The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  We are the new Good Witches who do not want to be invisible, nor do we want to look grotesque, as older women do when wearing the clothes of an adolescent. Anne Hollander is the prophet come to tell us that clothes have a language and speak for us. Women always knew this, but it was the good woman’s role to say, “It’s not how you look, dear, or what you wear, but who you are inside.” Well, yes, being good is important, but it is possible to be “good” and also be sexual and beautiful.

  “We’re tired of being good all the time,” says novelist Margaret Atwood, a seasoned voice of honesty. “When you deprive women of any notion of threat, it pretty much puts them back in the Victorian age. All innocent, and without power, except the power of being good.”

  The fashion designers don’t know how to see us, so revolutionary is this new category of women’s extended life. Mature women were never thought of as deserving a special image. They weren’t working en masse in offices, holding high positions in government, wielding financial portfolios. When I was young, the mothers of my friends never arrived at mature sexual beauty; they had reached their beauty peak in adolescence, saved virginity for marriage, and gone quickly from Prom Queen to motherhood, the latter look devoid of sexuality. As a new generation of young women grew into the fashion spotlight, their mothers visually disappeared into the landscape. Only the great movie queens with fashion designers like Edith Head and Adrian had the mature erotic beauty thing down pat; these stars had extraordinary lighting to accentuate the mesmerizing quality of sexual ease they were trained to draw up from deep down inside. That is why we called the movies “make-believe.” We never saw women like that in the flesh.

  But you and I do not age as our mothers did; many of us work outside the home and have good money to spend: Women ages fifty-five to sixty-four earn 41 percent more than that age group did thirty years ago; women over sixty-five make more than twice as much. I emphasize the money because you would think cash, if nothing else, would make the fashion designers scramble. But we cannot blame the tailors, whose job isn’t psychiatry. “What do women want?” has taken on new meaning; an army of us has evolved with neither a psychological nor a visual model of a mature sexual beauty. We have nothing to wear!

  Fashion critic Holly Brubach wrote of the seventies, “There’s something especially alarming about the recycling of that decade, as if all history were turning into a hall of mirrors…. It seems to me easier to take shelter in the style of another decade than to invent a style for one’s own time and refurbish the world in it. Either way, it’s a cop-out, a means of abdicating the life that we’ve been dealt.”

  Most of the tailors who resurrect the fashions we wore when we changed the world in the sixties and seventies weren’t even around then. Do they play our old music and reinvent the clothes in the hope that the “look” might recapture the old momentum and get us out of this rut we’re in? Fashion designers can only invent clothes when people are ready to wear them, because the look fits the times. We aren’t there yet, therefore they can’t dress us.

  “The silence of being unseen can be devastating after a lifetime of listening for the compliment or searching for the approving glance that confirms one’s ability to please,” wrote psychologist Rita Freedman in 1986. But the devastation felt by young women today comes after a “lifetime” of only twenty-five years. They are caught between an impoverished self in the nursery and the fear of growing older, there being so few images of admirable older women out there.

  Women’s magazines reinforce their anxiety that life only exists in this moment. Get yourself looked at now, for only obscurity lies ahead. I remember well the fashion bibles I grew up seeing on coffee tables, mother’s magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar with their mesmerizing images of beautiful adult women who promised mystery, an exciting future owned by grown-ups. At sixteen we didn’t want to look that way, not yet, but these exotic women, like the movie queens on the big screen at The Gloria, offered an alternative future of sexual beauty to that of dear old mom.

  In the sixties and seventies, when the baby boomers, by sheer numbers, conquered the media—“The Youthquakers” was what Diana Vreeland called them—images of Jean Shrimpton, Penelope Tree, and Twiggy took over the fashion pages. The rush of music, art, and writing provided content to The Look. These books and songs and paintings were the message heard round the world. The voices of early Feminism played to the backdrop of Warhol’s paintings, The Stones’ music, and the shrunken T-shirts and long hair of The Youthquakers. Everything interesting and important was in sync with the Civil Rights Movement, abortion rights, the protest against the Vietnam War.

