by Margaret Cho
I tried to lessen the shock of it, what it did to me. I tried to rationalize, like—“This is the big time, we are all gentlemen here, I can take it.” I obviously couldn’t.
My face. My face. We always hear, “Your face is your fortune,” “The face that launched a thousand ships,” “That face, that face, that beautiful face.” Even when I would get heavier, people would at least say, “You’ve got such a pretty face.” But not now. How did I not run and scream when the cameras were on me, to spare the world a glimpse at this huge face that could barely fit on the screen? I felt like the Elephant Man—my head, a gigantic monstrosity that I presented to the world, unavoidable because it was the very me of me.
The pain went deep. I wanted to kill my face from the inside out. At least a skull is small. A skeleton has a tiny face. I couldn’t look in a mirror without feeling rage at myself—why does my face have to take up so much space? How I tried to kill that reflection! Working out to exhaustion, feeling the sweat pour out of my face, touching my cheeks and chin to feel if they had gotten smaller, hungry and weak, trying so hard to please this network that had done nothing but make me want to kill myself. Kill my face. But it isn’t their fault, I told myself then. It is mine. I let myself react that way. I know there isn’t anything I could have done about how I felt, and I cannot apologize for how I hurt myself. Who is there to say sorry to, except my face?
I want to say sorry now. To my face. My poor face that endured so much and only wanted to be pretty and liked and maybe loved sometimes and certainly didn’t do any harm and could make people smile a lot of the time.
My poor face that would flush bright red from all the vodka and pills I downed so that I could pass out and not look at it anymore. My poor face that I could barely lift to have people see because I thought it was so full, so ugly, so wrong, so huge, so awful, so trying to be something it was not.
I kept having those feelings until they were just normal. They barely hurt, I was so used to them.
Years later, someone took a picture of me and I looked at it. Really looked at it. It occurred to me that yes, my face was full, but it was lovely. My eyebrows curved up inquisitively, sexy, like a ’30s screen goddess. I had alabaster skin that glowed and Cupid’s bow lips that shyly smiled.
My face was shaped like a heart, because through all of the injustices it endured, it still shined with love. Now I have finally learned how to love it back. The battle for self-esteem is a hard-won victory, because as human beings we tend to err on the side of self-loathing, but winning this war is the only way we can survive.
My agent, Karen, called almost immediately after I hung up with Gail. She was outraged and was urging me to pull out of the show. “Don’t you see? They don’t get you. You are making a big mistake. They can’t ask you to lose weight. They can’t do that! Don’t let them do that! It isn’t right. And if that is who they think you are, this show isn’t going to work!”
I did the only thing I knew to do: I fired her. I didn’t want to go back to auditions. I didn’t want to go back out on the road. She didn’t understand. Nobody did. If I could just lose some weight, then everything would be fine. I thought Karen was in my way, but that wasn’t true. I was.
I got some new, “high powered” agents from William Morris. They all hugged me for too long and sat me down in conference rooms to talk about my possible future in CD-ROMs. They sent me lists of directors and got me auditions for “girlfriend” parts. I didn’t book anything, but they said, “If it takes ten years, we’ll do it.” The expensive lunches and high-quality fag assistants bought my confidence.
The network mobilized the troops and launched a full-scale war against my body. A trainer named Vine came to my house six days a week at 7 A.M. and worked me out for four hours. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t gone on and on about his show-business development ideas. He was the ultimate pain in my ass. A trainer/pitcher. I just hated him so much. Seeing him every day, having to make ridiculous small talk and act friendly while he was making me do sit-up after sit-up and trying to get his perfect pitch down to twenty-five words or less was nothing short of torture.
Now when I walk my dog in the hills by my house, I see trainers just like Vine walking with their clients and it seems unholy to me. I can always spot them because one person is heavier and the other person is stupider.
In addition to the trainer, I had this diet company deliver food to my house in creepy white bags because I obviously couldn’t be trusted to make my own fatty choices. The portions were so small, it was hard to believe that people could survive on them. It also astounded me that I had been eating comparatively so much before. It was like I had been a gorilla, consuming my weight in bananas every day.
