by Sue Johnston
I was devastated. I already thought I looked at my worst, but for someone to pick up on it and make such an issue of it was extremely hurtful. I didn’t want to leave the house. Frances Barber, who had played my sister in the drama, had read it too and she was extremely supportive.
‘Sue, you have to try to ignore it,’ she said.
‘I can’t ignore it. It’s so awful,’ I replied, feeling that everyone in the country must have read it by now.
‘They don’t think they’re writing about a person when they write these things,’ she said, trying to comfort me. ‘They just think that as you’re on the telly you’re fair game.’
It didn’t feel fair. I didn’t want to be fair game to some critic.
Without me asking anyone to do it, people emailed the editor of the Observer. My friend Susie emailed the critic in question, telling him in no uncertain terms what she thought. He emailed her a rather curt response back. ‘Right!’ she said angrily. ‘He’s going to be getting a little present from me!’ And she marched off to buy two tennis balls. She parcelled them up and I saw her writing a note.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked.
She held up the note that she was about to post along with the balls. It read, ‘Shove these up your arse!’
I like to think that I’m made of tougher stuff, that I could weather something like this, but it just makes you feel vulnerable. The critic did issue an apology the week after, and I was very grateful to everyone who complained on my behalf but I was still very shaken by it.
Attacks on one’s appearance are so personal that I think it is hard to ever shake them off. It certainly is for me. The nose comment from the drunk in the bar came at a time when my self-esteem was on the floor. I really needed some help: I was allowing things like this man to get to me and I felt that the grip I had on myself was getting looser day by day.
One evening, Peggy threw a family party and one of her relations asked rather cuttingly what I was doing there when I was Neil’s ex-wife. I felt devastated. I realised it was time I moved out and stood on my own two feet, even though I didn’t feel ready for it.
*
I felt like I had failed, that my life was beginning to move off into uncharted territory and I wasn’t quite sure how I’d come to this point. I needed some control, and the one thing I knew that I could control was food. I performed in a drama at a summer school around this time and I was talking to the director about a part that I would quite like to play.
‘Oh, you could never play that part,’ he said flippantly. ‘You need to be thin to play that role and you’ll never be thin, you’re big-boned.’
Again, this comment really affected me. I was upset at the idea that I would never be tiny and left thinking ‘Who is he to tell me what size I can be?’
After the summer school, I embarked on another theatre tour and while I was away I stopped eating. When I did eat it was in a very controlled way. I would have a pork pie and a Scotch egg at lunchtime and then nothing until lunch the next day. I don’t know why I chose those two things, but I don’t think that matters, the fact was I had begun to ritualise my eating habits.
This obsession with food, or control of what went in and out of my body, wasn’t something that I’d had when I lived at home with my parents. It was something that had crept up on me since college.
It is interesting to think about where the seeds of body consciousness are planted. As a teenager, I never thought about my weight or my figure; I’d always been happy with the way I looked. I was an average weight. I never went on a diet. We’d have fry-ups for breakfast, a lunch that consisted of whatever my mother put in front of me, and dinner at night. I was very active, expending energy all the time. At school I walked there and back. I was always out playing in the street as a little girl and then as I got older I would be out dancing till all hours. Food wasn’t something I worried about; it was simply fuel for my body.
My mother would occasionally tell me if I put on weight, and if I lost it she’d say, ‘Ooh, you look thin.’ She wasn’t frightened of telling me that my hair looked a mess, I could do with putting on some make-up, or that I should stop dressing like a boy. But my mother never fanned the flames of what would eventually become an eating disorder.
I can remember clearly when food became an issue for me. While at college, Neil and Matt had gone away on tour for a few weeks, and Val came in one day waving a piece of paper with some instructions on it.
‘Look at this!’ she said excitedly. ‘It’s the grapefruit diet. We should do it while the lads are away. We’ll look great by the time they get back. Surprise them.’
‘What’s the grapefruit diet?’ I asked. I’d never heard of it before.
‘Well,’ she said, scanning the instructions, ‘you have a grapefruit before every meal.’
The look of the moment was led by the likes of Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy, and around the corner from our college Biba had just opened their first shop, which was full of little slip dresses that were to die for. Being skinny seemed like a perfectly normal thing to want to be.
‘And that’s it? I can eat what I want?’ I asked, thinking about having grapefruit then pie and chips, yet still managing to slink down the road a size eight. This diet was some sort of miracle, I thought for those few short moments, why had no one discovered it before!
‘No,’ Val said, looking slightly downcast as she delivered the disappointing truth. ‘You can have an egg for breakfast, some turkey for lunch and a bit of ham for tea. Oh, hang on,’ she said, her face brightening. I leant in – what was it? Crisps? I wondered, or maybe a cream cake? ‘You can have some veg,’ she said flatly. My face fell.
So this was a classic high-protein diet. And having never dieted before in my life, at the age of twenty-two I embarked on the grapefruit diet. Val and I stuck to it religiously and miserably and when the lads came back we had lost over half a stone each.
Of course, after a few weeks of eating normally, I was back to my old size and my Biba dress was confined to the wardrobe. What I hadn’t realised was that I had begun the never-ending diet cycle.
