I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting (4 page)

I
t has been exactly thirty years since Madonna exploded into the public consciousness with her debut album
Madonna,
and what great years they have been. Is there a woman out there more impressive than she is? Madonna is the top-selling female artist of all time. She has a son named Rocco. One time she was interviewed by Norman Mailer and he kept wanting to talk about feminism and its discontents and she subtly made fun of him the entire time and he did not seem to get it.

However, being Madonna is not easy. And how does she do it? She is fifty-six years old and she had to wear a crucifix on her butt at the Met Ball. Literally no one has ever done that before, and perhaps no one will ever do it again.

So, while Madonna’s actual accomplishments are too much for the modern human to even contemplate, it would be nice to have her biceps at some point in my life. In that spirit, I decide to attempt Madonna’s apparently draconian fitness and nutritional regimens. There is no time like the present to do something truly ambitious with your life.

Madonna follows a very strict macrobiotic diet that abolishes the consumption of wheat, eggs, meat, and dairy and extols the benefits of something called “sea vegetables.” You were expecting this woman to mess around? She does not mess around.

In order to follow Madonna’s actual diet as closely as possible, I buy a cookbook written by Madonna’s former private chef Mayumi Nishimura (who now is a sort of public apostle of macrobiotic living). It is called
Mayumi’s Kitchen
and details various macrobiotic meals she used to serve Madonna and Madonna’s starving passel of backup dancers. Madonna even wrote the foreword to the book. I am going to follow Mayumi’s “10 Day Detox Diet.” I hope it won’t kill me. Some of the recipes, like “Tofu Tartar Sauce” and “Sauerkraut with Thyme,” sound a little suspect. I plan to do some of the recipes out of order for this reason. I want to save the sauerkraut until the bitter end, for example.

I also purchase Madonna’s series of workout DVDs, as one cannot be the queen of pop without a punishing fitness regimen. I am a little worried, because Madge is in such good shape. Her trainer Nicole Winhoffer said she has to put her in “really odd positions” before she even feels an exercise. Madonna actually owns a series of gyms in badass places like Moscow and Mexico City. They are called Hard Candy Fitness. The DVD series is called
Addicted to Sweat
, which I am not.

If I am going to be honest, this is altogether the strictest diet veteran dieter Rebecca Harrington has undertaken. Will it be horrible? Or will it be as awesome as the time Madonna eviscerated Mike Myers in
Interview
magazine? (Madonna: “Would you ask me some questions that have a resonance to my life? This interview is mostly about what you’re interested in: toys and hockey.”) I simply don’t know.

I start the day with a nourishing portion of miso soup and brown rice. I was worried I would not have the stomach for miso soup in the morning, but I really enjoy it and it’s rather filling. It’s so filling that I skip lunch and don’t eat until dinnertime, which is a stew of barley and seaweed. It is not very good, and I sort of regret that I missed out on the soy meat and spiral rice pasta of lunch. But do you think Madonna engages in regrets of this nature? This is a woman who wrote a song where the chorus goes “I’m not your bitch / Don’t hang your shit on me.” In the background of this chorus, she whispers, “Handle it.” So, no, I don’t think she would.

In order to give your “stomach a break” from the tremendous strain of sea-vegetable barley stew, Mayumi suggests that you start off day 2 with a heaping portion of steamed greens and a Fuji apple. I am getting a little hungry now, I must admit. I am seeing the puritanical nature of this diet. A woman cannot survive on greens alone.

I keep wandering around New York City listening to “Papa Don’t Preach” to take my mind off my all-encompassing hunger, and it strikes me how revolutionary Madonna was. Did you know that Madonna dedicated that song to the pope because she hated “male authorities”? And the pope is called “
il
Papa
” in Italian! (Clever!) I mean, what pop star even cares about standing up to the pope now? Or male authorities? Pop stars today are just like, “Male authorities, how am I doing? Am I the prettiest? You tell me!” or “Where is the pope? Is he on a bus? I am going to visit him!”

