Brittany Murphy

I liked Brittany Murphy. Her father was a mobster. She could look ugly. She had a smart mouth. When David Letterman asked her what she thought of her X Ashton Kutchner hooking up with Demi Moore, she famously replied, “Well, he loves her, so age doesn't matter, and she loves him, so size doesn't matter.”

The pressures on that kind of a life are enormous. I participated in it in a very small way in my late teens when I went back to New York, city of my birth, and modeled for seven months. I looked like a hybrid of Anouk Aimee and Sophia Lauren, a look that today would be very commercial, but Gia Carangi had not yet broken the ethnicity barrier. Nobody would shoot me for catalogs so I ended up relegated to the slut shots, liquor, cigarettes, Maidenform bras. I was never good enough even when I got picked – art directors would circle me where I stood, product in hand, lips frozen in smile, “Yeah, yeah, the face looks good – but what are we going to do about those thighs?” Understand that I am 5’10” and in those days – thanks to a diet of Dexedrine and Goetze’s caramel creams – I weighed about 120 pounds. My thighs were the circumference of a broom. But they were too fat.

I got taken out to dinner a lot by mid-level executive types which, of course, necessitated purging in a lot of expensive restaurant bathrooms. I slept with a lot of guys and some women. A few of the people I slept with had career plans for me – and in fact the girls who eventually made it big all had managers, other people who had taken on the burden of ambition and choice so the girls were free to be merely beautiful. Sometimes these were boyfriends or husbands, often these were parents. You read pejorative things about these Svengali types in People magazine or TMZ.com, but think about it: it’s an equitable trade.

My eye was on the prize. I was saving up money to bicycle around Great Britain for a year – to see the cliff Gabriel Oakes’ sheep threw themselves off and the assembly room where Elizabeth Bennett first danced with Darcy.

When I'd saved up enough money, I took it and ran.

But then I’ve never had any particular desire to be in the spotlight. Attention, if it’s not a means to an end, makes me very nervous. In this regard I’m somewhat atypical for someone with my degree of early childhood dysfunctionality. Most beautiful girls raised without fathers – like Brittany Murphy – crave attention, it completes them in some way.

Personally I think women in their thirties are way more beautiful than girls in their twenties. But that’s not the Hollywood way of looking at it. Murphy was 32. Though a gifted performer, she hadn’t really built a body of work to sustain her actress cred as she grew older. I imagine she was really, really unhappy. I imagine she was starving herself and gobbling lots of prescription painkillers. They do kill the pain.

My favorite Brittney Murphy movie is actually a piece of fluff called Uptown Girls. I like it because RTT and I were watching it the night I told him how crazy my mother – his grandmother – was, how one night when I was 12 I ran away to Coney Island and rode the Ferris Wheel for hours. Moments later Murphy’s character reveals a similar experience.

We are Coney Island sistuhs, Brit! Happy solstice. Peace out.