The Fame Lunches

by Daphne Merkin

  So there I was, in search of such an undergarment, determined to appear thinner by external means rather than through an inner girdle of steely abs acquired by force of will and endless hours at the gym. Let other women pretend that they ate lemon rinds and endured the boredom of exercising to benefit their physical well-being. I was having none of it, despite the fact, as I soon discovered, that it had become politically incorrect to mention—much less wear—a girdle, as though the nomenclature itself had become suspect.

  “I know what the original girdle looked like. I see it as something with four garters from years ago,” said Susan Ornstein, owner of Livi’s Lingerie on Third Avenue at Eighty-Third Street in Manhattan, a store she inherited from her mother and that’s been in business since 1948. “The girdle as such is obsolete. There are senior citizens who are wearing it, but you couldn’t live on that. I sell body shapers and control garments, more modern foundations, all the time. Women need help. Nobody looks like a mannequin.”

  Or a model, as we say these days. Well, I can report back that Ms. Ornstein, with her hair dyed a Lana Turner shade of blond, is absolutely correct. A proper, old-fashioned, breath-shortening girdle is nearly impossible to find. No retailer, it seems, wants to have anything to do with this once most essential and now most demonized aspect of a woman’s wardrobe. In the course of my investigation, I came to understand that for a lingerie store owner to link herself to girdles would be to suggest that some of her customers might not be young or, a worse fate yet, not in control of their bedtime snacking. When I called the proprietor of a fancy little shop specializing in imported European lingerie on Madison Avenue in the Seventies and inquired as to his available stock, he could barely hide the note of horror in his voice, insisting that he no longer carried anything of this antiquated ilk. His clientele, I was politely but firmly given to understand, didn’t go in for such measures (being, presumably, in prime neo-anorexic shape), and he suggested that I try Orchard Street or Brighton Beach. I attempted to coax him into greater receptivity by coming out in the open with my dual identity as a private customer with a professional interest in the field, but not even the possibility of getting his name in print stirred his interest. “Try Brighton Beach,” he repeated. “They still cater to zaftig women.”

  Newly aware of my marginalized status, I decided to focus on stores renowned more for their fitting expertise than for their assortment of cashmere bed jackets or exorbitantly priced Swiss underwear. I went to a lingerie shop not far from where I live, one of a national chain that has gotten lots of ink—as well as an Oprah endorsement—for its skill at sizing bras. The place was bustling with saleswomen carrying rows of bras on their arms like so many stacked bangles. There were tempting gossamer pieces everywhere I turned, from itty-bitty white cotton briefs to lacy black push-ups priced in the three figures. For a moment it looked hopeful: How could a place specializing in shaping and modifying breasts not also pay attention to such readily expandable areas of the female corpus as the midriff, waist, and stomach?

  As it turned out, the store staked its reputation on Spanx products in varying grades of holding power; it carried nothing beyond this limited range, no merry widows or hourglass corsets. I snaked myself into a long-legged number that was billed as the firmest of the bunch and discovered what I already knew, which was that Spanx had come into existence precisely in recognition of the fact that the era of zaftig was over, except in the subordinate boroughs. Spanx tights, briefs, and slips are great, that is, if you are already in possession of a body toned and firmed from hours in the gym; they add a last bit of smoothing gloss, a kind of gilding of the corporeal lily. But if you are in need of real help, if you are looking for body armor to shield your extra rolls from scrutiny, forget it.

  It was incontrovertible: where girdles had once reigned, rowing machines, ab crunches, personal trainers, and plastic surgeons now held uncontested sway. With a few exceptions, girdles had gone resoundingly off the radar. These last outposts include fashion museums, histories of lingerie, and sex emporiums like Kiki de Montparnasse, where girdles have been reconceived as fetish objects. (Freud thought such fetishes spoke to castration shock.) Or they have been appropriated by aficionados of irony, like the fashion designers Jean Paul Gaultier (whose gold corset set the theme for Madonna’s Blond Ambition tour), Vivienne Westwood, and Thierry Mugler. Just to utter the word “girdle,” like the word “corset,” which preceded it, is to hark back to fleshier, gaslit times—before the advent of pantyhose and before the diet and fitness industries had balkanized women’s imaginations—and thus stigmatize oneself by implication as not only unfit but passé.

