo the kitchen last November," Field says sheepishly. "But I got carried away."
But then, doesn't she always? Field still can't live down her famous "You like me!" Oscar acceptance speech for 1984's Places in the Heart, though she now is willing to play it for laughs. "We almost had her saying `You like me' in Soapdish," when Celeste accepts an award, says Greisman, who coproduced the film. "But Sally said that it takes you out of the movie and reminds you of who she is in person."
In person, of course, she is one of America's best-loved actresses, a distinction that Field attributes to the public's impression that she is "like one of them." Even her hobbies -- needlepoint and gardening -- are heartland favorites. "It seems to me, in the words of my friend Shirley MacLaine, that this is my path," Field says. "I'm not going to be knighted, like Meryl Streep. My real assets have always been acting and just being pleasant."
In Field's case, being America's sweetheart may have saved Soapdish from a dreaded R rating. Under MPAA interpretation, two utterances of the F word could spell R. In addition to Field's Gloria Swanson outburst, Robert Downey Jr. uses the celebrated Anglo-Saxonism in the movie, yet remarkably the film sailed through the censors with a PG-13. "I guess when Sally Field says f---, it doesn't count," says studio executive Gary Lucchesi.
But when Sally Field says march -- or don't march -- people listen. Says Kevin McCormick, the partner in her company, Fogwood Films, which produced Dying Young: "If there's a principle of justice involved, she jumps on the table with the strike sign."
Not that Field ever had designs on emulating Norma Rae, the rough-and-ready textile-mill labor organizer she played in the 1979 film. "Sally became a producer out of self-defense," says Laura Ziskin, who coproduced 1985's Murphy's Romance with Field. "There just aren't great roles for women. Here was someone with a tremendous talent who said, `I'm going to have to take control of my life and develop my own material.' " Field hasn't jumped on an equal-pay bandwagon though. When Streep complained last year in the Los Angeles Times that Jack Nicholson earned more money for his films because he was a man, Field didn't offer sympathy. "We should fight for working mothers who are really strapped," she said, "before we fight for whether Meryl Streep makes as much as Jack Nicholson."
Field used to shy away from female friends, but actresses such as Goldie Hawn and Kate Capshaw have become warm pals. And some young actresses see her as a role model. One recipient of Field's advice on dealing with celebrity has been Roberts, 23, her Steel Magnolias cast mate. "I told her that the only way you learn is by making mistakes," she says.
Field herself learned the hard way after breaking into television on Gidget at 18. There was the memorable Flying Nun, which she has called "a walking joke," and a series of all-too-forgettable TV roles before she won her first Emmy for 1976's Sybil, based on the true story of a woman with 16 personalities. By the time she followed it up with her two Best Actress Oscars, she had not only been through a much-publicized five-year romance with Burt Reynolds but had filled up her dance card with names including Johnny Carson and Soapdish costar Kevin Kline.
Time has healed any lingering wounds from her breakup with Reynolds. While razzing many of his former costars (such as Kathleen Turner and Dolly Parton) in his recent one-man road show, he called Field "the best actress I've ever worked with." She says Reynolds freed her from prudishness: "I was raised in the '50s, and I was such a product of my time that sexuality was something frightening to me. Burt was this very vigorous, attractive man, and he helped a lot in just liking me and being attracted to me. It helped in shaking myself loose."
She wasn't ready to be caught again until she met Greisman in the spring of 1984, when he came to her pitching film ideas and ended up pitching woo. The couple married that December. Field credits the laid-back Greisman with erasing her insecurities about men, which began when she was 4 and her drugstore-owner father, Richard, and actress-mother, Margaret (a Paramount contract player), divorced. Although Margaret Field was later remarried to Jock Mahoney, a sometime movie Tarzan who helped raise Sally, an elder brother and younger sister, Field remained cautious in her own relationships until now. "Alan's a worker emotionally," she says.
If she's more devoted as a wife, she is also more self-assured as a mother the third time around. "I used to feel guilty about my kids just because I wasn't Betty Crocker," says Field. "But then Peter and Eli grew up, and -- they're fine. They're better than fine, they're stupendous." Peter, who will graduate from Syracuse University this summer, enters the master's writing program at the University of Iowa this fall; Eli will be a sophomore at the University of Colorado. "I realize how fast childhood goes, so I think I cherish Sam's that much more." Although from afar the 5 ft.2 in. Field could pass for a child herself (Soapdish costume designer Nolan Miller fit her wardrobe on a 12-year-old stand-in), she is aware of the visible signs of midlife. "I try to ignore aging because there's nothing I can do," she says. Well, maybe one thing. "I haven't done it yet, but I'm gonna definitely do it," she says, rubbing her jawline with her hands. "I think, well, what can you do here? I think it's great to do plastic surgery."
But first there are projects to develop and decisions to make. At her flower-filled production office in Brentwood, she is talking about a new script. "There are four elderly sisters with a murderous secret," she explains. "The house is crumbling around them, and there's a flood...It's for an older actress." She laughs. "We'll keep it for later," she says.
CAPTION: SOAPDISH'S SALLY FIELD With an eating disorder and a shaky self-image, Gidget had a hard time growing up -- but today she has two kids in college, one in nursery school, and is making movies as well as starring in them. How does she do it? "Now my strengths come from experience."
CAPTION: COVER STORY
CAPTION: "I have three great children, so my biological clock is quieted," says Field (with youngest son Sam, by their Brentwood swimming pool).
CAPTION: As a parent, "I can still be scared and anxious," says Field (in 1989 with Greisman and her son Peter Craig).
CAPTION: Field and Greisman, with contractors Joseph (left) and Leo Moore, check out renovation plans.
CAPTION: Sally "just doesn't stop," says Cathy Moriarty (left, with Field and Whoopi Goldberg in Soapdish).
CAPTION: "I've always been really physically silly," says Field (playing with dog Rupert).
CAPTION: A rare moment for the busy actress-cum-mogul: Sally sits! "If I could just hang out!" says Field (needlepointing in her award-filled living room). "But I always find a way to overwork myself."
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Sally Field (1/29/96)
Cerio, G., Gold, T., & Wright, L. (1996, January 29). Cover: Serenely single. People, 62+.
After years of anxiety, Sally Field knows what she really, really likes: The satisfaction of being alone.
THE STEPS SEEM AS TIGHTLY choreographed as a pas de deux from Swan Lake--though this is a dance most mothers know: the Breakfast Ballet. Moving with fluid precision around the pink terra-cotta island counter in the airy, skylit kitchen of her home in L.A.'s tony Brentwood, Sally Field gives Cody, her chocolate Lab, his bowl, answers the phone and then kicks a basketball belonging to her son Sam, 8, out of the way into a corner. With a spin, she puts a palm to Sam's head--the slight fever he had is all but gone--then sets about figuring how she'll arrange snacks of pizza and sliced fruit for his Boy Scout meeting that afternoon.
As she pushes the bangs from her eyes, the two-time Best Actress Oscar winner turns to a guest and asks, "Glamorous, huh?" But at age 49--she turns 50 on Nov. 6--Field says, "One of the good things about the passing years is that you learn to ride things out. Or else you crumble and drool in a cup."
Sally Field could have crumbled a long time ago. After a career that has successfully spanned 32 years--her 21st movie, Eye for an Eye, costarring Kiefer Sutherland and Ed Harris, just hit the big screen--she is only now coming to terms with a painful shyness and insecurity. The problem had troubled her since her youth in California's San Fernando Valley--and revealed itself most memorably in her notorious "You like me!" speech in 1985 when she won an Academy Award for Places in the Heart.
Field has faced eating disorders that, during her days as TV's Flying Nun in the '60s, caused the 5'2" actress, who normally weighs 100 pounds, to binge on candy and balloon 20 pounds. Career-wise, she once had to struggle to move beyond the spunky, white-bread image she earned in her earliest TV roles as Gidget and the famously soaring Sister Bertrille. And in her love life, Field has charted a bumpy course. Her first marriage--at age 21, to high school sweetheart Steve Craig, a property manager Field has called "the only person I knew"--ended in divorce after seven years and two sons, Peter, now 26 and a writer, and Eli, 23, a recent college graduate. In 1977, the actress struck up a five-year romance with Burt Reynolds. This was followed in 1984 by a 10-year marriage to film executive Alan Greisman, 48, which ended in divorce 18 months ago. Contemplating such travails, Field looks at her past self as a "little girl," and says, "I look back, and I'd like to embrace her, help her out. Because things didn't have to be all that difficult."
Just 14 years ago, that little girl thought she had life all figured out. Her relationship with Reynolds had just ended ("I was the dumbest asshole ever to walk away from her," Reynolds told People last week. "We just got together at the wrong time."), and she was raising two sons. Field met Greisman at an L.A. restaurant. "She was a movie star, I was a producer," says Greisman. "I didn't think she'd be interested." Indeed, the spark didn't catch until 18 months later, when Greisman was pitching Field on a story idea. It was then, Field says, that she realized, "I desperately wanted another family. I wanted to be a mom again. It was my last shot."
Less than a year later, in December 1984, she and Greisman were married, and for a while it seemed they had it all. Field was coasting on her Oscar wins for Places in the Heart and Norma Rae in 1980. They renovated their 7,000-square-foot Brentwood home, adding huge windows and a fireplace so that Field could turn the kitchen into the family's gathering place. And in 1987, Sam was born.
But even then Field and Greisman were discovering they had profound differences. Greisman was a social animal who loved premieres and power lunches. Field was happier at home with her books and needlepoint. It wasn't just a matter of inclination: Field, because of her extreme shyness, dreaded socializing. "He wanted to go out, to be with people or go to parties," Field says. "I couldn't take it. I'd have an anxiety attack."
After a few more years, she says, the marriage was a shell. "The joy had gone out of Mudville," she says. "Instead of appreciating what we cared about in each other, we focused on the negative things. I didn't want to live in a household that was tense and unhappy."
The end came without the usual Hollywood trimmings of bitterness, betrayal and recrimination. "This isn't right," she recalls telling Greisman. "This isn't a good place for you, Sam or me." Before the couple separated in January 1994, Field says, they prepared Sam. "We worked up to it," she says. "We talked about how people love each other and how that sometimes changes. By the time Alan moved out, Sam was ready to deal with it."
Greisman, in fact, calls Field "my good friend" and says that in the divorce "the main thing I was concerned about losing was family. The good news is we still have one." Greisman, who is not seeing anyone steadily, takes care of Sam six days out of every 14 and remains close to Field's other sons. The group even spent last Thanksgiving together at Field's lodge in Aspen. "They have such a nice divorce," says friend Kate Capshaw, Steven Spielberg's actress spouse. "They are great at coparenting."
Field, though, says the breakup has prompted her to rethink her outlook on marriage. "I'm a woman who was brought up in the '50s, and so there's part of me that still wants to be June Cleaver and call to the family, 'Dinner's ready!' But my needs have changed. I now realize that people need their solitude and separateness," she says. "I believe if you have the money, couples should have separate bedrooms. There's something unnatural about sleeping in the same bed, dressing in the same closet, sharing everything." What's more, Field says that she has stopped feeling guilty about her lifelong penchant for being alone. "I'm finally coming to grips with the idea that I don't like giving up my space. I don't need somebody with me to make me whole. I'm totally complete."
If such attitudes seem at odds with Field's normally sunny image, so be it. "I think I'm much darker than people suspect," she says. She is certainly more literary. Field is a compulsive reader who lately pores over a book of Emily Dickinson's poetry and several Strindberg plays; she has Eudora Welty's novel The Optimist's Daughter on her night table. Field is also an avid journal keeper, having dutifully recorded her life on a daily basis since her mid-20s. Each time she fills up another journal, she tosses it in an off-white canvas satchel beneath her office desk--and forgets about it. "I never read the old ones," she says. "I don't know why."
Many of her memories may be too painful. Field describes her formative years as a time of fear and manipulation. When she was 4, Sally's parents--Richard Field, now deceased, a drugstore owner, and Margaret, now in her mid-70s, a former actress--were divorced. Her mother was soon remarried, to the late Jock Mahoney, a macho actor (TV's Yancy Derringer from 1958-59) who, Field says, boasted he had a special ability to divine any person's secret weakness. Growing up with her older brother Richard Jr., now 52 and a college physics professor in Florida, and her half-sister Princess, 43 and an assistant director in L.A., Field says, "I was terrified that my stepfather knew something about me that I was hiding."
Field believes that her constant anxiety was one reason she rushed into marriage with her classmate Craig, with whom she has remained close over the years. "I'm a textbook case of a fatherless daughter," Field says. "When you don't have that nourishing relationship with a father as a child, you're never certain how to get that in your life. Consequently, I've always felt confused about what I want."
The thing she latched onto was acting. She was 18 and still taking classes at a Columbia Pictures Workshop, when she landed the role as TV's boy-crazy Gidget in 1965. Colleagues from her early career remember Field both for her stunning talent--and an often abrasive ambition. Field wanted desperately to get beyond fluff. John Davidson, now 54 and touring in State Fair, recalls his work with Field on the short-lived 1973 sitcom The Girl with Something Extra. Though he had a deep crush on Field, he found her on-the-job outspokenness a bit intimidating. "Each week she'd fight with the writers and producers about the script," Davidson says. "I was satisfied to have this lightweight show, but she wanted more. She usually got it."
Though Reynolds says Field "was a grownup long before I was," he also saw her more competitive side. In the late '70s, he recalls, the pair went to see Meryl Streep in a play in New York City. They left after the first act, he says, with Field seething, "I could act her right off the f- - -ing stage!" Reynolds also recalls that when Field didn't win the 1976 Golden Globe for the TV drama Sybil, she refused to attend the Emmy Awards. The two watched the ceremonies from a Santa Barbara motel room. "When she won," he recalls, "we ordered champagne, danced on the bed and acted like 9-year-olds."
Eventually, the hard driving paid off. Field, besides winning a pair of Oscars, has appeared in two of the highest-grossing movies of recent years: Forrest Gump and Mrs. Doubtfire. In director John Schlesinger's Eye for an Eye, she plays a mother whose daughter is raped and murdered. When the killer (Kiefer Sutherland) is set free on a technicality, she takes off after him herself, Charles Bronson-style. It is a role that in one sense fits in well with Field's new image in Hollywood as an outspoken advocate for a new media image of women, calling on filmmakers to depict more strong, independent females. And, perhaps, older ones, too. "There are very few roles for women in my age group," she says with a sigh. "But that will change. Give us time--we'll break through."
Meantime, Field is working to improve her own understanding of women. Always a loner, she had to be wooed into friendship by pals like Capshaw. "I pursued Sally," says the actress, whose son Theo, 7, plays on the same peewee basketball team as Field's son Sam. Now the two mothers share car-pool chores. And though Field is a sometimes reluctant participant in the mommy klatches Capshaw organizes with Hollywood women including Goldie Hawn and actress Rita Wilson, Capshaw says, "Once Sally comes over, she doesn't want to leave." As Field told IN STYLE last February, "I'm hungry to know more women who are interesting...to know what they go through and what life is like for them, because it helps me figure out my own life now."
Naturally, that life includes men, though Field insists that "I'm too old to date. I have male friends. I go do things. If I enjoy the person, that's enough for me." She laughs off recent reports that she is deeply involved with Jerry Knight, a 36-year-old film technician she met on the set of Eye for an Eye. "Jerry is a friend," she says. "Not a boyfriend. We've been out--but I haven't seen him in a long time."
The mention of a hot rumor from the summer--that she was back with Reynolds--draws a shriek: "No! Oh, my God, no!" Looking back on her days with Burt, Field says, "It was fascinating. So showbiz. But I was a whole other person." Today, she adds, "I wish him nothing but well, but I haven't seen him for 15 years." Reynolds, though, says the two did talk on the phone in 1994. "Before my autobiography came out, I called and told her what a schmuck I'd been during our relationship," he says. "I also told Sally that she was the love of my life and that I hoped she finally realized how special she is."
