My Life So Far (15 page)

Peter, throughout much of his school years, was faced with the taunting of schoolmates, the cruelty of boys toward peers who show signs of vulnerability as a means of proving their own unchallengeable entry into the world of “real men.” It is to Peter’s credit that he rarely caved. I marveled at the extent to which he would, in the face of Dad’s anger, remain himself, exposing his heart, challenging Dad: “See me for who I am. I will not change in order to make you comfortable.” I, on the other hand, was loath to be anything that would bring on my father’s disapproval—until, at a later age, I realized that if I wanted his attention, disapproval was the best I could hope for.

CHAPTER SEVEN

HUNGER

—E
MILY
D
ICKINSON,
1862

T
HE HUNGER BEGAN
that beach summer with Susan. That’s when I moved “outside” myself full-time, and a perpetual, low-grade anxiety took up residence in the newly empty inside space. I didn’t know where the anxiety came from, I just thought that was how life felt for a girl once she’d hit the you’re-supposed-to-be-feminine age—feeling like an outsider, nose pressed against windows, hungry to get in, not knowing that it was myself I was outside of; but then, how could I be
inside
myself when I had discovered I was not perfect? Who’d want to be inside something imperfect? Before that summer, at age thirteen, the concept of “perfect” hadn’t yet begun to darken my horizon—I was too busy climbing trees and wrestling. Now, on it came.

My feelings of imperfection centered on my body. It became my personal Armageddon, the outward proof of my badness: I wasn’t thin enough. Thinking back, I am sure my mother’s suicide had a role to play; after all, being superthin is a way to postpone womanliness, to put off victimhood: freedom through androgyny. Then, too, Mother had had ample obsessions of her own with body image. Certainly the fashion industry has a role to play in glorifying the emaciated-as-chic look, pushing
thin
down the throats of young girls just starting to work out their identities. But my father was implicated as well. Dad had an obsession with women being thin. The Fonda cousins have told me that this was true of all the men in the family, going back generations. On his deathbed, Douw Fonda asked his daughter Cindy, “Have you lost weight yet?” (She wasn’t fat.) Eating disorders abound in Fonda women, and at least two of Dad’s five wives suffered from bulimia. Once I hit adolescence, the only time my father ever referred to how I looked was when he thought I was too fat. Then it was always his wife who would be sent to let me know he was displeased, that he wanted me to wear a different, less revealing bathing suit, a looser belt, or a longer dress.

The truth is that I was never fat. But that wasn’t what mattered. For a girl trying to please others, what mattered was how I saw myself—how I’d
learned
to see myself: through others’ judgmental, objectifying eyes.

Maria Cooper Janis, a friend from childhood, told me once that when she was around age sixteen, she and her parents, Rocky and Gary Cooper, had come to our Malibu beach house for lunch. Apparently, while we were sitting on the beach, my father said to Rocky, “Jane’s got the body, but Maria’s got the face.” I was stunned when Maria told me this, partly because her mother had repeated it to her, but mostly because it showed how judgmental Dad was—and willing to objectify me—even to other people.

Obviously the trouble is that wanting to be perfect is to want the impossible. We’re mortal, after all; we’re not meant to be perfect. Perfect is for God:
Completion,
as Carl Jung said, is what we humans should strive for. But completion (wholeness) isn’t possible until we stop trying to be perfect. The tyranny of perfection forced me to confuse spiritual hunger with physical hunger.*
 
¹
This toxic striving for perfection is a female thing. How many men obsess about being perfect? For men, generally, good enough is good enough.

Dad had decided that Peter and I should go to boarding school, as was common at the time for families who could afford it. Peter was enrolled at the Fay School for boys in Massachusetts and I at the Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. Starting my freshman year at Emma Willard, being very thin assumed dominance over good hair in the hierarchy of what really mattered.

I remember cutting out a magazine ad that said with $2 and some box tops they would send you a special kind of gum that had tapeworm eggs in it and when you chewed it the worms would hatch and eat up all the food you consumed. It sounded like a splendid idea to me—a way to have your cake and eat it, too, so to speak. I sent in my $2 and the box tops, but the gum never materialized. When I told this story to a friend recently, she said, “You’re a smart girl, Jane. How did you get duped into believing this and sending in the money?” Because I was thirteen (hence immortal) and health wasn’t a factor if it meant getting thin. I knew tapeworms weren’t fatal. If it had been a bubonic virus I was sending away for, I’d have thought twice—maybe. But anything that would allow me to get thin without having to do something active seemed attractive. Mind you, I wasn’t as extreme as a few other girls, who had to be hospitalized because they refused to eat, but I prided myself on being one of the thinnest in the class.