  That said, there are things worth preserving from the past that got lost in the revolutions. We who lived through them are the last generation to have been born into a world of tradition and manners. If we don’t incorporate that civility and live it so that our parents’ look that we loved is in us, then it will become extinct. There are reasons we run the old movies again and again and reinvent the old clothes; Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett sound as sweet as the summers of youth in our parched world, even to people who didn’t hear them the last time around. Everyone is hungry.

  We must find a look for The Good Witch. Are women uncomfortable looking powerful, associating strength with age, meaning mother? We bring to the sight of a beautiful fifty-year-old woman a different memory than we bring to a man. Should we just glimpse her, not know her, we would be drawn to her beauty. But then someone tells us her age and we see her differently. The image of the first woman in our lives shades how we see ourselves aging and, by extension, how we see other aging women; part of the pleasure in destroying older women is getting back at the witch in the nursery, not the good one, the bad.

  When we see ourselves in the mirror, age fifty or sixty, we are reluctant to rely on our looks. Only the emotionally separated, individuated woman arrives at a stage where she can see the internalized mother whole, thereby seeing herself as whole too. Those of us who never did are left with the Good Witch and Bad Witch of fairy tales, with the split of the most powerful woman in the world into the loved and the hated mother. Of course we don’t want to look powerful.

  The Brothers Grimm, in the “Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel” tales they collected, were so disturbed to find mothers at the center of the stories about murder, jealousy, abandonment—which had been passed on orally from one generation of old women to the next—that they changed the character into a stepmother for the collection’s third edition, published in 1819. “For them, the bad mother had to disappear in order for the ideal to survive and allow Mother to flourish as symbol of the eternal feminine, the motherland, and the family itself as the highest social desideratum.” It is too bad. Children need to hear reality spoken; they can take it. So can we. Otherwise, when we look at a powerful older woman, ourselves or another, what we see and fear is The Bad Witch.

  My own ambivalence regarding my need to be seen, as against emptying the crowded closets and traveling with one small suitcase, is in this puzzle somewhere; exhibitionism, putting oneself out there in a dazzling dress, carries with it the threat of loss of control, as when flying. For instance, when I board a plane I instinctively reach for fashion magazines; nothing diverts me from fear of loss of control in flight like judging beauty. I turn the pages of Vogue with languid anticipation, alternately relieved—a rush of superiority—that nothing is good enough to catch my eye, and then an Aha! of adrenaline when I spy something that would make an entire restaurant turn to gaze.

  Imagining myself in beautiful clothes has got me through a lot of bumpy flights. Nowadays, when the airplane lands safely, and I cheat death again, I see that I have turned down the corners of fewer and fewer fashion pages. I am an addict in remission, sympathetic to why women are buying less: we, the best-looking, moneyed generation ever of women our age, are different from our mothers and nothing represents us. When the eye focuses on middle-aged women, it can’t take us in. Even so-called adult women’s m
agazines are unable to move beyond adolescent beauty, are at a cultural impasse.

  Flying down to Key West yesterday I read an article in Harper’s Bazaar about the “invention” of a hot new model. “Agents call it inventing the girl,” said the writer, “you pick and choose their work…. You position them. You decide how they’re going to be seen… to satisfy our culture’s hungry eye… hers is a loveliness that seems to compose itself and draw you in the longer you look.”

  But this is no Garbo face, as the last line above might suggest, it is a pretty face of the latest eighteen-year-old, chain-smoking icon in jeans and tank top. All of her pet peeves and philosophy are duly noted in the text. The median age of the female reader of Vogue is an adult 32.4. Is it true that “youth is the only thing worth having,” as Dorian Gray said? Our own preoccupation with it goes beyond fear of age itself, as if the beautiful new turn-of-the-century woman that our revolution has given us is, as men used to say, “too much woman for me.

