What I didn’t realize, back when I was this twenty-five-year-old pinup for geeks in that me myself and iconic metal bikini, was that I had signed an invisible contract to stay looking the exact same way for the next thirty to forty years. Well, clearly I’ve broken that contract. Partly because, in an effort to keep up my disguise as a human being, I had a child at some point. And then, in an effort to stay sane for said child, I took pounds and pounds of medications that have the dual effect of causing water retention (think ocean, not lake) while also creating a craving for salad—chocolate salad. So yes, in answer to your unexpressed question, sanity does turn out to come at a heavy price.
And finally almost a year ago I perhaps inexcusably quit smoking—a famously fattening form of self-improvement whose reward was my being taken over by the famously challenging urge to hurl heaps of non-nutritious nourishment into that hole in my head under my nose. You might say (if you were Henny Youngman and had nothing else to do) that I was throwing good calories after flab. Anyway, before long I left my single-digit-sized slacks eating the dust in my closet’s rearview mirror in favor of leggings. You know, the ones that give and stretch to accommodate one’s ever-widening Sequoia-sized thighs. So I sported the leggings below and what was tantamount to a giant tea cozy above, my fashion statement basically being, “I’m sorry.” (“Hey,” Henny Youngman yelled at me from across my life, “whatever floats your bloat!” What a jerk, right?)
So, until I hopefully managed to get it replaced, the photo on my Wikipedia entry was grotesque albeit accurate. I can only imagine it was put there by someone who hates me and has too much time on his or her hands. I don’t know, maybe it was just one of those über-accurate pictures of someone—myself, say?—situated precariously past her fiftieth year and languishing in very unflattering lighting while being captured, for all time and for everyone with Internet access, in that flattering angle under her jaw, causing me to look not so much like someone with a double chin as someone whose neck starts at her lower lip and continues straight to her alphabet-resistant monster rack. It might just be that my jaw drowned. It was last seen lounging precariously between my face and neck, keeping them apart for pity’s and safety’s sake, and the next thing I knew I was one long head from hairline to treasured chest.
I’ve always wished that I was someone who really didn’t care what I looked like, but I do. And yet, even though I end up caring about it almost more than absolutely anything, it takes way more than a lot to get me to do anything about it. So, wide bottom line, I would rather stay in my house, unnoticed and ashamed, than go out and subject other people to having to think of something nice to say to me like, “I like your shirt.” Or, “You look so . . . healthy!” Rather than hearing someone I respected until that moment lie to my fat face and say, “Wow, you’re looking good!” and rather than subject us all to hidden painful social experiences like this, I remained behind closed doors.
Now, I’ve always heard that one of the most important things in life is to be comfortable in one’s own skin. Well, I may have unconsciously come to the not illogical conclusion that the more skin you have, the more comfort you’ll feel! Presumably you’ve heard of making a mountain out of a molehill? Well, that once fussy molehill was now this eternally black-clad mountain. And, if my alleged resemblance to Elton John turns out to be a problem for anyone out there, all I can really say (politely and in a sing-song voice) is “blow my big bovine, tiny dancer cock!” Or you could just skip the whole thing—your choice.
Anyway, I finally reached the point where nothing in my closet fit other than a few socks, some hats, and a scarf. Ultimately it might just as well have been an entire other human’s closet. Basically, I was drifting closer and closer to that point of no return where one has to buy two seats on an airplane and/or their families are forced to bury them in grand pianos.
But come the fuck on, how many women do you know who are over forty-five, or over fifty—and don’t get me started on over fifty-five—how many women of this ever-advancing age do you know who are effortlessly lean and impishly lithe? Oh sure, I’d be thin, too, if I starved myself and spent a tragically huge portion of the day jogging and/or hurling myself ever forward, drenched in sweat and downward dogging my sunrise salutations, before moving on to Pilates sessions filled with far-from-free weights. Sure, if I did all that, it would be virtually impossible to not resemble a busty clothespin. But to be a feast for an army of snacking eyes requires devoting enormous chunks of your time to denying yourself on the one hand and forcing yourself on the other.
