Today I Am a Ma'am: and Other Musings On Life, Beauty, and Growing Older (4 page)

My friend Carol, who had always been thin as a rail, was complaining about how she couldn’t stop eating. “I used to have a voice in my head that would tell me, ‘No, don’t take that. Don’t have that. Stop.’ I don’t have a voice anymore. I just eat until there’s no more food.” Boy, I know how that feels. I was the queen of the crash diet. Up and down, yo-yo style. There’s a food fool in a lot of women. Wouldn’t it be great to get rid of it!

Speaking of cops . . .

Some women feel a certain embarrassment about admitting that we’re on a diet. For some reason we think thin thighs are worth more if they’re endowed naturally. Although I have a long history of sneaking “goodies,” I have occasionally extended my sneaking to diet foods. One day I was driving in Beverly Hills, drinking a can of Slim•Fast. A policeman pulled up behind me on his motorcycle. He was young and tan and handsome, and he was motioning me to pull over. I checked my face in the mirror, ran my fingers through my hair, and stuck my Slim•Fast can under the seat. When he walked up to the driver’s side window, I gave him my best smile. “Yes, officer, how can I help you?”

He didn’t smile back. “Show me the can, lady,” he ordered, peering past me into the car.

“What can?” I asked brightly.

“You know what can. The beer can.”

I just kept smiling. “Why?” I asked stupidly. For some reason, I preferred him to think I was drinking a beer than to admit I was guzzling Slim•Fast on the road.

“Come on, lady.” He was getting impatient.

“Look,” I offered, “I’ll take the test, walk a straight line, whatever you want. Breathalyze me. You’ll see I’m not drunk.”

“Just-show-me-the-can.”

So I reached down and pulled out the can of strawberry Slim•Fast. He gaped at it, and then he started to roar with laughter. I could still hear him long after his motorcycle had gone a half mile down the road.

Many of Rhoda’s jokes focused on weight—although Rhoda was hardly fat. She just wasn’t rail thin like Mary. In one episode, Rhoda ran into a guy with her car and took the opportunity to get a date. After she hit him, she asked him to dinner. Later she was at Mary’s apartment all excited about her date. Mary offered her a snack—some bacon curls—and she refused, saying, “I gotta lose ten pounds before eight o’clock.” That line got incredible laughs from the studio audience.

Then Rhoda’s date showed up at the door, accompanied by his cute little blond wife. Rhoda introduced him to Mary: “Mary, this is my date, Mr. and Mrs. Armand Linton.” Then Rhoda proceeded to dump the bacon curls into her lap and start shoveling them into her mouth. The audience roared.

Looking back, I see that under the humor was actually a kind of sad truth. Way before I was cast in the role of Rhoda, I had the art of self-deprecation down pat from long years of practice. I didn’t have great writers handing me punch lines, but I carried around my own arsenal. When I was an aspiring actress, and obsessive about my weight, my roommate Arlene once said, “You crack me up. When you walk into a room, it’s as if you announce, ‘Hello, I’m Valerie Harper and I’m fat. There! I said it before you did.’” She was right. And I wasn’t fat, even if I wasn’t Twiggy-thin, either. But think about it—at least in the days of Rhoda, they scripted a character who was worried about her weight, who talked about eating and being fat, who said things like, “I thought chocolate was a major food group.” You never even see that today. I’ve heard casting people make remarks like “Look at her. She’s fat as a pig.” And this is about an actress who is perfectly normal. When I filmed a guest appearance on
Melrose Place
, I felt as if I’d been dropped onto another planet. Those kids are beautiful. Other humans pale in comparison. But they actually said, with straight faces, “Ordinary people can relate to us. We’re just like them.”

These were women with thighs so narrow that you could drive a truck through the space between them. And yet these young beauties were discussing ways they could trim down their already perfect legs. In the lengthy catalog of frivolous obsessions that engage women, I confess that the state of my thighs has always been front and center. I’m not especially proud of all the hours I’ve spent over the years bemoaning the lack of breathing room between my thighs, or the abject envy I’ve felt toward women who have gorgeous, slim legs.

Well, thank God that’s behind me. One of the benefits of growing older is the liberation from thigh madness. They’re here, they’re mine, they’re fine!

Many of us think of food in one of two ways. It’s either legal (a lettuce leaf) or illegal (a brownie). When I look back on my own craziness I have to laugh about it.

While I was out doing errands, I passed a bakery with a delicious-looking window display. My eyes settled on a birthday cake, piled high with creamy frosting. It wasn’t my birthday, but I wouldn’t be denied. With great anticipation I carried the cake out to my car, where I had planned to eat it. Well, I couldn’t take it home for my family to see because I was supposed to be on a strict diet. Now I faced a dilemma. Since there was no knife in the car, how would I cut this scrumptious indiscretion? I looked around and saw that the only other shop on the block was a beauty-supply store. I ran in and bought a rattail comb, the handle of which served very nicely to cut my clandestine birthday cake.

On another occasion, in the early 1970s, while religiously following the Weight Watchers diet, I was invited to a party. I brought along my preweighed Weight Watchers dinner and felt very righteous as I ignored the sumptuous buffet the hostess had provided. But midway through the evening I experienced a crashing fall from grace. On the way to the bathroom, I passed the kitchen and I was stopped short by the sight of a large platter piled high with brownies. My favorite! I stood frozen in place, staring at the brownies. We were alone. Just me and them. I quickly gobbled three, then rearranged the others so that no one would notice. A short time later, the hostess carried in the brownie platter, warning all of us, “For those of you who don’t indulge, these brownies have marijuana in them.” I covered with a weak “No thanks,” but inwardly I was screaming at myself, “You fool! You fool!” I was sick as a dog for two days.