Now, everything that went into my mouth was carefully measured and monitored. When I finished my last meal of the day, I wanted to cry because I was still hungry. I drank so much water that my insides hurt and I stopped thinking about anything but food. I dreamt about eating spaghetti with ricotta cheese swirled into it and would wake up in a cold sweat, afraid I had actually eaten it.
I had a brand new body in days—but it didn’t look any different to me. I couldn’t see it, but everyone else could. “I hear Margaret Cho’s got a hot body now.” Now? What do you mean now?
I went to the Lava Lounge and a whole new school of guys was checking me out, which was totally terrifying. I don’t know if they thought I was cute or that I was skinny enough now to “make the grade.” Either way, it was scary and then it pissed me off, so it was unpleasant no matter how you looked at it or how it looked at you.
We started rehearsals for the pilot. I guess the network thought that my face could now fit on the screen and they wouldn’t have to letterbox it.
The cast of the show was not only my fictional family, they immediately felt like my real family, too. B. D. Wong, Amy Hill, Clyde Kusatsu, Jodi Long, Judy Gold, Maddie Corman, the guest stars for the pilot—my old friends Kennedy Kabasares and Garret Wang— and I are bonded together because we made history. Garret and I are probably especially close because he endured some of my medical drama as well.
Through diet and exercise and sheer terror, I lost thirty pounds in two weeks. I got sick, big sick. My kidneys collapsed.
I was in my trailer with Garret. He played the first in my long string of on-screen romances. I had a crush on him, so kissing him on camera was especially pleasant.
I went into the little plastic bathroom and started urinating blood. I was screaming: “I am peeing blood! I am peeing blood!” and I sent Garret out to get someone. Then I got embarrassed, so I called him back in and said, “Forget it. I’ll be okay.”
Lost and confused and in pain, I called up Greer. I told his assistant Nancy, who pulled some strings and got me to the hospital without anyone knowing.
At the hospital, an old woman in a pink smock came in and introduced herself. “Hi. My name is Gwen. I am here to wash your vagina.”
This later became one of my most popular routines, and it was all true. This woman’s job struck me as so odd, and not only was she damn good at it—not like I know, really, I don’t have anything to compare it to—but she wanted to personalize it by introducing herself, putting a name to the hose. Like she had read the “Techniques of Highly Effective People” and was applying them to me.
She cleaned me out and the doctor catheterized me. He then filled my bladder with water and inserted a tiny camera. We watched the Fantastic Voyage on the video monitor up in the corner of the room and I wondered if I could get a copy of the tape. Talk about an Entertainment Tonight exclusive.
Blood started to fill the screen and it was a surreal—and painful— moment, as I saw myself bleed internally on TV.
I didn’t tell anybody about being hospitalized except for the people who were directly involved: Greer, Vine, and Nancy. I was ashamed and also afraid that they would somehow make me stop dieting. I didn’t want to put that weight on again. I was terrified of losing the show and eve
rything I had worked for. I didn’t want to go back out on auditions and I really didn’t want to go back out on the road. There was no other way.
I thought my life depended on my willingness to lose weight. Too many people were focusing on the size of my body for me to be able to feel comfortable eating. I now see how sick that was, but it seemed strangely normal then.
Deep inside, I knew that the show wasn’t good, that I had gotten myself into a big mess. The jokes weren’t so much stereotypical as stale. It had all turned out like Saved By the Gong. It was immature and unfunny, and playing an overgrown, oversize teenager was not my forte. I looked stupid, and even worse, I knew I looked stupid. Instead of focusing on that pain, I fell back on the old familiar pain of being unhappy with my weight. It is a pain I have had all my life and I know all the words to it. Ever since my first and last ballet recital when I was eight years old, when my father told me that I was the fattest ballerina, I have hated my body, and I have had to completely change my way of thinking to stop feeling it.
