by Anna Journey
Mrs. Hill had recently discovered an application on her iPhone that digitally aged photographs, like those time-progression programs used by police to make posters for children who’ve been missing for a decade. She lined up her twenty-five students in front of a wall outside of the classroom, snapped their photographs one by one with her cell phone, and digitally aged each six-year-old’s chubby face and firm neck into the fuzzy upper lips and rippled jowls of a hundred-year-old. Although my mother was off assisting another class when Mrs. Hill’s students first encountered the life-sized printouts, she returned later that day to help the students paste the images onto sheets of manila paper. They attached their aged faces and necks to flat, semicircular busts cut from scraps of striped or polka-dotted wallpaper.
My mother noticed that most of the students seemed dismayed or bewildered by the approximations of their future ancient selves. She watched them quietly paste and smooth their wrinkled countenances onto the paper, just above the paragraph-long “stories” of their elderly lives. Their pruned earlobes dangled like putty pressed between thumbs. Their neck folds pooled like crepe iguana wattles. Most of the boys were bald. She heard one of them say, warily, “My grandpa looks like that.” Many of the centurions still sported comical, little-kid hairdos: wild silver cowlicks or white ponytails top-heavy with pink bows. Their expressions, too, remained childlike—those huge jack-o’-lantern grins—though the missing front teeth and exposed gums worked at both ends of the age spectrum. Mrs. Hill hung the twenty-five portraits in the hallway, the sagging faces arranged like a jaunty pictorial roll call decorating the lobby of a retirement community.
“These are flat disturbing,” my mother said of the images to another first-grade teacher, who nodded. One especially bright child, Leo, had been so upset by his hundred-year-old face that his mother asked Mrs. Hill to remove his picture from the wall. “They’re six years old,” my mother told me over the phone. “They shouldn’t have to internalize their own decrepitude.”
I first saw a photograph of Dr. Fredric Brandt, the world-renowned cosmetic dermatologist, a year before he hanged himself in the garage of his Coconut Grove estate in the early hours of Easter Sunday, 2015. The previous March the New York Times had run a largely flattering profile of Brandt, by Guy Trebay, on the front page of the “Style” section: “The Man Behind the Face.” The details make Brandt sound glamorous and self-possessed: he’s a sophisticated art collector who hosts his own radio show; he lives in Manhattan and Miami; he runs a company that sells his antiaging products; he’s the “magician” responsible for many a celebrity’s ageless face (Madonna’s, John Travolta’s, Naomi Campbell’s). “[A] Brandt creation,” Trebay writes, is “a person whose skin is smooth and yet not freakishly taut, whose cheeks possess the firm curvature of a wheel of Edam, whose unblemished flesh calls to mind a Jumeau bisque doll, a baby’s bottom, or, perhaps, Madonna.” Brandt’s handiwork on his own plumped-up skin is, however, immediately and viscerally shocking. Due to abundant injections of botulinum toxin (Botox) and various volumizing facial fillers (Restylane, Perlane, Juvéderm, Voluma), his mid-sixties visage conjures the uncanny: it’s at once ancient and infantile, foreign and familiar, a poreless rubber mask that’s neither old nor young. With his wispy, Warhol-ish flaxen bob, wide ivory face, and pale grey eyes, Brandt resembles a foppish albino. His lips stretch, broad and froglike, puffed up and tea-rose pink. All bags and lines have been wiped from beneath his eyes. In one photograph, Brandt resembles a Scandinavian vampire posed in black leather pants, a jet velvet blazer, and designer high-tops in front of an Albert Oehlen painting. (The artwork’s focal point features the face of an androgynous blond in which a dark flesh-colored “X” blots out the nose and most of the figure’s expression.) In another photograph, Brandt emotes with a strange, open-mouthed pucker at a party for Lady Gaga’s fragrance launch at the Guggenheim, a black Colombina carnival mask dangling by the elastic around his neck. As I glanced at Brandt’s image for the first time, I gasped, shaking the paper wordlessly in front of my husband’s face.
