Then Again - Diane Keaton [32]
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