I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting (2 page)

I
n 1960, when she was generally considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world, Elizabeth Taylor’s daily diet consisted of the following: Scrambled eggs, bacon, and a mimosa for breakfast. A hollowed-out piece of French bread filled with peanut butter and bacon for lunch. And for dinner, a feast: fried chicken, peas, biscuits, gravy, mashed potatoes, corn bread, homemade potato chips, trifle, and a tumbler full of Jack Daniel’s.

But like all great eras in history, the age of Taylor’s high-calorie eating habits came to an end. During her fifth marriage, she gained quite a bit of weight, eventually reaching “180-odd pounds,” and then lost it, plummeting to 121 pounds (she reached 119, realized she was losing her bust, and “put on some flesh in a hurry!”). In 1987, she wrote a diet book called
Elizabeth Takes Off
. The cover of the book has a picture of Liz staring off into space as if transfixed by a magnet. It was a national bestseller and is now out of print.

As a die-hard fan of both diets and Liz Taylor, I was curious to test her eating plan. How could a woman who appreciated the best of everything – food, furs, men, diamonds – create a bad diet? She couldn’t. Or so I thought.

In the days leading up to the diet, I start to read
Elizabeth Takes Off
. “It’s too easy to become fixated on calories,” Liz writes breezily. I nod. “Too tempting to say to yourself, ‘Umm … I can have 20 potato chips for 230 calories, or 6 oz. of chicken for 310 calories’ … That’s no way to lose weight.” This sounds correct to me. Math has always been a personal scourge. As I flip through the recipes, though, I become worried. Cottage cheese with sour cream? Steak with peanut butter on it? Dry toast every single morning? This sounds very disgusting, but who am I to question Liz? She says she is “rarely hungry” on her diet.

The book itself is not particularly concerned with food, really, despite the fact that it is ostensibly a book about dieting. There are a lot of pictures and chapters about Liz’s personal life. She thinks she married so many times because of her “quaint attitudes.” “Basically I’m square,” she says. Me too, Elizabeth!

Every breakfast on the Liz Taylor diet is the same: dry toast and a piece of fruit. Dry toast is a weird thing, I must say. Like a cracker with a strangely moist interior. This morning, I can’t deal with the toast, so I eat only the fruit. In an hour I am ravenous. For dinner, I prepare a fillet of swordfish using Liz’s recipe, which is essentially to sprinkle lime juice on the swordfish and stick it in the oven. It tastes like a lime-flavored old shoe on the ground.

The one bright spot is that I am not compelled to exercise. Liz’s feelings on physical fitness are ambivalent at best; one chapter of this book is titled “Aerobic Exercises: Are They for You?” One exercise is to stand on your toes.

For dinner this evening, I am supposed to make a piece of steak and put it on top of a piece of bread slathered with peanut butter. Despite being so hungry I could eat my hand, I cannot handle this concoction. The steak’s juices mix with the peanut butter in an unappealing, oily way. I have three bites, then throw the rest out.

Elizabeth Takes Off
advocates several mental dieting techniques, such as pinning a picture of yourself at your fattest on your fridge. Apparently Liz heard that Debbie Reynolds used a fat picture of her this way, after Liz stole Debbie’s husband. (Eddie Fisher was Debbie’s first husband and Liz’s fourth.) “If you think this picture of me as Miss Lard will inspire you,” Liz writes, “go ahead and put it on your refrigerator, I have no objection.” I refrain from tearing Liz’s picture out of my book but spend some time clicking through photos of myself on Facebook. They are all unflattering.

On the third day of the diet, I become so hungry that I decide to make one of Liz Taylor’s famous dips. You are supposed to have dip every day at 3:00 p.m. with a series of raw vegetables. And so, in the afternoon, I mash sour cream, blue cheese, vinegar, and a shallot together. I dip a piece of broccoli into it and eat it. It’s not bad, but it does make me rather conspicuous in my office. The dip smells vaguely of rotting eggs, and later I introduce myself to someone, casually holding a piece of broccoli with dip on it the entire time. I think about this a lot throughout the day. “Why didn’t I just put down the broccoli?” I ask myself, and cannot come up with any sort of answer. Suffice it to say, it does not remind me of the time when Mike Todd (Liz’s third husband) said to her, “Why, honey, you’re a latent intellectual,” when they first met on a yacht.