Clearly, she has. Though Field says she doesn't "like the way my neck looks at all," and talks about cosmetic surgery, she no longer feels ashamed of her body. She is, says Greisman, "coming to terms with the fact that she's in great physical shape." In the past, she says, she tried "the grapefruit diet, the egg diet, the cucumber diet--it was so destructive, so full of self-loathing." Now, if her Eye for an Eye costar Harris says Field is "pretty nice to hold," it's because the keystone of her diet is common sense. She cooks dinner nearly every day, with standards that include fish baked in parchment and pasta with tomato and basil sauce. (Field admits, though, that she keeps a box of See's dark chocolates with her "at all times.") She works out in her home gym, equipped with a StairMaster and a Universal weight machine, and runs 20 to 25 miles per week. "I've fallen in love with running," she says. "It fits where my head has been the past few years."
Not that the anxiety has disappeared entirely. "For someone who has been in the public eye," says Capshaw, "she still suffers panic attacks over the fact that her shoes don't match her pants. She has no confidence, but she's funny, not sad, because somehow she finds the courage to overcome it."
Field, though, says she doesn't feel pushed to her limit. "All those younger years were spent trying to be acceptable and pleasing to somebody else," she says. "'Am I good enough, darling? Did I please you, dear?' And there's something very sexy about saying, 'This is what I want, and this is what I want right now.'"
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Tracey Gold (2/17/92)
Sporkin, E., Wagner, J., & Tomashoff, C. (1992, February 17). Cover: Terrible Hunger. People, 92+.
The victim in a desperate struggle between mind and body, Growing Pains' Tracey Gold is fighting for her health and her life.
TRACEY GOLD'S MOTHER, BONNIE, VIVIDLY remembers the moment she realized the gravity of her daughter's illness. That was last Nov. 10, Bonnie's 45th birthday, when she visited the set of the ABC sitcom Growing Pains, on which Tracey has played wholesome Carol Seaver since 1985. In Tracey's dressing room Bonnie caught a glimpse of her 5 ft.3 in. daughter changing out of her street clothes and was horrified by the skeletal apparition before her. "Although she was very careful to cover her body," Bonnie recalls, "I saw it and almost fainted." The once robust Tracey had wasted away to 90 lbs. "We both stood there crying," says Bonnie. "She said, 'Mommy, Mommy, I'm going to get better.' I said, 'Tracey, you've got to get better, because I'm not going to lose you.'"
For the past three years, Tracey, 22, has been a prisoner of anorexia, the baffling disease of self-induced starvation that, along with other eating disorders, currently afflicts an estimated 8 million Americans, the majority of them women. (See pages 96-98 for companion stories on anorexia and another eating disorder, bulimia -- an abnormal craving for food accompanied by some form of purging.)
On the outside Tracey seemed "pleasant and cheerful -- a rock," recalls her TV dad, Alan Thicke. But in private the young actress' real-life growing pains were killing her -- and those who loved her felt helpless to stop her slide toward physical illness and self-destruction. "This has been all we've been talking about and thinking about since it came into our lives," says Harry Gold, 39, a Hollywood talent agent who married Bonnie in 1975 and has guided his adopted daughter's career since Tracey appeared in her first TV commercial at age 4. (The Gold family also includes Missy, 21, who played the governor's daughter on Benson for seven years, and Brandy, 14, who has some 10 TV and film credits, as well as Jessie, 7, and Cassie, 3.)
Because Tracey had been camouflaging her steadily declining weight by dressing in baggy sweaters, even the Golds were unaware of just how emaciated she had become. That's why, explains Bonnie, "I went full-tilt in the dressing room. I was in total shock and fear."
Sadly, though, the confrontation did not become a turning point for Tracey, who has been unable to stop dieting since she began a doctor-supervised weight-loss program in 1989. Despite two years of psychotherapy, her condition finally forced her to leave Growing Pains on Jan. 7 and enter a Los Angeles hospital specializing in eating disorders five days later. On Jan. 15, though, Tracey took her health back into her own hands, checking out of the hospital. She is determined to battle anorexia her way, with a private therapist and nutritionist. "I am going to beat this," she says, talking publicly about her disease for the first time. "But it's going to take time."
"Anorexics are very bright and very sneaky," says Bonnie, squeezing her daughter's hand as she sits beside her on a cocoa-brown sofa in Harry's 14th- floor Burbank office. "Tracey was very good at fooling people. She would cut up meat in small little pieces to make it look like she'd eaten more. Or, she'd say, 'I ate before,' or 'I ate in my dressing room.'" What she ate followed a ritualistic pattern associated with her disorder. "I would starve myself all day and then eat the same meal for dinner every night," says Tracey. "Pasta with chicken and broccoli. It was always the same, a certain time, certain place, certain bowl. And I'd reheat it three or four times, just to savor it."
Her obsessive eating habits spilled over onto the Growing Pains set. "Tracey was always carrying her quart of diet Coke," Thicke says. "That became the staple of her diet. We teased her in a friendly way when she got thin, but then she went over the edge."
During the show's Christmas hiatus, Tracey became ill with bronchitis and was thinner than ever when she returned to the set. Frightened for her health, the producers sent her home on an indefinite leave of absence. The season's remaining four scripts have been written both with and without Tracey's character, who has been shipped off to London to study rare books at the British Museum as part of a college course. "If I had my wish," says Tracey, "I would like to be back for the last episode of the season."
Tracey was first diagnosed with anorexia at 12 by her pediatrician, but she recovered after four months of psychiatric treatment. Her more recent downward spiral from what she describes as "a normal eater" into a compulsive dieter began at 19, when she reached 133 lbs. "I was made fun of by a casting agent," says the fragile, brown-eyed actress. "If I were a different person, it probably would have rolled off my back. But I have the kind of personality where I will let those kinds of comments affect me. I' ve always wanted to please people."
On the recommendation of her doctor, Tracey went to a well-known endocrinologist who, she claims, told her that her ideal weight was 113. "He put me on a 500-calorie-a-day diet, and he taught me how to basically starve myself, even knowing I had a past history of anorexia, so I don't have any respect for him," Tracey says.
She reached her goal in two months. "It was so wonderful," she says. "All of a sudden, I wasn't awkward Tracey. People were saying I was pretty. I fell right into the pitfall of 'I can't lose this constant praise.'" Though she started psychotherapy in the spring of 1990, Tracey kept losing weight, getting down to 100 lbs., then 95, and finally 90.
"I yelled and screamed," says Harry. "I begged. I'd say, 'What are you doing to yourself?' But she was working with a psychiatrist at the time, so you kind of give up. You feel at such a loss. You want to say, 'Eat, just eat.'"
What most perplexed her parents was that Tracey seemed to have everything going for her. Growing Pains remained a solid hit, and she had a boyfriend, free-lance production assistant Roby Marshall, 26. The couple met on the set of the 1990 TV movie Blind Faith, where Marshall was a consultant to the producers of the drama based on his father's arranged murder of his mother. (The mother was played by Tracey's Growing Pains mom, Joanna Kerns.) "Roby is my first love, a truly wonderful person who has been supportive throughout this," says Tracey. "This has nothing to do with him."
Nor, believes Thicke, did it have anything to do with the Golds. "The Gold family has always been a role model," he says. "Harry and Bonnie Gold make the Seavers look like the Manson family."
In fact, Harry and Bonnie, a former New York City advertising account executive, always wanted a normal life for their daughters. "I knew all the traps," says Bonnie, who once said of her kids, "We're letting them act for two reasons: One, they love it, and two, financially they'll be set." Benson, it turns out, is paying for Missy's education at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where she is a senior pre-med student. Tracey, who lives in a guest house on the grounds of her parents' North Hollywood home, "is quite wealthy," says her mother.
Tracey's television family, which is just as close as her real one, also intervened after her latest setback. Kerns sat Tracey down for numerous TV-mother-daughter talks. "I urged her to get help," she says. "I told her it looked like she was going too far with the weight thing."
Tracey won't say what went wrong last month after she was hospitalized. "Everybody wanted me to stay there," she says, "but that hospital was not the right place for me." After checking herself out, she took a cab to her parents' house.
"She came into my arms and just held me," says Bonnie. "It frightened me that she was back home, and yet it relieved me too."
Tracey is now working with a nutritionist and a leading UCLA therapist who specializes in eating disorders. "They've stabilized my weight now," she says, "and I'm healthy enough to know that I don't want to lose any more. I am fighting it, but it's hard. It consumes my every thought."
The Golds know that Tracey's recovery has barely begun. "I go over to her house, and I check on her every single night to make sure she's still breathing," says Bonnie. "That's how scared I am. I check her pulse. And I just thank God that we've gotten through another day."
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Tracey Gold (1/31/94)
Levitt, S., & Wagner, J. (1994, January 31). Cover: Weight & see: After nearly dying from anorexia, Tracey Gold has regained her appetite for life. People, 50+.
MOST ANY PARENT WOULD BE MOVED, WATCHing a young and lovely daughter model her wedding dress. But when actress Tracey Gold tried on the ivory satin gown she plans to wear when she weds Roby Marshall next October, her mother, Bonnie, 47, was absolutely undone. "I don't think I was prepared for what I was going to see," she recalls. "She looked like an angel. I wanted to get right down on my hands and knees and thank God."
Bonnie is, to be sure, thankful that her daughter has found a loving fiance in Marshall, a 28-year-old production assistant on the CBS sitcom Hearts Afire. But beyond that, Bonnie is profoundly grateful that 24-year-old Tracey, who for six seasons (1985-92) played the ebullient Carol Seaver on the highly rated ABC sitcom Growing Pains, is alive.
There had been, after all, many moments when it seemed that Tracey would become not a bride but a fatality -- a victim of anorexia. "It was like a rubber band," says Bonnie of her daughter's struggles with the disease. "Tracey would get just so far, think she had made so much progress, then the rubber band would snap back."
The insidious eating disorder, whose main characteristic is self-induced starvation, affects some 8 million Americans and claims thousands of lives annually. (See pages 56 and 58 for related stories.) Thus, a little more than two years ago, when Bonnie caught a glimpse of her daughter changing clothes in her dressing room, she was frozen with fear. At an emaciated 90 pounds, the 5'3-1/2" actress looked sepulchral.
Despite her brave pronouncement -- "They've stabilized my weight," she told PEOPLE in February 1992, after a month of therapy, "and I'm healthy enough to know that I don't want to lose any more" -- she suffered a relapse within six months. Her weight plummeted to 80 pounds, and, she says, "all life meant was losing weight, counting calories."
To Marshall, even worse than his girlfriend's inward agony ("I couldn't be there for him," Tracey says, "I could only be there for my anorexia") was his own feeling of powerlessness. "Tracey went through hell," he says, "and I had to sit there helplessly watching it. Nothing I could say would register."
What finally did register was Gold's catching sight of her 80-pound self in the mirror one night in September 1992. "I saw somebody," she says, "who would die of anorexia, and I had a panic attack." The diuretics and laxatives she had taken to purge herself made her heart beat even more rapidly, and Gold sat up all night, afraid to go to sleep because she was terrified she would never wake up. That marked a turning point: Tracey Gold chose to fight to save her life.
Today she is decidedly healthier. But she still weighs in at a mere 92 pounds -- 17 pounds below the minimum weight guidelines for her height as set forth by the Department of Health and Human Services -- and the pace of her recovery has been painstaking. "It took me months to make even the slightest bit of progress," she says. "I had gotten to the point where I wasn't eating anything all day."
Her adoptive father, Harry, 40, says he now realizes that recovery from anorexia "is a gradual thing, not one great revelation." (The Gold family also includes Missy, 23, onetime costar of the sitcom Benson, who's now studying for a doctorate in psychology; Brandy, 16; Jessie, 9; and Cassie, 5.)
But while Harry says, "I see Tracey making progress," her Growing Pains dad, Alan Thicke, isn't totally convinced. "I wish I could see her heavier still," he says. "It's my fantasy to see her chunky and say, 'Tracey, I'd like to see you drop a few pounds.'"
He's likely to have quite a wait. True, Gold, now rosy-skinned, has lost the ashen complexion she says she had when she was "skinny, skinny, skinny." And, no longer hiding her undersize frame in oversize clothes, she's dressed in a form-fitting sweater and pants as she sits in the kitchen of her family's San Fernando Valley home, just blocks from the three-bedroom ranch house she and Marshall bought last October. But Gold admits her wedding dress had to be "scaled down to my size" -- size 1. And it's unlikely she'll be eating more than a bite of wedding cake at the elaborate reception she's planning.
Even now, says Bonnie, Tracey "sees a lump of butter and shudders." Moreover, it's a Diet Coke Tracey is sipping as she ticks off her daily food intake: for breakfast, cereal; for lunch, frozen yogurt or a fruit salad; for dinner, pasta. She claims she no longer gets "freaked out" when her weight fluctuates. But she has not topped 93 pounds in 16 months, and she continues to climb on the scale daily.
Still, she has gone all that time without a relapse, and there have been breakthroughs, such as the day last October when Gold went to an Italian restaurant and "pretty much ordered off the menu without giving a million different directions to the waitress."
In November, however, Gold did make a scene in a restaurant -- with fisticuffs. As Gold tells the story (which made tabloid headlines), she, her parents and about a dozen friends, in New York City to shop for Tracey's wedding dress, were celebrating Bonnie's 47th birthday at Elaine's, an Italian restaurant and celeb hangout on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Bonnie got a craving for a cheeseburger, but since burgers aren't on Elaine's menu, a friend dashed out and brought one back from a local takeout place. Bonnie admits she continued "sneaking bites" -- even after a waiter told the Golds that owner Elaine Kaufman didn't want an imported burger eaten on her premises. Kaufman, was, in fact, so enraged, says Tracey, that she let loose a stream of profanities as the Golds were leaving. "I lost it," Tracey concedes. "I have a temper and, yes, I hit her."
The spat was only the latest example of the way food has complicated her life. She was only 12 when her pediatrician first diagnosed her anorexia. Four months of psychotherapy seemed to get the problem under control -- and then some: by the time Tracey turned 19 in 1988, she tipped the scales at 133 pounds. This time, she saw an endocrinologist, who put her on a diet of a scant 500 calories a day so she could achieve her ideal weight of 113. She reached that goal in two months, but during the next three years her weight kept dropping, until in January 1992 Tracey was forced to leave Growing Pains and enter an L.A. hospital specializing in eating disorders. After three days, she signed herself out: "I knew if I didn't, not only was Tracey the anorexic going to take over but my mind was going to snap."
Two new men in her life kept that from happening. One was Dr. Michael Strober, head of the eating-disorders clinic at the University of California at Los Angeles, whom Gold began seeing for two hours every day starting in late January 1992. (She's now down to monthly visits.) The other man was Roby Marshall, whom Gold started dating after they spotted each other in, ironically, a studio cafeteria in late 1989.
"My response to Tracey," says Marshall, "was that she's like a bundle of life and energy that I want to be near." No wonder; Marshall has had to deal with far more than his share of personal tragedy. In 1984, his mother, Maria, was shot dead in a picnic area off a New Jersey highway. The person behind that murder, it turned out, was his own father, Robert Sr., who had hired a hit man so he could collect $1.5 million in life insurance he held on his wife. The macabre tale became the basis for author Joe McGinniss's 1990 best-seller Blind Faith, which in turn became a two-part 1990 NBC miniseries. It was his work as a consultant on that movie that brought Marshall into the lunchroom and into Gold's life.
But when Tracey got on a scale in May 1992 and saw her weight had climbed to 95 pounds, not even Marshall's love could still the panic she felt at being just 5 pounds short of 100. As is common among recovering anorectics, approaching triple digits on the scale triggered Tracey's terror and a relapse. "It's not that I felt fat," Tracey says. "I just felt that if I gained any more, I wouldn't have the same control over my weight." She fell into a cycle of starvation and self-denial. "I was always saying," she recalls, "'Well, I don't want to eat this now because there might be something I'd rather eat later.' Of course, that time never came."
Over the next three months, her weight would drop to 80 pounds. Nothing Marshall did could distract Tracey from her obsession with her weight. "I tried everything," he says, "from breaking up to taking her to Hawaii."
