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People Feature
Liberté, Egalité, 36C
Why was a pneumatic Victoria's Secret model chosen as the embodiment of the French Republic?
By Debra Ollivier
[02/19/00]

People Feature
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Giovanni Ribisi's résumé read like that of every up-and-comer-to-watch this side of John Travolta. Then he attracted the notice of the best directing talents in the business.
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Nothing Personal
Analyze this multimillionaire
A chat with the shrink to TV's recently married moneybags; gay guys want to bed Madonna, Everett says; Renée Zellweger tattoos her caboose with whose name? Plus: Aaron Spelling is mad as hell!
By Amy Reiter
[02/18/00]

Nothing Personal
Courtesy flush, please!
Extra! Extra! Put the seat down! Senate reporters forced to use coed loo; "American Pie" man Don McLean gets goopy over Madonna. Plus: The descent of man continues -- Carlos Santana announces his own clothing line.
By Amy Reiter
[02/17/00]

Column
"Sex" and Synanon onstage
The Draconian sexual mores of Mae West's era and the curious past of former cult kid Deborah Swisher turn up the heat in New York theater.
By Cintra Wilson
[02/17/00]

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The bewildered beefcake left tantalizing photographs of himself in his wake; they await the eyes of someone lascivious, such as Tellalian or myself. It probably wasn't only Tellalian's appearance that threw the young actor; her home-office decor, she concedes, is "not exactly the most professional environment." In seeking representation from Vesta Talent Services -- i.e., Jacqueline Tellalian, personal manager to a small stable of fledgling, unknown or disabled actors and models -- surely the newbie didn't anticipate multicolored walls, the kitchen floor inlaid with a giant question mark, the collection of skull-and-skeleton-theme tchtochkes, the Jimi Hendrix silkscreen, the autographed photo of John Wayne Gacy (among other serial-killer memorabilia), the transparent toilet seat encasing a crown of barbed-wire or the ceramic penis that once functioned as a bong but presently serves as a vase.

And in interviewing her prospective client, Tellalian surely didn't expect to hear that her pad reminded him of the apartment on "Friends." Still, the galling remark won't influence the decision she makes several days later not to represent him. Nor, surely, will the photo of the chiseled actor in his skivvies: "It's a very compelling picture," Tellalian deadpans. Indicating his crotch, she adds, "Not bad for a white guy."

When most people think of what the protagonist of "Working Girl" described as a "bod for sin," they envision a physique like the young actor's, not like Tellalian's. In fact, hers is a bod that lies so far outside conventional beauty standards that it thwarts much of the sinning she'd like to do. A botched breech birth left Tellalian paralyzed, with a spine so curved that she leans significantly to the left, looking as though she's about to shift in her chair and say something stunning, which she often does. She can move her arms, but nerves in her left hand are damaged.

At 46, Tellalian hasn't had a nonplatonic relationship in several years -- a fact that has nothing to do with her libido (this is a woman who vacuums to porn). Nor, she claims, does it have to do with her own body image, but with others' fear and prejudice.

"Because I grew up with the wheelchair, it was just there," she says, insisting that she's "never had a why-me period." Regarding the snubbing she's received from various men and employers, she says, "What's their problem? I have all these things to offer, and they don't want it? I don't get it. That's why I've got a question mark in the middle of my floor."

Raised in Hialeah, Fla., Tellalian's misadventures in the "primitive rehab world" proved that even so-called experts had few satisfactory answers: "They had a giant contraption that keeps people standing who can't. Think of an iron lung, only standing up. So there you are, fake-standing and encased. It made me want my wheelchair. 'I can't walk! Why are you trying to make me walk when you know I won't be able to?! Just sit me down!'" One doctor told Tellalian's mother, right in front of the child, that she wouldn't live past 18.

But as a teen and young adult, Tellalian managed myriad experiences that most people didn't expect she would. She was an avid rock concert-goer and still boasts about seeing Jim Morrison get hauled offstage in Miami for lewdness. She self-published a rock fanzine. She not only had sex, but enjoyed it, thank you. (Granted, she says, partners need to be more assiduous, "just to get the nerve endings a lot more jazzed. If you don't get someone who's aggressive, it's pointless.")

But purely sexual fulfillment was easier when she was younger, she says, because she wasn't as averse to casual sex back then. Nowadays, if there's no emotional element, she'd "rather have a piece of cake." Besides, during the hippie era, "it was easier for people to not feel self-conscious about being with someone who's imperfect" because "there was nothing about body image ... You were taken for what you were. That was the beauty of living during that time. The idea was not to conform."

These days, she notes, image is everything, and aging hasn't helped. "You're out of the marketplace after a certain age. And being in a wheelchair just compounds the issue," she says. Disabled women have it tougher than disabled men, Tellalian insists: "All the disabled guys I know are either married or have girlfriends. Whereas only one woman I know in a wheelchair is married. I'm talking about mixed marriages," she qualifies -- i.e., relationships between able-bodied and disabled partners.

Female "walkers," she believes, are more nurturing and less visually oriented than male counterparts: "Able-bodied men are very conscious of how society perceives them" and often feel that a disabled partner reflects poorly upon their own virility or ability to score a desirable babe. Also, "they're more afraid of what they think I can't do [sexually] than being at all interested in what I can. ... It's very myopic." Tellalian plans to make a short film in which "a bunch of guys jerk off on my empty wheelchair to express body image and how I'm perceived sexually. In this literally seminal film, she adds, "I wouldn't show their faces."

Tellalian has been making experimental short films and videos since late adolescence. (She's proudest of "Die-O-Rama, " a comedically grisly meditation on the connections between sex, pornography, butchering, death and food consumption.) In fact, her filmmaking aspirations were primarily why she moved to Manhattan in 1975. She wangled an interview with New York University's prestigious film department, but her interrogator "rejected me because I couldn't walk," Tellalian claims. "He said, 'Well, how can you hold a camera?' -- while I was holding a film I'd made! He wouldn't even look at it." She wound up studying film history instead, which "completely altered the entire direction of my life."

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