Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints

by Simon Doonan

  All Betty wanted was the perfect shade of Grace Kelly blond. Was that too much to ask?

  Time and time again I would hear her complaining to the lodgers that Madge had “bollixed” up her hair yet again. Yet again it had “come out brassy.”

  Brassy blond is too warm in tone. It has too much orange. It looks like dark brown hair which has been dyed blond, which was what Betty’s was. Betty wanted people to believe she was a blonde.

  Her quest continued into the 1960s. By now her vintage hairstyle was starting to have curiosity value. My friends at school commented on it, and on her overpainted Joan Crawford lip line.

  Madge canvassed Betty to adopt a more current style. Her hair was now officially two decades out of date. Under pressure from Madge and Queenie et al., Betty capitulated, but with a caveat: she would change her hair but it must remain up. She would never go down.

  Accordingly, Madge scraped her hair back into a cluster of large tunnel curls, which sat on her head in the yarmulke region. This look was augmented with dangly earrings and false eyelashes. One wet Saturday afternoon, Betty strode into the house, yanked off her plastic rain hood, and unveiled her new look. Silence. We were not sure what to say. Betty now looked horribly cheap. Though she was always painted and dressed, Betty was never cheap-looking. Until now. This new tarty, hard-faced, crowlike, unfamiliar Betty got the thumbs-down chez nous, even from blind Aunt Phyllis. Betty stuck her head under the kitchen faucet and demolished Madge’s handiwork. After pouring herself a comforting glass of elderberry-potato wine (Terry was experimenting with improbable ingredient combos), she began the painstaking task of reconstructing her signature hairdo.

  Betty had had it with Madge and her crazy ideas. From now on she did the whole job herself. She purchased all the necessary paraphernalia, including professional scissors and two evil-looking two-inch metal clips. These were worn above the ear whenever she was not in public and guaranteed that the hair at the temple was going in the correct, i.e., upward, direction. We referred to these as her “electrodes,” as in “Hey, Mum, you forgot your electrodes!” They became objects of amusement. Schizophrenic Uncle Ken, who lived on the second floor and was a frequent recipient of electric shock treatment, seemed unphased by this insensitivity. He chuckled along with the rest of us.

  * * *

  In the 1970s there was a massive 1940s retro explosion. Betty’s entire look, including platform shoes, came screaming back into fashion. She was frequently accosted by young girls asking her where she got her hair done. Betty was delirious. She contemplated opening her own salon and putting Madge out of business.

  Betty cut and styled her own hair for the rest of her life. There was a short break in the 1980s when she broke her shoulder and Terry took over. He did his best but was unable to get the requisite height. “It’s bad enough being in agony without having to look like a bloody washerwoman,” said Betty ungratefully.

  Finally, in her seventies Betty eschewed peroxide and allowed her hair to grow out. With her steely gray coiffure, she never looked better. Her entire look—maquillage, coiffure, unlifted face, and tailored wardrobe—came gorgeously together. And she knew how good she looked.

  It was around this time that Betty began to indulge in a bit of revisionist history. She started to deny ever having been a bottle blonde. At first she claimed that the bleach period had lasted only a few months. Before long she was denying ever having done it.

  I called her one day in the late nineties when she was going through chemotherapy. “A young lady from social services is coming round today with some wigs.” She cackled malevolently. Betty loved nothing more than to watch a do-gooder fall flat on her face.

  I wondered if Betty had made any attempt to forewarn the lady about her Byzantine hairdo. Since Betty’s hair was upswept, there would be no way to augment it unless with an expensive custom hairline wig. Pull-on wigs went down. Only hairline wigs went up.

  “Have you described your hair?” I asked tentatively.

  “No. I thought it would be fun to see what this trout comes up with,” replied my mum, who had no idea that referring to the other females as “trouts” might ever be considered offensive.

