GETTING A MOVE ON : ‘Female, Fertile and Frustrated,’ Diana Jordan Finally Has Something to Cheer About

A one-time brown-haired, pimply faced little girl who was absolutely crestfallen when she didn’t make high school cheerleader, Diana Jordan seems to have almost gotten over it.

Getting a series with CBS, having your first book about to be published and buying your first home can ease that sort of pain.

“I never got to be a cheerleader or buy a Barbie bridal dress,” said the comedian, 43, revealing another haunting memory. “I wanted to be a cheerleader so bad, but I forgot to do the flip during my tryout. I was crushed. I still think about that.”

But what she prefers to think about these days is her upcoming CBS gig.

“We’ve signed a development deal with CBS for our own series and are in meetings with producers now,” said Jordan, who would like to be a producer one day.

Though thrilled at the series’ prospects, Jordan was reluctant to give full details of the show until she and her management company sign a producer. CBS was also mum, citing a policy of not discussing development deals.

“Hollywood stuff,” Jordan explained. “You know what I mean.”

The deal took root when network executives visited the Ice House in Pasadena recently to see Jordan’s show, “Female, Fertile and Frustrated,” which is geared to an all-female audience and had been running every Monday since March. Men are allowed, but the theme is very pro-women.

“That’s the character they want to drop into the series,” she said during lunch last week at a Mexican restaurant a few blocks from her then-home in Burbank. “I play a strong woman’s point of view.”

The midseason replacement series is scheduled to air in March and features a character who reflects what Jordan talks about in her 90-minute act, which she will be performing for a month of Mondays at the Irvine Improv through November.

But if she is purposely vague about her role in the sitcom, she is eager to point out what her character isn’t .

“I’ve been approached about four times to be in a trailer park. No! No! We’re going to do a woman of the ‘90s role,” she insisted in the low and raspy voice that she says is a family tradition. (“It’s like a spoon caught in a garbage disposal. That’s what a guy said to me once.”)

“This is my dream. I’ve been in entertainment since I was 19--a singer for 10 (years), a writer for four and a comedian for 10. It’s all incorporated into the act.”

Jordan’s show business life began when she quit studying psychology at the University of Oklahoma in 1970 to sing country music for five years before evolving into pop. Jordan (whose mother was a singer with Lawrence Welk) had to give up country music “when I couldn’t get my hair big enough any more.”

But the more she sang, the more she started working little asides into her act and found she was getting more response to her humor than to her singing.

So the native of Midwest City, Okla., mixed everything together in January and came up with “Female, Fertile and Frustrated,” which also includes a bit of Tina Turner dancing. She traveled with it before taking it to the Ice House, and continued to do some touring around that gig.

“I wanted to do a one-woman show, something different than just stand-up. It’s an hour and a half, sometimes two hours,” Jordan said, unaware of the turning heads when she broke into song during lunch. “I wanted something that would show my acting skills.”

Until a couple years ago, Jordan traveled about 30 weeks a year, but she decided that spending that much time away from Los Angeles wasn’t the road to success.

“This year, I stayed home more to make what’s happening now happen. You can’t make it happen in Mobile, Ala.,” said Jordan, who peppered the lunchtime conversation with salty language and ended up smoking most of the six cigarettes she goes through in a day. (But she’s quitting Jan. 1, she insisted.)

Also, she added, living out of a suitcase was getting old and taking a toll on her health.

“I had the flu five times one year. But that’s the way you build your act. Singers can use tapes to see if they’re on key. A comic needs an audience. When I started, I had five jokes. And three of them didn’t work.

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“When you’re a comic, you have to come through. Let me tell you, you don’t feel funny half the time. After my mother died (four years ago), I was on stage four days later and kept thinking about her, about the moment she died. But the audience didn’t know how I was feeling. You have to do your show.”

Jordan might have been able to hide her feelings, but Playboy readers have seen her hiding little else.