My kidneys bother me to this day, and I am sure the drinking and the drug abuse that came later didn’t help. It was all because I did not take the warning signals my body was giving off then, because I wanted to be thin like the other Hollywood actresses, because the Friends were hot, because skeletal was in. Because I grew up never seeing Asian faces on TV, so inside I viewed myself as the recipient of some kind of special Hollywood gift that I needed to somehow repay with starvation. Because my mother went on crash diets. Because Gail had told me the network had a problem with my face. Because I got a letter from some prisoner who said he loved women with fat arms and that I had the fattest arms he had ever seen. Because, because, because . . .
It’s funny, but the feeling I remember most about having to be hospitalized was relief that I wouldn’t have to work out—at least on that day. Nancy called Vine and told him what happened. His reaction: “My God, I’ve killed her.”
He knew how hard he was working me. He might have even known that it was unsafe, because I had been eating so little and was under so much pressure from the press and our shooting schedule.
Those weeks of working out and dieting and finally of illness made me weak and lifeless. I remember going to one Oscar party and all the queens were making fun of the gowns and the winner’s hair (“Oooohh, that’s right honey! Accessorize that nose with a part!”) and I couldn’t even laugh because I was so hungry and tired and staring at the taquitos the entire time.
Because of the bleeding and the catheter, it hurt like hell to pee. Every time I went to the bathroom, I was painfully reminded that I was fat, I was meant to be fat, would always be fat, and when I tried to starve myself thin, my body would rebel, fighting for its right to be fat.
I couldn’t let up on myself. I thought beating myself up would burn more calories, so I did it until I reached my target heart rate.
The costume designer saw how hard this was for me and watched my changing sizes with sympathy. She said that she had a doctor who prescribed diet pills that worked like magic. His office was conveniently located just blocks from the studio.
After my initial visit, which included a blood test and a brief visit with the doctor, I never had to come in again, sending PAs from the show to pick up my meds. The pills were nasty smelling and I took them mostly on an empty stomach, feeling them grind against each other in the most horrifying way.
They gave me migraines and panic attacks. After the pilot was picked up, we would do network run-throughs, where all the executives would come down to the studio and watch us rehearse our unfunny show, and I would sweat so much I am sure they must have thought I was on drugs.
In a sense, I was living out a kind of Valley of the Dolls fantasy, taking uppers in the day to control my weight and make early call times, and getting stoned at night to come down from the amphetamines. The show was on the air, and I was flying alongside it. The pills were as addictive as the fame.
I worked out on the speedy high they gave me, in order to run faster, sweat more, die quicker. It is a miracle that I didn’t give myself a heart attack. I stayed on the pills for years afterward, even after the FDA had them recalled, saying that people were experiencing lung and heart failure due to excessive use. I rationalized that my use was not excessive, that I could do it, that it was worth the risk, that being a few pounds lighter was worth anything. I wanted to be thin more than I wanted to be alive.
My appetite scared me so much that I spent years never even feeling it. I was so afraid that my own hunger was so great that I would consume everything in my path, and that if I let myself feel it, I would eat away my career, my livelihood, my attractiveness, everything I thought was important. I thought that if I could be thin, then I could be happy, but it wasn’t true. I was thinner than I had ever been and totally miserable.
I smoked pot at night to calm my screaming head, but I did it as close to bedtime as possible so that I wouldn’t eat when I got the munchies. I would fall into bed high and hungry, my head spinning with relief that I had not gone off my diet for one more day. When the place where I was going stopped supplying the pills, I changed doctors. I found a sleazier operation that dispensed outlawed prescriptions to the truly desperate. When you called them, the outgoing message was “If you are experiencing difficulty with the medication, hang up the phone and dial 911.” For real, that was the outgoing message!
To make the contraband scripts last longer, I would ration them and take some mid-afternoon, then jog around Lake Hollywood in the hot sun, sometimes with a weird blue Jack La Lanne–style rubber belt on to encourage weight loss around the abdomen.