  The trout arrived, took one look at Betty’s thinning, complex coiffure, handed over a bag of cheap pull-on wigs, and fled. This wig bag provided Betty and Terry with endless amusement. They even staged a fashion shoot, using the horrid wigs, in the backyard of their bungalow and sent me the resulting pictures. Perched on a stool, the formerly glamorous Betty in her pull-on wig looks like a horrid little hobbit. She no longer makes a pleasing and glamorous impression. She voluntarily picked this moment, while staring her mortality in the face, to let down her guard and remind the world what a fabulous job she had done of concealing her inner troll, and of enhancing our lives.

  Her impudent expression seems to say, “If I weren’t such a generous and glamorous person, I would have subjected you to this! Instead I elected to transform myself, for which gargantuan lifelong effort you should be eternally grateful.”

  Betty saw her vanity as a component of good manners. It was life enhancement for everyone. No charge! According to her, we owed it to each other to make an effort. She did not engage in deranged attempts to turn back the clock. She did not waste money on pointless skin-care unguents or self-punitive procedures. For Betty, beauty was a positive thing, a life-affirming, creative force.

  When she was on her deathbed, yet another well-meaning, breezy trout materialized in the hospital room doorway and offered her assistance with what was left of her hair.

  By this time pain-racked Betty was venomous and irate. She insisted on smoking in her room and would berate me for trying to substitute low-tar ciggies for her usual brand. She would take one drag, remove the cigarette from her mouth, snap off the filter, and reinsert the offending item in her mouth while giving me a look of withering contempt.

  “Let’s see what you can do,” challenged Betty, eyeing the fresh trout with a mixture of faux encouragement and malevolence.

  I decided to avoid the inevitable fracas and leave them to it. As I walked down the hallway, I could hear Betty berating and abusing her new friend.

  “Not down . . . up . . . up! Up!”

  CHAPTER 4

  NUTS

  The whole setup reeked of Narg.

  The downstairs hallway was almost completely blocked by a large pile of junk. The placement, though clearly the work of a mad person, was nonetheless strategic. The assorted members of our household were now obliged to Matterhorn over it in order to enter the house, reach the stairs, or access any of the main-floor rooms.

  I examined the mound. There was some old-fashioned kitchen paraphernalia: a meat grinder, a rolling pin, and a rusty, encrusted potato masher. I also saw furniture: Narg’s rocking chair and a broken step stool. Against the wall was a heavily stained ironing board supporting an arrangement of depressing souvenirs in various shapes and sizes: a tea towel from Ulster emblazoned with the famous red hand, a hideous paperweight from Belfast, and a sand-filled glass lighthouse from the Isle of Wight. On the top of the pile was a chocolate box filled with old birthday cards and vacation postcards.

  At seven o’clock, Terry roared home from work on his motor scooter. I came downstairs and clambered back over the junk. We—my mother, Betty; my aunt Phyllis; my sister; and I—sat down to dinner. Narg and Uncle Ken were dining à deux in the adjacent room, which also functioned as Narg’s bedroom. We could hear Narg’s radio blaring. It seemed louder than usual.

  Pleasantries were exchanged. Parsnip wine was uncorked. Even though we had all been obliged to navigate it, nobody mentioned the ominous pile of detritus in the hallway.

  Suddenly the door burst open. Narg charged into the room like a stampeding cow. We turned our heads in her direction and continued chewing. We all resembled cows: It was a bovine tableau. Our grazing had been interrupted by the arrival of an angry heifer.

  It was clear from Narg’s expression that she was not in
the best of moods.

  “It’s time for a few home truths!” she shrieked, surveying the room with wild eyes. There was a pause. We waited. We anticipated. We winced. Then it started. A volley of unrepeatable accusations was lobbed at pretty much everyone in the room, including Aunt Phyllis and her guide dog, Lassie. Eventually Narg ran out of breath and tore out of the room.

  This was more than just the typical Narg mood swing. Something was up. Narg had clearly made the transition from deranged but benign in-law to fire-breathing maniac.

  Nobody said anything.

  “Better get back to work,” said Terry. He stood up, donned the battered tweed sport coat with the leather elbow patches which he wore through my entire childhood, and returned to his night shift, leaving the rest of us barricaded in our living room.

  Narg paced the floor of her adjacent room. Narg cranked up the radio.

