Are These Dianetics Low Carb?

New York Times/August 19, 2005
By Campbell Robertson

Kirstie Alley was hungry.

"Can I have something to eat?" she called out to some unseen part of her room at the Pierre yesterday afternoon. "Is all that I ate today, that sunshine sandwich? That's why I'm hungry."

Ms. Alley, who has lost "50 plus" pounds in the past few months on a JENNY CRAIG diet, was in New York to film a Jenny Craig commercial and to speak to a gathering of the company's clients and employees in the Pierre's ballroom.

Ms. Alley is smaller by a significant degree than she was on "Fat Actress" and in the various photos of her engulfing hamburgers in her car, though she still sits, perhaps unconsciously, with her arms crossed over her waist.

"The paparazzi were camped out at my house," she said, adding, with a laugh, that now that she's lost weight the photographers have left her alone.

After picking up a little tray of Jenny Craig turkey, mashed potatoes and green beans, Ms. Alley moved from the chair to the floor and put the tray on the coffee table.

On another table nearby sat an enormous cage housing PINOCCHIO, a timid Egyptian spiny mouse that she recently bought for her children to add to their menagerie of rabbits, chinchillas, cats, lizards and dogs (and one lemur).

But the subject for now is weight, or diminishing amounts thereof.

"I didn't really know how really fat I was until I saw my show," she said. "Because rag magazines alter photographs and stuff."

So is the show still going on?

"In my heart I think it's not," she said. "I'd always said it doesn't matter if I'm fat." She paused. "But now that I'm not fat, I'm like, eww."

She talked freely and often self-deprecatingly about her life as a fat actress. "My view of myself was my face, my cleavage and my shoes. But when you look at the whole, in a picture or on a show, you go, 'Oh my God!' "

And about her love life, which has been nonexistent for the past five years. "So I had this incredibly stupid viewpoint," she said, "I wanted a guy that's really in love with me, just me. So if somebody can see past that to see me like this, then that's the guy for me. Then about a year ago I went, 'How crazy is that?' "

And about her desire to be the host of a radio show neither political nor shock jock-y, but funny and positive: "the anti-HOWARD STERN," as she described it.

As the interview wrapped up, we thought we would be remiss if we didn't bring up the flak TOM CRUISE has recently been getting, since Ms. Alley travels in circles with KELLY PRESTON and JOHN TRAVOLTA and other Hollywood Scientologists.

"I don't think he's getting flak," she said. "I have seen as much of the press as any other person, and he's not getting flak. He has brought up a very controversial subject and rightfully so."

And there it was. Psychiatrists and drug companies. Over half an hour. As if a switch had been thrown.

"You're talking about a group of evil, evil people who have got evil tools that they're using, who are selling in the guise of lovely little cartoon characters on TV," she said, referring to the little happy-faced Zoloft blobs. "Underneath that is at best ignorance and at worst really something pretty evil."

At one of the few pauses we asked: Have you ever been in therapy?

"Are you kidding? No. I've had these viewpoints my whole life," she said. "I had personal experience in my life of meeting psychologists and psychiatrists, and they're lunatics."

Along with MATT LAUER, we don't know, we don't understand. So we sat there quietly and learned about the billion-dollar psychotropic drug industry, the rate of suicide among psychiatrists, the recent growth in electroshock therapy and the role of drugs in school shootings.

"It's a legitimate war," Ms. Alley said. "It is a war. And it is controversial because you're either in or you're out. If you think it's good to give kids heroin, Prozac - I mean, heroin, cocaine, crack - then you belong in the group that likes Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft, all these. This is the psych-think."

"Over here," she said, referring to the Scientology position, "is, I think, not a religious issue but a humanitarian issue."

Eventually, we meekly brought up Jenny Craig again and the interview came to a close.

Pinocchio poked his nose out of his little shelter and watched as Ms. Alley walked us to the door, where a room service tray was sitting.

"Ooh, cherries! My favorite," she said, reaching into a little bowl. "Want one?"