Delta Burke - Delta Style: Eve wasnt a size 6 and neither am I

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Contents

In memory of

my wonderful Nana,

Ruby May Burton,

December 23, 1911February 27, 1997,

and my loyal companion,

Blanche,

July 21, 1986May 22, 1997,

together now in heaven

INTRODUCTION

I have a thing about crowns. The bigger, the better. I entered my first beauty pageant at the age of sixteen, and it wasnt long before I began catching on to the fact that some pageants have bigger crowns than others. Those were the ones Id enter. At times I was even tempted to call up pageant officials and say, I want to enter your pageant and how big is your crown?

I still have two little pink carrying cases that were gifts to contestants at the Miss Orlando pageant of 1974. Inside one, wrapped in white tissue paper, are all of my crowns. Inside the other are the sashes that went with the crowns. Theres Miss Flame, Miss Florida Flame, Miss All-America Girl, Miss Cover Girl, Miss Optimist of College Park, Miss All Veterans Day, Jamboree Queen, Orlando Action Princess, Miss Orlando, and Miss Florida. One I slept in. I even bought a couple myself, to replace the ones I thought werent up to snuff.

Some beauty queens are embarrassed to wear a crown in public, but not me. Id show up at appearances in a chiffon gown, long white gloves, the robe, the scepter, the banner, the hair, the worksdidnt matter whether I was opening a super-market or riding a 400-pound hog at the state fair. It never occurred to me how peculiar I may have looked. All I knew is that people treated me like a fairy princess, and I was a natural ham who loved the attention.

Crowns, like all things flashy and dramatic, were right up my alley. I thought they were a cure-allI was always putting mine on some kids head and expecting magical things to occur. But for me, crowns were also a means to an end, because I knew the direction I wanted to go. My ultimate goal was to be a famous actress and movie star, and my ticket out of town was pageants. Even when I was in the Miss America pageant, I had a fleeting thought that if I ran up and ripped the crown off the winners head, I might get on The Tonight Show.

Today, when I rummage through those pink cases, the image that sticks in my mind is of a seventeen-year-old with a big crown on her head merrily zipping around town in a little car with a big sign saying DELTA BURKE, MISS FLORIDA emblazoned on the sidea seventeen-year-old who was skipping school to cut a ribbon or become an honorary Boy Scout or judge a nursing home pageant. What was going through the minds of the people who pulled up beside me as I turned to them and gave them my best pageant wave (open hand moving from side to side, not like that stuffy cupped wave the British royalty dothey could use a little more of that all-American Hey, yahll kind of wave) and then burned rubber down the road?

And who knows what my classmates were thinking when, to avoid flunking out of high school, I went from classroom to classroom in an Anne Boleyn costume, on my knees doing a Tomorrow I shall die soliloquy in a Southern-twanged English accent? While everyone else was going on dates and cheering on the football team, I was showing up for a heart fund benefit in a belly dancers costume and shimmying like a striptease artist. Who on earth was that person? And why was she doing these things?

I wanted to be a star, right from the get go. I have been in the public eye since I was fifteen, when I discovered acting. I remember getting off the plane after my first acting job, which was playing nursery rhyme characters for Tupperware salesmen in a traveling Tupperware Jubilee. I made a beeline for my mother and said, I know what I want to do the rest of my life. Meaning, of course, actingnot traveling around entertaining Tupperware salesmen, although that in itself had its rewards. At the time, it was as big, glamorous, and exciting to me as anything I could imagine.

But being in the public eye for so long has also meant that Ive had to do a lot of growing up in public over the years. Even at fifteen, it occurred to me that I had an image to maintain. That kind of scrutiny doesnt afford you many goof-ups.

I learned that lesson too many times to count. It really hit home when I was nineteen and living in London, attending the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA); I was starving myself to lose weight and passed out down some stairs at a swanky dinner party. I learned it at twenty-one, when, all dewy-eyed and new in Hollywood, I carried a script to a Malibu party to show the bigwigs that I was a serious actress and discovered that I looked more like a juicy piece of prime ribfresh meatthan an actress to them. I learned it most painfully about five and a half years ago, when I was starring in the hit television show Designing Women. I had been nominated for an Emmy two times. I was married to the love of my life. But an unexpected thing happened. The press attacked me because of what was perceived as a slipup in my beauty queen image. I was gaining weightand that weight gain was very publicly chronicled because I was famous. I had to stand in the grocery store checkout line next to tabloid headlines that screamed I was devouring whole boxes of candy and chasing people around on the set to get at their food. I had to hear radio stations play songs like Delta Dawn, How Much Weight Have You Put On?

I was totally unprepared for the constant invasions into my private life. I became public property. Strangers felt they could say anything to me. I remember one woman coming up to me on the street in Massachusetts and pulling open my overcoat. Lets see, how big are you? she said. Another time, I was approached on a Natchez, Mississippi, corner by a woman who blurted out, You really are fat, arent you? Then there were the constant allusions to my so-called pregnancy. People would come up to me out of nowhere and ask, Whens the baby due, Delta? or How far along are you?

My mama raised me to be a lady, so for a long time I just had to stand there and take it. I would answer, as sweetly as I could, No, Im not pregnant, Im just plain fat. But after a while, I couldnt help but react to the rudeness. Hey! Id say, gritting my teeth. Theres no baby in there, okay?