I would have refused the pot. My downfall was the sugar. Talk about illegal consumption! I should have stuck with the lettuce leaf.

I long ago came to the understanding that the problems I once had with food were not merely about food. Eating was a way of trying to fill up the emptiness, to provide comfort. It was a substitute for love. I’m not referring to the love that comes from someone else. The love that was missing from my life was self-love. With age I’ve discovered a sense of worth that makes me less hungry. A piece of cake is just a piece of cake.

It gives me pause. Why is a woman’s important transition called MEN-opause? Are we pausing from men? I know, it’s Latin for monthly. But since pause means a temporary stop, then shouldn’t the proper term be
men-o-end?
Contrary to popular belief, menopause has a lot to recommend it. Good-bye periods and birth control. Hello entertaining hot flashes, power surges, private summers. Many women actually find menopause liberating. If it didn’t get such bad press, we’d all embrace the change of life with much more gusto. Instead, there is an aura of shame that in spite of being utterly ridiculous is hard to shake. How can women feel good about themselves when the message from society is that menopause is an embarrassment? Here’s an example. A few years back, a Seattle woman requested a personalized license plate reading MENOPOZ. In a letter denying her request, the Washington State Department of Licensing wrote, “MENOPOZ is offensive to good taste and dignity.” I ask you. Is that any way to talk to a woman?

The three of us were having the time of our lives. We hadn’t seen one another for quite a while and the gathering had the feeling of a reunion. We were the noisiest table in the place, laughing and chatting about husbands, kids, and politics. Suddenly, I was sweating into my crudité medley. “God,” I whispered, pressing the pale peach linen napkin to my moist face, “I’m having a flash and it’s a big one.” In unison, my friends both said, “No, you’re not. It really
is
hot in here.”

I called the waiter over and asked him to please turn up the air conditioning. By now the three of us were fanning ourselves, gulping water, and mopping our brows with the pretty napkins.

The waiter approached apologetically. “The air conditioning is turned all the way up,” he said. “In fact, we’re getting complaints that it’s too cold.” We stared at one another for a moment, realizing that we were having a rare bonding experience—a simultaneous hot flash.

Men will pull the menopause card whenever it suits their purpose. I once heard a guy blame the Waco tragedy on a “menopausal Attorney General”—referring to Janet Reno. Oh, yeah? And what’s Newt Gingrich’s excuse? Maybe men do have menopause, after all.

My friend Penny described getting older this way: “When I was eighteen, I thought Lady Macbeth was an evil old witch. When I turned fifty, I understood Lady Macbeth. Sure, she overreacted, but look how much she’d been through.” I guess you could call that the wisdom of age. I’ve heard that when women hit forty, their brain cells start multiplying in direct proportion to the way men’s brain cells start declining. Maybe that’s why men say that menopausal women are crazy. It’s their last mode of defense.

I never pictured myself as “Valerie Harper: Menopause Spokeswoman” up on a billboard in Times Square, but there you have it. And alongside me in the giant photo were Joy Behar, cohost of
The View;
Mary Wilson of the Supremes; Suzy Chaffee, former skiing champ; Dr. Mary Jane Minkin, physician and author; Karen Giblin, founder of the Red Hot Mamas, a menopause support group; and Janet Peckinpaugh, the news anchor who won a multimillion-dollar age discrimination suit.

The purpose was to promote a new soy menopause supplement, but the effect was to say, “Hey, world, these are the faces of menopause—and we’re not shrinking violets.”

This new face of menopause is women who move, women who shake. It’s FLASH, a senior women’s hockey team in Chicago. It’s Gloria Steinem getting married for the first time at age sixty-six. It’s fearless women in their fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond. It’s women like Ruth Gordon, who taught me a wonderful lesson about what it means to be an older woman.

I loved Ruth Gordon. On
Rhoda
she played Carlton the doorman’s mother. I also worked with her on a TV thriller called
Don’t Go to Sleep
. Acting professionally since 1915, Ruth was spiffy, eccentric, and full of life. When she was almost eighty, Ruth told me, “I made a decision a long time ago that I could get old, or I could get older. That was my choice. I didn’t have the choice to stay young. I decided to get older instead of getting old. Because
old
is a destination.
Older is
a process and a path.” When she died, Ruth Gordon had only gotten older. She was never old. That’s wisdom.

I recently saw Barbara Walters interviewing an author who had just written a book of techniques women could use to value themselves more highly. Barbara was enthusiastic. “Try one of them on me,” she urged. The woman said, “Okay, we’ll do one right here. First I need to know your age.” There was a long beat, then Barbara leaned forward and whispered conspiratorily, “I’ll tell you during the commercial.” I felt badly, not for Barbara—she can take care of herself—but about the unfair age standard foisted upon women in our society. Here was
the
Barbara Walters, a celebrated, highly successful woman not admitting her age. Granted, she didn’t lie, but she sure didn’t feel safe saying it. Aw, to hell with it, Babs—it’s none of their business anyway!

My friend Sue described how she had her first hot flash while attending a bris. For those who don’t know, a bris is a Jewish ceremony where a guy with a set of very sharp knives trims the foreskin from a baby boy’s penis—accompanied by screaming (the mother), fainting (the father), and gulping wine (the baby). After it’s over, everyone eats.