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.