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Unbearable Lightness

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ISBN 978-1-4391-7778-5

ISBN 978-1-4391-7780-8 (ebook)

To Ellen, for showing me what beauty is

Unbearable Lightness

PROLOGUE

HE DOESN’T WAIT until I’m awake. He comes into my unconscious to find me, to pull me out. He seizes my logical mind and disables it with fear. I awake already panic-stricken, afraid I won’t answer the voice correctly, the loud, clear voice that reverberates in my head like an alarm that can’t be turned off.

What did you eat last night?

Since we first met when I was twelve he’s been with me, at me, barking orders. A drill sergeant of a voice that is pushing me forward, marching ahead, keeping time. When the voice isn’t giving orders, it’s counting. Like a metronome, it is predictable. I can hear the tick of another missed beat and in the silence between beats I anxiously await the next tick; like the constant noise of an intermittently dripping faucet, it keeps counting in the silences when I want to be still. It tells me to never miss a beat. It tells me that I will get fat again if I do.

The voice and the ticks are always very loud in the darkness of the early morning. The silences that I can’t fill with answers are even louder. God, what did I eat? Why can’t I remember?

I breathe deeply in an attempt to calm my heartbeat back to its resting pulse. As I do, my nostrils are filled with stale cigarette smoke that hung around from the night before like a party guest who’d passed out on the living room sofa after everybody else went home. The digital clock reads 4:06, nine minutes before my alarm was set to wake me. I need to use the restroom, but I can’t get out of bed until I can remember what I ate.

My pupils dilate to adjust to the darkness as if searching for an answer in my bedroom. It’s not coming. The fact that it’s not coming makes me afraid. As I search for the answer, I perform my routine check. Breasts, ribs, stomach, hip bones. I grab roughly at these parts of my body to make sure everything is as I left it, a defensive measure, readying myself for the possible attack from my panic-addled brain. At least I slept. The last few nights I’ve been too empty and restless, too flighty—like I need to be weighted to my bed and held down before I can surrender to sleep. I’ve been told that sleep is good for weight loss. It recalibrates your metabolism and shrinks your fat cells. But why it would be better than moving my legs all night as if I were swimming breaststroke I don’t really know. Actually, now that I think about it, it must be bullshit. Swimming like someone is chasing me would have to burn more calories than lying motionless like a fat, lazy person. I wonder how long I’ve been that way. Motionless. I wonder if that will affect my weight loss today.

I feel my heartbeat, one, two, three—it’s quickening. I start breathing deeply to stop from panicking, IN one two, OUT three four . . .

Start counting

10 =

100

I start over. I need to factor in the calories burned. Yesterday I got out of bed and walked directly to the treadmill and ran at 7.0 for 60 minutes for a total of negative 600 calories. I ate 60 calories of oatmeal with Splenda and butter spray and black coffee with one vanilla-flavored tablet. I didn’t eat anything at all at work. And at lunch I walked on the treadmill in my dressing room for the hour. Shit. I had only walked. The fan I had rigged on the treadmill to blow air directly into my face so my makeup wouldn’t be ruined had broken. That’s not true, actually. Because I’m so lazy and disorganized, I’d allowed the battery to run down so the plastic blades spun at the speed of a seaside Ferris wheel. I need that fan because my makeup artist is holding me on virtual probation at work. While I am able to calm down the flyaway hairs that spring up on my head after a rigorous workout, the mascara residue that deposits under my eyes tells the story of my activities during my lunch break. She had asked me to stop working out at lunch. I like Sarah and I don’t want to make her job more difficult, but quitting my lunchtime workout isn’t an option. So I bought a fan and some rope and put together a rig that, when powered by fully charged batteries, simulates a head-on gale-force wind and keeps me out of trouble.

As I sit up in bed staring into the darkness, my feet making small circles to start my daily calorie burn, I feel depressed and defeated. I know what I ate last night. I know what I did. All of my hard work has been undone. And I’m the one who undid it. I start moving my fingers and thumbs to relieve the anxiety of not beginning my morning workout because I’m stuck here again having to answer the voice in my head.

It’s time to face last night. It was yogurt night, when I get my yogurt ready for the week. It’s a dangerous night because there’s always a chance of disaster when I allow myself to handle a lot of food at one time. But I had no indication that I was going to be in danger. I had eaten my 60-calorie portion of tuna normally, using chopsticks and allowing each bite of canned fish to be only the height and width of the tips of the chopsticks themselves. After dinner, I smoked cigarettes to allow myself the time I needed to digest the tuna properly and to feel the sensation of fullness. I went to the kitchen feeling no anxiety as I took out the tools I needed to perform the weekly operation: the kitchen scale, eight small plastic containers, one blue mixing bowl, Splenda, my measuring spoon, and my fork. I took the plain yogurt out of the fridge and, using the kitchen scale, divided it among the plastic containers adding one half teaspoon of Splenda to each portion. When I was satisfied that each portion weighed exactly two ounces, I then strategically hid the containers in the top section of the freezer behind ice-crusted plastic bags of old frozen vegetables so the yogurt wouldn’t be the first thing I saw when I opened the freezer door.

Nothing abnormal so far.

With that, I went back to the sofa and allowed some time to pass. I knew that the thirty minutes it takes for the yogurt to reach the perfect consistency of a Dairy Queen wasn’t up, and that checking in on it was an abnormality, but that’s exactly what I did. I walked into the kitchen, I opened the freezer, and I looked at it. And I didn’t just look at the portion I was supposed to eat. I looked at all of it.

I slammed the freezer door shut and went back to the living room. I sat on the dark green vinyl sofa facing the kitchen and smoked four cigarettes in a row to try to take away the urge for that icy-cold sweetness, because only when I stopped wanting it would I allow myself to have it. I didn’t take my eyes off the freezer the whole time I sat smoking, just in case my mind had tricked me into thinking I was smoking when I was actually at that freezer bingeing. Staring at the door was the only way I could be certain that I wasn’t opening it. By now the thirty minutes had definitely passed and it was time to eat my portion. I knew the best thing for me in that moment would be to abstain altogether, because eating one portion was the equivalent of an alcoholic being challenged to have one drink. But my overriding fear was that the pendulum would swing to the other extreme if I skipped a night. I’ve learned that overindulging the next day to make up for the 100 calories in the “minus” column from the day before is a certainty.

I took out my one allotted portion at 8:05 and mashed it with a fork until it reached the perfect consistency. But instead of sitting on the sofa savoring every taste in my white bowl with green flowers, using the fork to bring it to my mouth, I ate the yogurt from the plastic container over the kitchen sink with a teaspoon. I ate it fast. The deviation from the routine, the substitution of the tools, the speediness with which I ate silenced the drill sergeant and created an opening that invited in the thoughts I’m most afraid of—thoughts created by an evil force disguising itself as logic, poised to manipulate me with common sense. Reward yourself. You ate nothing at lunch. Normal people eat four times this amount and still lose weight. It’s only yogurt. Do it. You deserve it.

Before I knew it, I was on the kitchen floor cradling the plastic Tupperware containing Tuesday’s portion in the palm of my left hand, my right hand thumb and index finger stabbing into the icy crust. I ran my numb, yogurt-covered fingers across my lips and sucked them clean before diving into the container for more. As my fingers traveled back and forth from the container to my mouth, I didn’t have a thought in my head. The repetition of the action lulled the relentless chatter into quiet meditation. I didn’t want this trancelike state to end, and so when the first container was done, I got up off the floor and grabbed Wednesday’s yogurt before my brain could process that it was still only Monday. By the time I came back to my senses, I had eaten six ounces of yogurt.

The alarm on my bedside table starts beeping. It’s 4:15 a.m. It’s time for my morning workout. I have exactly one hour to run and do sit-ups and leg lifts before I get in the car to drive forty-five minutes to the set for my 6:00 a.m. makeup call. I don’t have any dialogue today. I just need to stand around with the supercilious smirk of a slick, high-powered attorney while Ally McBeal runs around me in circles, working herself into a lather of nerves. But even if I’d had actual acting to think about, my only goal today is to be comfortable in my wardrobe. God, I feel like shit. No matter how hard I run this morning, nothing can take away the damage done. As I slip out of bed and do deep lunges across the floor to the bathroom, I promise myself to cut my calorie intake in half to 150 for the day and to take twenty laxatives. That should do something to help. But it’s not the weight gain from the six ounces of yogurt that worries me. It’s the loss of self-control. It’s the fear that maybe I’ve lost it for good. I start sobbing now as I lunge my way across the floor and I wonder how many calories I’m burning by sobbing. Sobbing and lunging—it’s got to be at least 30 calories. It crosses my mind to vocalize my thoughts of self-loathing, because speaking the thoughts that fuel the sobs would have to burn more calories than just thinking the thoughts and so I say, “You’re nothing. You’re average. You’re an ordinary, average, fat piece of shit. You have no self-control. You’re a stupid, fat, disgusting dyke. You ugly, stupid, bitch!” As I reach the bathroom and wipe away the last of my tears, I’m alarmed by the silence; the voice has stopped.

When it’s quiet in my head like this, that’s when the voice doesn’t need to tell me how pathetic I am. I know it in the deepest part of me. When it’s quiet like this, that’s when I truly hate myself.

PART ONE

MY HUSBAND left me.

Two months ago, he just left. He had gathered evidence during the trial known as couples’ therapy (it was revealed to me during those sessions that not every woman’s idea of a fun night out was making out with another woman on a dance floor; I was shocked), judged me an unfit partner, and handed down to me the sentence of complete sexual confusion to be served in isolation. I watched breathlessly as he reversed out of our driveway in his old VW van packed with souvenirs of our life together: the van that had taken me camping along the California coastline, that had driven me to Stockton to get my Maltese puppy, Bean, and that had waited patiently for me outside casting offices in LA. As he cranked the gearshift into first and took off sputtering down the street, I ran after him with childlike desperation, panicked that my secret, true nature had driven him away. And with it, the comfort and ease of a normal life.

In a way, I loved him. But I loved the roles that we both played a lot more. I had assigned him the role of my protector. He was the shield that protected me from the harsh film industry and the shield the prevented me from having to face my real desires. Standing by his side in the role of his wife, I could run away from myself. But as his van drove away from our California bungalow with its white picket fence, it became clearer with the increasing distance between me and the back of that van that I was, for the first time in my life, free to explore those real desires. The shield had been ripped from me, and standing in the middle of a suburban street in Santa Monica with new skin and gasping for air, I realized that as his van turned the corner, so would I. It was time to face the fact that I was gay.

I had met my husband Mel on the set of my first American movie, The Woman in the Moon, three years earlier. During the arduous filming schedule of the lackluster indie movie, which had brought me from Australia to the Arizona desert, I entertained myself by creating a contest between him and a girl grip whose name I forget now, mentally listing the pros and cons of each of the two contestants to determine who was going to be my sexual partner. The unwitting contestants both had soft lips and were interesting choices for me. Mel was my onscreen lover and his rival was part of the camera crew that captured our passion on film. Of these two people I had met and made out with, Mel was the winner. The fact that I chose him over the girl grip was surprising to me because, although I didn’t show up to the movie a full-fledged lesbian, I was definitely heading in that direction. During my one year of law school prior to this movie, I’d had an entanglement with a very disturbed but brilliant girl that I guess you could call “romantic” if it hadn’t been so clumsy. By this point, I knew that the thought of being with a woman was exciting and liberating, and the thought of being with a man was depressing and stifling. In my mind, being with a woman was like being with your best friend, forever young, whereas being with a man felt like I would be trapped in adolescence with acne and a bad attitude. So it was surprising to me when I felt a rush of sexual attraction to Mel. (It was surprising to him, too, when I showed my attraction by breaking into his Holiday Inn hotel room, pummeling his chest and face and stomach while yelling “I’m gay,” and then having sex with him.) And not only was I attracted to him, I could actually imagine living with him and his black Lab, Shadow, in LA. The mere thought that maybe I was capable of living a “normal” life with a man made me so excited that at the airport lounge waiting for my connector flight that would take me to Sydney, Australia, via Los Angeles, I drew up another list of pros and cons, this time for getting off the plane in LA.

Pros: 1. Acting. 2. Mel.

Cons:

Almost immediately after arriving in LA, however, the rush of sexual attraction evaporated into the thin air of my wishful thinking. By the end of our first year together, despite my desire to be attracted to him, my latent fear of my real sexuality was simmering and about to boil. I was almost positive I was gay. So I married him. The fact that I got shingles the minute we returned from city hall didn’t deter me from my quest to appear normal, and so my husband and I attempted a happily married life in an apartment complex in Santa Monica that had closely resembled the television show Melrose Place.

There was a girl who lived next door. She introduced herself to me as Kali, “K-A-L-I but pronounced Collie, like the dog. She was the goddess of the destruction of illusion.” Kali. A quick-witted artist with elegant tattoos and a killer vocab that made you feel like carrying a notepad so you could impress your less cool friends with what you’d learned. Every night she’d be sprawled on the floor of her studio apartment sketching voluptuous figures in charcoal, her thick burgundy hair spilling onto the paper. Every night I’d excuse myself from watching TV with my husband to go outside to smoke. I’d find myself positioning the plastic lawn chair to line up with the one-inch crack where her window treatments didn’t quite stretch all the way to the wooden frame so I could watch her. I would smoke and fantasize about being in there with her, but due to my being married and the fact she was straight and only flirted with me for sport, all we ever had together was a Vita and Virginia–type romance—a conservative exploration of hypothetical love in handwritten notes. She would often draw sketches of me and slide them underneath our door. Kali’s drawings were so precious to me that I locked them away in the heart-shaped box my husband had given me one Valentine’s Day. This was a contentious issue between Mel and me, which culminated in him demanding that I throw them away in the kitchen trash can while he watched. A seemingly endless succession of thick, wet tears dripped into my lap as potato peels slowly covered ink renditions of my face, my arms, my legs.

During my evening ritual of smoking outside and watching her, I was in heaven. Until invariably I was dragged back to earth forty minutes later by a loud, deep voice asking, “Are you smoking another cigarette?” Mel and Kali. Melancholy.

Strangely enough, none of this seemed strange to me. In fact, playing the role of heterosexual while fantasizing about being a homosexual had been my reality since I was a child. At age eight I would invite my school friends over on the weekends and convince them to play a game I called “husband and wife.” It was a simple game that went like this: I, in the role of husband, would come home from a grueling day at the office and my wife would greet me at the door with a martini and slippers. She would cook dinner on the bedside table. I would mime reading the paper. Occasionally, if I had the energy to remove my clothes from the closet, I’d make her remove hers to stand inside the closet’s long-hanging section to take a make-believe shower. The game didn’t have much of a sexual component to it; we were married, so the sex was insinuated. But I carried the role-play right up until the end where I judged my friend on her skills as a wife by timing her as she single-handedly cleaned up the mess we’d made playing the game in my room. Although I was aware of that manipulation (I could never believe they fell for that!), I think my intentions behind the game were quite innocent. I wanted to playact a grown-up relationship just like other kids would playact being a doctor.

It was the beginning of a recurring theme until the day my husband left me: I was pretending to be in a heterosexual relationship while exploring a gay one. My husband leaving put an end to the flirtation between Kali and me, as I realized I was no longer playacting. I couldn’t pretend to be in love with my next-door neighbor anymore, I had to find a relationship with someone who could simultaneously make me grow up and keep me forever young. I continued therapy, painted the kitchen walls, and fantasized about my future life: I would bring water lilies home to her every day in summer, I would wrap my arms around her waist as she chopped vegetables, I would fall asleep holding her hand . . .

“GOOD NEWS!” It was early to be calling my mother. It was 2:00 p.m. in Los Angeles, which would be only 7:00 a.m. in Australia, but I couldn’t wait a second longer.

“Hang on a minute, darling. I’ll just get my robe on and go to the other phone.” I stood breathlessly next to my car in the parking lot of Fox Studios, my cell phone plastered to my ear. I was too excited to get in my car and drive.

“Okay, darl. What’s going on? Did you get a job?”

“Ma. I’m going to be on Ally McBeal! I’m their new cast member!” I waited for the enormity of what I was saying to compute, but as the show hadn’t yet reached Australia, I was forced to say this: “Ma, I’m going to be famous!” Both of us fell into an awe-filled silence. I was excited, wondering what my brand-new life would be like, but with the excitement came a little fear. I was gay. I knew that being openly gay wasn’t an option, but what if they—the press, the public, my employers—found out? As the silence grew I couldn’t help but wonder how I was going to pull this off. I could sense by the length of the silence that my mother was thinking the same thing, since the subject of my being gay had featured heavily in all of our recent conversations since my breakup with Mel six months prior. Although I had come out to my mother at age sixteen after she found The Joy of Lesbian Sex under my bed, I had thwarted my own attempts to convince my mother that I was a lesbian by being with Mel, despite the fact that my dalliance with heterosexuality was actually the “phase” she referred to when talking about my lesbianism. However, after months of hour-long phone conversations, she finally accepted that I’d married Mel to try to bury my homosexual tendencies, and she was forced to take my sexuality seriously. Her feelings about it were a source of conflict to her and of confusion to me. She would be supportive to the point where she would talk to me about dating girls, but still she encouraged me to be secretive with everyone else, especially people who had the power to advance my career. She told me not to tell anyone, that it was “nobody’s business,” including close family members. She convinced me that because they were from another generation and from small towns, “They just wouldn’t understand.” So I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I didn’t want to upset anybody. I had upset myself enough as it was. And at least I could talk to her.

After several moments of processing and a few exclamations of pride, my mother gently said, “You’d better be careful, darling.”

“Don’t be crazy, Ma! I’m not even dating anyone. No one will ever know.”

And with that, my excitement about my impending fame dropped substantially. Well and truly enough to allow me to drive. I got in the car but instead of going straight home, I drove down Santa Monica Boulevard to a popular lesbian coffee shop called Little Frieda’s. I sat outside and savored every sip of coffee and every moment of being at a lesbian coffee shop, because after this, I knew I would never allow myself to go there again. The feeling that came with getting the job, the feeling that I had been chosen, was better than limply sitting outside at a lesbian coffee shop too afraid to glance at the other patrons much less approach them. I was not ready live my life as a gay woman. I had a career to establish. Being a regular cast member on a hit TV show was what I had been working toward. Famous actresses were special people. At last I had a chance to be special.

• • •

My quest to be special had begun in childhood. My aunt and uncle had lifelong family friends, the Goffs, and the Goffs had three daughters. The eldest, Linda, was a lawyer. The middle one, Amanda, was a physiotherapist. And the youngest, Allison, was a model. Despite the obvious accomplishments of her sisters, Allison received the lion’s share of my family’s interest, admiration, and praise. There wasn’t a week that went by that my mother didn’t point out “pretty Allison” in a catalogue that would be left in our mailbox to announce a spring sale or a winter bargain. Although I was quite a smart kid and received A grades, I needed something that would be exciting to people. I needed to be the girl my mother pointed to in a catalogue. So I decided to become a model.

