Anchovies and How I Won an Emmy

I was a kid who loved anchovies. I loved them when they showed up on the big platters of antipasto glistening with olive oil that my Italian grandmother set out for Sunday dinner. I loved them on the sandwiches she made with fried peppers, and when they were mashed up with black olives, parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs into a stuffing for escarole and artichokes. I loved anchovies when they were the background flavor for a nameless spaghetti sauce which was known to the rest of the world as puttanesca or whore’s sauce, but it was nameless to my family because… well, the whore thing, and you had to know my grandma. But I digress.

My point is, I loved the way food tasted. From an early age. The richer and stronger the flavor, the better — also, the more calorie-laden -- but we’ll talk about that later. For me and my parents, my love of food was not a good thing. I was a few months old and about to go on solid foods when they first noticed a pudginess in their little princess. My mother took this concern to my pediatrician who told her that bananas were particularly fattening and, from that time forward, no banana in any form ever crossed my lips. My mother was a woman of great determination. To this day, I can’t even eat banana bread.

In my parents’ defense, the culture around us didn’t help. I came up in an era when a teenage girl who was having an after-the-movie snack with her date would take a couple of bites of her hamburger and slide the rest over to the he-man across the table. The myth behind that bit of theater being that testosterone fueled his manly appetite, and she was too ethereal to do more than nibble daintily. I want to believe that we’ve evolved since then, and no young woman today would go for that bullshit, but if there is one somewhere who would, don’t tell me.

It turned out that my parents’ fears were well-founded. By the time I was 5, we were shopping in the chubby department for me. I went on my first official diet when I was 11. Mama went on it with me for support. She lost 13 pounds, and I learned how to sneak ice cream. I also gained 10 pounds.

My unfortunate appetite wasn’t the only factor in my struggle with weight. To say I wasn’t an active child is to wallow in understatement. When I was forced to go outside to play, I’d climb my favorite tree — a Japanese maple with two low-growing branches that formed a fairly comfortable seat — and settle in with a book.

There were efforts to get me moving. I was sent to a tennis camp where I managed to connect with the ball once. That’s one time during the entire summer. I was given swimming lessons. I understood intellectually that it was possible to exhale while your face was in the water, but I never believed it. I’d take a huge breath at the start of a lap across the swimming pool and then hold that breath until I reached the other side or sank like a stone, whichever might be first to occur. And then there was the time when the swimming coach and my father teamed up to teach me to dive. I was afraid to go into the water headfirst, and my belly flops were epic. The coach had a solution. He and my father would kneel at the side of the pool with their arms locked and I would run toward them. When I reached them, they would raise their arms and flip me into the pool. Headfirst. Having done it once, I’d never be afraid again. The coach said it was a foolproof cure. My father was enthusiastic. I had my doubts, but I’ve always been a people pleaser. They took their positions. I backed off, gritted my teeth and ran at them. That was the day when, in front of at least 20 fascinated onlookers, I did a spectacular belly flop into the pool — and took two grown men in with me. Daddy had just come from work so he was wearing a suit and a tie.

It wasn’t that I was unaware of being overweight. Show me an overweight kid who is unaware. Trust me, you can’t. I knew what I looked like. I was ashamed of my gluttony. To say nothing of my lack of femininity. In high school, I began putting myself on a diet of my own devising — usually before some event that mattered to me. For two weeks before a beach party, I ate nothing but five apples a day. I did it again, before the Connecticut State Oratory Contest. For a few glorious days, I was able to button a skirt I hadn’t worn in two years. But no matter how hard I tried, I never could get into long-term starvation. Eventually, I’d get sick of seeing black spots every time I bent over, and I’d be in the kitchen in the middle of the night drizzling olive oil over a sandwich of peppers and anchovies. The skirt would be retired to the back of my closet.

So naturally, several years later, with all that history — all that guilt and hunger and failure — I chose to go into show business. As an actress. A profession where at least two thirds of the job requirement is being slim. And by “slim,” I mean the kind of skeletal thinness that is usually associated with survivors of a disaster at sea. This was especially true if you worked on television, where the camera puts on 10 pounds. Most of the jobs I landed were on daytime television. My first gig in the genre was playing a character named Emily Rogers Hunter on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow. The original Emily had been a normal-for-television size four. After a week of eating apples, I was somewhere between a size eight and a size ten. That caused a problem.

