JOHN ALLEMANG
Saturday, December 23, 2000

Calista Flockhart, the cadaverous star of Ally McBeal, has finally found a diet that agrees with her. It's low-fat, nourishing and medically approved, an instant solution to the anxieties of actresses who feel a growing pressure to be thinner than is humanly possible. There's only one drawback. Flockhart had to collapse on the set of her show last week, suffering from dehydration and exhaustion, before doctors would hook her up to Hollywood's latest miracle cure: the intravenous drip.

Will the IV diet catch on? As long as Flockhart's Svengali, David E. Kelley, masterminds some of television's hottest shows, there will always be a glut of dangerously skinny women ready to abuse their shrinking bodies for his growing profits. Kelley, married to actress Michelle Pfeiffer, may be the smartest writer-producer in the television industry today. But his ability to win Emmy Awards for both Ally McBeal and his legal drama The Practice, and to snare a five-year deal with Fox worth hundreds of millions, is compromised by his sick attitude to the female body.

The guy who writes Ally McBeal by day spends his nights with Michelle Pfeiffer -- how sick can he be? Extremely so, once you see his influence in the neuroses that forced Flockhart's co-star Courtney Thorne-Smith to quit the series last season.

Thorne-Smith was no wide-eyed innocent when she entered Kelley's world. She had spent time on the Aaron Spelling soap opera Melrose Place, and knew the standard sacrifices demanded of a TV beauty -- the daily eight-kilometre runs, the meals that consist of little more than salads and fruit, the ever-handy water bottle that provides the illusion of replenishment.

But striving to be thin in the shapely shadow of Heather Locklear was nothing compared to working alongside the stick figures of Ally McBeal -- not just the childlike Flockhart but also Portia de Rossi and Lucy Liu, the lean creatures Kelley added to the cast as competition for an increasingly underused Thorne-Smith.

"When I put on some weight," she confessed to US magazine last month, "the producers commented on it and it just triggered me." The pressure to be thin, and regain Kelley's favour, became all-consuming. "I started undereating, overexercising, pushing myself too hard and brutalizing my immune system. The amount of time I spent thinking about food and being upset about my body was insane."

By real-life standards, Thorne-Smith is stunning. But size in Hollywood is a relative thing. When Kelley and his underlings compared her to the evanescent Flockhart or Liu, she looked like a misfit. To please the producers, she drove herself down to Size 2 exhaustion, went weeks without protein so she could hold her own at awards shows, and even avoided dressings on her miserable salad dinners unless they were certifiably fat-free. Only by good luck did she escape Flockhart's recent fate, quitting the show before her body quit on her.

Flockhart, bony arms, skeletal face and lank hair to the contrary, has denied that she suffers from an eating disorder. Though she once voiced a preference for egg-white omelettes, carefully staged photo-ops have shown her munching lustily on a hot dog at a World Series game like a contented stevedore. When she swooned on the Ally set, it wasn't because she'd been cutting back on the egg whites in her morning omelette, said her publicist. The official explanation was that the entire cast was feeling the effects of co-star Robert Downey Jr.'s recent arrest on drug charges. "I think it's been a stressful and emotional time on set," the spokeswoman volunteered, "because everyone is concerned about Robert."

Yes, concern will take it out of you. But this kind of denial is the rule at David E. Kelley Productions. "It may be that actors are just thinner than other people," the great man himself once told a reporter with a straight face while munching on a repast of salad and Diet Coke.

Coming from a producer whose 42-year-old wife isn't just thinner than other people, but is thinner than most actresses, this is wonderfully rich. Kelley has had a close-up view of an aging star's travails over the past eight years, he has listened to her obsess over fat and worry about the competition from anorexic twentysomethings and fret openly about the catty comments Joan Rivers is going to make if she overflows her tiny Academy Awards gown -- and then he pretends that the vocation of acting can be reduced to fast metabolism.

