Today I Am a Ma'am: and Other Musings On Life, Beauty, and Growing Older (2 page)

I’m here to tell you that now it’s my turn—or I should say,
our
turn. Women live with a giant boulder hanging over our heads called fat, or old, or ugly. We’re always staring up at it, worrying that it’s going to come crashing down to crush us. Enough already.

To be a woman of any age in America today is to take a walk down
de’mean
streets. We’ve come a long way, baby—but why are you still calling us baby?

There are countless ways women are discounted. It matters what you call something.

I think I understand why women loved Rhoda so much. It was because she refused to be demeaned. She wasn’t the typical American sweetheart—not the soft, compliant, blue-eyed blonde. Rhoda wasn’t a prom queen. She was a real woman. She cracked jokes to cover her fears and insecurities. She worried about her weight. She was just like you and me. She walked de’mean streets with a swagger.

Even so, when I look back thirty years, I find myself somewhat amazed by the self-deprecating tone that was part of Rhoda’s signature. There’s an underlying mix of guilt and inadequacy that belies Rhoda’s power.

For me, the great fun of playing Rhoda was her mixture of insecurity and great bravado. Remember the lines she spoke at the beginning of each episode?

My name is Rhoda Morgenstern
.

I was born in the Bronx, New York, in December 1941
.

I’ve always felt responsible for World War II
.

The first thing I remember liking that liked me back was food
.

I had a bad puberty; it lasted seventeen years
.

I’m a high school graduate. I went to art school. My entrance exam was on a book of matches
.

I decided to move out of the house when I was twenty-four. My mother still refers to this as the time I ran away from home
.

Eventually I ran to Minneapolis, where it’s cold and I figured I’d keep better
.

Now I’m back in Manhattan. New York
—
this is your last chance!

The writers consistently wrote Rhoda and the other characters as hilarious but authentic human beings. Viewers identified with them. As my dear pal Nicole once observed, “Mary is who you want to be. Rhoda is who you probably are. And Phyllis is who you’re afraid you’ll become.”

I have never met a woman, no matter how beautiful or self-confident, who could face a mirror without cringing. Especially when that mirror wages a sneak attack. You’re running to catch a bus and catch a side view of your sagging jawline in a store window. Or you’re all dressed up for a party and your friendly bathroom mirror is telling you that you look fabulous. Then, in the course of the evening, you enter a restaurant ladies’ room with lights so bright you think you’re in a police lineup, and you can see every flaw and bulge.

Reality check. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Sometimes I think that women’s mirrors have been fitted with those special fun house warp features. Or maybe it’s all mirrors. My friend Sue, a real liver of life and a recent enrollee in tap classes, describes standing within a group of dance students and catching a glimpse of a sadly sagging pair of knees in the mirror. “God, whose knees are those?” she thought with pity. Her eyes slid up the body until she was staring into her own face. “Oh, no!” she yelled, horrified, stopping the class in its tracks.

A perfectly attractive woman can stand in front of a mirror and see the Pillsbury Doughgirl.

Recently, a male acquaintance who travels a lot for business was complaining about what he perceived to be the deterioration of the flight attendant—or, as he said, the “stewardess.” He reminisced longingly about the good old days when flying the friendly skies meant being served by young beauties with perfect bodies, dazzling smiles, and doormat demeanors. Today’s flight attendants are male and female, old and young, multi-ethnic, and efficient without being slavish. They’re working men and women, not club hostesses.

Flight attendants today look like America. In the 1940s, an aspiring flight attendant had to be single, female, white, under age twenty-seven, between 105 and 125 pounds, and between 5 feet 2 inches and 5 feet 7 inches. She could have no physical abnormalities, including wearing glasses.

Who were these girls? Beauty pageant runners-up? Former fashion models? The American ideal? More likely, the ideal of male airline executives and their marketing consultants.

Men, like my acquaintance who misses flying the good old skies when women were girls, should ask themselves whether they’d rather have a dewy-eyed, compliant girl or a strong, authoritative, well-trained woman around in case of an emergency.

It’s impossible to talk about women and food service without talking about breasts. Breasts are getting bigger and higher, and it’s not because women are more comfortable or look more “natural” carrying around overstuffed mammaries. They’re doing it for the consumer—and I don’t mean infants. The new look in breasts is a gravity-defying feat. High and firm like a presentational display. Like a platter being offered: “Coffee, tea, or milk?”

Here’s some food for thought. Have you ever noticed how often women get referred to as edibles? Usually they’re described as a dessert and are almost always sweet, spicy, or juicy. Consider:

Most women would have no trouble using any of these delectables in a sentence. We’ve heard them all.

“Sweetie pie, you look good enough to eat.”

“Hey, baby cakes!”

“Honey bun, give me a little sugar.”

My new favorite is “arm candy”—a term used to describe a beautiful woman on the arm of a powerful man. Ask yourself: Do you want to be with a man who thinks of you as a Snickers bar?

It’s not sour grapes when I say that our culture has been trampled by the supremacy of youth. Hard bodies and unformed minds. I can still remember a time when one’s value was defined by experience and ability. We all longed for those precious credits and were proud when we could add them to our résumés. Not anymore.

A dear friend of mine, who also happens to be one of the great creative geniuses of our business, told me about applying to work on the creation of a show. The woman who interviewed him was twenty-two, and he immediately saw that his name didn’t ring a bell. So he started to name some of the hit shows he’d worked on in the seventies and eighties. The girl’s face registered a glimmer of recognition, followed by a look that is generally reserved for sniffing old meat. “Yeah, I’ve seen them on late-night cable,” she said, dismissing him to the rest home.

