Fear and self-loathing in LA

AUSTALIAN actress Portia de Rossi explains how she overcame anorexia and sexual angst to find true love as Mrs DeGeneres.

"It's not just the image of me and Ellen happily together - I want people to know I've really suffered and struggled," says di Rossi. Picture: Getty

WHO knew, when Portia de Rossi appeared looking like a Hitchcock blonde in a tight grey lawyer's suit in Ally McBeal, that she was anorexic? Everyone was pin-thin on that show. She didn't stand out as being the thinnest – the press fixated on Calista Flockhart's skin and bones – but then, fearing that she didn't stand out was what drove de Rossi to the extremes of thinness in the first place.

Who knew when, in the same hit TV show, she pranced about in her underwear to seduce her male boss, that she was gay? Nobody knew. She went out of her way to hide it, even marrying an actor and keeping up the pretence of the happily married wife for two years.

Now 37, de Rossi has written a surprisingly open memoir, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain, and is married to the world’s most famous lesbian, the award-winning American talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres. She is the opposite extreme of her once closeted “don’t ask, don’t tell” self.

Today, as she orders penne with Roma tomato for lunch, she insists she is ¬eating-disorder free. DeGeneres “saved” her from all that. We meet in a Beverly Hills hotel. She is wearing a tight, dark green and blue wool dress, thick wool tights and high-heeled ankle boots. She still looks skinny, but not skinnier than Terri Seymour, Simon Cowell’s ex-girlfriend, who has just been interviewing her for an American TV show, Extra. So let’s just say she’s regular Hollywood size.

Her book is a gripping story about dealing with the combined shame, as she saw it, of gayness and fatness. In it she relates how, as a teenage model in her native Australia, she would starve herself before shoots. She started dieting at 12 and by 15 she was attending weight-loss classes at Jenny Craig, weighing less than the goal weight of most of the other people there. At one point, doctors even prescribed a diet drug called Duromine to help her keep her weight down. “I was terrified people would find out I was average,” she says now. “I was terrified people would look at me and think I had an ordinary body. I was terrified that people would find out I changed my name. [She invented Portia de Rossi, inspired by Shakespeare. Her real name is Amanda Rogers.] My sexuality was a very difficult thing for me to come to terms with.”

It was her mother who found The Joy of Lesbian Sex under her bed when she was 16 (her father had died of a heart attack when she was eight), but even then de Rossi didn’t know for sure. She spent the next few years at law school thinking she was bisexual and then after her first film, the successful Sirens, alongside Elle Macpherson and Sam Neill, she decided she couldn’t be gay as an actress and promptly married a man she met on her second film, Mel Metcalfe. “We had a good relationship. I did love him, but I realised something was missing, and what was missing was the intimacy I felt with a woman. I don’t think it is about sex; it’s about intimacy. It’s the way that, when I would feel really excited and energised with someone, it was always with a woman. And when I was very young I would get very excited to see my best friend after school vacation. Of course, I didn’t think it was a crush back then. It took me a long time to figure it out.”

The figuring out took the form of replacing her sexual angst with body angst. It was as if the ultimate goal of thinness would bring acceptance and she wouldn’t have to worry about her sexuality making her a misfit. This convoluted way of thinking was further exacerbated by the industries she chose to throw herself into. “A lot of people were hard on me, too. It was my profession. If I was modelling and I didn’t fit into the clothes, it would be humiliating and I wouldn’t be booked into another job. I was medium-boned, not small-boned like the other girls, so I was forced to diet. The end of a job would always trigger a binge because I wanted the comfort of food and because I was starving. ‘The camera adds 10 pounds [4.5kg]’ is something I’ve heard since I was a young girl, so in 1998, when I joined Ally McBeal, I felt I should lose weight. When I did, everyone praised me and made good comments.”

Does she think that, because Ally McBeal star Calista Flockhart was the focus of so many anorexia rumours, people didn’t notice her own disappearing act? “I think we have to put it in context. It was the end of the supermodel era and actresses became the new models. Actresses were on the front of magazines and had beauty campaigns. There was a lot of pressure on young actresses to be model-thin.”
Insecurity about not being good enough or thin enough and carrying a big secret were a potent cocktail, but it’s still amazing to think her eating disorder went unnoticed for so long in Hollywood. The Ally McBeal wardrobe department simply kept getting suits a size smaller: 6, 4, 2. She was praised for her thinness, for her discipline, which involved getting up at 4am to run on a treadmill and eating only 300 calories a day by consuming meals that included 30g of yoghurt or a tiny portion of tuna fish, eaten with chopsticks so it would last longer. She didn’t even brush her teeth in case she imbibed calories through her toothpaste. For the same reason, she stopped using lip gloss. Her whole day was dedicated to the ritual of preparing food in tiny portions that she would sometimes not even eat, and to expunging calories by ruthless exercise regimes. There would always be 105 sit-ups for the five she might not have done properly. She even had a nutritionist, supposedly to stop her yo-yo dieting.