I wasn’t that pretty, nor was I particularly tall. I was okay looking, but I certainly wasn’t good-looking enough to have one of those annoying stories that supermodels tell on talk shows about how the boys teased them at school and called them “horse face” and “chicken legs” because they were so skinny and “plain.” When I was eight, Anthony Nankervis used to call me “Lizzie,” which was short for “Lizard Eyes” because, as he brought to my attention daily in a singsongy chant, my eyes turned into slits when I smiled. Instead of deflecting the insult like any other eight-year-old would have done with a retort about his body odor, I took him to a mirror in the playground to explain to me what he meant. To the soundtrack of bouncing balls and playground squeals, I alternately smiled and frowned and to my horror, I discovered he was right. When I smiled, my eyes disappeared behind two fatty mounds of flesh. The memory of Anthony and me standing in front of that mirror, both of us horrified by my fatty, slitty eyes, is still quite painful. Being called a lizard is not something that ages into a compliment, not like having the legs of chicken.

If her parents had allowed her to pursue modeling, my friend Charlotte Duke would’ve been that girl with the annoying talk show story. Not only was she teased for being tall and skinny, her nickname was MX Missiles because she had unusually large breasts for her age. She had short, sandy hair, and freckles covered her face, and when she got head-hunted for an editorial modeling job (which her mother wouldn’t allow her to take), I couldn’t have been more shocked. She was so ordinary in my opinion. She never wore makeup or put hot rollers in her hair. She didn’t care about fashion or models or magazines. At twelve, what I thought was beautiful was the cast of Dynasty and anyone who guest starred on The Love Boat, and I looked more like any of them than Charlotte Duke did. With Breck Girl hair and my face covered in makeup, I thought I could pass as pretty. What I lacked in looks and physique I made up for in determination. I took a series of Polaroid pictures of myself in various outfits, including an Indian-style headdress, in the front yard of our suburban house, and sent them to the modeling agencies in the big city, an hour from where we lived.

But I wouldn’t just hit the Melbourne modeling scene unprepared. I’d already been to deportment school, as my mother thought having ladylike manners and learning about makeup was part of a well-rounded education. For me, it was one step closer to becoming a model. I finished first in the class at a runway show/graduation ceremony that took place in the daytime in a dinner-only restaurant, but with the win came my first flush of insecurity. There was a girl called Michelle who was a very close runner-up. We were locked in a dead heat and received the exact same scores for Correct Posture, Makeup Application, Photographic Modeling, and Social Etiquette, but due to my ability to walk better in high heels, I took the Catwalk Modeling category and took center stage to receive my trophy. (Actually, I stood on the carpet between two tables already set for dinner and received a sheet of paper.) But the fact that another girl had been close to taking my crown made my mother and me equally nervous and had a huge impact on both of us. I know this is true for me because I can still remember every physical detail of that girl, and for my mother because whenever my childhood accomplishments are discussed she says, “Do you remember that girl in deportment school who nearly beat you?”

Two weeks after sending the photos off to various modeling agencies, I received a call from the Modeling World. A new agency by the name of Team Models had seen me in my Indian headdress and were impressed enough to request a meeting. This was slightly problematic because after my father’s death three years earlier, my mother had taken a full-time job at a doctor’s office and she couldn’t just take time off to drive me to appointments. Although she enjoyed the idea of me modeling almost as much as I did, she told me that I had school and to be realistic. So I did what any twelve-year-old would do. I screamed and cried and told her that she was ruining my life. I threw a tantrum so violent and relentless that my mother was forced to take a sick day and chauffeur me to the meeting. As it was my foray into the working world, I felt I had to appear independent and in control, so I instructed my mother to wait in the car while I went in to “wow” them. I’d rehearsed just how I was going to do this several times in the two weeks since I’d sent the photos and waited for the call. My plan was this: I would walk through the lobby and would pause in the doorway of the agency, my hands on either side of the frame, and once I got the bookers’ attention, I would simply announce my name, “Amanda Rogers.” They would show me to a chair, tell me that I was the face they were looking for, and welcome me to the Team Modeling family. And honestly, that’s not too far off from what actually happened. Except for “the face” line. And, thank God, no one saw me posing like a fool in a doorway. But even then I knew that it wasn’t my looks that got me a place in the agency, it was my gift of gab. I talked them into it. I told them that I would be the youngest model on their books and that I would make them the most money. I told them that my look was both commercial and editorial. I told them that I was dedicated to modeling and would be professional and always available. They were no doubt amused by the bravado of this twelve-year-old, and because of that they decided to give me a shot. I collected my empty gray and pink Team portfolio and walked like a model back to the car where my mother was patiently waiting. “Good news,” I told her when I got into the passenger seat. “I’m going to be a model.” And from that day on, “good news” was the phrase I would use to tell my mother when I booked a modeling job, a TV show, or a feature. And “good news” remains the phrase that my mother is always the happiest to hear.

DURING THE week before I started work on Ally McBeal, my excitement about my new job continued to be overshadowed by my fear of public scrutiny. Perhaps it was because I was so judgmental of other actors when they were less than brilliant on talk shows or when their answers to red carpet questions didn’t convey the information in a succinct, perfectly witty quip designed to politely yet definitively wrap up the probing interviewer. I’ve always had a gut-wrenching feeling of embarrassment for people when they say stupid things. And now I was going to be held up to the same scrutiny. Would I be smart enough? Would I have the perfect comeback to Letterman’s subtle jab? Would I be able to convey intelligence and yet be fun and flirty with Leno? And how was I going to answer anybody’s questions when my answers couldn’t be truthful? Truthful answers to any of those red carpet questions would kill my career in an instant. “I’m not a fan of Ally McBeal. I’ve only seen one episode and I didn’t really like it.” Or “I actually don’t follow fashion and I prefer engineer’s boots to Jimmy Choos” wouldn’t be a friendly introduction to the world, and I’m sure Joan Rivers wouldn’t have appreciated it either.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that David Kelley had made a mistake by casting me as the new hot lawyer on a show about hot lawyers and their romantic entanglements. When I met Mr. Kelley to discuss a possible role on The Practice, a show I had watched and liked, something I did—like flicking my hair off my shoulder or the way I crossed my legs—made him say, “I see you more for Ally.” And with that I was Photoshopped into a poster of the cast, squeezed into the show’s trademark unisex bathroom. He had made a mistake for sure. Apart from not being that fun and flirty leading-lady type that I knew the character had to be, I just wasn’t good-looking enough for the role. I was okay at certain angles, but my profile was ugly (I knew this from years of modeling), and my face was very large and round. Plus the character itself was a stretch. Playing a commanding, intimidating professional brimming with self-confidence was going to be a challenge. While I would eagerly accept such an acting challenge for a movie, the thought that I had to play this powerful woman who was so vastly different from myself year after year on a television show was daunting. How was I going to stop my head from tilting in deference to the person I was talking to like I did in real life? How was I going to always remember to stand with my weight evenly balanced on two high-heeled legs when I usually slouch over my left hip in boots? Because I would need to fight every natural instinct to act out the character, I decided it would be immensely helpful if I could change my natural instincts. I would teach myself to stand straight and listen with my head straight. I would practice sounding self-assured and confident. I would stop sounding Australian and always sound like an American when I spoke. It was too late to get out of it, so I had to change myself significantly in order to get into it.

I needed to shed my old self and step into this new role. And not only did I have to become the role of Nelle Porter, I also had to play the role of a celebrity. But what did celebrities do? Did they go to parties, get spray-tanned, become philanthropic? Did they get their hair and makeup done when they went to the supermarket? Did they go to the supermarket at all? Becoming a celebrity felt like a promotion to me. The problem with thinking that being a famous actress was an upgrade from being just an actress was that I wasn’t given a new job description. As an actress, I learned my lines, interpreted and performed them. But there was no actual profession that went along with being a celebrity. After observing Elizabeth Hurley’s meteoric rise from actress to celebrity, I knew, however, that becoming a celebrity had a lot to do with clothes. As I didn’t read fashion magazines or care which celebrity wore the same gown more elegantly than her counterpart, how was I going become the fashionable celebrity that the new cast member on Ally McBeal was expected to be? I was given this promotion but then left alone to guess how to do the job.

Either that or I could ask an expert.

When Kali wasn’t painting, she was absorbing fashion. I say “absorbing” because watching her hunched over a Vogue magazine, her arms protectively wrapped around it, her body still and focus intent as she traced the outline of clothing with her eyes, you’d swear she was recharging her life source. You couldn’t talk to Kali when she began to read the new issue of W or even talk to anyone else within her earshot. One summer, a houseguest of Mel and mine saw a plastic-wrapped Vogue on the stoop next door, unwrapped it, and was discovered by Kali reading it in the courtyard. After finding out that this thief who had robbed her of the great pleasure of being the first and only one to handle her subscriber’s copy was a friend from my modeling days in Australia, Kali stood in our living room in a state of shock quietly repeating, “Who would do something like that?” Mel and I were forced to take sides: My husband, who leapt at the chance to argue with Kali, told her she was overreacting and took the model-friend’s side. This argument was one of many that created the state of melancholy in which I lived, as there was a lot of tension between Mel and Kali. Naturally, I took Kali’s side. Since she was a creative genius, whatever inspired her was obviously important. It didn’t matter that I didn’t care for fashion magazines.

With only one week before I had to begin work, I called Kali in a panic. Kali told me not to worry about buying new clothes and becoming someone else. She told me that they hired me for my uniqueness. She told me to be myself.

“A lesbian?”

Kali agreed to meet me at Banana Republic that afternoon.

Dressed in a vintage Iggy Pop T-shirt, faded black denim jeans, and a pair of perfectly worn black leather engineers’ boots, I walked across the outdoor mall in the heat of a Pasadena summer toward Kali, who was waiting for me in the store. She was going to help me put together a new, casual, everyday look that I could wear to work. I chose Banana Republic, because I figured that I could find clothes there that would help me smooth out the sharp edges and make me look more like an acceptable member of society. Or at least less like an outcast.

I saw Kali among the racks of white and beige dressed in a uniquely cool vintage dress that made her stand out in the store designed to help you blend in. My face must have conveyed the anxiety in my head because Kali just skipped the “hello”s and hugged me, wrapping her arms around my waist, each hand clasping shirts on hangers that dug into my back.

“Thanks for doing this, Kals.”

“It’ll be fun. I don’t know if you need me, though, Pickle. You have a great sense of style.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t see too many photos of leading ladies in ripped black jeans and engineers’ boots.”

I became self-conscious of my black clothing. No one else in the store was wearing heavy black boots or a black T-shirt. They were wearing summer prints and skirts.

“You could use some lighter colors for summer. Do you need skirts?” Kali was looking me up and down like I was more of a project than a friend.

“I guess so. I don’t know. Do I?”

She smiled at me sweetly and handed me the two shirts she was holding.

“Why don’t you start with these and I’ll find you some pants. Do you like Capri pants?”

As I wasn’t certain that I knew what they were, I shrugged my shoulders and took the shirts. I found a dressing room with a full-length mirror and tried on the shirts. I tried the white one and then I tried the other white one.

As I waited in the dressing room for Kali to bring Capri pants in a color palette that would make me more palatable, I looked at my body. I looked at my big thighs, the fat around my knees. I looked at my hips and how they formed a triangle where my butt hit the top of my legs. It wasn’t the first time I was critical of my body. I’d spent my life trying to change it, but I was overcome with the feeling that it would continue to beat me—that I could never win the game of successfully changing its shape. I thought about the time when I was eighteen and got stoned and stared at my reflection in a sliding glass door, sobbing, “I will always look like this.” Or when I met the voice when I was twelve and a modeling client asked me to turn around so she could see my butt. She asked me to take down my pants, turn around, and face the wall so she could see my ass. I faced the wall with my pants around my ankles for what seemed like a long time before she asked me to turn back around to face her. “I’m surprised your butt is so saggy for such a young girl,” she said in a friendly, inquisitive tone. “Do you work out?”

You need to work out. That was the first thing the voice said to me. It was a very deep, male voice that was so loud and clear I wondered if the other rejected models in the elevator with me could hear it. It continued to ring like a shock wave long after it had delivered the message. And standing in front of the mirror in Banana Republic, I was ashamed to think that at twenty-four, it had to keep giving me the same message.

“What size are you?” Kali’s innocent question sent me into a mild panic. Not because I thought I was fat other than the parts that needed reshaping, I just didn’t know how sizes ran in the States. In Australia, the perfect size to be was a size 10. But in the States, what was the equivalent to a 10? I’d only ever shopped at thrift stores or at Urban Outfitters with their “one size fits all” clothing since coming to the States, or I wore the same old jeans and T-shirts I’d always had.

“What size should I be?”

“What do you mean?” She looked at me with an inviting smile on her face, like we were about to play a game. She had no idea that her answer to my question was going to change my life.

“What size are models?”

“Well, a sample size is usually a six.” Kali knew a lot of things like this.

“Then I’m a six.” As it turned out, I actually was a 6. Mostly. The Capri pants that were a size 6 were too tight, but I bought them anyway as incentive to lose a few pounds. It didn’t occur to me to go up to the next, more comfortable size because as far as I was concerned, a size 8 didn’t exist.

As I left the store with my new buttoned-down wardrobe I felt immobilized with anxiety. I sat down with Kali on a concrete bench in the outdoor shopping mall, bags strewn around my feet, feeling overwhelmed. I had a few days’ worth of acceptable clothes, but what would happen after that? I would have to keep shopping for this new personality or else people would figure out who I really was, and if that happened, I would lose my career. Nobody would hire a lesbian to play a leading role. Ellen DeGeneres’s TV show had just been unceremoniously canceled after her decision to come out, and there had never been any openly lesbian “leading lady” actresses—ever. In the three years I’d lived in LA, I’d realized that in Hollywood, there were really only two kinds of actresses: leading ladies and character actresses. The character actresses wait around all day in a toilet-sized trailer for their one scene, and they get to eat from the craft service table for free, while the leading ladies get the story lines, the pop-out trailers, and dinners with studio executives at The Ivy. Oh, and the money. No one I could think of in the history of acting had ever been a leading lady and a known homosexual, and being revealed as such a person would mean sudden career death. Of that I had no doubt whatsoever. After I explained this to Kali in order to convince her how stupid her suggestion to “just be myself” was, I was able to collect my new things and head to the shoe store for some high heels—something to wear with my size 6 clothes. As I walked across the mall wondering if the way I walked made me look obviously lesbian, my mind switched to thinking about how much weight I’d have to lose to fit comfortably into those Capri pants. And so I gave myself a goal. I would wear those pants on my first day of work.

The diet was a very simple one. It was the same diet that I had gone on six to eight times a year since I did it to get ready for my first fashion show. Instead of eating 1,000 calories a day, which seemed to be the recommended weight-loss calorie consumption for women, I ate 1,000 kilojoules. I was Australian, after all, and turning it metric was only right. It was a pun with numbers that I thought was funny. As 1,000 kilojoules was approximately 300 calories, I embarked on my 300-calorie diet with the goal of a one-pound weight loss per day and I would do it for seven days. I knew how it would work because I’d done it so many times before. The first three days I’d lose a pound each day, and then days four and five I’d see no movement on the scale, then day six I would lose a satisfying three pounds, and the last day I’d round it off with a one-pound weight loss to total seven pounds. It was a no-fail diet, and losing weight just before starting my new job seemed like the professional thing to do. Not only would it make me look fit and healthy, but because being thinner always made me feel more attractive, psychologically it would help me to feel confident and ready for whatever acting challenge I’d be given. And then of course, there was the imminent wardrobe fitting. If I could lose weight it would make the costume designer’s job easier, since she could pick up any sample size for me and know that I’d fit into it. Losing weight was the silent agreement I’d made with the producers, and I was ready to keep up my end of the deal.

AS I pulled into my parking space out front of a sound stage on Kelley Land, aka Manhattan Beach Studios, I was dizzy with excitement and nerves. It was my first day at work on the set of Ally McBeal. I got out of the car, smoothed out the wrinkles in my comfortably fitting Capri pants, and looked around. It was a very austere and sterile lot. It had been built recently and accommodated David Kelley’s production company, and it appeared that the final touches that would make it look habitable still needed to be done. The studio lots I had worked on in Hollywood and in Burbank were bustling with people walking in and out of a café or from a newsstand manned by a colorful employee who knew every actor and producer who went there for Variety or the LA Times. But there were no people at Manhattan Beach Studios, only cars. There was no commissary, no park where you could read a novel at lunch under a tree. In fact there were no plants or trees. The buildings were huge, monolithic peach rectangles with no overhangs for shade, so the sun bounced off the clean white pavement and onto the windowless structures making the whole lot look like every corner was lit by a spotlight. In Kelley Land there wasn’t a shadow in which to hide. It looked like headquarters for a research and development company where scientific tests were conducted under the intense scrutiny of plant managers, unseen by the outside world. Either that or a minimum-security prison.

I walked out of the late-morning summer heat and into the hallway of the air-conditioned building looking for the dressing room with my name on the door. The first door read Peter MacNicol, next was Greg Germann, and then there it was: Portia de Rossi. I had arrived. It was the nicest dressing room I’d ever had. There was a deep green sofa and matching chair, a desk with a desk chair, and a bathroom with a shower. Everything was squeaky clean and new. No actor had ever been here before, it was a sterile environment, and that was comforting and yet also somehow disquieting. No actor had rehearsed her dialogue, paced the room in anticipation of a scene, or smoked cigarettes out of boredom or nerves in this dressing room. There were no memories or stale cigarette smoke trapped in these walls. It was just going to be an alternately anxious and bored Portia de Rossi wanting to smoke but unable to smoke, looking at her flawed reflection in the full-length closet door mirrors.

I threw my bag on the sofa and checked my watch. It was 10:30. I was early. At 11:00 I had a wardrobe fitting and then at 12:00 I would begin makeup and hair. The reason for wanting to be early was less about first-day jitters than it was about my appearance. Despite being told as a child model to show up to shoots with a clean face and clean hair, I have never turned up to a job with a freshly scrubbed face or just-hopped-out-of-the-shower hair. I just got better at concealing it. I loved concealer. The magic oily stick of beige makeup was as essential to me as oxygen. I could have half my face covered with the stuff and still look like I was clean and naturally flawless. Of course, this careful application of concealer was painstaking and time consuming (trying to cover up shameful secrets always is), and it was for this reason I arrived a full half hour early. Naturally, before leaving home, I’d made the first pass over my red, blotchy skin, dark circles, blemishes, and scars of blemishes, but the drive across town was a long one, and I had anticipated that I would need to patch the areas where the heat had melted away my artistry. After I was satisfied that I’d done all I could to be the attractive, new actress that the wardrobe girls were no doubt expecting to meet, I headed over to the wardrobe room. It was in another building quite far from my dressing room and I roamed around in search of it for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, I was intercepted by a production assistant and escorted the rest of the way.

The PA wore shorts and sneakers. She looked flustered and told me that she’d been frantically looking for me. She told me that she was scheduled to be waiting for me at my parking space at 10:45. The more she talked (who feels confident enough about their legs to show them off without the help of high heels?) the more stupid I felt for arriving so early and for leaving my dressing room before a PA came to get me. Damn it. All I had to do on my first day was appear to be professional, to know what I’m doing, and I have already given myself away. By the time I got to the wardrobe rooms, I had a knot in my gut. I was dying for a cigarette. What was a lesbian doing here on this show playing an ice-cold attorney in the courtroom who would, no doubt, be hot in the bedroom in an upcoming episode? Would I fit into a size 6 suit?