That evening I host a dinner party. I make tacos for my guests and Liz’s ratatouille for myself. The recipe consists of vegetables boiled to a goop in tomato paste and eaten with a spoon. It is nothing like the French food in that Pixar movie. (Was anyone else grossed out that rats made the ratatouille? Even though that is a pun, I still hate it.)

Bright spot: I do make Liz’s favorite cocktail, which she used to drink with Rock Hudson on the set of
Giant
. Apparently filming
Giant
was just the worst, and in an effort to “bolster [their] spirits,” Rock and Liz drank all the time. It was during one of these “toots” (?) that Liz made what she termed “the best drink [she] ever tasted” – a combination of Hershey’s syrup, vodka, and Kahlúa. Everyone at my party hates the drink, but I like it because it’s the most logical flavor combination I’ve had in days.

I have now realized I
love
dry bread. It’s so delicious; why didn’t I know this before? It is by far the best thing I have eaten.

Liz is a big believer in what she calls a “controlled pig-out.” She says it really helped her stay on the wagon with her diet. A controlled pig-out is when you eat everything you want, indulging your “wildest food fantasies” for one meal a day. For example, on one of Liz’s controlled pig-outs, she ate a whole pizza followed by a hot-fudge sundae.

For my controlled pig-out, I eat like the old Liz. I have a peanut butter and bacon sandwich and fried chicken. They are delicious, but then I get incredibly sick after I have them. Perhaps my stomach shrank from lack of food.

I’m supposed to eat fillet of sole for dinner, but I have a date with some friends. I force everyone to go to an abandoned restaurant, the only place in the vicinity that serves sole. I am loudly derided for this, and I don’t actually blame my friends because I have flagrantly disobeyed one of Liz’s cardinal rules. “When you are dieting, be discreet,” she writes. “You don’t have to report to your acquaintances as though they were the commanding officers of your Great War Against Fat. Even your most supportive friends can become bored.”

I fear that my friends have become very bored with me after the sole incident. They all eat mozzarella sticks rather sourly while I talk about how sole is okay if you don’t stuff it with crabmeat and yet how it pains me to take the crabmeat out of the sole because I am too hungry to deprive myself of any calories. I am so famished when I get home that I make “minted new potatoes,” a swampy mess of mint leaves and potatoes.

I go on vacation to Cape Cod with my family. My mother says I look thin but is grossed out by the dip I am eating. Every night my family eats something delicious, like spaghetti and meatballs, and I eat something separate and disgusting, like overcooked swordfish. I go to the beach and stare into the ocean, thinking about food and how much I miss it. This must be the opposite of how Taylor Swift feels when she is in Cape Cod.

Sheer hunger drives me to combine cottage cheese and sour cream and pour it over fruit, as Liz recommends. (Previously I left out the sour cream.) It resembles curdled milk and tastes similar. Absolutely repugnant. Never try it.

Stray observations: Plain veal is extremely disgusting, a bit like eating a cardboard box that has been left out in the sun. Nutmeg on vegetables is problematic. Liz’s attitude is wearing off on me, though. I find myself imitating Liz’s style, as documented in the photo section of her book. In tighter clothes and bigger earrings, I contemplate marrying a hotelier or Shakespearean actor. I don’t know where to go to meet them, though. Maybe an airport.

I decide to make Liz’s tuna salad. This recipe combines tomato paste with tuna, grapefruit, scallions, and mayonnaise. Do these disparate flavors act like an experiment in molecular gastronomy? No, they do not. It is more similar to something a cat would like.

I finish the diet! I jump on my mother’s scale and find that I am six pounds lighter. I am also hungrier than I have ever been in my life.

I have also gained a new appreciation for Liz Taylor’s irrepressible personality. Even as she describes the most disgusting meals imaginable in
Elizabeth Takes Off
, Liz is funny and self-deprecating, unapologetic about her marriages, and a total gossip about her extensive web of friends and her hatred of Louis B. Mayer. She is, in short, an excellent broad with really bad taste in food.

