Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty

by Diane Keaton

  I was fourteen when I first jotted down a few in my “Dear Diary.” It was August 8, 1960. This is what I wrote:

  1. Sleep with a bobby pin stuck on top of my nose. Tilt it to the left where the bulb is fat, by fat I mean swollen to the extreme. If pressed on a regular basis the bulb will eventually be squeezed out of existence.

  2. Spend time practicing a series of smiles. Part of “smile time” must be attended to by exercising the sincerity of my feelings. The best location is in the back seat of Mom’s station wagon where I can see myself in the rearview mirror, free from Robin’s dim-witted remarks.

  3. Exercise my eyes for 30 minutes a day. Open them as wide as possible, then shut them tight, at least 24 times every 60 seconds. In addition, swing them back and forth faster than the speed of light. This kind of to and fro motion, which McCall’s magazine describes as “swaying,” will make them appear wider set apart. By combining these two exercises my eyes will actually become larger. Don’t forget to try exercising in Civics class, where Mrs. Clark is frequently distracted, but watch out for Mr. Barnett in Spanish Two, he’s no fool.

  4. Today I tried “smile time” on Dawn Utley and Dale Finney by looking off into the distance with a happy-faced grin. No response. After I finished my eye exercises in the girls’ bathroom I spotted Dave Garland, so I leaned against his locker and pretended to be lost in thought. As I slowly turned my face to his and smiled with a glow that came from the heart, he said, “Hey, Diaps, what’s the matter? Did somebody die? You look weird.”

  5. This morning the bobby pin on my nose left a mark that took a half hour to wear off. I’ve decided to buy some wooden clothespins. They’re much more gentle. I asked Mom if I could eat my Cheerios in the bedroom ’cause I needed more alone time. If she knew what I was up to, it would be curtains, but the risk is worth it. Besides, I’m sick of listening to boring Bob Crane on the radio.

  Mom let me wear lipstick in ninth grade. It was so much fun. But one day Willie Blandin took a long, hard look at my face and said, “Diane, listen to me. Now that you’ve started wearing lipstick, you can never go back. I’m not steering you wrong. Those lips of yours are going to dry up and disappear into nothing more than slits unless you have an ever ready supply of lipstick in your pocket. Welcome to womanhood, young lady.” She scared the hell out of me, until Maria Gusman, Willard Junior High School’s only female janitor, commented on how pretty I looked and inquired about the color of my lipstick. Thrilled, I thought of Willie in gratitude, and vowed to never leave the house without a tube of lipstick in my pocket. In her honor I shared my knowledge of Tangee’s “Many Mini Colors” with Maria. I also suggested that Maria might consider the new set of Revlon’s “frosty” colors for women with darker complexions.

  Eye makeup at school was a different story. Willie supported it. Mom was firm: no eye makeup. How ridiculous. I mean, come on, it was 1960. Models like Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, and Penelope Tree never appeared on the cover of fashion magazines without plenty of eye makeup. Plus, “the Shrimp,” Vogue’s “face of the moment,” was only a few years older than me. Mom finally caved during my junior year and allowed me to spend my salary from Newberry’s five-and-ten-cent store on a Maybelline eye kit.

  Sitting in my bedroom, I read the entire Maybelline eyeliner-application pamphlet. First: with Maybelline’s soft eyebrow pencil, I was told to draw a narrow line across the upper eyelids, at the base of lashes, adding a short upstroke at the outer corner. Then, and only then, would I be ready to soften the line with my fingertips. Next: use short, light upward strokes of Maybelline’s eyebrow pencil to form beautiful expressive brows, then taper lightly at the outer end to soften the effect. This was fun. I liked the whole soften-the-effect concept. Maybelline suggested I buy their smooth mascara, too. It would further enhance my eyes. For an extra touch of mysterious eye beauty, the pamphlet added, it would be wise to blend a bit of Maybelline eye shadow on the upper lids. The instructions said it would “bring out the unsuspected loveliness” of my eyes.