I hovered at the doorway of the costume designer’s office, waiting for her to acknowledge me as she sat at her desk. When she turned to find me standing at the door, I could see that she was on the phone.

“Come in,” she mouthed, gesturing for me to enter. I walked across the threshold and into the rooms that would be the main stage for the drama my life was about to become—a drama in which I wrote, directed, produced, and played all parts: my very own one-woman show. I stood in the middle of the room since racks of clothing flanked the walls and took up most of the space, leaving only a small, carpeted square in the center like a tiny stage, but instead of facing an audience, it faced a large, full-length mirror.

“Hi. I’m Portia.” I extended my hand and smiled at her as she hung up the phone and walked toward me from her desk.

“It’s nice to meet you in person. I’m Vera. Welcome to the show.”

Vera and I had met over the phone when she asked for my measurements.

“Thirty-four, twenty-four, thirty-five.”

That sounded better than the truth, which started at around 32 and probably ended up around 38. I stopped measuring after my first interview with my modeling agents at age twelve when they told me to call them with my bust, waist, and hip measurements when I got home.

“Thirty-two, twenty-seven, thirty-seven,” I had told the Team Modeling booker.

“Are you sure?” A long silence followed, then my next instruction. “Well, just tell people you’re thirty-four, twenty-four, thirty-five, ok? We’ll put those measurements on your card.”

Now I stood center-stage in the Ally McBeal fitting room in front of the mirror, dressed in a pinstriped suit with a nipped-in waist and a large, rounded lapel. All the suits I had tried so far had fit. I was relieved. After all my anxiety preceding the fitting, I felt relaxed. I admired my reflection in the mirror. The suit I was wearing was my favorite for no other reason than it was a size 4. I was almost giddy with excitement. For my first episode of Ally McBeal, I would wear a size 4.

“Ugh. Take that off. That’s horrible.”

As I began to reluctantly take off the size 4 suit, Vera walked to her desk and picked up a large folder. I could see that the script inside had colored tabs and notes all down the margins.

“I think your character would only wear monochromatic suits. Conservative. Do you think there would be a hint of sexiness to her—like, say, a slit in the leg of a pencil skirt?”

“Umm. Sure.” I thought Nelle should have some sexiness and I guessed a pencil skirt was really the only way to make a business suit sexy. I was worried, though, that my hips looked big in pencil skirts.

“What do you think she’d wear on weekends?”

I attempted to sound like I had given the character’s costumes a great deal of thought, but it was immediately obvious to me that Vera’s exploration of my character was far more extensive than my own. To my surprise, her preparedness was the only unnerving part of the whole fitting. I was so busy trying to fit into the size 6 suit, to be the perfect-looking addition to TV’s hottest legal show, I’d forgotten to think about the clothes as an expression of the character I was about to portray, potentially for years. She closed her folder and walked back to her desk.

“Well, we’ve got a pretty good start. Let’s just go with what we have for this week and we’ll figure the rest out later.”

I put my Capri pants back on, thanked Vera, and headed out. I left the fitting and was escorted by the PA to the makeup trailer in a state of mild shock. I was amazed that I could ever walk out of a fitting feeling ashamed for something other than my imperfect body. Still, I had passed my first big test of fitting in, and in the case of clothes, fitting into a sample size, and I was on to my second. My body had passed the test, next was my face.

As I shook the hand of the makeup artist, Sarah, and looked her in the eyes, I registered her pupils dilating to begin their scan across my face. Could she see imperfections? Discoloration? Makeup?

“Are you wearing makeup?” The question was straightforward, but her tone was slightly incredulous. Enough to make me feel very embarrassed.

“No.” When attacked, defend by lying.

“Sit down. Let’s get started. Is there anything I should know before I start?”

“No. You’re the expert. I’m sure it’ll be great.”

The truth was, I wasn’t so sure. Practically every time I sat in a makeup chair, I’d look worse at the end than I did before we started. But I had never really learned what it was that made me look bad, plus even if I had, I didn’t feel it was my place to tell a makeup artist how to do her job, much less the head of the makeup department for Ally McBeal. As I was shuffled back and forth between the two chairs due to the hair and makeup artists alternately being needed on set (God, what was going on in there in the scene before mine? What was I about to face?), I applied a similar philosophy of trusting the experts in the hair department to do their job. After we collectively decided that Nelle Porter should wear her hair in a bun, how my hair was pulled back and all other decisions were my hairstylist’s business. After all, I was the new girl. I didn’t want to make a scene or stand out, I just wanted to fit in. I wanted everyone I met to think of me as quiet and professional. I wanted the headline to be “how the new character melted seamlessly into the ensemble cast.” And now that I’d left Portia on the floors of the hair, makeup, and wardrobe rooms, it was time for Nelle Porter to meet the cast.

CAGEEveryone. I’d like to introduce the newest member of Cage and Fish. Please welcome Nelle Porter.

ELAINE(to Ally and Georgia)Just so we’re clear, we hate her, right?

ALLY AND GEORGIA(nodding in agreement)Uh huh.

“Cut. Back to one.”

I stood on the stairs of the law office set staring out into the crowd. There they were. Ally, Billy, Georgia, Elaine, Fish—assembled on the floor of the office foyer, looking up at me standing midway down the staircase preparing to deliver a speech about how I was going to breathe new life into the firm and shake things up around the place. I hadn’t even met them yet. I just stood on the staircase smiling awkwardly at each cast member as they tentatively smiled and waved, sizing me up just as their characters were directed to do in the script. I was meeting the lawyers as Nelle Porter for the first time, and I was meeting the cast as Portia de Rossi in the same way, from the same step, and we were all carefully and awkwardly smiling and waving. How ironic that my character was supposed to be intimidating to these people, and yet I was too scared to hold a script to check my lines because I knew the shaking piece of paper would give me away—the trembling hands that were supposed to encase nerves of steel, the hands that belonged to “Sub-zero Nelle,” the self-assured woman whose only purpose in the show was to be the antithesis to insecure Ally. I worried about meeting them. I worried that I would say something that would show them that I wasn’t going to be the outstanding addition to the cast that they’d been told by the show’s producers I would be. What if they could immediately see that I wasn’t exceptional and special, that I was merely an average girl?

I knew I was average. I had learned this fact on my first day of Geelong Grammar School. In Grovedale, the suburb of Geelong where I grew up, we had the biggest and most beautiful house in the neighborhood—a brand-new two-story AV Jennings home with a swimming pool. My father was a well-respected community organizer, the founder of the Grovedale Rotary Club, and there was talk of him running for mayor. But on my first day at my new school, when I saw one kid being dropped off in a helicopter and others arriving in BMWs and Jaguars, it became obvious to me that I was not like them. They owned things my family couldn’t afford. And while I had felt jealousy before, seeing that boy get out of a helicopter elicited a brand-new, uncomfortable feeling. Jealousy for me had been rooted in the belief that what I was jealous of was attainable, but this was different. I felt intimidated. I felt less than, not equal, and on a completely different, un-relatable level. Throughout the day I heard stories from the students of summer vacations spent yachting around the Caribbean while I had spent my summer pretending to be an Olympic gymnast in the cul-de-sac. I was embarrassed to think that I had been strutting around town like a spoiled little rich girl when I wasn’t rich at all.

“Why didn’t you tell me we were poor?” I fired at my mother with uncharacteristic anger when I got into the car. (I have since learned that anger is my first response to embarrassment.) My mother was clearly hurt by my question, and as we drove home in her Mazda 626, she stared at the road between her hands clenched at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, and explained to me with tears in her eyes that she’d tried very hard to make sure our lives continued as if dad were still alive.

“But we’ve always been poor!” She couldn’t possibly know how poor we were. She probably didn’t even know what a yacht was.

When I saw my brother later that night, I attacked him. I was especially angry with my brother, since he had attended the school for two years prior to my arrival. Surely he could’ve told me the truth.

“We’re not poor, stupid. We’re average.”

Average. It was the worst, most disgusting word in the English language. Nothing meaningful or worthwhile ever came from that word. In my twelve-year-old mind, there was no point in living if you were average. An average person doesn’t cure cancer, win Olympic medals, or become a movie star. What kind of a boring, uninspired life was I going to live if I was thought of as “average” in any category? My brother could not have levied a greater insult than calling me average with the exception of “normal,” “ordinary,” and “mediocre.” These were words that I hated just as much as the word “average,” and I knew they were lined up right around the corner ready to attach themselves to me like a name badge unless I did something exceptional and gave myself a better label, starting with my unexceptional, common-sounding name. My name was average. I knew this because I wasn’t the only one who had it. When I was eight, I was a track and field star. My race was the 200 meters. At the regional track and field meet, there was a girl in my heat with the same name—Amanda Rogers—who was my only real competition. I simply couldn’t see the point of running the race. Where’s the glory in beating the girl with the same name? Why make a name for myself when somebody else already had it? Amanda Rogers in first, followed by Amanda Rogers in second?

I needed to give myself a better label. Model. Law student. Actress. No one was average at my new school. They were rich. I needed to be exceptional just to fit in.

The thought of being in the middle of the pack had always worried me. From my first awareness of competition—that someone could win and another person could lose—the pressure to excel in everything I attempted was immense. I had to win, get an A, and take home the prize. Even when I took first prize, topped the class, won the race, I never really won anything. I was merely avoiding the embarrassment of losing. When ability is matched by expectations, then anything less that an exceptional result was laziness. And laziness in my opinion was shameful.

But I wasn’t naturally inclined to excel in all the tasks I was given as a child. For example, I was never good at math. Even basic addition eluded me. I learned my multiplication table at school because we used to have “heads up” competitions in front of the class. The teacher would invite two students to come to the blackboard and would then proceed to ask them various multiplication questions such as “six times seven” or “five times three.” I drilled the answers into my brain. All day long this little eight-year-old would be silently playing the game of teacher and student; the teacher firing questions with machine-gun rapidity, the student, armed with preparation, deftly deflecting every bullet. I made it through the third grade undefeated. But I wasn’t a math champion for long. By age fourteen I was bawling over my physics homework.

Devastation was my usual reaction to things I couldn’t comprehend. It would start with mild anxiety if the answer wasn’t at the ready, and would progress to full-blown terror, physically manifesting in sweating, yelling, crying, hitting myself on the head, and chanting, “I don’t understand” until I was exhausted and on the verge of collapse. In order to prepare myself for a less than perfect result, I would occasionally give myself the opposite of a pep talk by writing hundreds of times in a journal, “I will not get honors,” as I awaited the results of a ballet exam, for example. I’m not sure if this ritual actually helped me to accept the less than perfect grade I was preparing myself for, because I always did get honors. Dancing six days a week for two hours a day, plus hours of practice at home will get anyone honors, much less a nine-year-old whose only competition had just learned to point her toe. The ballet school I attended was a small side business of a onetime professional dancer who rented out a church hall to teach young kids the basics of dance in a suburb of a mid-sized town. Nobody took it seriously. I treated it like it was the Australian Ballet.

I don’t know where this pressure came from. I can’t blame my parents because it has always felt internal. Like any other parent, my mother celebrated the A grades and the less-than-A grades she felt there was no need tell anybody about. But not acknowledging the effort that ended in a less than perfect result impacted me as a child. If I didn’t win, then we wouldn’t tell anyone that I had even competed to save us the embarrassment of acknowledging that someone else was better. Keeping the secret made me think that losing was something to be ashamed of, and that unless I was sure I was going to be the champion, there was no point in trying. And there was certainly no point to just having fun.FISHCan I have your attention please? Everybody. I really have splendid news. I would like to introduce to you all, Nelle Porter. As of today she’ll be joining us as a new attorney. She is going to be an outstanding addition, and I trust that you’ll all help make her feel as welcome as I know she is. Nelle Porter.NELLEThank you. Thank you. It’s a tough decision to change jobs, but I’m excited. I’m grateful to Richard and to Paul for the offer and also Ally . . . my brief chat with her . . . well, I knew coming here it would be fun.

I COULDN’T LIGHT a cigarette fast enough. In fact, even though I was scared that someone would catch me, I greedily inhaled a lungful of smoke before my car had driven off the lot. My first day had definitely been challenging, and not having a hiding place in which to smoke made it even worse. I hadn’t eaten all day either. But my need for food wasn’t from hunger as much as it was the need to fill a hole in my gut. Since I didn’t have to go to work the next couple of days, my brother Michael and I decided to meet at our favorite restaurant to celebrate my first day. When my husband left me, my brother moved in to my place. I loved that he lived with me. The living arrangement was to keep both of us company after my husband ran off with his wife. My husband ran off with his wife, so we kept each other company and we liked to go out for margaritas and Mexican food to commiserate. Or to celebrate. And after the day I’d had, I wasn’t sure which of those things I would be doing tonight. Naturally, he’d think we were celebrating and I wouldn’t let him think otherwise. He already thought I was a bit of a drama queen as it was.

“How did it go, Sissy?” He called me Sissy when he was happy to see me and the feeling was reciprocated. If I’d had a cute way of turning “brother” into something to express my love, I would’ve done it then, too. I just called him “brother.” Since moving to LA, he’d had to deal with a lot. He had married his longtime girlfriend, Renee, just before leaving Australia and the two newlyweds moved into an apartment in the same Melrose Place–style complex that was home to me and Mel. In the evenings, the four of us were inseparable, but during the day, when my brother and I were at work, Renee and Mel formed partnerships. They were professional partners in my husband’s cappuccino business and in his carpentry business. The fact that Renee would wear skimpy, lacy underwear clearly visible underneath her oversized, gaping overalls should have indicated to my brother and me that a personal partnership was also forming, but when Mel left me and Renee suddenly sabotaged her marriage to my brother to be with Mel, Brother and I were left idiotically scratching our heads in disbelief.

My brother’s first year in Los Angeles was tough. Apart from his wife falling in love with my husband, he had a great deal of drama in his new job as a manager of a biomedical engineering company. We had both come to the United States to pursue our dreams of a bigger, more challenging life. Either that or we were both really influenced by our father’s love of America after he came back from a business trip with stories of wide freeways and snowy mountains, fancy cars and Disneyland. In any case, the fact we both ended up here together was a blessing.

“It was great, Brother. The scene went well, the place is great, and the people are really nice.”

“That’s great. Table for two on the patio, please.”

“Certainly, sir, right this way.”

The Mexican restaurant was a dark, seedy place with greasy food and an outdoor patio where I could smoke. I started smoking when I was fourteen for two very good reasons: to win over the cool girl at school with the shaved head and to suppress my appetite—a tip taught to me by my modeling colleagues. While I never really became friends with the cool girl, I did learn that the more I smoked, the less I’d eat, which is particularly important when you sit down to dinner at a Mexican restaurant. So despite its average food, the fact that this restaurant was the closest one to our house with an outdoor patio made it my favorite.

As I smoked and talked and allowed the tension of my day to melt into my margarita, I made the decision to eat nachos. The blend of cheese and sour cream with the crispiness of the corn chips and creaminess of guacamole will always turn a sour mood into a happy one. A peace came over me when I ate food like that. Like life had no other purpose than pure enjoyment. I had nowhere to go and nothing to accomplish. For that moment, I could put life on hold and believe I was perfect the way I was. I was focused in the present—in the moment—and the moment was bliss on a corn chip.

I hadn’t eaten any bad food since the day at Banana Republic when I decided to get professional, and I really felt like I needed to reward myself for all the hard work that went into getting into that size 6 suit. Besides, I’d made too much of a big deal out of it, anyway. The suits were very conservative and would easily hide a pound or two. I didn’t need to be rail thin to wear them. So I didn’t feel bad when I ordered an additional meal of enchiladas. I simply wouldn’t eat the following day.

“So that idiot in lab went over my head today and told Chris . . .” As he talked about his lab geeks and his psychotic boss, I wondered how he’d take the news that I was gay. I hadn’t told him yet because it was too soon after my marriage to Mel and I was afraid he wouldn’t believe me. Of the few people I’d told, most didn’t believe me for some reason. Some thought it was a phase, some thought I was just saying it to be different, to get attention. It’s a particularly bad reaction because sharing that deep secret with someone takes a lot of courage, and disbelief feels like ridicule. Like two little girls together is something silly not to be taken seriously. I simply couldn’t risk my brother reacting that way. He was all I had.

I kept ordering margaritas and eating enchiladas, and when I was done with mine, I got to work on his. After the main course was over, I went back to the appetizers we’d been served at the beginning of the evening and ate the last of the corn chips with the puddle of salsa that was left in the stone bowl. I was amused at the thought that an appetizer was supposed to stimulate appetite and I silently congratulated ours for doing its job.

As my brother and I finished up our conversation, our watered-down drinks, the last drag of a cigarette, I knew I’d done some damage. There was a dull ache in my gut and a layer of fat on the roof of my mouth that proved it. It’s a weird sensation knowing that you’ve just altered your course. In a fleeting moment of arrogance, in one self-congratulatory thought, I decided I was good enough, that I could stop right there. My quest for perfection, for discipline, for greatness, was over. I’d reached my goal. I had nothing more to do. I’d completed one day of work, worn the suit with the character in it, and done a good job, and that was enough. As I got up from the table, I looked down at the wreckage. I saw the ugly plastic checkered tablecloth and the flimsy utensils for the first time that night. I saw the cigarette ash on the table, pools of water dripped from the glasses that were cloudy with greasy fingers, lipstick-tipped butts in an overflowing ashtray that wasn’t clean to begin with. And then there was the food. Food looks so ugly when it’s half-eaten and torn apart. The refried beans smeared on the plate looked like feces, and the browning guacamole and clumps of rice looked like vomit. What disgusted me the most in this grotesque tableau was that the cheese from the enchiladas had a wide greasy ring around it that separated it from the plate. Like a beach separated land from the ocean. I had ingested a beach of grease. I grabbed my keys from underneath a few grains of rice that had spilled over the edge of my plate during this mindless, repetitious act of filling my mouth with food and headed out to the car.

There’s a big difference between eating and what I had just done. What I’d done was an act of defiance.

I pulled away from the curb and lined up behind my brother’s car that was barely visible through the curtain of exhaust smoke that separated us. The bright red stoplight reflected off the black road and as I sat there on the cold leather seat, I wondered who I was being defiant toward. You’re only hurting yourself, was the phrase I kept thinking, and while I knew that was true, why did my bingeing feel like someone else was going to be pissed off and hurting, too? Was anyone else really invested in my weight and how I treated my body? All I thought about when I continued to eat after the initial rush of the food wore off, after the taste became familiar, and after my stomach was full was HA HA! You can’t stop me! But who was I saying that to? As I drove down the road toward home, now separated from my brother by several cars and a lane or two, I wondered if my little act of rebellion was over for now or if it would continue with a stop at 7-Eleven.