  In a hushed and excited tone, Betty attempted to shed some light on our current predicament. According to Betty, Narg’s freak-out had been triggered by an altercation between herself and Narg. The subject of the argument was Hawo the cat. This friendly beast was dubbed Hawo because he always seemed to be saying “Hello.” Hello became Hawo, because, according to my cat-obsessed mother, he could not pronounce his l’s.

  Hawo had recently become sick with feline influenza—or fewine infwuwenza as he would have called it himself. Betty had asked Narg not to let Hawo run outside. Fireside warmth was critical to his recovery. Narg had ignored Betty and left the window open. Hawo escaped. Hawo got sicker.

  Betty had dealt with years of circusy unpredictability from her mother-in-law, as had we all. Narg was a classic paranoid schizophrenic, postlobotomy. She had arrived chez nous not long after her operation. The surgery was deemed a success: she no longer believed that Martians were beaming rays into her living room. The hallucinations were gone. What was left was a Vegas blockbuster of disinhibited antisocial behavior. Narg could always be relied upon to tell it like it is.

  I well remember our first Christmas together. I was about six. On Christmas Eve, Narg came to wish me good night. Popping her head round my door, she found me wide awake and in a high state of excitement. I was convinced that I had just heard the sound of sleigh bells tinkling in the distance. Since Narg was no stranger to the concept of hearing things, I thought she would be a good person in whom to confide such a piece of information.

  “Listen! Can’t you hear Santa’s sleigh bells?” I asked with a misty-eyed, festive look.

  “No, I can’t, and neither can you!” said Narg bluntly as she clutched her mauve, rubber hot-water bottle to her ancient bosom with her white-knuckled, blue-veined hands.

  “But I’m sure I—”

  “There are no sleigh bells, because there is no Santa Claus.”

  Beat.

  “Merry Christmas!” she shrieked and was gone.

  * * *

  Life with Narg was not without its chuckles. My sister and I identified strongly with her love of anarchy. We were almost proud of her: none of our playmates had a wacky relative like Narg. Their grandmothers never paraded boldly down the hallway in their old-fashioned Edwardian bloomers.

  Whenever “God Save the Queen” played on the radio, Narg would stand to attention until the very last note, sending us into fits of giggles. Was she making fun of our monarch? I could never quite tell if her allegiance was a hundred percent sincere. Knowing Narg, she probably went back and forth.

  At the time of the Hawo incident, Narg had been living with us for about six years. Her abrasive unpredictability had long since lost its charm. For Betty, a huge animal lover, the Hawo debacle was the last straw.

  That morning, while we were at school, she had taken the unprecedented step of politely reprimanding her psychotic mother-in-law. Betty’s admonishing tone had taken Narg utterly by surprise. Having been a card-carrying lunatic for so many years, Narg was completely unused to being criticized or held accountable. She had always enjoyed the carte blanche accorded to mobsters, aristocrats, circus clowns, and lunatics.

  Narg had not reacted well to being cross-examined. Unable to put her feelings into words, she decided to create an art installation. She dashed into her quarters, grabbed every single thing we had ever given her, and hurled it into the hallway. Et voilà! The Matterhorn.

  The next few weeks were interesting. Every day we picked our way over Narg’s discards. We were terrified to move anything. You never quite knew when Narg was going to spring into action, slamming doors, shrieking reproaches, and venting years of accumulated ire and general insanity. It was not long before she tired of performing before her immediate family. The Reading Town Center became her stage.

  One overcast Saturday, about two weeks after the Hawo incident, I was walking down the local high street with my pal Biddie and his dad, Cyril Biddlecombe. We had just been to see a movie called The Belles of Saint Trinians, a goofy fifties comedy—entirely suitable for two camp twelve-year-olds such as ourselves—about a bunch of recalcitrant, slutty schoolgirls.

  As my eyes adjusted to the daylight, I spotted a familiar silhouette on the horizon. It was Narg. She was jackbooting down Reading High Street toward us while staring up at the sky. I ducked in behind Cyril’s Pacamac.1 Too late! She had spotted me through its semitransparent plastic murk.