  My makeup bonding with Willie continued throughout high school. As a bona fide member of “Club Willie,” I was privy to some of the more extreme remedies for facial woes. According to her sources (whatever that meant), Marilyn Monroe was nineteen when her agent, Mr. Johnny Hyde, advised her to have a slight bump of cartilage removed from her bulbous nose. Bulbous? Oh my God. Marilyn Monroe had a bulbous nose, too?! Willie must have made that up. A nose job? No way. Willie also described Ann Miller’s botched nose job. “Who’s Ann Miller?” I asked. Shocked, Willie informed me that Ann Miller had starred in Easter Parade with Fred Astaire, and that when she was tap-dancing, she could click five hundred times per minute. Anyway, the surgeon cut off so much cartilage on one side that the flaw showed up on camera. It was such a disaster the studio makeup department was forced to create a fake nose for filming. During one of her numbers in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate, she twirled around so fast her nose flew off and hit the camera. I couldn’t believe my ears. And as if that wasn’t enough, Willie showed Mom and me a photograph of Dean Martin, her hero, before his nose job. “Let’s just say it wasn’t pretty.” That’s the way she put it. It wasn’t pretty. “And how about this,” she said. “Lou Costello, from The Abbott and Costello Show, paid for Dean’s new nose. That’s friendship for you.”

  I told Willie I didn’t believe Dean Martin would do such a thing. Men weren’t like women. They didn’t care about their looks, did they? She just shook her head and said if I was so smart, why hadn’t I heard about Gary Cooper? Didn’t I know what had appeared on the front page of the Mirror-News a couple of years before? That’s right, Gary Cooper’s face-lift!

  Clearly, I hadn’t seen the newspaper article commenting on his face and how it looked “quite different” and how the procedure had “not been successful.” The facts were this: fifty-six-year-old Gary Cooper had entered the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital for a full face-lift by Dr. John Converse, one of the leading plastic surgeons in America. Mom and I were baffled. Gary Cooper had a face-lift? Really? But then I thought, Hey, someone had to be the first male movie star to get a face-lift. Why not Gary Cooper? Besides, I identified with the facial dilemmas of Marilyn Monroe, Ann Miller, Dean Martin, and my hero Gary Cooper. Corrections had to be taken seriously.

  The bobby pins on my nose, the endless adjustments to my face in search of the right smile at the right angle, the swinging-eye exercises, the celebrity pink lipstick, and the acquired skill of displaying my deepest feelings as if it would improve my countenance were only the beginnings of a determined will to right my wrongs. I’m sorry to say the Corrections didn’t do much; nor has their failure stopped me from trying out “solutions” to innumerably more serious “issues,” mainly medical. There’s my skin cancer regimen, which requires monthly visits to Christie Kidd, who freezes off keratoses, i.e., fledgling skin cancers. There are the endless varieties of creams and lotions, like Renewal Plus, and Solaraze gel, and every imaginable sunscreen. This has made my skin so sunblocked I don’t even need to tint the windows of my car. There’s the mouth guard worn every night to keep my teeth in place, and the happy brightening gel to make them almost white. I won’t go on. The truth is, this is only the beginning of a long list that isn’t about beauty; it’s about survival.

  As far as my face goes, the question is, how far am I willing to go? Particularly at this age. And what would the results give me? With every choice there’s a possible gain, but also a loss. I can’t say exactly why I haven’t turned to surgery or fillers, at least not yet. But what does it matter, particularly now? Why the hell not? Who cares? Maybe I don’t want to change my everyday me because I can’t picture what I will look like, nor can I imagine what effect it will have on myself or others. I tell myself to hold on to authenticity. But am I authentic? I’ll tell you one thing … I’m authentically confused by what authentic is. For instance, is it authentic for me to seek out attention by wearing “eccentric” clothes with a lifetime supply of hats? Or
is that a look I insist on repeating because it’s a habit, a habit that has come to define me? Is it because I admire the unusual? Is it because we’re only here once and why not take things as far as you can? Even if it’s self-centered, what does it matter—aren’t we biologically self-serving animals? Was Georgia O’Keeffe inauthentic and self-consumed when she left Alfred Stieglitz to go live by herself in the desert to paint and pull her hair back and wear Indian jewelry and live her life her way, not the high way? I don’t think so. Even if it’s narcissistic, is that always such a bad thing? Somebody has to be Joan Rivers, just as somebody has to be Hillary Clinton. Authentic? Inauthentic? I have to laugh. All I know is I’m sick of worrying about my authenticity.

  If I want to be prettier, yes, fillers and Botox and a neck-lift would help. I look at my contemporaries who’ve had “good work.” Are they any less authentic? No! And neither are the women who’ve had procedures that went awry. And yet … why haven’t I had work done? I still might, though it’s borderline too late.

