My disease would invariably overcome me whenever I was being inauthentic in a relationship, pretending something that I didn’t really feel, betraying myself on some level. Earlier, before adolescence, I could simply absent myself from false relationships—as the Lone Ranger. But as I grew into womanhood, in order to not be alone I assumed a façade so as to be loved by my father or boyfriends. It was always men I was concerned about pleasing. Sustaining inauthentic relationships and the self-abandonment it required placed me in a state of perpetual anxiety. But I chose to “stuff” my real feelings, to split off from them, rather than risk being alone.
Being around food, sitting down at the table for a meal, would cause me terrible anxiety, so I would find ways to avoid food-related social situations. I went through what should have been my most beautiful, sensual, fun-loving years in a cocoon, hiding within my numbness. I reserved what intimacy I had for the scruffy floors of the dorm john and, later, the elegant tiles of the bathrooms in Beverly Hills’ best restaurants; I became expert at throwing up everything I’d eaten and returning to the table all cheery and fixed up.
I stopped my food addictions in my forties, but it was not until my third act (my sixties!) that I began to accept myself, imperfections and all, and to reinhabit my body, finding, as Emily Dickinson’s poem ends, “That Hunger—was a way / Of persons outside Windows— / The Entering—takes away—”
E
mma Willard was founded in 1814 as a female seminary by Emma Hart Willard, a pioneer in education for women. Prior to her advocacy, women’s education had been at the mercy of private funding and student tuition, while men’s education received state and federal aid.
Did you ever see the movie
Scent of a Woman
starring Al Pacino? The school in that movie is Emma Willard. It sits in Gothic splendor overlooking the wooded hills of upstate New York. It has turrets, gargoyles, leaded windows, and carved wooden balustrades curving up the impressively wide staircases. It is a classy place, and I was miserable a lot of the time I was there. Isn’t it the thing to do, be miserable and complain about no boys and strict rules? Actually, I would do it all again in a heartbeat. The teachers were wonderful, the classes stimulating.
Attendance at chapel, replete with hat and gloves, was required every Sunday. The only time I remember being deeply stirred by a sermon was when Reverend Dr. Howard Thurman, the first African-American dean of chapel at Boston University, preached for us. Because my father was an agnostic, religiosity had been out of the question for me. But I loved Protestant hymns—loved singing them and loved hearing them. Today I often find myself singing those hymns when I’m fly-fishing or pulling weeds. There is an improvised scene in
Klute
when, as Bree Daniel, alone in her apartment, sitting at a table, smoking a [pretend] joint, I started singing softly to myself, “God our Father, Christ our brother, all who live in love are thine. . . .” I don’t know why I did that—it just came out—and the director, Alan Pakula, always one to appreciate contradictions, left it in.
Freshman year, a group of us would gather after dinner in a small dorm room, flop down on couches, and talk. That’s when I realized I was one of the few remaining girls in the class who hadn’t gotten her period. There was lots of talk about which were the preferred brands of pads (Kotex), who used Tampax (very few girls), did it hurt to put a tampon in (no), who had cramps, and how long everyone’s periods lasted. I was very quiet during these sessions. I didn’t want anyone to know I had a faulty “down there.” Actually, by then we called it vagina. I had a faulty vagina. About this time, in sophomore year, a man from the Bronx named George Jorgensen Jr. had gone to Denmark and become Christine Jorgensen, with the world’s first publicized sex change operation. “Nature made a mistake, which I have corrected,” wrote Christine to her parents. “I am now your daughter.” The sex transformation scandalized America and made news for months, pushing the Korean War and hydrogen bomb tests on Eniwetok off the front page.
I was obsessed by the story, feeling, like Jorgensen, that a mistake had been made with me: Perhaps I was a boy inside a girl’s body. Haunted by this, I would lie on the floor with my legs up on a chair, holding a mirror to see if there were any signs of a penis. It’s not easy to study your vagina. It takes commitment. You have to maneuver yourself into the perfect position to catch the light and not cast shadows (or find a flashlight—but either way, positioning the mirror is never easy). I was both fascinated and scared by what I might find in all that confusion of colors and folds. (At least I didn’t have to contend with pubic hair. There wasn’t a hint of that, nor would there be for years to come.) I found my clitoris, of course, and for a good year was sure it was a penis waiting to be liberated, and I felt sad that Mother wouldn’t even be around to learn that her daughter was really her longed-for son. I never told anyone about my concerns, just as I had never told anyone about my unusual childhood fantasies, the possible molestation by the nanny’s boyfriend, or my “down there” sickness at camp. They all stayed inside me, my secret evilness.