Finally he decided to propose marriage, hoping that might "light a fire." His proposal was as public as it was hopeful. Last May 6, ABC's news show PrimeTime Live aired an interview with Gold in which she discussed her battle with anorexia. At its conclusion, coanchor Diane Sawyer announced that Marshall "is so convinced" Tracey is on her way to recovery that "after the story airs...he's going to ask Tracey to marry him." Recalls Gold: "At that moment Roby got down on one knee and had my ring and placed it on my finger and said, 'Will you marry me?' I was so excited I couldn't breathe. It was magical."
The magic has continued. "My whole life is changing," says Gold. "I want to move on. I want to be a wife. I want to be a mother." She also wants to resume the career she put on hold to wage a full-time battle against her anorexia. Last February, she traveled to Wilmington, N.C., to star in the CBS TV movie Labor of Love -- the true story of Arlette Schweitzer, who bore her own grandchildren as a surrogate mother for her daughter Arlette (played by Gold).
Not only was it her first acting role since Growing Pains, it was a recovery milestone: "I went away on location for a month," Gold says, "and I did great. I ate on the set. I had not even a smidgen of relapse."
Still, Gold recognizes that she is not yet "a normal person about food." The daily struggle she wages is captured in the pride with which she offers up her latest achievement. "There have been occasions," she says, "when I've had to eat dinner and nobody's been home. But even though nobody would know if I didn't eat, I sit down, watch TV and I eat it all, and it's wonderful. It's a feeling of accomplishment, you know?"
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Tracey Gold (10/24/94)
Cerio, G., & Wagner, J. (1994, October 24). Wedding: A glorious day: Winning her daily struggle against anorexia, Tracey Gold had her wedding cake -- and ate it too. People, 112+.
THE YOUNG COUPLE, ABOUT TO exchange vows that would bind them for life, stood before the altar as Father George Magee spoke of the responsibilities of marriage and the love that had brought them together. "These two young people have climbed a mountain of hardship to be here today," said Magee, his arms outstretched as if offering a blessing.
He did not exaggerate, as the 270 family and friends gathered in St. Charles Catholic Church in North Hollywood on Oct. 8 for the wedding of Tracey Gold, 25, and Roby Marshall, 29, were well aware.
For both newlyweds, the road to the altar had been exceptionally difficult.
Just over two years ago, anorexia had whittled Gold, the actress who played Carol on ABC's Growing Pains, down to an 80-lb. wraith who was in danger of dying.
Hard work, therapy and nutrition counseling have slowly helped put flesh back on her bones.
Walking down the aisle on the arm of her father, Harry, she looked radiant in a white-and-ivory silk satin wedding dress by designer Helen Benton.
Though still fighting what she calls a "meal-by-meal battle" with anorexia, Gold now ever so gently tips the scales at a healthier 95 lbs., about 10 pounds shy of her optimal weight.
Her groom, a production assistant on CBS's Hearts Afire, had to overcome a nightmare of his own: In 1984, Roby's father, Robert Sr., hired a hit man to kill his wife, Maria, so that he could collect on a $1.5 million insurance policy.
The high-profile case became the basis of author Joe McGinniss's 1989 best-seller Blind Faith and an NBC miniseries that aired the next year.
Tracey and Roby met five years ago after actress Joanna Kerns, who played Gold's mother on Growing Pains, appeared as Roby's murdered mother in Blind Faith.
She invited Roby, a technical adviser on the miniseries, to the Pains set and introduced him to Gold.
"He had a gleam in his eyes from the moment they met," Kerns recalled at last week's wedding.
Gold's TV father, Alan Thicke, was also at the ceremony. "They wouldn't have been officially married if I weren't here," he joked, adding that Gold and Marshall had been inspired to include the word "lover" in their vows (along with "companion and spouse") after hearing Thicke and his new wife, former Miss World Gina Tolleson, exchange a similar vow at their wedding last August.
At the reception, held at Tracey's parents' North Hollywood home, the newlyweds made their married debut on the dance floor to "Sea of Love."
The next morning the pair would leave for a weeklong honeymoon on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
But Gold was looking further into the future. "I plan for this to be the only wedding of my life," she said.
"Roby is my partner, my soul mate. We've been together for so long and been through so much, I'm just filled with overwhelming happiness."
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Tracey Gold (6/26/00)
Where are they now?: Growing Pains, 1985-1992. (2000, June 26). People, 137+.
Dad was a work-at-home shrink, Mom a reporter. It was the dual-career '80s, after all. Skeptics judged the creators "insane to think we could compete with The A-Team," recalls producer Michael Sullivan, but the show became a smash.
Alan Thicke
DR. JASON SEAVER When he auditioned for Growing Pains, Alan Thicke was best known as the talk show host who took on Johnny Carson--and bombed. That didn't faze the sitcom's creators. "We looked at 150 actors before we came across Alan," says producer Michael Sullivan. "He brought a certain charm and charisma; we thought he was a godsend." Adds TV spouse Joanna Kerns: "Few men are that smart and that funny." After Growing Pains was canceled, Thicke, now 53, starred in the short-lived sitcom Hope & Gloria, but he found his real niche as a host of game shows and specials, such as the 1992 Miss World Pageant, where he met titleholder Gina Tolleson, 31, who became his second wife two years later. (Thicke has two sons by actress Gloria Loring, 53: Brennan, 25, who works in film production, and Robin, 23, a lyricist who has written for such pop sensations as Christina Aguilera and Brandy.) Although Thicke and Tolleson split last year, they share custody of their son, Carter, almost 3. "It's just him and me three days a week," says Thicke, whose $1.2 million San Fernando Valley mansion is overflowing with stuffed animals. "We have so much fun together, neither of us can let the other out of his sight."
Joanna Kerns
MAGGIE SEAVER "I always knew that Growing Pains was not going to go on forever," says Joanna Kerns. "I remember thinking, 'I'm going to enjoy every moment of this.'" Kerns clicked with her castmates, especially TV spouse Alan Thicke. "We never went on a date," he says, "but we had chemistry, which our unrequited romance preserved for the entire show." Kerns also made a wise choice with her money. As a divorced mother raising a daughter, Ashley, now 21, she says, "I invested. I wanted to cushion the future. I'm a financial success!" Married since 1995 to Los Angeles architect Marc Appleton, 55, Kerns, 47, played Winona Ryder's mother in last year's Girl, Interrupted. She is also a director, which is no surprise to her TV daughter Tracey Gold, who recalls, "Joanna was always helping me with my scenes." Last year, Kerns helmed the Thanksgiving episode of Ally McBeal. Of her latest behind-the-lens effort, the June 27 season opener of Showtime's TV-industry satire Beggars and Choosers, Kerns warns, "Don't be shocked, but it has nudity." Still, she doesn't scorn her sitcom past: "Growing Pains opened every door. I wouldn't trade it for anything."
Tracey Gold
CAROL SEAVER While playing the Seavers' studious older daughter, Tracey Gold endured some agonizing growing pains of her own. In 1989, at age 19, she developed anorexia. "You could tell she was starving herself to death," recalls Seaver mom Joanna Kerns, who advised Gold to seek help and offered a shoulder to cry on.
Says Gold, now 31, of her TV folks: "Joanna and Alan [Thicke] were very nice, but there was nothing they could do." By the final season of Growing Pains, the 5'3" actress had wasted away to 80 lbs.; she was briefly hospitalized and missed three of the show's last four episodes. Despite her affection for her castmates, Gold was relieved when the series ended. "Being out of the limelight helped me," she says. "Everybody knew me so well that nothing was private."
After taking a year off to grapple with her illness ("Tracey showed a lot of courage," says her younger sister Melissa, who played Katie on Benson), she settled down to making TV movies. Gold has appeared in 30 so far, most recently this year's Wanted. "I've gotten to the top of the Movie of the Week industry," she says jokingly.
The actress, who is no longer painfully thin, is wrapped up in another production as well: her family. Married since 1994 to private school swim coach Roby Marshall, 35 (they were set up by Kerns), Gold is mother to Sage, 3, and Bailey, 1. Most mornings she and the boys get in the car for a three-minute drive to visit her parents at their San Fernando Valley home. "I want four children," says Gold. "I'm not done at all." But if she can help it, none of them will be watching reruns of Growing Pains. "It's so embarrassing," says Gold. "I was so dorky!"
Jeremy Miller
BEN SEAVER For Jeremy Miller, the worst thing about being a child actor was having to leave his TV family every year. "When the season was over, he'd cry," recalls his TV mother, Joanna Kerns. Miller, 23, still mourns the show's demise. "The closeness is what I miss the most," he says. Yet while he was on the series, he also missed the freedom of an ordinary childhood--and he has been making up for it ever since. "For about two years, I was a little wild. I was out partying, having adventures," says Miller, who tried to attend college at USC but dropped out after a year. "I have attention deficit disorder, so sitting in a classroom is not the best thing for me." Today, his life is more subdued, although he says that he still enjoys a game of high-stakes poker and "taking 9 or 10 people out for dinner and popping for the check." Miller, who lives in a modest house in Van Nuys, Calif., spends much of his time helping care for his half brothers Adam, 11, and Tanner, 8, the children of his mom, Sonny Levine, 43, a preschool administrator. With his Growing Pains savings dwindling, Miller says he's "hungry to get back into acting," and he recently shot a sci-fi pilot called Space Trucking. He nurtures another dream as well. "My grandmother was a chef, and she taught me to cook," says Miller. "One day I want a restaurant, a small Italian grill. That's my aspiration."
Kirk Cameron
MIKE SEAVER "Whenever he appeared on the set, it was like Beatlemania," recalls producer Michael Sullivan. "There were girls jumping around in the bleachers." Kirk Cameron brought a dose of glamor to his portrayal of the oldest Seaver sibling. But the actor (whose younger sister Candace was on Full House) was anything but a good-time guy. As a teenager, he told reporters that he planned to be a brain surgeon; he also followed a strict diet that involved baking his own bread. For Cameron, now 29, teen stardom "was just my job. I didn't see it as my real identity." At 20, he became a born-again Christian and married Chelsea Noble, now 35, who played his TV girlfriend Kate. The couple are raising their three children--Jack, 3, Isabella, 2, and Anna, 1--at their home in the Santa Monica Mountains, and they don't keep in touch with the rest of the Growing Pains cast. Although he was invited, Cameron did not attend the weddings of Tracey Gold, Alan Thicke or Joanna Kerns. Kerns wasn't surprised. "In the last years of the show he stayed separate from the rest of us," she says. Rarely apart from his own family, Cameron chooses projects that allow him to work with Noble. They are now shooting Left Behind, an independent film in which millions of people around the world suddenly disappear. "It has a soul-stirring message," explains Cameron, who says he hasn't completely turned his back on the Seavers. He's game for a Growing Pains reunion show, tentatively scheduled to air in November. "I've read the script," he says. "Mike is married to Kate and has five kids. I think Mike would say to me, 'I'm right there with you, man.'"
Ashley Johnson
CHRISSY SEAVER When Growing Pains had its season premiere in 1990, viewers got a surprise: The littlest Seaver, who'd been played by 3-year-old twins the previous spring, was suddenly 7. "I got some mail about that," says Ashley Johnson. "People wrote, 'What happened? Why did you grow up so fast?'" The change, says producer Michael Sullivan, occurred because "we knew that if we made the character older, we'd have more to play with. And when Ashley walked into the audition, she knocked everybody's socks off." Johnson had her share of scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio, who played a homeless boy taken in by the Seavers during the show's last two seasons. She remembers him "as a goofy boy. I didn't have a crush on him then, but now I do! I saw him a couple years ago, and my hands were shaking. I said, 'Hi there, Leo DiCaprio.' And he jumped up and yelled, 'Ashley!' and gave me a big hug. I didn't want to take a shower for the next four days!" After Pains, Johnson landed roles on the sitcoms Phenom and All-American Girl, as well as a recurring spot on ER ("I played a cancer patient, and George Clooney had to cut off my leg"). Now 16, the actress--who lives in the San Fernando Valley with her mother, Nancy, 48, a writer, and her dad, Clifford, 52, a retired ship's captain--just got her high school diploma via home schooling and is considering college. In the meantime, she's shooting the comedy What Women Want, due out this December, in which she plays Mel Gibson's daughter. "It's my first big role in a big production," says Johnson. "I'm having a blast."
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Book bonus: Tracey Gold (2/3/03)
Gold, T. (2003, February 3). Body language. People, 121-124.
Beating anorexia, Tracey Gold writes, meant facing the pressure of family--and fame.
For the past decade actress Tracey Gold has rarely spoken publicly about surviving anorexia, because she feared sharing details of the eating disorder that plagued her from 1989 to 1993 might backfire and encourage others to starve themselves. "So many people who try to help," Gold says, "end up doing damage." But in 2001, as a favor to her brother-in-law, she agreed to speak at Lehigh University--and realized the power of sharing her experiences. "It began to feel selfish that I wasn't talking about it," Gold says. "I knew I had something good to say."
She says it all in her new autobiography, Room to Grow: An Appetite for Life. While the book, excerpted exclusively below, avoids specifics about her weight ("Every anorexic looks at numbers to see how low her weight can get," Gold says), it takes an unflinching look at the pressures--her desire for control, the image Hollywood demanded and her mother's own eating disorder--that fed Gold's need to stay thin. Today Gold, 33--mother of sons Sage, 5, and Bailey, 3, with husband Roby Marshall, 37, an aquatics-club swim coach--continues to act (she recently filmed a guest spot for the USA Network's The Dead Zone). Equally important to her, however, are the lectures she now gives on college campuses. "I want to be remembered," she says, "as a person who made a difference."
Gold wishes such a person had been around to talk to when she was 13 and making her movie debut as one of four sisters in Shoot the Moon.
Making this movie and spending time with these girls was the first time I ever heard the word "diet" pertaining to me. The girls' idea of dieting was not to eat dinner, but have a Kit-Kat instead. My mom said this was nonsense and insisted I come eat dinner with her. She was right, but the idea had made its way into my mind.
[My mom] didn't always practice what she preached. As I kid I always knew [she] had an eating disorder, though I didn't think of it in those terms. [My sister] Missy and I knew she threw up a lot. She disappeared during meals or afterwards; she very rarely sat with the rest of us and ate.
In 1981 Gold landed a role in the TV movie A Few Days in Weasel Creek. But as her career picked up, so did her preoccupation with eating.
I particularly noticed that a lot of the actors would go out at night but wouldn't eat dinner. When I'd ask why they'd say, "Oh, I'm on a diet...it's not good to eat at night." I was 12 years old, what did I know? Everyone else in my profession did not eat dinner. That was what I was learning.
I was starting to develop breasts, and it completely threw me off guard. I'm not sure where I'd gotten the irrational, but very powerful, idea that once you got boobs that was kind of it...it was time to go off into the real world on your own. But the concept of being on my own, away from my parents, frightened me terribly. As a result of these feelings I started limiting what I ate. I wanted to stay a child.
I became obsessed with the book The Best Little Girl in the World. [It] was a bible for eating disorders. Though I'm sure it was unintentional, the novel glamorized anorexia and made being too thin enticing.
When I went to the doctor for my physical he flat out said, "It looks like she's got anorexia nervosa." I had grown four inches and lost six pounds in the year since he'd last seen me. He referred me to a therapist who I saw a few times. These brief sessions were helpful. I started to look around and realized that you could get older and still stay close to your mother. [It] really helped me over this rough patch; it nipped my eating disorder in the bud. The crisis had passed...for now.
At 16, Gold scored the plum role of middle sibling Carol Seaver on the sitcom Growing Pains. The hit show, which ran for seven seasons, brought Gold her greatest professional success--but took a devastating toll.
The spring that I turned 19 I went to Kansas City to perform in a play. I was living away from home for the first time and I put on some pounds. When I got back to work for the new season of Growing Pains I was quite aware that I had put on weight. Suddenly, it felt like every other page of my weekly script contained a fat joke. The producers assured me that it was just brother/sister banter. But after they reassured me, my father [who is my agent] would inevitably get a phone call. The producers would say flat out, "Tracey really needs to lose some weight." My self-esteem was shot. I was the fat, ugly little sister.