“I had already relied on my 300-calorie starvation diet to get ready for a modelling job, but my nutritionist taught me how to do it properly. How to weigh my food and put it in a food journal. These were the tools I needed to become obsessed. It felt very scientific – now I had complete control over my food. It enabled me to feel powerful and I had this feeling of logic: it was given to me by a nutritionist, therefore it was healthy.” Except she drastically reduced the amount of calories and lied in her food journal.

Nonetheless, no one seemed to notice she was disappearing until, on the set of the first Hollywood movie in which she had a starring role, Who Is Cletis Tout?, her bones could no longer hold her up and her muscles could no longer move her. She collapsed. She weighed 37kg and she looks tall for her 168cm. She was diagnosed with osteoporosis, and was forced to seek help at an eating-disorder clinic.

Has she ever had any relapses? “No, not since I stopped dieting, but it took me a while. I went from 37kg to 76kg in six months. It took another two years to realise that diets don’t work because I’m part of the 95 per cent of people who can’t stick to a diet. I stopped having any kind of relationship with food.”

The turning point came when she started her relationship with DeGeneres, whom she credits with saving her, though ironically both were so head over heels when they first met, they could hardly eat. “We just stared at each other,” she says, still excited at the thought. They’d been seeing each other just a few weeks when, “It wasn’t a decision. We just had to be together. I feel our souls are supposed to be united and we would have been together whatever happened.”

Four years later they were married. Who proposed to whom? “Ellen was going to surprise me with a joint birthday party. Her birthday is January 26 and mine is January 31 – we’re both Aquarians. She was going to surprise me with a little commitment ceremony, but she wanted to let me know because she thought maybe I’d want my mother there, and I definitely did. So we planned a date for the ceremony that summer.” Then gay marriage became legal in California. It no longer is. “It was a small window. I couldn’t believe it was such a gift.”

In the event, the “little ceremony” morphed into America’s celebrity wedding of the year. The newsstands were plastered with covers of the couple – DeGeneres in a white suit, de Rossi in a Zac Posen ballgown, both looking deliriously happy. Yet de Rossi has never talked about any of it. “This is the first time I have come out as a lesbian, which sounds ridiculous being Ellen’s wife. I suppose I want to show people it’s not just that image of me on the red carpet or me and Ellen happily together – I want people to know I’ve really suffered and struggled.”

Was DeGeneres shocked when she read how far de Rossi’s obsession had driven her? In her book, de Rossi writes that DeGeneres felt sorry that she couldn’t have been there to save her. “She is so supportive of me,” affirms de Rossi. “She gives me all the confidence I lacked in the past and I think I really ground her. We really are together. We’re inseparable. We adore, adore each other. I don’t understand how a relationship could be better than ours. We are kind to one another. She is a very busy woman, but we’re together every morning because she doesn’t leave for her show until 11 or 12 and she comes home every night at 6pm. My jobs are in LA and her talk show is in LA, and if she travels I go with her and vice versa. I don’t want to be away from her and she doesn’t want to be away from me.”

DeGeneres has said she doesn’t want to have children because she doesn’t want to share her time with anyone else. Is that how de Rossi feels? “That wouldn’t be my reasoning for not wanting kids. I was never that young girl with the mummy idea, and everybody told me I’d change my mind when I met the perfect person. I have met the perfect person. I’m in my mid-30s in a secure, loving relationship, yet I still don’t feel the need to have kids, except for selfish reasons. Ellen is 15 years older than me and I’m most likely to be old and alone, and kids and grandkids might make my third act a little bit sweeter. But that’s not a reason to have a child. We do love our niece [rather cosily, her brother Michael, his wife Casey and their 18-month-old daughter, Eva, live next door] and our animals.” They have quite a menagerie: two dogs, a poodle and a mongrel, three cats and horses.

Since she and DeGeneres met, they have both become vegans, and DeGeneres visibly skinnier. “It’s difficult for me to talk about being a vegan because I don’t want people to think it’s another form of eating disorder.” But isn’t being vegan essentially like dieting because you don’t eat fat or dairy, so you don’t have the fattening choices? She looks at me harshly and says she eats lots of vegan junk food, things like vegan M&Ms. “I became a vegan after I read a book called Skinny Bitch. When I gave it to Ellen I had to tear out the pages that would upset her because she’s sensitive to animal cruelty, but she went to the shop and got another copy, and that was it. We quite often read the same book at the same time. It’s like a mini book club. We love to read and cook together and talk about what we’re reading, except she’s a faster reader than me.”

