Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints

by Simon Doonan

  I do not recall how I described the rest of my nearest and dearest. I remember Betty’s blurb because, for years to come, she would hold up the incident as an example of my compulsion to focus on the tawdry and unwholesome, to the exclusion of anything more cheery or heartwarming.

  “Oh, great! I can hardly wait till parents’ night,” said Betty as she pored over the essay, having just poured herself a sizable gin and tonic.

  “What about my weekly pottery class? You could have mentioned the silver cup I won for flower arranging.”

  I did not really understand her point. It was not as if I had made the whole thing up. We all knew she bleached her hair. And damn good it looked too! Martha Elizabeth Doonan was, hands down, the most charismatic, glamorous mum in the neighborhood. She wore white pencil skirts, seamed stockings, maquillage, and figure-accentuating, long-line girdles. Next to Betty, the other kids’ tea-total mothers, in their sensible flats and sweater sets, looked like a bunch of middle-aged men dressed up as Queen Elizabeth on one of her off-duty corgi days.

  And, yes, she drank gin. Uncle Peter, a family friend, worked for an illustrious London gin company. A bachelor and a bon viveur, he was no stranger to what he called the “sample room.” As a result, our sideboard was invariably groaning with stolen gin of various genres and vintages. On Friday nights he would ride over to our house on his motor scooter with a bottle of gin strapped insouciantly to the passenger seat.

  Gin and bleach aside, it was a shock to me that Betty could not quite grasp the overwhelmingly complimentary thrust of my essay.

  Betty Doonan examined her reflection in her compact mirror. She was checking on the status of the complex, much-admired hairdo into which she funneled so much creativity. With a sigh of resignation, she took the bottle of peroxide out from under the sink.

  “I can’t imagine what Mrs. McCann must think of me,” she said as she began to touch up her roots.

  * * *

  Mrs. McCann was not really concerned with the likes of Betty Doonan. Nor were any of our teachers. More’s the pity. They could have learned a thing or two from Betty Doonan. Betty was fun. Betty looked great. Betty smelled great. Betty made the world a more glamorous and amusing place. Betty was life-enhancing, and Betty judged everything and everybody on the basis of whether or not they too were life-enhancing.

  Our teachers would never have qualified. They were not life-enhancing. They were life-corroding and life-disemboweling. While my home life was all gin and bleach and fun, school was the exact opposite.

  To describe our teachers as “dour” would be inaccurate. They were completely and utterly Stalinist. Every school day was more of a gulag fest than the last.

  There was nothing pedestrian about the way these gals enhanced our lives. They were extremely creative. Whether tying us to chairs with our own skipping ropes or subduing us with terrifying gusts of flatulence and halitosis, our tormentors were full of surprises. And, lucky me, I arrived just as an entire generation of these angry women were ambling into the menopause.

  Our day started with morning assembly, which was staged and choreographed with totalitarian flair. Punctually and wordlessly, we filed into the gymnasium in our green and gray uniforms accompanied by Miss Stoddard on the piano.

  What cheery, uplifting selections did she favor to start the day? “All Things Bright and Beautiful”? “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of My Garden”? Much too prissy. With amazing libidinal passion and skill, Miss Stoddard pounded her way through “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Edvard Grieg’s ominous, throbbing anthem conjured the hellish kingdom of the Norwegian trolls and their dark and horrible leader, the Mountain King. With her relentless pounding, Miss Stoddard gave our morning gatherings a distinct feeling of impending folkloric genocide. She had brought us together only to eradicate us. We would never have thought of staging any kind of uprising. We were just a bunch of worthless little trolls, and we knew it.

  Once assembled, we scabby-kneed trolls were called upon to sing gruesome, unlife-enhancing Anglican hymns about choosing “the steep and rugged pathway” and not wanting to linger “by still waters.” There was no mention of gin or bleach. The message was simple: the more grim life is, the more character-building will be its effect, especially upon wretched little trolls.