I decided it was time to go on a diet. Given my history with anorexia, [my parents]</raw? were worried and wanted me to go to a medical doctor where I would be supervised. The doctor I went to see was an endocrinologist. Knowing full well that I'd had a bout with anorexia at age 12, he told me, "You can go on a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet or a 500-calorie-a-day diet. On the 500-calorie-a-day diet you'll lose weight in half the time."
It took only a couple of months to get down to my ideal weight--a loss of 20 pounds. But very gradually I started to slide into a new plan. I would not eat a single bite of food all week from Monday through Thursday--nothing. I would drink Diet Coke and tea--and on the weekends I would binge--eat whatever I wanted.
I would dream about food. Once when I was sick with a cold my mom said, "You need to take some cough syrup." I said, "Absolutely not. Today's a not-eating day." She said to me, "This craziness has to stop." But it didn't.
''Gold's TV mother, Joanna Kerns, introduced Gold to her future husband, Roby Marshall, then a television production assistant, in 1989. He was immediately concerned about her eating habits.''
In the first year Roby and I were together, I probably lost 5 pounds. Some of this had to do with the fact that this was the first time I was sexually active. It was important to me to be perfect, as it is for so many girls.
But when Roby questioned my behavior, I knew I had to make some adjustments fast. My journal entry from that time spells it out this way: I will eat one meal a day (a light meal) and leave two days--Friday and Saturday--for eating days. Carbs were all I ever ate! Pasta, in particular.
By the beginning of 1991 I was starving myself and throwing up, and I couldn't hide it any longer. <raw>[That] summer I entered my first eating disorder program. I was losing weight rapidly because I was throwing up what little I did eat. I befriended a girl who was very seriously anorexic. She's the one who taught me to read the labels on the food packages and see how many grams of fat were in everything. The whole experience taught me that a group situation can be very detrimental for people with eating disorders. In those six weeks I became quite an expert anorexic. I learned plenty of new tricks. I wanted to become the "best anorexic."
Once Gold was out of rehab, nothing could change her behavior--not even the threatened loss of her job.
Once I went under that all-important 100-pound mark I wasn't about to go back up. I didn't, in fact, for two years.
Everything came to a head after Christmas break. My dad had gotten a phone call from Warner Bros. They told my dad I couldn't go back on the show until I got help. They had found what they thought would be a great program for me. It was based on the 12-step program. No one watched me to make sure I was eating. I was not allowed to talk to anyone. Yet right outside my "room" was a pay phone. Roby was the only one who took my calls. It was a cold and scary place. And it didn't specialize in anorexia.
I said [to the doctors]: "I can't stand it here; this doesn't feel right to me." They said, "We're telling you if you leave this place you will die." And I said, "Well, I prefer to die at home."
Back at home, Gold decided to devote herself to recovery.
I had taken a year off from acting to concentrate on getting better. Therapy was my full-time job. [Head of the eating-disorders program at UCLA] Dr. [Michael] Strober did family therapy with my parents and Roby. There was a lot of anger, fear and hurt feelings, but there was also healing.
Six months into therapy with Dr. Strober, I hit rock bottom. [One night] in August, at Roby's apartment, I got up in the middle of the night. I looked at my body in a mirror and I was shocked. I had a moment of seeing myself the way I really was, which was "death." I was sure I was going to die. I thought to myself, Please, please let me just make it till morning. That was the turning point. I never lost another pound after that terrible night. I'd finally had it with my illness.
One of the final pieces of Gold's recovery process involved confronting her mother about her bulimia.
In January [of 1993], after almost a year of therapy, I was offered a part in a television movie. My mom came with me on the trip so I wouldn't be alone.
One night [she] got furious with me because I wouldn't eat a banana. Then later that very same night I caught her sneaking off to throw up! She was mortified, but I know this scene played a big part in her decision to finally stop. It wasn't the last time either one of us threw up, but it marked another huge turning point.
I remember when I was sick I would always say that having anorexia felt like I was drowning. I would struggle to reach the surface and stick my hand up, waiting for someone to grab it and pull me out. Somewhere along the way, I realized that the only person who could pull me out was me.
Photographs by DANA FINEMAN-APPEL
Captions:
~p 121: "I still have anorexic moments, but I talk my way through them," says Gold (at home in Valencia, Calif.). "It gets easier all the time."
~p 124: Gold cooks "healthy food" for her guys (from left, Bailey with Eloise, Roby and Sage).
Photographs p. 122, Clockwise from top: ABC, courtesy Tracy Gold (2)
Captions:
~Fat jokes about Gold (left, with Kirk Cameron in '88) on Growing Pains helped send her spiraling into anorexia (above, in '92).
~"They thought the book was a great idea," says Gold (second from left) of her family (from left): sisters Brandy, Missy, Jessie and Cassie and parents Bonnie and Harry (in L.A. in '91).
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Dawn Langstroth (11/8/99)
Chin, P., & Breu, G. (1999, November 8). Cover: Emotional rescue. People, 128+.
No longer able to ignore the signs of her daughter's eating disorder, singer Anne Murray curtailed her career, confronted her martial problems and managed to put her child on t...
Looking back, Canadian singing star Anne Murray knew her daughter Dawn Langstroth was in danger. Murray would find stacks of magazines hidden in the closet in Langstroth's bedroom, each with an article on eating disorders carefully bookmarked. Almost every night, the 16-year-old made excuses to avoid sitting down to dinner with the rest of her family, saying she'd eat later. On those rare occasions when she did join them, she merely picked at her food or shoved it around on her plate. Determined to become a model, Langstroth had dropped 15 lbs. in two months and, measuring her waist every day, fretted that she wasn't skinny enough. "I'm not dense--I saw signs that something was very wrong," says Murray now, four years later. "But it didn't click because I didn't want it to."
In May 1997, Murray was forced to snap out of her denial. "Dawn came in, lay on my bed and said, 'There's something wrong with me,'" she recalls. By then listless and distracted with a sallow complexion and dark circles under her eyes, Langstroth could no longer bear keeping her secret. "I was sick of not talking, of exercising compulsively and not eating anything," says the 5'10" Langstroth, whose weight had dropped to 120 lbs. "It was one of those days when I was so exhausted I felt like I had died."
The next day, Murray set up an appointment for Langstroth with a Toronto psychologist specializing in eating disorders. Her diagnosis was unequivocal: Langstroth was suffering from anorexia nervosa, the potentially fatal illness in which people literally starve themselves in a quest for thinness. Anorexia afflicts mostly women--an estimated 5 to 10 million of them have the disease compared with 1 million men. Fortunately, Dawn was not suffering from secondary conditions such as hair loss, muscle atrophy or irregular heartbeat. Even so, "when someone gives you that diagnosis, it's like being kicked right in the stomach," says Murray, who, despite her shock, knew there was little time to waste. "I thought, 'Okay, let's face it. Let's see what we can do.'"
Two weeks later, in early June 1997, Langstroth and Murray were on a plane bound for Willough at Naples, an eating disorder treatment center in Naples, Fla. "When you first get the call from a big star's family, you really wonder what the chances are of the patient getting well," says Dr. Virginia Condello, the center's medical director. "But Anne was back and forth every time we needed her and was very responsive and receptive. The father and brother came down. The family put Dawn's recovery ahead of their own needs."
Today, mother and daughter are sitting shoeless beside the pool at the spacious five-bedroom house they share in Thornhill, Ont., just outside Toronto. They are strumming guitars and singing a duet, "Walk Right Back," which was written by a local songwriter after she learned of Dawn's struggle. Indeed, the title testifies to the triumph over an ordeal that included three hospitalizations for Langstroth and months of painful therapy for the entire family, including Dawn's brother Will, 23. They are still coping with the fallout. Exploring the dynamics that contributed to her daughter's illness exposed the fault lines in Murray's marriage to her ex-manager Bill Langstroth, 69. Eighteen months ago, after 24 years of marriage, the couple legally separated. Murray, 54, has also taken her first hiatus from her rigorous touring schedule to ensure that Dawn, who is still coping with her disease, stays healthy. On this sunny autumn afternoon, though, the two are just happy to harmonize and revel in their renewed relationship. "Mom helped save my life," says Dawn, who this fall dropped out of Toronto's University of York in hopes of achieving some of the singing success her mother has enjoyed. "She was a great support and saw me through everything." Says Murray: "She could have died from anorexia. She stopped it, but I helped. I was there for her at every turn. That's what you do as a mother."
Still, Murray was, by her own admission, often an absentee mother. With the phenomenal success in 1970 of her album Snowbird, Murray, the only daughter of a surgeon and a nurse from the coal-mining town of Springhill, N.S., became a crossover star in both Canada and the U.S. Married to Langstroth in 1975, she would go on, over the course of her three-decade career, to win four Grammys and sell some 40 million records worldwide. But success meant that she was constantly on the road, separations that were especially distressing for Dawn. "She would sob and beg me not to go," Murray recalls. "It was so hard on me, I'd say, 'Please don't do this to me.' And Dawn would just bury her feelings and stop crying." Says Marion Murray, Anne's 85-year-old mother: "Dawn loves her mom and does not seem to be able to get enough of her, and I think this is because she was gone a lot."
With Murray touring, Bill Langstroth played househusband, driving the kids to and from school and participating in their choir and drama activities. At age 10, Dawn began to show signs of an eating disorder when she became obsessed with having the same food--a peanut butter or grilled cheese sandwich--for a particular meal every day. The following year she grew five inches, and figuring she had stopped growing, eventually eliminated fatty foods from her diet. "I decided to eat things that wouldn't make me gain weight, like bran cereal that goes through you real fast," she recalls. In hindsight, she realizes, "I was trying to deal with my mom's schedule and her being away. I couldn't control that, but I thought controlling my eating would help." Dr. Condello agrees: "Anorexia is a way to learn how to control things. If I can control my hunger then I can control feelings. If I control my need for food, I can control my need for love."
Langstroth's obsession with her weight intensified at age 16 when she went to a modeling agency and was told she needed to pare 15 lbs. off her 130-lb. frame. She stopped eating altogether. Her day began with a 45-minute swim and no breakfast, then a 75-minute gym class at school and a long walk at lunch; going home at 4, she would collapse on the couch and either sleep through dinner or leave the house when the family ate. She also discovered that starvation distracted her from her feelings and had a numbing effect. "By not eating," says Langstroth, "you get a buzz because you're so light-headed, and after a while your mind doesn't work at all."
Yet some part of Dawn wanted help. In her junior year, she told a teacher about her behavior, and the teacher went straight to Murray. Confronted by her frightened mother, however, Dawn downplayed the severity of the problem. "She'd say there was nothing wrong and she'd eat for a couple of weeks," says Murray. "Then I'd go on the road, and she would stop." When asked how much she weighed, Dawn would simply lie. Even after she finally disclosed the awful truth, she insisted she didn't need to see a therapist. That's when Murray realized she had to take charge. "You want to bet you're not going?" she recalls saying. "It was horrible. Dawn was wailing, but we went."
When she arrived at Willough, recalls Dr. Condello, "Dawn was curled up in a ball, didn't make eye contact, never stood up to her full height and never had her chin up." During her $75,000, two-month stay at the 64-bed facility, Langstroth gradually acclimated to her new environment. Her days were spent in intensive counseling sessions that her family would sometimes also attend. When alone, Langstroth participated in group therapy and workshops that addressed body image issues, nutrition and spiritual healing. She was put on a diet high in protein and fiber and low in fat and carbohydrates. "They didn't force-feed us," says Langstroth, who shared a room with another girl. "If we did not eat, we'd get a supplement like Ensure. But it was amazing food." To help curb her obsession with weight, Langstroth was not allowed to get on a scale and see how many pounds she had gained.
The 90-minute family-therapy sessions with Dr. Condello were far more wrenching. Families afflicted by anorexia tend to "hold things in instead of letting it all out," she says. "Outside, things appear normal, but everyone is suffering. Sometimes, treating a single patient is a way to rescue the whole family." In therapy, Langstroth was terrified of revealing her flaws because, Dr. Condello says, she felt pressured "to keep up appearances--especially with a famous, larger-than-life mother who is also competitive and a perfectionist."
Still, Dawn found the courage to blow the whistle on her parents' long-troubled marriage. "When I was sick, I'd just swallow it," she says. "But in therapy I got p----d off enough to talk about it." The fragile union unraveled immediately when both husband and wife acknowledged they had stayed together only for their children's sake. "Once we established our family, it became clear we weren't really cooking on the same stove," says Langstroth, who says he has received a "generous" settlement from Murray and lives less than a mile away from her and the children. "We had different agendas--different places to go, different things to do." Murray agrees. "Bill had to be Mr. Anne Murray for all those years and that is tough." Also, she adds, "I'm away all the time and you lose touch." (Before the legal separation, there was yet another family reckoning when Will confronted his father about his alcoholism. In the fall of 1997, Langstroth completed six weeks of rehabilitation at Homewood Hospital in Guelph, Ont.)
For her part, Dawn continued to struggle with her anorexia, and two months after her treatment ended, she relapsed into her old patterns. In early November 1997, she checked herself back into Willough. "The first time I went was for my mother," says Langstroth. "This time I needed to do it for myself." After a four-week stay, Langstroth returned home, her condition much improved. She has since joined a support group in town, phones fellow members whenever she has a problem and sees a therapist weekly. Last April, she went back to Willough for two weeks to recharge by attending more workshops. "They'll give a good boot to your butt," says her mother approvingly.
And while Langstroth understands she is not cured, she has learned to enjoy eating a balanced diet. A typical day consists of four meals that include meats, fruits, vegetables, dairy products and, yes, fat. "I don't really worry about my weight because I don't weigh myself," says Langstroth. "There is no focus on numbers."
Musical numbers are another matter. For the first time ever, she feels healthy enough to pursue her dream of being a singer. In July 1998, after her second stay at Willough, Langstroth went to a local karaoke bar and belted out the Bonnie Raitt hit "Something to Talk About." She made a tape and told her mother to listen to it. Murray was stunned. "I was hyperventilating and the hair was standing up on the back of my neck," she says. "I thought, 'My God, where did her voice come from?'" Last January, when Murray was asked to do a benefit concert for Sheena's Place, an eating disorder support center in Toronto, she asked Dawn to join her. Towering over her 5'5" mother, Dawn sang two duets with Murray, who, acknowledging her daughter's height, told the audience, "I watered her well."
The irony of his sister's career choice hasn't been lost on Will, a sophomore at the University of Guelph, who plans to become a physician and join Doctors Without Borders, the humanitarian medical-aid group. "Dawn needs a challenge, but I'm not a friend of the music industry because--to put it in the most childish terms possible--it stole my mom. It's harsh and impersonal and will likely end up being a boot in the head instead of a positive experience."
Murray disagrees: "If Dawn wants to sing, so be it." As for being in what she calls the twilight of her own career, Murray doesn't seem to mind. "I don't get played on radio anymore. Once you're over 40, forget it. It's hard for performers to grow old gracefully, but I'm trying." That includes a lot of golf: Murray is a member of Chicks with Sticks, a group of 12 friends that hits the links regularly and on occasion travels as far as Scotland. "Anne is fun to be with," says Cynthia McReynolds, 57, a member who brought Murray into the fold. "But first and foremost she's a mom. Anne and Dawn have an amazing attachment to each other. She's a strong lady, but all this has been a devastating struggle, and she's still working at it."
Bill Langstroth, who speaks with Murray often, believes that life is better for both of them after the emotional upheaval they've gone through. "I can't tell you how good it is that we are talking," he says. "It brought a whole lot to the surface which is nobody's business but ours, but it made us look at each other in a new way. The experience has given Anne a focus on what's important. She'll find what she needs to fulfill herself."
Right now, it's furthering her daughter's fledgling career. "Dawn doesn't have an agent or a record contract--so there's only one way to go and that's up," says Murray, laughing in her velvet alto. "My only concern is that she get well and be happy. I just came off the road the other week and I looked at her face, and she was just beaming. This is the healthiest she has looked in 10 years."
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Leila Pahlavi (7/16/01)
Hewitt, B., Biddle, N., Nolan, C., & Cotliar, S. (2001, July 16). Burden of grief. People, 85+.
Wearied by a near-lifelong sadness, the shah of Iran's daughter Leila dies at 21, in exile in London.
