Being tall can create issues for some people. It may draw unwanted attention that creates a type of unease
WATCHING JULIE & Juliaon RTÉ last week – wasn't it terrible? I enjoyed it immensely. It was interesting to discover that the pioneering food writer Julia Child was extremely tall. There are no statistics given in the film but in fact Julia Child was 6ft 2in (1.88m). Her husband, Paul Child, as demonstrated in the film, was significantly smaller. They married in 1946.
It was Paul Child who designed the kitchen in which all of Julia’s famous television series were made, the first of which was shot in 1962. They changed cooking forever. The television kitchen was in the Childs’ own house in Massachusetts, and Paul Child made sure that the counters and worktops were built at the right height for his wife; consequently, and probably unintentionally, he made her look less tall.
Here's what Meryl Streep, who played Julia Child in the bearable half of Julie & Julia,said to the New Yorkerabout her being 6ft 2in: "I mean, it was like having a club foot. It was a handicap of sorts, certainly in the world where she was born."
Julia was born in 1912. Her sister Dorothy, five years younger, was 6ft 4in.
Now, if we can skip back a couple of contemporary award ceremonies, there is Adele, with her six Grammys and her two Brits and millions of album sales and the sobbing gratitude of music industry executives everywhere. When Adele won her first Brit award, for best female solo artist, it was presented by Kylie Minogue. Kylie’s hardly 5ft tall. Adele told Kylie that she looked fantastic, and then said “I feel like a drag queen next to you”
Adele has claimed to be 5ft 9in, but the sad people who follow celebrity heights online – please don’t hate us – say she could be shorter. Adele, as she politely pointed out to Kylie, wears pretty high heels.
And here is Blake Lively, a young actress, back in 2009, in an interview with Allure magazine, talking about being 5ft 10in in what used to be called her stocking feet. Lively said she “feels like a tranny a lot of the time. I just feel really big a lot of the time, and I’m surrounded by a lot of tiny people. I feel like a man sometimes.”
In line with The Irish Times'sethics guidelines I should say here that I am hardly 5ft 7in on a good day. I don't see why I should be so interested in the worries of the very tall: but perhaps their attitudes tell us something about how females see themselves. We don't want to feel big.
And it’s not as if Adele and Julia Child were ever shrinking violets. Adele can look after herself, as she demonstrated by making a rude gesture at the Brits when her speech was cut off. She has said that she always enjoyed being the centre of attention. Her remark to Kylie Minogue about feeling like a drag queen was a confident courtesy to a predecessor.
Julia Child was a prosperous, un- self-conscious American whose good humour and lack of pomposity made her popular. Her extraordinary voice reminded her fellow countrymen of Eleanor Roosevelt, another public woman was also very tall: 5ft 11½, America’s tallest first lady until Michelle Obama arrived at the White House.
Julia Child was an extrovert. She loved appearing on television and, in one of the more memorable statements ever made by a cookery genius remarked: “I am a ham.”
So no one is saying that Julia Child’s inspirational life was blighted by being so tall. However, it would have been nice to know about her height before.
In the States, Arianne Cohen wrote The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life from on Highsome years ago, to address what she calls "the vortex of silence around tall female public figures". Cohen is 6ft 3in. She explained she felt she had to address the lack of role models for young tall girls – she cited former US attorney general Janet Reno as one of the few, and pointed out that Reno used to be imitated on Saturday Night Liveby a man.
For a tall female teenager – or indeed for Reno – that’s not terribly encouraging (although Julia Child was imitated by the young Dan Ackroyd and loved it).
Being a very tall teenager of either sex is tough. We are not talking about the extraordinary height of skinny models here; we are talking about being a very tall person in the real world. As Cohen put it: “The constant struggle of height is that to be tall is to be public, the constant sense of walking round with spotlight on you. There’s no place to hide, and that’s genderless.”
And doubly tough for teenagers. We have so many extremely tall teenagers now that we older ones do spend a lot of time standing on furniture so that we can tie on necklaces, examine hairstyles, check orthodontic appliances and so on. It would be nice to think that it is easier for tall girls these days. And it would have been nice to ask Julia Child about being tall. She died in 2004, almost 92. Her last meal was French onion soup. Her great age had reduced her great height. She had taken to saying “I used to be 6ft 2 . . .”