She’s Made Her Case a Bit Too Well

The 8-year-old girl in the corner of the room has a question for Camryn Manheim. “Um,” she begins, in a shy voice, silencing the crowded bookstore. “Um. Would you be here tonight if you weren’t fat?”

Coming from this cute, innocent stranger, invisible amid the crush of people, the question takes on a new meaning. As in, “Who are you, anyway?”

For the past several months, Manheim has not had to answer such a question. Even to a public that has been paying only cursory attention to the media blitz, she is variously “that fat actress,” “that fat actress who won an Emmy,” “that fat actress on ‘The Practice’ who won an Emmy” and “that fat actress I saw in TV Guide, on ‘David Letterman,’ in People magazine.”

“I think she’s on this sitcom. It’s like ‘Ally McBeal’ for fat people.”

This last remark comes from a patron who has unwittingly wandered into Manheim’s appearance at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park on a recent Friday evening. Manheim is sweeping through the San Francisco Bay Area to promote the May release of her book, “Wake Up, I’m Fat,” a kind of celebrity memoir meets anti-diet manifesto.

In Menlo Park, hundreds of people have colonized the bookstore--mostly women, of all shapes and sizes, though the vast majority are heavy. The scene will be repeated the following evening in Santa Cruz, the crowds raucous and effusive. “I feel like a rock star!” is Manheim’s opening line each night. In her mind, she’s been rehearsing scenes like this for some time, the triumph of the confident, spirited fat girl over the shameful, self-loathing one. To some, it all looks like a celebrity playing an angle, but those who know Manheim say success couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. “I think she realized because of her size, people expected a certain dynamism from her,” says Michael Mayer, the Broadway director, who watched Manheim blossom when the two worked in off-off-Broadway theater in the 1980s. “It was almost an acting job. She created a character for herself, in life.”

Only in the last year, however, has everything in Manheim’s world turned upside down. The awards, the edgy Emmy acceptance speech (“This is for all the fat girls!”), the book--a whirl of fame-inducing activity that suddenly rewrote the rules of her career. They were rules that had once seemed so unforgiving but now offered her everything, and so, far from fighting a stigma, Manheim jumped into bed with it--showing up in countless articles and on just as many talk shows (next stop: “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” on Monday), appearances that perpetuated the same image, over and over: Camryn Manheim, hear her roar.

Everybody got a little piece of this outspoken, thrilled-to-be-here star--from the lesbian magazine Girlfriends, in which Manheim talked about her lapsed heterosexuality (“I really wanted to be a lesbian,” she said, “I would have made a great [expletive] lesbian”) to Conan O’Brien, who was so impressed by Manheim’s ease on the couch that he wondered if she’d gone to some kind of talk-show school. After months and months of it, Manheim was feeling tired, occasionally cranky. At times, she confessed, she feels lost, or like an impostor--tired of playing the character that got her here in the first place.

For a legion of women, this character--pretty, brash, famous, size 22--is not just a hero but also a best friend, a confessor, a redemptive spirit, a symbol of power and beauty. In Manheim’s book, a girl grows up heavy, decides to become an actress, tries for years to lose weight, endures all of the indignities, large and small, of being a fat woman breaking into show business, perseveres and fights, and in fighting starts to like herself, gets acting work in New York theater, and finally, after a decade of this, she lands a prominent role on a series called “The Practice,” executive-produced by David E. Kelley, the hottest dramatist in prime-time television, which leads, two years later, to a defining moment: Camryn Manheim, resplendent in an Emmanuel gown, wins an Emmy Award for her portrayal of the tough-minded attorney Eleanor Frutt, the raw emotion of her acceptance speech softening even the hardened cynics in the Shrine Auditorium crowd.

These days, Manheim’s close friends like to leave her snotty phone messages about how overexposed she’s become, but the friends don’t need her the way the public seems to. At her appearances people line up, ostensibly to get their books signed, a picture snapped, but really they want more. They want Manheim to volunteer for eating-disorder panels, to give size-acceptance talks, to listen to their stories. For these women, Manheim is a projection of a world that doesn’t exist--the world in which overweight and obese women feel emboldened by their bodies and get whatever they want, celebrated as sexy and glamorous. Manheim, in turn, imparts a message that combines fantasy, humor and just a little tough love.

“I don’t want to hear you complain that the Gap doesn’t have your size,” she says, “unless you’re willing to write a letter to them. It’s futile to complain without trying to make some change.”