  Of course, corsets—whether fitted with stays (later called boning), busks (long, rigid strips inserted down the middle, made of wood or steel or more elaborate materials like ivory or silver), gussets, or metal eyelets—were a byword of the female lexicon beginning in the late sixteenth century and lasting through the 1920s. The more flexible girdle, anachronistic though it may seem, is in fact a twentieth-century innovation, indicating that whalebones and the sort of drastic lacing that enabled Scarlett O’Hara to whittle her already-wee waist down to seventeen inches had been replaced by more pliant materials and devices. In 1829, back-laced corsets, which had presumed the presence of a servant, attesting to aristocratic or bourgeois status, were joined by a two-piece steel busk—the first corset a woman could fasten herself, thereby democratizing it. Still, the canons of gender, class, and fashion were, with a few remissions, upheld rigorously. “During the nineteenth century,” Jill Fields notes in her fascinating account An Intimate Affair, “virtually all free-born women in the United States wore corsets.” (Indeed, most women still wore open-crotch drawers—to differentiate them from men’s closed drawers and to demonstrate women’s essential lack of sexual interest—until about 1910, when underpants were first introduced.)

  As the twentieth century brought with it the rise of athleticism and the lure of the flapper, concepts of comfort, mobility, and bodily display began to offset the tenets of stoicism, sedateness, and modesty that had required cumbrous layers of clothing. This shift was met by immediate resistance, from both men and women; what was seen as the “fad” of corsetlessness was identified with radical feminist and utopian movements and was also seen as threateningly foreign, possibly even Bolshevik. Articles appeared like “Fighting the Corsetless Evil” and “Flappers Are Responsible for Corsetless Craze.” The embrace of waist cinching returned with Dior’s New Look in 1947, which posited a chastely feminine stylishness calling for longer skirts and tiny waistlines. Two decades later, though, the girdle was left for dead.

  I finally found some semblance of support at Livi’s, where Susan Ornstein fitted me with a panty girdle that she suggested I wear every day and an all-in-one by a line called Va Bien that she praised for its crisscross paneling and ability to hold the wearer in “beautifully.” I tried out the panty girdle first, feeling the need to step gingerly into these new waters; within minutes it rolled over my waist, adding to instead of subtracting from my girth, and I spent the rest of the day surreptitiously rolling it up again. I fared better with the one-piece, which really did kind of lift me up. But I hit pay dirt with one of the items I had ordered from a sixty-four-year-old company called Rago, whose slogan is “Shapewear for Today’s Woman” and whose control undergarments are apparently worn by Brunei royalty. Although I had high hopes for No. 6210, an “extra firm” high-waisted article that came equipped with a zipper backed with hooks and eyes and several different kinds of control panels (as well as four concealed garter tabs), I fell hard for No. 9057, a black lace all-in-one that I had ordered in two sizes just to be safe and that gave me a fetching Belle de Jour look, as though I were the older but still sexy sister of Catherine Deneuve—or a Pigalle streetwalker.

  I would be less than honest, however, if I said that it restored me to my twenty-year-old body, and I’ve since passed the smaller of the two items on to my nineteen-year-old daughter, who had been ey
eing it for its erotic potential. Which leaves me more or less where I began, in my comfortable but untransformative cotton underpants, seeking cover in untyrannical clothes from Eskandar, Shirin Guild, and the supremely talented Ronaldo Shamask. Have I surrendered my waist for good? Not quite. One of these days I’ll sign up at my neighborhood gym and start working my way back to a waistline worth cinching.

  BRACE YOURSELF

  2006

  My long-standing obsession with my teeth is not something I’m particularly proud of—the way I take pride, say, in my encyclopedic knowledge of the Bloomsbury group. It is, however, one of the few ways in which I consider myself to have been ahead of the cultural curve—an unwitting trendsetter, if you will—because, as is abundantly apparent these days, the search for whiter, straighter teeth has become a multibillion-dollar national pastime. The evidence is everywhere you look: at the proliferation of BriteSmile spas, the vaulting sales of tooth-enhancing products like Crest Whitestrips, and the blizzard of advertisements for “smile makeovers” in newspapers and magazines.

