“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.
4
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.