Today I decide to do my first
Addicted to Sweat
DVD. I am so scared. On the outside it has a massive picture of Madonna, like Stalin in Moscow, looking beautiful and addicted to sweat. She is presiding over a tiny graphic of a woman (it’s Nicole, Madonna’s personal trainer, I find out later) doing an insane move where she holds the back of her foot near her head. When I actually put the DVD on, it does not mention Madonna, play her music, or feature her in any way. The whole workout stars Nicole in what seems to be a Russian warehouse doing incomprehensibly difficult dance moves. She keeps jumping, and there are a lot of “ball changes” going on. Madonna is only implied. Handle it!

Later that day, I make something called tofu tartar sauce, which is just tremendously disgusting and lumpier than it should be because I do not have a strainer.

One time Madonna told
Spin
’s Bob Guccione Jr. that “straight men only think about how you may dominate them in some way and make their dicks shrivel up or something.” In that aggressive yet very fun spirit, I start my day off with corn in a plum-paste sauce. It is good, actually. It gives me a sugar rush because I have not had sugar for several days, even in plum-covered-corn form.

Madonna, at least in her younger years, took time off from her rigorous dieting schedule on the weekends and ate whatever she wanted. In honor of her, I do the same, but the truth is, I am basically dying on this diet. I don’t know how Madonna lives. It is so hard to give up all those foods. Literally every food! It is not Mayumi’s fault. She is doing the best she can with tofu tartar sauce, but there is just not all that much you can do.

Back on the diet, I have to make tofu cheese for a quinoa salad I will consume in three days. Why do I have to make this cheese now? Because the tofu has to be spread with miso and kept in a sealed container for three days so that it rots a little, not unlike cheese! Spreading this tofu with miso is actually hard. I am so hungry I eat a little of the raw miso.

Later, I decide to go out to (macrobiotic!) dinner with a friend who notices I keep really cleaning my plate on this diet in a compulsive way I never do normally. “It’s like you are starving!” he says. I feel like I am starving, but I am definitely not. I am eating food. I am just hungrier than I have ever been. I mean, as old Madge once said, “How can you be
like
a virgin?” So how could it be
like
I am starving? I am not actually starving, I don’t think.

Today, I decide to have a macrobiotic dinner party. I invite all my usual friends, who seem decidedly unhappy about this new theme. I make Mayumi’s sweet-and-sour tempeh and brown rice with almonds on it, with a side of sauerkraut. Guess what? Everyone loves the sauerkraut, which I bought from a store. It is universally acclaimed as the best dish there.

It is the end of the diet! And in celebration I do my last
Addicted to Sweat
DVD, called
Jaw Breaker Chair: Dripping Wet
. I was so scared of this DVD the whole week that I actually hid it in my couch. Finally, I find it in my couch and play it. It is so hard! It involves doing push-ups with your feet on a chair.

I saved the tofu cheese for my last meal on the diet. It has been rotting in my fridge relatively unmolested for three days and now it is time for its moment in the sun. I combine the tofu cheese with quinoa to make a gross salad. The tofu cheese tastes surprisingly like tofu, yet combined with quinoa it has an odd granularity. I am supposed to finish the diet with a tofu scramble, but I can’t even do it. I have some fried chicken instead.

So, in conclusion, is Madonna’s diet hard? You bet your ass it is. Is it fun? No! Do you have to eat sauerkraut? Yes! But what I really realized is that Madonna is a feminist revolutionary and it’s hard to be on a revolutionary’s diet. She danced in a wedding dress! She called David Mamet a chauvinist! She made a sex book called
Sex
! Paul McCartney may have suspiciously brown hair, but no one says he tries too hard to be young! I guess the question is this: Did Susan B. Anthony eat sauerkraut every day? Probably she did.

I
n the thirties, famously reclusive actress Greta Garbo met self-described “doctor of natural science” (i.e., doctor of nothing) Gayelord Hauser, nutritionist to the stars. They reportedly hit it off, which is saying a lot, because Garbo had very few friends, hated going out, and once refrained from speaking a single word during a dinner with Mae West.

But Garbo and Hauser were bonded by their love of calorie restriction. Garbo had begun shedding pounds in 1924, after Louis B. Mayer told her, “In America, men don’t like fat women,” and she dieted continuously throughout her life. She particularly loved fad diets, which made her a good disciple for Hauser’s science; he had written several books about nutrition, including
New Health Cookery
and his most famous tome,
Look Younger, Live Longer
, in which he suggested eating raw yeast and drinking buttermilk as a fun treat.