  Teeth matter not because they are windows to your soul (that’s your eyes) but because in our image-driven culture they are windows to something much more ascertainable than a soul, something that you can flash into the night like a diamond watch or a platinum credit card, conveying everything from economic standing to moral worthiness. Think of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront observing with gruff tenderness to Eva Marie Saint, who has blossomed into young womanhood since he’s last seen her, “You had wires on your teeth. You was really a mess.” His admiration for her lovely smile (not to mention her unbracketed teeth) is a tribute not only to her comeliness but to her character. All of which probably helps to explain why I, a person who steadfastly refuses to floss and has never invested in basic homeowner’s insurance, ended up with an armamentarium of bridgework and porcelain in my mouth when, several years ago, at the ripe old age of forty-eight, I embarked on a second set of braces.

  My tragicomic thirty-some-year search for a fetching set of pearly whites began when I was a teenager, at the tail end of the 1960s. I wrote away for a tiny bottle of tooth-whitening liquid I had seen advertised in the back of the movie magazines one of my sisters and I used to devour. I can still remember the excitement with which I painstakingly applied the liquid (which looked exactly like typewriter correcting fluid) to my front teeth. I went to bed convinced I would wake up with a megawatt Ali McGraw grin, only to discover the next morning that my off-white teeth were now mortifyingly streaked with what looked like graying bits of Elmer’s glue. If I had known the cornucopia of elective procedures that the combined forces of a free-market economy and the unflagging ingenuity of an international cast of worker bees (Swiss lab technicians as well as Korean and Italian ceramicists) would have in store for me over the next few decades, I might have gone off to school that morning in a less dark mood.

  In that backwater of an era—a dental wasteland by comparison with today—perfect smiles were still a rarity, glimpsed mostly on movie and television stars; toothpaste was still being touted for its cavity-fighting rather than whitening powers; and grown-ups didn’t wear braces. But just because no one had heard of Invisalign didn’t mean that everyone walked around with chipmunk teeth. Braces—the old-fashioned “railroad tracks” kind—were the norm among urban, upper-middle-class kids, and I, like most of my friends and my five siblings, benefited from orthodontic intervention. Unlike them, however, I continued to agitate about the deficient luster of my teeth after the orthodontic work was completed—a fixation helped along by my innate and inordinate self-consciousness. I was in the habit, for instance, of trying on smiles in front of the mirror, assessing their varied effects, which is how I fell for that ridiculous tooth-whitening offer in the first place.

  In the mid-1970s, just as I was turning twenty-one, a new technique for improving the color, size, and shape of teeth called bonding was introduced, and you can be sure I signed on at the first opportunity. In those pioneering days the bonding process was a more tenuous, touch-and-go affair than it is now, with the result that the resin had a tendency to break off at inopportune moments. I remember one particularly ill-timed incident when the bonding on a tooth cracked just as I was preparing to go to dinner with a somewhat imperious man I wanted to make a good impression on. I called him and tried to beg off, referring mysteriously to something urgent that had come up. When he pressed me further, I caved and mumbled something about a broken tooth. Instead of finding this bit of female vanity endearing, he snapped at me to get out of my “narcissistic jungle.” Chastened, I rushed out to meet him and spent the entire evening trying not to reveal the flaw in my expensively touched-up smile.

