Going Off Script (4 page)

My parents always refused to leave Ischia before the season there was over, which meant I was always starting school two weeks late in the fall. I would badger them to go back to the United States, but they didn’t see the point: I could make up my schoolwork, but we would never get this time with family back
if we relinquished summer now. But I wasn’t the kind of student who could catch up easily once I was behind, and my grades always suffered.

The kind of freedom I enjoyed in Italy didn’t carry over to the States, but I didn’t object: I understood that they were two very different worlds. I remember sitting on a hill with some friends at recess one time in the eighth grade and feeling my blood rise when the American kids started in on how strict my foreign parents were, and how unlucky I was. “My parents are smart, because they know what we’ll do if they let us go to parties and have sleepovers, you idiots,” I said. “They’re the best parents in the world, because they’d do anything for me.” I never touched drugs, or got drunk, or slept around—not because I was afraid of how my parents might punish me, but because I was so scared of disappointing them. None of the three of us kids wanted to ever lose their respect. I still feel that way. But as I entered adolescence, I found a different way to rebel: I became a prankster. In that category, I had way more imagination than common sense, and, for a change, I was utterly fearless. From the age of about twelve on, I occupied a place due north of mischievous and barely south of felonious on the bad-behavior spectrum. I was always hatching crazy, elaborate, sick schemes. Grandma and the Play-Doh Penis Incident was one of the earliest installments of my prankster life.

Whenever my parents brought my maternal grandmother over from Italy for a visit, Nonna Maria would share my pink Laura Ashley bedroom with me, sleeping in the twin bed across from my own. Posters of my favorite celebrities were tacked to the walls. Along with Madonna and whatever boy band was hot at the moment, I had a life-size cutout of another one of my heartthrobs—basketball star Manute Bol. I wasn’t obsessed with basketball, but I was crazy about Manute. At seven feet, seven
inches, he was one of the tallest men to ever play in the NBA, and with the polished ebony skin and sinewy build of his native Dinka tribe back in Sudan, one of the most striking. My replica of Manute hung over Nonna’s twin bed. I loved Nonna dearly; she was the one who had taught me to pray as a small child, and every night, we would kneel on my bedroom floor together to thank God for all our blessings, which we would tick off one by one. Tender as it was, that connection we had did not immunize poor Nonna against my wicked sense of humor.

One night when I was twelve, I was hosting a sleepover with friends, and we were all giggling and listening to New Kids on the Block in my room while Nonna snored contentedly in her bed. We decided that we needed to make Manute more noticeable than he already was. I broke out the cans of Play-Doh, and my friends and I went to work. Soon, I was climbing over my sleeping grandmother with our masterpiece in hand, ready to be affixed to Manute. It wasn’t a perfect match: Manute’s complexion was nowhere near the “flesh” color of Play-Doh (seriously, are there actual human beings that sickly shade of melted Dreamsicle?), and the generous appendage we’d sculpted for him kept falling off onto Nonna’s pillow. Eventually, it stuck to him more or less where nature intended it to, and we fell asleep and forgot about it, until my mother walked into my room the next morning.

It was always hard for my friends to gauge just how much trouble we were ever in at my house, or if there was trouble at all, since my whole family routinely conversed in high-decibel Italian with the kinds of theatric gestures Americans usually save for sudden heart attacks, shocking news, or declarations of war, not requests to pass more linguine. The casual swearing also threw most outsiders for a loop, especially when I bothered to translate it for them. My mom could smile like Mrs. Brady, tell
me something in Italian, and I’d smile, nod, and say something back, and a friend would nudge me and want to know what she’d said.

“Oh, nothing, she just called me a dumb little bitch,” I’d shrug.

(Shocked silence.)

“Omigod. What did you say?”

Another shrug.

“I told her to go fuck herself.”

