by Diane Keaton
All my half-baked forays into the world of beauty never held a candle to the lure of food. I was a closet glutton, waiting for a future where I would get what I wanted and MORE. That future became the present when I was cast in Hair just after I’d graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse. You can imagine how wildly out of the ordinary it was to find myself gossiping with Melba Moore about whether it was true that Janice gave birth to her baby on LSD in Gerry Ragni and Jim Rado’s dressing room after the show one night. Hair offered too many options. The entire cast was given a free trip to Fire Island, with lots of peyote. If you took your clothes off during a performance, you received a fifty-dollar nightly bonus. When Hair tribe member Lamont Washington died in a fire after he fell asleep with a lit cigarette while smoking in bed, the message of peace and love seemed beside the point. There was too much infighting and confusion thrust upon wildly talented yet inexperienced young people who didn’t have the advantage of counseling, me included.
Instead of making friends, I retreated to Tad’s Steakhouse and indulged in the $1.29 steak dinner. The thing about Tad’s was, I could eat all I wanted. While my cast mates were smoking grass, I was eating Carvel soft vanilla cones in between matinees and the evening show. My big break came when Lynn Kellogg, the lead, left to do an episode of Mission: Impossible. I filled in. After the first week, Michael Butler, the producer, called to tell me I could have the part if I lost weight. At five feet seven and weighing in at 140 pounds and gaining, I hightailed it to Dr. Paul, who, for fifty dollars a shot, would inject me with vitamins—speedy vitamins. I stuck with it long enough to lose ten pounds and land the starring role of Sheila, of “Good Morning Starshine” fame. With such good news, I rented a studio walk-up on West 82nd Street and got my first phone.
The Toilet Down the Hall
Diane’s room is hard to describe. It’s long and narrow. The tiny kitchen is curtained off with burlap. Inside is a blue chipped bathtub and washbasin, a stove to cook on, and a closet for clothes. The walls are collaged. A very small refrigerator stands alone in the corner, working very hard because it needs defrosting so badly. Worst of all, she shares a toilet down the hall with three other tenants. Oh, dear. This is worrisome; so much for abandonment and discomfort.
When Mom and the kids’ visit was over, it was goodbye, Dr. Paul; I saved an extra 150 dollars a week and said hello to ten pounds. What if Michael Butler came to the show? What if he saw I’d gained the weight back? What if I got fired? One night after several charbroiled steaks at Tad’s, I overheard tribe member Shelley Plimpton talking about someone she knew who deliberately regurgitated in order to stay thin. How disgusting. How awful. How interesting. I have no memory of the first time I tried to throw up. I do remember taking a day here, a day there, to explore the effects. In no time at all I was committed to three unordinary meals a day. Breakfast took an hour; lunch two; dinner three, which added up to a time-consuming six hours a day spent processing food.
It was Sunday brunch at Grossingers seven days a week. It was breakfast with a dozen buttered corn muffins dipped in Chock Full o’Nuts coffee, plus three orders of fried eggs over hard with bacon, and a side of pancakes topped off with four glasses of chocolate milk. It was lunch to go, including three buttered steaks with salty charbroiled fat on the side, two and a half baked potatoes with sour cream and chives, a black-and-white malted with hot apple pie plus two chocolate sundaes with extra nuts from Schrafft’s. Dinner began with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, several orders of french fries with blue cheese and catsup, and a couple of TV dinners. For dessert it was chocolate-covered almonds with a quart-size bottle of 7Up, a pound of See’s Candies peanut brittle sent from home, M&Ms washed down with mango juice on ice, one Sara Lee pound cake, and three Marie Callender’s frozen banana-cream pies. I learned to throw up so fast it had no effect. At first there was no problem with vomiting or its aftermath. I didn’t need help stimulating the gag reflex. I had it under control. No fuss, no muss.
It was always the same: After the first too-good-to-be-true bites turned into the third and fourth, adjustments had to be made to re-create the original taste. When that didn’t work, the menu reverted to reliable standbys like toasted white bread with butter and strawberry jam. When that took a dive, there was another switch, and another and another. The more I ate, the more disenchanted I was with the results. It didn’t matter, because the impact of the first few bites triumphed over all setbacks.