I took laxatives every day, experimenting with many kinds: drinks, powders, tablets, herbal remedies, good old chocolate squares of Ex-Lax. There are so many different ways to make yourself shit. Almost as many as there are ways to say “I love you.”
My roommate at the time was bulimic, so our garbage can was always filled with chewed-but-not-swallowed peanut butter cookies.
One very famous actress, a yo-yo dieter from the old school, told me that she had maintained a thirty-pound weight loss by not eating after 5 P.M. and downing two shots of expensive tequila when she got hungry at night. She reported that it killed her hunger, and she had the tiny ass to prove it. She gave me a pair of her old shorts that no longer fit her; they were so small I couldn’t get them past my ankles. Surely this was the answer.
Unfortunately for me, those two shots turned into an entire bottle of Patrón and then some. Soon, all my calories were going toward my alcohol consumption. Drinking killed my hunger as well as my already dwindling lust for life. On top of everything else, I smoked more than a pack of Marlboro Lights a day.
After the show had ended, and I was in the depths of my drinking and depression, I got a little walk-on part in a film. On the set, the makeup artist ran a brush through my hair and it all fell out. She trapped me in the chair and questioned me harshly about my diet. I told her about the pills, not wanting to but not sure I had a choice in the matter. She pleaded with me to stop taking them. She said she had done the same thing, and all her hair had fallen out and her tongue had turned black.
Seeing that I was unfazed, she kept dragging the brush over my scalp. My hair fell out in clumps, hitting the floor—Plink! Plink! She called over all the other actresses and makeup and hair people to watch my hair fall to the floor like rain. They all started up about the dangers of dieting and the pills, jumping around in the puddles of my hair, and yet it didn’t stop me—even when I went home with a bald spot, a graying tongue, and a massive headache.
I just took more vitamins. I massaged my scalp once a day. I kept taking the pills! Why was being thin so important to me? Perhaps it had something to do with my upbringing. Koreans have weight issues.
My uncle lives in Tennessee, which is a problem in itself. Why a Korean immigrant would choose to live there is beyond me. He saw me on TV once and panicked. He called my mom with a new diet he had been on that re
ally worked. She called me and I told her never to mention it again. She kept on, of course, and explained it to me again, as if my angry reaction was merely my way of saying: “Tell me one more time.”
The diet consisted of consuming only one small bag of rice a week and chewing every bite fifty times. He also sent it to me in a letter that I received by registered mail and had to sign for when it was delivered. Not believing that was enough, he copied the letter and faxed it to me. I did not respond, and a couple of weeks later he called me and left it on my machine.
“You eat one bag, did you get my fax? You chew it fifty—because I send you a letter. . . . I think you need to lose some weight—didn’t your mom tell you?!”
Then, when he was visiting out West with his family, he made a special trip to Los Angeles so he could come to my house and discuss the diet with me in person. I got him to leave by showing him pictures of myself at the Amsterdam Sex Museum riding a collection of penis sculptures much taller than myself. He departed, but not before grabbing my hand and begging me one last time to go on the bag-of-rice diet.
I have never been a heavy person, but for some reason, my physique drives some Korean people insane. They feel that I am too large for them to be comfortable, too large to be one of them, so they go out of their way to tell me what to do about it. It is either personal weight-loss secrets or cautionary tales about people who refused to lose weight (“And she never got married . . .” followed by a shudder). If it isn’t that, it is because I have lost weight and they must comment on how much better I look. Most commonly, it is to inform me that on television I look grossly overweight, but in person, I look great.
My relatives were probably the worst to me about my weight, since they had my entire life to pester me about it. My mother and father, when they’d call me on the phone, would say, “How is your weight?” instead of “Hello.” It got to be so unbearable that whenever they said it, I would immediately hang up on them and not let them speak to me unless they stopped saying it. How joyous being an adult and having no repercussions for hanging up on your parents! If you haven’t done this, you haven’t truly lived. Doing that was so instantly gratifying and wonderful, especially when they would call back and I would let the machine answer it and they would beg and plead to know how much I was tipping the scales at.