Kelley, a former lawyer, is not a man who likes to give a straight answer to a serious question, as he showed at a press conference in Los Angeles last year for The Practice. The sullen-looking producer shared the stage with one of his creations who is Flockhart's match for speedy metabolism, Lara Flynn Boyle. Boyle, like Flockhart, like Lauren Holly whom Kelley brought in to rescue his medical series Chicago Hope, can make ordinary people gasp in fear just by moving among them. If the camera adds 10 pounds, the real world quickly subtracts them, and the sight of so little flesh stretched so tightly over so many protruding bones astonished even veterans used to Hollywood's starved look.

The talk turned to an oddly playful scene that Kelley had written into a crossover episode between Ally McBeal and The Practice. Flockhart steps out of an elevator, and is confronted by her body double Boyle. They glare at each other for a moment.

"I was just admiring your outfit," says Boyle bitchily. "Maybe you could eat a cookie."

"Maybe we could share," retorts Flockhart.

With this provocative exchange providing an opening, somebody asked Kelley what he was trying to tell us about the issue of weight. He didn't bite. "The little crossover stunt," he answered reluctantly, "was probably just a comment from us that we do think it's kind of overblown and silly. Weight, size, has never really been an issue that we've considered. . . . And I think that the public and the media sometimes try to seize onto stories and make stories that aren't there."

Kelley knows that the story is there. Even the normally slavish People magazine has challenged the industry's no-problem attitude with a worrying article last year that detailed the self-destructive methods -- from dangerous low-carb diets to a reckless use of diuretics and suppositories -- favoured by actresses pursuing Hollywood's empty ideal.

But mouthing a socially acceptable platitude about weight issues isn't in Kelley's nature. Whenever he's on display, he comes across as someone who wants to be left alone to get on with his writing, where society's real ambiguities and inconsistencies about the human form can be revealed for the powerful forces they are.

However carefully he pretends otherwise in public, Kelley has made body image his creative passion. And it's not just a matter of casting impossibly skinny women as his leads, although he's well aware of the potent feelings that such visibly neurotic characters can arouse. An alarming thinness, Michelle Pfeiffer carried to an exaggerated extreme, may be his prevailing house style, but fat is what really gets him worked up.

It goes back to his earliest Hollywood days in the mid-eighties writing for L.A. Law, where a cold-blooded advocate in a Kelley-scripted episode could make a case for firing a worthy colleague simply because she was obese -- fat's just bad for business, in law as in TV shows. And it's a subject that still turns up with obsessive frequency in any Kelley show.

Look at The Practice, where the only woman who isn't a standard-issue Hollywood X-ray turns out to be the vastly oversized Camryn Manheim. This season, her character has somehow managed to become pregnant, a condition that is treated with incredulity by the rest of the law firm. While Manheim plays the resident unfortunate fatty on The Practice, on Ally the part is doled out to guest actors whose unhappy lives provide the show's law firm with no end of opportunities for litigation and jokes.

Remember the sorry situation where Ally had to sort out two oversized sad sacks who could never know the joy of coupling for lust or even love, who had to make do with each other because that was all fat people could hope for? This was Kelley at his most brutal, showing that society's idealized feelings of bliss are denied to those who lack Ally-like perfection.

It's an us-and-them nastiness that clearly resonates with him, and he has returned to it this year with a vengeance. In Ally's season-opening episode, a plain woman seeks an annulment from a handsome husband who gives her only companionship, not sex. Her physical frumpiness -- in the world beyond Hollywood's charmed circle, she would pass for normal -- is a cause for great mirth in the law firm's office, where she's compared to a hamster and labelled a beast and made to humiliate herself by doing a sexy dance under the clearly ludicrous impression that one of the pitying partners is attracted to her. Kelley's hostility to this woman's ordinariness seems almost pathological, but the cruelty that can be generated by physical appearance clearly fascinates him.

He returned to this sad theme yet again last month, when a motivational speaker (played by skinny Flockhart precursor Florence Henderson), sued for spurring a husband toward divorce, turns on the big-boned abandoned wife. "What you need to do," she says with the patented casual spite of a Kelley character, "is find a fat guy with no teeth, a man with no other choices. He is your demographic. And if you want someone to sue, sue society."

That could be Kelley's motto. Society is to blame. He isn't the one who drives Courtney Thorne-Smith to fear for her sanity or Calista Flockhart to sink into unconsciousness. Kelley doesn't make the rules. He just takes advantage of them.