True You (7 page)

And yet…

When it came to food, the concept of discipline didn’t exist. I was given no instructions about what or when to eat. We were a show business family focused on show business success. Food was fuel to keep us going. Food was necessary, but hardly required study.

In the early days, when I went on the road with my brothers, it was all about room service. In fact, it became a running joke that little Janet had memorized the room service numbers at every hotel on the circuit. I loved calling up and ordering whatever I liked—cheeseburgers, or apple pie, whatever and whenever. It was magical. Pick up the phone, and thirty minutes later there it was: my fondest desire arrived on a silver platter.

Disciplined artistic training came to me as naturally as eating, yet when it came to eating, discipline flew out the window.

Some of my siblings, such as my sister La Toya, have high metabolisms. La Toya could eat dozens of her beloved chocolate turtles without gaining a pound.

My metabolism was slow.

My appetite was big.

After a show, after receiving a standing ovation, I wanted to celebrate the good feeling. I would go back to the hotel room and make a phone call.

The waiter would wheel in the food—hamburgers, french fries, and ice cream.

If someone had told me back then that just as I needed to be a disciplined actor, I also needed to be a disciplined eater, I wouldn’t have understood. Though I was hardly a rebellious kid, I would have surely rejected the idea of curbing my eating habits.

Eating was emotional for me; eating calmed my nerves and brought me instant gratification.

“I hated the word
discipline,”
a friend of mine once told me. “My mother was a rabid disciplinarian. If I got out of bed a minute late, I was punished. If I didn’t eat every last bite of my oatmeal, I was punished. If my homework wasn’t finished by eight, even more punishment. As a result, I was always late getting out of bed, I never finished my oatmeal, and I never completed my homework on time. I flat-out rebelled. I couldn’t stand the pressure, and I resented how everything had to be just so.

“‘Why?’ I asked my mother. ‘Why can’t I stay in bed another five minutes? Why can’t I have another hour to get through with my homework?’

“‘Because you need to learn discipline’ was always her answer.

“‘What’s the big deal about discipline?’ I wanted to know.

“‘Without discipline, you’ll never amount to anything.’

“Well, when you’re seven or eight years old, the idea of ‘amounting to something’ isn’t foremost on your mind, is it?”

“But at least it showed you that your mother cared,” I said.

“I didn’t feel that she cared about me,” my friend said. “I felt
like she cared about this principle of discipline. Discipline was just making me do things I didn’t want to do when I didn’t want to do them. Her insistence on discipline turned me into a wild child.”

For all the truth in my friend’s story, I saw the positive side of discipline. I didn’t reject or resist discipline, because I saw how discipline led to success. Success meant pleasing an audience and earning a standing ovation.

I was still a preteen when Mike introduced us to vegetarianism. I believe that came out of his love for animals, a love that I share deeply. It seemed to make sense, and the majority of the family went along with the program. Mother agreed and felt it was not only important to exclude animal flesh from our diet but to employ colonic treatments on a weekly basis. The idea was that the bacteria and toxins that accumulate in the colon have to be flushed out. Later I would learn that many doctors disagree with this method, feeling that the body’s digestive system naturally eliminates those toxins. There is a school of thought, however, that maintaining a healthy colon requires extraordinary measures. For many years, our family adopted those measures. And as an obedient child, I didn’t argue or challenge the plan. As a young girl, that wasn’t my nature.

Because I loved Mike and cherished the times he and I spent together, I was more than willing to embrace his diet. That became another bond between us. Before he recorded
Off the Wall
, he could go out in public without security. People recognized him and asked for autographs, but it was still manageable and not intrusive. We’d go out alone.

He’d drive us from the San Fernando Valley to a vegetarian restaurant run by Sikhs on Third Street in Los Angeles, called the Golden Temple. We’d eat salads and drink Yogi tea. The meals were delicious, and we stuffed ourselves. I remember thinking—or hoping—that overeating healthy food wouldn’t get me fat the way nonhealthy food might. I still worried, however, that healthy or not, I was too fat and that my eating was out of control. But these were private worries; I didn’t mention them to Mike. At the same time, Mike, who had problems with acne, never discussed that with me. All of us in our family—brothers, sisters, mother, and father—kept such thoughts to ourselves.

