by Luaine Lee
Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service
Republished with permission

The report was completely bogus, but a New York news program snatched a few headlines with the story that the Ally McBeal production had closed down due to star Calista Flockhart's anorexia.

When they finally checked with Fox, they found that unco-operative weather had earned Flockhart an unexpected day off, and that she always eats her porridge like a good little girl. 

So everything ended happily. But it brings up an issue that no one ever talks about in Hollywood: the pressure on performers -- especially females -- to stay bone thin.

Calvin Klein's heroin chic ads featuring emaciated models were only an overt symptom of a malady that has oppressed Tinseltown since Lillian Gish swooned in Orphans of the Storm.

It's true that the camera adds a little avoirdupois to the silhouette, but many starlets literally starve themselves to cadaverous dimensions, hoping the lean and hungry look will widen their cinematic possibilities.

With no regard for health, the show biz industry has imposed impossible standards for women. Not only is their talent and ability put to the test, but so is their dress size.

More than a few voluptuous females have arrived on the Sunset Strip, only to diet themselves into beanpole status.

Jennifer Aniston, Dolly Parton, Ally Sheedy, Helen Mirren, Elizabeth Hurley, Sherilyn Fenn and Kim Basinger were once women of pleasingly rounded proportions. Now they're as lean as 10-year-old Romanian gymnasts. Alicia Silverstone has been derided for her round-cheeked baby fat and Drew Barrymore frets when she allows her exercise program to lapse. "The minute you start to get too lazy about it you get that drive again," she says. 

Jane Fonda has admitted that she was anorexic for a time. Alexandra Paul (Baywatch) told me she suffered from a similar eating disorder a few years ago and so did Susan Dey.

Since the powerful studio days, women were required to look frail and helpless.

It is well known that the studio often guarded Elizabeth Taylor from caloric consumption and that diet pills were prescribed for Judy Garland.

When Marie Osmond and her brother, Donny, helmed their own TV show in the late '70s, chubby little Marie was almost destroyed when a producer took her aside and told her she was embarrassing her family because she was overweight.

"Being a 14- to 15-year-old girl, that was major. It was at that point I just stopped eating for three days of the week," she says.

"That was a very difficult thing to go through where you had to find self-esteem inward and not outward and finding that being healthy is so much better than the physical shell because your soul is dead."

Like most anorexics, Osmond had a false image of her body. "I would not eat and one time I put on a jump suit and looked in the mirror and I looked like a skeleton! For the first time I realized how thin I was."

Bulimia and anorexia are serious disorders. Anorexia nervosa ran its cruel course when singer Karen Carpenter died of it in 1983 at the age of 33.

"They want me to look like a girl, and I'm a woman" Andie MacDowell, who began as a model, wars against the tyranny of the tape-measure.

"I'm real frustrated," she says. "I know where I live I can separate myself and live a normal life. I eat very healthy and don't have neurotic problems. I don't work out two hours a day and just eat vegetables, let's put it that way. But when I come into the business there are people who are setting up this kind of body for women. I think it's extremely frustrating."

Producers have often admonished her to lose weight. "They want me to look like a girl, and I'm a woman. It's very hard for women nowadays. I think it's hideous. I don't read articles about men working out three hours a day and eating just vegetables."

Anna Nicole Smith has always fought the prison-camp image for models. She finally managed to drop pounds for a series of sexy Guess ads. Now she says, "They wouldn't let me model. I was too big and my hair was too light. Before I had Daniel (her son) I weighed 125 pounds and, looking back, I was so anorexic. And it was so sickening! After I had my son I got up to 211 pounds and that's how I've gotten so, uh, large and they don't want large women. They want anorexic. And I said, 'I can't do that. I look horrible.' " 

Ricki Lake probably would not have won her own talk show if she hadn't pared down her ample proportions. "For so long I sold myself as "Oh, I'm the happy-go-lucky fat girl,' she says. "It worked for so long, then it didn't. I knew I had to change that."

Over five years Lake lost 140 pounds. "Losing weight, I did that because I desperately needed to do that for myself," she says. "Now when people say to me, 'How did you do it?' or 'What are the answers?' I don't have answers. I think there are better ways to do it than the way I did it. I was passing out. I was starving myself, doing things that were not healthy but it worked for me. I wouldn't recommend anybody go do it." 

It's true that most women are dissatisfied about the way they look. Jennifer Lopez and Sharon Stone -- peerless specimens in person -- moan about their oversized derrieres.

"Women are nicer to you when you're thin"

Roseanne not only lost weight, but submitted to a permanent touch-up on her face. "Women especially are nicer to you when you're thin," she says, "absolutely. It's so amazing, it's really depressing. You lose a lot of weight, you're always prepared for men to be nicer to you, but nobody ever tells you about the women."

Many stars began as dancers. And the draconian dancer's discipline often remains, keeping devotees working out at the barre and sipping Slimfast long after they need to.

Neve Campbell used to dance seven hours a day. Teri Hatcher studied six hours of dance a day until she was 16. Jane Leeves, Mary Tyler Moore and Teri Garr all began as dancers. So did Sarah Jessica Parker, who still slips into a size 4.

Lea Thompson, who started as a dancer, told me a few years ago: "Most of the dancers I danced with wanted to be anorexic. Sometimes I think I am because when I feel really nervous or really upset, like if I have a movie coming out, I have trouble eating. But I think that's just nerves. I don't think I ever was anorexic. I've always been pretty healthy."

Of course, dimension is mostly in our DNA, and skeletal stars like Winona Ryder, Lara Flynn Boyle, Lauren Holly and Gwyneth Paltrow may just be lucky in the draw.

But women can never consider themselves liberated until the average female body is good enough them. And good enough for Hollywood.