MENOPAUSE: CINDERELLA HITS MENOPAUSE
Lynda invited us to gather at her Japanese-style fantasy beach house. At the door each woman was invited to leave her shoes on a shelf and choose a kimono. I kept looking for a gray hair in the crowdscarcely a one among this mostly blond, mid-fortyish group. The guests draped themselves over big black cushions on tansu boxes in the screening room. It was reminiscent of slumber parties in junior high school, when girls played dress-up and talked about taboo subjects like sex. But now we were grownups; and the very fact these prominent women had showed up, in this subculture, was an act of bravery.
"I invited Glenn Close to come," said one of the women. "I thought she was going to faint dead away."
I began by asking those present to introduce themselves, give their age, and say why they had comewhat meaning did menopause have for them? The wife of one of the town's top studio executives confessed she usually shunned "negative subjects," but her mother was dead and she had no one else to consult. A woman who heads her own company described herself as an information junkie. "My gynecologist tells me that I'm not going through the Change at all, but I know my body, and I feel different over the past year. I've had occasional night sweats. I used to think I had a virus."
Lisa Specht, a lawyer who appears as the legal correspondent on ABC-TV's Home Show, has no children and said she didn't think she had to worry about menopause, at least until she was fifty-five or something. "I haven't had any symptoms yet, except that my skin has been oily," she assured herself.
The outspoken Joanna Poitier broke the ice. She was willing to admit she might be going through menopause, although her primary concern was letting go of her two daughters, now eighteen and twenty. "I keep waking up in the middle of the night, changing my nightgown. I went to the gynecologist, and she told me that I was still moist. She said I probably won't go into menopause for another two years. I have night sweats. I tried it without the duvet and the nightgown, and I still have night sweats. I have day sweats, too! The back of my neck is damp all day long."
The next speaker was immediately recognizable. Lesley Ann Warren, the movie actress we all remember from her ethereal portrayal of Cinderella in the TV musical, is even more beautiful today. Her features are still delicate, her body is still slim and supple, and reddish brown hair ripples over her shoulders. More appealing than all that are the quickened intelligence and candor that she has earned over forty years and brought to her more recent roles in the films Victor/Victoria and Choose Me. But Lesley Ann makes her living here in Cinderella Land, where girls are never supposed to grow up. Hollywood ruthlessly cuts the finest actresses once they reach fortyyes, even Meryl! Studio executives will callously describe a thirty-eight-year-old actress who is still gorgeous as "over the hill" or "She's an old hag." As an actress in that workplace, Lesley Ann Warren is torn between her liberated feminist beliefs and the devastating reality that every day her worth is judged by her age and her looks.
Divorced from Jon Peters, former co-head of the former Columbia Studios, with whom she had a son, Lesley Ann has been single for some time. She now has a new love. It was he who found a photocopy of my Vanity Fair article lying around. Lesley Ann wanted to educate herself on the subject before it happened so she could deal with it homeopathically and herbally, as she does everything else. She had forgotten to hide the evidence.
"You know, I read this article," he said casually one night.
Ohmigod, he's found me out! was the actress's first thought. "I was really scared he would think I was menopausal. I felt ashamed." But he surprised her.
"I'm glad I read it. I feel like any man who's in a relationship with a woman dealing with this must be very loving, very aware, and very present," he said.
Lesley Ann counted her new love among an ultramicroscopic subspecies of the male genus, at least as they are bred by the movie business. "In all the rest of my experience, men are so staggeringly uneducated in this area, it's deadly for us," she told the group. "Most men I know run from the word menopause."
"We're afraid to educate the men, that's our problem," amended Joanna. "I have never been afraid to say how old I am. I've never had surgery or collagen or anything like that. And I don't feel any less terrific because I'm menopausal. Whoever you are with, they should experience the whole thing that you're experiencing." Joanna added vociferously, "I take no aspirin, no Tylenol; if I have a headache, I live through it. I don't believe in pills. I know that I will not take hormones, because to me it's unnatural."
The word holistic was almost a fetish in this group. Used indiscriminately, it might mean one who never uses Tylenol, or one who has stopped taking drugs and alcohol, or one who consults Chinese medical doctors and herbalists but never a member of the American Medical Association. A bouncy talent agent with a blond boy-cut admitted she was taking hormones; admitted, because, like so many women, her decision was tinged with guilt. "I knew something was up when I went to a restaurant and had to ask the waiter for two menusone to see what I was ordering and the other to fan myself."
Knowing laughter rippled through the group. We decided that if we met again we would call ourselves The Fan Club.
The agent revealed a more intimate reason for her decision. "One night when my husband and I were having sex, it felt like I was a virgin. I said, 'Something is wrong here.' My gynecologist took a blood test and told me it was the Change of Life." She emphasized that she was on a very low dose of hormone replacement therapy and that she was happy with the results.