There’s a breed of women in Hollywood who wander among us looking very tense and very mad. Of course they’re angry. Who wouldn’t be enraged about having to ensure you’re looking an age you haven’t been in a generation? Regarding the concept of letting yourself go, shouldn’t we be able to at some point? Of course, whether or not we should be able is moot. There are two choices post forty-five: letting ourselves go or making ourselves sit like good, well-groomed, obliging pets, coats smooth and wrinkle-free, stomachs flat, muscles taut, teeth clean, hair dyed, nails manicured—everything just so. The thing is, though, not only is this completely unnatural, requiring warehouses full of self-control and perseverance, but it demands a level of discomfort you have to be willing to live with ’til death by lap band or liposuction. Until then, everyone marvels at how almost completely unengaged you look! It’s spooky. You look like a teenager! To the point where I kind of want to ground you. “Go to your room! Because I said so. And no dinner!”
People spend oceans of time ensuring that they are camera ready at all times. They glide through this unofficial American-Idolized world aching to impress the very judgmental audience that we move among, inspiring them to say, “No! I don’t believe it! You can’t be. I could have sworn you were sisters! You must tell me your secret! Please!” Because given a choice between youth and beauty or age and wisdom, I’ll let you guess which one most of us would opt for. Take all the time you need. I’ll wait here . . .
Then, just when I’d almost resigned myself to living out my remaining years as Betty the fat girl, my unexpected ship came in, the S.S. Jenny Craig.
I mean, is this an amazing planet or what? There I am, ginormously minding my own business—show, monkey, and otherwise—when where should I suddenly find myself but right up there in lights on none other than Jenny Craig’s list!
That’s right. I am getting paid to do something I ought to have done years and years and pounds and pounds ago.
Now, before you think, Sure, just because she’s a celebrity she gets all the breaks while all the noncelebrity . . .
Hang on. Before you go any further, don’t forget—not only do I win the wacky Jenny Craig lottery, I’m also a bipolar recovering addict who woke up next to a dead friend after getting left for a man—these and a few other such shrink-employing events could be seen, from a certain vantage point, to kind of balance out the Jenny eat-less luck fest.
Of course the Jenny Craig folks are always on the lookout for giantly fat celebrities to go on their program and prove how easy and effective it is. And I was humiliated—being the poster girl for enormousness is not something any kid grows up aspiring to.
And though much of this makes me a whore of giant proportions, I also wouldn’t be a whore with just any John. See, I’m not that good a liar. I mean, there’s a lot of other things I could do for money. I could sell autographed ECT machines or rhinestoned mood stabilizers or even Star Wars scented laxatives. But do I do that? Do I do a commercial on television to (attempt to) sell a medication while running around some random backyard with some rented golden retriever laughing and looking cured and totally amazed to be so worry-free while a voice comes on and says, “Reginol is not recommended for wayward fish or Libras with dementia. If you notice swelling in your femur or notice a subtle beam of backlight glowing northward from your anus or the anus of someone you went to school with, call your doctor immediately as this could be a symptom of hydrocephalus that c
ould lead to roughhousing and misguided bloat. Reginol is not recommended for pregnant Nazis or yodelers over seventy. Reginol does not protect you from unpopularity or autism . . . ”
All I’m ultimately saying is, how great is it that I’ve been paid handsomely to get healthy and weigh what people have to weigh to be pretty? Or pretty thin. In any event, this is a fuckin’ awesome confluence of debt reduction and cutting my swollen self down to social life size.
Craig is great,
Craig is good,
Thank you for this portion-appropriate food. A-men!
And by “men” I mean the four or five that might look at me again in a few Jennified months. And when I say look, I don’t just mean in amazement at my vague resemblance to a space princess from the silent screen era, but because I look good for my age, and maybe even for the age I was a year or two ago.
The Senator
What else was I going to tell you? Oh, yeah! About the time I went on a blind date with a senator from Connecticut. (No, sorry, it wasn’t Joe Lieberman.)