Garbo was an adherent of the Hauser regimen, which emphasized the glories of vegetables, nuts, and yogurt, for many years. Some publications even speculated that the two were having an affair based around their shared love of disgusting food. They often cohabitated, and a neighbor of theirs in Palm Beach once complained of their exploits, writing, “that skinny Swedish actress and her fancy boyfriend are always running around naked in their backyard.” Though Simon Doonan described Garbo as Hauser’s “longtime beard.” Whether they had an affair or not, here was a chronic dieter who lived with her nutritionist. Garbo was living the dream! So I wanted to emulate that in some small, sad, yet thoroughly modern way for my latest experiment in historically validated strange eating habits.

After a rather exhaustive search, I find two of Hauser’s aforementioned books on the Internet and buy them. When I finally receive the books in the mail, they’re quite dusty and a little intimidating. Neither seems to have been opened since they were published in 1930 and 1951; when I crack the spine of one, I start sneezing.

The first line to
Look Younger, Live Longer
is “You are making a mistake.” Why? Because you are treating this book “like any other book” when it is in fact “a passport for a new way of living.”

Hauser believes that if you fuel your body with “wonder foods” you can live until you are one hundred. In case you are curious, wonder foods are: brewer’s yeast, wheat germ, and molasses, apparently all rich in various vitamins and minerals that will guarantee long life. These are not easy products to procure in the modern world. Edible yeast is quite hard to find (the stuff that makes bread rise is not something you can just pop in your mouth) and looks very disgusting and inedible when I buy a version you can sprinkle on cereal at a health food store next to my apartment. Apparently yeast is quite nutritious. My grandmother tells me that she had a relative who used to eat yeast all the time. “Of course she did have stomach troubles,” she tells me.

The recipes in both books look absolutely terrifying. There is one particularly horrible-looking one for a “celery loaf,” which Hauser defends as “really delicious” and consists of pureed celery, nuts, and milk. There is something about this combination that makes me involuntarily shudder. Luckily, I also find an exhaustive fan website devoted to Garbo’s eating habits. Apparently she loved dried apricots.

In one of Garbo’s first and only interviews, she told a reporter in exasperation, “I was born. I had a mother and father. I went to school. What does it matter?” It is in that spirit of Lutheran simplicity that I start my diet with one of Garbo’s favorite lunches: “a cup of chicken broth with chives, cottage cheese, half a ripe avocado with a vinegar, herb and oil dressing, a slice of pineapple and one piece of toasted and buttered dark bread.” Although this dizzying array of food does not go together in the classic sense, it is not exactly terrible. It is just plain. Terrible comes with dinner, which is based on Hauser’s meal for Garbo the first night he met her: a veggie burger “consisting of wild rice and chopped hazelnuts, mixed with an egg and fried in soybean oil,” plus a dessert of “a broiled grapefruit with [blackstrap] molasses in the center!” The veggie burgers take a long time to cook and taste predominantly of eggs. The hazelnuts are an unpleasant surprise. Broiled grapefruit tastes medicinal. I am not very hungry, just confused about why these ingredients have been paired together.

There was a period in Garbo’s life where she subsisted almost entirely on “chicken, dried apricots and whole milk, with brown beans and biscuits for snacks.” This is actually a fun day. Whole milk is delicious, and brown beans are very filling. I eat chicken I bake in the oven. I feel like I am in the army in 1942.

Garbo retired from acting at the age of thirty-six after she appeared in the notorious flop
Two-Faced Woman
. (This is a crazy movie in which Garbo plays fake twin sisters and has to dance for a very long time. She is not a good dancer.) Soon thereafter she moved to New York and did most of her grocery shopping about ten blocks away from my apartment. I could have bought apricots at the same store she did! I feel like we were practically neighbors, except she lived in a beautiful castle on the East River and I do not.

Garbo was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm in 1905. Although she got rid of her original name, she always said she “missed” the food of her native Sweden. She once brought what was probably lingonberry jam to Italy and flummoxed the Italians when she put it on her cornflakes and then poured coffee over it. In honor of Garbo’s affinity for her own country’s cultural heritage, I eat waffles with lingonberry jam on them. Then Swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam on them. It’s delicious!

