Striking a Delicate Balance Between Exercise, Diet

People ask if I get nervous interviewing celebrities. I do--because I’m a klutz. So it was just as well that I was going to interview Edward Albee over the phone. I didn’t want anything to go wrong, not with this three-time Pulitzer Prize-packing playwright. That’s what I was thinking while adjusting my phone headset and eating oatmeal, awaiting his call. That’s probably why, when he did ring up from his home in Manhattan, the microphone on my headset dipped right into the porridge.

Albee said he could hear me fine--”Things fall into oatmeal,” he allowed--and went on to say that he’s been so “damn busy” that I should remind him what we were going to talk about. Albee, 70, won his most recent Pulitzer for “Three Tall Women” (1994). (The other two were for “A Delicate Balance,” 1966, and “Seascape,” 1975.) Last year he was traveling a lot for a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

I reminded him that the topic at hand was . . .

Question: Fitness.

Answer: Well, I do take pretty good care of myself. Let’s see, some things--I stopped smoking about 25 years ago.

Q: How’d you do that?

A: Well, you see, if you’re compulsive, you have to do things completely. You have to give it up absolutely and you have to do this kind of self-psychoanalysis where you say, “How can I possibly want a cigarette? I don’t smoke.” And it works. I can’t drink because I have adult onset diabetes. I used to drink like everybody else did. I don’t do that anymore.

Q: What do you do for exercise?

A: I’ve always played tennis, swum and things like that, but I started going to the gym rather seriously, oh, I guess about 15 or 20 years ago--lifting weights and doing calisthenics and aerobics, four days a week. Anyhow, that’s what I do. There’s two reasons for it. I mean, health is one. Also, vanity is another. And getting to the age that I am with arthritis and all the rest, I take all sorts of nonprescription things.

Q: I assume you’re working out at a gym, not at home.

A: Well, yeah. I travel so much that I go to gyms all over the country. That’s why I keep my membership with the YMCA in New York because I can use the Y’s all over the country.

Q: What do you eat?

A: Well, being diabetic, of course I don’t eat any sugar that I can possibly avoid. I mean, there’s sugar in everything. There’s sugar in skim milk, naturally, but I don’t use sugar. I try to avoid it as much as I possibly can.

Q: Do you take insulin?

A: No. Fortunately, I don’t have to. Just two pills a day. And following a diet sensibly.

Q: What would be the ideal menu for you throughout the day?

A: Breakfast, well, I can’t resist coffee, but I do half caf and half decaf and with Equal, of course, and skim milk. And I’ll have a whole variety of dry cereals. Maybe I’ll have a bagel in the middle of the morning and usually fat-free cottage cheese for lunch, sometimes with fruit in it.

Q: You weigh how much?

A: Oh, 160.

Q: How tall are you?

A: About 5-10.

Q: Do you cook?

A: Oh, sure. Yeah, I had a great teacher. It was called poverty.

Q: Was that when you were delivering telegrams in New York City? (1955-58)

A: Oh, sure. Yeah, of course. Do you think anybody gets rich delivering telegrams? I was talking to Joe Heller the other night--he used to deliver telegrams too. And Henry Miller used to deliver them too. He worked for another telegraph company.

Q: So is it true that you “liberated” a typewriter from Western Union to write your first play--”The Zoo Story” (1958)?

A: I did, indeed, yeah.

Q: Still have it?

A: No. I think it broke.

Q: I don’t want to forget dinner.

A: Dinner, you know, you try to have vegetables, salads and chicken or fish that’s without much

fat. Especially when I’m out in [his home on] Montauk in the summer near the ocean with fresh fish, it’s wonderful.

Q: That’s where I picture you at your happiest. In Montauk.

A: That may be where I’m happiest. I think it is, yeah. I love to be by the ocean, walk by the ocean and look at it and hear it.

Q: This is totally off the subject, but when I heard you lecture at the Huntington Library in 1996, you said--”I was adopted when I was 1 week. I guess you’d call it precipitous termination of breast-feeding.” Do you recall saying that?

A: That’s rather funny. I like that.

Q: Me too. Can I have it?

A: Yeah, sure. Keep it. What a funny quote. I must have been having a good evening. You get on a roll sometimes. Nothing to be done about it.

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* Guest Workout runs Mondays in Health.