Okay, now we’re going to have a brief lesson in Soap Opera History 101. Hang on.

Soaps back in the ’60s didn’t buy wardrobes for their actresses. Those shows didn’t have the budget for that. Or much else. Daytime drama was TV for the “little ladies’’ at home — bless their sweet, petite brains — and money was reserved for nighttime television when the serious male writers, directors and producers delivered The Golden Age of Television to the man of the house who had control of the remote. Search for Tomorrow borrowed the clothes its actresses wore. Once a month, the costume designer would go to a department store called Orbach’s, where he would pick out enough stuff (hopefully) to clothe the girls for the next four weeks. After that, everything would be returned to Orbach’s, where it would go on sale. Obviously, anything we’d worn had to be in pristine condition. Collars would be lined to protect against any trace of makeup. Huge uncomfortable dress shields would be installed, (“Don’t sweat,” the wardrobe mistress would command.) If any kind of tailoring was needed, it was done with pins that could be removed. And God help the actress who was caught drinking a cup of coffee after she was in costume. For its generosity in letting the show use its garments, Orbach’s got a credit in the crawl at the end of the show. When I came on Search for Tomorrow, the costume designer wasn’t due to go back to Orbach’s for another three weeks. So, I made my soap opera debut clad in the only item of clothing on hand that fit me. A blue bathrobe. Emily Rogers Hunter wore it for the better part of a month. It was the only thing she wore. Scripts were hastily rewritten to keep her housebound. By the time that robe went back to Orbach’s, I’m pretty sure she and I had sweated in it.

Somehow, over the next 20 years, I managed to have an acting career. Not to be gushy, but I was blessed. It’s something special when your work brings you joy. But side by side with the joy, was… the bathroom scale. Right now, I can tell you to the ounce what I weighed when the writers on Where the Heart Is said they’d have to cancel the love story they were planning for me if I didn’t knock off a few pounds, and what I weighed several years later when the producer of another show said the same thing to my agent and me at, ironically, a fancy lunch. I can tell you how many pounds I lost when I locked myself in a motel room in Burbank, Calif., and did my apple diet before I started shooting on a primetime show in the ’60s, and how many sizes I dropped when I did a water fast in a motel room before I reported for work for Norman Lear’s All That Glitters in the ’70s, and… you get the drift.

Cut to: It’s the ’80s. I’m working on a soap opera called Ryan’s Hope, playing a character named Rae Woodard, and in real life, I’m married. To a man named Roger, who knows me very well. And I’ve just been nominated for the Emmy. For the third time. (I’d lost twice before.) In those days, when you were up for an Emmy, you had to submit a videotape of your best work of the year. This was known as your reel. (I have no idea how it’s done today.) In order to put your reel together, you watched hours of your own work and picked the scenes you thought were the best. I’d compiled my reel, and Roger — who, as I said, knew me well — had just watched it. The following conversation ensued.

Me: You’re doing that thing with your face. You hate my reel.

Roger: No…

Me: Yes, you do. You think it’s bad.

Roger: It’s just… (Carefully) Um… sweetheart, can you tell me what you were thinking when you chose those scenes?

Me: I thought they were good.

Roger: They are. For Peter Haskell, Christine Jones and Kelli Maroney.

Me: What are you talking about?

Roger: I don’t know how you did it, but you managed to find three scenes where almost all shots of you are of the back of your head.

Me: They were the best ones. I looked okay in them.

Roger: (Light dawning) You picked scenes where you thought you didn’t look fat.

Me: I had to. You didn’t see the way my hips looked. What are you doing?

Roger: Calling your agent, we’re going to re-do your reel.

Me: No! I won’t submit hip shots!

The fight that followed was one of the ones where his sons had to act as go-betweens for a couple of days. But Roger did call the agent, she called the producer of my show, and frankly, they were all big bullies and they overruled me. That year Roger and my agent did my reel. And that was the year I won. I celebrated with an anchovy and peppers sandwich.

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