As a little girl Leila Pahlavi, the younger daughter of the late Shah of Iran, led what seemed a blissful life. In the '70s she and her three siblings were schooled on the palace grounds, high in the hills above Tehran, with a small group of students handpicked to be their classmates. Leila could even bring along her beagle, Snoopy, who was permitted to stay just outside the classroom. But she delighted most in the attention of her father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who would often stop by to visit and push her on the swings. "Her father would make time to see her all the time," says Goli Samii, a classmate of Leila's who later remained perhaps her closest friend. "They had a special relationship."
But ever since 1979, when the Shah and his family were forced to flee Iran to escape the Islamic revolution of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Leila's idyllic existence had been marred by heartbreak and torment. On June 10 she was found dead at age 31 in her room at the Leonard, a pricey London hotel. The cause of death remains a mystery, pending the outcome of lab tests. Her family speculated that Leila, who suffered for years from depression, might have accidentally taken an overdose of sleeping pills and tranquilizers. But they flatly rejected any suicide scenario. Samii says she spoke to Leila the night before she died and that her friend had seemed excited about plans to get together soon in London. "The last thing she said to me was, 'I can't wait to see you, sweetie,'" recalls Samii, 30, now an actress.
There was also disagreement over whether Leila, who had become quite thin, suffered from anorexia, which might have played a role in her death. "Everyone says that she had an eating disorder, but I've seen people with eating disorders, and they were thinner than she was," says Ali Bagherzade, 35, an Iranian businessman who was friendly with Leila. But one acquaintance of Leila's mother, Farah Diba, the former Empress of Iran, said Leila did not eat well, preferring instead to sip constantly from a thermos of coffee. "That's how she would get through the day," says the acquaintance, "on unsweetened coffee."
Those who knew Leila well describe her as an unpretentious and exceptionally sensitive young woman. "She had an innocence in a way that is very rare nowadays," says Bagherzade. But she had been severely affected by the trauma of being uprooted from Iran. Not only was her family driven from their homeland, they were exiled at a time when her father was suffering from lymphatic cancer.
To make matters worse, anti-Shah demonstrations took place around the world, and no country seemed eager to play host to the royal family. Finally, in October 1979, the United States allowed the Shah to come to New York City for emergency medical treatment, a move that prompted Iranian militants in Tehran to seize 98 hostages at the American embassy 13 days later. For much of their first year in exile, Leila, her brothers Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, now 40, a leader in Iranian exile politics, and Ali Reza, 35, a graduate student at Columbia University, and her sister Farahnaz, 38, who does charitable work, stayed in the United States, separated from their parents, who tried to lie low in places including Panama and Mexico. Vincent Meylan, author of a biography of Empress Farah, says the ordeal was particularly hard on Leila, who was only 9 at the time. "Her mother would telephone every night, and Leila would be screaming and crying, 'Where are you? I want to see you, I want to see daddy,'" says Meylan. "You can imagine how traumatic that was for a child."
Her father's death, in 1980 in Egypt, shattered Leila. "The last memory [of him] is the most painful," she told the French magazine Point de Vue in 1999. "When I understood the end was near, they wouldn't let me into his room. For a long time I had the feeling I had betrayed him by my absence." In the years that followed, though, she seemed to rally. The family settled in Williamstown, Mass., to be close to Crown Prince Reza, who was attending Williams College, and Leila enrolled at the nearby private Pine Cobble School, where she was well-liked by her classmates. "She did everything every other student would do," says her sixth-grade teacher Judy Wright. "She did not want to be treated like royalty." After graduating from Rye Country Day School in Rye, N.Y., she enrolled at Brown University, but dropped out after one semester. At the time she had begun complaining of severe stomach pains, which plagued her for the rest of her life and which friends regarded as a symptom of the depression they had begun to notice in her. "Leila was sick," says Samii. "It was true pain."
Since she didn't need to work--the Shah had salted away at least $100 million, and perhaps far more, in foreign banks before he was deposed--Leila led a life of discreet leisure. She first moved into her mother's home in Greenwich, Conn., then into a Manhattan apartment, but often traveled to Europe. In a 1998 interview with PEOPLE, she said that while she missed her homeland, she enjoyed living in the U.S. "I can go anywhere and not worry that people will recognize me and say, 'Did you see that? Did you see how she ate her french fries?'" she observed. Friends say she had at least one serious romance with a man and that it ended badly. "She told me that she had trouble forming relationships," says biographer Meylan, "because she was obsessed with the idea that people only approached her because she was the daughter of the Shah."
The death of her beloved grandmother Farideh Diba last November drove her spirits even lower. She admitted to friends that she was losing weight but maintained that it was food allergies that prevented her from eating properly. "At one dinner party recently she produced half a dozen kinds of teas from her Hermes handbag and said, 'I don't know which one to drink. I don't know which one will make me ill,'" says Ross Benson, a journalist with Britain's Daily Express, who was told of the incident by a witness who was a mutual friend. "The other guests looked away. They saw her behavior for what it was--a sign of severe depression."
Friends knew that Leila had visited many doctors looking for help. She was believed to be on antidepressants but apparently to no avail. Denyse Beaulieu, a French journalist, had gotten to know Leila well over the past two years, when the princess was splitting her time between the Leonard hotel in London and her mother's Paris apartment. She says the two often had great fun, discussing poetry or having tea at the Ritz in Paris. But there were other times when Leila could barely function, when all the pain she felt--spiritual, psychological and physical--threatened to engulf her. "She had insomnia and terrible migraines that kept her in bed, unable to move," says Beaulieu. "It was as if she had fallen into the bottom of a pit and the sides were slippery and she couldn't get out no matter what she tried."
Indeed, even as they mourned her death, friends expressed hope that Leila had finally found the peace that had always seemed to escape her in life. "She was young and beautiful and privileged, yes," says Beaulieu, "but you can't ever judge other people's suffering."
Illustration/Photos:
COLOR PHOTO: IMAPRESS/CLEMOT/BENITO/GLOBE PHOTOS The Empress Farah Pahlavi mourned at Leila's funeral on June 16 in Paris.
COLOR PHOTO: VANESSA VON ZITZEWITZ/SIPA "My ambition is to make progress on the road to serenity," Leila (in '00) once said.
COLOR PHOTO: VASSAL HUGUES/GAMMA PRESSE The Pahlavi family (from left, Reza, Farahnaz, Ali Reza, Leila, the shah and Empress Farah in Iran in the early '70s) were together almost constantly until the 1979 revolution.
COLOR PHOTO: IMAPRESS/GLOBE PHOTOS Gravely ill and exiled, the Shah managed a smile for Leila in Mexico in '79.
COLOR PHOTO: GILLES ROLLE/IMAPRESS/GLOBE PHOTOS A concerned Farah (with Leila in Paris last year) stayed in daily touch with her daughter.
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Alexandra Paul (7/27/97)
Dougherty, M., & Sheff, V. (1997, July 27). Screen: In Dragnet, Alexandra Paul proves that even a squeaky-clean virgin can get her man, Friday. People, 58+.
She'd never seen Saturday Night Live, barely recognized the name Dan Aykroyd and couldn't tell Joe Friday from Jack Webb. So when Alexandra Paul cruised into Universal Studios for an audition last October, her spirits were a lot higher than her expectations.
She was up for a part in Dragnet -- the movie satire of the big daddy of TV cop shows -- of which Aykroyd was the co-writer and star. “I'd never seen Dragnet,” says Paul, 23. “We weren't allowed to watch TV when I was growing up because we had to concentrate on studies. So I didn't get any of the jokes. I guess you could say I was a natural; my character didn't know what was going on and neither did I.”
But she got the job, and now Paul is giving a striking performance in one of the nation's top movies. She plays Connie Swail, the virgin who is kidnapped, served to a python as the main course in a pagan sacrifice and rescued by Sgt. Joe Friday (Aykroyd) and his partner (Tom Hanks). Stony, straitlaced Friday falls in love.
Paul might quibble with his choice. “I don't think I am a particularly nice person,” she admits, sipping tea in the living room of her one-bedroom L.A. apartment. “But for some reason, I tend to get cast as the sweet thing.” Don't let her Bambi browns deceive you. Tacked up between the soft pastels of her Monet posters (more camouflage) are animal rights pamphlets, newspaper clippings on nuclear protests and pictures of Paul and her twin sister, Caroline, being arrested. In February Alexandra and Caroline, a world-class white-water rafter, spent four days in a Nevada jail for demonstrating against nuclear testing.
It would seem that the statuesque actress, who combines Audrey Hepburn pixieness with Grace Kelly sophistication, the one Dragnet director Tom Mankiewicz calls “a lucky penny,” is an old-fashioned hard- nosed activist. While filming American Flyers in 1984, Paul and pal Daniel Sladek created Young Artists United, a 150-member group that counsels teens on such problems as drug-and-alcohol abuse, eating disorders and suicide. “We used to talk about what we would do for the world when we were rich and famous,” Alexandra recalls. “Then we decided not to wait.”
Paul gives talks about anorexia and bulimia, both of which she has been combating herself since age 15. “The next time you see me on the screen and think I'm so perfect,” she tells her audiences, “remember I've leaned over a toilet bowl and stuck my finger down my throat.”
A relaxed, expansive but exceedingly serious woman, Paul was born in New York and raised in Paris, where her father worked as an investment banker. The family moved back to the U.S. in 1974, and her parents divorced five years later. The twins and their brother, Jonathan, now 21, all went off to separate boarding schools. In 1981 Paul graduated from Massachusetts' Groton with honors, but she postponed college for a year and, while modeling in New York, landed a role in a TV movie, Paper Dolls. She then enrolled at Stanford University but backed out three weeks before registration. “I finally admitted to myself that I loved acting,” she says. Work came steadily: Christine, Just the Way You Are and American Flyers all featured Paul in virgin-next-door roles. Eight Million Ways To Die, a sleazy detective story co-starring Jeff Bridges, provided a refreshing contrast. “Playing a whore,” says Paul, “ I had to be comfortable with my body. It made me explore my sexuality.” Her offscreen romantic explorations are comparatively tame. Steadily dating no one, Paul counts actor Barry Tubb and her personal trainer, Scott McCray, & among her close male friends. Her wedding band, she says, is only a “wolf ring,” worn to keep the unwanted away. “I don't really believe in marriage, and I don't ever want to have kids, although my mother says I'll change my mind when I'm 29. She says, 'Alexandra, if you get your tubes tied, I'll just die.'“
Paul is refreshingly forthright about her career goals. “I want to become very powerful and rich,” she admits. “The only way kids will listen to issues is if there's a celebrity attached. It's kind of a sick thing, but people go for the glitzy.” You don't get a whole lot of bull from Alexandra Paul. What you get, as Sergeant Friday would say, are just the facts, ma'am.
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Jenny Seagrove (5/21/90)
Farrell, M. H. J., & Cooper, J. (1990, May 21). Screen: After years of fighting her own demons, Jenny Seagrove strikes terror as The Guardian's evil nanny. People, 148+.
Had Barbara Walters put her infamous question “What kind of tree are you, if you think you are a tree?” to British actress Jenny Seagrove instead of Katharine Hepburn, she might have elicited a heartfelt reply.
Seagrove, who portrays Camilla, the tree-worshiping nanny from Hell in The Guardian, William Friedkin's first horror flick since The Exorcist (1973), has given a lot of thought to flora and fauna. “Being an avid gardener, I was perfectly cast,” says Seagrove, who has the dirt under her fingernails to prove it. “I' ve always been funny about plants and trees. I'll often just go and hug a tree. I'm sure they can feel us.”
Or consume us, as Friedkin would have it. Seagrove's character -- at first meeting, every yuppie's child-care dream -- is a misguided Druid who plans to serve up her employer's infant as a sacrificial offering to a burly oak. “This is an unusual horror film,” Seagrove rather unnecessarily points out, adding, “It's a wonderful part. I get to play everything from Miss Nice to Miss Deeply Unpleasant to Miss Evil Supernatural.”
Seagrove's ability to change like the seasons led Friedkin to cast her. “I was looking for an unquantifiable woman, one who would embody stark reality and otherworldliness,” he says. The director remembered Seagrove as the web- toed, seagoing scientist in Bill Forsyth's quirky 1983 film Local Hero: “She has a mystical quality that's hard to explain.”
Maybe it's the way Seagrove, 31, traps people in her unwavering gaze. Or her direct way of answering questions about her sometimes hellish past. The drama in her own life -- prolonged bouts of anorexia and bullimia and a messy divorce from a Svengali-like husband -- has often eclipsed her acting career. Now, with a healthy romance with director Michael (Death Wish) Winner, 54, and a starring role in a major film, she hopes to restore the balance.
Seagrove's childhood, though privileged, had its frightful moments. Born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Derek, who ran an import-export firm, and his proper postcolonial British wife, Pauline, Seagrove spent her early days in the kind of luxury a house full of servants can provide. But wealth couldn't cushion her from a brutal blow: When Jenny was less than a year old, Pauline suffered a stroke and was unable to care for her. This early hardship, Seagrove believes, created in her “a constant cry for attention.” At age 9, Seagrove was shipped off to St. Hilary's, a girls' boarding school in Godalming, England. A gawky adolescent -- “I had short hair, thick glasses because I'm very shortsighted and was a little chunky” -- she often took the male leads in school plays.
Convinced she wanted to be an actress, Jenny still honored her mother's wish and spent 1975 at Mrs. Russell's Three Star School of Cookery in London. But at Mrs. Russell's, Seagrove burned more than her share of crumpets, and her lack of interest in culinary pursuits soon led to acting classes. Determined to be independent, she refused her parents' offers of financial aid.
Instead, she says, she went on the dole -- about $25 per week in welfare payments. To save money, she cut back on food. “I was quite happy not to eat, because it meant I could lose weight,” she says. “Then, of course, I got terrific attention like, 'Jenny, you must eat.' So I quite enjoyed that as well.” By the next year, the 5 ft.6 in. Seagrove had shed 30 of her 120 pounds and had developed a full-fledged eating disorder. The anorexia continued for the three years she attended Bristol's prestigious Old Vic Theatre School, where she often found it hard to focus on her studies. “It eats your mind,” she says of the disease. “It's very hard to concentrate because all you're thinking about is food.” Not even love could break the compulsion. After leaving school, Seagrove met Indian-born Madhav Sharma, a little-known actor-director. When their courtship evolved to include romantic dinners, she adopted bulimia as a weight control method. “It's very hard when you are having a relationship not to eat,” she says. “ So I did -- then I'd run to the toilet and get rid of it all.” Seagrove says she gradually realized she was damaging her health. “I could feel myself tearing my stomach, and I kind of pulled out of it,” she says. “It was a very slow process.”
As her body filled out, though, so did her career, with roles on British television followed by a part in A Shocking Accident, which won a 1982 Oscar for Best Short Film. Her personal life was less easily healed. Sharma and Seagrove married in 1984, but, she says, the union was filled with tension from the start. As Seagrove became more successful, Sharma became more possessive, even to the point of following her to wherever she was working. “He needed the applause ((for)) having created me, when in fact he was destroying me,” she says.
Sharma, 46, who still lives in the couple's former home in Suffolk, refuses to comment, says his agent. When Seagrove filed for divorce in 1986, Sharma tried to block it in the courts. In his ruling granting the divorce, England's High Court Judge Clive Callman said: “I find as a fact, to fulfill his own needs ((Sharma)) literally sapped his wife's self-confidence and self-esteem. He, with an extraordinary, almost hypnotic power, was a Svengali to Jenny Seagrove. Unable to star in his own right, his wife became his crutch.” The marital war left Seagrove in the middle of what she now calls “a great cloud of sadness.” Nonetheless, in 1987, when she showed up to audition for Winner's film Appointment with Death, her allure cut through the mist. “I rang her agent and said, 'I have a firm offer for Miss Seagrove. . . . I wish to marry her,' “
Winner says. Seagrove eventually won the role as well as his heart. After filming ended, she took a small apartment around the corner from Winner's 40-room house in Kensington and began spending most of her time with him. Before her divorce from Sharma became final in 1988, he called her repeatedly, Winner recalls. “It was unbelievably harrowing.” While Winner has cast Seagrove in three of his movies, including last year's A Chorus of Disapproval, he insists he has no interest in controlling her career. The couple -- despite his early, impulsive reaction -- also have no plans to marry. And children, says Seagrove, aren't in the picture. “I don't have to mention marriage or children to Michael,” says Seagrove, laughing. “As soon as I say I'm cooking dinner, he runs out of the house."
