The Power of Beauty: Our Looks, Our Lives

by Nancy Friday

  He telephoned on a late afternoon in August, catching me walking past the phone, usually answered by machine; I’d been having a bad day with envy, trying to capture the killer feel of it on paper, therefore grinding my teeth a lot. And so the ringing phone was a momentary respite and I picked it up. A man’s gentle voice tentatively reminded me that we had met several months earlier at a dinner party in honor of a mutual friend’s film, and then, hearing no response, he asked me how I was. “I’m battling with siblings,” I grumbled by way of hello. Would I like to have a drink? I had planned to stay home that night. But it was past four o’clock and I was already restless. Later he would tell me, “I figured if you turned me down I could always rationalize it was because it was so late in the day.” The intrepid newspaper editor feared rejection. It touched my heart, which had a weakness for sheep in wolves’ clothing.

  He came for drinks and never left is how we tell it now. In fact, when the doorbell rang I had no expectations, no memory of his physical self. And there he was, instantly dear, black curls, head slightly lowered like a bashful fellow on a date. We sat out on the terrace, he with a beer talking about some balanced or unbalanced budget in Mexico while I watched the late afternoon August sun work its magic on Fifth Avenue windows across the park; floor by floor the little squares blazed into vermilion as the sun hunkered down behind the horizon on the far shore of the Hudson. The air was so sweet and heavy you might have parachuted on it down the seventeen floors to the sidewalk.

  “Who’s playing the piano?” he asked. I told him it was Peter Allen, and we stopped to listen as Pete’s voice rose, stopped, and started again. “He’s writing a musical,” I said. The song he sang was called “Come Save Me.” We wouldn’t be able to save Pete, though I didn’t know it then.

  When it was dark, we taxied to an East Side restaurant where, over dinner, we continued our impersonal chat, so unlike everything since. Afterward we walked out onto Madison Avenue and he took my hand. It was just a handhold. He might as well have scooped me up in his arms, leapt on his horse, and ridden off into the night. It was a most remarkable handhold, so much so that I blanked on the names of two good friends walking by. I was that sure of what was about to happen.

  What followed was a scene I’d been genetically programmed to play all my life. We returned to my apartment, I poured him a drink, put on Roberta Flack—who just happened to be singing “I’m the One”—and leaned across and kissed him, he in midsentence. I’d had no fear since the fire. It had burned away the Nice Girl crust. Risking rejection, taking chances, making the first move had once again become my nature. My Prince responded as in a fairy tale, awakening. He came alive.

  Do you know that being seduced is one of men’s favorite sexual fantasies? Men close their eyes and become hard at the thought of a woman taking the lead, allowing them to drop the in-charge demeanor that they feel women demand and that they demand of themselves should they be rejected. No sweat, honey; easy come, easy go. That night I took him by the hand and led him downstairs to my bedroom, all freshly painted, carpeted, everything a lovely hue of nude.

  During the next three days he managed to say good-bye and farewell to the several women he’d been seeing, and when a week later he left for Europe to create a newspaper, we vowed to speak every day by phone and to meet, his country or mine, every two or three weeks. Three years later I completed Jealousy, two years after that got my divorce, and we married. Oh, how we married!

  Peter Allen determined the staging of our wedding when, one night after dinner, as we parted at our respective doors he said, “You two get married, I’ll sing and dance at your wedding!” It was an offer we could not refuse. Marriage was on our minds, but now we needed a set appropriate for mounting not just a wedding, but a musical.

  Two weeks later Norman put an engagement ring on my finger; we were having dinner in The Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center. “There,” I said, pointing to the little stage high above the orchestra, “there is where we should be married.” Norman tilted his head and looked up. “There?” he asked, certain that I was joking, but not altogether sure. We had been through many trials and tests, as Bettelheim would say, not the least of which was Norman’s pained sense of invisibility during the low-profile years of our love affair prior to the grim divorce. “I want to hire an airplane,” he used to lament, “and write Norm loves Nancy across the sky!” Well, here is a platform in the sky, I said to him. He squeezed my hand, on which he’d just placed the ring, looked back up at the platform and then at me and said, “I trust you.”