My new life was labor intensive. Think of hauling all that food in all those brown paper bags up a flight of stairs and into the darkness of my room on West 82nd Street. Think of the tiny un-defrosted freezer/refrigerator and the yellowing cabinets slid open to an ever-changing array of canned goods and baked items. Think of me throwing my body into convulsions three times a day with a box of baking soda standing on the floor next to the toilet. It was as numbing as it was compulsive.
After six months of knocking off twenty thousand calories a day, I became hypoglycemic. I had heartburn, indigestion, irregular periods, and low blood pressure. I was dogged by sore throats. All of which created unwanted activity—namely, calls to doctors and trips to the pharmacy for over-the-counter Ex-Lax. Dr. Stanley Darrow, my dentist, found twenty-six cavities in one visit. Soon my front teeth had to be capped. More work. More pain. But worse were the psychological effects. I became increasingly isolated. I didn’t think about friendships. I didn’t acknowledge the shame. I was busy ignoring reality. I had work to do.
Woody Allen and I met in the fall of 1968 at the Broadhurst Theatre while I was auditioning for Play It Again, Sam. We read together. He was funny but not intimidating. I got the part, or, as Woody teased me and I used to say, “I created the role of Linda Christie.” Play It Again, Sam was a showcase for Woody’s talents. My husband, Dick Christie, played by Tony Roberts, and I took Allan Felix, played by Woody, under our wing. After he was dumped by his wife, we encouraged him to date. Unbeknownst to us, he was also getting help from Humphrey Bogart, who appeared to him during failed dating attempts with gorgeous women. Allan and Linda, both insecure, fell for each other.
During rehearsal, I fell for Allan as scripted but for Woody as well. How could I not? I was in love with him before I knew him. He was Woody Allen. Our entire family used to gather around the TV set and watch him on Johnny Carson. He was so hip, with his thick glasses and cool suits. But it was his manner that got me, his way of gesturing, his hands, his coughing and looking down in a self-deprecating way while he told jokes like “I couldn’t get a date for New Year’s Eve so I went home and I jumped naked into a vat of Roosevelt dimes.” Or “I’d rather be with a beautiful woman than anything else except my stamp collection.” Things like that. He was even better-looking in real life. He had a great body, and he was physically very graceful.
As in the play, we became friends. I was a good audience. I laughed in between the jokes. I think he liked that, even though he would always remind me I wouldn’t know a joke if it hit me in the face. But I knew behavior, and his behavior was way more interesting to me than jokes could ever be. Woody got used to me. He couldn’t help himself; he loved neurotic girls.
While I continued to try to convince him that I was more than a goofy sidekick, many of our conversations—even those centered on my favorite subject, me—were distracting. I was all too often pulled away by a commitment that overshadowed my crush on Woody Allen. For instance, let’s say he wanted to see a three o’clock screening of The Sorrow and the Pity at 59th and Third. How could it work? There was no time to cash my paycheck and get to Woolworth’s on 86th before it closed at seven P.M. I was running out of Kraft caramels, Boston baked beans, and bubble-gum cigars in assorted flavors. Besides, the 59th Street theater was too far away for us to have a chance to stop at Gristedes. It’s pathetic that the demands of bulimia outshone the power of my desire for Woody, but they did.
On the surface, all was going well. Woody slowly began to see me as something more than a gal pal. Our relationship wasn�
��t off and on, but it wasn’t exactly committed either. Even then Woody was the most disciplined, hardworking, dedicated, organized, and—ironically—resilient person I’d ever met. On a daily basis, he practiced his clarinet, appeared in the play, read all the works of Tolstoy, and wrote new jokes for appearances in Vegas at Caesars or in Reno, where Frank Sinatra Jr. opened for Sir Woody of Allen at the medieval-themed Cal Neva Hotel. He was always busy, so nothing much was required of me. I moved a few things into his new penthouse apartment, but I kept my studio on 82nd. When it got broken into, the police advised me to put bars on the windows. I didn’t listen. What did I care? The apartment was there for one thing only, to implement my routine.