In 1985, I was filming a TV miniseries—a now almost quaint form of entertainment (currently being singlehandedly kept from extinction by HBO) that unspooled its yarn over a contained period of several life-altering nights. This particular miniseries, which set out to tell the story of how the Frenchman Frédéric Bartholdi came to build the Statue of Liberty, answered to the imaginative name of . . . wait for it . . . Liberty. It starred, among others, Chris Sarandon, Frank Langella, Dana Delany, LeVar Burton, Claire Bloom, George Kennedy, and me. I played Emma Lazarus, the gal whose sonnet, “The New Colossus,” appears on a plaque on Lady Liberty’s base: “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled hunchbacked masses yearning to be free, fun-loving, and straight-backed—or, if not actually straight, then gay, as befits an immigrant mincing stylishly through Ellis Island.” I may be misremembering some of the words, but hopefully you get the gist.
Liberty was shot on location in Baltimore, a semi-stoned throw from Washington, D.C. At some point while the weeks of filming marched majestically monthward, a producer friend from L.A. suggested that I look up Chris Dodd, who, in addition to being his buddy, was also a U.S. senator.
At the time I had become less discriminating than I might have been about the projects I subjected myself—as well as a potentially agonized audience—to. Not quite thirty, my filmography included not just Shampoo, Hannah and Her Sisters, and the Star Wars trilogy, but also such seminal classics as Hollywood Vice Squad (I played a policewoman out to take down a child pornographer) and Under the Rainbow, considered to be the Gone With the Wind for the under-four-foot-six set. (One review described it as “a ‘what-if?’ comedy that poses the question: ‘What if 150 people auditioning to play the Munchkins in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz were staying in the same hotel as some Nazis and a group of spies?’ ”) If you look it up on the Rotten Tomatoes website, you’ll find this prominently displayed excerpt from that review: “A peculiar career choice for Fisher.”
Liberty, though, had some class. I mean, it was written by Pete Hamill, which was nothing to sneeze at, right? (And where does this phrase “nothing to sneeze at” come from, and why is it such a negative? I often consider sneezing at things as a tribute of sorts.) So, having recently graduated completely healed and normal from my first stint in a rehab, and appearing in an almost perfectly respectable piece of work, I found myself driving from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., to have dinner with Chris Dodd, this senator who I knew virtually nothing about.
Nor did Senator Dodd—like most people, then, now and always—have any idea who I was in the wide, wide world beyond this cute little actress who’d played Princess Leia. And, what did it matter? That is who I was. Maybe not to myself, but then I won’t be consulted on that future day when my death is reported and a picture of Princess Leia will appear on television with two dates under my absurdly bewigged face.
The senator was not a handsome man, but he was far from unattractive. Probably in his early fifties, he had, as I recall, the reddest of cheeks, the whitest of hair, and the bluest of eyes—an American face!—and there was a merry sort of force that twinkled out of these eyes. Merry, alert, and intensely engaged in making the most of this world, for himself and even others, be they his Connecticut constituents or girls from the west, newly sober and inclined to adventures outside the norm, whatever that might be.
So there I was, being driven around the iconic sights of our capital by an actual bona fide senator, and what I was noticing was that Senator Dodd’s skin began pale and smooth at his brow and flowed serenely past his cheekbones, with his chin continuing unhindered by jawline through to his neck and beyond, smoothly, to the rest of him.
But while he may not have been a gorgeous man, this was a powerful man—a man used to getting and making his own way—and powerful men of any sort don’t have to be movie star handsome as long as they remain powerful. And it was clear that Chris Dodd was in for the long run.
I sat beside him in his unassuming car, enjoying the ride as the senator drove me around the capital, proudly providing me with a brief history of each formidable site we passed in the gathering twilight. We took in the Supreme Court, the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and even the U.S. Mint. So much to see! So much to learn! Especially if you didn’t know all that much to begin with. Now, I freely admit to having rather large gaps in various areas of knowledge. Hopefully less now than then, but most of my life I’ve found myself tumbling over one area or another along the way that I felt I perhaps should—but didn’t—know about, and at this point in my life government was one of them. And, as you will now see, it was a decidedly cavernous gap.