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Jamie-Lynn Sigler (4/16/01)
Lipton, M. A., & Miller, S. (2001, April 16). Mafia princess. People, 137+.
Daddy's girl on The Sopranos, Jamie-Lynn Sigler cuts a CD and joins another family--Cindarella's--onstage.
So what's it like having Tony Soprano for a father? To Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who plays feisty daughter Meadow to James Gandolfini's gruff New Jersey Mob boss Tony on The Sopranos, life on the set sometimes imitates art. Gandolfini, it seems, likes to lean on even the actors who play Sigler's boyfriends. "Listen," he told one, "you don't slip her the tongue. You don't mess with her! You don't do anything!"
But there are also Father Knows Best moments. "One day I was feeling really stressed about college," says Sigler, 19, who was then attending New York University. "I had a midterm in the morning and then filming and a photo shoot in the afternoon. I was so overwhelmed I started crying. And Jim just said, 'Everybody stop. Leave her alone.' And he took me in a corner and sat and talked with me. He was really compassionate and warm."
Nowadays Sigler not only has a surrogate father in Gandolfini but a fairy godmother in Eartha Kitt, her costar in a touring musical production of Cinderella. "She's growing into being a very excellent actress," says Kitt, as well as a budding model, having signed in December with the Wilhelmina agency.
And next fall Sigler, who put her NYU studies on hold after one semester to focus on her career, will release her first CD--a coup she says she owes to her Sopranos role. Last season, she says, "there was a scene where I was singing TLC's 'No Scrubs' with my friend while we were making grilled cheese sandwiches. Someone called my manager and asked about my singing." That someone turned out to be an executive with Edel North America, a new German-based label that signed Sigler to do a pop album titled Here to Heaven.
Sigler, who sings a few songs in Spanish on the CD, attributes its Latin flavor to her mother's Cuban heritage. Both Connie, 51, a homemaker, and Steve Sigler, 52, the founder of the 40,000-member Men's Senior National Amateur Baseball League, encouraged their daughter's showbiz aspirations. Growing up in Jericho, N.Y., with two older brothers, Adam, 27, a stockbroker, and Brian, 24, a law student, Jamie-Lynn started dance classes at 3. By 9 she had landed the role of Marta in a community theater production of The Sound of Music. Lead roles in The Wizard of Oz and Annie followed. "I knew how serious she was," says her mother, "because she continued to get straight A's [at Jericho High]."
She was all set to go to summer camp in 1997 when she decided to take a chance and audition for the role of Meadow. Sigler nailed the part and shot the pilot episode, but by the time filming began on the series a year later, "it was hard to even recognize her," says Edie Falco, who plays her mother, Carmela. The 5'6" Sigler had weighed 120 lbs., but her weight had now dropped to 95, mainly as a result of compulsive exercising that lasted up to three hours a day. "She told me how she hated it," says Robert Iler, 16, who plays kid brother Anthony Jr., "how it took her over and how she used to wake up with nightmares every night." Worse, says Sigler, "suicide was crossing my mind, and that terrified me." Then, in April 1998, she told her parents, "I have an eating disorder. Please get me help!" After two years of twice-weekly visits with a nutritionist and a psychiatrist, Sigler is now back to her former weight. As a spokeswoman for the American Anorexia Bulimia Association, "I get tons of mail," she says. "Most of it is from young people, and they just say 'Thank you.'" Her advice to teenage girls: "Embrace what makes you different."
Sigler, who is currently unattached and has moved into her own one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, is eating healthily and exercising three times a week. But last June she had another medical scare: Hospitalized with Lyme disease, she was paralyzed from the waist down for five days. "Fortunately, Jamie's disease cleared up with antibiotics," says Falco. "We were all thrilled."
Last year, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in L.A., Sigler experienced another kind of paralysis when Dylan McDermott of The Practice walked over and told the bedazzled actress, "I have to tell you, I'm such a fan." That was nice, but it's a good thing he didn't get too close. Tony wouldn't have liked that.
Illustration/Photos:
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALLISON LEACH Juggling acting and school, "I didn't lose out on my childhood," says Sigler (at her parents' home in Jericho, N.Y., with dog Randi).
COLOR PHOTO: EVAN AGOSTINI/IMAGEDIRECT "Jim says he's my second dad," says Sigler of costar Gandolfini (in February).
COLOR PHOTO: CAROL ROSEGG "She's 74 and has more energy than me," says Sigler of Cinderella costar Eartha Kitt.
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALLISON LEACH "Her biggest problem is learning to say no. She answers every fan letter," says Sigler's mother, Connie (with husband Steve, left, son Brian and Jamie-Lynn).
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Jamie-Lynn Sigler (5/27/02)
Sigler, J., Espinoza, G., Lynch, J., Scott, S., Baker, K. C., Baumgartner, A., et al. (2002, May 27). Exercising control. People, 69+.
Beating an eating disorder marked by excessive workouts teaches a Sopranos star to define beauty her own way.
In August 1997, after beating out hundreds of other actresses for the role of Mafia princess Meadow Soprano, Jamie-Lynn Sigler filmed the pilot episode for a new HBO series, The Sopranos. But waiting to hear if the show would be picked up for a full season while juggling schoolwork and breaking up with her first boyfriend left the high school junior, then 16, feeling "like everything was out of control," she says.
By November Sigler had fallen victim to a combination of borderline anorexia and compulsive exercise, restricting her daily calorie intake to less than 500. At the same time, she worked out for as much as four hours a day. "I said, 'This is one thing I can control,'" she recalls. "That was my outlet."
During the next five months the 5'6" Sigler went from 120 to 90 lbs. Although her parents--Steve, now 53, an entrepreneur, and Connie, 53, a homemaker--expressed concern, "Jamie-Lynn was very good at disguising that this was a problem," says Connie. "She was losing a lot of weight, but I thought it was from running around too much."
In April 1998, Sigler finally realized she had a problem and told her parents, who quickly got her medical help. Now up to a healthy 125 lbs., Sigler, 21, is filming her fourth season on The Sopranos and moving into a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.
She also has a new boyfriend--her manager A.J. Discala--and is awaiting the publication of her autobiography, Wise Girl, in August. But her greatest satisfaction comes from serving as a spokeswoman for the National Eating Disorders Association. "To know that you can change even one person's life," she says, "is amazing." Sigler recounted her struggle to PEOPLE correspondent KC Baker.
It's hard to pinpoint when I went from exercising 20 minutes in the morning to exercising for four hours a day and not really eating. I would have two egg whites for breakfast, and lunch was a scooped- out bagel and a Diet Coke. Dinner turned into a fat-free yogurt. And I couldn't stop exercising. I would wake up at 4 a.m., run for 45 minutes on the treadmill and then do a workout video. When I did laundry, I'd bring one sock at a time to the laundry room so I'd have to take the stairs 10 times. I did squats as I was making my bed.
My grades started dropping because I kept nodding out in class. I was getting colds all the time. My hair was falling out. At school I heard comments like, "Oh my God" and "That's disgusting!" when I walked by.
I wasn't looking in the mirror thinking, "I'm fat." I was looking in the mirror thinking, "I look horrible, but I can't stop this." I was so depressed that at one point the words "I don't want to live anymore" went through my head. That same day I told my parents I needed help.
The next day I was in a psychiatrist's office. It was nice to have someone disconnected from my life who I could tell everything to. A few weeks later I started working with a nutritionist who had me make gradual changes. I would do the treadmill one day and a workout video the next, instead of on the same day. I added a piece of toast to my breakfast and toppings to my yogurt. But I had setbacks. Once, at a party, I had a piece of cake. The next morning I woke up crying, convinced I wouldn't fit into my pants. I ran straight to the gym and worked out for two hours.
After that, I got a prescription for Prozac. I started slowly getting better. [She is now off Prozac.]
I went to shoot the first season of The Sopranos in June '98. The cast hadn't seen me in a year. I had been a size 4 or 6 and now I had the body of a 12-year-old. During the wardrobe fitting, I was praying, "Let something fit." [Series creator] David Chase did a double take when he saw me--he didn't know who I was. He went to my mom and said, "What's going on? We love her, but Jamie's got a lot to do in this show, and she has to be physically able to handle it."
I was terrified. I was like, "This is my dream. I can't lose it." I stopped exercising every day and started eating more. By the end of the season I was at a great point. Now I have this normal lifestyle. I work out two or three times a week. I eat when I'm hungry, and I stop when I'm full. In the industry I'm in, I have to be in shape, but I'm not going to torture myself to fit any kind of mold.
I'm not going to lie and say I don't think about what I eat. I don't think an eating disorder is something you ever fully recover from. I get letters from girls who tell me that because I'm talking about it, it makes them feel better. The first time that happened, I said, "This is the true meaning of life."
Illustration/Photos:
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSEPH MONTEZINOS "I was the girl who had everything," says Sigler (in New York City last month).
B/W PHOTO "I really thought I was going to lose her," says mom Connie of Jamie-Lynn (in '99).
COLOR PHOTO Sigler got the support of (from left) costars Aida Turturro, Drea de Matteo and Edie Falco.
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Countess Victoria Spencer (4/17/95)
Green, M., & Smith, T. (1995, April 17). Royals: Her secret pain. People, 129+.
Di's sister-in-law Countess Spencer struggles with anorexia, alcoholism and a troubled marriage.
ON THE FACE OF IT, PRINCESS Diana's brother Charles Spencer and his wife, Victoria, would seem to be a charmed couple: Young, titled and attractive, they live in magnificent Althorp House, the 121-room Georgian mansion in Northamptonshire that Charles, 30, inherited in 1992. Last year, Victoria, 29, gave birth to Louis Frederick, the longed-for son who will inherit the Spencer title and fortune. And the Oxford-educated Charles has been working since November on a documentary about stately homes for NBC's European Super Channel--the perfect job for an ambitious aristocrat bored with country life.
Last week, however, the British public learned that the Spencers' marriage, like the Waleses', is a painful charade. Struggling with anorexia and alcoholism, the countess was tracked by the News of the World to the $300-a- night Farm Place clinic in Surrey, where she is expected to complete a three- month stay on June 12. Other newspapers noted that Charles had spent just eight nights at Althorp since Jan. 15--sleeping instead in a leased London townhouse. For the first time, friends conceded that the couple are at odds. According to the Daily Mirror, Charles--who became the ninth Earl Spencer when his father died--told a friend his wife has “changed so much, I hardly know her.”
The published reports prompted a swift counterattack from Spencer. Like his sister, he is skilled at using the press for his own purposes--inviting a slick weekly to photograph him with his family at Althorp, which is open to paying visitors, and attacking journalists who are unkind to Di. Charging that reporters with “sick minds” had harassed Victoria and posed as friends or prospective patients to gain access to the clinic, he lodged a protest with the Press Complaints Commission, which could censure the offending papers. At the same time, he managed to present his wife as a severely troubled woman. “My wife would be happy to tell you that she's had a problem with addictions and eating disorders for 10 years,” he told a reporter for the ITN-TV news service on April 3.
“This is the first chance that I've had to persuade her to go in for proper treatment for serious psychological problems.” The press intrusions, he said darkly, “have severely undermined the chances of her ever getting better.”
The severity of Victoria's problems may have shocked the public, but friends claim the crisis was inevitable.
Raised in London by Jean, a magistrate, and John, a prosperous executive in the Civil Aviation Authority, Victoria Lockwood was an emotionally frail anorexic whose social circle included heroin addicts when she met Charles at a London party in 1989. Ten days later, the two were engaged. According to one royal watcher, Charles was besotted with Victoria (then a model) in the beginning, but his ardor quickly faded.
Six months after their September 1989 wedding, he had a fling with society journalist Sally Ann Lasson, who described their torrid coupling to the tabloids.
With Di (who has known the pain of both eating disorders and marital discord) acting as a sounding board, the Spencers patched things up, but family friends noted that Victoria remained “insecure and out of her depth.” Says one: “She was scruffy-looking and thin as a waif.”
By all accounts, the pressure to bear a son didn't help. “Her raison d'etre was to produce an heir,” says the Spencer intimate. Three girls--Kitty, now 4, and twins Katya and Eliza, 2--were born in quick succession before Louis arrived, and “it was exhausting for her,” says one palace watcher. Living in isolation on the Althorp estate also took its toll on the countess. With Charles often in London, “it must have been like being exiled to Siberia,” says the family friend.
Of late, the strain between the Spencers has been difficult to ignore. In a speech at his birthday party last May, the earl announced that his father (who divorced Charles's mother in 1969) had advised him to look for a wife “who would stick by me through thick and thin. Well,” he continued, “those of you who know Victoria know that she's thick--and she certainly is thin.” The countess's friends gasped.
For the moment, Spencer's fragile wife remains at secluded Farm Place, a converted 17th-century mansion where she receives individual counseling, attends twice-daily group therapy and goes for the occasional stroll. As insiders see it, a separation is almost inevitable. According to one friend, the earl is an emotionally distant sort who has grown weary of his wife's problems. Now that they have an heir, claims the chum, her services are no longer needed. Adds Lady Colin Campbell, author of Diana, the Princess Nobody Knows: “I think he's realized that the marriage is untenable. Like many men in his position, he's trying to assuage his own guilt. `Pity me,' he seems to be saying. `I can't carry the wounded forever.'
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Princess Diana Spencer (8/3/92)
Cover: Di's private battle. (1992, August 3). People, 60.
The Princess' struggle with bulimia brings a puzzling disease out of the shadows.
ON HER HONEYMOON SHE RAIDED THE GALLEY of the royal yacht, Britannia, for ice cream. At Windsor Castle a footman caught her scarfing down an entire steak-and-kidney pie. During an evening of bridge, friends saw her devour a pound of candy. And at a 1989 charity dinner in Manhattan, a guest watched with alarm while Princess Diana “hunched over her food and shoveled it in, broke the roll with her teeth, and used her finger for a pusher. It was astonishing.”
Hardly what one would expect from a lithe specimen like the Princess of Wales -- who, at 5 ft.10 in., weighs in at about 127 lbs. But while she may have a humongous appetite, Diana, 31, has weathered two pregnancies, countless state dinners and 11 demanding years in the spotlight while keeping herself trim -- and, at times, even gaunt. Her secret, as revealed this summer with the publication of a trio of best- selling biographies, is not a pretty one.
Though only Diana and the therapists who reportedly have treated her know for sure, the Princess is believed to have suffered from bulimia nervosa -- the binge-and-purge syndrome that afflicts millions of American women. (See page 70.) Since the palace cold-shoulders inquiries about her condition and few intimates are talking, details about her struggle are elusive. Insiders disagree about when the disease appeared, how severe it was and whether it is under control. Most, however, note that becoming a high-profile royal seems to have set off the bulimia and that marital difficulties aggravated the problem.
Lady Colin Campbell, author of the best-selling Diana in Private, claims the condition surfaced in 1981, when Diana, an enthusiastic nosher who then weighed about 145, was getting ready for her wedding. “She saw engagement pictures of herself looking heavy, and she promptly went on a diet,” says Campbell. “She ate practically nothing, but she [eventually] went on binges. Then she'd make herself sick.” After a staff member witnessed one such incident, the Princess “was open and amusing about it at first. She said that she'd found this wonderful new way of dieting. But then it became a problem, and she was trapped in a downward spiral.” In his book Diana: Her True Story (excerpted in PEOPLE, June 22),
Andrew Morton asserts that it was life with cold-fish Charles that sparked the disorder. Morton now says, “I think she slimmed before the wedding as a result of nerves, and then the whole thing was triggered during her honeymoon, when her husband put his arms round her and said, 'You are a bit chubby, darling.' “ Although Diana's stepgrandmother, romance novelist Barbara Cartland, calls Morton's book “a lot of rubbish,” she has acknowledged that Diana “was very ill when she married.”
