The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  This is my favorite image of myself, not just because I borrow the hibiscus’s beauty, but because flowers in a woman’s hair connote easeful femininity in a sexual liaison with nature. It is a fairy tale transformation from the way I see myself by day: a flowerless, driven, ambitious, impatient, not always kind, less lovely and therefore less good person. The truth is, a little beauty probably does make most of us better, even nicer, seeing ourselves transformed in the mirror. The representation is confirmed when others hesitate and look at us in a different way; and we, seeing them see us, are grateful. So the exchange goes, each working the beauty transformation through their individual systems until something characteristically said or done breaks the spell, reminding us that it is only a flower or a dress or a new hairdo, and that underneath we are still the less than beautiful people we always were. Which doesn’t mean we should dismiss the power of the transformation, for it is omnipresent. Someone, somewhere, is always slipping into a dress of gold thread woven by elves.

  For me, a woman seldom at rest, who draws heavily on her masculine genes, it is deeply rewarding to accentuate the feminine. Three double whites in my hair may be exhibitionistic, but unlike a transparent blouse, flowers are disarming; who can accuse you of drawing attention to yourself, of arousing envy, if you have simply borrowed from nature?

  In the morning I find the dear, shriveled corpses of my hibiscus from the night before on my bedside table, on the floor, or lying in a brandy snifter; they are always full of memory as with orchids from a boy long ago. But in giving the hibiscus to myself, I am distanced from that powerless girl who was totally dependent on the boy. These flowers are my chosen accomplices, implicated in the pleasures I initiated the night before, not just my own good times but generous acts performed for others, kindnesses I wouldn’t/couldn’t have performed as effortlessly without the flowers’ beauty transforming me from the Bad Nancy.

  I have never doubted that my exhibitionism stems from competition with my older sister, the child beauty. (That my own share came when I was about nineteen is beside the point; it was far, far too late to be believed in.) I told myself as a child that I didn’t mind failing that silly contest, having gone on to invent, and win, other competitions in which I starred. When the looks arrived, this early pattern of exhibitionism on the playing fields had already been taken in and learned. It was part of me, who I was. Wearing these exotic, enormous flowers in my hair in make-believe Key West has the most soothing, benign effect; the nervous edge of not measuring up is gone, pffffft!, as fast as a fairy wand.

  Today being Christmas, I say a little extra prayer that nature has been bountiful while we slept. I shall need at least nine blooms to get me through the three acts of Christmas Day, the first being breakfast with our dearest friends and neighbors, Dick and Bob, whose garden adjoins ours. I part the giant shards of a bird-of-paradise and there they are, a magical harvest of dewy hibiscus blooms, three for now, three for Jimmy’s brunch, and three for David’s dinner on the roof of the old Kress building. I retire to the kitchen to scramble eggs, fry rashers of bacon, and heat pounds of Entenmann’s pecan coffee cake and brioches from the French bakery on Duval. The StairMaster will wait until tomorrow.

  We always make an extra fuss over Dick during this ritual to compensate for a Christmas when he was four. That morning he donned his little blue blazer with the red piping, his knee socks and short gray flannel pants and, good little boy that he was, stood at the top of the stairs in full expectation of a perfect holiday. Instead, he looked down upon his beautiful mother being carried out the front door in the arms of the chauffeur, her lover, never to return to his father’s house. Dick was promptly sent to his room, his presents left unopened.

  He is an only child, which doesn’t mean he has been spared sibling rivalry. His mother covers all the bases, sibling and Oedipal. It was his father who had wanted “a beautiful son and heir,” and had thus selected a perfect, much, much younger specimen as mate and mother to his boy. “He used to hold me, toss me in the air, and kiss my tummy, making me laugh,” Dick sighs. But when his mother walked out, his father never held his son again.

  As in fairy tales, it was his warmhearted grandmother who presided over her son’s house and nurtured her little grandson. Periodically he would visit his mother, The Ice Queen, but when his grandmother died, he was bereft of the only love he’d known. On Sundays his father’s brother, the poor relation, would come to dinner with his Brunhild wife and their “no-neck monster” children, as Tennessee Williams would write in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. They would compete for his father’s attention/money. Bitterly resenting Dick, the beautiful one, the evil uncle and cousins would eventually connive to have him disinherited.

  Twenty years ago, Dick’s mother invited him to lunch at the Westbury Hotel’s Polo Lounge in New York and kissed him off forever. She was about to marry for the fourth time, and she was sure he would understand “that no one would believe I had a son your age.” Never mind that Dick is a man of exceeding good looks; a woman who trades on her beauty feels that her power is jeopardized if the wrong numbers, any numbers, are attached to it. She was only seventeen when he was born, and she hated his beauty, seeing it as a threat that would draw admiring eyes away from her. When he grew into an adolescent of eye-stopping appeal, and one particular lover’s eyes abandoned her and rested too long on him, she curtailed his monthly visits. “Mother will call you when she wants to see you,” she announced with near sibling rivalry.

  That day at the Polo Lounge, she added, “Oh, and don’t ever telephone again. Don’t ever try to reach me.”