She has twice posed topless for the magazine. On a wall in her old apartment is the layout from her June, 1991, session, which shows her reclining on a couch, wearing not much more than a smile, high heels and stockings. For a while, though, that session was in jeopardy.

“Two months before the Playboy shoot, my doctor found a lump in my breast the size of a golf ball,” said Jordan, who showed up for this interview in form-fitting blue jeans and a white blouse that at times exposed bare midriff. “I just knew I was going to lose that breast. I was thinking this may be the last time I ever see my breasts together again.”

After being treated by a specialist in Beverly Hills, the lump, which turned out to be benign, disappeared. She tells the whole story now to underscore how important it is for women to have mammograms and perform self-exams.

“Women don’t want to go because they don’t want to know. That’s dangerous,” she said.

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She told interviewers at the time that she did the Playboy shoot to show that life for women doesn’t end at 40, but in her act she joked that she had a more practical reason: “Who’d want me to pose nude five years from now? National Geographic?’

“I’m not embarrassed to say I did it,” she says now.

Though Jordan doesn’t see herself as a spokeswoman, she does think she has a role as someone who can empower women. She constantly encourages women to take control of their lives and not depend on men.

“Women have to know they can live by themselves and be fine. Men are icing on the cake of life.”

Jordan says she is not anti-male or anti-relationship, even though two months ago she broke up with her boyfriend of three years, despite wedding plans.

“I think you have to accept men on their terms or become a lesbian nun, which I have considered,” she said. “Men want to be the end-all, be-all.”

To address that, Jordan has written a book of advice, due to be published by Avon in May.

“Wife’s Little Instruction Book,” co-written with Paul Seaburn of Houston, is a play on “Life’s Little Instruction Book,” H. Jackson Brown Jr.’s best-selling compendium of sayings and advice to his college-bound son.

“I read that and thought, ‘Why not something for mother to daughter?’ I flew to Houston and wrote it in five days.”

She also plans to turn “Female, Forty and Frustrated,” which the Improv is billing as an alternative for Monday Night Football widows, into a book.

At last week’s interview, Jordan, who in 1991 was one of five finalists for top female comedian at the American Comedy Awards, was a tad frazzled after being up most of the night before when a fire broke out in an apartment at her complex. She had also been trying unsuccessfully to get the keys to the new condo she just bought a block from CBS’ Studio City lot.

Leaving her $1,350-a-month Burbank apartment for new digs with a canopy bed and Jacuzzi bath has the comedian in a good mood.

“It’s such a woman’s place--pastels all over.”

Jordan, who moved to Los Angeles in 1978, is particularly stoked about negotiating $24,000 worth of furniture from the sellers for just $3,500. Now, she said, she can donate her old furniture to the Red Cross and her former beau (honest). Also to help the Red Cross, Jordan gave up her fee at Monday night’s show to help fire victims.

Part of the comic’s success can be linked to her appreciation of her fans.

Before her final Monday show at the Ice House in October, management overbooked the room and was going to turn away about 200 fans because the club wasn’t budgeted for a second show.

“You can’t do that,” said Jordan, who ended up doing a second show for free. “They are your fans. One woman had driven 400 miles.”

Though her show is geared toward a female audience, men are allowed in. But the female fans are the ones who empower Jordan.

“The most enjoyable thing, and this makes me feel good, is even though my show is racy--truthful, but racy--people come up to me and say, ‘You know, I thought I was the only one going through this.’ ”

Woman’s Work Is Never Done

At first blush, one could mistake Diana Jordan’s one-woman show as an exercise in a male-bashing. Jordan, however, prefers to think she’s merely pointing out idiosyncrasies of the male species. For instance:

* If Moses had been a woman, the desert trek wouldn’t have lasted 40 years because she would’ve stopped for directions.

* If women ran the CIA, they would be able to get more out of someone in five minutes in the ladies room than all the men in the CIA ever did.

* Her ex-fiance lost big points while shopping for a ring when he suggested that diamonds clashed with her skin tone but the cubic zirconia looked marvelous.