  Like most women, I’ve had some serious disappointments. We each deal with them the best we can. We slather, we dab, we rouge, we nip, we tuck, we ignore, we dream. I don’t regret that the face I present to the world is the same I was born with. I’ve been banged up a bit. I’m older. Actually, I’m a senior citizen. My nose is still my central sense organ. And the bulb? I still hate it, just not as much. I hear with my ears. I eat, speak, and breathe with my mouth. My face includes hair. My forehead is high. I have eyebrows, eyelashes, and two eyes that see. That’s my favorite thing about my face. I can see trees and sunsets. I can see Dexter’s oval face, and the color of my thirteen-year-old son Duke’s eyes: they’re chocolate brown, not gray. I can see shadow and light. I can see paintings and portraits on a wall. I can see the ocean from a bluff. I have two ears and two cheeks. With one mouth, one set of lips, one chin, and lots of skin that’s still a working vital organ, I’m not complaining. I know from experience how lucky I am. But the most thrilling aspect of my face is its ability to express feelings. All of my feelings and all my emotion come out on my face—my sixty-seven-year-old face. You see, my face identifies who I am inside. It shows feelings I can’t put into words. And that is a miracle, an extraordinarily ordinary miracle, one I’ll think twice about before I change.

  I woke up knowing this: I had a dream. In my dream I was bald. The rest was unclear. According to The Dictionary of Dreams, when a person dreams of hair loss she is concerned with getting older. (No shit.) She is also concerned with losing her sexual appeal. (I’m sixty-seven—what sex appeal?) Approximately thirty minutes later—four forty-five A.M., to be exact—I was sitting shotgun in the Range Rover as my daughter, Dexter, then sixteen years old, began the drive to Oceanside, California, where she would join approximately three hundred people in a 2.4-mile open-water swim in the Pacific Ocean. I pulled down the sun visor and looked in the mirror. No apparent hair loss, at least not for now. Dexter wanted a Carson Daly morning; I wanted to listen to Morning Edition with Steve Inskeep and Renée Montagne. We flipped a coin. Dex won. And with it, Carson Daly played Adam Levine’s “Payphone.” “Yeah, I know it’s hard to remember the people we used to be.” For sure I couldn’t remember the person I used to be, much less the people.

  I glanced at Dexter driving south on the 405. She’ll never have to worry about a receding hairline. She’ll never have hair issues. But I do, and always did. As an underdeveloped, overlooked junior in Santa Ana High School, I was constantly concocting “unique” hairdos, in particular my version of Betty Rubble’s “buzzy” beehive. It was just one in a variety of elaborately teased “Big Hairdos” requiring a can of Style hair spray every three days. My inspiration? Dusty Springfield, Cher, and all three of Phil Spector’s Ronettes.

  Dexter couldn’t care less about hair spray. She’s a swimmer. I don’t understand the kind of mind-set that makes a girl walk around with wet hair at six A.M. in the dead of winter, or drench herself in chlorine 250 days a year in swim cap and goggles. When I was young, all girls were forced to wear bathing caps at the public plunge, which made it all the more humiliating when Sawyer Swartz and his gang of geeks would tease me, saying I looked like a jarhead or, worse, a bald-headed Olive Oyl, Popeye’s scrawny girlfriend.

  The point is, hair, the meaning of hair, the look of hair (my hair, to be exact), has dogged me all my life. Which makes it all the more bizarre that I was cast in the original Broadway production of the musical Hair. I remember lying under the scrim one night, waiting to see how many tribe members were going to strip naked, when James Rado, one of the show’s creators, stood up with nothing on except a shoulder-length honey-blond wig. I have to say, it was even more riveting than his large penis. His nudity gave the wig a kind of otherworldly glow, a life of its own. Everyone knew Jim was disguising the fact that he was balding. Fine with me. Why not? He was in good company. Sean Connery, Howard Cosell, Burt Reynolds, and Jack Benny wore hairpieces, or toupees, as they called them back then. In any event, no matter how hard James Rado tossed his head back and forth to “give me down to there hair, shoulder length or longer,” his wig never swayed, not even an inch.

  Once we hit Costa Mesa, Dexter took the Bristol exit in search of gas. As she sped up to make the light, I reminded her that it’s best to slow down before approaching an intersection. My words fell on deaf ears, and Dexter ran her first red light. “It was still yellow before I hit the middle, Mom.”

