Might as Well Laugh About It Now (15 page)

As a family treat, my father would buy huge boxes of Fudgsicles at a local drive-thru dairy. He would stock the freezer full. There were so many of us that my parents would buy all food products in bulk. Unfortunately, I was the only one who bulked up!

My dad would try to motivate me by saying that I could have some when I lost a pound or two. That only motivated me to get clever in the sneaking-a-snack department. I would stay awake into the night until I heard my brothers go to bed and my parents snoring. That was a sure signal that the coast was finally clear. Then I would creep silently downstairs into the kitchen and take two Fudgsicles (or six or seven) back up to my bedroom to enjoy them in privacy. I hid the evidence of the wooden sticks under my mattress. This worked well until the day my parents went to replace my bed and several hundred Fudgsicle sticks fell to the floor.

They called me into my room, where my mother was pointing at them, scattered across the floor. I looked up, into their faces, and said the first thing I could think of to break the tension.

“Arts-and-crafts projects, anyone?”

I don’t remember how I became the owner of my first girdle by age ten, but my mother most likely saw my distress at feeling chubby and found the most practical solution. After all, in that era women didn’t really do sit-ups or concern themselves with muscle tone: it was all about the foundation undergarments. They wore girdles! I mean, they had to wash and wax the floors. Why in the world would they even think about doing sixty sit-ups?

The San Fernando earthquake struck in the early-morning hours. Our house, in Arleta, California, became a lot more rock ’n’ roll than Donny could ever hope to be. The evening before, at ten p.m., when the female Osmonds always get their “second wind,” my mother had very impulsively decided to switch around the order of the kitchen. She and I stayed up quite late moving the glassware from the open shelves into the cupboards and the canned goods to where the glassware had been. It was good intuition because, making our way through the kitchen during the aftershocks, we only had to dodge rolling cans instead of splintered glass.

Our Airstream trailer was parked in our backyard, and Alan and Wayne and Merrill were sleeping in it that night. They called it their bachelor pad because it gave them space outside of the house. During the earthquake, Wayne said, he thought someone had hooked the trailer onto a car and was driving them down the freeway at eighty miles per hour.

Jay’s prized possession, a giant Buddha sculpted from metal that had been given to him by a Japanese fan, plummeted off the wall above his bed and landed directly on his pillow moments after he sat up. I screamed and rolled out of my own bed, my head landing in the wastebasket. Bookcases toppled over and lamps crashed to the floor. The earthquake was so intense, it shook most of the water out of our swimming pool, leaving the lawn flattened down, as if it had gone through Mother ’s wringer.

When the whole family finally gathered in the front yard, shivering in our pajamas, I looked down to see what was in my hands. In my panic to get to safety, not knowing if the house was going to collapse on our heads, I had grabbed my girdle as something I couldn’t live without. In my other hand was my set of Klackers, a popular toy that year. They were two hard acrylic globes at either end of a folded string. The object was to “klack” them together above and then below your hand as fast as you could. They were soon taken off the market because of the injuries they caused children. Klackers could crack a skull pretty easily. If my brothers ever felt like laughing at my unreasonable choice of what to save, they never did in front of me. Perhaps it was because of the Klackers.

By age sixteen I had learned to live with being hungry quite often in order to stay slender. I was five feet five and weighed only 110 pounds, when a producer of the
Donny and Marie
show made it absolutely clear to me that unless I lost ten pounds to look better on camera, the entire show would be canceled and scores of people would be out of work, all because—as he put it—I couldn’t keep food out of my mouth.

I figured out how to keep almost all food out of my mouth pretty quickly. As good as I was at sneaking Fudgsicles at age ten, I was even better at hiding that I was eating nothing at all on most days. I would tell my mother that I had eaten breakfast before she got up and then wave off any offers of dinner saying that I had already eaten at the studio before I came home. I would drink lemon squeezed into water with maple syrup and cayenne pepper all day long for four days out of the week. The weekends were the only time I would let myself eat real food, but not without some horrible guilt that it would all show up by Monday on my stomach. When I got down to ninety-three pounds, I still didn’t feel I was thin enough—even when I became too weak from hunger to do the dance numbers in the show. A friend of mine, who was becoming a model, taught me how to “eat without consequences.” I went through several months of bulimia, until it began to cause damage to my vocal cords.

I was still desperate to stay thin, so as soon as I would gain three pounds I would starve five more off of myself. The seventies ideal was to be as skinny as Twiggy, the first-ever supermodel. I wasn’t thinking about the health consequences. No one seemed to be. The shocking death of my friend in the entertainment business Karen Carpenter, in 1983, was the first time the public really became aware of eating disorders.