You’d think writers would be less affected by ageism than actors, but not so. I know older writers working today in Hollywood who hire young people to pose as their “partners” in business meetings to make them seem more hip.

I say, let’s not sit here and take it anymore. After all, we’re the majority; we can influence the types of movies and TV shows out there.

What do you suppose would happen if one million women, between the ages of forty and sixty-five, petitioned producers and commercial sponsors for more quality programming featuring women their age? Maybe it would wake them up.

Years ago, Mary Tyler Moore said to me, “Val, did you ever walk into a restaurant and wonder if they’re looking at you because you’re beautiful, or they’re looking at you because you’re famous? Does that ever bother your?”

I laughed. “No, I’ve never lost sleep worrying that people only looked at me for my beauty.” I got her point, though. Deep down, every woman wants to be loved and admired for who she is on the inside, but we all know that the world judges us first from the outside.

Barbie ran for president in the year 2000. You may have heard about her campaign. Although she never made it onto the electoral map, a campaign by America’s perfect doll is interesting to contemplate: What exactly propelled Barbie to enter the race? It’s not as if she didn’t have a very satisfying career—or twelve—already. Astronaut, doctor, airline pilot, princess, Olympian, career woman, cabana girl. Where did she ever find the time?

If you ask me, the motivation was clothes. Just think about the wardrobe involved in running for president!

She’s got her tailored suits with skirts, her tailored suits with pants, modest heels, Habitat for Humanity workshirts and boots, straw hats, baseball caps, campaign T-shirts, picnic attire, jogging outfits, winter wool (not fur) for the chilly North, a smashing fundraiser wardrobe—the list is endless. Then, of course, if she wins, there’s the Inaugural gown and Ken’s stylish tux.

Sometimes it seems as if everything in life comes down to clothes.

I’ve been hitting the shopping racks for many moons. I’m old enough to remember when the odd-numbered sizes were introduced. Now we had a choice—not just sizes eight, ten, and twelve but also sizes seven, nine, and eleven. My mom used to insist that the odd numbers were better for us “short-waisted” girls. I knew being short-waisted was a hideous affliction, because she always looked sympathetic when she said it. You don’t hear much about short-waistedness these days.

At some point in the seventies, I began to notice an interesting ruse being perpetrated by the fashion industry. A size eight was no longer a true eight. It was really a ten or a twelve. Maybe this is where the term “downsizing” came from. Oh, we women knew the scam. We weren’t fooled. But we gladly participated in it. “Look, honey, I’m still a size ten.”

When I was filming
Rhoda
, I was always on or falling off a diet, so setting wardrobe was a challenge. Our wardrobe supervisor would hold up various items and ask, “Are you going to attempt to get into these today?” I had “attempt pants” and I also had a couple of “attempt suits.” Some of my attempt clothes have yet to be worn to this day. I’m still attempting, but not so hard anymore.

When I was in grade school, shopping with Mom became a deeply humiliating experience. She would take me by the hand, march me up to the saleslady, and, turning up the volume on her voice, ask, “Miss, where can I find the
chubby
sizes?” The Chubby Department became the bane of my early existence and I resented that the male equivalent was called
husky
. Husky seemed a more favorable image—a powerful arctic dog as opposed to a fat kid.

I was conditioned early on to be size conscious—thus eight was perfect, ten was acceptable, twelve was heading toward chubby. The standards have undergone a dramatic shift, like everything else in our society. Perfection is shrinking.

My daughter and I were out shopping recently when I discovered a rack of hip, fashionable clothes. They were size zero. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks. They must have been size ten. But no, on closer inspection, the clothes were size zero.

What a strange race of alien creatures these must be, those who wear no size of clothing. Not size one or two. Even infinitesimal-seeming size four is a beached whale next to a size zero.

Zero represents a state of nil. Neither above nor below. Not minus one or plus one. The place of nothing that is between the two. An empty space. My big toe wouldn’t fit through the leg of a pair of size zero pants. My right breast couldn’t manage to contain itself in a size zero top.

Talk about raising the bar while lowering the standards of reality: Isn’t all fashion a conspiracy to force us constantly to redefine our image of ourselves and what is deemed culturally acceptable? And by doing so, to sell us the fabulous new fall fashion line? It’s commerce. Not sociology, not psychology. Cloth. Goods. Money.

Women are highly susceptible to the siren call of fashion. Otherwise, why were we walking around in cropped pants that ended somewhere between our calves and our ankles last summer? Who decided that would be a good idea? So attractive. Someone, somewhere, is having an awfully good laugh on all of the rest of us. They’re probably wearing those cropped pants, too. Handmade. That’s the look. It’s theirs. They said it would be so, and we (the fashion-conscious public) lined up for our cropped pants.

But size zero cropped pants! What waiflike figure inhabits that airy realm? What fluke of genetics or life of starvation leads to size zero? If you are no size, what size actually is it that you are wearing? Does it take less cloth to make something of no size than it does to make the same piece as a size one? How much of something without a size can one person turn out in a day?

My daughter tells me that it’s a ludicrous but real status symbol in her generation of younger women to wear a size zero. I tremble at the future possibilities. Size double zero. Size triple zero. Size minus fifteen. Where are we going? What if you have a body? Like a woman? Are we headed for a time when we’ll be embarrassed to say, “I’m a size two”?

Most women seem to accept the fact that you have to suffer for beauty. There’s no better example of that than the act of applying hot wax to the most sensitive areas of our bodies in order to render them hairless. I still remember the day Iva and I discovered the Hot Wax Torture Chamber.

We were young Broadway dancers at the time. We held one dancer named Nancy in especially high esteem. She was absolutely gorgeous, and her legs were long and as smooth as silk. Nancy’s secret was her own special waxing brew. She agreed to give us a lesson.