Do they ever row? “No, not any more. We did when we first got together because we were working each other out. We are very similar and both of us don’t like to argue, so disagreements get defused very quickly. And since we got married we’ve stopped arguing.” Is that because the arguments were to do with insecurity? “I think so, and because we’d both been searching for a more peaceful way to be in our own bodies. We’ve learnt so much from each other. We never lie. If I want to go out she might say, ‘I think you will look better in something else.’ If she doesn’t like what I’m wearing, it doesn’t mean we don’t find each other beautiful; it just means we could perhaps have a better shirt.”

By the time de Rossi got together with DeGeneres in 2004, she was in recovery from her disorders. That said, if it hadn’t been for her disorder they might have got together much sooner. When they first met, several months earlier, DeGeneres invited her back for a party, but de Rossi felt too fat to go.

“I have to say I fell crazy in love with Ellen about a year before we got together. I saw her at a photoshoot and I felt I’d been shot through the heart with an arrow. My feelings for her were overwhelming. I didn’t make them known because I was in a relationship. It was a good relationship, but eventually it ran its course.” This was her first full-on relationship with a gay woman, Francesca Gregorini (Bond girl Barbara Bach’s daughter), but she still had not publicly come out.

“I didn’t know if I wanted to live as a lesbian. I was very afraid of it. I didn’t think there was anyone out there who was gay who I would want to emulate or be with. I didn’t know what that person was going to look like. I didn’t like the idea of a femme role in a lesbian relationship, and I didn’t feel butch. I didn’t know how to be in a relationship. You can be attracted to women who have masculine traits and women who wear dresses. It’s a very complicated thing. I don’t like the roles because it doesn’t encapsulate you as a whole person. If you feel 100 per cent woman wearing pants every day, then wear pants. All I’m saying is, you don’t have to fit into a role to be accepted. I liked the idea of taking care of my girlfriend. I want to be the strong, independent one, and I also want to wear lipstick and heels.”

In the event, de Rossi was outed after a tabloid ran pictures of her making up with Gregorini in an alleyway. The paparazzi had been hounding her for a while and, having been forced to come to terms with her anorexia, she was also forced to come to terms with her other big secret, thinking, “I’m fat. I may as well be gay.” It’s clear the publication of those pictures had an enormous effect on her. She can’t help asking me whether I was shocked when I saw them, shocked to know she was gay. I tell her that that’s not the kind of thing that shocks me, and she seems relieved.

“When Ellen and I got together I hadn’t really come out, although there had been rumours of it. Ellen is a very honest person. I could not have been with her and not been out. When we saw each other at an awards show I decided I would tell her about the arrow through my heart. I thought she would say, ‘I’m flattered, but no thank you.’ Instead she explained that the last time we’d seen each other and she invited me to her house, she’d only organised the party so she could get to know me. On a few occasions when we’d seen each other in public she tried to talk to me and it seemed that I wasn’t interested. That’s because I was too scared. There was no way on Earth I was going to be with the most famous lesbian in the world when I was closeted. I just wanted to steer clear of her. I made sure I was never booked on her talk show because I had a crush on her and I knew if I sat down next to her I would blush.

“It’s debilitating and a horrible thing to hide who you are. But I love acting and I feared it would be the end of my career. The studios won’t green-light something with a lesbian actress playing a mother of two. There hasn’t been a precedent for famous gay actors playing straight characters. There are many gay actors, but they don’t come out, and that makes it harder for ¬everyone because it tells people you’re ashamed of your sexuality.”

That said, she hates doing sex scenes, lesbian or heterosexual. She doesn’t want to do them at all. “I don’t want to be making out with someone else.” But you’re an actor. “I’m very prudish. I’ll probably have to kiss somebody, but it’s just not my favourite thing to do. I’m not much of an exhibitionist. It’s a very private thing for me, very sacred.” Indeed, she gives off almost no sexual allure at all. She’s perfectly pleasant and engaging, but not sexual in any way. It’s an odd juxtaposition, someone who can talk about the intellectual minutiae of sexuality, but not seem to obviously embrace it in her person. Not that I expected her to flirt with me, but I wasn’t expecting her to be so contained. But there again, contained is what she’s always been.

At the peak of her anorexia and self-loathing, L’Oréal used her for a shampoo ad. She freaked out because it had a morality clause in it and she thought if someone found out she was gay, she would have to pay all the money back. The irony of saying, “Because I’m worth it”, wasn’t lost on her. Happily, she wouldn’t have a problem saying it now.