Diane Keaton always knew she didn’t fit the mold of the classical beautiful movie star and lamented, before she was even in high school, that the “attractive genes” in her family had passed on to her two younger sisters.
But the Oscar-winning Keaton, who died Saturday at age 79, came to be known as a “world-class beauty” and a fashion icon in her own way, as The Guardian said. She was “a quiet subversive who, in the most cookie-cutter of Hollywood eras, dodged the stamp of the machine and chose to live her life her own way.” Still, Keaton had to abide by certain Hollywood beauty standards in order to have a successful five-decade film career. It helped that she had a radiant smile and that she was both blonde and slender.
But as Keaton described in her 2012 memoir, “Then Again” (Random House), staying thin became a major source of anxiety early in her career. She also revealed that she long kept a secret from those closest to her. It is that she had once struggled with bulimia. This eating disorder, she said, had her consuming up to 20,000 calories a day for about five years.
American filmmaker and actor Woody Allen with actress, Diane Keaton, his girlfriend at the time, at the Hilton Hotel, London, 18th October 1970. (Photo by Pierre Manevy/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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Keaton revealed that this struggle occurred while she was working with and dating Woody Allen, one of her “unattainable greats,” who also included ex-lovers Al Pacino and Warren Beatty. The comedian-turned-auteur had made Keaton a delightful film comedy star by casting her in “Play It Again Sam,” “Sleeper,” “Love and Death” and “Annie Hall.” But at times, she said, she begged out of dates because she needed to secretly eat and purge. “It’s pathetic that the demands of bulimia outshone the power of my desire for Woody, but they did,” she wrote.
Keaton’s insecurities about her appearance began before adolescence, she wrote. She recalled seeing a Life magazine cover of Audrey Hepburn at age 11. “She wasn’t pretty,” Keaton wrote. “She was beautiful. In fact, she was perfect. I began to notice disturbing things about my eleven-year-old body. It was too big in the bathtub.”
“Worst of all, I began to understand the troubling concept of comparison,” Keaton continued. “When I compared myself to Audrey Hepburn, something was off.”
As Keaton wrote, she grew up in a loving, middle-class home in suburban Los Angeles. But, as a girl, she was fixated on sweets for a sense of comfort and reward. Her fixation followed her to New York City. Always ambitious, she studied acting at the famous Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York City. Soon after graduating, she landed a role as a “member of the tribe” in the original 1968 Broadway production of the musical “Hair.” The show became a cultural phenomenon, though Keaton garnered early press for refusing a $50 nightly bonus to shed her clothes during performances, according to Playbill.
Three months later she got the chance to play the starring role of Sheila. But the producer told her she needed to lose 10 pounds. Keaton recalled she was 5-feet-7 inches, weighed 140 pounds and was already putting on weight because she liked to eat out at a nearby $1.29 all-you-can-eat steakhouse and indulge in soft vanilla ice cream cones between matinees and evening performances. The producer “called to tell me I could have the part if I lost weight,” Keaton wrote.
Such comments activated Keaton’s long-entrenched doubts about “not really being pretty.” While dining out with “Hair” colleagues at the steakhouse, she overheard a female cast member talk about a woman she knew who deliberately regurgitated to stay thin. “How disgusting. How awful,” Keaton thought, but also, “How interesting.”
“I have no memory of the first time I tried to throw up,” Keaton continued. “I do remember taking a day here, a day there, to explore the effects. In no time at all I was committed to three unordinary meals a day.”
For breakfast, for example, Keaton said she would have a dozen buttered corn muffins, plus three orders of fried eggs over hard with bacon, and a side of pancakes topped off with four glasses of chocolate milk, she said. Dinner involved a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, several orders of French fries, and a couple of TV dinners. There always was dessert: chocolate-covered almonds, a pound of See’s Candies peanut brittle sent from home, M&Ms, one Sara Lee pound cake, and three Marie Callender’s frozen banana-cream pies.
Keaton wrote about always trying to chase the flavor and feeling of the first bite of any meal. “After the first too-good-to-be-true bites turned into the third and fourth, adjustments had to be made to re-create the original taste,” she wrote. “The more I ate, the more disenchanted I was with the results. It didn’t matter, because the impact of the first few bites triumphed over all setbacks.” But after six months of daily binging and purging, Keaton said she became hypoglycemic and suffered heartburn, indigestion, irregular periods and low blood pressure.
Keaton met Allen in 1968 when she auditioned for a role in his play, “Play It Again, Sam.” Because she was two inches taller than him, she almost didn’t get the part, but his “near-immediate fascination” with her eventually won over the producers, according to Playbill. Keaton wrote that she fell in love with Allen during rehearsals, though her crush began back in Santa Ana, when her family would watch him on Johnny Carson. “He was so hip, with his thick glasses and cool suits,” she wrote.
For her performance in “Play It Again, Sam,” Keaton received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play. After Keaton reprised her role in the 1972 film adaptation, she said became more than Allen’s goofy sidekick, but his most famous muse, culminating in “Annie Hall.” Their romance wasn’t exactly “on and off,” she said, but they also weren’t committed to each other. In her memoir, Keaton wrote about her eating disorder leading to isolation and a “self-made prison of secrets and lies.”
“Woody didn’t have a clue what I was up to in the privacy of his bathrooms,” Keaton wrote. “He did marvel at my remarkable appetite, saying I could really ‘pack it in.’ Ever vigilant and always on the lookout, I made sure he never caught me. This is not to say that Woody was oblivious to my problems. He knew how insecure I was.”
It was Allen who suggested she see an analyst, which Keaton said eventually led to her recovery. Six months after she blurted out the secret of her eating disorder to her analyst, Keaton said the binging just stopped. “The miracle of getting over bulimia is almost as strange as its slave,” she wrote. She said she channeled whatever drove her eating disorder into acting. She said she started to study with a teacher who helped her rediscover “the world of expressed feeling,” while her commitment to her chosen profession became “more intense.”
In her memoir, Keaton didn’t discuss whether or not her body-image issues came up while doing nude scenes in “Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” The 1977 film came out the same year as “Annie Hall,” and had Keaton departing from comedy to play a young Catholic teacher for deaf children who leads a double life: frequenting singles bars at night to pick up random men for sex. At 57, Keaton also shed her clothes again for a brief nude scene in her 2003 hit romantic comedy “Something’s Gotta Give.”
As Keaton reflected in her memoir on why she fell prey to bulimia, she rejected the idea that she lacked parental affection growing up, especially from her mother. She noted that bulimia can be related to the high expectations of parents, as well as social class, income, education and an introverted personality. But in the end, she said, the reason anyone becomes bulimic is complex. As Keaton wrote about coming clean about her secret years later to family and friends, she said: “I gave five years of my life to a ravenous hunger that had to be filled at any expense.” She said she hoped to finally be “released from the burden of hiding.”