  Now we pile far too many splendidly beribboned boxes under the tree fashioned of boughs of bougainvillea, and while Tony Bennett fills the air with songs more seemly for seduction than Christmas, we toast the beauty of the day and our good fortune in having one another. As we unwrap our gifts, family members telephone to wish us well, but no family calls for Dick.

  One of our calls is from my cousin in Charleston to say how much the children love our gift, a bound set of fairy tales on video. “We must have rented Snow White from the video store a dozen times,” she says. “Now they have their own copy. Guess who loves them the most? The two-year-old.”

  Two years old and hooked on beauty, love, and killer envy, the stuff of life when you’re two and want the straight poop.

  “Beauty is as beauty does,” mother murmurs the ancient mantra in her dear voice, wanting to keep baby humbly in her place, but also to ward off the evil eye and teach the ambivalence of beauty power. “You shall not escape me,” cries the evil witch who tries to murder her too pretty stepdaughter in the Grimm tale, “Sweetheart Roland.” This is the secret of ancient mantras, in a couple of words they say it all.

  Barely off mother’s milk, the two-year-old records the contradictory mantras so reminiscent of what life is really like. Beauty is power. The lesson has been learned and, along with it, the etiquette every beauty must practice if she is to survive in women’s world; the possession of beauty already places you so far ahead of all the other girls—especially those in the family, in the next bed—that it is only proper, only safe, to downplay your own.

  By the time the little girl is four “beauty is only skin deep” will be so deeply imprinted on her brain that the words will not have to be repeated. Other children will have taught her their own ambivalent feelings regarding her gift; they will seek her out, as drawn to the serenity of her lovely form as any adult. Should she acquire more power, admiration is transmogrified into the envy that was always waiting in the wings. The beauty’s portfolio can be devalued in an instant, worse, she can be put at risk, and no one is more aware of her precarious power than she. How to survive in women’s world, even little women’s world, if you have the gift? Play it down, be careful, already having so much, don’t try for too much more.

  By the time a child reaches the advanced age of ten or eleven, the defense system against envy has become so practiced that when a study was done on fifth
-grade girls, more than 75 percent of them, including the prettiest, graded themselves as the least attractive in the class. It is a remarkable finding, so rich in implications that one doesn’t know where to begin. How can the minds of ten-year-olds be so programmed that they dare not acknowledge reality? And we wonder why women never believe in their beauty, why our closets are so filled with clothes that promised beauty but never delivered.

  I’d thought twice about sending that collection of fairy tales on video to my cousin’s children. Being read to was what I’d loved as a child, the adult’s physical presence close to me, the sight, the smell of this dear person giving me exclusive attention, their time, and then the familiar voice repeating the stories that were called “make-believe” but which felt closer to life than anything real.

  The Brothers Grimm collection was a heavy blue volume when I was a child, and the raised, ornate, gold scroll on its cover promised convoluted tales that never disappointed. I would thrill in my bones at the terror, probably recognizing my own rage as an envious child with a beautiful older sister whose tie to my mother seemed to leave no room for me. Perhaps more than anything I loved the idea that my own mother had been read to from the same book, for inside there was a printed plate that read, “From the Library of the Colbert Children.” Imagine!

  Myths and folklore offer the child imaginary resolutions to the real contradictions in life. Transformations and disguises do not so much confound as explain. Ugly frogs turn into handsome princes, kindly seeming grandmothers become crones who torture small children. Yes, it feels right, because to a child, the adult world is rampant with contradictions. Adults do not call emotions by their real names. Their interpretation of what is going on around the house is at odds with what the child experiences. They say they love you when they don’t, and lie about the value of a pretty face. The fairy tale is closer to reality than what mother says. Even as I write this I become aware of how the belief in my secret evil childhood self grew into a portrait I brought to every important relationship later in life; once again I had to appear to be someone I wasn’t, someone who was nicer than the Bad Nancy. As for my sister and mother, well, I have only recently demythologized them, allowing them some of the badness that as a child I had monopolized.

  Whatever is right and true, neither today’s intellectual understanding, nor kindness and spontaneous generosity, no, not even love for my darling husband seem to purge my suspicion that childhood envy has marked me as a Bad Girl for life. When a dear friend writes a malicious review of one of my books, I am beyond consolation. My husband tries to tell me that it was envy that provoked her. But other people’s envy doesn’t lessen suspicion of my own. The self-portraits we draw in childhood are overly harsh to protect us from them and them from us. Without today’s Zoran, earrings by Ted Muehling, and store-bought blond streaks, I would be recognized as who I am. To trace our midlife disguises to the early years of life is as obvious as follow-the-dots.

  I have tried to understand the anxiety in that house I was brought to from the hospital. My young mother was economically dependent on her domineering father, who was so opposed to her marrying the man she loved that they eloped. Then he went away, my mysterious father, gone, never to return again. Of course she had no time or inclination for baby pictures. But I have the inner eye of memory, snapshots from my bank of dreams, which tell me I correctly sense that my exhibitionistic life grew out of the earliest possible hunger for visibility.