  It would be a fairy-tale wedding in all ways, including the last trial/test, which was the misadventure of my dress; it didn’t materialize, literally, meaning the fabric and the tailor disappeared, whooosh! Today, eight years later, a panicked bride might readily find another wedding dress; even Armani is designing a bridal collection, but in 1988, dressed-up weddings hadn’t yet recycled out of feminism. Even the bridal departments at Saks and Bergdorf’s were dusty alcoves with gowns of little imagination; wedding announcements didn’t fill a page in the New York Times. What was the heroine in the wedding musical to wear?

  Enter the master of threads, whose name I’d known since the late sixties when I’d watched Barbra Streisand sing and dance in his creations. The first “Important” dress I bought was designed by Donald Brooks. When a mutual friend contacted him, he declined, saying he was too busy designing costumes for a film to invent a wedding dress for a stranger. But I didn’t stay one for long; I auditioned for him at The Russian Tea Room over vodka and blinis, and before we’d downed the last, he’d drawn on a paper napkin a gown fit for Marlene Dietrich, complete with a lace hood.

  It was July, however, and most of the fabric showrooms were closed. But Donald, being a wizard, found bits and pieces of white lace sufficient for a gown to be stitched by a Spanish seamstress who spoke no English. When he arrived for the last fitting, two days before the wedding, I greeted him wearing his dress from twenty years prior, a long, one-shoulder sinuous wool jersey column of wide navy-and-white stripes. He and I had come full circle.

  And so Norman and I were married in the world’s most beautiful nightclub, on a stage high above the revolving dance floor where performing artists in the 1930s used to make their Ta-Da! entrance before descending the curved Art Deco staircases that embrace the orchestra below.

  It was a night out of a finale in one of my childhood movie musicals at The Gloria—a once-in-a-lifetime celebration and a deliberate contrast to the preference for privacy that we’ve had before and after the wedding. As we were pronounced husband and wife, Peter Duchin’s orchestra began to play, the golden curtains around the room rose to reveal all of Manhattan, and the dance floor began to spin. Round and round it went, out came the banquet, up sprang the dancers, in rolled the wedding cake, and then, just when you thought you couldn’t take any more pleasure, Peter Allen offered his gift to us, his band, his backup girl singers and Pete playing his piano, dancing, his dinner jacket thrown to the wind, the crowd calling for another chorus of “Rio.” No one could make you happier than Peter Allen.

  The day after the wedding, Norman and I went to our home in Connecticut where, during those perfect July days, I would ask him to tell me again and again, in detail, what our wedding had been like. When you produce your own wedding, it is hard suddenly to become the bride; I was there, but I had big memory blocks. For instance, I scolded him for not dancing with me. “But I danced half the night with you!” he protested.

  What I remembered was that it had been glorious, and something else too, something that kept me getting up from where we lay around the pool and retreating into the house to write, something that demanded to be told: “Let me out!” By the end of the week, I had written a short story about a young girl growing up in a small Southern town, a story that began on a high brick wall in the shadows of St. Phillip’s and St. Michael’s churches, which bordered my old neighborhood. When I finished, I took it out to Norman, who read it, smiled
, and thanked me.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Isn’t your story in answer to my toast to you at our wedding?”

  “You made a toast?”

  Here is my husband’s wedding toast, which I offer to all once brave ten-year-olds:

  When Nancy was a little girl growing up in Charleston, she was ever the adventurous leader of the pack. With friends in tow, she would run along the highest walls in town yelling, “Farther! Faster!” challenging her friends to keep up. There was no dare she wouldn’t take, no thrill she wouldn’t seek, no challenge she wouldn’t happily embrace.

  Tonight, standing at the top of the Rainbow Room’s fabled staircase, looking out at all of you and all of New York, I understand the effect young Nancy must have had on her friends. Taking her hand, following her lead, is what makes me braver than I’ve ever been, more willing to live life at its fullest. Dearest, darling Nancy. Meeting you, marrying you, is the thrill of my life, the adventure I want to pursue. I look forward to the good times ahead, with no dread and no regrets. Here is to our marriage and our life together and to the many high walls we’ll climb, living life to its fullest.

