Everything About Me Is Fake . . . And I'm Perfect (9 page)

                (By the way, my friend refused to sign an
exclusive deal with this moron—which just made him want her more, treat her
better, and shove more money at her than she ever thought was possible. She
decided to use the cash to help a friend go to rehab. It only seemed right.) E
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                I’ve seen it all in this business. There was
one B-movie starlet—I can’t tell you her name—who met me at an audition in this
New York studio that smelled like dog shit. She took one look at me and said, “You
know, if I were you, I wouldn’t even try out for this movie. I hear all the
character wears is a G-string and stilettos.”

                “What do you mean? Don’t go in for the
audition?” I said, sweetly. I wanted to see how far this bitch would go to
sabotage me.

                “It could ruin your career,” she said,
flashing me a smile I’d seen on television and in the movies.

                “Honey, I’ve made a living for years going
naked. A G-string will be a nice change of pace,” I replied. “I guess you
shouldn’t go in, either. After all, how can you wear a G-string after just
having a baby last month?”

                “I didn’t have a baby!” she stammered.

                “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, staring at her
stomach. She just slinked away. Later on, a friend called me up to tell me that
the starlet in question had pulled this trick many times in the past. She ran
into my friend at another audition and warned her not to read for what was
really going to be

                “a soft porn film.” In the end none of us
got the role, which made me happy; at least you-know-who with her backstabbing
ways wasn’t rewarded for her treachery. A few months later, I ran into Ms.
Starlet at another casting call. This time she was talking to a beautiful young
girl. “They’ll want you to do all these horrendous things in this movie,” she
whispered. “You should just get out of here now.” Would it ever end?

                “You know, Janice. They have really early
calls on this movie,” she tried to warn me. But now she was dealing with the
Big Dog.

                “Well, if they want me in before ten, that’s
good. I’ll just be getting in from the night before—I can just swing over to
the studio,” I said. Scumbag Starlet just shrugged and walked off. The last
time I saw her working was on a late-night cable movie that was more about ass
than class. “Who did she beat out?” I wondered out loud. “She must have told
the three other hookers who showed up to audition they’d have to work for free.”

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J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

                This kind of sabotage may be bad—but
self-sabotage is worse. I was reminded of this recently when one of my friends
and I were salivating over the dessert menu at a chic little Beverly Hills
eatery. My friend just sat there moaning that she needed to lose thirty pounds.
“I really shouldn’t have dessert,” she said. “But how bad can a little sorbet
be?” I told her we’d split something; I knew dessert wasn’t the real problem
here.

                “How did you start gaining in the first
place?” I asked her. And she poured out a truly sad story: not only was her
fiancé fucking around with a younger girl, now he was going to marry the little
Twinkie—who, incidentally, worked in the local ice cream parlor. I kid you not.
And here was my brilliant girlfriend, with a Ph.D. in psychology, spending her
Saturday nights curled up with her new best friend: Sara Lee. Why do so many of
us sabotage our chances to get to the next level of happiness? Because some
bitch or some jerk has managed to convince us that we don’t deserve it anyway.
I know because I’ve been there. You can call me the Queen of Fucking Things Up
on Purpose. My problem revolved around a man, too, but it’s not what most
people think. He was my first role model. He was a pedophile. And he was my
father.

                Here was a man who beat me on a daily basis
because I wouldn’t accommodate his sexual demands. It set me up for a lifetime
of feeling bad—which I thought gave me carte blanche to wreck my own life in
the most boring ways possible, including booze, drugs, and inviting the wrong
men to share my 300-thread-count sheets.

                To some degree, I’m sure, we’ve all been
there. We do moronic things we know aren’t good for us, but we can’t seem to
stop ourselves. There’s something liberating about being so bad—at least that’s
how I felt as I tried to get through the 1970s and 1980s. It was far from a
perfect lifestyle—hell, it wasn’t even halfway decent when I think about it
now.

                The one thing I managed to avoid was
overeating. Instead I did cocaine to feel better, and when that didn’t work, I
dove headfirst into tons of plastic surgery. When that didn’t work, I shopped
until I dropped, and E V E R Y T H I N G A B O U T M E I S F A K E . . . A N D
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                nearly keeled over when I got my credit card
bills. When the buying sprees didn’t work anymore, I filled the empty spots
with sex, sex, and more sex. And even when I was held in the strongest and most
comforting of arms, I couldn’t find a moment’s peace. After too much coke, too
much plastic, and too many $10,000 American Express bills, I was still thinking
about my father.

                Now I’ve learned to fill myself up by walking
in the light—which I know sounds all deep and spiritual, but it works. It’s
part of my own personal twelve-step program, which is what made me want to
write this book in the first place. I want to encourage women and men of all
shapes, ages, and forms to try to reach forward instead of backward. I may
still hear my father’s voice in my ear every day, but I keep busy, keep
driving, keep fighting. My first book was subtitled The Accidental Life of the
World’s First Supermodel, but I probably should have called it The Driven Life
of the World’s First Supermodel.

                Here’s what I want to share with you:

                If you can just put your hand out and
embrace something new, the good in your life will start to outweigh the bad.
The best way to think about the future is to think of an expectation that’s so
far-fetched you can’t even really imagine it happening for you. It’s the
opposite of sabotage: it’s shooting for a future that’s so bright you can’t
even imagine it. Why not believe in magic—even if you’re in your forties, with
two kids and a mortgage you’re not sure how you’re going to pay?