  “Listen to me, Dexter. I’ll say it again: it’s unwise to speed up at an intersection. Okay?! Are you listening to me?”

  Silence. I looked over in exasperation and noticed a head of hair so thick it hid her ears. I’ve never seen her hair part around her ears like mine does. There was a period in the 1980s when I wore a variety of berets to hide my Spock ears because, let’s face it, my ears were, and remain, just one more of my many disappointments.

  Back to wigs. First there was the one I wore in The Godfather. Robert Evans, the head of production at Paramount Pictures, thought I was too “kooky”-looking for the role of Kay Corleone, so Dick Smith, a.k.a. the Godfather of Makeup, turned me into a WASP with a canary-yellow wig ten times larger than my head. Twenty years later I played Bessie, the caregiver sister in Marvin’s Room, opposite Meryl Streep. Bessie is diagnosed with leukemia, undergoes chemo, and loses all her hair. Throughout most of the two-month shoot, I wore a wig donated from a local candy striper volunteer organization. Jerry Zaks, our director, was enchanted by its authenticity. To me, it was sort of a throwback to Jim Rado’s shoulder-length tresses. Only this one was a brunette nightmare from hell. I tried to convince Jerry to give me a chance to wear a hair-hat wig on occasion. Sound strange, a wig sewn into a hat? Not to me. I figured Bessie would look good in a hat. Jerry would have none of it, pointing out that Bessie was not vain. He also added that Bessie was not Diane. Shrugging him off, I continued to press my point, until the day we shot a makeup and hair test for the bald cap I had to wear toward the end of the shoot. As soon as I saw my hairless head, I begged Jerry to please let me keep wearing my candy striper James Rado shoulder-length brown synthetic, almost attractive wig. That is, until the day Meryl told me we both looked like shit. Frankly, I was relieved that she included herself.

  The last wig I ever wore, both on- and offscreen, was a curly shag in the practically straight-to-video movie I made with Dax Shepard called Smother. Enough said.

  As Dexter and I sat in the car at the Chevron gas station, I breathed a sigh of relief. We were two females, one mother, the other daughter. Yes, Dexter had run a red light, but we all make mistakes in the process of learning something new. In the peace of the moment, I mentioned my dream. Dex nodded and, after her quiet way of gathering thoughts, responded with a hair dream of her own: “Okay, Mom, I’m looking through my hair, and it starts falling out in clumps. My head has bloody sores, and blisters, and even holes in the flesh. Every time I look, it’s worse than before. It was so creepy. I kept trying to find you and Duke to help. But
you were nowhere to be found.”

  “Wow, Dex, I bet you’re glad it’s not a reoccurring dream.”

  “But it is. That’s the horrible part, Mom. It is.”

  I told her that the meaning of dreams is hard to unravel. I told her that she of all people will never have to worry about blisters and sores on her gorgeous hair. Ever. Her hair is perfect. And I was telling the truth.

  Woody used to dream of hair loss. Not now. He’s done very well retaining what hair he has. Warren used to pontificate on the subject for hours, insisting that hairdressers were worth their weight in gold. According to him, hair was, in fact, 60 percent of good looks. This philosophy must have at least partially inspired him to produce and star in the box office blockbuster Shampoo. With hair on his mind, you can imagine how taxing it must have been for him to select the hairstylist for his Oscar-winning movie Reds. His pick? Barry Richardson, who did Julie Christie’s hair in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Barry was a hairdresser genius, but in truth Reds was more hat movie than hair movie. I wore a variety of broad-brimmed hats, several variations on the beret, a number of cloches, and, in one pivotal scene, a peasant scarf tied at the back of my neck. It was all so perfect. I couldn’t have been happier. During the weekends I roamed through London’s Portobello Road, my favorite flea market. One Sunday, I found a high-crowned black hat with a wide fur trim wrapped around its circumference. I put it on, and, oh yeah, let’s just say I bought it on the spot. Later that afternoon, a man with long curlicues dangling on both sides of his face walked past me wearing the identical hat. Shaking his head, he glared at me in an unfriendly manner. When I got back to the hotel, I looked at the label written in Yiddish. Duh. It was what’s called a shtreimel. Shtreimel hats are worn exclusively by married male Hasidic Jews, not thirtysomething female actresses. What the hell was I thinking?