In Santa Cruz, a teenage girl--pretty, overweight--stands nervously before Manheim, then bursts into spasms of tears. The actress gives the girl a reassuring hug, takes a picture and signs a book (“Raise hell!! Love, Camryn”), but just as quickly, the moment is over, the girl is moved along. There are hundreds more in line, and Manheim has been told by book-tour-savvy friends: “These people, they’ll suck away your energy if you let them.”

Manheim, it turns out, with her quick wit and earthy charm, can make a 10-second encounter feel meaningful. Weeks earlier, at a party thrown for her poolside at the Four Seasons Hotel by In Style magazine, she conveyed a similar authority among a much glitzier, if no less insecure, crowd that included a gaggle of thin prime-time actresses, including Sharon Lawrence, ex of “NYPD Blue,” and Courtney Thorne-Smith and Portia de Rossi from “Ally McBeal.”

In time, the 38-year-old Manheim hopes, the inexorable link between her fame and her girth will disappear; by this logic, if someday she does lose weight, for cosmetic or health reasons, it won’t become a public issue. For now, though, it’s worth noting that Manheim is paid more handsomely as a full-figured celebrity with a story to sell than as an Emmy-winning actress on a hit show. Sensing the salability of her personality, 11 publishers bid for “Wake Up, I’m Fat”; Manheim’s advance started at $75,000 and climbed to $385,000, the winning offer from Random House imprint Broadway Books.

Considering Manheim had yet to win the Emmy and widespread attention, this was an impressive advance. In the speculative market of celebrity book publishing, six- and seven-figure advances are bet against the commercial appeal of the star’s name or story, but it isn’t enough to write the book--in Manheim’s case, a third of the advance was payable only upon completion of the star’s publicity tour. For Manheim’s Hollywood management team, this presented a slight problem. Inspiring as the two-week wall-to-wall book tour may have been, Manheim’s handlers endured it with some trepidation, sensing a backlash just around the corner, a collective groan from the public along the lines of: “OK, we get it, you’re fat.”

Without seeming hypocritical, Manheim is now trying to move beyond an issue--size acceptance--before it brands her. Her fatigue is understandable, if a tad disingenuous. Regardless, once Manheim steps away from the issue, she’s sure to be missed. Overweight celebrities aren’t exactly lining up to proclaim pride in their size; most, like Kathy Bates, who declined to be interviewed for this article, quietly content themselves with character roles, preferring not to politicize their careers.

“From here on in, I can just try to be the beautiful, sexy Camryn Manheim, but everyone’s going to want to talk to me about it,” she says. “I fear that the only way I’m going to get out from underneath the shroud of the torch carrier for fat acceptance is if I have something else I’m speaking out about, or I drop out of sight entirely, and that’s what I plan to do.”

Manheim, though, is already starting to occupy a parallel universe. She has the role of Snow White in a Robert Halmi Sr.-produced miniseries, “The 10th Kingdom,” which airs on NBC this February. Also on deck is a weight-blind part as a best friend in “What Planet Are You From?,” a comedy directed by Mike Nichols and starring Garry Shandling and Annette Bening. More intriguing still are the roles that now appear on Manheim’s radar screen. She read, for instance, for the part of a half-human, half-cat character in a movie called “Monkey Bone,” a role that went to the more conventionally shapely Rose McGowan.

Manheim, in other words, no longer has to settle for the “get-me-a-fat-actress” roles, having said “no” recently to portraying Mama Cass and Kate Smith in separate movies of the week. Fashion spreads in Mode and Self magazines have accentuated her beauty and sexuality, qualities that the last big-girl-to-make-it-big, Roseanne, never projected.

“There are a lot of older, thin actresses who don’t have the viability today to play romantic leads,” says Peg Donegan, one of Manheim’s managers. “I think she’s going to get the chance, and the test will be whether it’s successful.”

*

Manheim doesn’t set up lunch interviews anymore because she discovered that reporters inevitably homed in on what she was eating. And so it is 4 p.m. Saturday, several hours before her reading at the Book Shop in downtown Santa Cruz, and the interview is conducted on the patio of a restaurant that is closed until dinner.

“One thing I want to talk to you about, because I think this is really important, is the Self magazine article I did when I was supposed to be on the cover and they put me to the back of the magazine,” she says.

The photo shoot that Manheim thought would result in a Self cover spread included shots of her at the beach--Camryn wrapped in a towel, naked underneath. Camryn on a cliff, again wrapped in a towel, hair dripping wet, the ocean behind her. In the end, two photos and an accompanying story ran on Page 209 of the May issue, while a swimsuit model appeared on the cover, next to the headline: “Slimmer by Summer: Burn fat, tighten your butt fast!”

