House Call
In the Eighties, Lisa Edelstein Used Her Club Kid Notoriety to Pen & Produce an AIDS-Themed Play to Spread Awareness. Now, the Actress & Costar of House Confers with A&U’s Dann Dulin About Sex, Prevention & Treatment in the New Millennium
"Did you see that entertainer on the corner?” Lisa affably asks, as she pours her imported mint tea into a small glass from a silver teapot. Outside the Casbah Café, a cozy Moroccan eatery in L.A.’s edgy Silver Lake district, an androgynous figure sporting wild makeup and a Barbie doll that dangles from his waist is dancing on the sidewalk. “I’ve seen him many times before and really get a kick outta him.” Edelstein peers out at the neighborhood with its distinctive New York flavor. She’s at home in these eclectic, bohemian surroundings and indeed, she lives just up the street. Unlike the glitzy city that surrounds it, Silver Lake is down to earth; its residents less concerned about appearances. Lisa reflects this community ethos—she’s refreshingly honest, real, and outspoken.
Moreover, Edelstein is attracted to edgy, diverse acting roles. She’s played a lesbian on Relativity, a transsexual on Ally McBeal, and a prostitute on The West Wing. Currently, she plays Dr. Lisa Cuddy, Dean of Medicine and chief administrator on the hit medical drama, House. Dr. Cuddy is the counterweight to Dr. House’s excesses, with one eye on his brilliance and another on the bottom line. (This season they did an episode about HIV/AIDS.) On the big screen, Lisa’s appeared in The Doors, As Good As It Gets, What Women Want, Keeping the Faith, and Daddy Day Care. Edelstein is a vegan and doesn’t wear clothes made from animals, she practices yoga daily, and is involved with several charities including Best Friend Animal Sanctuary (which rescues abandoned pets), Step Up Women’s Network (a community-based organization dedicated to educating and empowering women), and several AIDS service organizations.
“Because of my busy schedule, I’m not able to volunteer often” she admits, “but when the opportunity arises, I’ll happily step forward. I used to perform at AIDS benefits all the time in the early days, but now I give money and donate personal items.” Edelstein, clad in a casual, ebony, funky-fashionable low-cut dress and decked out in green, faux-suede military couture boots, has been on the AIDS frontlines since the early eighties, when she was a New York City club kid. (She’s maintained that youthful energy and there is an appealing naturalness about her.) This was the beginning of the epidemic when AIDS was referred to as GRID (gay-related immune deficiency), and there was no treatment. If you were diagnosed, it was a death sentence. “I must have seen a hundred people die. It was so strange and so rapid—so surreal,” she bewilderedly remembers, adding “and President Reagan wouldn’t even say the word.”
The Gay Men’s Health Crisis had just been established and Edelstein attended a weekend caregiving training workshop. Later, she would make frequent hospital trips to visit PWAs. “After I took that workshop, the people I was hanging out with at the clubs suddenly pulled me into bathrooms and into corners. They were showing me the insides of their mouths or their knees or their arms asking, ‘Is this KS? What is this?’ People were in a panic, grasping at straws. Nobody had any information! What little information I had was still a million times more than the average person. The epidemic struck me hard.”
Lisa channeled her intense emotions into creativity. She wrote and performed in a musical, Positive Me, at New York’s La MaMa Theatre in 1989, a time when myth and misinformation enveloped prevention efforts. The play centers on the politics of AIDS and people’s denial, exploring why some don’t play safe. Lisa names off some of the reasons: “Is it that you hate the other person? You’re embarrassed? Lack of experience? You’re too cool for AIDS to hit you? You’re not gay?” After twenty-five years of the epidemic and HIV seroconversion on the rise, Edelstein’s astute questions seem timely today.
“I was young when I wrote Positive Me. I had such resilience,” she recalls. “There was a lot of pain doing it. People who had hurt my feelings, betrayed me, stole from me. I learned a lot about life and it was a huge experience for me.” (After the play, she landed an MTV gig, Awake on the Wild Side.) Lisa leans back into the egg-white pillow-covered bench. “I mean, people were dying!” she blurts out. “One friend committed hari-kari. He was twenty-eight. After consulting the Hemlock Society, another friend suffocated himself. He was forty-five.” Lisa is talking excitedly, but there’s hurt in her voice. “My friend who committed hari-kari did so because he had no family, no money and there was no way for him to take care of himself through the disease. He was dying fast. He tried many alternative ways, including drinking his own urine. There was nothing going on to help people,” she says heatedly about the Reagan administration.