I picked up a ton of junior high street—okay, cul-de-sac—cred as the girl who was allowed to curse. In two languages, no less. Being considered cool was something new and exhilarating to me, and since all adolescence had given me so far was acne, braces, and a bad perm, I was eager to work with whatever little scraps fate tossed me. “Did you know Julie can say fuck and shit and piss at home and not get in trouble?” a friend boasted one day at the lunch table. I confirmed that I had blanket potty-mouth immunity, and offered to prove it by taking any doubters back to my house for a live demonstration. Mama was in the kitchen and greeted us warmly.

“Mama, I’m allowed to say ‘fuck,’ right?” I asked. Mama said yes, of course, why not, and went about her business.

“Mama, I can say ‘shit,’ too, can’t I?” Another distracted nod. I then turned to my friends like a magician about to perform the grand, saw-the-beautiful-girl-in-half finale. “Now I’m going to say ‘cunt’ in front of my mom,” I announced. My friends gaped as I proceeded to do just that. Mama, having never heard that word before, couldn’t have cared less. My audience was hugely impressed. I smirked triumphantly, and was still reveling in my newfound coolness when I heard a roar and felt myself being picked up by the ankles and thrown to the floor.

“Don’t you ever cuss at her, you fucking little shit, if you ever call Mama that again I will fucking kill you!” My brother, six
foot four and seven years older, then proceeded to swing me head first against the wall while I screamed at the top of my lungs. My friends looked on; this show just kept getting better and better. “Pasquale, why-
a
you killing your sister?” Mama shouted over the commotion, stopping short of actually forbidding Pasquale to murder me.

Pasquale’s God status made him the perfect fodder for what would turn out to be by far the worst prank I ever pulled. I was twelve or thirteen, and I was up in my room talking with my friend Matt Donnelly when I got the brilliant idea that we should prank my mother. “Okay,” I instructed Matt, “let’s conferencecall my mom, and you pretend to be a police officer.” I went over his lines with him, and we dialed Mama. I could hear her pick up downstairs.

“Do you have a son named Pasquale DePandi?” Matt asked in his best serious adult voice, identifying himself as an officer with the Montgomery County Police Department.

“Yes?” Mama answered. “What-
a
this is about?”

Matt drew a deep breath. He was a natural. I listened, excited for the punchline.

“I’m so sorry to tell you, he died in a car accident.”

Up in my room, I heard a boom, followed by a prolonged wailing. “Noooooooooo,” Mama howled. I raced downstairs to find her weeping on the kitchen floor.

“Mama! Mama! April Fool’s! It’s April Fool’s Day!” I cried.

“Noooooooo, nooooooo,” she kept screaming through her tears.

“It’s a joke!” I assured her, hoping she would find my fake glee contagious. “Pasquale is alive!”

“Waaaaaaa?” Mama jumped up and began beating me with every kitchen utensil within reach—wooden spoons, metal spatulas, a random cheese plane. She hurled pans at me as I fled her wrath. Fast-forward to me as an adult, getting ready to go on
The
Arsenio Hall Show
with my husband, Bill, and sharing this memory with the producer, who thought it was hysterically funny and urged me to tell it on air. Arsenio hadn’t heard it and didn’t know what was coming when he followed the prompt his producer had provided. When I finished telling the story, he looked stricken and said something like “Oh.” The studio audience was uncomfortably silent, and when I looked past the lights, I saw a sea of moms glaring back at me.
Oops.
The only two people laughing were Bill and the wicked producer backstage.

I don’t even have a great moral to the story. The important life lesson I took away from this episode was to think before I pranked, and avoid targeting old-school immigrants who have no idea what April Fool’s Day is and have zero awareness of child protection laws in this country. I was outgrowing these childish practical jokes, anyway. Soon, I would be entering high school, and it was time to mature. That meant broadening my horizons, and graduating from prankster to aspiring juvenile delinquent. Sex, drugs, and drinking remained on my taboo list, which narrowed my options somewhat, but the bad behavior I did engage in, I turned out to be very good at: It’s not that I didn’t get caught stealing cars; I just always managed to get away. I was sort of a one-girl
Dukes of Hazzard
in greater Washington, D.C.

