I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting (6 page)

W
hen you are from New England, certain truths are indisputable. Iced coffee is a seasonless beverage; whimsical bow ties are appropriate for family parties. And the Kennedy family is important and their dramas are absorbing.

Thus, it was with reverence and the inborn curiosity of a New Englander that I decided to become “a Jackie” for my latest diet experiment. Jackie has always been my favorite Kennedy, for her ability to speak French and the time when she reportedly declared: “Why worry if you’re not as good at tennis as Eunice or Ethel, when men are attracted by the feminine way you play tennis?” That is a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Jackie Kennedy famously watched her weight “with the rigor of a diamond merchant counting his carats,” according to one poetic staff member. One diet consisted, according to legend, of nothing but a single baked potato, stuffed with beluga caviar and sour cream, eaten once a day. Since that diet is exorbitantly expensive and vaguely insane, I decide to bolster my Jackie Kennedy diet with recipes and practices from her housekeeper Marta Sgubin’s cookbook,
Cooking for Madam
.

Caviar is a surprisingly difficult thing to buy. For example, you cannot just go to Gristedes and demand caviar, because I have tried it. I decide to purchase my caviar at the Grand Central Terminal fish market in midtown. I am initially shocked (and rather outraged) that the tiny amount I’m buying costs approximately thirty dollars. By comparison, though, this is cheap. Jackie Kennedy’s favorite type of caviar, beluga, comes from a sturgeon found in the seas of the former Soviet Union. According to Wikipedia, it retails for approximately $7,000 to $10,000 per kilogram. It was even illegal for a while in 2005, and you cannot eat it with a metal spoon. You have to eat it with a mother-of-pearl spoon. I decide that once again, I must sacrifice my art in the face of practical reality. “This is like
New Grub Street
,” I say to myself for the one millionth time that day.

As I embark on my diet, I decide to live as Jackie did and select white jeans and a turtleneck to wear, even though it is winter. In Jackie Kennedy’s high school yearbook, she lists her favorite song as “Limehouse Blues” and her favorite saying as “Play the rhumba next.” I listen to “Limehouse Blues” as I put on my jeans. It sounds like music that would play if you ever had a seizure in an amusement park. I like it!

I take a potato to work with me. Around 2:00 p.m., rather hungry, I microwave it within an inch of its life. It emerges shrunken and weirdly hard in some parts. I cut it open, slather it with sour cream and caviar, and take a bite. Despite the vagaries of the potato itself, it really is delicious. I would eat this at any sort of fancy occasion, including my birthday and my mother’s birthday. I am not even hungry for many hours afterward, even though I do leave halfway through an 8:00 p.m. showing of
Anna Karenina
, possibly because I am too hungry to concentrate. But I also could have just hated it.

I wake up really hungry. This is to be expected, but still I am surprised given how well the “one potato” thing was going yesterday. I put “Limehouse Blues” on, but it makes me feel jittery. I eat a potato at work, then pack up my caviar and assorted potato accessories and board a bus to Rhode Island, where I am spending Thanksgiving. I pack the caviar in ice and give it its own seat on the bus.

I weigh myself in my childhood bathroom. I have lost three pounds in two days. This is a very effective diet! I am also crazy now, however. For example, I realize my tiny jar of caviar is basically empty. I gave an empty tin of caviar its own seat on the bus!

Today is Thanksgiving
. Cooking for Madam
has a whole chapter about Thanksgiving, which Marta says was “opening day of the hunt” for the Kennedys. (Tallyho!) The menu is pretty traditional, so to honor Jackie specifically I choose a fruit dessert that Marta says Jackie preferred over other types of desserts. I make “Peaches Cardinal,” which is basically steamed peaches and raspberry sauce. It is not as good as pie, and I am the only one who eats it. My mother promptly throws out the raspberry sauce, which has taken many hours to strain. “Play the rhumba next!” I almost say to her, but I don’t.

Today is my sister’s birthday. We go to Newport, Rhode Island, the site of Jackie’s wedding to JFK, and drive by the church they got married in. It is made out of brownstone and looks dark and imposing. I have mussels, another Jackie favorite, for lunch and try to imagine how to say “Play the rhumba next!” in a way that would not completely disrupt a conversation.

After periods of heavy eating, Jackie would go on a fruit fast. Though my Thanksgiving binge also consisted of fruit, I do the fast anyway, which is not particularly terrible, dietwise. However, it is rather hard to eat fruit while everyone else is eating Thanksgiving leftovers. People rib you about diet journalism. Food is an emotional conundrum, after all. A paragraph in Marta’s cookbook about Aristotle Onassis illustrates this maxim quite well. Apparently one day, Onassis arrived for dinner after everyone else had eaten. He asked Marta to pass the salt, and when she tried to hand it to him, he made her put it down on the table. Then he said, “If you hand someone salt, you will have a fight with them and I don’t want to be fighting with you.”