Edelstein’s friend planned his own death and even threw an “I Am Committing Suicide Party” party, eerily paralleled in Randal Kleiser’s 1996 film, It’s My Party. “He had all his friends over. I was in L.A. at the time and couldn’t make it,” she recounts. “I asked him to wait one day, and he said, ‘No, I want to watch The Simpsons and then I want to die.’” He had all the directions from the Hemlock Society: take a certain amount of pills, wait ten minutes, take the rest of the pills, and then put a plastic bag over your head.
After taking the first dose of pills you will probably pass out, so have someone beside you to wake you up to take the second allotment of pills. “But nobody wanted to wake him up!” says Edelstein. “So he woke up six hours later, really mad. But he did it again. This time he kicked everybody out except two people...and he did it.” Lisa takes a moment for this journalist to compose himself. And then again, another moment. “He had KS, had lost a lot of weight, had nobody to take care of him, and he just didn’t want to be a burden,” she explains and clarifies. “This was the early nineties, several years before the cocktails would be on the market.”
Another friend of Edelstein’s was Alison Gertz, one of the first known heterosexual women in the U.S. to become infected. Gertz was a wealthy Jewish girl from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. No one ever thought it would happen to her. C’mon, she was the girl next door! (In 1992, Molly Ringwald portrayed Alison in the TV movie, Something To Live For.) Lisa confides that in her whole life, Alison had just four sexual partners. And one of them happened to be a Studio 54 bartender who infected her when Alison was sixteen years-old. Lisa reasons that since it was 1982, the bartender certainly had no idea that he was HIV-positive, and due to Alison’s inexperience, vaginal tearing can occur, which makes transmission easier. Alison lived with the disease for nearly five years. At the time, research was moving at a snail’s pace and there wasn’t a lot of useful information available yet. Edelstein notes that the important health issues for women have always been somewhat different than those for men.
“Ali really suffered,” Lisa pensively calls to mind, as she locks her intense smoky blue eyes with mine. “She was amazing! A really bright girl, and she spent her time from diagnosis to death educating people about the disease by speaking around the country and around the world. Ali was very attractive, so it was a good face to put with this disease.” Soon after Alison’s death, three of her friends founded Love Heals, an organization that continues Alison’s mission to educate young people about HIV and AIDS.
A coffeemaker grinds at the counter, as daylight retreats. One of the café’s waitstaff places tiny lit candles on our table. Soft Indian music plays and drowns out the swooshing traffic outside the café on Sunset Boulevard. When the topic of HIV and young people comes up, Edelstein immediately gets revved up. “Argh,” she grumbles, shaking her head and grimacing as though she had a bitter taste in her mouth. “What really pisses me off is the abstinence plan. I can’t even….It’s so stupid....It’s so unrealistic. Oh, it just makes me angry. And it just creates more problems because it makes sex more of a secret and more of a back alley thing. This is the problem! This is exactly the problem.”
Lisa folds her hands and places them in her lap. “And you’d think with my history, I’d walk around in latex from head to toe,” she laughs, with a little girl’s smile on her face, “but I don’t. Thank God, for me, I never got sick. But, I tell ya, any time I get tested, I think about every one of those [intimate] moments and ask myself, What the fuck was I thinking?! How great was that relationship?! I think we all have that same problem, I don’t think it’s just young people.” (Edelstein remarks that the last time she got tested, she discovered that the clinics have added a new category for men: “straight, but you sleep with men,” which sometimes means on the down low.)
How does Lisa propose we reach this younger generation—along with her club kid descendants—and protect them from infection? “You have to start by talking about what it’s like to be a human being,” she instantly replies. “Hormones are really powerful and they’re really difficult to think around. Just mix those hormones with fantasy, and perhaps add drugs or alcohol, and you’ve got a dangerous combination. And I don’t mean the kind of fantasy where ‘you be the cheerleader and I’ll be the football player.’ No, I mean the more dangerous, insidious fantasies, like, ‘Here’s the man of my dreams, and I know he did that to me, but I’m gonna ignore it. Or, oops, he did that too, but I’m gonna ignore that, as well. You have to work so hard at bringing yourself back to reality. You basically have to protect yourself from yourself and that’s not easy. Then there are those moments in your life when you just want to say, ‘No, I don’t want that world filled with AIDS. I want the world that exists in my fantasy where everybody’s fine and it’s okay’—that’s a very dangerous place to be too.”
Edelstein points out that most of us were raised on the old Puritan ethic and that our nation’s politics currently lean to the right. “It’s scary,” she quivers. “Unfortunately, there are very few people even in my generation who were taught to deal honestly with sex, and so to turn around and be honest with the next generation is a real challenge. But kids cannot be taught that sex is a sin. Abstinence might work in one-hundreth of one percent of the cases, but even those kids at some point are gonna go get fucked. Sex is such a powerful part of living in a physical body! After all, we are built to have sex. That’s how we’ve been designed.”