As we made our way from our tour of the monuments to our assignation at a nearby Georgetown restaurant, I turned to the senator, who I was now being encouraged to address as “Chris” (rather than, say, “ball sack” or “RuthAnn”) and said, “So, Chris, I was wondering, how many senators are there, actually?” It was probably only his intention to sleep with me that kept him from laughing mercilessly. (When I phoned my mother later that night and told her what I’d asked him, she was appropriately horrified. “Oh dear, how could you? Everyone knows there’s one per state!”)
Anyway, after having been reacquainted with what it meant to be a free American by a genuine hoping-to-get-reelected (and, in the shorter term, laid) senator, it was time to meet our fellow dinner companions—two other couples, half of one of which was also a senator. And not just any old senator, but one considered by many—and certainly by those who had no idea how many senators there even were—to be the senator. Yes, that’s right. Ted Kennedy.
Also with us—and by “us” I mean “them”—was Ted’s girlfriend of the moment, a very pretty blond girl, appropriately demure and/or well-bred, named Lacey Neuhaus. I don’t remember Senator “Call me Chris” Dodd’s having alerted me to the impressive identity of our pending dinner companion, but I have to assume that he did, as he had only just met me and so couldn’t be sure that I wouldn’t be struck dumb by the close proximity of someone of Senator Kennedy’s mien.
Completing the round six-seat table, nestled in a dimly lit private room on the second floor of this very exclusive restaurant in the virulently charming neighborhood of Georgetown, was a lovely married couple about whom all I knew at the time was that they lived next door to Ethel Kennedy’s Hickory Hill estate. Given the exclusive area of town they called home, and given the ease with which they conducted themselves in the current American royal company, I had to assume that they were extremely wealthy, intelligent, and well-connected people. I do recall that they were also charming, and not just because they appeared to find me so. (Their names have escaped the often-unlocked cage of my memory.)
Though the lines between show business celebrity and political prominence have frequently blurred, the chasm between the skill set required to distinguish oneself in Hollywood as opposed to Washington is fairly vast. Despite this, all too often the two disparate worlds of the well-kno
wn not only overlap but have been known to actually fuse, resulting in hybrids that have provided us with mutations along the lines of President Reagan and Governor Schwarzenegger.
This mutual attraction between our political leaders and our entertainers has led to numerous instances of what might be described as crossbreeding. President Kennedy’s White House dalliances with Marilyn Monroe. Elizabeth Taylor’s marriage to Virginia senator John Warner. Jane Fonda’s marriage to Tom Hayden. Debra Winger’s relationship with Nebraska governor Bob Kerrey. Linda Ronstadt’s “seeing” (and presumably hearing, speaking to and even feeling) California governor Jerry Brown. And now it was my turn to contribute to this overlap, however briefly and insignificantly.
Chris and Senator Kennedy, I quickly learned, could be snatched from us at any moment, summoned back to the Senate floor for a vote, so we were united in this limbo between food and drink and the potential pressing call to attend to the running of our country. I was impressed. So with the shadow of “the floor” looming over our little gathering, the two senators held forth, fifth, sixth, and beyond, while sipping red wine and consuming appetizers.
Senator Kennedy was particularly eloquent. I don’t recall his subject matter, but I do remember it was of a topical, political nature. Shocking, I know. It occurs to me that Nicaragua had something to do with it—that was the country Americans argued about at the time—but I can’t be certain. (Of pretty much anything lately, when it comes to memory. But there’s the swap: out goes the depression, propelled by friendly electricity, and with it go all manner of recollections that at one time might have stayed put.) But I do remember marveling at him, if that’s an appropriate expression.
What I’m trying to say is, this was surely a remarkable human. I mean, obviously you don’t get to his position in the world by accident or without merit. (At least this is what I believed before the arrival on the scene of alarming creatures such as George W. Bush.) Well-spoken, extraordinarily intelligent, poised, thought-provoking—he was a statesman in every sense of the word. I was intimidated by him, in awe of him, overwhelmed. He had something, for want of a better word, heroic about him.
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