Carrie Knows Best

L.A.'s latest diet diva has stars and moguls brown-bagging it to Le Dome

In Six Degrees of Separation, John Guare dusted off the conceit that no one in the world is more than six people removed from another in friendship. I find Guare's figure excessive. If you know Howard Rosenman, one of Hollywood's more colorful producers, you need only two.

As Rosenman descends into his chair at the legendary Le Dome on the Sunset Strip, he is able, between his vertical and seated positions, to call hello to, wave to, smile at, nod at, or otherwise acknowledge a total of 11 people, including Yul Brynner's daughter.

He has scarcely begun enumerating Madonna's virtues as a friend when the maitre d' slides over. Rosenman takes out a brown paper bag, withdraws a foil-wrapped something, and deposits it in the maître d's hand.

"Put this on a plate for me, would you?'' says Rosenman. "Do something magical with it on a bed of cucumbers.''

The maître d' smiles and withdraws.

"Meat loaf and a bialy,'' he replies in answer to my raised eyebrow.

"You're brown-bagging it at Le Dome, Howard?''

"Dan," he says, "I have the best dietitian in the world. She not only tells you what to eat, she cooks it for you and delivers it to your office. Her name is Carrie Latt Wiatt, she's married to Jim Wiatt [head of ICM], and the most famous people in Hollywood are her clients."

Carrie, it turns out, lives in a splendid rambling house in the Pacific Palisades. She's considerably younger and prettier than expected—shoulder-length brown hair and, at 34, the figure of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. She has a B.S. in nutrition and food science from Cal State, is a member of the Southern California Culinary Guild, and consults for the Pacific Heart Institute. She married Wiatt on May 16. They met in the summer of 1991. He's a client. She did have a very strict policy against dating clients, but Wiatt was persistent and she succumbed.

Carrie guides me into the living room and seats me on a low modular sofa. "I started Diet Designs seven years ago," she says, "primarily because I was so frustrated working for clinics as a dietitian, counseling people.

They'd come back with food diaries of what they'd consumed for the week, and I felt like I needed to participate in the food side of it. Most of these people are compulsive eaters, and some of them just aren't able to take care of themselves."

"You wanted to control their lives," I say gently.

"Yeah, that's part of the problem," she replies, chortling, kidding on the square. "I'm a control freak—no. ... I make the food, I deliver the food, I do everything but feed them—you know. I'm there for pep talks. Sandy Gallin [manager for Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton, the Pointer Sisters, Neil Diamond, and the world], I have to call him every day. It helps him before he goes out to eat. Sandy is so. . . "—she pauses to select le mot juste—"...childlike. I'm a shrink to some people, I'm a mommy to someone else, I listen to their life. I probably know more about their personal lives than their own shrink does. I get to see everything, I hear everything, from their love lives to their. . .everything," she says with a shudder.

Besides Howard Rosenman and Sandy Gallin, Carrie's client list includes Tony Danza, Gary Collins, Swoosie Kurtz, Laraine Newman, Carrie Fisher, Anita Pointer, Alan Ladd Jr., producer Ray Stark, and. . .

"Barbra Streisand is one of my clients. She's the kind of person when you start a diet with her she doesn't believe you, she has to check everything. So she called every doctor and every other nutritionist, and then she came back to me and said, 'O.K., O.K., you check out.' So she kind of put me through the wringer, but that's O.K.

"Howard Rosenman strips down to his underwear. Sandy Gallin and he both do that to me. Sandy doesn't care, he's in the bathroom, showering; he says, 'Come on in'—no inhibition.

"John Davis, Marvin's son, the first time I weighed him he had all his assistants on the scale together. He didn't want me to know how much he weighed, so he played with me for a while. Then I had to get tough with him.

"John Landis was a client of mine, but he won't be with me anymore. He said it was, like, too much to think about. He had to cut my meat loaf. My Country Meatloaf is sliced by the client so it remains fresh. I almost killed him. I said, 'Then you're not a person who wants any responsibility for your own life—go somewhere else!' ''

(Landis has not quit the program and swears he never told her cutting the meat loaf was too much trouble.)

With a new client, Wiatt makes a home or office visit, to record medical history, dietary intake, and life-style profile. "I'm in my car all week long, meeting with my clients. The food is delivered once a week."

She charges $45 a day, or $200 for five days' worth of food (15 meals). Delivery, vitamins, and a weekly personal consultation are extra. In the second phase of the program she teaches clients how to make the food themselves. "What I tell them to do," she says, "is eat my food and then go to a restaurant and have a bowl of berries or a cup of decaf cappuccino. But instead I find out they're taking my food to the top five restaurants in the city. My husband takes my food to the Palm. I call up now and tell them, 'He's coming in. I want him to have four ounces of the chicken breast, not eight'—you know the portions in restaurants. When they see me at Mortons, I think they want to run the other way. But they're very accommodating. We bring in our own dressing. We love Caesar salad, so I have a Caesar dressing I make. We'll order a Caesar salad—we'll ask for romaine lettuce, hold the dressing, hold the anchovies, hold the Parmesan cheese. So it ends up being lettuce, and they go, 'Fine.' They mix it in the back, so I won't have to be doing it at the table, and when they come back we already know what we're going to order. We'll have the tuna or the sashimi to start, and if they have an uncreamed soup we'll order that. They have the best lime chicken in the city, but we order the white meat only—we don't take the dark. They take the skin off for us, and then we take their mustard and some balsamic vinegar and we mix it up and that's our dipping sauce."

Carrie admits she can be tough. "I'm part diet shrink, part Hitler. I'll say, 'Knock it off, you're being a ridiculous child.' When they have to weigh with me and they're not where they should be, I lose my temper. It's like 'Whose time are you wasting here?'

She goes into clients' homes and throws out unhealthy food. "Richard Baskin is a producer, and he's from the Baskin family of Baskin-Robbins, so he had tons of ice cream. I must have taken out 10 gallons from his freezer and emptied it into the garbage disposal. And then I took popcorn. ... I go through the condiments. I take the ketchup, the mayonnaise; I leave the mustard. At Ron Meyer's house the maid stopped me when I was taking the candy. She said, 'That's for the kids—I swear he doesn't eat it.' So there I was corrected.

"Sometimes they cry. Laraine Newman had a hard time saying good-bye to some of the things I threw out. Sometimes I'm in a home and a husband and wife will start arguing—'No, no, don't let her take that!' And I'm sitting there like this sergeant, saying, 'I must take it,' and they're not too happy about it." Even Sandy Gallin has felt her fury. "She sees me at functions when I'll take a glass of wine and totally go off the diet; she calls up the next day and says, 'I can't believe what you've done!'

Eventually, clients either lose dozens of pounds or learn how to cheat. Tony Danza, for one, hasn't let Wiatt entirely rule his life. "I'm a late-night junk-food eater," he confides. "Just before bed I like to get into the M&Ms. So she threw those out. But I just want you to know. . . they're back!"

DAN GREENBURG