I stopped at 7-Eleven on the way home for food. I barely felt any anxiety as I pulled into the parking lot because I think I’d subconsciously planned this stop from my first bite of nachos. As I’d already blown the diet, I figured I might as well keep going—I might as well eat all the things I’d denied myself for the last few weeks. And I had to get it all done in one sitting because if I allowed myself to do this again—to eat all this food—I’d get fat. If this reckless eating continued into the following day, I’d get fat and I’d end up in TV purgatory, kept on the show due to an unbreakable contract, yet disappearing, making only the occasional background cross as my character’s life with all the promise of great story lines faded into the blank page from whence it came. Of course, I’d have to throw up after, but that was okay. I would’ve had to throw up anyway just from the Mexican food. I didn’t have work for the next two days so I had time to get rid of the dots above my eyes that were caused by my blood vessels bursting from all the pressure and strain of purging. With that much pressure, something had to burst.

I could either force myself to throw up the food or gain weight from it. Of the two options, I figured that it was better concealing a few red dots on my eyelids than showing up to my second day of work two pounds heavier with my skirt stretching across my thighs. And if I had to throw up anyway, I might as well eat all I could. I might as well eat everything.

Throwing up was something I had taught myself as a child. I learned from the more experienced models I worked with that it was something you could do if you had to eat in front of people, including the clients that book you. Apparently, it was more desirable to look as though your body was naturally stick thin than trying hard to get it that way, so models ate pizza before a fashion show, then threw it up quietly before showtime. That would take a lot of practice, since you’d have to be neat and clean about it. No matter how much I practiced, I was never good at it. Apart from the red dots above my eyes, my eyes and nose watered badly from the heaving efforts. Plus I was so loud. The gagging sounded like really loud coughing and would serve as an alarm to let everyone in the public restroom know what I was doing.

Unlike the other girls, I didn’t throw up because I had to eat to impress the client but because I wanted to eat. Nothing was better after a modeling job than food. It was the only thing that took all the bad feelings away. Like an eraser, it allowed me start over, to forget the feelings of insecurity and awkwardness I’d experienced that day. But the comforting ritual of rewarding myself with food started to backfire as the jobs started being booked back to back. Instead of having a week of starving to counteract the weight gained from eating fries, ice cream, and candy, I was given a day or two to get back on track, to be the 34–24–35 model that they’d booked off my card. The client was expecting an image of me that wasn’t who I really was. They wanted a self-confident young woman who was naturally thin, beautiful, comfortable in her skin. Who I really was, was an average-looking child staving off puberty with its acne and weight gain just waiting to expose me for the phony I was. So I’d throw up.

After my first day of Ally, I needed to start over. I needed to forget the insecurity and awkwardness I felt standing on that staircase, pretending to be the fabulous Nelle Porter. Just hearing the words “outstanding addition” gave me a hole in my stomach that no amount of food seemed to fill.

Go on, eat it, you fat piece of shit. You’re pathetic. You can’t even handle one day of work without bingeing. You have no self-control. You don’t deserve this job.

Driving home from 7-Eleven with a bag full of food, I hated that my brother lived with me. Now I had to eat in the car a block from my house and throw up in the street so he wouldn’t know what I was doing. And I had to do it fast because he’d wonder where I was. I started by eating a large bag of Cheetos. The bright orange color would serve as a marker during the purge. It would be a map, almost, telling me how far I’d come and how much further I needed to go. When I saw orange vomit cascading from my mouth and flowing in chunks between the two rigid fingers jammed against my gag reflex, I’d know I’d passed 7-Eleven and then I’d make my way back to the restaurant and back through each course beginning with the corn chips, the enchiladas, and ending with the nachos. As I shoved the jelly doughnut into my mouth, I came up with my lie. Mom called and my cell service was beginning to drop out so I had to pull over to complete the call. That would do. I barely swallowed my last item, the Snickers bar, before I began regurgitating it. I shoved my fingers down my throat and threw up in the plastic bag five times before I was satisfied that I’d gotten most of the food out. I took off my T-shirt from underneath my sweater and wiped my face and hands on it. I found a trash can. I drove home.

As I walked in the front door, I saw my brother on the couch with the phone to his ear.

“Where the hell have you been? Mom’s on the phone.”

He handed the phone to me.

“Hi, darl! How did it go?” My mother was more excited than I’d ever heard her. I knew that she’d been thinking about me the whole day, just waiting to hear news of the cast, the set, and my new life as a star of a hit TV show.

I took a deep breath. I mentally selected the appropriate pitch to my voice.

“It was really great, Ma. I had the greatest day.”

It was a lie, but it should’ve been the truth. It would’ve been the truth if not for my debilitating insecurity, and I was certain that insecurity would fade with time once I had proven to myself that I deserved the job. In time, I was sure that I would be happy. After all, anyone else would’ve been. Most people would kill to have the opportunity that was given to me. How could I possibly complain to anyone that I didn’t like it, that loads of money and fame, the most desired things in society, made me feel uncomfortable? While I waited for my genuine enjoyment of it to set in, I would simply lie about how much fun I was having. Complaining to my mom would have just been immature and embarrassing. In fact, anything short of perpetual joy seemed pathetic.

I’d pretended to enjoy modeling also, so I’d had practice in pretending. It was my goal to be known as a model because I wanted to be the envy of my seventh-grade peers and be thought of as beautiful and worldly. But being called a model and actually having to model were two different things entirely and caused me to experience very different feelings. At the very beginning of my modeling career, I needed test shots by a well-known photographer whom my new agents had chosen for me, and filling a modeling portfolio cost money that we didn’t really have. I was told that I was lucky that I had caught the photographer’s eye and should jump at the chance to have my pictures taken by him. His fee was a whopping $1,400 for three different looks. Prints would cost extra. So I struck a deal with my mother. If she bankrolled my test shots and drove me to Melbourne, I’d pay her back all the start-up money with my earnings from my first few jobs. She agreed, and my modeling career began.

In preparation for the test shots, my mother had rolled my hair in rag curls the night before, and the lumpy twisted rags felt like steel rods between the pillow and my head and made it impossible to sleep. This method of curling the hair was really unpredictable because often one section refused to curl at all and so the “naturally curly, I can’t help it, I just woke up this way” look became the “I hate my straight, limp hair and so does my mother, who spent all night curling it in rags” look. On top of that, the rags had stray threads of cotton that would snag in my hair, and prying them out gave other sections an Afro-like frizz. I knew I had done the wrong thing by curling my hair the minute I walked in the door. The hairstylist grabbed my hairsprayed ringlets and proceeded to lecture me on how I should go to every job with clean, unstyled hair. As a twelve-year-old it never occurred to me I may have insulted him by doing my own hair. I was just avoiding what I thought would be an instant cancelation of the shoot if the photographer saw that I had just ordinary, limp, straight hair and, as a consequence, wasn’t worthy of his time. I felt like I’d bullshitted my way into making the modeling agency take me in the first place and that my hair was going to expose me for the fake I really was. Luckily, my hair and makeup were done before the photographer arrived, so my real identity, with my ugly hair and my red, blotchy skin, remained undiscovered.

The photographer was a sluggish, heavy-set man whose droopy eyes accidentally registered me as he was glancing around the studio looking for something of interest—like a light or an assistant. After several hours of ordering and eating lunch, tweaking lights, and touching up my makeup, I began the actual modeling part of the photo shoot tired and wilted, and spent several more hours in that sweltering hot studio shooting the three different looks. For $1,400 I got a close-up wearing a jean jacket and a beret, a ridiculous jumping-up-and-down photo on a mini trampoline wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and a more grown-up look in a skintight black dress with a black plastic trash bag on my head scrunched into an abstract shape. The latter, I was told, was high-fashion, avant-garde.

Although the photos turned out to be something that I showed anyone who cared to look at them, the experience of taking them was horrible. No matter which pose I struck for him, he had a correction, each more embarrassing to me than the last. “Don’t jut your hip out like that, stand normally. Chin down, relax your mouth, open your eyes.” He yelled his orders at me all day, demanding that I change what I was doing, chipping away at my joy and confidence with each command. By the end of the shoot, I had stopped attempting to inject my personality into the pictures. Instead I was like a scared puppy that sees its master and automatically rolls over because it knows that’s the one thing it can do to avoid a beating. I left the shoot feeling tired, anxious, and insecure, but because my mother had paid for it and taken another day off work to act as my chauffeur/chaperone, I felt I couldn’t tell her the truth of how the photo shoot made me feel. So I lied and told her that I was excited about my new career.

On the way back to Geelong from the big city, we stopped at McDonald’s. I held her hand as we stood in the “order here” line among other twelve-year-olds and their mothers. I stuffed myself with cheeseburgers, French fries, and a vanilla milk shake. And for the first time since the start of my career as a model, I was happy. Stopping at McDonald’s became a ritual for my mother and me after a go-see or a modeling job. It was a midway point between the big city and the smaller bay city where I lived, and it became the midway point between the person I was and the person I was pretending to be. I sat down to eat as a child, but talked about my exciting day at work like an adult. For that one moment, I let it all go and my mother watched me without judgment or concern. I’d passed the test, and food was my reward. I’d pretended to be an adult, and going back to who I really was, a child excited to be at McDonald’s, was my prize for being such a good pretender.

The only problem was that I couldn’t stop rewarding myself. Returning to regular school life, I started to gain a little weight. I don’t know why exactly, but I just couldn’t stop eating. After my first photo shoot, eating seemed to be a huge comfort to me, and so every day after school, my friend Fiona and I would walk to the local supermarket to buy potato chips and candy. I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, I knew I should be working out and trying to stay skinny for a potential modeling job that could happen at any moment, but eating just felt so good. My friend was a year older than me, and she told me that when I got to thirteen, my body would start changing, that I would hit puberty and get my period and get fat. Because she was older and knew more than I did, and because she had definitely gotten fatter since turning thirteen, I had no reason to doubt her, and so the inevitability of my weight gain made me think depriving myself of eating candy was futile. If it was going to happen anyway, I might as well make myself feel less anxious about it by soothing my nerves with a bag of potato chips. But I knew it was wrong. I knew my mother couldn’t see me doing it. She’d just lent me thousands of dollars to get my modeling portfolio with the proviso that I would model my way out of debt. No one would hire me in this condition. I weighed 120 pounds!

After four long weeks, I received a call from the Modeling World. My agency was hosting a runway show in Melbourne with a local designer so they both could show off their wares to the fashion industry. They asked me to walk in the show, which would take place in a nightclub, and the event was only five days away. I felt no excitement, just panic. I dreaded the fashion show and I hated myself for getting so fat. I was nervous about being on a catwalk in front of the fashion industry anyway, much less modeling clothes that might show them all the reasons not to hire me—my big hips, my bulky calves, my fat stomach. To be perfectly honest, after my experience with the test shots, I would’ve been happy if I’d never gotten hired to model. I had the glamorous pictures to prove that I was pretty, and a story to tell of what it was like to be a model while never having to admit how terribly insecure modeling made me feel. Proving that I could do it if I wanted to but not actually having to keep proving it over and over again would’ve been perfect. The only thing between me and this plan was my ego with its inflexible stance on failure. The embarrassment of failure was too much for me to bear. I’d already told everyone that I was a model, I’d convinced an agency that I had what it took to be a success, and, of course, I couldn’t disappoint my mother. The only thing standing in the way of devastating embarrassment and success and admiration was a Cadbury Caramello Bar. There was no other option but to starve myself for the five days and hope that I could at least lose the five additional pounds I’d gained in the last two weeks.

Not eating is pretty easy when you have a gun to your head. I just needed those five pounds off for the fashion show, and then after that I’d eat salads and I’d never again eat junk food. After this stupid, extreme diet, I was going to work out every day and never have to starve myself again to get ready for a job. It was all about being ready, being prepared. As I had discovered, 90 percent of my nerves and feelings of insecurity came from being underprepared—whether I hadn’t studied enough for a test or trained enough for ballet exam—most of my feelings of terror would go away when I felt I knew the answer to every conceivable question. Modeling would be no different. If the question was, “Will you look good in this tiny bathing suit at any angle?” then my answer would be, “Yes.” It was that simple.

My mother, a dieter from way back, approved of this quick-fix plan not only to get me ready for the show but also to shut me up. Unfortunately, when I was nervous, I’d cry a lot. I’d wail and howl and stomp around the house moaning about how stupid I was and how I was doomed for a life of failure and mediocrity. My plan to starve myself, although not the healthiest plan, was a one-time Band-Aid that was better than the wailing, and so she reluctantly taught me a couple of her dieting tricks. Mostly they consisted of caffeinated beverages without milk, Ryvita crackers with beets and steamed vegetables. Oil, butter, dressings—everything that made food taste good—were out. Dry was in. And so I embarked on my first diet, wanting desperately to succeed as a good dieter and to get this situation behind me.

Over the next five days, I consumed a total of 2,000 calories and had lost the five pounds. Thanks to my self-discipline and determination, I was a success. I felt like I could accomplish anything. I was proud of myself, and my mother was proud of me, too. We drove up to Melbourne for the fashion show with confidence and maybe even a little excitement. I was ready. I was twelve years old and about to start my career.

I arrived to pandemonium. Due to our hitting some traffic in the hour-long journey from Geelong and the fact that we were left alone to find our way to the backstage area, I was slightly late for the show.

“The girl that just walked in hasn’t been through makeup and hair,” yelled a man with a clipboard. I was yanked by the forearm from my mother and guided over to an empty stool. From that point on, I was a product on an assembly line. My head was doused with cold water and blown dry, the round brushes tearing at the knots in my hair while I was simultaneously poked in the face with a coarse brush that at certain angles felt like hundreds of fine dressmaking pins. Bright, ugly, unflattering colors were slapped on my face with the brushstrokes a house painter would use to apply primer. I sat in silence looking at my reflection as it became uglier, unable to even introduce myself because of the guilt I felt that my lateness had caused this panic. Nobody had asked me for my name anyway. There were models to the left and right of me in varying stages of completion, none of whom even glanced my way until the makeup artist exclaimed in a shrill voice, “What am I supposed to do with these eyebrows?” And that made the model next to me turn to look at them.

“Whoa. They’re some crazy eyebrows!” the male model said to me in a big, stupid way that made me angry rather than ashamed.

“They’re exactly like my father’s eyebrows and he’s dead.” That shut him up. I started thinking about my dad and wondered how he would feel about me modeling. Although I felt really bad about using him to justify having big, bushy eyebrows, it wouldn’t be the last time I did it to stop people from talking about them. Until I realized you could pluck them. Other than that one interaction with the model, I didn’t actually talk to any of the other Team models until after the show when we were directed by the bookers to mingle with the crowd. As I was awkwardly standing alone at a high-top table trying to look sophisticated by sipping sparkling water, I overheard one of the girls say, “Apparently there’s a girl here who’s only twelve,” and I blurted out in excitement, “That’s me! I’m twelve!” as only a twelve-year-old could. After that, word spread and other models talked to me in the condescending way adults talk to children. I was hardly a child and they were only a few years older than me, so I didn’t appreciate it. But the most upsetting thing about meeting them was that I realized how beautiful all of them were. Stripped of their crazy fashion show makeup I could see their big eyes, set far apart and cradled by their perfect cheekbones that the rest of their face hung from in perfect proportion. Their hair, thrown up messily yet beautifully in a hair tie, and their loose, easy clothes spoke of their attitude toward their beauty—it was effortless and unconscious. It didn’t require their critical eye reflected in a mirror to craft it; it just was there. They were so much more beautiful than me that I was in awe of them. I felt so ashamed of the dress and heels I’d bought for the occasion, and so stupid to have reapplied makeup after removing the show makeup. But the thing that gave me the pit in my stomach was the fact that I knew I needed it. Underneath the caked-on foundation was red blotchy skin, and if I didn’t wear eyeliner, my eyes looked too small for the roundness of my face. I was different from all those girls, and I had to be careful not to let anyone see it.

The show itself was pretty uneventful. I had to model only one unrevealing outfit—culottes and a T-shirt with built-in shoulder pads. I was sent down the runway with a male model who strutted around like he was line dancing, holding me by the wrist and twirling me around like I was a prize he’d won at the state fair. I felt stupid that I’d made such a big deal about the show. After I’d stood around practically in silence for over an hour, overhearing conversations that intimidated me because I couldn’t understand what anyone was talking about, I was finally allowed to go home. I felt relieved that the night was over. I got into my mother’s car, took my heels off, and curled my cold feet underneath me. I sat facing her as she drove, talking to her all the way like she was my best friend. I ate a whole bag of mint candies that my mother had put in the car for me as a reward for getting through my first fashion show and for successfully losing all that weight. I ate them greedily and steadily until there were none left. As we pulled into our driveway an hour later at midnight, exhausted and full of sugar, it crossed my mind that eating all those candies might have caused me to gain a pound. As I walked barefoot to the back door, my belly distended in my skintight dress, I devised a plan to stop the sugar from turning into fat. Tomorrow was sports practice at school, and I made a promise to run ten extra laps around the hockey field to make up for it. And that wasn’t the only promise I made that night that I didn’t keep. I promised myself I wouldn’t binge again.

“HEY, PORTIA. How were your days off?” I walked into the wardrobe fitting room passing Jane Krakowski as she was leaving.

“Great, thanks.” I was aware as I spoke that I hadn’t talked in awhile. It felt unnatural and my voice sounded raspy and constricted with phlegm, the telltale sounds of a chain-smoker. I cleared my throat, embarrassed.

“See you in there.” She said it in a way that sounded like we were both in trouble, like we were about to walk into a detention room at school. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Jane. Her facial expressions were infectious, like she was keeping a naughty secret that could crack her up at any moment. Apart from Jane, I hadn’t really gotten a sense of the cast yet. They all seemed pretty quiet and professional, more like corporate businesspeople than the actors I had known in the past. The cast of my first movie, Sirens, interacted with each other in a much more playful manner than I’d observed with the cast of Ally. During Sirens, we’d eat lunch together and listen to Hugh Grant’s hilarious stories or Sam Neil’s dry explanation of what it was like to be a supporting actor to a dinosaur in Jurassic Park. But maybe I would eat lunch with them today and hear their stories. Maybe I’d even tell them some of Hugh’s stories. They were much funnier than mine.

As I said my hellos to the folks in the fitting rooms, it occurred to me that in a great ironic twist, I could possibly be perceived by the cast as a threat. Any new cast member threatens to take away airtime from the ensemble cast members, their story lines and attention. No television actor really embraces the idea of a new cast member, with perhaps the exception of the overworked titular character. I didn’t feel as though the cast was threatened by me, however. I felt that they were threatened by the change that my presence signified, that it prompted them to ask themselves, “If this could happen, then what’s next?” While everyone was very pleasant to me, I got the sense that they were all just wondering why I was there. They were celebrities on a hit television show, and I’d only had small parts in three movies and two very short-lived sitcoms to my credit. I guess we were all wondering why I was there.

I was in the wardrobe rooms to check-fit my outfit for Day Two. I was nervous to try on the size 6 suit the tailor had taken in after my first fitting three days prior. After bingeing and purging I feared that I’d gained weight. I always tended to gain a pound after a binge and purge even if it was just bloat. I struggled to zip up the skirt in front of the costume designer, her assistant, and the tailor, who all witnessed the effort.

“It fits,” I said to the crowd, as I stood straight with my legs pressed together, careful not to show them that it would likely bunch up at the slightest movement. Even though I had to wear the skirt for the last scene that day, I was too ashamed to admit that it was too tight.

