Might as Well Laugh About It Now (14 page)

A soldier, a ballerina, a major league baseball player, and a political campaigner: these are the people I’ve been meeting. Not one of them has had one good word to say. In fact, the ballerina even spit at me. Or maybe I should say spit up
on
me. I guess they’ll all talk soon enough, once they have language skills. They’re all babies, under a year old, though their outfits make them look like they should carry business cards.

I’ve seen newborn boys dressed like they are ready to conduct a symphony, complete with a little black jacket, white shirt and bow tie, and baby girls acces sorized with a designer purse before they could hold a spoon. I drove by a day-care play lot and it looked like a job fair! Ever seen a plump toddler toddling along in pumps and a pencil skirt?

I love babies: squishy, mushy, delicate, innocent babies. It’s perplexing why we dress an infant in camouflage or sports jerseys or mini-tuxedos. I mean, in the big life picture, it’s only a matter of months that we even get to dress our children like a baby and win over the hearts of every person in a room without even trying. Why rush it? I think we should help our babies play that card as long as possible.

I cherished every second of pink and pale blue with my own eight little cherubs. I preselected the outfits they wore home from the hospital with almost as much care as I chose their names. I have stored away those debut tiny gowns for them to keep, the delicate embroidered rosebuds, the cashmere bunting, the irresistible ivory buttons. And even though my teenagers have openly mocked my sentimentality, whenever I bring the coming-home gowns out of storage, they are still beguiled by what small creatures they once were.

It’s pure joy for me to shop for white frilly booties and tiny knit sweaters, scrumptious sleepers and sweet little receiving blankets, all featuring nothing more mature than a newly hatched duckling. Babies don’t need sophisticated clothes to make a first impression. If you’re little enough to wear a onesie, then your statement is: “Hey, look at me! I’m brand-new!”

My lifelong friend Patty, who has been present, by my side, through the first days of life for every one of my kids, is a witness to my baby-dressing zeal. She claims that I put so many ruffles on my baby girls that their arms stuck straight out like wings on a pastel-colored 747.

It’s true. They did resemble tiny, yummy pastries for the first two years. I had the same experience when I was a little girl with the way my mother dressed me. I don’t think my hands touched my sides until I was nine. I have film footage of me, at age two, on Christmas Day. My parents had given me a child-sized rocking chair. As excited as I was to sit in it, the layers and layers of my petticoats couldn’t fit between the armrests. The rocking chair disappeared completely, engulfed by crinoline. I was their only daughter and my free will in the fashion area was overridden by my parents’ desperate need for a touch of the feminine among all their boys. Can you blame them?

Keeping with tradition, I decided that until my babies learned to say the word “no,” they were mine to dress up in darling blue rompers and white knee socks, even before their kneecaps came into existence. (Interesting baby fact: We are born without kneecaps and develop them between ages two and six.) The only mock-adult accessories they wore were sailor caps. And, like many moms, I’ve put an elastic pink ribbon headband on my girls before they had seven strands of caterpillar silk hair to hold into place. For special occasions, I even hot glued silk flowers to the handles of their binkies. I was wise enough to photograph these adorable moments, because they didn’t last nearly long enough.

My kids each displayed their fashion free will pretty early on. Like most children, mine began inching toward independence by dressing exactly the opposite of how I dressed them as babies. Even as toddlers, my children sent me the message loud and clear. Soft baby blue corduroy overalls were all over by age three, replaced by track pants and SpongeBob T-shirts. Floral sundresses with smocking were given the smack down and replaced by distressed jeans and polar fleece vests.

My first daughter, at age five, made a fashion statement that left me speechless, mostly because I was laughing. I opened the front door to find her riding a big-wheeled trike up and down the driveway, wearing only black leggings, snow boots, and her brother’s six-foot rubber play snake like a choker around her neck. It was clear to me that I needed to back off the Laura Ashley look or I was going to have a Hells Angel for a kid.

From then on, I may have made fashion suggestions, but, within reason, my children always made their own fashion choices. Growing up on TV and having to wear hundreds of different costumes, I completely understand the issue of the outer appearance not matching the inner self. As a teenager, on our variety show, I was dressed up as everything from a chimney sweep to a cheerleader, from a goatherd to an Egyptian queen, from Princess Leia in
Star Wars
to a vaudeville flapper. It was complicated to be a fifteen-year-old girl trying to figure out who I was, especially when I was dressed as Mae West. “Why don’t you come up and be me sometime?”

In an ironic twist, as twists usually are, my youngest daughter, the last in the line, can’t seem to get enough of the überfeminine. With her as a toddler and me as a tired middle-aged mommy, I was ready to move us both into the more practical world of cotton stretch pants and zip-up hoodies. She was having none of it. She would scowl at a sneaker and turn away from a T-shirt. Most girls start going through the schizophrenic daily process of clothing selection that involves ten or more trial outfits at around age sixteen; my little one started at age five.

