The darkness has fled the Cates homestead, driven away in a burst of light and color that owes more to Darlene Cates' overdue acceptance of herself than to her brush with film stardom.
Cates began replacing the drab carpeting and the somber brown throws and curtains with greens and reds and almond tones some time before the movies discovered her as a remarkable screen presence.The simple act of appearing on a "Sally Jessy Raphael" talk show has launched Cates, 46, into her first-ever acting roles, starting in the major leagues of Hollywood. She stars in the new movie "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," and guest-stars on CBS' "Picket Fences" on March 11. Both roles require a certain physical immensity, which Cates' weight range of between 500 and 525 pounds obviously suits.
The Cates' house, home to the family since the late 1970s, is unpretentious. Forney, a town of 4,500 that seems to belong about equally to the eastern fringes of Dallas and the darkening woodlands of East Texas, is likewise not the sort of place to attract notice.
In fact, the only drawback to Darlene Cates' resurrection is that even her modest brand of celebrity has attracted gawkers.
"It's been a problem," she said. "Mostly, curiosity-seekers and, on the phone, people expecting me to solve their problems the way I've solved mine. We're dealing with it."
Having emerged intact from a long bout of emotional depression and reclusive living, Cates says she is not about to let Hollywood's unexpected interest in her turn to exploitation.
Cates stars in Paramount Pictures' "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," right up there with such name-brand actors as Johnny Depp, Mary Steenburgen and Juliette Lewis.
To call this a turning point is pure understatement, for Cates would just as soon be settling into the serene family life she has long denied herself.
"I haven't brought myself to call it `my film career,' " Cates said. "If it starts and ends with these few appearances, I'm perfectly content with what I have here at home, with my husband and our kids.
"But the movies have given me a chance to bust some stereotypes wide open," she added. "And that means I can afford to be picky about what I might accept. I'm telling them right up front in Hollywood: I will not be anybody's sight gag, and I will not do anything that makes me or any other fat person look ridiculous."
That said, Cates said she still hopes to shed weight. A native of Borger, who was raised at nearby Dumas in the Panhandle, Cates has grappled with forces more formidable than mere pounds: a small-town upbringing, the divorce of her parents when she was 12, her own marriage at 15, three children and long periods of isolation brought on by her husband Bob Cates' career as a recruiter for the Marines.
"I began putting on weight after Bob and I married," Cates said. "He'd be stationed in California, where we didn't know anyone, and there'd be nothing to do except - `Well, what's for supper?'
"So the weight began to creep up on me. Bob was transferred overseas when I was 16 or 17, and I moved to Amarillo to be with my mother. Same old story: Didn't know a soul, and I'd go on these eating binges - two sandwiches, two bags of chips, two candy bars - like that."
During the 1980s, failing health and a fear of ridicule reduced Cates to a recluse. "I did nothing but sit here and feel miserable," she said. "Nothing memorable - no activities for myself, nothing for the family. I might as well have been a ghost."
Her great disappointment of the 1980s, Cates said, was the failure of an abdominal stapling surgical procedure, designed to stall weight gain.
"I had finally deteriorated into a suicidal state," she said. "Closest I'd get to going out was to be driven to the doctor's office - and then he'd come out to the car.
"I'd grown to consider myself a burden to my family, I was afraid to be seen in public, and I'd just sit there looking at those pills - lacking the courage to take them, lacking the courage to live.
"So, well, I bottomed out in July of 1991. Called up my doctor and told him, `Look, nobody ought to live this way,' and we took it from there."
Anti-depressant medication cleared her thoughts enough that she could begin putting matters back in working order. In the next several weeks, she started work on a correspondence course to earn the equivalent of a high-school diploma.
She also joined the TOPS Club - short for Take Off Pounds Sensibly - a 46-year-old Milwaukee network that emphasizes physician-approved, individually designed weight-loss programs and discourages fad dieting. Cates enlisted four friends in a Saturday-morning support group. She found additional incentive in the news that she was soon to become a grandmother.
In 1992, she celebrated her return to the real world with an excursion to see "Batman Returns." The last movie she had gone out to see was the 1968 movie "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang."
In those intervening years, Cates had become virtually the embodiment of the character she plays in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape."
Directed by Lasse Hallstrom from a screenplay by novelist Peter Hedges, "Gilbert Grape" tells of the tangled destinies of misfit Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp), his formidable and reclusive Momma (Cates), who will not face the public, and the rest of their out-of-whack family.
"What's Eating Gilbert Grape" is sober-minded, tender and quirky. The point of the film is that it will take a severe crisis to get Momma Grape to rejoin society. The fiction strikes unnervingly close to home for Cates.
Writer Hedges had imagined the mountainous Momma Grape character vividly, but he was astonished to see Momma spring to life on a 1992 episode of "Sally Jessy Raphael."
"Here's a story about acceptance, about real people who also are real unusual people," Hedges said, "and here on TV I'm looking at one of them."
That television shot was part of Cates' reversal of her own unhappy fortunes. "Sally Jessy's people in New York had called TOPS to see about their talking with overweight women who had just shut out the world, and TOPS steered 'em in my direction," Cates said. "Now, I've stood in judgment of people who do those kinds of shows, but that's because I'd never been there, I guess.
"I had also figured that God had forsaken me - but that was before I realized maybe I just didn't understand God's timetable.
"So I said, yes, maybe this `Sally Jessy' thing is what I need to do - tell the story, and maybe help somebody else avoid doing what I had done to myself - let five perfectly good years slip by."
Getting there was half the adventure. The "Sally Jessy" team acquainted Cates with the advantages of a wheelchair, and Cates boarded an airplane for the first time to reach the studio.
Meanwhile, writer Hedges was telling director Hallstrom about the likely prospect he had found. When approached at length, Cates said, she balked, fearing an attempt at exploitation, but then thought back to her own girlhood ambitions.
"My typical teenage fantasy was to be a rock 'n' roll singer," Cates said. "I kept up with the singers - my first 45 rpm record was a copy of `Teen Angel' by Mark Dinning.
"I liked the school plays, too, but I never got to act in them. I was always picked to be the narrator because I read well."
Her reading ability evidently remains intact, for at length Cates won the role of Momma over 60 other women - all professional actors - who were considered.
"Lasse Hallstrom said he knew I could do it even before he went through the competitive tryouts, but actually winning a role - that's a real confidence-builder," Cates said. "Especially when you know there were some professional actresses who weighed a lot and said they'd put on even more weight to get the role!"
The compassionate sensitivity of the "Gilbert" role appealed to Cates. Not so with the initial invitation to appear on CBS' "Picket Fences," which she turned down because she found the character a negative stereotype.
The "Fences" role is "a meanie," Cates explained. Her character is accused of murdering her husband by smothering him with her own weight. What Cates took issue with was a variety of ridicule directed at the character, as well as some physical gags about her weight.