  After a couple more hymns, we would repair to our various classrooms. These were designated as either A or B. It was a simple enough system: at the beginning of each year, the smart trolls were sent to A classes and stupid trolls went to B classes. Smart trolls were being groomed to attend the local grammar school, the gateway to a life of middle-class contentment. B troll boys like me were headed for the secondary modern school and thence to a grim, fiery apprenticeship in sheet-metal welding, which was very troll-like, if you think about it.

  Girl trolls fared better. They could look forward to, among other options, a hairdressing apprenticeship. This had a certain appeal to me. I had frequently assisted Betty in the application of her bleaching unguents.

  It was around this time, not uncoincidentally, that I started to consider the possibility of gender reassignment.

  One night when Betty was tucking me in, I impulsively told her that I had decided to become a girl.

  “My name will be Clare,” I said, assuming a wistful demeanor, “and I will have very, very long blond hair.”

  Betty smiled enigmatically and stared at the space on the pillow around my head where one day soon that long blond hair would lie in all its flaxen glory. Turning out the light with a jangle of her heavy bracelet, she advised me not to share my secret with anyone in my little B class or with that nasty Mrs. McCann. She might not understand.

  Betty was right.

  Mrs. McCann would never have understood. Mrs. McCann had never thought about the possibility of gender reassignment. Mrs. McCann did not think about anything much, except Canada.

  Mrs. McCann had recently returned from Canuck country. She had traversed that continent on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The double-decker observation car had afforded Mrs. McCann a spectacular view of the endless wheat fields. For some reason she found this very life-enhancing. In fact, she returned from this trip having fallen hopelessly and madly in love with wheat.

  She elected to share her new passion with us, over and over again. In lesson after lesson, Mrs. McCann dragged us from one side of Canada to the other, while encouraging us to marvel at the immense, golden nothingness of it all.

  Once she got warmed up, Mrs. McCann would stride about in front of the blackboard, twitching her dirndl skirt and tossing her dry, crinkly torrent of split ends, which coincidentally, had the consistency of wheat.

  No detail of her sojourn was too small for our consideration. After the wheat fields, she introduced us trolls to the concept of grain silos and then more grain silos and still more. Time and time again her chalk would break as she passionately scrawled endless statistics on the board relating to the vastness of the Canadian prairie, number and size of silos, and the inconceivably massive amounts of grain which poured forth from “The World’s Breadbasket.”

  Her travelogues were supported with brochures and personal snaps: Mrs. McCann boarding a train, Mrs. McCann staring into the middle distance on an observation platform, a grain silo, a wheat field, another silo. To this day, I cannot look at a loaf of bread without thinking of Mrs. McCann and the vacation of a lifetime which she shared with us over and over again, ad nauseam, ad delirium.

  Her thinking was no doubt as follows: “Since these trolls and trollettes will never ascend to the level of society which permits transcontinental Canadian vacations, let them vicariously enjoy mine.”

  It was inconceivable to me that Mrs. McCann could find this stuff interesting or glamorous. Statistics about grain silos and wheat fields would never have held the attention of anyone in my house. The gin-fueled, witty repartee which sizzled and crackled between my parents and their friends was infinitely more titillating and engaging.

  And getting more so.<
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  Not only did we have free gin but we now had free wine, gallons and gallons of it.

  It all started after we took a mind-expanding trip of our own. It wasn’t very far, and it didn’t take very long, but when we returned we were changed forever.

  * * *

  One day in the early 1960s, Betty; Terry; my sister, Shelagh; and I took the train up to London and visited the Ideal Home Exhibition.

  This sounds like it might have been a gigantic yawn, but nothing could be further from the truth. Here, in booth after booth, we deprived postwar Brits encountered something beyond our wildest dreams. Talk about life-enhancing! There were free beverages! Free hors d’oeuvres! Chips and dips! Crackers and nibbly bits! Cheeses of the world, and bizarre things like anchovies, all proffered by attractive, enthusiastic young men in tight trousers.

  I was experiencing, at no charge, my very first stand-up finger buffet!

  The scene, however, lacked the gentility normally associated with such events. Unself-consciously and ungratefully, we plebs crammed handful after handful of exotic morsels into our mouths without any regard for the provenance thereof. It was more like feeding time at London Zoo.