  Letting forth a high-pitched scream of maniacal glee, Narg barreled toward us, arms outstretched, at about thirty miles an hour. Terrified shoppers leapt out of her path.

  If Narg had been an exotic eccentric who wore peacock feathers and massive wigs and brooches, her behavior would have seemed far less disturbing. But Narg’s personal style lacked any surprises. She was, in fact, profoundly average in every aspect of her appearance. Unlike my mother, who always stood out in a crowd, Narg, with her dour crochet knits, straight skirts, flat shoes, and string shopping bag, exuded the same ordinariness and frumpiness as did every other old gal shopping for support hose in Marks & Spencer. There was something hideously and unspeakably terrifying about seeing one of these granny archetypes—i.e., Narg—go totally off her rocker while others of her genre moved discreetly away and tried desperately to avoid eye contact.

  Salvation appeared in the form of a double-decker bus. Cyril, Biddie, and I alighted and escaped, leaving Narg ranting incoherently on the pavement.

  One week later, on a sun-dappled Saturday afternoon, Narg appeared fully dressed at the top of the stairs, suitcase in hand. “I’m off!” she yelled and began to stomp down the stairs with amazing agility and speed. When she got to the front gate, she turned around and yelled back into the house at nobody in particular. “Simon will never forget his granny!”

  Narg then walked out of our lives forever. She journeyed one block south and took up lodging with a poor unsuspecting lady down the street.

  To say Betty and Terry were relieved is an understatement. Suffice it to say, there was much guzzling of Château Doonan potato wine that night.

  My joy at Narg’s departure was mixed with a lingering feeling of uneasiness. What exactly had she meant by “Simon will never forget his granny”? None of us would ever forget Narg, that much was obvious. So why had she singled me out? What was she planning? Had she selected me to join her in the land of the loonies at some unspecified point in the future?

  I felt like a marked man.

  * * *

  My parents’ euphoria faded quickly. The following morning they woke up to a potato wine hangover and a jolt of reality. The burden of Uncle Ken’s care—his food, his laundry, and his complex medications—had now descended onto their shoulders.

  (Much as it pains me to compliment the two people who imported Narg into our home in the first place, I have to admit that Betty and Terry always embraced the responsibility of their problematic in-laws without a lot of whining. If there is a Nobel Prize for taking care of extremely frightening relatives, I would like to think that my parents are under consideration.)

  Uncle Ken was pleasant, blond, and quite good-looking.
Like Narg, he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Despite their common diagnosis, they were quite different. While Uncle Ken was more generally appealing than Narg, he was infinitely more out of it. Narg’s lobotomy had made her somehow more present.

  Uncle Ken had only a glancing connection with reality. He was often to be seen having conversations with invisible people or performing strange pantomimes involving various aspects of the coal-mining process. Kenneth had been a mining engineering student at the time of his departure from his trolley. He was quite nostalgic about his night shifts “down the pit.”

  Now he worked as an attendant at the Arthur Hill Memorial Swimming Baths. My sister and I were frequent visitors to this institution. Ken always seemed pleased to see us. He would acknowledge our presence by dumping large buckets of powdered chlorine onto us while we were swimming. It was nice to get preferential treatment.

  * * *

  Our first ensemble dining experience constitutes my strongest memory of Uncle Ken.

  It started off auspiciously enough. Ken seated himself next to me. I was happy. It was like having a big brother.

  Then the food arrived.

  The minute Ken’s plate hit the table, it was as if a starting pistol had been fired which only he could hear. He grabbed his knife and fork and attacked his food, eating noisily and with astonishing speed.

  “Slow down, for God’s sake! Savor the flavor!” begged Terry of his younger brother, but to no avail.

  Gobbling food was probably a habit he picked up in the asylum prior to arriving chez nous. Meticulous, refined mastication was doubtless out of the question in such an establishment: there was no shortage of aggressive inmates waiting to swipe your grub off your plate if you did not shovel it down your gullet in record time.

  Having wolfed down his lunch in a matter of seconds, Ken retired to a fireside armchair. Here he rolled the first in a long series of handmade cigarettes. He performed this skill without watching his hands. He just stared into the middle distance.