“Is it comfortable?” the costume designer, Vera, asked, squinting as if seeing better would help her sense my discomfort.

“Yeah. It should be fine.”

“I think I take in too much,” the tailor told Vera in a thick, unrecognizable accent. “I take out a little.”

I didn’t say anything. I just took off the skirt and handed it to the tailor, allowing her to believe that it was her fault that the skirt didn’t fit. I slipped into my new beige Banana Republic pants, walked outside, and headed into makeup, all the while fighting the desperate urge for a cigarette.

• • •

“Hi, Portia. How were your days off?” Peter MacNicol was sitting in the makeup chair next to the empty chair that was waiting for me. He looked tired and I could tell that he was slightly envious that I’d had days off when he was working twelve-hour days all week.

“Great, thanks.” It occurred to me that the more important the character, the fewer the days off. I hoped I would never be asked that question again.

I stared into the mirror at the red dots on my eyelids. Despite my efforts to conceal them, they were so pronounced I could see them clearly in the mirror from several feet away. To my amazement, my makeup artist didn’t comment. It was almost worse that she didn’t, as it suggested to me that maybe she knew how I got them and didn’t need to ask. She began my makeup by thickly applying foundation with a wide, flat brush. After several minutes of silence, Peter got up from the chair next to mine.

“See you in there.”

The makeup trailer wobbled as he walked down the steps.

“Yeah. See you in there.”

“Cut!” the director yelled loudly to the cameraman and the actors, which was then echoed by several ADs stationed all over the set. I heard the word cut about ten times after each take to release the background or let the people who were at craft service go back to making noise as they fixed themselves coffee or a snack. We were all waiting this time, however, for the first AD to ask the cameraman to check the gate, which meant that the cast and crew could break for lunch. The scene was a “walk and talk” that took place in the hallway next to the courtroom. It was a short scene where I met up with Ally and asked her to have drinks with me at bar at the end of the day, explaining, “I would like to talk to a woman’s woman” before making a decision to join the law firm of Cage and Fish. I did well, even though it made me nervous as it reminded me of a scene I did in the movie Scream 2, in which my character, a nasty sorority girl, walked up to the entire assembly of the movie’s stars, and for some reason, had to say, “In a six degrees of Kevin Bacon sort of way.” I kept screwing it up. Take after take I would wrongly say, “In a six degrees of separation sort of way.” I was panic-stricken before each take and the panic made my head spin with fear and my mind go blank. I literally saw white light as I incorrectly repeated the same line over and over again. In this scene where I bullied Ally into meeting me for a drink, despite my urge to say, “I’d like to talk to a woman first,” I got the line out without any cause for panic. I was very nervous, though, as I was lauding it over Ally, intimidating her. In between takes I felt just as nervous, feeling as though I should fill in the silence with small talk, even though no one was really doing much talking. I, like the crew, was breathlessly waiting to be released for lunch, only I didn’t need to eat. I just needed to be released from the stress of being looked at, being judged. Was I good enough?

“Check the gate.”

The cameraman shone a penlight into the camera to check for dust on the film. “Clear.”

“Gate’s good. That’s lunch. One hour.”

I walked from the set to the dressing rooms with Calista and Peter.

“Where do you guys normally eat lunch?” The minute I said it, I felt stupid, and like a nerdy schoolgirl who was attempting to force an invitation to be part of the cool kids’ group. There was a slight gap between my asking and their answering that reinforced my feeling of stupidity.

“I tend to nap during lunch.” Peter spoke sweetly but in a way that informed me that there would never be an exception to this routine.

“I have a phone interview.” Calista made a slight face that suggested that in another time before she became the poster child for America’s changing views on skirt length and feminism, she would’ve gladly swapped stories over lunch with another actor. The face she made was enough to make me think she really did wish things were different. I knew in that second that I liked her. But I also knew that I would never really get to know her.

“How are you liking it so far?” She looked directly into my eyes.

I inhaled and nodded my head up and down a few times. I wanted to tell her that it felt strange, that I felt out of place, that I was scared of not delivering. I wanted to tell her that I felt pressure to look good, to be fashionable, to be someone other than who I was. I wanted to say that I felt isolated and that maybe I kind of hated the show. But I didn’t. In the four years of working on that show I never did say any of that to her.

“I love it.”

“Great! See you back in there.”

As I walked through the door with my name on it and into my dressing room, I heard my name being called from the hallway. It was Courtney Thorne-Smith in sweatpants walking toward the makeup trailer.

“You break for lunch?”

“Yeah. What are you up to?” Maybe I could have lunch with Courtney. I hadn’t had any real scenes with her yet and I wanted to get to know her. I used to watch Melrose Place.

“That’s weird. They just called me into makeup. Everyone’s at lunch?”

“Yeah. You wanna grab lunch with me?”

She looked at me in a way that suggested that she felt sorry for me. I guess you could call it condescending, but there was a glint in her eye that told me that she too thought what she was about to tell me was strange.

“We don’t really eat lunch together here.”

“Oh. Cool. Okay.” I stared down at the carpet, embarrassed, as I began to close the dressing room door. “See you later, then.”

I looked at my bag that was sitting on the new green chair opposite the full-length mirror. I had an hour. I grabbed my cigarettes, stuffed them underneath my shirt, and started walking out of the building. I walked away from the windowless monolithic peach rectangles that housed the stages and away from the offices, stacked one on top of the other, David Kelley’s office sitting on top of them all. In the far corner of Manhattan Beach Studios, out of sight of anyone and in between the chain-link fence and the loading docks, I embarked on what would become my lunchtime ritual. I hid from the people who made me feel awkward, stupid, or like a schoolgirl. I hid from producers, directors, and people who evaluated me. I hid from the voice that became very loud in front of that full-length mirror in the dressing room that was supposed to make me feel comfortable. And I chain-smoked.

I FELT NERVOUS. As I walked through the house with wet hair to make myself tea I heard the television broadcasting my thoughts. “What will she be wearing? Who will win for best comedy?” The Emmys was a thing that I’d only seen on TV; I’d never actually helped provide the content that made it a show. Ally McBeal was nominated, Calista and Jane were nominated, and I was a debutante about to be introduced for the first time to the public who could potentially love me or hate me. My brother, thinking he was being supportive, had turned on all the TVs in the house for the preshow. I knew at some point my nerves would get the better of me and I’d lose my nonchalant attitude toward it and would tell him to shut it off. But I was trying on a different personality, one that was excited to walk the red carpet and show people who I was because I thought I was perfectly fabulous. This personality was not a bit worried or nervous that I’d say something stupid or be wearing the wrong thing. As I made my tea and listened to what was left of the segment after the kettle had sputtered, boiled, and whistled, I was completely unaffected by the shrill voices of the entertainment news reporters and the judgment of fashion commentators. I liked this new personality. It was calming, mature, balanced. I wondered how long I could keep it.

I found that if I sat still for too long, my insecurity seized the opportunity to take control of my mind. Especially if the chair I was sitting on was positioned in front of a mirror. It’s not that I hated the way I looked, it’s just that I worried that I wouldn’t look good enough. That I wouldn’t be transformed from the girl who often forgot to shave her legs and rarely got a facial into Portia de Rossi, Hollywood actress and new cast member of the hottest show on television. In an attempt to avoid looking at my face as my hair was blown-dry, I looked down at the notes in my hands. My hands; my big, ugly, red hands that had only recently seen a manicure because that was what my cast mates did on weekends to ready themselves for the week ahead. I did whatever they did because they knew things I didn’t. Although I hated going to a nail salon, I wasn’t going to ignore the people around me who were more successful than me and who had figured all this out. I really hated my hands. My hands were manly. They belonged to a working-class boy who helped his dad around the farm. In my ugly hands were the pieces of paper that would act as my safety net, my little bit of reassurance, proof that if I studied them, I could ace the ensuing exam on that bright red carpet. On sheets of lined, reinforced paper I’d written:How did you get the role on Ally McBeal ?I met with David Kelley for a role on The Practice, but he saw me more for Ally, and within a couple of weeks, I was sent a script that featured my character, and that became the first episode of the new season.Describe your character.Nelle Porter is a very driven, ambitious woman who has sacrificed her private life for her career. She’s seemingly ruthless and insensitive, but deep down she wants love and happiness like everyone else. She’s so cold her nickname is “Sub-zero.”Were you a fan of the show?Yes. I love the show and I’m so proud to be a part of it. It’s like a dream come true.What is everyone on the show like? Have they welcomed you to the cast?The whole cast is great. Everyone is lovely and has been really friendly and welcoming toward me. I feel very lucky to be working with such a talented and nice group of people.What is in store for Nelle Porter this season?Well, you’ll have to watch and see . . .

As I memorized my scripted responses to hypothetical questions in the kitchen chair that could barely fit in the bathroom of my one-bathroom house, I wondered if anyone else out there sitting in hair and makeup was doing this. Did any other actor rehearse “off the cuff” responses to red carpet questions? Did they rehearse their talk show stories as they sat in foils at the hairdresser’s? When you’re under spotlights and nervous, it has to help to have a script to fall back on. The fact that my character always knows what to say is one of the reasons I love acting. If I could be given a script to answer the hard questions seamlessly, I wouldn’t be so nervous that I might say the wrong thing. Sitting in front of the mirror and learning my answers, a feeling of self-hatred and shame came over me as I remembered a conversation with Greg Germann a couple of weeks earlier. On set and in between takes, in an attempt to be friendly, Greg had asked me what he no doubt thought was a simple question, but it was a question that silenced me with fear.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

When I froze and was unable to answer this seemingly easy question, Greg raised his eyebrows and in a joking, incredulous tone asked, “Are you gay?”

The question took me off guard. I wasn’t prepared. If only I’d had a script of perfect witty responses, I could’ve flicked through the brilliantly written pages in my brain and found the right one. But without the script, all I could think to say was, “I don’t know.”

I hated seeing him at work after that. I worried about that conversation every day.

I arrived at the Shrine Auditorium alone after getting into the car an hour earlier and chain-smoking the entire way. The last twenty minutes had been spent circling the venue, waiting in line as the celebrities, in order of importance, were given the drop-off spots closest to the red carpet. My driver told me all of this as we were waiting, which suggested to me that despite my silver dress and diamonds dripping from my neck and ears, he instinctively knew I was a nobody, even though my clothes suggested otherwise.

When I eventually got out of the car at the mouth of the red carpet, I felt assaulted by the heat. For the first time, it occurred to me that it was the middle of the day, the hottest part of the day, and all these people were in gowns and diamonds pretending it was evening. It looked ridiculous to see a sea of sequins and tulle and satin at 3:30 in the afternoon on a hot summer day. Of course, it was just another costume, and these were actors. The red carpet was full of people. There were hundreds of people all jammed on a carpet, some trying to hurry through to the entrance of the Shrine, some lingering, trying to be noticed by photographers. And then there were the publicists, the people in drab black “stagehand” outfits swimming upstream to grab a client by the hand and hurl him or her in front of the firing squad, the section at the beginning of the carpet with photographers, all screaming and sweating, in rows ten deep. The noise coming from this section was aggressive, and it came in surges depending on who walked near them. The photographers yelled the name of the actor to get her attention and then a few minutes later the fans in the bleachers did the same. There was definitely a lot of yelling and sweating, posing and cheering for such a glamorous and important event. I didn’t know why, but it seemed different on TV. It seemed like the actors simply walked to the entrance and happened to be shot by photographers, quietly and respectfully as they breezed past. The fans, in my fantasy, would fall silent as the celebrities passed by, awed by their proximity to these precious creatures, like people do at the railing of a zoo enclosure. This seemed more like a sports event.

The Fox publicist found me patiently waiting at the start of the carpet after beads of sweat had formed all over my face and body. This was my introduction. This was my turning point. After today, everyone would know who I was and have an opinion about everything I did. And with my hair in ringlets and my individual eyelashes glued onto the corners of my eyes, scripted answers and a silver Calvin Klein dress, I was ready to face the firing squad. She took me to the start of the photographers’ section of the carpet. As I’d just watched several women get their picture taken, I wasn’t terribly nervous. I knew I’d stand in four different spots as the photographers yelled out my name and jostled for the best picture. I approached the line of fire as the publicist stated my name and place of business. “Portia de Rossi—Ally McBeal.” As I stood there, smiling, hip jutting out in a casual but elegant pose, I was alarmed by the silence. Not one of these people with machines for faces had called my name or asked me to spin around. No one was asking me who I was wearing. I instantly felt like this unenthusiastic response was my fault, like I should do something to make the picture better, more interesting. I felt sorry for these people whose bosses expected something more than just a girl in a silver dress. They expected a star with personality. They wanted to see the reason for adding a cast member to an already successful show. At the end of the stills photography section I saw a news crew whose reporter was handing out plastic fans. In a desperate attempt to justify the photographers’ time, the jewelry designer’s generosity, the publicist’s uphill battle to get me noticed after swimming upstream to come fetch me, and to not make David Kelley look like he made a mistake by casting an ordinary girl with no personality, I grabbed a fan and dramatically posed with it high in the air—like Marilyn Monroe with her dress blowing up, but different. The photographers liked it. They were taking pictures. Some of them were even yelling, “Over here!” so I’d turn more toward them while holding the pose.

I was officially a hypocrite. I wanted to blend in and disappear yet be noticed doing it.

Before I knew it, I was answering questions into a microphone.

“What is the one beauty item you can’t live without?”

Shit. I didn’t know the answer to that one. I mean, “concealer” was the truthful answer, but what was the right answer?

“Lip gloss.”

I hate lip gloss. I hate anything on my lips, but it sounded right. It sounded pretty and feminine and like something boys would find attractive; big, goopy lips, moist and inviting. Next . . .

“What is your must-have fashion item for the season?”

Shit. I didn’t know fashion at all. I didn’t read magazines and I wasn’t really interested. I wished Kali were there; she would’ve known the answer to that question. In fact, a few months ago she’d wanted Chanel ballet flats . . .

“Chanel ballet flats.”

My answer took a little long in coming, and the interviewer could sense it wasn’t going to get any easier, so I was dismissed from the interview with a “Thanks for stopping to talk to us.” I was surprised by the questions I was asked. Most of the interviewers didn’t care about my character or the show. All anyone wanted to know was who I was wearing and what my beauty tips were and how I stayed in shape. As I walked away from the news crews, I heard the last reporter ask my publicist, “What’s her name?” The reporter didn’t discreetly whisper the question to my publicist in an attempt to save me from having hurt feelings, she yelled it. She had just been interviewing me like I was important enough to tell the public my thoughts about the increasing number of actresses who wore their hair down to the Emmys and yet she had no idea who I was. The answer came over raucous screams announcing Lara Flynn Boyle’s arrival so she asked again as if she wondered if she’d heard correctly. “What’s her name?”

I was embarrassed and a little afraid. I was often embarrassed to tell people my name because I had made it up. I had a deep fear of someone discovering the truth, that this exotic name wasn’t mine—that I’d borrowed it like I had borrowed the dress and the diamonds, that it was a little too fabulous for me to own and at some point I was going to have to give it back. Portia de Rossi. A fabulous name. A name that belonged to a celebrity.

I made it up when I was fifteen. I was illegally in a nightclub when the club’s manager took me into his VIP room to award me with a coveted all-access, never-wait-in-line medallion. I knew I couldn’t give him my real identity for fear that he would discover my age and never again allow me back in the club. I was flustered coming up with a name on the spot, but I knew I had to do it. Not only was he offering me a key chain medallion to flaunt, a sliver tag announcing to the world that I was in with the “in-crowd,” he was offering me a job. I could be a hostess for the club, and all I had to do was show up twice a week. All that—if I could come up with a name other than Amanda Rogers, the name that belonged to the fifteen-year-old kid that stood before them. I could be a VIP if I could come up with the right name.

I hated my birth name. Amanda Rogers. It was so ordinary, so perfectly average. It had “a man” in it, which annoyed me because every time I’d hear someone refer to a man, I would turn my head, waiting for the “duh.” I’d toyed with changing it the way most kids do. When I became a model, my modeling agents suggested I change it, as reinventing oneself was pretty common practice in the modeling world in the eighties. Sophie became Tobsha, and Angelique became Rochelle. What Amanda could become was something I was still fantasizing about until I heard one manager in the VIP lair say to another, “What’s her name?” as he hovered over a book of entries with a black fountain pen.

“Portia . . . de . . . Rossi.” The words came out slowly but with certainty. I really wanted that medallion.

“How do you spell that?”

I wrote the name in the air with my index finger behind my back to see whether a small d or a big D would look better. I got Portia from The Merchant of Venice, and de Rossi from watching the credits of a movie. The last name stuck in my mind among a million names that flew by. In a sea of a million unimportant names, I saw de Rossi. I put it all together in that room, got my medallion, a job, and walked out in shock. I had changed my identity. Just like that.

As I walked into the Shrine Auditorium where the Emmys were about to take place, I freaked out about how caught off-guard I’d been, how unprepared I was for the biggest test of my life—the test that required me to show them all why I was special and chosen. I made a mental note to buy fashion magazines and start caring about beauty items and perfume and exercising. I needed to find answers to these questions if I were going to feel confident next time. It was time Portia de Rossi earned her name.

AS I drove to work, my thoughts kept returning to my wardrobe. For Day One of the scripted days in this episode, I wore the black pencil skirt and long jacket. That would be okay because the waistband on the skirt was a little roomy, unlike the jeans I was currently wearing, which were cutting into my flesh and making my stomach fold over the top of them. I took my right hand off the steering wheel and grabbed my stomach fat—first just under the belly button and then I worked my way over the sides in repetitive grabbing motions. For fun I did it in time with the music. In a way it felt like a workout or a kind of dance of self-hatred. The fat extended all the way around to my back—not enough for a handful, but enough to take a firm hold of between my thumb and forefinger. As I looked down at my cavernous belly button I couldn’t help but wonder if I was getting away with it. Did I still look like the girl they had hired? Did people notice? Obviously, my costume designer was aware of my weight gain over my first month on the show as she watched the weekly struggle of trying to pull up a skirt over my hips or straining to clasp the waistband. If pretending not to notice is the kind thing to do, then she was very kind to me. She always blamed the zipper for getting stuck because it was cheap or not properly sewn into the item of clothing even if she had to call her assistant in to hold the top of the zip as she put some muscle into trying to move it.

Did people look at me and think, “She’s let herself go?” Did my actress rivals look at me and smirk, satisfied that my weight gain rendered me powerless to steal roles, scenes, or lines? As I pulled into my parking space, I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe it was not just increasing familiarity but my nonthreatening physique that was the reason everyone had seemed a lot more comfortable around me lately. My presence no longer prompted them to ask themselves, “If this happened, then what’s next?” as another actress, Lucy Liu, had joined the cast and answered that question. I was no longer the new girl, and I had proven to them that I wasn’t a threat to their status on the show. With the weight gain, I wasn’t exactly the hot blond bombshell that Cage and Fish talked about almost daily in their dialogue to each other. I cringed to read their lines and how they would talk about my character as being “hot” and “untouchable.” While I wanted to be considered attractive, it made me uncomfortable to be thought of as being sexually desirable to men. But mainly the dialogue made me uncomfortable because I knew that reality didn’t match up to the character David Kelley had written.

