Getting Waisted (20 page)

My mother was buried with all the pomp and circumstance befitting the Austro-Hungarian Queen Elizabeth. Everyone she ever played cards with was there. Every woman for whom she had sewn beads on bustles came to pay their respects. Her family of seamstresses, her hairdresser, and even Rose, from whom she had bought her bread, came. My mother, unlike my father, had a rich and full life. Speeches were made, anecdotes were shared, but I couldn’t say a word. I had just found my mother and now I had lost her.

I left before her casket was lowered into the ground. I looked back and saw a sea of family and friends who were genuinely bereft at her passing. I felt proud to be her daughter.

19

A Fat Girl
in Thinland

Diet #22
The Russian Air Force Diet

Cost
1,757.46 rubles or $60.00 per week

Weight loss
14 pounds

Weight gained
Too much

With both my parents gone,
I was not only grieving but I was also out in left field. I loved my mother and father and it was clear that they had loved me, but I was so used to my role as their go-between that, with their absence, I felt cast adrift. The phone didn’t ring at all hours with my mother’s amped-up rhetoric that she was going to kill my father. She got her wish but my father also got his. It was much like the oft-quoted exchange at a dinner party between the very tart-tongued Lady Astor and Winston Churchill, whom she loathed:

“Winston, if I were your wife, I’d put poison in your coffee.”

“Nancy,” Churchill replied to the acid-tongued woman, “If I were your husband, I’d drink it.”

I was adjusting to married life and I had very little to complain about. Gilles was not a saint but he did come very close. He cooked, he brought me flowers, and he was teaching me to believe in myself. That was his most difficult challenge; shortcomings were my specialty and I was pretty sure no one would ever demand their money back for false advertising. I kept waiting for the gift wrap to crumble away from Gilles, exposing his true mean and dark underbelly. He didn’t have one. I wasn’t used to smooth sailing, so I looked for ways to stir up trouble. I would ambush Gilles out of nowhere and over nothing, like demanding to know how he could say he was a Catholic when he never went to church, believed in the right to choose, and didn’t believe in Hell. And yet he was bizarrely protective of the Pope. His response to that was simple; it was because he was a Catholic. I challenged him again, accusing him of keeping the door open just in case when he got old and nervous about dying, the club may not let him back in. We went in circles ’til he would declare me the winner, just so we could get back to our far more harmonious ways.

Gilles was a true Renaissance man. He could create and re-create almost anything anyone fancied. He was a phenomenal designer of everything from dresses to drapes and so much more. He could look at anything that someone else had sewn or built and almost immediately know how it was constructed. He would have been an amazing engineer. One minute he’d be salvaging some castaway door and the next it would be sitting in a designer showroom as a much-coveted table, but before you could catch your breath he’d be constructing a replica of an Ottoman-era chair. Amongst our friends, he was nicknamed “MacGyver” for his innate ability to problem-solve. He was not only good with his hands but also with his voice. He carved out a profitable career as the go-to guy for dubbing English films into French. His talents were much in demand.

My performing career had become my true passion and I loved every minute of this unexpected turn. I was hosting a new weekly TV show in which I profiled events happening in and around Toronto. On one episode I was to showcase a comedy club and my producer suggested it would be fun if I were to do a stand-up routine as part of the show. I had no idea how one went about doing stand-up comedy. I was barely an actress and now I was being asked to leap into another alien world. I was terrified. I took to my bed surrounded by balled up wads of paper from endless failed attempts at writing something coherent let alone funny. As my performance night got closer, I got more and more tense and more and more scared. I was almost buried alive under the reams of bad jokes. I finally committed to memory a piece I had written about how different nationalities respond to sex. It was a world tour where some cultures took to it like rabbits, others with acrobatics, and then there were the Brits who preferred to close their eyes, carry on, and hope it would be over before the tea bell rang. I had no idea if it would work but there was no turning back now and I took it all out on Gilles. I was snappish, which only made him and me feel worse. The night came and I felt like I was walking to my execution as I mounted the stage. The bright lights shone in my face and I couldn’t see anyone or anything. My knees quaked and I said a prayer. That’s all I remember from that moment until I heard screaming fits of laughter and thunderous applause.

Ten minutes after I walked off the stage to hugs and congratulations, two producers who had been sitting in the audience offered me a job writing for a variety show in Los Angeles. At first I thought it was a joke that someone must be playing on me—but it wasn’t.

For me the timing was perfect. With the death of my parents, I had no tether; I had shuttered the door on my mother’s boutique after coming to understand that without my mother’s brilliant dressmaking talents, her clients would move on and I didn’t want the responsibility of rebuilding the business. My heart just wasn’t in it anymore. The TV show only required me once a week and I was at loose ends, with too much time on my hands—and too much food in close range. I didn’t want Gilles to have to give up his thriving and artistic career, but in classic Gilles fashion, he believed he could ply his trade anywhere and there would always be open arms waiting to embrace him. I was gob-smacked by his confidence and more than a little envious of it.