My first escapade behind the wheel was honestly more of a favor than a felony. Monica had gone off to college in Boston, but her best friend, Niki, was still like part of our family and treated me like a kid sister. As I grew older, Niki would become both a mentor and friend to me. So when she found herself in a pinch and needed a ride to the airport, I was flattered that she turned to me for help as a stand-in for her absentee BFF Monica. I generously offered Niki my parents’ Mercedes. We got to the airport, and it only then seemed to dawn on Niki that someone—thirteen-year-old me, to be exact—would have to drive the car back home. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” Niki
assured me. The airport was a good twenty miles from Bethesda, on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, but you could take surface streets and avoid the dreaded Beltway. This was all pre-GPS and iPhones, of course, but I was sure I knew the way. It didn’t take me long to get lost in one of D.C.’s sketchier areas. This was when the District was considered one of the most dangerous cities in America, racking up nearly five hundred murders a year, and here I was, an eighth-grader joyriding her daddy’s Mercedes through a neighborhood where people got shot and killed for their sneakers and Eddie Bauer jackets. I clipped a curb while making a turn, and a police car appeared out of nowhere behind me, lights flashing and siren whooping. I rolled down my window.

“License and registration,” the officer said.

“Oh, shoot, I forgot my license,” I said. “Can I just give you my name and birthdate?” I rattled off Monica’s information, and he went back to his car to check it out. I had a quick flash of myself posing for a mug shot in striped jailbird pajamas, and my whole school finding out—they’d probably use it in the yearbook—but it wouldn’t really matter because my parents would kill me, anyway, and I wouldn’t have to face my classmates again. Just as the cop walked back up to my window, another car suddenly shot past us, tires squealing. “Holy shit!” the cop swore. “It’s your lucky day,” he told me before running back to his patrol car to give chase. I somehow found my way home, and Mama and Babbo never missed me or the Mercedes.

I had something of a Roadrunner versus Wile E. Coyote relationship with the police. I got pulled over again when I went joyriding in my friend Liz’s family station wagon (with Liz riding shotgun, of course). I slammed the gas and fled as the policeman was getting out of his squad car. He gave chase, but I lost him in the leafy neighborhoods of Bethesda by wheeling into a driveway and pulling into a random garage whose door
was open. I turned the lights out, and Liz and I crouched down in the seat for twenty minutes to be sure the coast was clear. Knowing I had shaken the police gave me the best adrenaline rush ever. I was such a little gangster, I even made it a habit to take the license plates off whatever car I was borrowing without permission (or a license).

On yet another occasion, Liz, my friend Alison, and I heard about a party we wanted to go to late one night during a sleepover freshman year. Securing that particular ride had put my formidable acting experience to the test, since it was Alison’s grandmother’s car we were borrowing, the keys were on her grandmother’s nightstand, and her grandmother was asleep in the bed next to them. Alison had been a less than enthusiastic accomplice (
“Are you crazy? We can’t steal Nana’s car!”
), but I was persuasive (
“Sure, we can! Watch this!”
). Liz and I tiptoed into the room. Nana was not the heavy sleeper my own Nonna had been—she definitely would have noticed a Play-Doh penis plopping onto her pillow—and she stirred as we inched our way inside her bedroom.

“Alison, honey, is that you?” she murmured.

“Yes, Nana, go back to sleep,” I whispered sweetly. “I just need a tissue. I have a runny nose.”

“Okay, honey. The Kleenex are on the nightstand.” Zoom, off we went. And back we came a few hours later, with no one the wiser.

I had an uncanny ability to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened, and I could fool even the people who knew me best.

It was a survival skill that was about to be put to the test.

“N
ext. Uh, huh, uh huh. Okay. Next.” The school nurse was calling us forward one by one in gym class to check our posture. I waited nervously. I had always avoided doing self-checks in the mirror or asking my parents to see if my spine was straight, terrified that what had happened to my sister might happen to me. I silently prayed for the school nurse to nod in approval and write down on her clipboard that Giuliana DePandi was normal. When it was my turn, I stepped up, waited for her to look me over, then moved aside for the next kid in line.