  As with so many costly habits, once you start, there’s no looking back. Over the last decade, I have seen several dentists and tried an ever-evolving array of procedures, eventually arriving at the most extravagant phase of my obsession: braces. I had never liked the slightly flared effect my capped front teeth had, nor the slight thrust forward of my jaw when I smiled. These defects weren’t something other people noticed (except for my teenage daughter, who is in the habit of scrutinizing my appearance and deemed everything about me, including my teeth, subpar). Yet, while some people are fated to be content with their looks, no matter what the prevailing ideal of beauty happens to be, others (me, for instance) will never live up to their own internal standards. And so I recently ended up in the office of Caroline Grasso, DDS, a young prosthodontist with perfectionist instincts and the enthusiasm to match. Grasso studied my mouth as though it were a valuable fossil and then reported that not only was my entire bite off but my bottom teeth had never been properly aligned. Orthodontic intervention was strongly recommended to prevent further migration of my teeth and damage to my gums. I was assured that the aesthetic gain, although secondary to the functional improvement, would be visible somewhere down the line.

  The decision to wear braces should not be assumed lightly. Take it from me, who hesitated and then plunged into a sea of wires, brackets, and rubber bands from which I thought I’d never emerge. Braces are unsightly, uncomfortable, and inhibiting. Think cracked lips, persistent gum sores, and humongous, rivetingly painful blisters on the inside of your cheek. And that’s just the beginning. There’s a reason they’re typically worn by children—who aren’t called upon to attend business lunches or meet with editors—rather than adults. Think endless apologies before, during, and after meals about the bits of food that will cling unbecomingly to your braces, adding insult to injury. Think, too, of the slightly puzzling impression you and your braces will make upon people who had once relied upon your judgment and maturity only to now view you as a walking testament to misplaced chronology and arrested visual development.

  You’ll notice I haven’t even begun to touch upon the delicate matter of the effect braces can have on one’s love life. Remember Dorothy Parker’s famous quip about men seldom making passes at girls who wear glasses? Well, just try being a grown woman wearing braces. Someone should compose a song about women wearing braces and call it “Unkissable You.” As a divorced mother who went out on the occasional date and always liked canoodling, I would swear that braces put a damper on my already less-than-hectic romantic life.

  Then again, perhaps I wasn’t the right candidate in the first place, given the time-consuming care and maintenance involved. Put it this way: I’ve always had trouble with follow-through, and I’ve always had trouble projecting into the future—envisioning how an apartment might look after it’s renovated, how a haircut might grow out, whether next week will really come to pass. The kind of person who’s suited to braces should be either dazzlingly self-involved and unremittingly vain or a punctilious and goal-oriented type—like the writer I bumped into on my very first visit to the orthodontist. I could see that he was applying himself to braces with the same mole-like zeal he put into writing and playing tennis. As he smugly showed me how cleverly hidden his braces were—although my bite required the re
gular obtrusive kind of hardware, he had been fitted out with Invisalign—I was struck by the piercing realization that I didn’t want to be in orthodontic cahoots with him (or anyone else, for that matter). I could just imagine his dropping our chance meeting into dinner-party chatter, indelibly linking the two of us as earnest seekers of self-improvement.

  When my braces finally came off, two months ago, no one noticed but my daughter and my mother. Thousands of dollars and ceaseless humiliations later, I can say that had I known then what I know now, I probably would have settled for a clinically askew bite—a class III malocclusion, to be exact—and an aesthetically winning smile, skipped the braces, and gone straight to caps and veneers. Meanwhile, the demand for blindingly white, perfectly straight teeth continues apace (one out of five orthodontic patients today is an adult, and tooth whitening is the most requested cosmetic procedure), leading dentists to devise new whiter-than-white shades with the addition of custom-blended porcelain powders.

  One might wonder whether the fixation on teeth is a symptom or a cause of what ails our culture in general, an indication of the zero-sum game of treating ourselves as objects in an exhibition, competing for face time with an invisible but harshly assessing public. “In the 1980s,” observes Marc Lowenberg, DDS, a New York dentist who has created many of the elite smiles that grace the pages of magazines, “American women wanted big hair. In the 1990s, it was large breasts. The turn of the twenty-first century has brought an obsession with gorgeous white teeth.” And although it may behoove dentists to emphasize the importance of healthy teeth, just as it behooves orthodontists to emphasize the structural importance of a corrected bite, I would guess that few of us are thinking about the welfare of our teeth when we decide to spring for laminates or braces; we are thinking about looking younger and more desirable.