Experts
A century ago, women struggled with mental problems like hysteria and anxiety, not bingeing. Today, mental-health experts believe bulimia is related to social class, income, education, the occupation of parents, and an introverted personality, which causes high rates of phobias, alcoholism, anxiety disorders, and panic attacks. Bulimic women differ from depressed women because they’re more likely to be overweight and to have overweight parents. Apparently, parents with high expectations create an atmosphere that fosters eating disorders. Lack of parental affection is one of the main reasons bulimics soothe themselves with food.
Spare me. I can’t stand the ease with which experts blame parents, especially mothers, for their teenage daughters’, slash soon to be young adults’, slash middle-aged women’s, slash angry old ladies’ food addictions. Come on. I’m sorry, but my mother was nothing if not affectionate. And, by the way, dazed is the word I would use to describe the effects of indulging in an eating disorder. The facts are the facts, but the reason one becomes bulimic is more complex than overweight mothers, which Dorothy was not.
Mom made every effort, particularly in the early days, to present a cheery worldview. She gave me everything I wanted—at least, as much as she could—but years of keeping things bottled up had their effect. Before I left home, the undertones in her silence were obvious. I must have been fourteen the first time I heard Mom and Dad fighting behind the closed door to their bedroom. I remember rushing to Randy’s room, where I caught him stuffing Playboy pictures of bare-breasted women under his bed. Panicked, I asked him if he heard Mom and Dad yelling about getting a divorce. Did he? Did he? His response was to run away, leaving me with their not-so-muffled screams. Did this incident make me more susceptible to fulfilling a future of MORE, so much MORE? I don’t know. Even if, early on, Mother had had the privilege of participating in the revelations of the analyst’s couch, would my insatiable hunger have taken a backseat to a less pathological method of satisfying my needs? It’s hard to say.
October 31, 2009, would have been her eighty-eighth birthday. Last Halloween she’d been dead for six weeks. This year it’s been four hundred and nine days and nights without my mother. I thought time was supposed to heal all wounds. As I wait for Dexter to come out of swim practice, in my Tahoe Hybrid parked at the top of Santa Monica City College, overlooking the local graveyard, I can still see Daphne Merkin’s plaintive face in the Polo Lounge this morning, whispering, “Diane, don’t you think they’ll come back to us? Don’t you think they’re coming back, our mothers?” Daphne … I wish. I wish they would. All of them. All the mothers.
Packing It In
Woody didn’t have a clue what I was up to in the privacy of his bathrooms. He did marvel at my remarkable appetite, saying I could really “pack it in.” Ever vigilant and always on the lookout, I made sure he never caught me. This is not to say that Woody was oblivious to my problems. He knew how insecure I was. It must have been annoying as hell to be the brunt of my constant need for support and encouragement. After Play it Again, Sam closed, I couldn’t get a job. It seemed like every audition was lost to either Blythe Danner or Jill Clayburgh, who weren’t “too nutty.” A year came and went without work. When I landed a commercial for Hour After Hour deodorant, where I wore a tracksuit and bit my husband’s ear, saying, “Hour After Hour … it won’t wear out before the day is over,” I hit bottom. The bingeing was off the charts. What would Woody think if he knew my secret? Why couldn’t I get a job? I kept fixating over something Lee Ann Fahey, another aspiring actress, said about “making it” before you’re twenty-five. I was twenty-five. What was I going to do? It wasn’t enough to be Woody’s washed-out Ali MacGraw girlfriend. What was going to happen? Should I quit? Woody suggested I see an analyst named Felicia Lydia Landau.
Monday through Friday I walked up Fifth Avenue to 94th and Madison; got on the elevator of the nondescript red brick building; pressed the button to the sixth floor; made my exit, walked down the narrow hallway, and pushed the buzzer outside Dr. Landau’s office. When she opened the door, I would say hello and hit the couch. Once on my back, with the ceiling as my horizon, I was ready to map out the history of my neurosis. We couldn’t have been a more unlikely pair—me, the firstborn daughter of a sunny-looking family from Southern California; she, a Jew from Poland who escaped on the eve of Hitler’s invasion.