When we arrived in California, we moved into Beverly Hills, where we acquired, through a friend, a beautiful sublet apartment we could actually afford. It was not in
the
Beverly Hills, but in the “flats,” as everyone who lived in the Hills called them, south of Santa Monica Boulevard, which literally used to have tracks running through them. They were a grand experiment when a vast trolley system called the Pacific Electric “Red Cars” used to run all the way to the beach. Legend has it that the car companies bought the whole thing and dismantled them.

The flats were lovely and filled with million-dollar, red-tiled haciendas on pretty tree-lined streets. They were all considered tear-downs to those
north
of the Boulevard, where the houses had pedigrees and big fat gates and all of the newest owners had a story of a former star or director who had lived there before them: “Lucille Ball used to live here, but the only thing we kept was the upstairs bathroom, which we use as a powder room. Isn’t it amazing that anyone thought of this as anything more than a closet, especially a big star like Lucy? Shocking.”
To live in the
real
Beverly Hills, the houses must come with Hollywood lore. “When Tom was married to Mimi, he lived in the flats, but when he was married to Nicole, he lived up here.”
This was all before the Katie years, when he lived in a compound near their BFF’s, The Beckham’s.

The question most often asked from a true Beverly Hillser upon being introduced was, “So tell me, are you north or south of the Boulevard? As soon as
south
fell from my lips, the temperature dropped, becoming downright icy. But then I would drop the big one, that we lived in a duplex with three bedrooms and three bathrooms, and we were
renters
. It got worse; we had a two-car garage but we had only one car, and it wasn’t a Mercedes or a Beemer, just a car, something nondescript and American.
Eeeew!
With this horrific revelation the frost was instantly gone, replaced by icebergs, and the big-bucks, pouf-headed blondes moved on. We were DOA on so many counts. We didn’t belong to a synagogue, a church, a golf club, or a country club, nor did we shop at the
way-more-than-retail,
Gelson’s food-shopping experience. We shopped at normal grocery stores and we always bought the specials and we cooked the food ourselves. There was no maid, no takeout five times a week, just us in the kitchen with pots and oven mitts. Living in Beverly Hills without famous movie star parents or their lawyers as siblings, without a trust fund, or a tattooed and wrinkled rock-star husband, or seriously lipo’d legs and majorly enhanced breasts rendered me socially closer to the endless parade of waxers, weavers, tutors, and trainers that came and went.

Nothing could have prepared me for the strange and beautifully manicured planet known as Beverly Hills, where fat is considered a disease worse than cancer. It is the gathering place for the genetically gifted; a place filled with women who won’t be happy until they again reach their original weight—six and a quarter pounds. This is the place that invented size zero. What was I thinking? I was a Martian in comparison to these dames. I hated my floppy jaw and my wattle. It quivered. My arms flapped in the breeze and I refused to look any further down to see the other horrors. I understood that I was a large woman in any town, any city, perhaps, even on every planet, but this is the one I was on.

If money was to be one’s report card, in the Hills of Beverly, it was the number one way to be awarded a 4.0. Fame only came in at a 3.8. I was probably pulling in no better than about a 1.3. How was I going to survive? The way I looked at it, I was going to be on life support fiscally and socially unless I could crack the code in a whole new way. I knew I had to take stock of my assets as well as my liabilities, some of which I had already come clean about. I wasn’t planning on being rendered unworthy just because someone forgot to leave me a whopping inheritance, or any kind of inheritance, for that matter. Instead I was left a whopping debt portfolio from my mother’s overextended business. The irony of being a fancy-ass couturier with a fancy clientele meant the outlay of running her labor-intensive boutique often meant drowning in debt. And dumb blonde that I was, I sabotaged my future by marrying for love and not for money. My sweet husband was an artist not a businessman. After paying off the creditors there was nothing left. My liabilities seemed to far outweigh my assets. I was fat, poor-ish, unconnected, only half-Jewish, and married to a lovely man who was no shark, scion, or rock star.

What was worse, being fat or poor in Beverly Hills? It was a toss-up. Both were considered criminal. Poverty was shocking and alien. There wasn’t any. A Beverly Hillser’s idea of poor was having only seven pair of Maude Frizon’s or only one Chrysler convertible, but I concluded being fat was definitely worse. It smacked of failure on so many fronts. I knew I needed to find a way to gain acceptance. So, if I wasn’t going to be able to buy my way in, or bribe anyone, nor offer up any famous parents or famous friends who could open those massive triple-locked Spanish fortress doors behind the many-spiked wrought iron gates, I would need to think of something. My strategy was bold—but it was all I could come up with—I’d have to “embrace” my own failings, make them funny, unthreatening, and hope for the best. Yikes!