I didn’t continue those eating habits after the variety show ended, but I never looked in a mirror without analyzing my weight and mentally criticizing myself for not being stick-thin. Still today, there are times when I view myself through harsh eyes. A lifelong habit is tough to break completely and I still have some long-term consequences from my radical approaches to losing the weight.

After the birth of my youngest son, Matthew, in 1999, I began to open my eyes to the extremely negative effect that my public “role model” image had on the self-esteem of women who paid attention to my life. I had my baby halfway through the eight-week break between season one and season two of the
Donny & Marie
talk show, leaving me less than four weeks to lose the sixty pounds (yes, 6-0!) I had gained in pregnancy and to fit back into my wardrobe again. I didn’t make it. (Hmmm . . . perhaps a severe bout of postpartum depression held me up a bit. Talk about being put through the wringer! I felt as two-dimensional and emotionally flat as wet laundry.)

I had to shoot press photos for the billboards and magazine ads for the second season while I was still nine months pregnant. I had a lot of extra poundage from one set of cheeks down to the other. The solution was to dress me in black and then alter the photo by digitally removing my pregnancy and all the extra pounds from my face, my arms, my waist, and my backside. The results were pretty impressive. I looked better than I did before I got pregnant and I was grateful for modern technology. I wanted to try the same thing at home. It didn’t work. My butt wouldn’t fit into the scanner! It really ticked me off!

The day we returned to the studio my assistant gave me a stack of fan letters and e-mails that had arrived. Many were congratulations on the baby, but there was a large handful that really caught my attention. They each contained a different version of the same message: “I had my baby the same time you had yours. You look fabulous but I still have a lot of extra weight to lose. How did you do it? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I drop these pounds?”

I felt as though I had sent scores of postnatal women to the back corners of their closets to cry in shame. I wanted to write to each of them personally. Nothing was wrong with them. It’s completely natural to have extra weight after giving birth. The body needs time to recover. Knowing that the altered photos of me looking slender two weeks after giving birth were making new mothers feel bad broke my heart and changed my mind forever about body image.

My mother imparted this bit of wisdom to me a number of years ago. She said, “You spend the last half of your life fixing what the first half did to you.”

Now I know she was absolutely right, but I’d like to believe that we could shake the earth with thinking differently about our weight and focusing more on how true beauty comes from being healthy, both physically and emotionally.

I’ve decided that I’ll no longer flee the thought of having a true female body. And I’m going to stand and fight for my own daughters to be healthy, no matter what their natural body size. I wish I could have all the countless hours back that I spent worrying about my weight or believing the media-supported illusion of what constitutes a perfect woman. I’m not embarrassed by my weight anymore. I’m more concerned about wasting another moment of precious life on self-criticism.

Sure, I’ll still carry on my makeup when I fly to make sure I have lip liner for touchups and powder to conceal the red veins on the sides of my nose, and I’ll still hold in my stomach when I’m in front of a group of people, but I won’t hold in my thoughts about how important it is to love and accept yourself as you are. Then, when the ground moves and you find yourself out on the lawn, you don’t have to pack up your self-esteem. It will carry you forward through anything that comes your way.

And, as a side note: Your seventy-two-hour emergency survival kit should never contain an eighteen-hour girdle.

WXR-Pee

Each year for Halloween, I go green as Witchelina. The year I did my radio show, Donny dressed up as me. Scarier than my witch garb by far, mostly because he has better legs than mine!

Here’s the major benefit of having a radio show: Wake up. No makeup. All you need to be ready for work is your voice and a sense of humor. Being heard but not
seen
sounded like heaven to me, especially after growing up in a business where it was unfathomable to have a blemish. One zit was enough to get me sent to a dermatologist when we were doing the original
Donny and Marie
show. The culprits were vacuumed out, sometimes weekly. To this day, my pores still cringe when I turn on the Hoover to clean the carpet!

In the fall of 2003, a national radio company approached me with an offer to host my own syndicated afternoon show. They suggested the show be broadcast right from my neighborhood in Utah. I immediately said “yes” and “thank you.”

A studio was built into the top floor of the building where my office was located, and along with a three-person staff and a handful of interns from the local universities,
Marie and Friends
hit the radio waves.

I’ve always had a love for radio. The public’s awareness of my brothers’ music skyrocketed in the 1970s because of radio. I’ll never forget the day their career was truly launched. We were in our church’s parking lot on a Sunday morning, listening to the popular DJ Casey Kasem count down to the number-one song on his show,
American Top 40
. Our father had let us duck out of the service a bit early knowing that “One Bad Apple” was somewhere on the charts. None of us had any idea what number it would be.