Today I decide to make the dinner Jackie so lovingly supervised for when Lee Radziwill and her husband came to visit her in Washington. The menu involves
poulet
à
l’estragon
and casserole
marie
blanche
. If you are not familiar with French (me), the casserole involves both sour cream and cottage cheese, and the chicken is basically made with oil and tarragon. At the time this was apparently the height of sophistication. At the party, everyone danced to an orchestra until 3:00 a.m. In her book
Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House
, Sally Bedell Smith notes that the Kennedy-Radziwill party attendees sat at tables “covered in yellow linen with white, embroidered organdy top cloths, and decorated with low vermeil baskets of spring flowers.” In my version of the party, my mom and I eat a disgusting casserole (I do not get combining sour cream with cottage cheese, yet this seems to be a bylaw of the 1960s) as we watch
Liz and Dick
on Lifetime.

Back in New York, my poor friend and I make a dinner after Jackie’s own heart: bay scallops with small strips of pepper and a spinach risotto. Jackie was a big fan of risotto, but I am concerned that this recipe does not incorporate cheese, which has been essential in most risottos I have loved. This is just rice mixed with spinach leaves I put in a blender. It is supposed to turn a “nice green color,” and I guess it does, if that is a thing that food is supposed to do. It tastes like dirt. Marta said, “That was the thing about Madam and food. She was very refined about it in the ways she was about everything, but [dining] wasn’t really what she was most interested in.”

I have just gotten to the part in Marta’s cookbook where Jackie discovers Lean Cuisine. According to Marta, “she couldn’t get over that you just had to put one in the oven and after a short time you took it out, and there was everything from soup to dessert. She thought that was great.” I don’t know what this means – soup and dessert, all in one Lean Cuisine? Are we eating the same Lean Cuisines? I buy a Lean Cuisine mac and cheese and microwave it for lunch. A suspicious amount of water collects at the bottom of the tray – soup?

I am off the diet and feel both thinner and more refined. My white jeans even fit better, even though I will never wear them again. In the end, Jackie had impeccable taste, even in diet food. Despite the times in which she lived, she always ate pretty okay things and wrote such incredibly nice notes to Marta, including a particularly gushing one about mango sorbet. Diets, it turns out, can be elegant affairs. Play the rhumba next!

A
ccording to legend, when asked what her beauty secrets were, famed Italian actress Sophia Loren was characteristically pithy: “Everything you see,” she famously said, “I owe to spaghetti.” In our current antigluten moment, such a sentiment might strike the modern ears as odd. “Pasta?” a modern woman might say while typing a code into her iPad. “Pasta can only lead to scurvy and an early grave. What of quinoa?”

Of course, in the modern era, Sophia denies actually saying that awesome thing about spaghetti. But it is true that Sophia has heavily extolled the magical healing powers of pasta. She wrote two pasta cookbooks. She wrote a book on beauty and mentioned pasta a lot. When people asked her, “Why did a twenty-eight-year-old Matt Damon hit on you at the Oscars?,” she just smiled, but you knew she was thinking something about pasta. So the message was clear.

Sure, recently pasta has been demonized as fattening, sad, upsetting, and mean – but what if it’s not? What if pasta is the greatest weight-loss food known to mankind? It would be impossible to know that without trying it, and this, dear readers, is what I will do for you. Because the public needs to know!

There is actually quite a bit of information on what Sophia Loren ate. She produced two cookbooks herself and even wrote a self-help book called
Women & Beauty
, which is about beauty, nutrition, and fitness and is full of backhanded compliments about other actresses, like, “Take for instance Elizabeth Taylor or Barbra Streisand. The way they dress could not be described as conventionally elegant, yet they both have a unique sense of how they want to look.”

I buy the self-help book, a book called
Sophia: Living and Loving: Her Own Story
, and the pasta cookbook entitled
Sophia Loren’s Recipes & Memories
.

“Almost from the beginning, interviewers have asked me what diet I follow to stay in shape,” said Loren in her cookbook. “It amuses me to see their expressions when I answer ‘pasta.’ It is only a slight exaggeration. I adore pasta and eat it almost every day.” According to
Women & Beauty
, Loren really did eat a serving of pasta for lunch and dinner, followed occasionally with a lean meat or fish. I plan to do the same.

To be honest, I am kind of excited about this diet because it doesn’t sound like a diet. Pasta for all meals? What could be better! Pasta is my favorite food, which I realize is not particularly original.

The problem is that recently, through no evidence at all, except for the Phantom of the Opera rash I had running down my face after I briefly cut out gluten on the Gwyneth diet, I have convinced myself I have a gluten allergy. Can I still eat pasta with my fake gluten allergy going on? It seems hard.

Today is the day that I start the diet. I’m unusually excited, not just because I love pasta but also because I’ve always been a big fan of Sophia Loren. In high school I rented a movie that happened to be very influential on me called
What a Woman!
It starred Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and was dubbed in English. The whole movie is Sophia Loren getting mad at Marcello Mastroianni and then doing absolutely psycho things to show Marcello Mastroianni that she is mad. Then after that he yells, “What a woman!” and forgives her.