I write about my vagina and my vagina-related fears because of the work I have chosen (and sometimes I feel I was “called”) to do in my third act. I work with young people on issues surrounding gender, sexuality, early pregnancy, and parenting. It is said that you teach what you need to learn, and through this work I have learned that the traumas and anxieties I experienced as a girl are not unique to me. If I am able to write about my vagina at all, it’s thanks to Eve Ensler, author of
The Vagina Monologues.
While some of you are probably wishing that was one epiphany I hadn’t had, it’s important for women and girls to be able to talk about that most complex part of themselves. It can represent an important owning of ourselves. Vaginas are, after all, very talented and versatile. They can stretch, shrink, give birth, feel and give pleasure. In 2001, just before coming briefly out of retirement to perform in
The Vagina Monologues
at Madison Square Garden, I said to Barbara Walters on
20/20,
“If penises could do half of what vaginas can do, there’d be postage stamps honoring them and a twelve-foot-tall bronze statue of a penis in the Rotunda of our nation’s Capitol.” Instead, because vaginas belong to the other gender, they have been raped, pried, cut, sewn up, objectified, and generally denigrated down through the centuries—the sorts of things one does to (apparent) objects of fear that men have so often needed to dominate.
My personal vagina was nothing but a pain in the ass till my late teens. The rest of me had succeeded in blending in rather well, but my vagina was a determined holdout. By sophomore year I took to buying Kotex (very publicly) and pretending that I too had a period. My interest in health and fitness, which surfaced midlife, was anything but evident early on. I hated physical education class and team sports, so since I was faking it anyway, I gave myself the most frequent, longest-lasting, crampiest periods in school as a way of getting excused from gym. I lived month to month, horrified I might be discovered. Scientific studies have shown us that girls who are scared of becoming women sometimes will their hormones into remaining inactive, thereby postponing puberty. Perhaps that was happening with me, because God knows I was scared of what being a woman might lead to—becoming my mother!
On vacations I’d go home to New York City, where Peter and I each had a bedroom in Dad and Susan’s snug brownstone. At Christmas 1951, I went out on my first real date. Danny Selznick, son of David O. Selznick, fabled producer of
Gone with the Wind,
had invited me to go with him, his father, and his stepmother, Jennifer Jones, to see the Broadway play
Dial M for Murder.
I had known Danny off and on since childhood and would sometimes go to his house to play, but dating was something else again. I was excited and nervous, knowing that Danny was more worldly than I was and that he had also dated Brooke several times. Brooke, by the way, was still living in Greenwich and would soon appear on the cover of
Life
magazine as the debutante of the year.
For my date with Danny, Susan got me a gray shantung party dress that had a low scooped neck, and she showed me how to wear falsies. Under the dress I wore a stiff crinoline underskirt, as was the fashion in those days: tiny waist with full skirt to accentuate it, a style that played to my assets. Then, just as in the movies: The doorbell rang, Susan answered, I came down the staircase to greet Danny, we went out and got into a limousine with Mr. Selznick and Jennifer Jones, and the four of us went to have a pretheater dinner at some fancy restaurant. I remember ordering a small steak. As I was cutting it, the piece slipped off the plate and down the front of my dress, where my falsies stopped it from sliding all the way down to my waist. I pretended nothing had happened and hoped no one would notice. But after a while grease began to darken the front of the gray shantung. I excused myself and went into the ladies’ room, covering my greasy chest with my purse and cursing my bad luck at being the clumsiest girl in the world. Just as the bathroom door closed behind me and I was reaching down the front of my dress, Jennifer Jones walked in and saw me. Jennifer
Song-of-Bernadette, Duel-in-the-Sun
Jones caught me as I was pulling a steak out of my dress! Totally mortified, I tried to disguise what I was doing, but Jennifer saw right away and laughed so sweetly. “Oh, Jane, you poor thing,” she said, “let me help you!” And she stuffed some paper towels down my dress (
Oh please, God, don’t let her feel the falsies
) and mopped up the grease, rubbed the outside with a warm, wet towel (so it wouldn’t stain), gave me her shawl to cover the wet mark, and with a loving hug walked with me back to the table. From then on Jennifer topped my list of mensches—a well-known Yiddish word for all-around decent human being.