*
The tour took us to Gillingham and I had a particularly unhappy time there. We were staying in high-rise blocks near the precinct in the city centre. There was a large municipal swimming pool nearby which would become my haven from the oppressiveness of where we were staying. For some reason we weren’t allowed to congregate in each other’s flats so the only place we could socialise was at the precinct and the pool.
One day I had taken myself off to the swimming pool and while I was there a child drowned. It was so awful, and although there was nothing that I could have personally done about it, it hit me really hard. I couldn’t stop thinking about this poor child and his poor mother. This event compounded my homesickness, how low I felt, and the awful flats that we were staying in added to this further. I stopped eating practically altogether and got thinner and thinner, still feeling that it was something that I was in control of in a world where everything else was out of my hands, where children could die under the same roof as me and I was powerless to stop it.
When I left Gillingham I went back to the theatre where the director worked who had said that I was bigboned. He didn’t recognise me, I was so thin.
My skinny frame was shrouded in an oversize jumper. The director looked at me in horror but I felt triumphant. ‘See, I told you I could be thin.’ Like it was some kind of prize.
I didn’t think it at the time, but the break-up of my marriage had hit me hard and I was trying to rein in my life in any way I could. I wasn’t sure what to do next or what direction my life should take, and even though I was managing to work as an actress I felt very alone and rudderless. It would be a long time before I felt like I got back to being me again.
Chapter Six
IT WAS THE late sixties and the world of theatre was transforming. Politics was seeping into not only the performances but in the way that theatre companies were being set
up. Small co-ops were springing up that would survive hand to mouth until they proved to the Arts Council that they were worthy of a grant. A lot of these companies were doing cutting-edge work and I wanted to be part of this.
The Portable Theatre Company had recently been set up by David Hare and Tony Bicât. David is now one of our most acclaimed playwrights. As time has passed it had become part of modern folklore that David was an ‘angry young man’, one of the new breed of directors, railing at the establishment, that Ralph Jago had referred to back in college. I can’t say that I saw much anger, if I’m honest, he was just a genuinely lovely director and writer to work with. But I suppose at the time we were all angry in a sense, if angry means unwilling to accept the place that our class deemed we should take in life.
That said, we were based at Tony’s mother’s house off Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia, a well-to-do part of London, and I ended up renting a room there for a time. It was a very grand place to be for an impoverished actor; we were hardly down t’pit!
We managed to get our hands on a clapped-out Volkswagen van to tour in and off we went around the country. My first role was as Madame in Jean Genet’s The Maids and after that we performed a number of different plays, with David writing some to throw into the mix. We would often find that we struggled to pay ourselves a wage, and the places we played weren’t exactly packed to the rafters. On one occasion, in Coventry, we played to an audience of two, which was pretty depressing.
I met up with David some years later when he was very much established as a great playwright. He said that despite the fact that we often found ourselves playing to one man and his dog, there are hundreds of people who claim to have seen those plays. They must have snuck in because we didn’t see them. That said, we did have a number of successful shows. We opened David’s first play, Slag, at the Canterbury Theatre and it was really well received. I felt that I was part of something fresh, that we were doing stimulating work.
Although David wasn’t quite the angry young man everyone would have him be, he was extremely well read and was the first person I’d met who brought an intellectualised way of looking at politics, it wasn’t just a gut reaction for him. I was very emotionally driven in my politics; any sense of injustice had me up in arms. David had a way of contextualising politics, of showing me that my beliefs actually had merit and basis. I suppose he was the first person who showed me that having a strong political opinion didn’t mean that I had to lose my rag. That my political beliefs could be expressed in a methodical and rational way.
At the Portable Theatre Company, I still had one eye on my weight. I was convinced that I was too big and that I needed to do something about it so I went to the doctor’s to see if I could procure some slimming tablets. I told myself it was because I was attempting to give up cigarettes and didn’t want to put on weight, but as anyone who has had the eating demon in their head will tell you, it wasn’t just to manage my weight without cigarettes; I wanted them to make me as thin as possible.
The doctor gave them to me and I went home and popped my pills. I completely lost my appetite, I smoked like a chimney – so much for that – and I cleaned the house from top to bottom. I had been prescribed amphetamines. When my packet of pills ran out I went back to the doctor’s like a junky after their next fix.
I walked through the door into the doctor’s room and said breezily, ‘Hi, Doctor, I’ve just come to get some more of the pills you prescribed.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, looking at my notes, ‘I’ve been told that I can’t prescribe those tablets any more.’
I felt a stab of anxiety but tried not to show it. ‘There must be a mistake, Doctor, the pills you gave me were working really well, they were fine. And I just need some more.’
‘I’m sorry, Susan, but we can’t give them out on prescription,’ he said, looking sorry for me.
My bottom lip began to quiver. ‘But the thing is, Doctor, I’m an actress and I have to keep an eye on my weight and…’ I launched into a pathetic story of why I needed these tablets. As my pleas became increasingly desperate, the doctor put his hands up to appease me.
‘Just wait here, Susan,’ he said and quickly left the room.