  Why don’t the editors, stylists, and photographers who create these fashion magazines devise a look for the eye and wallet of the majority of their readers? Just before Alexander Liberman retired as creative director of Condé Nast—which owns Vogue—where he had been for more than fifty years, I met him briefly in his office. Respectful, even intimidated, aware of the reverence in which he was held, I asked why these adult magazines didn’t have a more sophisticated look, as did the issues he designed thirty and forty years ago, which chronicled women of the world who belonged to a fashionable pantheon of supreme beauties like Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Babe Paley, Liz Whitney, and Slim Keith. I’ve always remembered Avedon’s miraculous shot of Dovina with the elephants, Horst’s mesmerizing black-and-white photo of Coco Chanel, and Liberman’s own of Marlene Dietrich. Posed in a style that said chic, soignée, cosmopolitan, these women, I said to Liberman, were a mystery I didn’t understand when young but which impressed me as my future.

  “You can’t sell a magazine that appeals to matrons,” he advised me with disdain. And then, “You are living in the past.” I was so taken aback, I stood up, speechless. The interview was over.

  I like to think that it is not just the mediocrity of fashion that accounts for the dearth of pages in Vogue that interest me but that I also have a better opinion of myself these days and am therefore less in need of fancy wrappings. Not a great opinion, but better, and very much a product of twenty-five years of writing, which has taught me that I was happiest in my skin when I was ten. It was precisely that ease, more than anything, that I would like to recapture. I never looked in mirrors then. I believed in the bright, articulate, athletic girl I was, and brave, oh, how brave! How did I lose her?

  When I was in the eighth grade, my grandfather sent my mother a silver evening bag for Christmas; inside was a gold tube of lipstick embossed with the figure of an elegant stork. Sherman Billingsley, the colorful owner of the Stork Club in New York, was famous for handing out such favors. The lipstick itself was a color I’d never before seen, a hot, shocking pink, which captivated me as in a fairy tale: “Take me,” it said, and I did.

  We girls were just beginning our beauty rituals—one starts early in the South—and when I put on my shocking-pink lipstick, everybody gazed. I was accustomed to people admiring my splendid report cards, my athletic prowess, my death-defying leaps through space from tree to tree, but now they looked at my mouth, my face. It was an altogether different feeling, having a part of my body admired.

  Maybe forty years later, on a summer day calling for the hot-pink lipstick I’d continued to keep as a part of my wardrobe, my husband and I drove down the road to visit our friends Charles and Belinda. We had taken separate houses in Malibu for the month of August, and it was a perfect day for drinking Bellinis. We sat in their garden and laughed a lot, champagne and peach nectar being an ebullient high. Eventually we ambled indoors to view a painting of a Rousseau jungle of animals that Belinda had just completed, she being a fancier of wildlife and parrots in particular, two of which she and Charles owned. He asked if I would like to have his parrot sit on my shoulder and, as I knew the bird to be the far tamer of the two, I agreed.

  Standing there very still, smiling my hot-pink smile, I didn’t see Belinda quietly circling behind me and without warning placing her irascible bird on my other shoulder, causing my head to turn abruptly. The bird squawked and sunk its beak into my face. I could feel the warm blood running down my cheek and hear Belinda’s laughter as she tipsily led me to her dressing table and applied astringent. Seeing the torn, bloody skin just below my eye, I began shaking so visibly that my husband had to take me home.

  When I stood at my own mirror and saw the crater in my cheek, and realized how close it was to my one good eye, I began to cry big tears, which is not at all like me. It wasn’t the pain, but something else so deep and sad that I couldn’t name it for days. Why had she put that bad-tempered bird so close to my face without even a word of warning?

  “It was your flamboyant look, that hot-pink lipstick,” she said when she telephoned to tell me what her “bird expert” had said regarding the incident. “The lipstick and that blond hair. You’re so flashy. It made my darling Petrov angry.”