“Hey, Porshe. Haven’t seen you in awhile. How were your days off?” Jane passed me in the hall on her way to set.

“Great, thanks.”

“See you out there.”

I walked into my dressing room and threw my bag down on the sofa.

There was a sharp knock on my dressing room door.

“Good morning, Portia. Makeup is ready for you.”

“Be right there.”

I walked around the desk to look in the mirror. The fat that I’d felt on my way there didn’t really show under my sweater. At least not when I was standing. I lifted my sweater so I could see my bare stomach and the fat that I remembered feeling. But I didn’t see fat. My stomach was flat. I stared into the eyes reflected in the mirror. They were smiling at me as if to say, “Oh, Porshe, what the hell are you worried about?” For a brief moment, I felt relief. But it didn’t last long. As I opened the wardrobe and looked at its contents, a wave of panic passed through my body; a hot, rolling rush of panic beginning in my stomach and ending at my head. Hanging on the bar were ten, maybe fifteen, sets of bras and panties. They were the kind of bras and panties that are intended to be seen, not the plainer flesh-toned kind that I was used to finding on the rack. Attached to the first pair was a note:

“For next episode. Please try on at your convenience. Thanks, V.”

Shit. Shit! The next episode was eight days away. There was a knock at the door. I jumped out of my skin.

“Portia. Can you go to makeup, please? We’re going to get to your scene in less than an hour.”

“Alright! I’m coming!” As usual, the people who deserved it the least get the brunt of my anger. The person who deserved my anger the most was my fat, lazy, self. I had been in complete denial. I’d decided that rather than get off my fat, lazy ass and accept responsibility for my job, rather than seizing this amazing opportunity and using every scene as a showcase for my talent, I’d just sit around drinking beer and eating Mexican food. I stormed out of my dressing room and walked toward the makeup trailer, the voice in my head berating me.

You can’t eat again until that scene. You need to work out. You’re such an idiot for thinking you could get away with bingeing on Mexican food and not working out when this kind of thing could’ve happened at any time.

For a brief moment, I was aware that Peter MacNicol had passed me in the hallway. I’m sure he said hello, but it was too late to reply. The underwear scene probably had something to do with him. Our romance had been heating up and I bet there was some kind of love scene in the next episode. Maybe that’s all it was. Maybe it would be a shot of me lying down on a bed in my underwear, or a waist-high shot of me unbuttoning a shirt to expose the top part of one of those pretty, lacy brassieres hanging in my closet.

“Hey!” My makeup artist gave me a hug and with a guttural laugh she said, “Did you read the next episode? You’re doing a striptease, girl!”

I pulled the script from her hands and with a cold, emotionless expression I looked at what she’d been reading. I didn’t want to give her any more enjoyment at my discomfort than she was already having. Of course, I didn’t know if enjoyment was what she was experiencing for sure, but given the way we talked about our weight struggles almost every day, I couldn’t imagine that she wasn’t enjoying my discomfort a little, if just in that way that people are grateful they aren’t dealt the same fate. The “better you than me” comment that is always delivered with a weird laugh makes it seem like they’re ready to pull up a ringside seat for the ensuing spectacle. The script read: Nelle waits in her office for Cage. Cage enters. Nelle begins to remove her clothing. Cage is flustered. Nelle, in underwear, walks toward him. He runs out of the office and down the hall. At that moment, I would’ve done anything to run out of the makeup trailer, to my car, and out of this ugly studio with its square buildings and its one-way windows. I would go home and pack my suitcases and take my car to the airport, get on a plane, go back to Melbourne, Australia, and just start the whole damn thing over. Start my whole damn life over. I’d go to law school, a studious, serious girl who wasn’t bopping around from photo shoots to lectures, having earned a place there after attending the local high school where I was the richest and smartest girl in the class. I would never have modeled, and so I’d think I was attractive just as I was, and I’d live in this blissful ignorance with my mother and father, because maybe for some reason he’d still be alive, too, and he wouldn’t need me to go out and prove I was pretty and special, because he’d know that I was pretty and special, and he’d tell me that anyone who thought I wasn’t the prettiest and smartest girl they’d ever known was stupid. Or jealous. Or both.

“Wow. That’s really exciting. That’s great for my character.” When attacked, defend by lying.

I sat in the makeup chair staring at my reflected image as it was transformed from a hopeful twenty-four-year-old to a beaten down, emotionally bankrupt forty-year-old; the thick foundation covered my pores, suffocating my skin, the heavy eye shadow creating a big, deep crease in my eyelids, the red lipstick drawing the eye to my thin, pursed lips. Until now, it had looked to me like the mask of a character. No matter how scared or insecure I was, there was always a glint in my eyes underneath the thick eyeliner that reminded me that this was just a character, that I was young and exciting and had a life away from this world where there were no trees and no one to talk to. But sitting in the makeup chair at that moment, watching the transformation, the lines were blurred. It seemed like less work to create the defensive, cold character. It seemed like we were just putting some makeup onto my face. We were just defining my eye, giving color to my pale lips, covering up my imperfections. The fat was back, too. The fat that I’d felt in the car, spilling over the waistband of my jeans, was visible through my sweater, and I knew that everyone in the trailer was looking at it, wondering how I was going to get it off in eight days. But no one was wondering more than me.

I joined a gym. It was close to the studio, so if I had a break during the day I could just hop in the car and onto a treadmill. That was part of how I got the weight off. The other part was just not eating, which is a highly underrated strategy as zero meals a day works just as well for weight loss as six small ones. The only problem was I was so hungry and weak I limped to the finish line, no longer caring how I was going to stand in my underwear, or which angle would most flatter my body. I stopped caring to the extent that after the rehearsal, my hunger wrestled with my common sense and like a diva I demanded that a PA go to a Starbucks and bring me back a bran muffin. But if that kind of behavior is ever justified, it was at that moment when the script called for an extreme situation and I was just expected to comply. There was no question in David Kelley’s mind as to whether I would do that scene. He demanded that I do it, and so I made my demands in retaliation. “Let’s see the new blonde in her underwear!” Well then, I said, “Get me a muffin!” Actually, demanded is the wrong word. I asked. But it was so unusual for me to ask for anything, it replays in my mind as being a little harsher than it was. It was very common for actors to ask PAs to get them food or to mail a package or to put gas in their cars, but I always felt quite disgusted by it. I always felt that actors were just testing the limits of what someone would do for them just to see if they’d do it. I hate entitlement. But more than that, I hate that someone else in the same position as me feels entitled when I just feel lucky as hell.

I ate it before I shot the scene. I ate that muffin with its salt and calories and wheat and butter and all of the other bloating ingredients.

I hated everything about the underwear scene. I hated that in just a few episodes, I’d gone from playing a high-powered attorney to a woman desperately trying to get her boss to sleep with her. I hated that I’d have to play a love-interest character from now on, and I especially hated what I wore. I chose black lingerie with tiny red and pink hearts sewn onto it. It was ridiculously uncharacteristic for Nelle, who would have worn a more conservative style, perhaps something in navy blue—small, lacy, and revealing yet dignified, and worn with an air of supreme confidence in the goods the underwear displayed. The lingerie I chose was trashy with a stripper vibe. If ever I was to take care of my own needs before worrying about acting, it was in choosing the most flattering underwear. Here was my thinking: I would wear the largest, fullest cut with the most distracting colors to deemphasize my hips and thighs as much as possible. I would pad up my bra to offset the roundness of my stomach and look more proportional from head to toe. I chose a dress that I could remove in one easy motion so I wouldn’t have to bend over and risk rolls of fat creasing on top of each other as I removed a tight skirt or a difficult blouse. I chose the highest of heels, because we all know that the taller you are, the more weight you can carry, and I wore my hair down, shaken all around, in an effort to lift the viewer’s eye north of my abdomen and away from my thighs.

I shot the scene and awaited the verdict. I didn’t have to wait long as it aired within a few weeks. Of course, when shooting a scene like that, some of the feedback is immediate. The energy of the crew changes, and no matter how professional you are, you still feel exposed, cheapened, paid to show your body. Or at least that’s how I felt. And in that scene I was no longer a brilliant attorney who could make the firm more money than it had ever seen. I was stripped of that ability and the respect that comes with it when I stripped down to my heart-covered bra and panties. I was just another blond actress playing a vulnerable woman who has sex with her boss, in the costume of an efficient, crafty attorney. I was just an actress playing a lawyer, which, after dropping out of law school, was the only kind of lawyer I’d ever be. I don’t know why I thought I’d be any more respected for simply pretending to be that which I didn’t have the stamina to become.

By the time the episode aired, my life had changed. For many reasons, I’d decided to move out of the place in Santa Monica that I shared with my brother; the place that I’d shared with my husband. I moved away from the life I’d known since coming to Los Angeles and into an apartment in Hancock Park. I was on my own. Kali had moved back to Pasadena anyway, and my other friend, Ann, a girl who made difficult, emotional conversations easy, had moved to New York. Ann is the friend that everyone wishes they could have. She pries the truth out of you in a nurturing way and then stays around to clean up the tears. Ann’s departure was one of the reasons I moved. But mainly I moved away because of paparazzi. Granted, there was only one photographer who had found my house, but the pictures of me sitting on my front steps, hair in curlers and smoking a cigarette, made me feel ambushed, watched, hunted almost. That one photographer made me feel like any of my private moments could be captured at any given time—unseen, unknown. I felt like I had a peeping Tom and every time I did something that I wouldn’t want anyone else to see, my thoughts escalated into paranoid panic—not only over the present moment, but over those that predated the smoking picture. Retroactive paranoia.

There was nothing fun about seeing my picture in the Star. It served as a warning that I’d better watch myself or I could embarrass my family. I’d better watch myself or I could ruin my career. The photo of me smoking upset my mother. She’d much prefer it if people didn’t think I did that, and now there was proof. Was there proof of my homosexuality yet? (Did I even have proof of it yet?) I wondered if the paparazzo was crouched behind the fence, overhearing my side of phone conversations with Ann when I would sit outside and smoke and talk to her about my therapy sessions. I talked to Ann about therapy and other important life-changing things. Ann had recommended I go to therapy and had also recommended the therapist. Ann listened to my panic and my confusion and to most of my dramatic statements like, “If I get into a relationship, if I even try, then people will find out I’m gay!” She replied, “What’s so bad about that?” Which was ridiculous, of course. Everything was bad about that.

The episode with the scene of me in my underwear aired in New York three hours before it would air in LA. So I told Ann to watch it and call me immediately.

“Hey.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought the show was great. You weren’t in it as much this week.”

“Ann! What did you think of the scene? How do you think I looked?”

“Great.”

“What do you mean, ‘great’?”

“Sexy. You know, great.”

“Did I look thin?”

“I thought you looked like a normal, healthy woman.”

Normal. Healthy. Woman.

My mother told me a long time ago that “healthy” was a euphemism for “fat.” She’d say to me, “Don’t you just hate it when you see someone at the supermarket and they tell you, ‘You look healthy’? They clearly are just trying to tell you that they think you look fat.” She’d tell me how she’d handle the backhanded compliment by smiling and pretending she was receiving a genuine compliment all the while ignoring their attempt to be insulting. After all, it’s in the way an insult is received that makes it an insult. You can’t really give offense unless someone takes it.

All of the words Ann used were euphemisms for fat. Normal just meant that I was fat. Since when did anyone ever go to the doctor’s and feel good about being in the weight range that’s considered normal? A normal size for women in this country is a size 12. Models aren’t “normal.” Actresses aren’t “normal.” She may as well have told me that I’d just embarrassed myself in front of 15 million people. If she didn’t want me to think that, she would’ve used words like “overworked” instead of “healthy,” and “girl” instead of “woman.” How could the image of a woman, with her big voluptuous hips and round thighs and big, heavy breasts be applied to me if I was the skinny, straight-up-and-down, shapeless girl I was starving myself to be?

Message received loud and clear, friend.

You can’t give offense unless somebody takes it.

I BOUGHT A treadmill and put it in my dressing room. That way I was able to run during my lunch break on the set. I also bought another treadmill and put it the guest bedroom in my new apartment. With two treadmills, I didn’t have an excuse not to work out. Because I had started to bring my Maltese dog, Bean, to the set with me, it was hard to get to the gym after work, and having a treadmill in my dressing room allowed me to run for the entire lunch hour instead of taking time out of my workout to drive to the gym and park. Although I hadn’t had exercise equipment in my dressing rooms prior to Ally McBeal, I didn’t invent the concept. Many of the cast members had them.

I got a nutritionist. Her name was Suzanne. I met her during a routine checkup at my gynecologist’s office. She worked out of a small office in the back a couple of days a week and helped women change their diets to decrease their weight and increase their fertility. My doctor introduced her to me after I’d complained about my inability to maintain my weight. I told him that there were weeks when I’d gain and lose seven pounds from one Sunday to the next. After doing tests for thyroid disease and other medical problems that might have explained my weight fluctuation, he decided that the fault lay with me, that I didn’t know how to eat. I agreed with him and hired Suzanne to be my nutritionist.

I loved the thought of having a nutritionist. It made me feel professional, like I was considering all aspects of my work in a thoughtful and serious way. Before my first session with Suzanne, I made the decision to do everything she said. Like a faithful disciple, I would follow her program without question the way a top athlete would drink raw eggs if his coach told him to. This was the kind of private, customized counseling I needed to be a working actress. Like a top athlete, I needed this kind of performance-enhancing guidance. I needed a coach. But mainly, I loved having a nutritionist because Courtney Thorne-Smith had one.

“Hi! Come on in. Mind the mess.” Suzanne was a tall, thin woman with a sharpness to her movements. She dressed blandly and conservatively and was almost sparrowlike with long, thin arms and bony hands that would dart back and forth. I wondered why a woman like that, who was naturally thin, would be drawn to nutrition. I knew there were reasons to be interested in food other than weight loss, but I couldn’t imagine those reasons being compelling enough to make nutrition your life. Instead of seeing her at the gynecologist’s office where we met, I met with Suzanne at her home in Brentwood. When we’d first met she was wearing a white lab coat, and although the meeting was brief, from behind a desk she seemed officious, judgmental, bossy. But a layer of expertise and officiousness was immediately removed just by stripping her of her white coat and placing her in a different setting, in her home with her child’s toys strewn about, her family in photographs looking at me. They were conservative-looking folk, poised to judge me for being so much fatter than she was. Then again, I felt they were judging her for being so messy. The fact that she was a black sheep made me feel a lot better.

“So from what the doctor tells me you have trouble maintaining your weight and knowing what to eat. Please know that you are one of millions of people who struggle with this, which is why people like me have a job!” Suzanne was no longer a skinny bird poised to judge me. She was caring and concerned. It was off-putting.

“Tell me why you think you can’t maintain a healthy weight.” She looked at me with kindness and openness, but there was a fragility to her that I found disarming, perhaps because I recognized a similar vulnerability in myself. Did she starve and binge and purge, too?

“Well . . .” I was surprisingly nervous. I really hadn’t planned on opening up to someone about my eating habits, and all of a sudden it seemed like no one else’s business. It seemed too personal. It seemed strange and a little idiotic to talk about food, like I was a five-year-old sitting cross-legged in a classroom learning about the five food groups.

“I don’t know. I guess I just never knew of a really good diet that I can do every day so my weight doesn’t fluctuate.”

“Well, Portia. I’m not going to teach you a diet, I’m going to teach you a way of life. We’ll talk about what you like to eat, and then I’ll devise an eating plan that will be healthy and help you lose weight.”

Sounds like a diet to me.

She talked and I listened. She had a lot to say about the kinds of calories one should eat, the value of lean protein, the dangers of too many carbohydrates, the difference between white and brown carbohydrates, and the importance of choosing the “right” fruits without a high sugar content.

“I like bananas. What about bananas?” Bananas were a staple in my “in-between” dieting phase. After starving myself by only eating 300 calories a day, I would often eat a slice of dry wheat bread with mashed banana.

“Well, Portia. Bananas are the most popular fruit, probably because they’re the most dense and caloric of the fruits, so you’ll have to be careful not to have them too often.”

That explained why my “in-between” diet packed on the pounds. Bananas. Of course, the only fruit I liked was the only fruit this big fat country likes. I’m so typical.

“What are your eating habits now?”

“Now? Well, unless I’m getting ready for something, like a photo shoot or a scene like I just did on Ally where I had to be in my underwear, I guess I eat pretty normally. But you know, with the occasional binge.”

“What do you mean by ‘getting ready’? What do you do to ‘get ready’ for a photo shoot?” She leaned in slightly toward me. What I was saying seemed to intrigue her. I was wrong in thinking that maybe she starved, too.

“I eat three hundred calories a day for a week.” I was shocked to see that her eyes widened with disbelief as she registered the information. It made me angry. She was judging me.

After a pause, she asked, “What do you eat to make up the three hundred calories?”

“Dry bread, mainly. Crackers. Pickles. Mustard. Black coffee.”

“What happens when you’re done with the photo shoot?” She asked like she didn’t know the answer. It annoyed me.

“I binge, I guess. I eat all the foods I didn’t eat while I was dieting, and then sometimes I eat too much and well, you know . . .”

Should I continue? Should I tell this conservative woman who already looked slightly shocked by my eating habits that I vomited? She’s looking at me with anticipation and encouraged me to continue with a slight nod of her head. “I throw up.”

I could see that she was uncomfortable, but I felt compelled to continue. “If I feel like I haven’t thrown it all up, I’ll take twenty laxatives to make sure it’s all gone.” Why would dieting and throwing up be so surprising to her? Really, as a nutritionist, she should have heard all that before. It made me wonder if she was qualified to help me. Maybe she helped really fat people take off a little weight, not someone like me who really needed to be taught the “way of life” that she was pitching. It made me mad because I didn’t want to talk about myself and feel judged, I just wanted to learn about the five food groups like a five-year-old and take home a weekly eating plan.

I knew that I was being overly dramatic and that maybe she didn’t need to know about the purging, but her reaction to my eating habits embarrassed me and that’s what happens when I’m embarrassed. I get mad and I punish. And in response to my aggression, she leaned back in her chair and held a book up to her face, like a shield in between us.

“Have you seen one of these?” She waved it around. “It’s a calorie counter. It’ll help you figure out which are the healthy foods you can enjoy so that you’ll never have to feel like you need to do those kinds of things again.” Her eyes and her voice lowered as she lowered the book, her defenses. “Portia, it’s really important that you understand food and stop this unhealthy cycle of yo-yo dieting.”

Yo-yo is an inaccurate way to describe weight fluctuation. It is not the term anyone would use to describe the highs and lows that were the basis of my self-esteem. Yo-yo sounds frivolous, childish, disrespectful. Yo-yo sounds like a thing outside of yourself that you can just decide to put away and not pick up anymore. It suggests that there are end points, predetermined stopping points where the highs and lows end, because the string of a yo-yo is a certain length that never changes. My “bottom” would always be 140 pounds, my “high” 115. But it isn’t like that. There’s nothing predetermined about gaining and losing weight. Every day of my life I woke up not knowing if it would be a day on the path to a new bottom, a new big number that I’d never before seen on the scale, or if I would have a good day, a day that set me on the way to success and happiness and complete self-satisfaction. Since I was a twelve-year-old girl taking pictures in my front yard to submit to modeling agencies, I’d never known a day where my weight wasn’t the determining factor for my self-esteem. My weight was my mood, and the more effort I put into starving myself to get it to an acceptable level, the more satisfaction I would feel as the restriction and the denial built into an incredible sense of accomplishment.