After another year of throwing up, intermittent joblessness, and learning how to talk to the ceiling with my back on a couch, I finally blurted out, “I stick my finger down my throat three times a day and throw up. I’ve been throwing up for years. I’m bulimic. Okay? I have no intention of stopping. Ever. Why would I? I don’t want to. Get it? I’m not stopping. That’s it. End of discussion. And nothing you say will ever convince me to change. I hope we’re clear on this. We’re clear, Dr. Landau, right? Right! Okay!!”
Six months later I stopped. One morning I went to the freezer and didn’t open a half gallon of rocky road ice cream. I don’t know why. I know one thing though: All those disjointed words and half sentences, all those complaining, awkward phrases shaping incomplete monologues blurted out to a sixty-five-year-old woman smoking a cigarette for fifty minutes five times a week, made the difference. It was the talking cure; the talking cure that gave me a way out of addiction; the damn talking cure.
Secrets
I used to think of myself as an attractive victim, a sort of sweet, misunderstood casualty. No one mistook me for the fat woman in the freak show. But I was. And I got away with it. I became a master, as well as a fraud. My secret, with all the little secrets it spawned, encouraged a broad spectrum of subterfuge. I lied to myself, and I kept lying. I never owned up to the truth of bulimia’s predatory nature. Yet I gave five years of my life to a ravenous hunger that had to be filled at any expense. I lived under the shadow of isolation in a self-made prison of secrets and lies.
In a culture where confession is a means to broader economic horizons, coming clean at such a late date is not only suspect but anticlimactic. I wish I’d been brave enough to tell Mom before she became entrenched in the uncertainty of Alzheimer’s. I told my sisters recently. Dorrie was sympathetic, and Robin remembered I ate a lot of hamburgers back in the day, but neither had much curiosity. Who cares thirty years after the fact? Nobody, really. The thought of becoming number—what?—seventy-five on a “Famous Bulimics” list is like aspiring to footnote status in a file labeled “Eating Disorders.” Why bother? I guess partly because confession is at the very least an admission of guilt and partly because there’s a humbling aspect to recognizing footnote status. I know “coming clean” is not going to deliver the flattering picture I prefer to roll out with great effort year after year. I don’t expect sympathy. I don’t expect commiseration. I don’t expect to be understood. What I expect is to be released from the burden of hiding.
Maybe
The miracle of getting over bulimia is almost as strange as being its slave. Nothing remains of my former craving. If anything, I have a borderline mistrust for the whole process of consumption. I haven’t touched meat in twenty-five years. I’m not remotely drawn to the preparation of food. I’m not hungry. I’ve had it all, and I’ve had enough. When I was a bulimic, constantly balancing the extremes of impulsivity and control was sort of like performing. Afte
r I stopped throwing up, acting—my lifelong chosen profession—came back into the picture. I started to study with Marilyn Fried, who helped me rediscover the world of expressed feelings. My commitment became more intense than it was when I was too young and too fucked up to take advantage of the opportunity I was given at the Neighborhood Playhouse.
Sandy Meisner used to make arcane pronouncements about how much better our acting would be when we got older and had more experience. Now that I’m the age he was when he stressed the necessity of being more mature in order to become a fully realized actor, now that life has become so much more engaging, if unfathomable, it’s hard to believe the accumulated knowledge I’m ready to give isn’t what audiences are always interested in. I guess life is always throwing curveballs. Like bulimia, acting is a paradox. Unlike bulimia, acting is a wild ride, shared in the company of other actors. Even though “living truthfully in the given imaginary moment” is not always what you had in mind, it’s always a great adventure.
These days I’m trying to learn to listen with the hunger I once reserved for my obsession. The talking cure saved me, it’s true, but listening may help me become part of a community. Maybe becoming one of many by doing something as simple as adding my name to a list of bulimics—famous, not so famous, and not famous at all—will give me the courage to cross a threshold that could transform me into the kind of Atticus Finch–type person I always wished I could be. Maybe. Anything’s better than the self-imposed loneliness I endured in secret.