In a phone interview, Self editor Rochelle Udell says Manheim misunderstood if she thought she’d been promised the cover. But asked if a person of Manheim’s size makes for a contradictory image in a magazine that promotes healthy living, Udell responded delicately: “There is the question, ‘Is she as healthy as she needs to be for herself?’ Certainly her mind is there, her values are there. Being accepted for who you are is very important.”

Manheim, meanwhile, sees the magazine’s editorial decision in more blanket terms. Self, she declares, blew an opportunity to be “the first mainstream periodical to feature a beautiful woman regardless of size.”

Whether or not this is true, it does highlight a prickly issue: Can America regard a 5-foot-10, 250-plus-pound actress as sexy and beautiful? And, given the health risks associated with weight gain and obesity, should they?

“I fight the demons of, ‘Am I really beautiful, or am I just pretending to be beautiful, or am I trying to convince you that I’m beautiful?’ ” Manheim concedes. “Often I really do feel beautiful, and then sometimes I feel really fat and ugly. . . . For the most part I think we don’t think that fat people are beautiful, and even the fat people don’t think they’re beautiful, and it’s a huge brick wall that I keep coming up against, even in my own psyche. So I go out there and [say], ‘Fat’s beautiful,’ because I have to, I have no other choice. I can’t be wishy-washy on this subject.”

Seen from a clinical distance--that is to say, stripped of her infectious personality and her celebrity--Manheim’s size is unglamorous; the older she gets, the more at risk she is for heart disease, diabetes and other ailments. Manheim, for her part, greets this subject somewhere between defiance and denial.

“I suppose at some point there is a direct correlation between [size] and problematic health issues, but that’s not the case with me,” she says. “I am incredibly fit, I’m incredibly strong, and I’m incredibly healthy. . . . I don’t see, and neither do my doctors, that my weight is hazardous to my heart or blood pressure.”

Beyond the health issue, there is the more obvious one: Can Camryn Manheim puncture the thin-is-beautiful standard?

On the one hand, interest in her personal life (she doesn’t deny well-traveled rumors of a relationship with actor Gregory Hines) suggests that the public is already thinking of her as a love interest. But spinning Manheim as a romantic lead still seems a tall order, particularly in an industry that gives leading-lady roles to skeletal women, their chest bones visibly protruding.

It’s a look summed up well by cultural critic and author Camille Paglia (“Sexual Personae”). In her column on last year’s Academy Awards for the online magazine Salon, Paglia, known for her outspoken views on beauty icons, gazed upon an evening of ultra-thin stars--including Helen Hunt and Gwyneth Paltrow--and proclaimed: “I’m so tired of that generic kind of pallid, decorous WASP anemia.”

The anemic look hit a discordant note when “Ally McBeal” star Calista Flockhart stepped out of her limousine at last year’s Emmy Awards wearing a backless dress and touched off a nationwide debate on whether she had an eating disorder. Seven months later, sitting down for an interview with Connie Chung on the ABC newsmagazine “20/20,” Flockhart denied she has an eating disorder, adding of the scrutiny: “People don’t walk up to people who are overweight and say, ‘You know, I’m really, really concerned. And I’m really worried about you. You’re too fat.’ ”

Paglia, for one, doesn’t think it’s unfair to wonder aloud about Flockhart’s health.

“She looks diseased,” she says. “She keeps on carrying on about how ‘I’m fine’ and ‘I have no eating disorder,’ but it is a disorder if you’re that thin and you choose a dress that is backless.”

Still, if Flockhart is to be held up as a symbol of the beauty ideal run amok, then room should be made for many others like her in prime time and in movies, where the “glammed-out” look, as one casting executive puts it, pervades.

“Women here are a kind of skinny that I never saw in New York,” says Marcia Shulman, senior vice president of talent and casting at 20th Century Fox Television. “Someone will get hired for a show, they look perfectly fine, and over the course of the year they get thinner and thinner. I don’t know what it is. . . . For every Camryn Manheim, there’s 10 women starving themselves.”

Paglia, meanwhile, says Manheim’s appeal is a challenge to today’s culture because, in essence, she represents an image from another era.

“She reminds me of the great Wagnerian figures. She’s quite right to make people focus on Rubens. The Rubensian women are quite unique, because they’re not just heavy, they’re energetic, they’re vivacious, they have this humor and vitality. That’s where Camryn Manheim is an advance over Roseanne.”