At the end of one chapter
,
Liz describes a recent birthday party. As party favors, Liz gave each female guest a rhinestone reproduction of the Taylor-Burton diamond. “Camp, yes, but I loved it,” Liz enthused. That is pretty much how I feel about her diet.

M
ost people think of Karl Lagerfeld, the head designer for Chanel, as a whippet-thin man with a shock of white hair. This wasn’t always so. Though he has always had white hair (Karl loves the eighteenth century because everyone had white hair then), nineties Karl was far plumper and wore diaphanous jackets with a huge wooden fan around his neck. He looked rather jolly actually, or would have if the fan was not there.

With the new millennium on the horizon, however, Karl decided to lose a bunch of weight. He claims it was entirely for “superficial reasons.” Apparently Karl was seized with the desire to “dress differently [and] to wear clothes designed by [Dior Homme’s] Hedi Slimane.” However, he also realized that “these fashions … would require [him] to lose 80 pounds.” After devoting himself to a strict diet designed by weight-loss guru Dr. Jean-Claude Houdret, he lost all the weight within the year. This dramatic weight loss was so remarked upon in the fashion community that Lagerfeld wrote a book about it, entitled
The Karl Lagerfeld Diet
. It was a bestseller in France because how could it not be?

Karl Lagerfeld has a cat named Choupette that I have always liked (she knows how to use an iPad and she has two lady’s maids, one for day and one for night), so I wanted to attempt the Karl Lagerfeld diet as a way of congratulating her. Also, anything that involves losing eighty pounds in a year must be effective, at the very least.

I purchase Karl’s book and lug it home from the bookstore. The cover shows Karl in boot-cut jeans he would probably glower at now, looking fiercely at the corner of the book jacket. He seems both mad and ready to diet, as am I.

After a particularly long period of contemplating the book’s cover, much the way a five-year-old Karl obsessively contemplated a painting of white-haired eighteenth-century aristocrats in his family’s home, I open the book. Inside there is a large picture of Lagerfeld’s diet doctor, Dr. Jean-Claude Houdret, who has a long Salvador Dalí–style mustache with curled ends. Dr. Houdret is the creator of the Spoonlight program – a French diet that advocates a mix of very expensive protein packets and meager bits of food. He actually wrote most of Karl’s diet book, it turns out. The book is written in a very high-literary style for a diet book, I must say. The conclusion is a meandering essay on the way a dandy functions in modern society. One would think the good doctor would know something about that because of his mustache.

Which is not to say that Karl had no hand in writing the book that bears his name; he did. Karl’s passages turn up occasionally, helpfully signed with his initials, KL. Karl is also interviewed at the beginning of the book by Ingrid Sischy, where he explains the genesis of his diet, and how he can’t even remember the man he was two years ago when he was fat, and that he’s so disciplined he’s not even tempted by any foods. Aside from the interview (which is very long and slightly repetitive), there are several essays on cosmetic surgery and skin care and personal anecdotes of a young and inexperienced medical professional by Dr. Salvador Dalí. Eventually, I find a brief description of the actual diet tucked in the middle of the book. There are several different diets the doctor prescribes – including a nine-hundred-calorie one that consists entirely of protein “sachets” and vegetables for the very severe weight-loss cases. I decide to pass on this as I have put myself through enough in the years I have lived. The middle version of the diet is Karl’s preferred diet anyway, an amalgam of lean proteins, vegetables, and more “protein sachets” clocking in at a whopping twelve hundred calories a day. There are recipes in the back too, which all look very arcane and French.

Karl says that when you are on a diet, “you are a general and you have a single soldier in your army. You must give him instructions and he must carry them out. It may annoy him but he has no choice.” And thus I start the day with what Karl calls his “winter breakfast”: a piece of toast, an egg (not fried in any oil, because that would be too appetizing), some juice, yogurt, and a Diet Coke. It is the spartan meal of a prisoner but it does the job.

After this, I decide to call my mother. I freely admit my mother is less fun than Karl Lagerfeld’s mother. To wit – Karl Lagerfeld’s mother told Karl he had “exceptionally ugly” hands and that he should never smoke. She also told him that his stories were “so boring” because he was six and that even though he was almost blind “children with glasses are the ugliest thing in the world,” so she never bought him glasses. She was a great influence on Lagerfeld’s life.