After introducing me to the calorie counter, Suzanne was all business. As well as teaching me how to count calories, she taught me to weigh my food. She told me that portion size was very important and to ensure I was getting the right portions, I had to buy a kitchen scale. She told me what to put on that scale for which meals. She told me that I should eat six small protein-enriched meals a day. She told me to keep a journal of what I ate.

Chicken, turkey, orange roughy, tuna, egg whites, oatmeal, blueberries, nonfat plain yogurt, steamed vegetables, brown rice, wheat bread, bran muffins, nuts—all weighed and documented—were my stable of foods I was allowed to eat. Most other things were not part of the program.

As I left her house that day I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I had heard that in order to know how to overcome difficulties, you needed the “tools” to do it. Suzanne had given me a program with tools. A no-fail system of calorie counting, weighing, and adding up my daily intake so there would be no guesswork to my weight loss. Now that I had my curriculum in the form of my “allowed” foods, homework assignments in the form of a diary, and weekly exams when Suzanne would evaluate how I’d performed, I could be a good student.

I WAS OFFERED the cover of Shape. Shape is a health and fitness magazine that depicts lean, physically strong women. Its articles explain the secret to killer abs and each month it unveils the no-fail diet. On the cover it displays a fit woman, a celebrity if they can get one, who promises to tell you her strategy for weight-loss success. They take pictures of their cover girls in skimpy outfits, like a bikini or spandex shorts, and then interview them about how they achieved optimum “health.” I knew why they picked me. It wasn’t for my lithe body or killer abs, and they certainly didn’t see the underwear scene before offering it to me. I was simply the new girl on the hot TV show. I doubted anyone making the decision had even seen me on the show. Of course, I panicked and gave a million reasons why I shouldn’t do it, but my publicist and manager thought it was a great opportunity. A cover is a cover.

It was hard to argue with my publicist and manager. My publicist and manager knew better than I did. The cover of Shape complemented the clean-living, fresh-faced image they were trying hard to create. They had subtly written a character for me to play in public, gently coercing me to play the role of an ingénue, fresh but glamorous and with an ounce of naïveté. They guided me into the character by favoring romantic dresses over sexy dresses for red carpet events and to most questions about the show or my life, they smiled with approval when I answered that my journey from law student to Hollywood actress was “a dream come true.” It seemed effortless and surprising: a Cinderella story. I understood their reasoning. I needed an image to sell; the truth of who I was needed to remain a secret and Portia, the young, heterosexual, self-confident Australian actress needed to emerge. Besides, most of the successful, leading-lady actresses had graduated from this rite of passage. However, the ingénue was a difficult role for me to play—more difficult in fact than a commanding, self-assured attorney. Even if I ignored the fact that I was gay, at twenty-five I was too old, too cynical. I played the ingénue once in Sirens when I was twenty, and even then I felt more like Dorothy Parker than the character of Giddy, the gullible artist’s model.

I didn’t know how to play that character for the Shape interview. With neither health nor fitness being of interest to me, I didn’t know what to talk about. How could I possibly explain my weight maintenance when it was attributed to starving and bingeing?SHAPE: Portia, tell us how you stay in shape?PORTIA: I eat three hundred calories a day for as many days as I can before a photo shoot. The rest of the time I binge and purge.SHAPE: What’s your favorite workout?PORTIA: I’m afraid to work out at all because I’m worried that muscle definition makes people look bigger. I hate the look of fit, muscular women. I prefer the long, waiflike look of models who are most likely just as sick as I am.

Suzanne had stopped me from crash dieting. It was a cycle of loss and gain, she explained, that once started, could never be stopped. It was true. After shooting the scene in my underwear I had gained a lot of weight. Reluctantly and fearfully, I put my new diet into practice for the week leading up to shooting the cover of Shape. I was extremely nervous that because I’d not starved myself the way I usually did before a shoot, my body wasn’t really in good enough shape to grace the Shape cover. Walking into my trailer that was sitting atop a hill at the location they’d chosen for the shoot, I felt unprepared and anxious. I had weighed in at 125 pounds that morning—not a number on the scale I was used to seeing the morning of a photo shoot, much less a cover shoot wearing a bikini. I had already eaten, too, another abnormality before a shoot. I had eaten my individually packaged oatmeal sachet with antioxidant blueberries and Splenda, a sugar substitute that Suzanne said was so healthy she gave it to her baby. Although I knew that I was being a good student and following the only program that had a chance of actually working for me, the guilt and unworthiness I felt by not starving myself in preparation for the shoot were unbearable. I was embarrassed to shake the hands of the picture editor and the executive editor of Shape. I was ashamed that even though I had a gym membership, I rarely used it. Although I’d never really liked the “fit” look, I wished that I could drop my robe to reveal muscular arms and legs and a defined abdomen and waist. I was dreading dropping my robe and showing them the exact opposite of what I knew they were expecting to see. During the shoot, and in a fit of insecurity, I asked one of the photographer’s assistants, an unattractive guy who looked sandy and sunburned, like he’d spent the morning surfing, how my body compared to the other girls who’d modeled for the cover. I’d been watching him all morning, not because he was interesting, but because he looked so bored, so uninspired by working on photo shoots, or perhaps this shoot in particular. He was the perfect person to ask because I knew he’d answer with complete honesty. He wouldn’t care if he hurt a girl’s feelings. His expression changed the second I asked the question, as if the question were like a plug inserted into his brain that reanimated him and sent energy flooding to his face. With a big, dumb smile he responded slowly, giving more weight to each word than was necessary to make the point. “We photograph some women with really sick bodies.”

I got what I asked for. Honesty. I knew my body couldn’t compare to the other girls; I just needed to confirm it. This dumb guy said what all the other guys out there were thinking. And if I were going to have a career, I would need to impress men just like this one. If I couldn’t be the Maxim girl with big breasts and a tiny waist, I could be model-like. Unattainable. I could be elegant. Graceful. Thin.

I would just have to get myself one of those sick bodies.

“Morning, dear. How was your photo shoot?” Vera, the costume designer, looked exhausted and like she really didn’t care to hear the answer. I was the fourth actor she’d seen that morning. But because she was very polite, she added, “What did you do again?”

“I did the cover of Shape.”

“Shape? What’s that?”

I told her that it was a fitness magazine and as I told her how important it was to me because I was passionate about exercise, I sounded like the well-versed liar I had been trained to be. My agent and manager would’ve been proud.

As I slipped into a navy skirt, I thought about my plans for the summer. I created a picture in my mind of me lying by a pool overlooking the Caribbean ocean, the most beautiful girl on the lounge next to mine. In my mind, the girl turned her head and smiled a sleepy smile, her eyes full of love for me. I had an uncanny ability to escape the present moment and into my fantasy world whenever I wanted to. I especially liked to think about other things during a wardrobe fitting. It made the inevitable comments about how the tailor can let the waist out a little, “just to make the skirt more comfortable,” somewhat bearable, knowing that I could choose a happier moment in another place and time. But I was going to be in the Caribbean with the girl of my dreams, so my daydream was borne more from excitement and a little wishful thinking than it was from a place of complete fantasy. Only a few more weeks of wardrobe fittings and my fantasy would be a reality. I held my breath and sucked in my stomach as the zipper closed the gap to the waist. I felt the pinch of the waistband and held my breath again, this time for the conversation between the costumer and tailor that would inevitably ensue.

Go to hell.

As I stood in the fitting room, I almost laughed out loud as I remembered the first words I spoke to Sacha, the girl I was going to be with over summer in St. Barths. It was my first day of Melbourne Girls Grammar School and a stunning black girl who I later knew as Sacha, had left the group in the corner of the quadrangle to talk to me, the new girl. Sacha looked as if I’d slapped her across the face. I didn’t know why. “Go to hell,” was the only thing I could say. She had strutted up to me with no prompting or subtle invitation and said to me, “You have such pretty hair you should wear it down. Take it out, I want to see it.”

The All Girls Grammar School was extremely strict and had a policy about hair, among many other things. The uniform had to be worn with a blazer when off campus, the socks had to always be pulled up to the knees, and the hair must always be neatly pulled back off the face. So you see, she was definitely just having a go at me. She was trying to get me in trouble—or worse. She was trying to get me to pull my hair out of my rubber band and shake it all around like a shampoo commercial so that the pack of girls she was standing with who dared her to come tell me to let my hair down could laugh their asses off at the new girl. I knew girls like that—mean girls. Besides, I was an easy target. I was a model who recently changed her name from Amanda Rogers to Portia de Rossi, so I was prepared for that kind of bullshit. So you see? “Go to hell” was the preemptive strike needed at the time and really the only thing I could say. I can’t really remember what happened after that, or how Sacha and I became friends, but we did. Over a period of weeks, we became inseparable. We would spend weekends at her parents’ home, staying up all night watching MTV and eating loaves of white bread, butter, and apricot jam. We borrowed each other’s clothes. We went out to nightclubs together and flirted with men. For years we were good friends, best friends. Until one day, long after we’d left school, I fell in love with her.

I fell in love with her the day I left home to audition for the movie Sirens. I was nineteen years old when I left law school and flew to Sydney to audition for a career I didn’t even think I wanted. I had spent my life studying to go to law school, and with one phone call from my modeling agency asking if I’d like to do a movie, I was prepared to ditch law and become an actress. By the time I disembarked and collected my baggage at the terminal, I had fallen in love with Sacha. She was no longer just a friend; she was the reason I had to get the movie. If I was successful, I could win her, seduce her with money and power just as Martina Navratilova and Melissa Etheridge had won their previously heterosexual girlfriends. By their actions, these powerful, famous lesbians told the world that straight women were more desirable than gay ones and if you were rich and powerful enough, you could snag one of your own.

Sacha was not a lesbian. But then, neither was I. I just liked to sleep with women.

My girlfriend had to be heterosexual because I didn’t want to be a lesbian. If she was heterosexual, then it suggested that I was also heterosexual. Also, I was scared of lesbians. In fact, I would cross the street if I saw one coming toward me. One time I didn’t cross the street and I ended up sleeping with a lesbian because I felt sorry for her. She had just lost her girlfriend in a car accident and I was devastated for her. Nothing sounded worse to me than losing your girlfriend; that the one precious connection that you had made in your whole life was gone, wasted, lost in a car wreck. It sounded so much worse to me than a wife losing her husband—it was worse than anything. I found this woman to be quite unattractive. She was overweight and had a shaved head and facial piercings. But I had to sleep with her. It was only polite.

My girlfriend would have to be someone I already knew, someone I could trust. The last thing on earth I needed at the end of my first season on Ally McBeal was to be outed by some girl who just wanted to date me because I was on TV, who just wanted to sleep with me so that she could tell people that I was gay. The career that I once didn’t think I wanted was now something that I couldn’t live without, and a rumor that I was gay would be enough to end it. As it turned out, I loved acting. During the filming of Sirens I discovered that while in character with the camera rolling, I couldn’t do anything wrong, that there wasn’t a right way to deliver a line, merely a different interpretation. I loved interpreting meaning from words. My happiest moments of learning in school or in college were spent deciphering poetry, reciting John Donne or Shakespeare using inflection with my voice to convey my interpretation of the poem’s meaning. I discovered while filming Sirens that acting was transformative. I discovered that you could be someone other than who you were and get attention for it, be applauded for it. And all of that was very appealing to me—especially the part about being someone else.

I had planned this vacation for us years before I could afford it, when I began to travel and thoughts of an island and Sacha and I together living on it, if only for a short time, kept me company. Over the years, each time I was away from home, I would write her long, romantic letters that explained my feelings, what our lives would be like together, and how I would take care of her. When I lived in London to complete postproduction after Sirens and then hung around to try to find a reason not to go back to law school—like a play in the West End or another movie—I would go down to the coffee shop in the morning to begin writing, and I’d finish the letter in the evening, sitting alone at the corner table of the local pub just off King’s Road in Chelsea, close to where I lived. Writing to her, I was no longer lonely. I had someone waiting for me across the world in Australia. I could tolerate anything as long as I had a notepad and a pen and could pour my heart out to her in these letters. In airport lounges, thoughts of her would engulf my senses to the point where I’d almost miss planes, and in Los Angeles, thoughts of her would numb the pain of losing a job, of hearing no after an audition. My fantasy life with Sacha was as helpful to me as it was adjustable. For when I was in a relationship with Mel, or had a crush on Kali, Sacha would again revert to being just my best friend. Sacha also had relationships of her own, long-term, serious heterosexual relationships. Because of that, I never sent her any of the letters that I had written. But she knew how I felt about her. I’d told her that I loved her after long drunken evenings of partying and making out with her on nightclub dance floors. I knew that given the chance to move to Los Angeles and be with me, she would no longer want to be tied down by these demanding, serious boyfriends. So none of that really mattered to me.

Besides, I had a boyfriend, too. His name was Erik.

Erik was Kali’s ex-boyfriend. He became my boyfriend when I invited him to be my date at a Hollywood event. Although he didn’t see why it was necessary for me to hide the fact that I was a lesbian, he assured me that he would play the role of my boyfriend to the best of his ability, so I made Erik my permanent beard. The fact that he agreed to be my beard proved his affection for me. Hollywood events were something he had no interest in attending, and in fact, as a budding novelist, he had expressed contempt for the whole industry. His idols were Hemingway and Vonnegut, not Cruise and Gibson.

I had adored Erik from our first meeting at Kali’s apartment in Santa Monica. He was deeply thoughtful, attractive, and intelligent. If I could have, I would’ve slept with him just to show him how much I adored him, but on the one occasion when he crashed in my bed and sex had crossed my mind, the smell of him took the thoughts away. He didn’t smell bad. He just smelled male. All men do.

Although Erik quickly learned his role, our first public outing as a couple was nerve-racking. I had never walked a red carpet with anyone before and his attitude toward the media was not helping to quell my nerves. To Erik, a television camera was an opportunity to be a wiseass. (He had told me that if he were to ever appear on Letterman, he’d give a shout-out to all the black people in the audience.) As usual, I’d left nothing to chance. I had memorized answers, this time to the right questions: What was I wearing? What are my workout tips? What is my must-have beauty item? In the rented stretch limousine on our way from my apartment to the event on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, Erik and I rehearsed answers to possible questions the two of us might be asked.

“So, if they ask something like, ‘How long have you been dating?’ just say something vague like, ‘just a few months.’”

“I think it’s funnier if I say that we just fucked for the first time on the ride over here.”

“Erik! This is serious! Don’t be a dick.”

It was all very funny to Erik. There was nothing on the line for him. He wasn’t gay and trying to appear straight. He could attend the event like a spectator, listen to Bocelli, observe this weird Hollywood charade, and drink wine and eat food without concern of getting fat. He wasn’t going to have to face the press and pretend that all this was real; he just had to say one easy thing or nothing at all.

“Please say nothing at all.”

He shot me an unnerving wink from underneath his mop of blond hair as he got out of the limo, straightened his jacket, and stood with his back to me like a statue, offering his arm like the gentleman escort role I had asked him to play. Despite the fact that he was a smart-ass in my ear all the way down the red carpet, he managed to obscure his disdain from the photographers, and my little plan worked. I was asked if he was my boyfriend and I decided that by answering coyly (“We’re just friends”), I would pique their interest more than by announcing that we were dating. Plus it carried the added benefit of being the truth. Because of him the event felt less like work. As someone who wasn’t particularly smitten with the world in which I lived, he gave me perspective on my job as an actress, served up with a drink and observations that made me laugh. The women at work assumed he was my boyfriend, and I did everything in my power to keep that assumption alive.

I had a boyfriend called Erik. He was smart and handsome and tall, and he was mine. Except Erik had a girlfriend. Erik left me for a woman who would have sex with him because he didn’t smell strange to her. He left me because I was never his to leave. It was a devastating breakup.

COME ON in, Portia. How have you been doing this week?” Suzanne was holding an unwashed dinner plate in her hand as she opened the door. I assumed she’d noticed this dirty plate on her walk from wherever she was, through the living room and to the front door. She was surprisingly messy for such a thin woman. I said hello to her, but in my mind I was thinking how funny it was that I would equate thinness with cleanliness. That observation triggered a memory of being in art class when I was asked to describe how Kandinsky painted and to explain why I didn’t like him. “He paints like a fat person,” was all I could think to say at the time, as his painting was messy, nonlinear, disorganized, as opposed to Mondrian, a painter who worked in the same period and used colors sparingly, modestly, and who stayed within the lines. He was orderly, clean, and thin.

By the time I left art class in my head and joined Suzanne, I was on the couch. I was beginning to trust her despite my initial fears and wanted to talk to her about my past. From my first session, I had become more aware of the abnormalities of my eating habits as a kid, and it felt good to talk about it out loud. I had considered going back to the therapist who had helped my husband and me realize that our relationship was doomed to failure, but food and eating seemed to be more of a nutritionist’s area of expertise than a couples’ therapist’s, so I told Suzanne everything. I no longer cared whether she was shocked.

I told her that from the age of twelve, starving and bingeing and purging had been the only way to reach my goal weight. That starving was easy because there was always an end in sight. Junk food was around the bend just after the photo shoot or the round of go-sees. But by the age of fifteen, I needed to devise a plan to not only lose weight but to maintain my weight loss. At the end of the school year, I’d convinced my mother that the strict girls’ grammar school I attended was “getting in the way of my education” and that I needed to take a year off to model, make some money, and then enroll in a more progressive private school the following year. The fact that I needed to lose weight was nothing new. Ever since I’d begun modeling, I’d always needed to “get ready” for a photo shoot. Me losing weight before a job was like an athlete training for a competition. But if I was going to take a year off school to model, I had to figure out a more permanent solution to the weight problem. I couldn’t starve and binge and purge like I had always done. By the time I was fifteen, the purging and the laxatives had become part of my everyday life, and although I wasn’t concerned about the possible damage it could cause to the interior of my body, it was a drag to have to spend so much time in the bathroom. Plus, there was only one bathroom in my house.

I told Suzanne that I had asked my mother to help me. Every time I was booked for a job that I had to drop pounds quickly for, I’d beg her to help me the next time so I’d never again be in the predicament of having to starve before a job. I’d say, “Please don’t let me eat chocolate.” And, “If you see me eating too much of anything, just remind me what I go through every time.” This request bothered my mother because, like an addict, when I was in the throes of eating, I could get quite angry and yell at her if she commented on my habit. “You don’t want to eat that,” was the most common thing she’d say as I was stuffing a chocolate-covered cookie in my mouth. She was wrong. At that moment, eating that cookie was all I wanted to do and I told her so in many different ways over the course of that little experiment. In sober moments, I’d apologize for my hurtful words and plead with her to continue to help me. I told her to hide the cookies. Then when I found them underneath the living room sofa, I’d angrily eat them, saying that all she cared about was how thin I was. That she didn’t really care about me. That all she cared about was my modeling career.