The second summer we were all together—Dad, Susan, Peter, and me—we rented a small house in the woods at the very end of Lloyd Neck, Long Island, so that Dad could commute into the city for his play
Point of No Return.
That summer I battled bouts of depression, though no one thought of it as such, least of all me. I just saw it as “life.” Some days I would sleep twelve or thirteen hours and be scolded by Dad for being lazy and moody. This was my first experience of feeling as if a party were going on somewhere else and I was left out and always would be. I could see no future ahead of me. Even the woods didn’t beckon anymore. Just as adolescence marked the beginning of my rejection of my body, so it saw me moving away from the natural world I had depended on as a child.
On nearby estates, debutantes threw elaborate parties and danced with boys from elite prep schools like Phillips Andover and Phillips Exeter. I wanted so much to be included, but I didn’t know how to go about it and Dad wasn’t part of that ritzy Long Island scene.
Then, to make matters worse, I was invited to Syracuse, New York, to visit a girl from Emma Willard who had been my “big sister” freshman year and who desperately wanted to be my friend, though we had little in common. I didn’t really want to go, but I didn’t know how to say no (a problem that would plague me for longer than I’d like to admit). I was shocked when I arrived in the Syracuse station to find two reporters waiting to interview me:
HENRY FONDA’S DAUGHTER COMES TO SYRACUSE TO VISIT SCHOOL MATE
was the angle, with the local family’s name prominently displayed, of course. I felt uncomfortable being interviewed, since I was not famous and had nothing to say, and I resented being put in this position by my friend—though of course I said nothing to her.
On the second day of my visit, we went to Lake Ontario. I decided to try out a new dive I had recently seen in a movie, where you run and fling yourself across the low waves in an effort to skim their surface. But I misjudged, and instead of skimming I hit the top of my head on the lake floor. Right away I felt something bad had happened and quickly pushed myself off the bottom, but when I surfaced and opened my mouth to scream for help, no sounds came out. My inability to make any noise frightened me. I managed to crawl out of the surf and up onto the sand, where I lay very still. I couldn’t move or speak, and there was a dull pain in my back. My friend and her mother came over to see what was wrong, and I motioned for them to let me just lie there for a while. In time I was able to talk and slowly get myself up, into their car, back to their house, and into bed. The next morning I told them I needed to go back to the city. I felt strange, but mostly I thought I was exaggerating as a way to go home early. On the train ride back, I told the conductor that I needed to lie down on a full seat because my back was broken—and then felt guilty for lying to him.
I hung around our house in the city for four or five days and then went backstage at the theater to see my father. “Dad,” I said, trying not to sound whiny, “I think there is something wrong with my back. I think maybe I should get an X-ray.” Dad called Susan, who came and took me to the hospital. The X-rays showed that I had fractured five vertebrae between my shoulder blades. The doctors said it was a miracle that I wasn’t paralyzed. One false move over the last five days, they said, could have done it for life.
Nowadays broken backs are treated very differently, but this was the fifties. The doctors put me in a plaster cast that reached from my collarbone to my pubic bone, a thick, heavy straitjacket. They didn’t even bother to give me the semblance of a waist. A few weeks earlier I had received my first invitation to one of the big, formal dances I had so coveted.
Now
what was to become of me? My life was surely over. Not so, said Susan, and she took me to a maternity store, where I got an evening dress for pregnant women. When the big night came she paid special attention to my hair, gave me a little makeup, and hovered over me till I had pinned on the orchid corsage my date brought me and was safely in the backseat with him.