  Eventually we reached satiation point. Stuffed to the gills, we staggered off in the direction of the kitchen appliances, little knowing that our lives were about to change forever.

  Nestling in between the chip fryers, cheese cutters, and ice cream makers, we discovered a whole booth dedicated to amateur winemaking. For some reason my parents seemed a lot more interested in this than in the pasta makers or the Chinese noodle-frying kits, or even the free snacks!

  Before you could say “cirrhosis of the liver,” my dad was forking over some cash.

  Within days of returning home, Terry Rothschild Lafite Doonan had gone into production.

  It’s no exaggeration to say that my parents went completely berserk. They filled every single inch of our house with vats and vats of gurgling, fermenting wine, jugs and buckets and flagons of it. Every time you opened a cupboard, you were confronted by some aspect of the winemaking process. The stench of yeasty fermentation, along with the sound of drunken laughter, is among the most the abiding memories of my childhood.

  Occasionally there were leaks and disasters. A vat of homemade black currant vin rouge exploded in the attic right next to blind Aunt Phyllis’s room. As it drip, drip, dripped onto Betty through the ceiling of her all-white bedroom, it gave her the distinct impression that Aunt Phyllis had been murdered in the windowless garret in which she slept.

  Nobody balked at the mess or inconvenience. Château Doonan was so fruity and sweet that everyone, all the assorted lodgers and relatives, knocked it back with ever-increasing enthusiasm. We entered an era of bacchanalian largesse during which, between Uncle Peter’s gin sample room and Terry’s ad hoc winery, no Doonan ever darkened the door of the local liquor store again. It wasn’t a hobby, it was a lifestyle, an utterly intoxicating lifestyle.

  My dad was beside himself, especially when he found out that you could make wine from just about anything.

  “It makes you wonder why they bugger about with grapes in France when you can make a delicious wine from potato peelings,” he guffawed as he secreted yet more bottles of tea-leaf and parsnip wine in the crawl space under the living room floor.

  It was not long before Terry figured out that he could magically increase the intoxication level simply by adding more sugar at the right juncture. As a result, Château Doonan became more of a rich, fruity sherry than a wine.

  Terry made gallons and gallons and gallons of it, which meant we could then drink gallons and gallons and gallons of it. Which is what we did. By the time I hit my teens, I was sloshing a dollop of Château Doonan in my Ribena, and learning to love the warm, comforting glow which ensued.

  Terry’s vin extraordinaire and Uncle Peter’s gin played a very important role in the day-to-day functioning of our family. Simply put, alcohol took the edge off. Alcohol was the low-cost prescription which enabled Betty and Terry to deal with the strains and unpredictability of life with batty Uncle Ken, not to mention the crazed and belligerent Narg.

  “Narg put her bloomers in the oven and set them on fire!”

  Slosh, gurgle, swallow. “No problem!”

  “Uncle Ken rode his bicycle into the canal!”

  “Bottoms up! Is he okay?”

  “Narg hurled insults at the ladies from the Women’s Institute!”

  “Mmmm! Try this! What did she actually say?”

  This is not a new concept. Lunatics have always driven their caretakers to drink. Grace Poole, nurse to the mad Mrs. Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, springs easily to mind: “an able woman in her line, and very trustworthy, but for one fault—a fault common to a deal of them nurses and matrons—she kept a private bottle of gin by her, and now and then took a drop over much.”

  We had two Mrs. Rochesters, so we needed twice as much booze.

  My mother, I hasten to add, was not a sloppy drunk like Grace Poole. Au contraire! Betty Doonan could “hold” her liquor. Though she drank every day for years, I have never once seen her plastered. Holding one’s liquor was a highly prized ability and seemed, in Terry and Betty’s milieu, to correlate with strength of character. People who could not hold their liquor were spineless toerags, while people who could hold it were thought to be much more important and valuable to society.

  The accolades heaped upon Betty for her drinking abilities were nothing compared to those she received for her hair.