Even Penny Junor, Charles's biographer and most vocal apologist, doesn't deny that Diana suffers from bulimia. Junor absolves the Prince of responsibility, however, and claims that Diana's troubled childhood is the cause of her eating disorder.
Although it seems surprising that a personage as public as Diana could conceal her disorder for so long, one of Britain's leading experts on bulimia contends that bulimics are highly skilled at hiding their problem. “Patients are quite capable of continuing their business life,” says Dr. Hubert Lacey, professor of psychiatry at St. George's Hospital Medical School in London. “Indeed it's usual for even husbands not to know anything about it.” Lacey refuses to comment on Diana's case, but the patient profile he describes is rife with similarities to the Princess' life: “Bulimia tends to occur in families where there are more girls than boys,” he says. “There ((are)) often problems in the parents' marriage, and a significant minority have fathers who have problems with alcohol.”
Diana, of course, has a brother and two sisters -- the eldest of whom, Sarah, was treated for anorexia in 1977, while Sarah was dating Prince Charles. Her parents divorced and began an acrimonious custody battle when Diana was 7, and though he was never publicly described as an alcoholic, her father, Earl Spencer, “had a drinking problem at times,” says Campbell. The disease is triggered, says Lacey, by “either the onset or the breakdown of [the victim's] first major emotional relationship, and usually [her] first sexualized relationship.” According to all three biographers, Charles was Diana's first lover, and the relationship broke down shortly after its onset.
Suicide attempts, says Lacey, are not uncommon among bulimics. In his book Morton describes Diana issuing cries for help with shallow slashes on her chest and thighs. “If they cut themselves, they will usually do it where the cuts will not be seen,” Lacey notes. By Morton's account, Diana's problem was so pronounced by the late '80s that even her husband noticed. At mealtimes, he claims, Charles would sneer, “Is that going to reappear later? What a waste.”
Campbell says that Diana refused treatment until 1988, insisting that she had no problem. When former flatmate Carolyn Bartholomew learned that her friend's depression and exhaustion might be caused by potassium depletion, she reportedly forced the Princess to seek help by threatening to tell the press.
According to both Morton and Campbell, in 1988, Diana began a course of treatment with Maurice Lipsedge, a fashionable physician and consulting psychiatrist at Guy's Hospital in London. By one report, he convinced her that her illness was a symptom of depression and that it could best be countered by attacking the depression itself. Has the Princess been cured? Campbell has her doubts. Morton says Diana “has bouts from time to time when she feels under stress, but that is very rarely. It used to be every day, then it went to once every three weeks last year, and now she is just about clear.” As painful as it may have been, the Princess' struggle may have had an ironic benefit. “Diana herself is far more balanced and mature [now],” says Morton. “Having suffered much, she is now able to empathize with those who suffer far more. Whatever happens to her personally, it must be heartening for her to know that thousands of women have gone for help as a result of the publicity."
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'Supermodels': Kim Alexis, Beverly Johnson, Carol Alt (1/11/93)
Sporkin, E., Alexis, K., Johnson, B., & Alt, C. (1993, January 11). Cover: They met the enemy and it was food. People, 80+.
THE BODY GAME: For supermodels Kim Alexis, Beverly Johnson, and Carol Alt, success meant a constant, gnawing hunger.
As a high school senior in Lockport, N.Y., in 1977, Kim Alexis swam the butterfly and backstroke competitively and planned on becoming a pharmacist. But after a talent scout discovered her in Buffalo's June II modeling school, the 5 ft.10 in., 145-lb. blond beauty was led down a greener path by John Casablancas, owner of the high-powered Elite modeling agency. "He guaranteed me a certain amount of money," she says, "if I lost 15 lbs."
Carol Alt was a straight-A, pre-law student at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., when a photographer noticed her waiting on tables at a Long Island restaurant and gave her the phone numbers of several top Manhattan modeling agencies. The 5 ft.8 in. azure-eyed brunet didn't use them until a few weeks later, when a broken romance put her in an adventurous mood. She consulted an agent who "told me I'd be perfect" she says, "if I lost 15 lbs."
Like Alexis, young Beverly Johnson was a champion swimmer. Like Alt, she planned to be a lawyer. The strong-boned, 5 ft.9 in. knockout from Buffalo was a criminal justice major on a full scholarship at Northeastern University in Boston until she was persuaded by friends to drop out and model. In 1971, at 17, she came to New York City, walked into Glamour magazine's fashion offices and was given an assignment on the spot. At 135 lbs., though, she too was told to slim down.
And so each budding supermodel began an odyssey that led to fame, fortune and more than 2,000 magazine covers among them. But behind the smiles were diet-related health problems and stress.
Says Alt: "Anybody who thinks that society pressures women to live up to our image should think of what we have to go through to maintain that image."
Today the three supermodels have branched out, are raising families -- and say they have learned the sensible way to control their weight (see page 86).
Alexis, 32, now hosts a weekly parenting show, Healthy Kids, on cable's Family Channel, is the celebrity spokesperson for Contempra Indoor Grills and is working on a fitness video. The divorced mother of two sons -- Jamie, 6, and Bobby, 3 - - she lives in Tampa with her new husband, former hockey star Ron Duguay, 35. Alexis now weighs 138.
Alt, 31, has a three-year contract to endorse Hanes panty hose but otherwise has forsaken modeling for acting. Her next project is a syndicated miniseries, Vendetta II, with Michael Ontkean. She lives with her husband of nine years, Ron Greschner (a former hockey teammate of Duguay's), 37, outside New York City. Alt once weighed as little as 115 but has now stabilized at 127. "I eat everything in moderation," she says.
Johnson, 38, has roles in two forthcoming movies, Robert Townsend's Meteor Man and Loaded Weapon I with Emilio Estevez. Divorced since 1979, she lives in L.A. with her daughter, Anansa, 13, a fledgling model, and dates Christopher Noth, 38, a star of NBC's Law & Order. Johnson says that she has fluctuated between 103 and 165 lbs. (during pregnancy) and now weighs 120.
Associate editor Elizabeth Sporkin brought the three women together at a downtown Manhattan photo studio. There they recounted their often agonizing battles to stay slim in an unforgiving business.
Alexis: I remember trying every fad diet. I remember starving myself for four days in a row. I remember trying the Atkins diet, which was low carbohydrate, high protein. If I didn't drop 10 lbs. in a week, I was on to another diet.
Alt: Do you remember the Beverly Hills diet? You only ate fruit. It was terrible. At another point I was drinking eight cups of coffee a day, and I ate salad for dinner.
Johnson: I ate nothing. I mean nothing.
Alexis: When I first started out, I was rooming in a New York City hotel with Kelly Emberg (the 1980s supermodel who was Rod Stewart's live-in girlfriend for five years and is the mother of his 5-year-old child, Ruby). One night I came home, and I was eating only a head of lettuce for dinner. Kelly walked in and said,"You're eating a whole head of lettuce? How could you?" I cried and said, "But it's all I've had all day. It's not even 50 calories!"
Alt: On my first modeling job, I fainted right into Kelly's arms. It was summer, and the two of us were posing in furs and woolens. An editor had given me one month to lose 12 lbs. If I did, she promised me a trip to Rome for a shoot. I had never been to Rome. So I stopped eating. Maybe I'd have celery. An apple. On this particular day, it was 97 degreesF, and the photographer said, "Carol, look up." And I went right over, and Kelly caught me.
Alexis: I think I was a normal person before I started screwing around with all these diets. My metabolism got screwed up. I lost my period for two full years.
Johnson: I developed some kind of thyroid problem that I always attribute to the crash diets.
Alt: I went along doing the one-salad-a-night routine for a year. And I remember feeling so tired and depressed and irritable. I had no personal life. I was always flying someplace -- weekends, holidays, vacations. Dinners at night were no fun because I couldn't eat. I remember sitting in a studio one day, thinking, "Why am I doing this?" And in popped another model, Nancy Donahue, who was bubbly and energetic. And I said, "How do you stay healthy?" She said, "I go to a nutritionist." I canceled all my bookings and went to her nutritionist the next day. I was diagnosed with hypoglycemia, an abnormal decrease of sugar in the blood. Eventually I learned to eat five small meals a day. Now if I'm making a movie and get hungry, I call time out to eat some crackers.
Alexis: But back then we had mental anguish about eating. I remember every booking I'd go to, I'd dread lunch because the client would look at me and say, "You're not going to eat that, are you?" Women who styled clothes for the shoots would say, "Honey, your ass is a little big." They didn't want me to be perfect, so they would pick on the one flaw. I cried for the first year of my career.
Johnson: So did I. But it changed when I got more successful. I was doing a shoot in Europe once, and they were paying me a lot, but I had put on some weight. When the clothes didn't fit, they said, "You are too fat." I said, "I'm Beverly Johnson. Cut the dress down the back!" And they did. I learned that trick from Cristina Ferrare and Cybill Shepherd, who had a tendency to be heavy and yet were very successful models.
Alt: Yes, once you became a famous model, you had the luxury of being able to fall off the pedestal -- for a moment. But if you went too far, they would say, "She's too heavy. We can't work with her."
Johnson: In our profession, clothes look better on a hanger, so you have to look like a hanger. It will never change. I personally took extreme methods to lose weight and as a result ended up bulimic and, at one time, when I was 27 or 28, anorexic. One day I was visiting my mom, and I had taken a shower, and my mother dragged me out of the bathroom. I said, "What are you doing?" She stood me in front of her three-way mirror, and I looked like a Biafran. My ribs were poking out, and I started to cry.
PEOPLE: Did that bring you to your senses?
Johnson: No. I think that I will always have an eating disorder. I think once you have it, it never leaves you completely. But seven years ago, I went into a 12-step program, Overeaters Anonymous.
PEOPLE: What was your motivation?
Johnson: I was sitting in front of the TV, gorging on a box of doughnuts. I was a famous model at the time, so being fat didn't handicap me. But I was really unhappy and out of control and, at this point, had bulimia. A girlfriend heard me purging in the bathroom. She took me to an Overeaters Anonymous meeting.
PEOPLE: Was your friend another model?
Johnson: A regular person.
Alt: A civilian.
Johnson: I thought, "I'm not going in there with a bunch of big obese people." But I was in this room with people who were thin. They shared their stories, and I knew I was in the right place.
Alt: Thank God there are places out there for women. When my sister, Christine, who's two years younger than me, became anorexic and bulimic, my mother had no idea what was happening. When I found out how serious it was, I cried.
PEOPLE: How did you find out?
Alt: In an article that she wrote for Glamour magazine last March, saying she was angry at me because I went on living my life without realizing what she was going through. She's 5 ft.11 in., and she made it down to 120 lbs. She was nervous, irritable, couldn't sleep, couldn't work, couldn't do anything. She was trying to be a size 6, and she wasn't meant to be a size 6. Now she weighs around 150, and she looks great. She's a very successful large-size model.
Alexis: She was just trying to follow in your footsteps.
Alt: And everybody made her feel like she had to, and it was terrible. Here was a person who used to have a great sense of humor. And she did a complete 180-degree turn.
Johnson: Well, starving is very prevalent, I think. I have a 13-year-old daughter, Anansa, who's starting to model. She is a big, healthy girl like we were. In this business, she'll starve herself like the other girls. She's going to get the same treatment that we did.
PEOPLE: Does your heart go out to her?
Johnson: No. I tried to discourage her from being a model, but if she wants to be one, OK. Good luck. She will be humbled.
Alt: This is not an industry to be in if you are sensitive.
Johnson: From the moment I took my first picture, I thought it would be my last, and from the moment I started modeling at 17 years old, I thought that the next 16-year-old girl who came in would be better than me.
Alt: That's the nature of this business. Ever since I started to model at 19, people would always ask, "What are you going to do next?"
Johnson: I think the image of models is very destructive to women. A girlfriend of mine recently asked me what to do with her hair. I took a magazine and pointed to a picture of model Christy Turlington with a perfect haircut. I said, "You see this? This took hours to get. Don't think just because they are models, they wake up looking like this. If you want to look good, it takes time and money. Simple."
Alt: It takes two hours to put on natural makeup.
Johnson: One of these days my daughter will be in Vogue magazine, she will weigh 105 lbs. and pose in a dress that a 35-year-old woman then will want to buy. That's really unfair. It does a lot of damage to women's self-esteem because it makes them try to reach a goal that they will never reach. I think that's why there's so much plastic surgery.
PEOPLE: Have you had plastic surgery?
Johnson: No, but if anything happens to me, I will be the first to say, "Doctor, fix it." Everyone should have enough money to get it. But we know people who...
Alt: ...have had everything done twice over.
Johnson: Sometimes seven, eight times! Like dieting, plastic surgery can become addictive.
Alt: When we started in the business, you couldn't fit into the clothes if you had any breasts at all. They would bind us up. Now all the girls are getting implants.
Alexis: I am fortunate enough not to really have to change anything. I can't imagine paying somebody to have a knife stuck in me.
Alt: I have an incredibly supporting, loving husband who told me if I ever get plastic surgery, he will not touch me. That frees me up to be who I am. When I am not eating, he says, "You're not eating." When I am unhappy, he tries to cheer me up.
Alexis: I was never thin enough or smart enough for some men. I would eat a plate of steamed vegetables, and they'd say, "You're eating too much." I'd say, "Look at this, it's 200 calories. How am I supposed to survive?"
Alt: I've known Kim for 13 years. She has been on every cover there is. She's one of the most beautiful women in the world, and I've never seen anyone with lower self-esteem.
Alexis: I think I felt I had to be punished for being beautiful, to humble myself.
PEOPLE: How did pregnancy affect your self-image?
Alexis: When you're pregnant, you have the fear that people won't love you because you're fat. But I had to love the baby more than I loved my own image, and just sacrifice. I gained 35 lbs. with my first child and 50 with my second. I had fat armpits, I was so fat.
Johnson: I loved being pregnant. I gained 50 lbs. I was fortunate because I was married to a health fanatic. So I drank spinach juice and ate healthy. And Anansa turned out to be such a beautiful child. I remember being on the delivery table awaiting her birth. My husband was just OK-looking. I was in labor, and I said to him, "What if she's ugly? You're ugly!" But I couldn't believe how beautiful this child was. I said, "This is my successor. Here she is."
Alt: I think that what scares me more than getting fat during pregnancy is the responsibility of a child.
PEOPLE: But is the thought of gaining weight during pregnancy a real problem for you? You haven't had children yet.
Alt: There is always that fear of getting fat again. It is always a thought, but it wouldn't stop me.
Alexis: After my first child was born, the weight came right off. I did the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED swimsuit issue six months after my first child, and I ran the New York City marathon after that. But it was harder to lose the weight after the birth of my second child. I was on a strict diet and working out an hour and a half a day. I lost the whole 50 lbs. within 2-1/2 months. I was miserable. I had no energy.
PEOPLE: Are you raising your children to eat healthy?
Alexis: Yes. I do the shopping in my house. Whole grain pasta, spaghetti sauce with no sugar, and no fat. I bake cookies with fruit juice. I don't allow ice cream.
Johnson: The emphasis for my daughter is more on no drinking, no drugs, no cigarettes. We try to eat healthy, but we will stop at McDonald's if we're running late.
PEOPLE: When you finally decided to stop modeling full-time and move on in your careers, did you feel relieved? Were you able to allow yourself to eat a little more?
Johnson: I thought I would be. But I realized I still want to look good. Staying fit and trim is an ongoing process.
Alt: I'm more conscious of my appearance now that I'm acting than when I was modeling. Three years ago, after I did Vendetta, I worked out and completely changed my body. I did a light, 30-minute exercise regimen and took a walk every day.
Johnson: I can't get the obsession with exercise down yet.
Alexis: For me, exercise is a daily part of my life. I would rather exercise than read a newspaper.
Johnson: Give me a newspaper and a bagel any day. I'm lazy. And I still like sweets. When I am under stress, I need a chocolate chip cookie.
Alt: You can change that. I worked in a bakery in my first year of college. I ate sugar all the time. Now I can't eat anything sweet. I thought bad thoughts about the sugar.
Alexis: You look at it and say, "That would be nice, but look what that would do to me." It might be good for five minutes, but in three days it will be on your hips.