“Julie, hold on a sec. Bend over,” the nurse said, pulling me back and running her hand over my spine. “You need to go to the doctor. You have a curve.”

I was thirteen. The same age Monica had been when she had had to have her surgery. I kept picturing myself wearing her old
brace, or on an operating table. My mind replayed that day in Monica’s hospital room when she had been in such agony she had wanted to kill herself. I feared the pain more than anything. I walked out of school that afternoon fighting tears as I imagined how my mother would take this devastating news. Mama refused to believe it at first—that old Italian denial—and made me bend over in the kitchen so she could see for herself. An orthopedist confirmed the school nurse’s finding: I had scoliosis. I was no longer just skinny and awkward: I was crooked. Monica cried. The good news was that I only had a nineteen-degree curve, and Mama and Babbo were against putting me in a brace, having seen one child suffer through that ordeal already for nothing. It was decided that we would just take a wait-and-see approach with me; if the scoliosis didn’t worsen, I might never need anything more than some ibuprofen now and then for backaches. That was the best-case scenario. But my body quickly betrayed me, and as I hit puberty, my right hip rose higher than the other, jutting out at an angle. One side of my chest protruded, which may have been less noticeable if I were curvy to begin with, but that wasn’t the case, so I would stuff my bra with Kleenex to try to even things out into something that did not look like a 32A through a funhouse mirror. I was all twisted, and every day the first thing on my mind was how to fool everyone into thinking I was straight.

I didn’t tell any of my friends about my diagnosis, and built my new wardrobe going into high school around oversized sweatshirts. Babbo had to start tailoring one leg of my jeans so they would fit right, but needle and thread weren’t going to fix the way tops hung on me. I wanted to be like everyone else, to blend invisibly into the unremarkable river of kids hurrying to class or hanging out at the mall. I wanted to not make myself sick with worry before my annual X-ray and MRI, when the specialists monitoring my scoliosis would decide whether it was
bad enough to warrant the same excruciating spinal fusion my sister had undergone.

Nonna had taught me as a little girl that prayer should never be a selfish act, but I figured I could sneak in a personal favor as long as it wasn’t a biggie and I made sure to express gratitude for all the blessings I already had. So I asked God to just let me be normal. Average was all I was asking. I wasn’t going to get all greedy and pray to wake up as Brooke Shields’s secret twin. Just please, God, Jesus, Mary, the Holy Ghost, and whatever saint is eavesdropping, could I not be lopsided?

As I grew, though, the occasional twinges turned into a chronic backache, and it got harder to deny the impact the scoliosis was beginning to have on my everyday kid life. I was a soccer goalie and junior varsity cheerleader, but I didn’t dare tell my coaches or teammates that diving for the ball was killing my hip, or that jumping up and down at a football game could leave me gasping for breath. I didn’t want anyone, including my own parents, to suspect how bad it was actually getting, so I just accepted every fresh or worsening symptom as my new normal. My life was turning into one big masquerade, and I was self-taught in the art of illusion. I learned to camouflage my misshapen body by casually leaning against walls when I could, so the jutting hip became part of a contrived slouch.
“Stand up straight!”
I was forever being urged by people who had no idea I couldn’t. “Oh, whatever, I’m just tired,” I would shrug. Nonchalance was the key to my whole act, my best survival skill. The more something mattered to me, the more I would pretend it didn’t.

I actually envied classmates who were overweight or had to wear thick glasses—millions of people in the world could relate to them. They had the option of making time their ally instead of the enemy; you saw it every fall, when a lucky few would return to high school a social caste or two higher than the semester before after losing weight or getting contacts or finding a good
dermatologist over the summer. But scoliosis was a different level of ugly. Scoliosis was the kid with the brace trying to drink out of a water fountain in the movie
Sixteen Candles.
Scoliosis was people staring. It was the voice inside their heads and mine, saying
Eeew, you’re a freak.
Scoliosis meant I was deformed, and that was something I never wanted anyone outside my family or orthopedist’s office to know. I accepted what I took to be the cruel truth—that I was ugly—but that didn’t mean I had to publicly admit it. Pity was the last thing on earth I wanted.