  As I reflect upon the complexities and contradictions of Betty’s life, and of the twentieth-century in general, I realize that they both found full expression in that incredible hairdo.

  Betty was always a rule breaker. As a child, she kept a pet pig. When the circus came to town, she played hooky from school in order to carry buckets of water to the zebras. She befriended the clowns, who cheered loudly as she tore round the sawdust-filled ring on her tricycle.

  In her twenties, rebellious Betty flew the coop, joined the Royal Air Force, and changed the direction of her hair. Gone was the dowdy, chin-length bob of her childhood. Instead, she adopted the complex upswept, bulbous hairstyle known as the Force’s Roll. This new hairdo had a transformative effect. She was no longer Martha, the small-town girl who left school at thirteen to churn butter and butcher pigs at the local grocery store. Martha had been replaced by Betty, the confident, sassy, lipstick-wearing broad with the Eve Arden wit.

  The new hairdo was infinitely more flattering and imposing than her previous 1930s bob. Formerly five feet, one inch, Betty now stood tall at five feet, seven inches, thanks to three inches of suede platform and a corresponding measurement of hair. The sculptural pompadour which now rose above her forehead not only added height but offset the impact of her large Roman nose. She now looked less like an American Indian and a lot more MGM. Like Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, Betty Gordon had traveled the road from troll to siren simply by reversing the direction of her coiffure. What had previously gone down now went up.

  Betty met Terry in a soup kitchen after the war. They married two months later at a registry office on a date which neither of them could ever remember, thereby relieving us forever of the obligation to do anything as bourgeois as celebrate their wedding anniversary.

  For the next fifty years Betty slept with Terry, and with a full head of hair rollers. The roller at the nape of her neck would frequently become dislodged during the night and work its way to the middle of her back. As a result Betty often dreamt that Zulus were chasing her and prodding her with their spears.

  Her morning toilette in front of the small gas fire in her bedroom always took at least an hour. While we unkempt slobs shoveled our breakfast alongside our lodgers and nutty relatives downstairs, Betty would be upstairs painting and primping and coiffing.

  Betty worked at it. She had no illusions. She knew she wasn’t Grace Kelly. Rather than long to be something she wasn’t, she took pride in her ability to imp
rove on what God had given her. Her philosophy could be summed up as follows: “Even if you happen to be a North Irish peasant, you can still, with the right techniques, learn to make a pleasing and life-enhancing impression. It is your duty not to inflict your innate troll-like appearance upon the people around you and to do everything in your power to camouflage it.”

  Becoming a blonde was part of this process. Becoming a blonde was also highly therapeutic. It provided Betty with a continuous outlet for her Irish Protestant temper. The quest for the perfect shade of blond gave focus to her combative streak. She was a highly visual broad with a naturally sophisticated color sense who was utterly obsessed with the tone of her hair. She had to have the perfect shade of blond. This became her Holy Grail.

  Her quest took her to see a woman called Madge, whose eponymous hair salon served our neighborhood. I remember Madge, the salon and the person herself, as if it were yesterday. This cramped, steamy hothouse of femininity reeked of perfume and something called hair lacquer. Before hair spray in aerosol cans, there was hair lacquer, a nasty brown liquid which came in medicinal-looking, opaque plastic, squeezable bottles.

  I logged in many hours at Maison Madge listening to the wheeze of the lacquer bottles and inhaling the chemical, toffeelike smell of their contents. Betty’s hair needed lots of extra lacquer. It had to withstand the rush of wind which jiggled it when she rode home from Madge on the back of Terry’s motor scooter.

  Madge was a woman with a mission. Her concept was to bleach every client’s hair ice blond and then, on successive weeks, coerce her into trying a novelty color tint. Madge’s employees, who had names like Queenie and Sylvia, all had the same ice-blond hair. Every week they would try a new pastel color tint. Queenie would be pink one week and violet the next. Sylvia even went pale green.

  Betty had nothing but contempt for this kind of pointless experimentation. “I don’t want to look like a tart!” she would say, fending off Madge and her horrid tints, and unintentionally insulting Queenie and Sylvia.