  She was more amused than concerned, having been bitten several times by her birds and feeling something else too. “You should have seen my friend Jane,” she went on, “when tiny Petrov chased her up the stairs. All that red hair of hers got to him. She was screaming, but it was hilarious, little Petrov hopping up the stairs after that big, gorgeous woman.”

  She is a beautiful woman herself, Belinda, though she goes out of her way to let the great bones, the hair, the skin, the whole masterpiece crumble through neglect. The demolition is so intentional. Still, it refuses to die. On her coffee table is an old issue of Vogue magazine with her on the cover as the most beautiful debutante of the year. What kind of unhappiness provokes her to put on display her youthful beauty even as she destroys what remains of it?

  Clearly, what beauty won her was not good enough. Better to thumb her nose at us for still worshiping what she now hates, the remains of what once promised so much. The magazine lies on the table, where she can walk by it, intentionally wearing something dowdy. Once Galanos, Halston, and Saint-Laurent begged her to wear their designs so that others might worship her in them, hence them on her. I study her closely, for I don’t want to become angry, envious of other women who refuse to imitate her bitter capitulation to age.

  In a version of the Cinderella fairy tale, after the two evil and envious stepsisters have been bested by the beautiful Cinderella in the competition for the King’s son, they try to get back into her good graces so as to share in her fine fortune. On the way to the church where the wedding will take place, two birds come and peck out one eye from each of the bad sisters; after the ceremony, the birds appear again and peck out the other eye from each. “And thus, for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness all their days.”

  Bruno Bettelheim’s comment on the birds’ blinding the sisters is that it is a symbol of their insensitivity, “but also the logical consequence of [their] having failed to develop a personality of their own…. [They did not] develop a separate self… discover the difference between good and evil, develop initiative and self-determination… they remain empty shells.”

  So much of life spent trying to be seen. With all my talk of emptying closets, I do not want to end up like Belinda with her evil birds. To decide to stop pulling the eye to oneself is a fine decision but must be made in full consciousness of what is being given up. Slaughtering what remains of beauty without acceptance of how you will feel when other women star in what was once your role, well, it can lead to a lot of birds being sent to assuage your envy, peck out the eyes of the “flashy” ladies who have dared to make you mindful of what you once owned.

  Somehow, perhaps in the writing of this book, I want to come to terms with my need to be seen so that when the time for flashy clothes is done—I don’t
see hot-pink lips when I’m on a walker—I will have internalized the belief that I am lovable for other, invisible qualities. That business of separation and individuation of which Bettelheim and Mahler speak begins in the nursery and, though it should ideally end around age two, wiser men and women know we work on it all our lives.

  “Behind every terror lies a wish,” Freud said, and no doubt when the breeze in Key West blows the sheer Zoran top against my breasts, I am split: Part of me wishes to be seen, the other half fears that I will be. Psychiatrist Eric Berne wrote about this in his book Games People Play, where he explains that instead of being a healthy adult who only does what he himself approves of, some of us play the game of being both critical parent and naughty child. If, indeed, I am still stuck at that stage of rebelling against my very critical mother who wouldn’t see me, I am resigned to it. It is my way of remaining tied to her, of still trying to get from her what I couldn’t as a tiny child. Do I write my books against her, did Freud, does Paglia; and does Madonna, like Marilyn Monroe and Gypsy Rose Lee, take off her clothes to get back at her/them? Or do we ever reach a point where we do it for ourselves?

  If the occasional bird gouges flesh from my face for my “flashiness,” the occasional friend telephones to remind me not to miss the latest evil review of a book I have written, I remind myself of the rewards of my exhibitionism, that this is what won my husband’s love more than anything.

  When I first began to interview gurus in the behavioral world, I was repeatedly corrected for using the word voyeur when referring to how we women looked at men in their tight jeans in the seventies, our eyes drawn to their creatively arranged crotches. “Men, not women, are the voyeurs,” I was corrected. And when I spoke of myself as an exhibitionist, I was also informed that the word exhibitionist referred to a male flasher who unzipped his fly in the park.