The word face derives from the Latin facies (form, appearance) and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it crops up in a number of expressions:
To fly in the face of, meaning “to do the opposite of,” is recorded from the 16th century. It is taken literally from the notion of a dog attacking someone by springing directly at them. To lose face, meaning to be humiliated, is a direct translation of a Chinese phrase. The 16th-century dramatist Christopher Marlowe coined the phrase the face that launched a thousand ships to describe the great beauty of Helen, whose abduction by Paris caused the Trojan War. Facet (early 17th century) is literally a “little face” from French facette.
Did Brandt’s artificial appearance fly in the face of conventional cosmetic dogma, which celebrates the ways aging people might look plausibly youthful? According to Lili Anolik’s article in Vanity Fair, Brandt projected a goofy, self-aware sense of humor about his highly stylized appearance, which he seemed to regard as a sort of costume or performance of camp. “Fred was famous for interrupting patients in the middle of a consult,” Anolik writes, “saying, ‘But enough about how you look. How do I look?,’ followed by a wild shriek of laughter.” In order to put squeamish clients at ease, he referred to Botox and filler by friendly-uncle-sounding nicknames: “Bo and Phil.” But did he lose face by stilling the nerves in his own? Was his “the face that launched a thousand jokes,” as online commentators mocked his Times profile? He read all of the posts. One person compared Brandt to “a character from a Wes Craven film.” Another suggested “an 80 year old trying to look 64.” Yet another wrote: “I wouldn’t let that butcher cut baloney.”
“I’d go with filler,” the head dermatologist, known professionally as Amy MD, said after scrutinizing my chicken pox scars. I kicked my legs back and forth like a child as I perched at the edge of the elevated exam chair and imagined Dr. Brandt’s alien face. An ancient baby. It reminded me of the ghoulish portraits on the wall outside of my mother’s first-grade classroom. “When I think of filler,” I blurted, “I think freak show.” Amy MD peered at me over her clipboard. She was a brunette of indeterminate age who’d recently begun hosting her own cable dermatology show, which played on a hypnotic, product-hawking loop amid the lobby’s maple-and-linen Zen décor. She appeared unmoved by my reaction. Due to my horror of injections—especially in the face, especially with that Dr. Frankenstein filler (some fillers use collagen harvested from pig corpses or medical cadavers)—we agreed I’d try a heat-based treatment called “fractional resurfacing,” which stimulates collagen production through targeted bursts of radio waves. “Your scars are subtle,” Amy MD said, as she looked down toward her clipboard again, “but they’re there.”
Two years after chicken pox left pink dents in my face, I went through a period in ninth grade when I deliberately inflicted scars on my skin. Alone in my room, I’d run my lighter across the bottom wire of a coat hanger and press the hot steel into my left bicep, repeating the gesture until I’d made three parallel burns that puffed into long blisters. The marks eventually blanched from a row of pink worms to a white, clawlike print, as if I were a bumbling falconer who let a hawk land on her bare arm. Other times I’d sit on the concrete steps in front of my house and play the Cigarette Game with my friend Laura. We’d press our forearms together—forming a mirror image—and one of us would light a Camel, puff on the filter to get a cherry going, and drop the cigarette in the valley between our arms. The first to pull away from the burn lost the contest. Although watching the damage unfold fascinated me, it was easier to win if I stared at a nearby pine.
Laura and I lost touch toward the end of that spring, after she got pregnant unexpectedly and dropped out of high school. More than twenty years later, the nine white cigarette burns on my right arm are at once marks of healing and traces of what won’t ever entirely fade away. They remind me that there’s a woman out there who reaches for a dinner fork, who drives to the
grocery store, who brushes a strand of black hair from her neck, all the while wearing an identical set.