There were also wonderful spontaneous trips that Mike and I would make to give food to the homeless. We’d buy a bunch of takeout meals and drive around the city, stopping whenever we saw someone holding a sign asking for help. That was Mike’s idea of a good time—simply give to the poor on a personal basis. All this happened when I was still a preteen and Mike was not yet twenty. Our closeness meant the world to me. There was still taunting about my booty or my inability to trim down, but that was more than compensated by our private time together. I saw no problems on the horizon.

“I did,” said my sister La Toya years later. “I always knew you’d have weight issues.”

“Why?” I asked.

“The teasing got to you. I saw it in your face. You might have said, ‘Sticks and stones might hurt my bones, but names will never harm me,’ but I knew that the names were harming you.”

Mike named me “Dunk” and we shared every dream, every confidence. I was his little sister; he always knew that I had his back.

I
was eleven and on break from
Good Times
when Mike invited me to New York. It was 1977, and the height of disco madness. La Toya was also there. Excitedly, Mike told me about this club called Studio 54. Nightclubs weren’t anything new for me. My siblings had been taking me to clubs for years. I was used to being the
only kid at the party. But from the minute we arrived, I knew this was different.

Long lines of people, dressed in fabulous outfits, were waiting to get in. Once we were spotted, we were whisked right inside. The place was mammoth. It was packed. Strobe lights flashing. People sniffing flour.

“Why are they doing that?” I asked, not understanding that it wasn’t flour they were sniffing. No one answered me. Everyone was too busy looking.

I was introduced to the owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. I saw Liza Minnelli. I recognized her from her films and knew that her mother was Judy Garland. I also knew the films of her father, Vincente Minnelli. I also recognized the man she was with—Halston. It was a dazzling, amazing scene. I don’t think I said a single word the entire night.

I felt privileged to be there. With the exception of Brooke Shields, what other young kid could gain entrance? It was a fascinating glimpse into the world of extreme celebrity glamour.

Mike could have excluded me from such experiences. But in his mind—and in mine—such experiences were fun. It was plain fun to see the outlandishness of one of the wildest clubs ever to host the stars.

To be included was to be loved.

I cherish such experiences. Despite whatever self-image issues I had—feeling I was fat, or a poor student, or inferior to my siblings—the presence of my family was and remains a comfort. Families can be challenging, and many are deeply dysfunctional.
But despite that dysfunction, a family can provide a loving energy that’s hard, if not impossible, to duplicate.

Long ago a friend told me this story that I’ll never forget. It’s testimony to the strength of family, even when that family comprises just two people.

“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I lived alone with my father. My mom had died in childbirth and all four of his grandparents lived far away. It was just Daddy and me. Daddy had problems. He was a drinker, and he couldn’t hold down a job. We were always moving the day before the rent was due. I changed elementary school five or six times. Usually I was the one who had to wake up Daddy so he could take me to school. I was very young—five or six—when I started making him breakfast. I didn’t know the word for it then, but I do now: he was depressed. It was hard for him to get out of bed and get going. In the evenings, we ate frozen dinners or takeout from McDonald’s. When I got older, Daddy wasn’t really capable of helping me with my homework.

“Once in a while he’d have a lady friend help me. One of his girlfriends was a bookkeeper and good at math. Another worked at the library and helped me with my reading. But Daddy wasn’t good at keeping these relationships. He’d quickly move from one lady to another. I often heard him fighting with them over the phone or in person. He had all sorts of problems that I could talk about for days, or years, or even the rest of my life.

“But here’s what I remember most, and here’s what I cling to
most—the fact that my father was there. Every night when I went to sleep, he was there. Every morning when I awoke, he was there. I know that he fed me the wrong foods and I know that he never had the right stuff to fight the demons that kept him down. But the simple fact that he stuck around—day in and day out—told me the one thing I needed to know. That he cared. And because he cared, I was able to feel that I was worth caring for.”

Being in the real world
taught me that when it
comes to relationships,
it is all about sincerity,
not class, or race, or
economic status.