I masked my deep insecurity by becoming the funny chick, that nutty Italian girl who was every guy’s pal but never more. I secretly crushed on virtually every one of those “just a friend” boys but rebuffed any of them who showed interest. I’d go to the school dances or out clubbing using my sister’s ID, but I always got off the dance floor if a slow number came on. I knew if I let a boy touch me, my freakishness would be exposed. No bra stuffing or expert tailoring of a homecoming dress would change the crooked contours of my body beneath it. I imagined the surprise and disgust a guy would feel when he felt my jutting shoulder blades, or put his hands on my hips to draw me closer, then discovered that one hand was inches higher than the other. It was much easier to suck down the loneliness and let everyone run with the assumption that I was playing hard to get. “Oh, Julie is so picky,” my friends would say. The upshot was that I had a really good reputation that I didn’t necessarily want. All my friends were hooking up while I watched from the sidelines of the popular crowd, forever the best supporting actress in everyone else’s movie. I wasn’t crying myself to sleep, though, or partying my way to oblivion like half my classmates did every weekend. I was sure that my time would come later.

Weirdly enough, for all my insecurity and self-consciousness, still burning inside me was that same stubborn conviction I’d had since the age of seven, that I was meant to be on camera.
I wanted everyone to look at me; I just didn’t want anyone to
see
me.

Walt Whitman High School was notoriously competitive, full of kids whose parents had been meticulously assembling them from a Build Your Own Overachiever kit since birth, and nobody would have suspected for a millisecond that I was just as ambitious—if not more so—than the classmates vying for valedictorian. At Whitman, achieving a perfect GPA wasn’t impressive enough; kids felt pressured to pile on enough honors classes, early college credits, and whatever else it took to achieve
above
a 4.0 average. It was the academic equivalent of being a size 0 in Hollywood: the quest for a beyond-perfect ideal that existed only because they created it out of their own desperation.

I was such a lazy student, I could barely maintain a D average. I couldn’t even muster a C in Italian. And the class was mostly conversational! How could I be incoherent in my native tongue? This just went to prove how stupid school was. Even getting kicked off the cheerleading squad for flunking a typing class (yes, typing) didn’t serve as a wake-up call. Nope, my dismal academic record didn’t bother me one bit. I regarded high school as my social life, and the classes I was required to take were just annoying bases I had to touch on my way to newscaster stardom. All those hours I saved not studying or doing any homework gave me lots of time to daydream, and my goals did not require me to perform autopsies on pickled frogs or measure the angles of rhomboids for no apparent reason. When my tenth-grade geometry teacher wrapped up an intense class once by asking if anyone had any questions, I raised my hand. “When will we ever use geometry in the real world?” I wanted to know. The teacher launched into a long tirade about the various ways geometry would come in handy, but let’s be honest, I had asked the question that was on everyone else’s mind, too, and I was too busy glorying in the instant peer admiration I had won to
actually listen to the answer. I was sure that geometry had nothing to do with Barbara Harrison’s continued success. The same anchorwoman I had admired in second grade was still on air ten years later. So there you have it.

There weren’t any easy or obvious ways to get a head start on my news anchor career while still in my teens, but there were plenty of ways to prep for my companion goal of being crowned Miss USA. What I loved about the Miss Universe pageant system was that it didn’t pretend to be about scholarship or talent—it was about stone-fox glamour. One of the best parts of watching the pageants was the carte blanche permission they gave you to just enjoy doing what you were going to secretly do anyway, and judge someone you didn’t know based entirely on how attractive you thought they were, without having to factor in whether they were a gifted pianist or planned to use their prize check to pay for dental school. From what I could glean, modeling seemed like a logical starting place for a future Miss USA. I was tall and skinny, so maybe there was some hope.