I start the diet off by making Loren’s famous “Salsa Sophia,” which I will spoon over whole wheat pasta per Loren’s instructions (Loren says that whole wheat pasta is the healthiest pasta). It does seem to be a recipe that Sophia Loren actually made up (once you start reading her cookbook you realize a suspicious number of recipes actually originate with her cook). “Salsa Sophia” is similar to a pesto – a combination of anchovies, pine nuts, and a lot of parsley ground with a mortar and pestle. It’s pretty delicious, and I have always especially liked anchovies. The catch comes when I actually look at the serving size of pasta Sophia is asking me to eat. It’s about as small as a balled-up fist, which I have always heard is the actual serving size for pasta, even though I have never eaten such a portion. When I finish my helping of pasta I am starved, and in some ways hungrier than I have been when I forced myself to eat something disgusting, like tofu cheese or seed falafel. This diet might actually be harder than I thought.

Later, before going out to dinner and a show, I decide to peruse Sophia Loren’s beauty tome
Women & Beauty
to get some tips.

To that end, I really scrub my head when I’m in the shower. (“Keep running the warm water through it until every last bit of soap is gone and the hair squeaks.”) I put on a severe amount of eye makeup (eyes “deserve the most attention,” says Sophia). Because it’s a rather formal outing, I wear a dress I actually took to a tailor once. The problem is that because it fits correctly, it is not very comfortable. It’s also electric blue, which Sophia would probably disapprove of. She, for example, thinks purple is too “violent” a color and used to dye all her clothing black, even her handkerchief.

For dinner before the show, I have a small helping of pasta and some shrimp and am again oddly starving. I don’t really understand why. I’m sure this was enough food, technically, to survive. It’s more that it was just so delicious, I actually want to keep eating it. I look longingly at the M&M’s my companion eats during the show, but I control myself, as Sophia does not believe in the American habit of snacking. I also realize that whether I am actually allergic to gluten or whether I have made myself think I am allergic to gluten, I am fancying myself ill throughout the second act. Time to switch to gluten-free pasta?

The next day, I continue to be hungry. I make myself an English muffin (Sophia likes them) and a scant hour and a half later decide to have my lunch, pasta in a lemon cream butter sauce. The pasta is very lemony and kind of bitter because you have to grate lemon rinds into the butter. Still, it’s delicious. Too delicious to stop eating so prematurely! This is starting to remind me of when Sophia Loren’s mother won a Greta Garbo look-alike contest and was promised a trip to America to have a screen test but then her mother (Sophia’s grandmother) wouldn’t let her go because she was worried that the Black Hand was going to murder her just like they murdered Rudolph Valentino (even though Valentino died of appendicitis, but whatever). So Sophia Loren’s mother had to stay in their tiny Italian town and eventually had an illegitimate child (Sophia) out of rebellion. An all-pasta diet seems great until it is ripped cruelly away from you.

In the afternoon, I decide to walk with my friend all around the city. Walking is Sophia’s preferred mode of exercise, and she walks for a long time every day. At one point, my friend and I stop for a minute and both think about buying overalls. They are very in now. But then I remember how disappointed Sophia was when her niece wore clothing that Sophia found awful, like “baggy pants and strange tops that made her look like a farmer at Harvest time,” and so I don’t buy them.

For dinner, I try to make Sophia’s tomato sauce over gluten-free pasta. I couldn’t keep eating the whole wheat pasta. The rash never returned, but after reading a WebMD article about gluten intolerance I think I have all the symptoms on that page. I feel bad begging off Sophia’s preferred pasta, but gluten-free pasta is far worse than regular pasta and this does seem to fit my estimation of Sophia’s powers of self-denial. Cary Grant was always proposing to her and she always said no. One time her sister (who married Mussolini’s son???) openly mused, “I sometimes wonder if Sophia today has any fun in her life.”

As any Italian home cook knows, you are always ultimately judged on your tomato sauce. I decide to make Sophia’s marinara tonight. Sophia’s is pretty darn good, if a little less flavorful than what I am used to. It’s very simple – just fresh tomatoes, herbs, and a little sugar. I myself am partial to gravylike sauces because I’m a philistine from Rhode Island.

After a hearty (but small) breakfast of spaghetti carbonara, I decide to make a three-course Italian feast for dinner made entirely from the Sophia cookbook. I am going to make
pasta
all’amatriciana
and veal saltimbocca. Unfortunately, the grocery store is out of veal, but as Sophia says, “Neapolitans live by instinct,” so I decide on the fly to change my dish to chicken saltimbocca. Also, Anthony Quinn once aggressively kissed Sophia while she was eating a lamb chop, so I feel that she would appreciate the lack of red meat in the meal.

Luckily, the dinner is fantastic. The
pasta
all’amatriciana
(which has bacon and pepper) is especially great. At the beginning of the meal, I decide to have the small helping of pasta the diet allows. But then the baby-fist-size portion just looks so sad and I remember when I went to a wine-tasting class in Italy and the instructor said, “There are no rules for wine!” and that was the whole class. “Oh screw it,” I say, and help myself to a more American-size portion. I am off the diet. It’s over!

So what did I learn? I learned that sometimes, the best things are terrible when they come in small packages. Better to live like a health nut and then the goodies of life aren’t always right in front of your face. Sophia, for your moderation, I salute you! What a woman!