Then, in sophomore year, Carol Bentley, a wet-eyed brunette from Toledo, Ohio, entered Emma Willard and became my best friend. I remember first seeing her as I was stepping out of the dorm shower. She was naked and took my breath away. I had never seen a body like hers: fully developed breasts that stood straight out over a tiny waist, and narrow hips with long, chiseled legs like Susan’s. I felt certain right then that she would end up running the world and that if I hung around long enough, some of her power would rub off on me. Already I had learned to equate the perfection of a woman’s body with power and success.

Carol Bentley and me on graduation day at Emma Willard, 1955.

Perfect body notwithstanding, Carol joined me in having major body-image issues. It was she who introduced me to bingeing and purging, what we now know as bulimia. She said the idea came to her in a class on the history of the Roman Empire. She read that the Romans would gorge themselves on food during orgiastic feasts and then put their fingers down their throats to make themselves throw it all back up and start over again. The idea of being able to eat the most fattening foods and never having to pay the consequences was very appealing.

We would binge and purge only before school dances or just before we were going home for the holidays, and then we would ferret away all the chocolate brownies and ice cream we could get and gobble it up until our stomachs were swollen as though we were five months pregnant. Then we would put our fingers down our throats and make ourselves throw it all up. We assumed that we were the first people since the Romans to do this; it was our secret, and it created a titillating bond between us.

Later it became ritualistic, with specific requirements: I had to be alone (it is a disease of aloneness) and dressed in loose, comfortable clothing. In a catatonic state, I would enter a grocery store to buy the requisite comfort foods, starting with ice cream and moving to breads and pastries
—just this one last time.
My breathing would become rapid (as in sex) and shallow (as in fear). Before eating, I would drink milk, because if that went into me first, it would help bring up all the rest later. The eating itself was exciting and my heart would pound. But once the food had been devoured, I would be overcome with an urgent need to separate myself from it before it took up residence inside me. Nothing could have stood in the way of my getting rid of it, differentiating myself from it—from the toxic bulk that had seemed so like a mother’s nurture in the beginning—because if it remained within me, I knew that my life would be snuffed out. Afterward I would collapse into bed and sink into a numbed sleep.
Tomorrow will be different.
It never was.

What an illusion that there were no consequences to be paid! It was years before I allowed myself to acknowledge the addictive, damaging nature of what I was doing. Like alcoholism, anorexia and bulimia are diseases of denial. You fool yourself into believing you are on top of it and can stop anytime you want. Even when I discovered I couldn’t stop, I still didn’t think of it as an addiction; rather, it was proof that I was weak and worthless. This seems utterly preposterous to me now, but self-blame is part of the sickness. For me the disease lasted, in one form or another, from sophomore year in boarding school through two marriages and two children, until I was in my early forties. My husbands never knew, nor did my children or any of my friends and colleagues.

Unlike alcoholism, bulimia is easy to hide (except from mothers or friends who have also suffered from the disease). Like most people with eating disorders, I was adept at keeping my disease hidden, because I didn’t want anyone to stop me. I was convinced that I was in control anyway and could stop tomorrow if I really wanted to. I was often tired, irritable, hostile, and sick from this, but my willpower to maintain appearances was such that most of the time no one knew the true reasons behind it.

In college I also became addicted to Dexedrine, which I began to take when I was cramming for exams and discovered that it killed my appetite. When I began modeling to earn money for acting classes and to pay the rent, I was easily able to get prescriptions from an infamous New York “diet” doctor—along with diuretics to rid myself of swelling-inducing fluids (and probably doing permanent damage to my kidneys). The Dexedrine made me hyper and emotional, and I began to feel that without it I couldn’t act.

There were years when I was actively bulimic and periods of time during those years when the bulimia would be replaced by anorexia (starvation), which Jungian analyst Marion Woodman refers to as the equivalent of an alcoholic’s dry drunk. At those times I would hardly eat at all, perhaps an apple core (never a whole apple) or a hard-boiled egg in the course of a day. My skin against my bones became proof of my moral worthiness. The disease would be particularly severe when there was a lot of pressure to be thin, like when I was a fashion model in my early twenties or when I was on the Broadway stage or in a movie where I had to show a lot of my body. I can look at some of my movies and see the disease in my eyes and on my face—a blank, sunken sadness—or the Dexedrine-induced hyperness in some of my television interviews, or the drawn, false thinness that comes with the use of diuretics. How much better I might have been back in those early movies had I been able to show up fully in the roles rather than work half-crippled by a disease that no one knew I suffered from!