When I saw an ad for the Barbizon School of Modeling in the paper, I begged my parents to enroll me. I would even get a certificate upon completion of the course. I could frame it as proof I was a real model. One brief interview and twelve hundred dollars of my parents’ hard-earned cash later, I was in! The weekly classes were the highlight of my week. I would learn how to get in and out of the backseat of a car elegantly (in case the paparazzi were shooting me arriving at a premiere). I also learned how to sashay down the runway based on what style of clothing I was modeling. Evening wear? Slow and seductive. High-fashion sportswear? Fast and fierce. My personal favorite was safari wear (because you never knew when you might get booked for the one Banana Republic fashion show of the year—hard to believe, but in the eighties, Banana Republic actually sold safari-inspired fashion). The key to modeling in a safari-themed fashion show,
we were instructed, is to appear “focused on a mission.” I would imagine I was on a mission to find monkeys and bananas in the jungle. Monkeys were my favorite animal as a kid, and bananas were my fave fruit, so…bam! Mission accomplished! I wasn’t merely a model, I was Academy Award material.

After a couple of months, Barbizon announced that we were ready for our photo shoots, which we could then use to assemble a portfolio to send to Eileen Ford and other top modeling agencies in New York that were
waiting to hire us.
Cindy Crawford was probably losing sleep over the very prospect. When I walked into the photo studio with my ten modeling school classmates, my eyes nearly popped out of my head. There were racks of clothes and fancy props. Everything from sequined gowns and boas to cocktail dresses and statement necklaces. It was even better than my sister’s closet (Monica would never be caught dead in feathers). One by one, the stylist and photographer sized each of us up and decided what our “look” would be—not just for the photos, but for all modeling eternity. Their choice was what we should carry forth into the industry if we wanted to become the superstars Barbizon had prepared us to be.

First up was the pretty blonde who was a little short to do high fashion. She was handed a cute peasant top and jeans and told her look was “catalog fresh.” Catalog fresh? I felt bad for her. I had heard that girls in catalogs made decent money, but nothing like the fortune tall girls like me could rake in on the runways of New York, Paris, and Milan. The next girl was labeled swimsuit. That definitely would not be my fate, given my curved spine. Next up: runway.
Okay, there’s room for two of us, no big deal.
Then came another catalog. Finally it was my turn. The two Barbizon reps looked me up and down. Then they looked at each other, and then at me, up and down again. Then they did something that they had not done with any of the other girls. The photographer and stylist walked away and started whispering.

Some girls would no doubt see this as a bad thing, but I was not one of those girls. My imagination hit the “Play” button on its favorite biopic in progress, and I saw them walking back to me with huge smiles on their faces as they looked me dead in the eyes and told me I had what it takes to go to New York and become a supermodel. My brilliant potential defied any label. This had to be how Naomi Campbell felt the first time she walked into a modeling agency, and now this was happening to me. It was the most exciting moment of my fourteen-year-old life until a voice rudely interrupted my reverie. “Julie,” the bitchy voice said, “you are what we call an athletic model. You’re tall and lean like an athlete, and we see you modeling a variety of athletic wear in catalogs.” It was bad enough I was being told I was a catalog model, but to be told I would basically be modeling for the Sports Authority’s newspaper inset was even more of a blow than modeling mediocre fashion pieces in the annual Spiegel catalog.

Before I could start crying, they thrust a sporty outfit into my skinny—
lean
—arms along with a tennis racquet, a white Izod visor to squash down over my short permed-mushroom bob, and size ten white tennis shoes that looked like a size fifteen with my teeny-tiny bony ankles poking out. Not a cute look. But Barbizon was not done with me yet: They stood me in front of a white screen and started throwing tennis balls at me, urging me to swing energetically. I kept missing and the tennis balls kept hitting me, and I tried to fend off the Barbizon attack by twisting the racquet every which way but up. It was awful.