Back on the Hauser regimen, I start the day with his notorious “pep breakfast” – two raw eggs beaten in orange juice. Hauser describes it as a “creamy drink fit for a King’s table.” I do not feel the same way. This is so much worse than the raw eggs in milk that I drank for the Marilyn Monroe diet. If pneumonia were a food, this is what it would taste like.

Later, I go to a bar with some friends. Garbo enjoyed the occasional drink, even in the depths of a diet. When she transitioned to the talkies, her first line on-screen was, “Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don’t be stingy, baby!” That is an awesome thing to say, but I don’t say it. I have a hamburger, a Hauser favorite, but I am still hungry. I also drink a beer.

Today is a special day. It is the day I will finally make the thing that has been ruining my life since I first heard about it: the celery loaf. Around 4:00 p.m., I psych myself up to do it. I puree the celery in my blender until it is a green mush. Then I add walnuts, parsley, onions, mushrooms, butter, eggs, and bread crumbs. The whole thing becomes an awful brown goop. I pour this into a baking dish and cover it with a lot of milk. Then I bake it. While it bakes, it smells like a rotting body. Finally, after thirty minutes, it is ready. Now, I am no baby. I have gladly eaten peanut butter with steak. I drank raw eggs in milk for several days. I even had tofu cheese.

Yet, when I open up my oven to get out my celery loaf, I start to dry-heave. It smells like I just put vomit in a baking pan and baked it for thirty minutes. I slam the oven door shut, spray the entire place with Lysol, and leave my apartment.

Today is the day of the Oscars. (Greta Garbo never won one! She just got an honorary one.) The people I invited over to watch the Oscars are eating popcorn and sushi. I am eating this weird Hauser recipe for “Swiss Steak,” which is steak you dip in bread crumbs, fry, and then boil in water. It is incredibly soggy and bland, and I am so hungry. Sometimes, I see the celery loaf peering at me from inside the oven, since I haven’t cleaned it out yet. My guests ask me what is in there. Maybe they can smell it.

In the next two days, I devote myself to “wonder foods.” I follow Hauser’s reducing plan, which has me drinking buttermilk with yeast (this tastes like yogurt mixed with something oddly breadlike and mealy), milk with molasses and yeast (this tastes like the worst milk shake of all time), and wheat germ on cereal (wheat germ tastes like quinine). For dinner, I have hamburger patties and liver. Liver, which used to disgust me, might be delicious. This diet might have broken me. It reminds me of the time Garbo just didn’t even go to her own wedding. She was probably overwhelmed.

I attempt the first diet Garbo ever tried. According to legend, Garbo ate nothing but spinach for three weeks to lose the weight Louis B. Mayer told her to lose. I am sort of relieved I don’t have to eat weird substances anymore, but I am really starving and it is extremely hard to eat only spinach when you already have been dieting for a while and there is a celery loaf that is still in your oven. But Garbo had tremendous willpower. Once on a trip to Italy, her lunch consisted only of yellow and red carrots, which she insisted had different flavors. I use that mental image as my guide, waiting until lunch to eat, when I have a big bowl of raw spinach. For dinner, I have sautéed spinach. After dinner, I take a walk. Garbo loved walks and used to walk from her apartment on Fifty-Second Street to Washington Square Park and then back. I meet my friend in the West Village. I am so hungry that I sort of cheat at her apartment and eat some dried fruit and a spoonful of gelato. But what is a spoonful of gelato when you are already in such a deep dark hole?

I am off the diet! I lost four pounds officially and look rather ill. (I am pale, and my cheeks are unusually prominent.) But I have a great respect for the grande dame of movie acting. No wonder she “want[ed] to be alone.” She had to bear the pain of such an insane eating regimen without the impertinent attention of the world.

Several days after the diet has finished and I am eating normally again, I return home to my apartment and smell something awful. It is the heart of darkness/my celery loaf, and it is still in my oven.

I forgot about it, but the time has come to confront my demon in its celery face. I take it out of the oven; the smell of rotting celery is overpowering and immediately I gag. I put it on the counter. I take a small piece, eat it, and then promptly scoop the whole loaf into a small trash bag. I need a whiskey.