Johnson: I put it in my purse when nobody is looking! If I want that cookie, I will have that cookie. I don't diet anymore because I've got a bank account.
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Carnie Wilson (6/17/02)
Scott, S., & Wihlborg, U. (2002, May 17). Finishing touches. People, 96+.
Dropping half her weight, Carnie Wilson found, was just half the battle. So she had a new round of surgery, losing the last of her old body and gaining a new attitude.
By all appearances, Carnie Wilson was feeling on top of the world. Seventeen months after her 1999 gastric bypass surgery, the 5'3" singer had dropped from 300 lbs. to a trim 148 and was flaunting her new shape everywhere--including the Jan. 15, 2001, cover of PEOPLE. Married since June 2000 to a handsome musician, Rob Bonfiglio, she had settled with him and their three dogs in a Spanish-style villa outside L.A.
She had a well-received memoir, 2001's Gut Feelings, under her belt and was planning an album with her pop group Wilson Phillips--their first since 1992. But Wilson, 34, wasn't celebrating. "I felt like a snake that was shedding its skin," she says. "I was trying to wiggle out of it and emerge as this new person, but the skin was still hanging on."
She means that literally. Though the former size 28 could now pluck 8s and even the occasional 6 off boutique racks, her epidermis hadn't gotten with the program. "I had skin hanging from underneath my armpits; my breasts were hangy and ugly," she says. "I would lie in the bathtub and my stomach would float to the top of the water." With the help of a bodysuit, she could fit into the sexy outfits she had dreamed about, but she cringed at how some of them looked.
"I avoided sleeveless clothes and anything that would show my stomach," she says. "I felt grossed out by my own body."
So on Jan. 31, 2002, Wilson took her lifelong battle with the bulge one step further. In an eight-hour operation performed in the Beverly Hills office of plastic surgeon Dr. Steven Zax, she had the skin on her tummy tucked (leaving her lighter by 7 lbs.), her belly button repositioned, breasts lifted and minor liposuction on her torso and hips. Zax also cut away half a pound of skin from under each armpit.
Approximate cost: $20,000 (none of which insurance covered). "When I woke up, I couldn't believe it," says Wilson, whose husband, mother Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford, 54, and sister Wendy, 32, spent the eight hours in Zax's waiting room and were there when Wilson awoke. "I've never looked down and not had a belly in my entire life! It felt incredible."
Deciding to go ahead with the procedure, which up to 20 percent of gastric bypass patients ultimately opt for, wasn't easy. Wilson knew it would be beneficial medically--the overhanging skin on her stomach, says Dr. Alan Wittgrove, who performed her bypass surgery, "was giving her a rash." But unlike the first operation, which she underwent because obesity was threatening her health, "this was elective," she says. "I was cutting my body open, and I was doing it because I wanted to! I was terrified."
Although she came through fine, the experience did have its rough spots. "Afterwards I had no pain, but I was stiff," says Wilson, who spent two postop nights being monitored in a local medical facility. "My stomach was pulled so tight I could barely walk at first." For the next eight weeks she wore a tight girdle around her stomach to protect her stitches, as well as a support bra day and night. Luckily the eight hour-long sessions of hyperbaric oxygen therapy prescribed by Zax and administered (at $250 each) in a cylindrical Plexiglass chamber, kept bruising to a minimum. Though her abdomen, breasts and armpits were marred with dark brown scars that will take 10 months to fade, by mid-April Wilson was exultant. "It's so fun to be proud when you're stripped down," she says. "Now I can wear so many things!"
Her husband, who supported this latest step in her transformation, was thrilled as well. "It's like the caterpillar-to-a-butterfly thing with Carnie," says Bonfiglio, 34. "I loved the caterpillar, but I love the butterfly more."
For Wilson, the caterpillar years started early. The daughter of Beach Boy Brian Wilson, 59, and his wife, Marilyn, now a real estate agent, she was a chubby little girl, weighing in at 110 lbs. by age 9. "Whenever something bad happened, I ate," she says. "I always used food when I felt lonely or sad."
Her weight didn't bother her much until she hit the spotlight in 1990 with Wilson Phillips, the vocal group she formed with her sister and pal Chynna Phillips.
Their self-titled first album produced three No. 1 singles, but the pressure of performing onstage and in videos with her two slender bandmates took its toll.
"The record company wanted us to be sexy," recalls Wendy. "It was hard for Carnie."
By the time Phillips left the band in 1992 to pursue a solo career, Wilson's weight had soared to over 240 lbs. After a failed run as a talk show host and a flop album with Wendy, Carnie took up acting, but jobs proved hard to come by. In May 1999 she topped out at 300 lbs.
She began considering gastric bypass surgery after TV's Roseanne, who had the procedure in 1998, suggested it when Wilson was a guest on her show.
The 90-minute operation, which was broadcast live on the Internet to an audience of 250,000, stapled her stomach down to the size of a thumb. (It has since stretched to the size of a lemon, but won't get any bigger.) The pounds quickly melted away, but Wilson' s problems didn't. "She thought she'd lose the weight, be fine and fly from there," says Leslie Jester, Dr. Wittgrove's head nurse practitioner, who has become her mentor. "But the psychological changes are enormous."
There was, for instance, Wilson's difficulty accepting her new self. "Even though she looked beautiful on the outside, she still struggled with feelings of not being pretty or good enough," says Bonfiglio. "I've tried to be as supportive as I can, to give her an extra 'Hey, you look great.'" Says Wilson: "Rob has been really great at making me feel good about myself."
Also tough for Wilson was finding ways to deal with everyday stresses without turning to food. "Most of her life, she had food to help her cope," Jester says.
"Now she had to cope on her own." Wilson turned briefly to smoking marijuana, which she had used occasionally in the past. Afraid she might become dependent--"I'm an addictive personality, " she says--she began weekly psychotherapy in April 2000 to help her quit and stepped up her attendance at meetings of her monthly support group, made up of 20 women who have had gastric bypass surgery.
"Some people come and they've gained 25 lbs.," Wilson says. "I think, 'I don't want that to be me.'"
Over last year's Christmas holidays, she feared it might be. "I was baking cookies for everyone and taking a bite here and there," Wilson says. Before she knew it she had packed on 7 lbs. and couldn't button her pants. She panicked. "The weight gain scared her," Wendy says. "But I told her, 'It's just a few pounds. You can lose it if you want to.'"
Wilson met with Jester for an emergency pep talk. She reminded Wilson of the four rules Dr. Wittgrove gives his GBS patients: Drink 64 ozs. of water a day, exercise at least 20 minutes daily, eat protein first and limit snacking. "It's very rare, but you can definitely gain the weight back after gastric bypass surgery,"
Wittgrove says. "Carnie will have to be accountable for the rest of her life."
These days she's feeling up to the challenge. Wilson power-walks with Bonfiglio three times a week and lifts weights with a personal trainer twice a week. Bingeing on former favorites, like french fries with sour cream and ketchup, isn't a temptation because if she eats too much at one sitting, she breaks out in a cold sweat, her heart races and she has to lie down. "It's the worst feeling in the world," she says. She eats three light meals of protein, fruit and vegetables a day and snacks on peanuts, raisins "and a tiny piece of chocolate--it's my daily fix." Her mother, for one, is impressed. "I don't know anyone who eats as healthy as my daughter," Marilyn marvels. "Before, she couldn't wait to attack the bowl of chips when we went to a Mexican restaurant. Now she looks at me like, 'Mom, control yourself!'"
Which doesn't mean Wilson no longer has cravings. "Getting full fast is easy because it's done for me," she says. "But choosing to say no to food? That's not easy, because mentally I still want it." She has tricks she uses to restrain herself. If she wants dessert, she' ll order it, take one bite "and then pour salt all over it before I take another bite," she says. "People look at me like I'm nuts."
But pleasing strangers isn't high on Wilson's list of priorities of late. What does matter is starting a family someday ("I'm not scared of gaining weight when I'm pregnant--I'll deal with it," she says), finishing up Wilson Phillips' new album (due out next spring) and raising awareness about gastric bypass surgery. Since the end of 2000 she has given bimonthly lectures about her struggles in cities nationwide, and the American Society for Bariatric Surgery credits her for helping to popularize the procedure (36,700 bypasses were performed in 2000; in 2001 the total was 62,400).
Says Wilson: "I love to assist people. It makes me feel good."
Almost as good as being able to slip into the outfit of her dreams: a slinky black halter dress. She isn't there yet, but after her next--and, she swears, last--surgery, to remove excess skin from her upper arms later this year, there'll be no stopping her. "It's the piece of clothing I want to wear and feel completely confident in," she says. "It will be amazing, so sexy. I'm ready to get out there and shine."
"I've never looked down and not had a belly in my entire life"
'"Choosing to say no to food? That's not easy, because mentally I still want it"
Illustration/Photos:
COLOR PHOTO: DOROTHY LOW COVER Carnie Wilson's PLASTIC SURGERY DIARY --Liposuction --Breast Lift --Tummy tucck The singer who famously lost 152 lbs. talks frankly about the next step; the reconstructive procedures that changed her, outside and in 2002
COLOR PHOTO: ALLISON LEACH COVER [See caption above] 2000
COLOR PHOTO: DOROTHY LOW "I felt like a snake shedding its skin," says Carnie Wilson after her gastric bypass surgery. "But the skin was still hanging on." [T of C]
COLOR PHOTO: SPLASH NEWS May 1999: 300 lbs.
COLOR PHOTO: JONATHAN EXLEY February 2000: 200 lbs.
COLOR PHOTO: ALLISON LEACH December 2000: 150 lbs.
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOROTHY LOW "I still have the same demons I had before I lost the weight," says Wilson (at home in Valley Village, Calif.), but, she adds, "the panic and guilt feelings about overeating aren't there anymore."
COLOR PHOTO: COURTESY CARNIE WILSON "Carnie has more confidence," says mom Marilyn (right, with her and sis Wendy, center).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOROTHY LOW Wilson (working out with hubby Bonfiglio, right, and trainer Richard Giorla) feels "young and free again," she says.
COLOR PHOTO: MIKE SEGAR/REUTERS Dad Brian (left) is "so proud of me," says Wilson (in black, at a 2001 Radio City Music Hall tribute to him, with Chynna Phillips and Wendy).
COLOR PHOTO: PHOTOGRAPHS BY DOROTHY LOW The reconstructive plastic surgery "was a celebratory thing for her," says Bonfiglio (at home with Wilson). "It was the topper."
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Naomi Wolf (6/24/91)
Hubbard, K. (1991, June 24). Controversy: The tyranny of beauty.
People'', 117.
To Naomi Wolf, pressure to look good equals oppression.
NAOMI WOLF WILL NEVER FORGET A certain fat boy named Bobby. He was her classmate at a Hebrew school in San Francisco in 1974, and one day, as 12- year-old Naomi bent to drink from a water fountain, he poked her tummy and uttered these chilling words: “You want to watch it, Wolf.” “That night, I just decided, 'All right, I will not be poked again -- I will win at this,'“ says Wolf, 28. “I went on a diet for like two weeks, and I couldn't stop.”
In fact, the gibe triggered a year-long bout with anorexia that would drop her weight from 105 lbs. to 84. (The 5 ft.4 in. Wolf resolved to overcome the disorder, she says, only when her doctor told her he could feel her spine through her stomach.) She regards her experience with anorexia as an early, personal intimation of the power of what she now calls the “beauty myth.”
That myth “ranks women according to how they compare with an artificially, | rather than biologically, established appearance standard,” says Wolf, a Yale grad and Rhodes scholar now working toward her doctorate in literature at Oxford. “I contend that this obsession with beauty in the Western world -- which has intensified in my lifetime -- is, in fact, the last way men can defend themselves against women claiming power.”
Wolf explores that thesis in her book, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, just published in the U.S. It is a manifesto of sorts, an indictment of the cosmetics, diet, pornography and plastic-surgery industries, and a call for a new wave of feminism to free women from enslavement to beauty's dictates. Wolf says that many young readers (the book spent several weeks at the top of Britain's nonfiction best-seller lists) have taken her message to heart. She says she daily receives letters from teenage girls and young women who tell her the book is “the most true thing about their generation they've read.”
Wolf's fellow feminists, however, are divided.
Germaine Greer pronounced the book “the most important feminist publication since The Female Eunuch,” which she wrote, and novelist Fay Weldon deems the book “essential reading for the New Woman.”
Betty Friedan is less enthusiastic. “Naomi's message is distorted,” she says. “There is a political and economic backlash against women -- laws on sex discrimination are being eroded; the U.S. is one of the only industrial nations without national policies of child care and parental leave. But I think women are much less apt to be passive slaves of beauty than they used to be.”
Reviewers, too, are split on Wolf's contribution. She has been accused of sloppy research and of assaulting readers with a barrage of random statistics.
Many critics, however, have found her principal argument convincing and well buttressed. Her claim that 87 percent of plastic-surgery patients are women, for example, is supported by the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. And no one argues with Wolf's data on what Americans spend to look good: some $20 billion a year on cosmetics, $33 billion on diet products and exercise.
“When the majority of American women [in a 1984 Glamour magazine survey] say they'd rather lose 10 to 15 lbs. than succeed in love or work, you're up against a social phenomenon,” Wolf says.
None of this, she argues, is happenstance. Women weakened and distracted by dieting, cowed by images of flawless fashion models and exhausted by what Wolf calls “the third shift” -- beauty-maintenance work squeezed in between career and housework - - will have trouble fighting for full equality with men, she maintains. “Over and over in the course of women's history, the female ideals that form just happen to be ones that serve what the economy needs at the moment,” Wolf says. “There's no conscious male conspiracy. There doesn't need to be. When a whole economy depends on people being perceived in a certain way, it doesn't take a smoke-filled room to propagate it.” As she states in her book, “An ideology that makes women feel worth less was urgently needed to counteract the way feminism had begun to make us feel worth more.” The burgeoning of what Wolf terms “image culture” -- films, TV, pictures in magazines and on billboards -- made visions of impossibly thin, ever-young females easier to foster.
“Men were scared, and women felt guilty about the changes in gender roles,” says Wolf, so both sexes responded to those images, and they proliferated.
“Men have a world of representation in which they see, you know, ugly old guys running the world on the cover of everything,” she says. “What that means is that men have many more ways to imagine themselves and their future than just, 'Do I look like an Armani model?' That's not the case for women.” Wolf's interest in women's issues started early. Her mother, now a psychotherapist, was an anthropologist who specialized in women's studies; her father, now retired, taught English at San Francisco State University. Naomi grew up reading “all the feminist classics,” she says. “I've called myself a feminist all my life.”
At Yale, where she majored in English literature, Wolf was “always yelling about women's issues in my classes,” she says. But the idea of writing a book about beauty didn't occur to her until she was studying at Oxford. “I discovered that four or five of the women Rhodes scholars I knew, women who had presumably attained some power in a masculine world, had suffered from eating disorders, and we'd all been told by classmates that we got our scholarships because we were cute,” Wolf says. The book took shape during a three-year stay in Edinburgh, where Wolf went to live with a Scottish boyfriend. “I'm antipatriarchy, not antimale,” she says, smiling. Nor is she even antibeauty. “Women make very individual accommodations with the beauty myth, and it's important that we don' t judge each other for the choices we make,” says Wolf, who wears makeup occasionally, favors “comfortable clothes that I think are pretty” and feels sure she'd be more preoccupied with her looks if she worked in an office.
“I'm a woman in this body, in this culture,” she says, “so I'm still beset by the same demons that all women are beset by. Still, we have to stop that look we give one another -- that face-to-shoes, what-are-you-wearing-you-slut look.”
These days, Wolf makes her home in a one-bedroom Manhattan sublet, where she is gearing up to write the Oxford thesis she put aside in 1988 (its subject: female beauty in 19th- and early 20th-century literature). For fun, she roller-blades in Central Park, cooks dinner with her new boyfriend, a newspaper editor -- and eagerly awaits more mixed reviews. “I'm trying to seize this culture by its collar and say, 'Stop! Look what you're doing!' “ she says. “To the extent that people get angry, I know I've done a good job."
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