After my call, I set about guzzling Diet Cokes. Lagerfeld drinks up to ten Diet Cokes a day, so I have to really set my mind to this task. After three in quick succession I get very jittery; after four I decide I’m so jittery I can’t eat lunch (protein sachet) or write or concentrate and just start pacing my room, which seems, all of a sudden, like a necessary activity. After my last Diet Coke, I give up and I go and watch the finale of
The Bachelor
. I rationalize this brainless but emotional activity because Karl is a rabid consumer of culture and has three hundred iPods. I have salmon with brussels sprouts for dinner and I am utterly starving afterward, although I feel so jittery. After the show finishes, I end up staying up until 7:00 a.m. reading about what Choupette does on the iPad. (She’s a cat, so nothing.)

Today I get up rather later than usual. I oversleep because I was reading so late, which Karl would never do. Karl sleeps exactly seven hours a night no matter what time he goes to bed. However, Karl also reads under a canopy in a room overlooking the Louvre and wears a white night shirt based on a seventeenth-century design he saw in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In penance, I decide to punish myself with Karl’s “summer breakfast,” which is even more barren than the “winter breakfast.” (What is the point of seasonal menus for breakfast and breakfast only? I don’t know.) It’s just fruit and yogurt, basically. It is very hard not to have a second piece of toast, but Karl says, “The height of luxury is for me to have an extra slice of toast. It’s the most delicious thing in the world.” And now I agree with him.

For dinner, I make one of the dishes in the back of his diet book, “Veal with Plums,” but there are no plums at the grocery store, so I make it with prunes. This is less good. I am starving for extra calories, so I have a glass of red wine. Dr. Dalí recommends two of those a day. A young doctor’s notebook!

Karl Lagerfeld does not usually like to entertain (“Loneliness is a luxury for people like me,” he has said), but he does have a recipe for quail flambé, which I have never had before. And can a woman just eat quail by herself? Apparently yes, because although I buy two quails (for $17; Karl is another one with an insane food budget), no one wants to eat them even though I ask in a plaintive voice. I have finally pushed my friends to the limit of their endurance, and quail is the last straw. It seems fitting. Karl says, “You have to be a real bore like me for the diet to work. When you are that boring, you have to make twice the effort in wit and conversation in order to compensate.” But I really don’t have the strength for that type of display this evening anyway.

If I am going to have quail flambé solo, the rest of the meal has to be, in some essential way, equally grandiose. This is what it means to be a dandy in modern society. I decide to make myself a traditional French multicourse meal using recipes from the Lagerfeld diet book. The first course is French onion soup. The onions are cooked with no butter whatsoever (usually, according to other recipes I have seen, the onions are cooked in an entire stick of butter); however, you are allowed to have a little Gruyère and croutons. Butter’s absence makes the soup seem oddly flavorless, like onion soup I have had in a cafeteria. Still, it is not entirely off from the real thing.

Quail, however, is horrible. If you have never seen quail before (I hadn’t), they are emaciated birds with dinosaur claws. If someone had ever grasped a quail in front of me and yelled, “This quail is rabid!” I would’ve believed them. I marinate the quail in wine for several hours. After a while, I take the quail out of the wine and then douse it in Grand Marnier and then set it on fire (flambé it). I don’t have a match, so I light a paper towel on fire with the stove burner and then throw it on the quail. This works surprisingly well. The quail comes out tasting mostly of wine and burnt paper towel, but also of tiny shards of quail meat. The thing about quail is that it has absolutely no meat on it. It’s only talons; that’s it. I practically attack it with my teeth and I barely make a dent. I even have protein powder for dessert, I’m so hungry.

I’m off the diet! I lost a couple of pounds and have managed to develop a sense of humor over the quail incident even though it was not funny at all at the time. As Karl says, “To follow a diet like this you have to have a sense of humor. Don’t take things too seriously, make fun of yourself, admit why you’re doing it. It’s a physical thing, that’s all. There’s no point in pretending it’s anything else.”

And that really is the gift of Karl. So many celebrities try to pretend that they are dieting because of nutrition when actually they are dieting because they want to fit into a certain shape of clothing. Karl does not stand for such hypocrisy and even eats quail while he does it. And Choupette eats at the table with him (her own food, not quail).