  Memories of my father. I have none. I grew up believing he was dead, though no one ever said the words. Someone must have, but when? “Oh, my daddy’s dead,” I would cheerfully reply when strangers asked of his whereabouts. Nothing more, for I knew nothing, also not to ask, not even to wonder about him, so forbidden, so loaded with terrible consequences was the subject of him. From the earliest days I assumed that he was the source of mother’s anxiety; she sighed a great deal, and on those few occasions when she, instead of my beloved nurse, Anna, braided my hair, her sighing behind my head was frightening proof that I was a terrible burden to her. Other times when I heard her sigh, I assumed it had to do with his absence. I put two and two together and knew that if it weren’t for me, she would still be with him.

  I’ve always suspected that there was a time, before I came along, when “they” were all happy—my mother, sister, and father. My sister had known him, been held by him, seen herself in his eyes. And surely my mother was happy then. It was my feeling that my mother and sister shared this family romance, a bond between them. I must have envied it bitterly, although I totally denied that envy until recent years, until writing books brought it out of me. Rivalrous with my silly older sister? Absolutely not! Was I not the most popular girl in class, the brightest, the funniest, she who was welcome in any house in town?

  Looks weren’t even on the list of what mattered in my young life; I worked at my happiness by winning love outside the family in any arena other than beauty. My defenses against the recognition of my envy of my sister for having known my father, and for resembling my lovely mother, were impenetrable.

  Now I find that in studies conducted among very successful women, the majority admit to an early sense of feeling themselves to be the less attractive sibling. When I did my own national survey with pollsters DYG Inc. in 1990, 75 percent of the women surveyed said that being the less “pretty one” in the family made them determined to prove themselves.

  Well, then, we might conclude, perceiving yourself as the plain kid has great advantages; but wouldn’t the best of all possible worlds be one in which the family went out of its way to praise intellectual curiosity, independence, wit, and bravery, and gave beauty its due too, acknowledging its powerful force so that you became competent at handling it in yourself as well as in others.

  Why would so many popular fairy tales turn on rivalries between brothers and sisters if beauty, simply by virtue of its luminous power, was not the issue that more than any other the tiny child wanted to hear told, and retold so that his or her own feelings could be recognized?

  Once upon a time—this is a real story—a man gave me a wide gold ring on which he’d had engraved an illustration of the fairy tale of the princess on the glass mountain whose father, the king, had said, “He who can climb the glass mountain will win my daughter and the kingdom.” There was a family of three brothers, the eldest of whom charged arrogantly up the glass mountain on his horse and failed miserably. The middle brother tried the same tactic and failed. It was the youngest, neglected brother who was able to ascend the slippery mountain on foot and win the princess’s heart. Sure enough, if you looked very closely at the ring, there was a tiny princess on a hill, and each of the three brothers.

  The man who gave it to me was the youngest of three brothers, they much older than he who was his mother’s darling. Until a sister was born, the much desired only daughter, who took his place. How he hated that sister, an envy that I now recall explains his solitary comment on what he referred to as the “breakthrough” in his analysis. Until now, his words have always puzzled me: “The beauty of women is important.” Never believing in any looks I got, I accepted the ring and wore it; I still have it. He was such a tough guy, that lover, an intellectual encased in defenses of iron. Imagine allowing himself to create such a gift. Imagine me never believing, ever.

  Here is a little rhyme with which to close this section on sibling rivalry. It was collected in England by the same people who gave us my all-time favorite, “I one my mother… I ate my mother.” It is noted by the authors that small children chant this while swinging:

  I went to my father’s garden,

  And found an Irish farthing.

  I gave it to my mother

  To buy a baby brother.

  My brother was so nasty,

  I baked him in a pasty,

  The pasty wasn’t tasty

  So I threw it over the garden wall,

  I threw it over the garden wall.

  Die once!

  Die twic
e!

  Die three times and never no more,

  And never–no–more!

  Learning to Be Clean (and Beautiful)

  A modern puzzle: Why do women, who are famous for disliking the sight, smell, and touch of genitals, their own as well as men’s, continue to be that sex that toilet trains the human race? We know that our most lasting impressions of our genitals are laid down in the earliest years, feelings that we carry into our sexual lives and which are painfully hard to change. With all the love in the world, what does a woman bring to the teaching of self-love, the whole self, including what lies between the legs?

  What do her eyes, facial expressions, her voice and body language communicate when she parts the little legs to clean the cracks and crannies? Is she impervious to the smell of shit? Can her lifelong approach to fastidious hygiene, her fear of humiliation regarding loss of control in all functions related to the genital area bring a relaxed, not overly critical approach to bladder and sphincter control? In the end, can she have any more regard for her daughter’s vulva, hairless and pure as it may look, than she does for her own, which she may once have allowed her husband to kiss but now hates for him to touch?

  Along with the grim but expected dysfunctions that our society has tried to avoid discussing for hundreds of years, we now have an epidemic of unwanted pregnancies as well as sex-related diseases that end in death. We have heard and read that the attitude we have about our genitals determines our sexual behavior. Our feelings, conscious and unconscious, are also going to predict how our children grow into adulthood, if they reach maturity.