“That sounds like a difficult situation for both you and your mother.”

“It was.”

Using my mother’s watchful eye as a deterrent to bingeing was probably the worst thing I could have done. While I’d always binged, it had never disappointed my mother as much as it did during this time. It had worried her greatly that I had left school to model, and if I wasn’t thin enough to book jobs, then leaving school didn’t serve any purpose. Since I’d asked her to help me maintain my weight, we were in it together. We had a problem that we could overcome together. The list of taboo foods got a lot bigger, too. In the past, while I may’ve hidden the occasional chocolate candy bar, now eating any food that wasn’t diet food sent the message that I was not helping myself. That I’d given up. It was simply heartbreaking to see the disappointment on her face as I sat the plate down on the dinner table piled high with the same food she’d once encouraged me to eat to make me big and strong. It disappointed me, too. Because a simple meal that my brother, mother, and grandmother would eat was never something I could eat. Models don’t eat mashed potatoes with butter. And as my mother kept pointing out, I was the one who wanted to be a model.

So I stopped eating in front of her. In front of her, I’d eat steamed vegetables. In the back alleys of restaurants, sitting in between two Dumpsters, I’d eat anything I liked. If my mother wasn’t home and lack of pocket money forced me to make do with the food that was in the kitchen pantry, I’d keep one eye on my grandmother as she sat in the living room and hastily get to work on half a loaf of bread and butter with apricot jam. I’d then walk to the supermarket with a butter knife, buy bread, butter, and apricot jam, throw away the few slices of bread to make it look like the untouched original loaf, then use the knife to remove the portions of the butter and jam to make it look like everything was just how I found them. Or I should say, just as she left them.

My mother thought there might be a medical solution to the weight problem in the form of a prescribed appetite suppressant. A drug called Duromine was well known in Australia. It is phentermine, the phen in Fen-phen, and was similarly heralded for its effectiveness in weight control. I was prescribed Duromine after a physical examination by a doctor and started taking the drug.

I lost weight. I lost weight and was thin—bony, even. I was ready for any modeling job without concern and was the envy of my school peers. The only problem with the drug was that I couldn’t sleep. If I took it every morning with a cup of tea, I felt jittery all day long, speedy almost, and that feeling of restlessness and anxiety stayed with me throughout the day and continued into the night. I could take it daily for only a couple of weeks before I felt like I needed a break from it. Instead of being the answer to helping me with consistent, steady dieting, the Duromine became like a yo-yo in itself. It became another wagon to fall off. It was yet another way to disappoint myself with my lack of willpower, of toughing it out. I just couldn’t hack it, just like I couldn’t hack dieting. I’d stop taking it, claiming that it affected my studies and my overall health, but secretly I missed eating. I missed the comfort that tasting and chewing and swallowing gave me. I missed the warmth in my belly and the feeling of wholeness; I was incomplete on Duromine, and on food, I was whole.

I realized during the sessions with Suzanne that it almost didn’t matter who I was talking to, it was good to talk. And while I talked, she listened. She gave me my program for the week, gave me some helpful tips for the upcoming holidays, and sent me back into the world with my homework.

I SURVIVED SEASON TWO OF ALLY MCBEAL!

THAT WAS the slogan on a T-shirt that was given out to the cast and crew by a cast member. I survived season two—but barely. Since beginning the show I had felt a constant indescribable pressure, a lurking threat of being fired, even though there was no evidence to suggest that I was displeasing the executive producer. While it was a good place to work and people were generally respectful, there was an eerie stillness and a certain kind of silence to the set that felt like a breezeless summer day, and while there were no insects, there were no birds chirping either. During the last four weeks of the season, every night after wrap, I would get into my car, smile and wave good night to hair and makeup, and like clockwork, I would burst into tears once I made the right turn from Manhattan Beach Studios onto Rosecrans Boulevard. And I would sob, not just cry. I made loud wailing noises that sounded more like “ahhhhhh” than the kind of crying I’d done over other things. In fact, I sounded like Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo when she would cry loudly, embarrassing Ricky to the point where he’d do anything she wanted just to shut her up. No one could hear my wailing, however. I wasn’t doing it for effect. I was doing it to soothe myself, to comfort myself. And I didn’t know why I was crying either. I would cry just as loudly if I’d spent the day performing a wordy two-page closing argument to a jury as if I’d been propped up on a chair in the background of the law office with no dialogue at all.

With the end of the season came the holidays. I had booked the trip with Sacha to St. Barths. While I was excited to realize my dreams of being with her, there was no doubt that I was nervous to see it through. I was worried that by embarking on a romantic journey with Sacha, the journey could come to an end, taking my romantic fantasies with it; the daydreams that lulled me to sleep smiling, the fantasies that filled otherwise empty hours, and the soothing thoughts that took pain and loneliness away would all go with it. These thoughts gave me both anxiety and hope toward the end of the season. Finally, for better or worse, our romance would become a reality.

In St. Barths, however, reality was shocking. It ruined romance like an annoying little brother. It was a pestering ever-present element in our conversations, especially as the conversations featured her boyfriend, Matt, to whom she was considering getting married. Our precious time alone in that tropical paradise was not filled with longing glances and passionate lovemaking, but rather it was spent with our heads stuck in our respective books and in arguments. A conversation about the book I was reading, in fact, ended all arguing, as reality punched me in the face and knocked illusion out cold.

“What’s that book you’re reading?”

“Ellen DeGeneres’s mother, Betty, wrote it. She tells her story about what it’s like to have a gay daughter.”

“Who’s Ellen DeGeneres?”

Her having a fiancé in Australia didn’t deter my quest to make Sacha my girlfriend, but not knowing who Ellen was two years after she made international headlines for coming out on her show suggested to me that being gay wasn’t even on Sacha’s radar, despite her willingness to make out with me on a dance floor from time to time. From that moment on, I knew that I was alone without my imaginary life to keep me company. So I swallowed my disillusionment in the form of cream sauces, piña coladas, and pastries, served up to me by the private chef I’d hired to help me seduce Sacha into a life of lesbianism. Now the chef’s role was to reward me for my hard work on Ally for the season. I ate my way into relaxation in St. Barths. And I got really fat.

The fact that I got fat was unfortunate as I was scheduled to shoot the cover of Rolling Stone Australia two weeks after my vacation ended. I went back home to Melbourne to my mother feeling more like a deserter than the war hero I had dreamed of. I thought I’d be paraded around Camberwell, the town where my mother lived, as the American TV star triumphantly returning. To be honest, there was still some parading, some walking up to the Camberwell shops with my mother to talk to the shopkeepers about my adventures overseas, but it felt wrong. The pounds were evidence of the pressure. Heaviness overshadowed the levity of talking about what I wore to the Emmys or what Calista was like as a person. People could sense my depression and discomfort, and that really ruined the fun for everyone. So my mother dutifully hid her chocolate-covered cookies, and I starved and cried and went back and forth to the gym I used to go to for aerobics classes back in the eighties.ROLLING STONE AUSTRALIA. ISSUE 566, OCTOBER 1999There are two rumours about Portia de Rossi . . . So which rumour would she like to address first?“Oooh, I love this,” the 26-year-old says in her peculiar LA via Melbourne accent. “It’s just like truth or dare!”OK, the first rumour is about the hair. We know it’s real. We know she’s a natural blonde because her mum has shown us the baby photos. Even as a four-year-old her white-blond hair was worn long and girly. So that’s that out of the way . . . The second rumour is that De Rossi was spotted in clubs around Melbourne recently cosying up to other girls. So does that mean she’s bisexual? A lesbian? A long, delighted squeal comes down the telephone line. “Ooooh, how fun! I love that question!” she says, shouting now . . .“Let’s just say every celebrity gets that rumour and now I feel like I’ve joined the club. Hooray!”

Hooray indeed. Not only were they “on to me,” a phrase that my mother would use when my secrets were being pried out of their vault and into pop culture, but the photo shoot exposed another terrible secret, possibly worse than being gay. It told the world, or at least the people of Australia, that I was fat. I tried as hard as I could to get the weight off, but whittling down from 140 pounds in two weeks proved to be too much of a feat even for this crash dieter. If only Sacha had fallen in love with me, none of this would’ve happened. Now I was on the cover of a magazine, fat and looking like a hooker in a chainmail boob tube and leather hot pants. Over the previous six months, I was told that I had ranked highly in the polls featured in men’s magazines as being “hot,” mainly because of the icy, untouchable nature of my character. Nothing was more of a foil for my real, gay self than to appear on the cover of men’s magazines as a sexy, man-eating young actress. Another difficult role to play, I was discovering who I was while desperately trying to convey the image of the woman I wasn’t.When Portia de Rossi looked at the clothes we’d chosen for this month’s cover shoot—leather hot pants, chainmail boob-tube, handcuffs, G-string, she only had one thing to say: “Oh fuck!” Several cigarettes later and a few soothing words from her mum and her aunt Gwen (also at the shoot), she was happily admiring herself in the sexy clobber. “Mama, do you think it’s too kinky?” she asked. “No,” her mum replied. “You look very pretty.”

After the photo shoot, I went to the airport. I had to fly back to Los Angeles to meet with executives from L’Oréal to discuss being their new spokesperson for a hair product. I knew that people thought I had nice hair. I knew it was special because I was often told that it was the reason for my success. The fact that I played the title role in the Geelong Grammar School production of Alice in Wonderland, for example, was because of my hair, according to all the girls at school. Occasionally, on modeling jobs I was singled out to be featured in a campaign because of my hair, and on Ally McBeal toward the end of my first season, my hair acted out more drama than my character did. It went to court to showcase how women use sexuality to get ahead in the workplace, it indicated when my character’s walls were up, and it even performed a few stunts, notably when John Cage “wired” my hair to remotely shake loose from its restrictive bun when he wanted me to “let my hair down.” So the fact that my hair had garnered some attention from people who sell hair products wasn’t surprising to me. In fact, it was the only thing that had made sense for quite a while. The fact that I didn’t like my thick, unmanageable hair was irrelevant.

I didn’t write letters to Sacha in the airport terminal. I ate. There was nothing left to say, no fantasies I could act out on paper of how we would be happy together in a tropical paradise, so I ate. I ate English muffins with butter and jam. I ate potato chips and cookies and gulped down Coke. I threw up. I left the first-class lounge to shop for food in the terminal. I ate McDonald’s burgers, vanilla milk shakes, and fries. I threw up again. Then I got on the plane.

“Can I get you a drink, Ms. de Rossi?” The American stewardess had a lipsticky mouth and overpronounced the syllables, as Americans tended to do. It was strange to hear the American accent after being in Australia. It reminded me that I had an accent, too. It reminded me that Australian-born Amanda Rogers was now American-seeming Portia de Rossi. If magazines didn’t say otherwise, I could definitely pass as a Yank. My dad had called Americans Yanks. I thought it was funny when I was a little kid. He’d also sung me to sleep with a passionate, out-of-tune rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun.”

“Baileys Irish Cream, if you have it.” Of course I knew they had it, it just sounded more polite, more whimsical. I was aware that the stewardess would think that an after-dinner cream liqueur would be a ridiculous drink to order before dinner, and I needed her to know that I knew it was ridiculous, too, so I said: “I’ve been looking forward to some Baileys. I always have it on planes.” That made it better.

When I refused dinner and asked for my sixth Baileys, the stewardess got weird again. Of course, she served it to me; I was a first-class passenger after all, but I could detect concern in her pour, more than just the concern that comes with pouring liquid into a narrow-rimmed glass on a moving vehicle that is subject to bouts of turbulence. She was judging me. She looked disgusted. She was worried for me. She had reason to be worried, I guess. I had spent a lot of the plane ride quietly crying, as I often do because I hate hovering between one place and another. “Neither here nor there” was an expression my grandmother would use to describe confusion and displacement, and it is a disturbing place to be. This state of hovering during the fourteen-hour journey was once filled with fantasy scenarios of being Sacha’s obsession or having a beautiful body on the cover of a major magazine. Now I had no choice but to fill the time by bringing a glass of thick, creamy liquid back and forth to my lips. I was neither in LA nor in Melbourne, neither straight nor gay, neither famous nor unknown, neither fat nor thin, neither a success nor a failure. My Discman played the soundtrack for my inner dialogue—rare recordings of Nirvana and so here we were, Kurt Cobain and I, displaced, misunderstood, unloved, and “neither here nor there”—he being neither dead nor alive, both in his life and in his death. It occurred to me as I listened to lyrics like “and if you killed yourself, it would make you happy” that if I were at the end of my life, I wouldn’t have to keep running the race. If I were really old and close to dying, I wouldn’t have to do another season, another magazine cover. I could be remembered as a successful working actor, a celebrity, even. I had been given the challenge of life and beaten it. The pressure I had put on myself to excel in everything I did made life look like a never-ending steeplechase. The thought that I had fifty more years of striving and jumping over hurdles and being the one to beat in the race was enough to make me order another drink.

After my seventh Baileys I threw up. I made myself throw up, but it took a long time to do it, and because I was drunk, it was sloppy. I’ve never liked airplane toilets. They’ve always disgusted me, so the unclean, smelly toilet made me nauseous and the nausea made me think there was more food and liquid in my gut to get rid of. A lot of dry heaving and coughing followed. My fingernails had cut the back of my throat where my gag reflex was and I was throwing up saliva, maybe bile, and a trace of blood. Several times, I heard knocking on the door. I ignored it. It didn’t bother me at all, actually. I deserved to be on this plane and in this bathroom just like they did. By the time I had unlocked the door, there was a guy in a uniform waiting for me. He looked officious and slightly angry, which made me angry. There are other toilets on the plane, for God’s sake.

“There’s some concern that you’re not feeling well. Is there anything I can do to help you, Ms. de Rossi?”

“No. I’m fine.” The purging session had given me a colossal headache. So I added, “Maybe some aspirin.”

As I walked down the aisle, I noticed a contraption in the way. It was in the aisle blocking access to my seat. It was silver, and looked like a cylinder on poles with wheels attached. The stewardess stood next to it and as if reading my mind she replied, “Oxygen. I think it’ll make you feel better.”

Something shifted. As I looked into the face of the stewardess, I no longer saw expressions of judgment and disgust. I saw concern. The once angry, officious-looking man in the uniform returned from getting aspirin for my headache and gave it to me with a smile. I looked at my two uniformed nurses, and their caring, nurturing expressions, and quietly sat in my seat and attached the oxygen mask to my face.

When I woke up to the plane preparing for landing in Los Angeles, the silver contraption, and my headache, were gone. I was in Los Angeles.

My name is Portia de Rossi. I’m an American actress about to embark on my second season of a hit TV show. I am here and not there. I am here.

THERE ARE a few places in Los Angeles where art meets up with commerce for a drink and the Four Seasons bar is one of them.

As I walked in from the lobby, I saw little plays being acted out at nearly all the tables—the actor, writer, or director presenting himself as something to invest in, the producer or executive sizing them up before deciding to purchase or pass. Sometimes, like a chaperone, the manager or agent will be present at one of these sales meetings. The manager tends to lubricate things with friendly, ice-breaking conversation. Also, the manager orders lunch or drinks for the table and plugs the awkward silences by asking after the producer’s kids. Most times, their kids play soccer together. Or attend the same school. Hollywood is a club. And with the help of a couple of referrals, I got to fill out my application.

I walked through the bar to the assortment of floral lounge chairs that would serve as the site for my success or failure. I was meeting with the L’Oréal executives. I was a potential new product. I approached them in the dress and heels I’d agonized over wearing for a week. Did the dress convey respect and excitement and downplay desperation? Or did it somehow expose the truth: that my self-esteem hinged on their decision? Was it too low-cut or too high-cut? Was it too tight? Did it display my wares in an attempt to arouse interest in a cheap, throw-in-everything-you’ve-got way? I led with my hair by running my hand across the nape of my neck to scoop up the thick blond “product” and dumped it over one shoulder for inspection: cheap, but effective.

“Hi. I’m Portia.”

Handshakes all round. They looked interested. They looked like they liked what they saw. I prayed that it would go well. I prayed they would pick me.

I really needed that campaign. My ego needed it. During the course of my first season on the show, I felt like I was blending into the background. The initial thrill of writing for the new character, Nelle Porter, had given way to the thrill of writing for an even newer new character, Ling Woo. I really couldn’t believe what happened. Instead of introducing one cold, calculating woman, David Kelley had split one character and given it to two people. He’d given us half a character each. If Nelle was given one cutting comment, Ling would take the other. Nelle would romance one boss at the law firm of Cage and Fish, Ling would sleep with the other. As always I had to wonder if it was something I had done wrong. Maybe I wasn’t vicious enough? Maybe my vulnerability shone through the austere exterior? Maybe I wasn’t sexy enough for the kind of nasty-in-a-good-way attorney he had in mind? Maybe I was just nasty in the bad way because no matter how hard I tried I didn’t give off a flirty, sexual vibe. I’d signed up to play an intelligent professional, not a sex kitten. And when I’d tried to break through the icy veneer to find the sex kitten, I tended to just look like a kitten: vulnerable, fragile, in fear of abandonment, and needing to be held.

Maybe I looked too fat in my underwear.

The L’Oréal campaign would fix all this. A beauty campaign would be an opportunity for me to restore my dignity, my uniqueness. Apart from gracing the cover of Vogue, I couldn’t imagine anything in the world more glamorous than a beauty campaign. A beauty campaign had the power to validate. Like becoming a model, it was a way to convince people beyond a doubt that you were, in fact, attractive. Selling shampoo serves up an answer to a question that’s vague and subjective. It tells you what beauty is, that the face selling this product is a beautiful face.

There’s nothing like external validation. I craved it. It’s why I went to law school. The theory of objectivism claims that there are certain things that most people in society can agree upon. A model is pretty. A lawyer is smart. Our society is based upon objectivism. It’s how we make rules and why we obey them. That was perhaps the only thing I learned in law school. I was too busy modeling to go to class.

The L’Oréal bigwig was a pleasant, smiling man and he ordered a Heineken from the server. I could tell he was the bigwig, because no one else who sat in a floral lounge chair would have had the gall to order alcohol in a meeting. It bothered me slightly that he did that. It seemed like meeting with me wasn’t terribly important. That he didn’t need to impress me, win me away from Garnier or any other competitive hair care brands that might be offering me a similar deal. But what bothered me most about the Heineken was the thing he said as he picked up the icy green bottle and pointed to it with the index finger from his other hand.

“No more of this for you, Portia.”

Now, I liked beer. I especially liked Heineken, and I didn’t like that anyone would say something like that to me. If he’d been a doctor who was explaining my impending liver failure while demonstrating what caused it at a bar, or if I was that Olympic gymnast I’d pretended to be in summer as a kid, who was celebrating her last night before going to a foreign country to compete for gold, I might have been okay with such a statement. At least, I would’ve understood it. But why did he not want me to drink beer? Could it be because alcohol is fattening? Aging? Makes you stupid if you get drunk? I didn’t understand. But what I did understand from that comment was that I had just been offered the job of being the new face of L’Oréal.