My seventh-grade science teacher, Mrs. Tart, a silver-haired woman in her mid-fifties, wore a dusty surfeit of terra-cotta rouge in unblended circles on her cheeks. The students in the class used to mock her doll-like makeup, whispering to each other across the desks. We called her Krusty the Clown, after a character on The Simpsons. When I finally returned to school after my two-week absence, Mrs. Tart noticed my fresh chicken pox scars and suggested to my mother at Back-to-School Night that perhaps once I got older I might have a facial peel. She must’ve seen the way I sat with my head tilted forward so my long hair closed over my cheeks. I don’t remember why I bought a container of cheap fuchsia blush from CVS, tied it in a red ribbon, curled the bow’s edges with a scissor’s blade, and secretly tossed the gift on her desk on the last day of class. I’d taped an unsigned note to it: “Dear Mrs. Tart, Why don’t you use some more blush!” Or maybe: “Have some more blush, Mrs. Tart!” Did someone dare me to do it? Did I brag about the prank afterward and feel like a punk-rock badass? Or did I feel ashamed? I was terribly shy in middle school. As far as I remember, I never teased other students. What combination of vulnerability and vindictiveness must’ve roused my capacity for cruelty, and created, like the opposing visages of the Roman god Janus, another face?
The likelihood that Mrs. Tart layered a heavy impasto of rouge across her cheeks to mask her insecurities about her own complexion didn’t seem to penetrate my adolescent narcissism or deter my viciousness. Perhaps I saw in her elaborately made-up face my own recent damage, as well as my inability to conceal it. Mrs. Tart never mentioned the incident. I’ve often wondered if she suspected it was me who made that most unfunny joke: the quiet girl in the front row who daily slathered nude foundation—always a shade too dark—over her own pale face.
Until Fredric Brandt’s suicide, I hadn’t recalled that hateful seventh-grade prank for decades. I sat down with my morning latte, and in the New York Times was the headline: “Dr. Fredric Brandt, 65, Celebrity ‘Baron of Botox,’ Is Dead.” Guy Trebay, the same author who’d composed the glamorous “Style” profile on the doctor a year earlier, had written Brandt’s grim obituary. “Susan Biegacz, a publicist for Dr. Brandt,” Trebay notes, “said he had been dealing with depression for some time and had recently been ‘devastated’ by what is widely believed to be a parody of him on the Tina Fey comedy series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, presented by Netflix.”
The next day, flying from Los Angeles to an annual conference in Minneapolis, I obsessed about Brandt. And each of the four nights at the conference, I searched for articles about his death as I sat in my hotel room, haunted by that blank, unnerving face. In the aftermath of Brandt’s suicide, some people blamed his death on the televised joke. In the episode, Martin Short plays a demented dermatologist whose overuse of Botox has caused a freakish speech impediment in which the doctor is no longer able to pronounce his own name, which is Dr. Grant. Short sputters a slobbery approximation—“Dr. Franff”—as he leaks drool from his greasy, rubberized face and leaps around the office in a white lab coat like a mad scientist. As Anolik writes in Vanity Fair: “That the doctor with the peroxided bob and face of a dissipated cherub, the skin as slick and shiny as a glazed doughnut whom Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski) visits for a foot facelift, is intended to be Fred is beyond question.” Two weeks before he killed himself, Brandt sent his coworker—Anolik’s husband—a text message after reading about the unflattering caricature in the gossip column “Page Six”: “Did u see page 6 I’m so upset I’m a freak.” However unfunny Anolik found Short’s performance on Kimmy Schmidt, she refuses to blame Brandt’s suicidal despair on satire. “For what it’s worth,” she writes, “I think the idea is loony. If the show did, in fact, push him over the edge, that could only be because he had one foot and four toes curled over it already.”
I had watched the now-infamous episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt with my husband several weeks before Brandt’s death. Although we’d both read the Times profile on the dermatologist a year earlier, neither of us managed to recognize Brandt in the caricature—we’d forgotten about him—and neither of us laughed. The gag seemed too obvious, like bad Saturday Night Live slapstick: the cosmetic dermatologist who turned himself into a monster. Brandt was already a joke: the doctor who could no longer recall the biblical proverb, “Physician, heal thyself.”
In the fairy tale “The Old Man Made Young Again,” recounted in the early nineteenth century by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Jesus and St. Peter stop at a blacksmith’s house one evening for food and lodging. Later that night, a disfigured old man arrives at the same house, ill and begging for alms. St. Peter pities the elder and asks Jesus to perform a miracle so that the beggar might be restored to youth and able to earn money to buy his own bread. Jesus asks the blacksmith for help:
“Smith, lend Me thy forge, and put on some coals for Me, and then I will make this ailing old man young again.” The smith was quite willing, and St. Peter blew the bellows, and when the coal fire sparkled up large and high our Lord took the little old man, pushed him into the forge in the midst of the red-hot fire, so that he glowed like a rose bush, and praised God with a loud voice. After the Lord went to the quenching tub, put the glowing little man into it so that the water closed over him, and after He had carefully cooled him, gave him His blessing, when behold! the little man sprang nimbly out, looking fresh, straight, healthy, and as if he were but twenty.