*

Manheim has already done two nude scenes. The first came in “The Road to Wellville,” the 1994 film about health faddist John Harvey Kellogg. The second came in “Fool’s Gold,” a film that, unless it lands domestic distribution, few will see. But in first-time writer-director Jeff Janger’s dark comedy, shown at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Manheim appears topless in bed with co-star Billy Gallo, her first official on-screen sex scene.

“In ‘The Road to Wellville,’ I had an orgasm on my bicycle, so [“Fool’s Gold”] wasn’t my first orgasm,” she says, laughing. “It was my first sex scene with another person.”

Manheim has yet to get a sex scene on “The Practice,” but she has made inroads for her character. Last season, Eleanor fell in love with a chiropractor, and the three-episode relationship included several on-camera kisses, rare in prime time for an actress of Manheim’s size.

Eleanor, says Jeffrey Kramer, co-executive producer of “The Practice,” wasn’t created with Manheim in mind. In fact, Manheim had to pay her own way from New York to Los Angeles to meet with the show’s creator and executive producer, David E. Kelley, and agonized about whether it was worth spending the money on a plane ticket.

Though it introduced her to a nationwide audience, “The Practice” did not pluck Manheim from self-loathing obscurity.

Self-loathing obscurity had come and gone before then. It began roughly around the time Manheim was an adolescent growing up in Long Beach, continued into her years as a student at Cabrillo College in Aptos, Calif., and UC Santa Cruz and followed her to New York, where Manheim was a drama student at NYU, slotted into roles as old women and sometimes men. Striving for a career in which she might someday play an ingenue, Manheim took speed to lose weight, dropped 80 pounds, then gained it back. After graduate school, she went out for parts that both humiliated and galvanized her to change the rules for aspiring fat actresses. (“Josie is 28,” was the description of a character she once read for. “She is so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak--5-feet-11 in her stockings and weighs around 180.”)

“What we articulated more than anything was our desire to be in control of the work that we did and not have to face typecasting,” says Broadway director Mayer, who first met Manheim when he directed her in an early Tony Kushner play, “Hydrotaphia,” a five-act farce about a 17th century English writer.

In the ensuing years, Mayer, an up-and-comer himself, would direct Manheim in off-off-Broadway productions of Caryl Churchill’s “Cloud 9,” Christopher Durang’s “Baby With the Bathwater” and an off-Broadway run of Craig Lucas’ “Missing Persons,” for which Manheim won an Obie Award.

Mayer also became a close friend, getting to know both the Manheim who cried herself to sleep and the one who eventually made a willful decision to take charge of her life, to become the brash, gregarious figure she is today.

In 1994, Manheim channeled this energy into the one-woman show “Wake Up, I’m Fat.”

The title refers to the day she was shopping for a dress with her mother, who kept bringing Manheim size 16s when she knew her daughter was larger. “Mom, wake up, I’m fat!” Manheim finally yelled, right there in the middle of the plus-size section at Bloomingdale’s.

The show earned Manheim a trip to the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., in 1996, where she performed “Wake Up, I’m Fat” and drew interest from television executives, including an offer from Fox to develop a half-hour situation comedy.

“I was kind of sickened by the possibility that I was going to do it and that I was going to ruin my career,” she says.

“I knew instinctively that if I did the half-hour, I would be buried in the fat, funny girl graveyard,” she says.

*

One of the things a lot of people ask Manheim these days is: “What happens if you lose weight?”

The question presumes that her body is her performance--that by selling herself as a self-actualized fat person, she’ll have some explaining to do if she ever drops weight.

Manheim, not surprisingly, has an answer to that: “I’m not here to proclaim I love my body and I love being fat, I’m just here to say I love being myself. But if I choose to lose weight or find a way to lose weight that suits me, and doesn’t make me feel deprived or angry or hostile, then I will do that. But you’ll never catch me telling somebody about the pill I’m taking or the exercise routine I’m on, unless they inquire.”

Manheim, in other words, vows never to sell salvation through weight loss. It’s a crowded industry, anyway, a neat little empire-building realm for show-biz types ranging from Richard Simmons to Oprah Winfrey. In her author’s note to “Wake Up, I’m Fat,” Manheim writes: “This book . . . is not the whiny lamentation of a girl who was never asked to dance. . . . It is a celebration of ass-kicking. It is my enthusiastic rejection of the beauty myth and a call to arms in the fight for self-acceptance. This is my journey, from victim to victor.”

Can it really be that simple? Well, no, but America likes nothing so much as a winner, and lately Camryn Manheim is winning. For her, it’s a kind of ultimate revenge, a world in which agents, producers and casting directors are barking desperately into phones: “Are there any more Camryn Manheim types out there?”