  I understand now why I’d not been able to hear those words when first spoken; even now it is difficult to take them in. It hadn’t been just the excitement of the wedding, but the content of what he said, so close to the bone, so much what I had always wanted to hear. Was it too painful or too wonderful? Maybe Nancy the woman couldn’t hear the gift, but the girl heard, which is why I’d had to go inside and write the story. She has been speaking to me all my life, demanding her presence in every book I have written.

  That autumn after our wedding, I was reluctant to return to the loneliness of the writing room. It had been years since I’d had time on my hands. I read, walked, leafed through magazines, enjoyed my first lunches with friends in years. But the worker in me was growing restless. I couldn’t resist getting into the research that eventually led to the outline for this book.

  A book is a journey, and while we may begin with an outline, it is not a map, by which I mean our subject hopefully takes us over, grabs us, and leads us into unimagined territory. We follow, trusting that the subject knows the way better than conscious intellect. Isn’t this why we chose the subject in the first place? Once upon a time we buried an idea that was too hot to handle, something we weren’t yet ready for, but which we couldn’t forget; eventually we are reminded, perhaps by a dream, that we must dig up that idea that very much wants to be consciously addressed. The time is right. Instinctively, we go to the spot and dig up the bone.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer did his best writing in bed, immediately upon waking, when he was just coming out of dream sleep. Where did I read that long ago? Oh yes, I nodded, understanding totally. What I love about the unconscious is its dogged determination to remind me while I sleep of what I refused to face during the day. For instance, my sleep patterns changed totally when I married that first time around.

  I’d never had trouble sleeping until then. No matter what anxieties beset me by day, I would lay myself down to sleep and do just that. But when I married the wrong man, insomnia took me over. I tried hypnosis, sleeping pills, but nothing worked. Then one day during a talk with my old friend and mentor Robertiello, I mentioned my sleep problem, and he said, matter-of-factly, “You and your husband are so symbiotic you’re afraid that if you fall into a deep sleep you will lose your identity. You fight sleep to hang on to your self.” I was never so distant from the girl of my tenth year as I was in that marriage.

  In this marriage to Norman I have been my most content; it is why this idea of emptying the closets and traveling with one small suitcase arose. What do I need of fancy wrappings? The girl of my tenth year, she who my husband saw and loves most, didn’t give a damn about beauty. I sometimes fear he sees her more clearly than I, which is when I slip into inauthenticity by day, and lose my way in bad dreams at night. Last night, for instance, I was on the road again, and there were the suitcases. To my horror, they were empty. All the fine clothes I’d packed to wear to the wedding to which Norman and I were driving had disappeared.

  We were in some honky-tonk town, a garishly lit main drag that resembled Key West’s stretch of T-shirt shops. Realizing I would never find anything “good enough” in this place and that I couldn’t possibly attend a wedding in anything less than “perfect,” Norman offered to drive me back home. But that would require an eight-hour trip. We would miss the wedding because of my stupidity, craziness, weakness. I stood in the street with the suitcases open, empty, revelers all around perfectly happy in whatever they were wearing. Why couldn’t I be like that, “letting my goodness shine through” as my Sunday school teacher would have said? Obviously, I fear that inside there is only badness, which only exhibitionistic dress can conceal.

  “Luggage that one travels with is a load of sin… that weighs one down,” wrote Freud. Oh, yes, Dr. Freud, I’ll buy that! “But precisely luggage often turns out to be an unmistakable symbol of the dreamer’s own genitals,” the master adds. Humiliation. Loss of control. Soiling myself. The other perennial nightmare my unconscious refuses to give up. Me and all the other women for whom the feminine hygiene commercials are created.

  Where did Freud get these ideas? I imagine the great man on a morning in turn-of-the-century Vienna sitting up in bed, he fresh out of dream sleep, writing down the last frames from the unconscious. “Lost luggage,” he writes, “is a symbol of losing one’s identity.” Ah yes, right again, whether in dreams or in reality, my own fear of lost luggage is that without my sensational wardrobe, I would either be unacceptable or invisible.