Joanna Poitier broke in with a question on everybody's mind. "Is it okay to go through the rest of life without estrogen?"
Dr. Allen said there was no definitive answer. "When we are in this part of our lives, we have to make decisions about what it is that we want. Beyond the symptomatic discomforts, there are also medical issues that bear on our long-term healthosteoporosis, heart disease, breast and uterine cancer." Dr. Allen's advice was to gather as much information as possible, including that concerning one's own family history, to find out if there is a medical reason to take hormone replacement therapy, and then make a decision.
"But we don't have to make a decision for life. We make a decision for three months, and then we make a decision again," she added, sowing visible relief in some of the tense faces. Others were impatient with this answer. They had come looking for a risk-free, all-natural curative.
Mary Miccuci introduced herself as a "stress queen." A tall, Cher-like streak of a woman who started her own catering business, Along Came Mary, she dashes around Hollywood putting on spreads for the stars. Her signs of menopause began with palpitations; she thought she was having a heart attack. "The quality of my life is changingall of our lives are changing. I want information!" she said angrily, pitching forward to lean her elbows on her knees. "I want to go through this process as quickly as possible. I'm on a holistic journey to deal with it. Are there the right herbs to take care of the silent killersheart disease and osteoporosis?"
Surely what they all wanted to hear from me and Dr. Allen was that some magic regimen yoga and yogurt, or yams and ginseng and green leafy vegetableswould allow them to remain as middle-aged women exactly as they had been: youthful wives, sexually appealing and responsive lovers, efficient career builders. They were not yet ready to consider a new self-definition. And until one is ready, the information that is available is not much use.
"I think that we have all been too passive about what the outcome of our lives should be," Mary continued huffily. "Because I tell you, the way I felt for a year was pretty shitty. I have a five-and-a-half-year-old little girl, and I want to be so together for this kid. This menopause stuff, I'll be goddamned if I'll let it get in my way."
Mary's hostility toward the whole subject was revelatory. She had become used to managing her life like a man, according to goals, timetables, balance sheets. She is a businesswoman accustomed to efficiency; in fact, she had to leave early to cater a screening party for Bette Midler's latest film. But now, at the peak of her productivity, she is feeling violated by this reassertion of her body's biologic identity. There is nothing efficient about "this menopause stuff."
Aloma Ichinose, a photographer equally active in her career, had taken the opposite approach. "I'm going through the Change right now. I feel great about it. But at first it was a nightmare. I was raised by a man so none of this was ever talked about." Allowing time for trial and error, Aloma had made several different decisions over the previous year. When urine and blood tests confirmed that she was in menopause, her doctor put her on Premarin. To her, it felt like doing drugs. "I did the Premarin for six months. I felt wonderful, and all my symptomsthe disrupted sleep, the for-getfulnesswent away." She added defensively, "I'm not into drugs. I haven't had a drink in years. But I was really worried about bone loss. I'm active, I'm a photographer, I need my strength." Eventually the fear and guilt over taking hormones got to her, and after the six months she stopped. "And all the symptoms returned," she admitted. "I just didn't feel well, and so I'm back on it again and I feel good."
An art gallery owner pressed the issue of age prevention. "How long do you take this? Will it prolong our youth? We are young in our forties, where people of other generations weren't. I'm forty-seven years old, but I don't think that I am forty-seven in numbers. I have the same energy as always."
Joanna, whose blond tendrils and soft curves help her to maintain the jolly all-American-girl good looks of a perpetual cheerleader, is able to maintain the illusion of her inner eye: "I still feel like I'm twenty-eight. I wear my hair the same way, I'm twenty-eight years old."
Another woman in the room muttered, "But you're not. And they know you're not."
It cut like a flesh wound into the self-image of every woman there. They were all attractive, and that statement didn't even need the qualifying prefix still. External beauty wasn't the real problem. It was the dysynchrony between their idealized inner imagesthe women they were at their nubile peaksand blanks where the faces and bodies and spirits of their future selves would have to be filled in, sooner or later. As vanguard baby boomers they agreed, they belonged to the most pampered, narcissistic and obstinately adolescent generation in American history. "We have delayed duty, responsibility and commitment," wrote a spokeswoman for their generation, Lynn Smith, in the Los Angeles Times. "We have dieted, jogged, and exercised so much, we look and actually think we are five to ten years younger than we are."
The most telling reaction of all came from a sleek-looking South African woman who had been mute all night. Before I left, she took me aside and asked the quintessential Southern California question:
"Tell me, what can I do so I don't have to have this?"
*10\221\2*
Womens health