Near the end of the interview, Lisa’s pal, who works at the shoe store down the block, enters unexpectedly. They greet, hug, and Lisa introduces us. I mention we are nearly finished with the interview. Her friend steps to the counter and orders tea, as I ask Lisa if she has any closing words. “No, not really….” She ponders a moment. “Unfortunately, people don’t want to think about AIDS anymore, even though the epidemic is at its worst and most deadly in the East and in Africa. If it’s not in someone’s own backyard, they don’t see it. AIDS is elsewhere and nobody wants to think about it. And the people affected? Somehow, they’re disposable.”
We bid farewell. As I depart, I glance back to see Lisa and her friend rapturously chatting away. Edelstein is truly in her element here. Fame has not yanked her into unconscious stardom oblivion. Even in L.A.’s vast urban maze, Lisa maintains her open, activist heart.
LISA'S LIST
Where is your favorite place to go to recharge your batteries?
Big Sur. [She tilts her head and ponders a second] I spend a lot of time alone. I'm
a loner.
Do you have a favorite city?
New York is the center of the world. [She broadly grins.]
Out of the many people you have worked with, is there one in particular who stands out who impressed you or inspired you
the most?
[She thinks briefly.] Hugh [Laurie] is an incredibly hard worker and so talented. What he does is awesome.
Who would you like to work with that you haven't yet?
So many people….[She immediately blurts after thinking] I'd love to do a Christopher Guest movie!
If you could have starred in any movie, ever, what would it have been?
Cabaret. Also, I would've liked to have played Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka, and the girl in Logan's Run.
Name one of your bad habits.
Chocolate? I don't know if that's a bad habit. I eat chocolate every day, but I think that's a great habit!
Name your favorite TV sitcom of all time.
I really loved I Love Lucy, but I could only watch the first ten minutes of it. Since Lucy wanted to be an actress, and I wanted to also, I couldn't watch when she would eventually mess it up. I'd get so upset that I'd have to change the channel.
What are you most proud of?
My play [Positive Me].
Complete this sentence. The best thing about being famous is....
The clothes. I enjoy fashion.
Quick Diagnosis
What comes to mind for Lisa when some of her past projects are cited?
Seinfeld: I can't tell the truth.
West Wing: Aaron Sorkin is a genius and I was madly in love with him at the time to boot. There was nothing better than playing his hooker [she lets out a mischievous laugh].
Ally McBeal: I loved that character! I had a lot of fun on that show.
Family Law: A very challenging part. To play someone who is so fundamentally religious is really hard for me.
Leap of Faith: [She ponders, smiling.] I'm editing myself. Short-lived, fun, but I don't know if I'd wanna say on record what my experience was really like.
The Practice: I was back doing a job for David Kelly. You know he hired me to play a tranny and now all of a sudden he's called me back in to play a really depressed woman who doesn't speak [she giggles], and I couldn't quite figure out why! [Thinking] I loved James Spader so much. He's an eccentric; an interesting guy. James Spader can just stare at somebody and it's interesting to watch and I don't feel that I have that. Being in a scene with him, just me and him [alone], that was my greatest challenge: How do I fill the space as quietly as he does. I don't know if I go there.
Frasier: Kelsy Grammer is one of those people…so professional, he loves what he does. We had a post coital scene. We're laying in bed huffing and puffing, and I said to him, I realized when I have sex with somebody sometimes I get this incredible tingling sensation in my hands and feet. And I think, My God, this is really great sex, but then I realize that it's because I'm hyperventilating. [She laughs.]
Awake on the Wild Side: Nightmare from hell! Public humiliation on national television for fours hours a day. I can't watch one frame of that show . . .
Lisa's Referrals
Lisa gives a one word reaction to these people who have touched her life.
Jerry Seinfeld: Famous
Peter Paige: Fun
Rob Lowe: [She chuckles] Complicated
Hugh Laurie: Brilliant
Kathy Najimy: Energetic
Robert Sean Leonard: Droll
James Spader: Piercing
Ben Stiller: Comic genius
Bryan Singer: Hypochondriac
Cybil Shepherd: Intense
Lisa takes a long pause before she tags a word to describe herself: Present
Star Gazing
Soon after we begin the interview, Lisa reveals that she had lunch at Orso's. "We sat next to Mel Brooks!" she says excitedly. "It was so awesome. Ya know, when you go out to lunch in Los Angeles you should be sitting next to Mel Brooks!" Before she left the restaurant, Lisa introduced herself.
Dann Dulin interviewed Roslyn Kind for the April issue.
May 2006
Índice 