The blacksmith, impressed by the beggar’s miraculous transformation, decides to make his crooked old mother-in-law young again. After all, it was his own blacksmith’s forge and bellow that the Lord had used to work the miracle, and who was in a better position to wield those tools than an expert? The next day, Jesus and St. Peter depart, unaware of the blacksmith’s plan. The latter asks his aged mother-in-law if she’d like to be turned into a girl of eighteen. “‘With all my heart,’” she answers, “‘as the youth has come out so well.’” “So the smith made a great fire,” the Brothers Grimm write:
and thrust the old woman into it, and she writhed about this way and that, and uttered terrible cries of murder. “Sit still; why art thou screaming and jumping about so?” cried he, and as he spoke he blew the bellows again until all her rags were burnt. The old woman cried without ceasing, and the smith thought to himself, “I have not quite the right art,” and took her out and threw her into the cooling tub. Then she screamed so loudly that the smith’s wife upstairs and her daughter-in-law heard, and they both ran downstairs, and saw the old woman lying in a heap in the quenching-tub, howling and screaming, with her face wrinkled and shriveled and all out of shape.
A face has over forty muscles, nearly seven thousand unique expressions. As social creatures, we fixate on faces, seek out cues and clues, read their fine lines. There’s a reason small children draw—almost exclusively—faces. Have you ever remembered someone by the fine shape of her right foot? Tenderly recalled a great-uncle’s distinctive elbow? Have you ever glimpsed in a patterned surface—in a spot of fleur-de-lis wallpaper or the mottled calcium of an oyster shell or the knobby burl of a redwood—the uncanny textures of a face? Brandt erased what made his face human. He muted all nuance, collapsing many facets into one: a deadpan, bovine impassivity. It’s easy to loathe a frozen face. It hides its experiences, suffering, and delights—the signals the shy twitch of a lip sends out, a smile that creases the eye. It obliterates that deep nonverbal richness of gesture. That’s why I reflexively despised Brandt before I learned that he was a funny, sad, and fragile man—why I gasped the first time I saw his photograph. I didn’t know he lived alone in his Coconut Grove mansion with three adopted dogs: Tyler, Surya, and Benji. I didn’t know he was fifteen when his diabetic father died, twenty when he lost his mother. I didn’t know his radio show got canceled. I didn’t know Brandt longed to “restore a face to harmony,” as if wiping away the world’s wrinkles could blot o
ut the losses in his life. His blank face gave away none of his empathy or anguish; it made him alien, other, the freak against which we define ourselves.
The fractional resurfacing device didn’t erase all of the chicken pox scars on my face. It did, however, cause collagen to plump up the shallow ones: two on my left cheek, three on my chin, one on my nose, two on my forehead. The deep triple pit gouging my upper right cheek is still there—the one in which a trio united to form a single trench, the one I used to fantasize about spackling with peanut butter or even concrete—but it’s softer, no longer immediately noticeable as a crater. A stranger would probably need to squint at close-up before and after pictures to discern any difference. But I know what it’s like to stand an inch from the bathroom mirror and scrutinize every mark and scar. I understand something of what Brandt must’ve wanted to hide by revising his skin. I’m reminded, each time I think of Brandt’s death, of my phone call to a suicide hotline during a breakdown years earlier, and I know his choice shocks me so acutely because it could’ve been my own. When I look at Brandt, I recognize something like an alter ego, the vulnerable side of myself I’d rather not see—its self-loathing, its impulsiveness, its vanity. I imagine the Roman god Janus who stands in doorways and wears two faces, one on the front and one of the back of his head—maybe they’re mine and Brandt’s—one facet fixed on an exit and the other, tipped toward an entrance, hoping—no, deciding—to venture on.