Getting her out the door to school is a challenge as we navigate through a pile of the frilly and the pink, the hair bobbles and the bows, the ballerina shoes in every color. And just like her mother, she never leaves the house without a lip gloss in her purse.

Now, when I’m the first one in my nightgown every night and can’t wait to scrub the makeup off my face, she wants to put on her Arabelle gown with jew eled tiara and give each other glittery manicures.

It serves me right.

Fight or Flee

I hated my dress, my hair, my gut, sitting up straight, and obviously posing in a ladylike fashion with my knees together. Whoops!

I sometimes wonder what ever happened to the girdle I rescued from the San Fernando earthquake. I guess it didn’t have quite the importance I gave it back in 1971, because it’s long gone. I wish I still had one or two of the miniature glass animal figurines I had collected from around the world at that time, but they broke because I couldn’t grab them. My hands were full. After all, I had a tummy panel sewn into Lycra to save.

When it comes to “fight or flee” situations and the answer is flee, I’m always fascinated to see what people take with them. When the Malibu fires were spreading rapidly across the hills in the fall of 2007, I watched the TV interviews of people packing their cars, preparing to abandon their homes. It wasn’t what they were saying that I found compelling, it was what they were saving. Men seemed to be loading up their electronics, golf clubs, and other things made of metal. Women dashed from the house to the car with stacks of photo albums, handmade quilts, kid necessities, and armloads of clothes on hangers. Everyone packed up the pets, but I didn’t see one plant.

If I had been at home when my own house caught on fire in 2005, I’d like to imagine that I would have acted the same way after I knew my family was safe: get the sentimental and irreplaceable belongings. I have reason to believe, however, that I’d be just like a woman I met in Chicago. She told me that when the fire alarm went off in her high-rise apartment building, she found herself standing on the sidewalk five minutes later “with a rolling suitcase full of cosmetics.” As she explained, “If I was going to have to live in a shelter, at the very least I wanted to look good.” Hey, I understand that completely! When traveling by plane, I always carry on my makeup. I think airline security hates me. Sorry, but if your luggage is lost, you can get away with wearing the same outfit twice, but two-day-old makeup always looks like . . . well, two-day-old makeup.

Being in show business, the pressure to always look good had sadly been ingrained in me so deeply by age ten that even an earthquake couldn’t shake that concern from my head. I was too worried about my tummy shaking. I felt like I had a lot to live up to and a lot to lose, literally.

I guess by the time my mother was pregnant with me, all of the DNA containing long eyelashes, slender body type, strong straight teeth, and thick wavy hair had been used up by my seven older brothers. As my mother’s only girl, I was blessed with the leftover goods in the genes department: tiny eyelashes and a propensity toward belly blubber. I was pretty unhappy being that chubby little girl with greasy bangs and a mouth full of cavity-prone teeth, including one that had grown in like a fang. It got me teased for being an “uncommitted vampire.”

I now know that some of my weight issues were in reaction to difficult issues of my childhood, which I wrote about in
Behind the Smile
. I dreaded being on the cover of
Tiger Beat
magazine along with my brothers. I wanted to hide in the background as much as I could. I must have thought that wearing a girdle would hold me together in all the ways I felt flawed in this family of what seemed like perfect boys.

There are almost no photos of me from ages eight to eleven, because one summer evening I gathered them all up and tossed them into the barbecue in the backyard. They made for some pretty tasty roasted marshmallows that night, though no one else was aware of the reason why. I wasn’t worried about frying my eyelashes near the flames; I didn’t have any to lose.

We had taped an
Andy Williams Christmas Special
only months before, where we all wore holiday attire, complete with fake fur hats and scarves and winter parkas. Nothing makes a girl feel more like a formless blob than a parka!

Even though I was very shy, I was part of the family, and Andy wanted everyone to be onstage with him. I don’t remember the choreography, the song we sang, or much at all about that show. My only memory is of overhearing two producers talking in the hallway: “How do we get the fat sister out of the camera shot?” one asked the other.

My closet at home was shaped like a wedge, wide at the front where the rods hung across. The back side of the closet came to a point that was out of sight unless you looked under the hanging clothing. It was my retreat. That night, I crawled into the back corner and, drawing my knees up toward my chin, buried my face in my hands. I choked back as much of my sobbing as I could, hoping that my brothers and parents could not hear me. I wished I could disappear. I wanted to start over again, to be born beautiful like Donny.

Little did I know that it was only the beginning of thirty years of complicated issues regarding my body image.

For about a decade my mother had a wringer washer that she refused to give up, even though they were horribly outdated. She liked to line dry the clothes and only a wringer truly squeezed all the water out, better than the spin cycle on any washing machine. I used to help by taking the clothes, post-squeezing, and putting them into a basket. I would stand there and daydream: “Wouldn’t it be cool if I could put my tummy through that wringer and, ‘poof’ . . . or maybe I should say ‘pop,’ be as thin as my older brothers?” They seemed to be able to eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and never had to think about being able to get their shirts buttoned up.