                Don’t you still deserve something
extraordinary? I know I do—because of my past, and in spite of it, too. Little
changes work, too. For instance, I try to learn ten new words a day. I pick up
the dictionary and find ten words I don’t know, write them down, and then use
them throughout the course of the day. I think it makes me more interesting.
Not so bad for a dumb model, eh? You might eat right at one meal, or put down a
drink. Baby steps. The other day Rene Russo called me from location in upstate
New York. It was the weekend, and the snow was coming down hard on her 244

J A N I C E D I C K I N S O N

                perfect strawberry-blonde locks. But on the
other end of the line my longtime friend was sobbing.

                “Honey, what’s wrong?” I asked her. I love
this woman—I couldn’t stand to hear her so sad.

                “I just read No Lifeguard on Duty,” she
wailed. “And I want you to know, Janice, that it meant so much to me.” Rene
went on to explain how the book confirmed something she’d always felt about me,
ever since we’d modeled together back in the day.

                “Your talent hasn’t even arrived yet,” my
beautiful friend told me.

                “You haven’t even cut your teeth yet. I
believe in you so much.”

                Now I was crying. (Which ruins those
individual lashes, by the way.) It was good for my heart, though. Rene and I
have daughters the same age; we’re both Aquarian women who have been through it
all and are still standing strong. Look at us today: Rene is one of Hollywood’s
hottest actresses, and I’m a bestselling author. Two models who probably never
dreamed we’d make it to our age intact—never mind still working, still
succeeding. It took a few changes along the way, sure. But here’s a tip from
Hollywood: every great script goes through rewrite before the story hits the
screen.

                There’s always time to rewrite your own
script. Just alter your approach: change your diet, your love life, your work
life; change your body, your soul, your future. It’s all in the approach you
take. You can start by refusing to label yourself today the way you did
yesterday. You don’t need to be “the fat girl” anymore, or “the dumb wife”
whose husband cheats on her. I used to call myself “an old whore” or “a bitch,”
until someone suggested to me that I stop putting myself down like that. In
other words, I changed my approach.

                Guess what? It worked.

                25.

               
The Perfect Ending

                When I’m having good sex, I scream.

                It’s not just the sex—not usually, anyway.
It’s because I am a passion addict. I clean house the same way: way too fast
and sometimes too hard. I just can’t stop myself. And I was the same way with
this book. My objective was to share my feelings about how we all mess up our
lives trying to be perfect—and I had to take it all the way. I couldn’t just
share a little bit. I had to share hard, yell it from the rafters. In our quest
to be perfect, we often hide our true feelings or wrap them in sweet-smelling
packages. This is why I want to create a perfume someday and skip the silly French
labels. I would call my scent Sexy Bitch. The slogan could be: “Wear it and get
laid.” At least I’d be telling the truth—and that’s as perfect as it gets.

                (And did you just catch me calling myself a
bitch again? Do I contradict myself? So sue me.) These days I live just as hard
as I did back then, but in a good way. I wake up, leap out of bed, and let the
light flood my bedroom—and my

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                soul. I get down on my knees next to my bed
and thank God for allowing me to start another day with a clean slate. I know
now that I don’t have to be totally perfect. Of course, I know that you can do
anything with a clean slate, good or bad. It’s up to you to mark it in a good
way, or mar it forever. The choices are endless; they’re intimidating; but they
can be inspiring. And how do I feel about perfection these days? Well, don’t
hate me, but I’m loyal to my cause. Call me crazy, but I’m still willing to
make myself a guinea pig. The other day, I had a substance called Artefill injected
into the various little wrinkles around my face—the ones that Botox just doesn’t
seem to be able to handle. They tell me Artefill is the better Botox. Of
course, the process of getting puffed hurts a little bit—

                they’ve never made a needle that feels
good—and afterward your face swells a bit, like you’ve just been attacked by
killer bees. We’ll see if it holds up as well as the rest of me.

                But I’m also learning to relax, in the hope
that new lines won’t form. These days, even when I step back into the modeling
game, I take it all in
The two Lucies singing along with the radio. Bel-Air,
California, 1998.
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                stride. To tell you the truth, I love being
on the other end of the camera almost as much as I do modeling, and my photos
have appeared in hundreds of national publications. I don’t even sweat the bad
moments. A few years ago, for example, I was standing on a dock in Key West
with about $20,000 worth of camera equipment strapped on my body. Well, it was
too much (isn’t this business always too much?), and I felt myself drifting
backward under all the weight. Suddenly I was off the dock and in the
water—laughing my head off.

                My equipment was destroyed, and the girl
posing for the cover of Italian Cosmo looked suddenly skittish, like maybe I
was going to blame her.

                “Honey, jump in with me,” I cried, and she
did.

                A few minutes later, I was on my cell phone
calling an ex-boyfriend who lived in the area. “Can you bring me a camera?” I
laughed, picking seaweed out of my hair.

                Moral of the story: Seaweed is a great
conditioner. Almost every single day, I try to teach my daughter, Savvy, a
little something about how fabulous her life is. I tell her that she’s
gorgeous, that she’s smart, that she can be anything she wants to be and more.
I’m desperate to make sure she feels secure with her life—so desperate, in
fact, that whenever I lose my temper (like any other nervous parent), I always
come back and apologize. “You’re still gorgeous and smart,” I’ll say sweetly. “But
get those wet socks off the bathroom floor right now,”