I sat in the chair, wondering where on earth he had gone. Had my histrionics been so bad that he had to leave the room for a break? About what seemed like ten minutes later he came back clutching a paper bag. He handed it to me.
‘Here you go,’ he said quietly. ‘And don’t tell anyone you got them from me. You’ll have me struck off.’
This is shocking, really, when you think about it, a doctor handing over slimming tablets to a desperate young woman. However, I know there was something very manipulative in my behaviour that day. Something that with hindsight was a warning bell for how gripping my obsession with food would become.
*
After two years with the Portable Theatre Company, I met a director called Malcolm Griffiths, who had just been appointed by Farnham Theatre Company. He asked me if I would consider joining him. The actors and the production team at Farnham were all on equal wages and the idea of a steady fair wage was hard to turn down, so off I went. Malcolm wanted to do great, experimental work and he was a fantastic director. We were performing plays such as Look Back in Anger, where Matt from drama school – now my friend Val’s husband – played opposite me.
I was living above a pub just around the corner from the theatre and once again I threw myself into theatre life. Malcolm continued to introduce new plays and new ways of directing. When he told us that we were to perform Much Ado about Nothing we were all excited to see what his take on Shakespeare would be. Malcolm was very progressive, and the fact that he had set up a cooperative had worried some of the people on the board of the Farnham Theatre Company. When he decided to stage Much Ado with an avant-garde twist, it was too much for the traditional theatre board and they told Malcolm that his contract would not be renewed. We were a cooperative and everyone felt very strongly that if Malcolm was going to be made to leave, then we would leave too.
Several of us had made our homes in Farnham and now had nowhere to go. We decided to move back to London and a few of us, including actors Maev Alexander and Denis Lawson, shared a flat in Chiswick. On the surface I was happy to be moving back to London, but I think that the despondency I’d been feeling throughout my twenties was now magnified by the move.
I began to spend more and more time on my own. I would get home, take to my room and get under the bed covers, not coming out for days. I had taken to painting everything black: my bedroom was filled with bottles of flowers and I had painted both the bottles and the flowers black. It seemed like a perfectly normal expression of how I felt at the time. But my friends were beginning to worry about me. I finally took myself to the doctor’s.
‘Is there a history of depression in your family, Sue?’ he asked.
Depression? I was shocked by the word. Surely I wasn’t depressed. There must be some more plausible explanation for why I felt so terrible. ‘No, of course not…’ I began, but as soon as the words came out of my mouth I knew that that wasn’t true. Depression – or at least a propensity to be despondent – had been with me for as long as I could remember.
Mum would say, ‘What have you got that face on you for? You need to cheer up, everything you’ve got, you should think yourself lucky.’
My mother very much belonged to the school of thought that says that everything can be solved by pulling your socks up and getting on with life. But even as a teenager I knew that there was more to it than just tugging at the tops of my socks. I used to write in my diaries about the way I was feeling but the fear of my mother reading them was so great that I would write in code. Months later, when the black fog of depression descended again, I would go back to my diaries to see how I had felt last time, only to find I couldn’t decipher my own code!
I knew that my dad and other members of his family experienced a similar malaise from time to time. My dad was very sens
itive, and when he was upset about something he felt it very deeply. I cannot say for certain that he suffered from depression but I do know that this is how I often have reacted to things over the years. We didn’t talk about things like that when I was growing up. He would be very quiet during these times and I would know that it was just one of those periods that Dad went through. It was only as I got older that I realised that my feelings of despair were similar to those of my father.
So I told the doctor that yes, I thought that maybe there was depression in my family. He prescribed antidepressants, and I went home feeling like I’d somehow just let the family cat out of the bag.
I have heard it described as the ‘black dog’ and over time I came to understand why this is. Depression is a malevolent black presence, always stalking you. Something that you have to be forever on your guard against. It was like something was constantly on my shoulders, weighing me down.
*
The tablets took the edge off my depression. It was still there underneath, but I now felt up to getting a job in a pub called the City Barge, next to Kew Bridge on the Thames. I loved working in a pub again. I got to know the regulars and quickly began to feel at home, but I think my friends still viewed me as something of a lost soul. One of them, Peter, a friend from Farnham, came to me with an offer. I think he wanted to help get me back on track.
There was a new arts centre in Marylebone called the Cockpit and Peter had got the job running it. He asked me if I’d go along too, but to open a coffee bar for them. It would be a stopgap, I decided, and at least I would be working in a theatre environment, so if any opportunities arose I’d be there to take advantage of them. I went about the venture with great gusto: I decided I would make fresh soup and cakes and hot meals, all from locally sourced foods. Of course, at the time we couldn’t have advertised it as locally sourced food, people would have thought we were mad. ‘What – you bought it from the market? What do you want, a medal?’ But I like to think of myself as a pioneer in the whole foods world! In fact, I used to go to the market round the corner from the theatre on Church Street in Marylebone and became very close to one of the traders there, a lovely man who took me under his wing. One morning he took me to Covent Garden, where all the market stall owners from around London still came for fresh fruit, veg and flowers. You had to be there early to get the best stuff, so I had to set off at 3 a.m. to witness this London institution first-hand.