  Maybe traveling with one small suitcase isn’t the definition of goodness; maybe it doesn’t have to be that black-and-white, meaning living on a farm with just two pairs of jeans, some cows in the barn, and Bongo’s grandpuppies. Maybe what is wanted is giving up the boo-hooing that Mommy didn’t love me and made me wear my sister’s old evening dress to the Yacht Club dance where no one saw me. And then it hits me that if I had enjoyed The Gaze, I wouldn’t be in this life with my husband who sees me and loves the exhibitionistic writer of naughty books. How can you cling to the past with a man like this?

  I lug my suitcases through my dreams as through life, always anxious lest the airline lose my identity. Even in adolescence—especially then, which is when it began—I overpacked. When I began this book, faced the empty page, I had no idea of how to begin. Just to put something down, and with every intention of crossing it out later, I wrote, “I am a woman who needs to be seen. I need it in a basic way, as in to breathe, to eat. Or not to be seen, that is the other increasingly attractive option.” No sooner were the words on paper than I began to empty my closets, some days getting up from my work to go upstairs and fill another box with barely worn clothes to be sent to relatives and friends. I will finish this book with far more than two inches of space between coat hangers. But am I a better person?

  The truth is that the woman Norman loves is the girl he toasted at our wedding. It is I who don’t accept her fully. That girl thrived on being seen for who she was inside, not for what she wore on her back. Her survival plan was far better than anything I’ve come up with since. Getting attention, winning love, was accomplished with kindness, humor, inventiveness, a good story well told. Why, love was the easiest thing in the world to win when I was ten.

  I believe we make our most important survival decisions so early in life that we cannot remember them. If enough time goes by, however, and we are alert to life’s repetitions, a sense of déjà vu strikes again and again. We get wise. We have lasted, and it isn’t just by chance. The repetitious chords tell us that we influence what happens to us next. We aren’t this powerless person to whom things happen randomly, who has good luck or bad. There it goes again, the familiar chord, reminding us that we’ve been here before, giving us another chance to knit together the shirttails of life. We are of a piece.

  I am not some made-up person who
unravels when she looks in the mirror; I have a passport photo that has gotten me through life again and again, and it is inside me. My husband’s words at our wedding opened a window onto the next chapter, allowing me to see the girl I’d once been and, in his words, still am. She was that chord striking again and again, that déjà vu whenever I survived the unsurvivable.

  She is waiting in the Lost and Found where I left her, all legs, old jeans, flannel shirt, pigtails, and bangs. No one would look at her twice. She is invisible, until she smiles, seeing me, catching my eye. She comes to life, talking, filled with animation, walking toward me, telling me a story, reaching for my hand, totally convinced that I will love her. I cannot take my eyes off her. And she is not pretty.

  “I’ll walk you home,” she says, and we start down King Street, past The Gloria Theatre, she already close to my height. The musical Easter Parade is playing, which she tells me she has seen twice. Across the street is the bakery where we used to fill brown paper bags with jelly doughnuts and éclairs, perfect food for a musical. When we pass Belk’s Department Store, scene of my shoplifting, I look to her sheepishly, but she is ahead of me, standing outside the house where Amorous lived. The Charleston News and Courier had given him that name, this Don Juan who’d disrupted the town, entering houses in the middle of the night, crawling into women’s beds, holding them close, and then, with a kiss, departing as silently as he’d arrived. Amorous only went to the best houses, where he had an uncanny sense of direction, as though he had been there before.

  “Remember the siren mother got in case Amorous visited her?” my companion asks. How could I forget the day the electricians installed the switch beside my mother’s bed, the electrical cord running out through the window to a siren big enough to awaken the entire town? How often I had sat on her bed, my finger on that switch, itching to turn it on. Eventually poor Amorous was caught, though his identity was never divulged, he being the slightly demented son of one of Charleston’s finest old families. Of course he knew his way around those houses he entered in the dark of night; he’d been to all of them as a guest.