Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?

by Jancee Dunn

  The book was an unpleasant shock. How could this sultry model whose pouty Calvin Klein jeans ad graced my bedroom wall be so eye-wateringly boring? It’s no stretch to imagine that her wooden wholesomeness was a response to her background as a child film star who played a prostitute at thirteen, a kid whose notorious mother/manager once compared her nubile daughter to a work of art that everyone should be able to contemplate. Yet somehow her book grew on me, maybe because her advice was so endearingly square, with many earnest lectures on resisting peer pressure and remaining true to oneself. While others may have spent the Reagan era waking up to a morning bong hit with the stranger they had picked up the night before, studious Brooke, whose circle of friends included Bob Hope and Wayne Newton, was busy being the least hip college sophomore in the United States of America.

  It’s hard not to wonder what Brooke’s dorm-mates thought of her, particularly when she divulged her method of coping with stress: listening to a tape that a fan sent her of “wonderful old accordion music.” She didn’t drink, smoke, stay out late, or touch sugar or dairy; one famous section in the book is titled “What My Virginity Means to Me.” In it, Brooke candidly admitted that she was scared to get intimate with a man (presumably her terror and confusion only increased after she dated both Michael Jackson and George Michael) and urged uncertain readers to take their time, too. Even if she hadn’t spelled out her uncharted sexual status, one glance at the photo she supplied of her college bedroom, with its frilly flowered lampshades and Cabbage Patch doll, told you everything you needed to know.

  But Brooke was not all self-denial. Sometimes, she wrote, her fun-loving Princeton classmates threw chartreuse parties, in which everyone had to … well, wear chartreuse, you see. (Brooke joined in the madness by putting on some chartreuse eye shadow and chartreuse fishnets.) But mostly she was incredibly disciplined, striving not to go a single day without exercise and avoiding the freshman fifteen by visualizing her mother appearing in the dining hall, watching her daughter’s every bite as she sat next to a giant scale. She counseled late-night studiers to fill up on carrots and celery rather than cookies. The whole book was like a demure letter of advice from Grandma, yet all of the photos were taken by such legendary fashion photographers as Patrick Demarchelier and Albert Watson.

  Which brings me to another reason why I cherish these books: Even the most primly sensible tome can’t suppress the ego and sheer kookiness present in even the most levelheaded famous person. Enterprising readers can always find beautifully telling details of these stars’ personal lives buried in the diet and hair tips. (Do you keep weight off by imagining your disapproving mother next to a giant scale? What, exactly, was going on in that relationship?)

  Sometimes these nutty biographical details aren’t buried at all. In Joan Crawford’s My Way of Life (in my view, the undisputed classic of the genre), she is blazingly frank about her control issues. Joan, of course, was a steely perfectionist who determinedly transformed herself from skinny Lucille LeSueur, product of a broken San Antonio home, into a sleek Hollywood star, and her continuing, obsessive quest for Total Excellence practically radiated off the pages. Known for showing up to every film set early and for scrubbing down the toilets of every hotel she stayed in, Joan ran her life with military precision and dictated that you do the same.

  One of her many revealing anecdotes was her livid reaction when three guests dared to show up at her New York penthouse apartment without an invitation (something, she noted, that her own children would never think of doing). This was not in the schedule her secretary was told to plan out three months in advance! She had just enough time to run to her dressing room, furiously whip on some lipstick, and don a “lovely dress that I had bought in Canada” before receiving her thoughtless, impulsive visitors.

  Apparently, Joan’s Way of Life was to wring usefulness and productivity out of every waking moment. Read your newspaper standing up as you do isometric exercises! Walk around the house with toes pointed inward for crucial extra leg toning! Sitting at a desk? Roll a bottle back and forth under the arches of your feet to slim the ankles! Do impromptu ballet moves while vacuuming! Better yet, simultaneously wear a nourishing mayonnaise mask on your face!

  Mayonnaise was one of her many beauty-enhancing kitchen-made remedies. “For years I washed my daughters’ hair with raw eggs, never soap or shampoo,” she wrote. “I wet their hair first and then rubbed in six whole eggs—a trick I learned from Katharine Hepburn.” I understood the practicality of her tip of using a thick layer of petroleum jelly as a makeup remover—gooey but a money saver—but were half a dozen eggs per child more economical, or easier, than shampoo? Well, Joan must have had her reasons.

  As for diet, the ultra-disciplined star avoided sugar, so much so that in a scene from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in which her character was supposed to be munching chocolates, she recalled that she made some tiny meatballs at home and brought them in to eat on camera instead. Wasn’t protein better than empty calories, after all?

  If Joan’s book displayed the most lunacy, Elizabeth Taylor’s engaging diet tome, Elizabeth Takes Off had the most personality. She struck the perfect balance between glamour (she dedicated the book to, among others, terminally suave actor Robert Wagner and Dynasty gown designer Nolan Miller) and the sort of genuine candor most celebrities would never dare attempt. No wonder the book sold petrillions upon its 1987 release (my mother kept a pristine copy for years and used many of Liz’s recipes, including the poached garlic chicken and the artificial-sweetener-powered “chocolate fantasy”). There’s so much to love in this book: Liz’s colorful, chaotic biography, which kicks off the proceedings, is so extensive, so replete with passions (Richard Burton! Diamonds! Rubies! Fried chicken and mashed potatoes!), that she doesn’t even get down to the business of dieting until page 111.

  This is a woman who dug into life with refreshing gusto. One of my favorite photos of Ms. Taylor is a snap of her and Richard Burton messily eating burgers together, descending upon them with the same zeal with which they fell upon each other. One is reaching for the ketchup. It’s the sexiest, most romantic picture I’ve ever seen. But what makes this book so relatable is that Elizabeth, as we all must, paid heavily for her earthy appetites. The volume’s saddest portion detailed life with her sixth husband, Virginia senator John Warner. When they married in 1976, Liz found herself thrown into the disorienting world of politics as she joined him on the grueling, fried-food-strewn campaign trail. She had already gained weight from bad hotel room service when he was elected to the Senate in 1976, and thereafter kept piling it on as she turned to food to alleviate boredom. The most wretched line in the whole book, as far as I’m concerned, occurred during her description of the deathly quiet nights at home with Warner in D.C., a bleak contrast with the whirling social scene in Los Angeles.

  “Most evenings,” she wrote, “he’d say, ‘Why don’t you go upstairs and watch TV, Pooters’—his nickname for me—‘I’ve got so much to do I just don’t know when I’ll finish.”

  There is so much pathos in that little scene. Pooters. Not a very sexy nickname, was it? Would you want to be called Pooters? And he’s basically telling her, not unkindly, to run along now. It was a grim picture, this celebrated Hollywood star, trudging upstairs in her caftan for another night of Carson.

  And so she eventually ballooned to 180-plus pounds. She wasn’t shy about presenting photographic evidence in the book, either, accompanied by tart captions, or of describing her face as “suet” and likening her body to a great white whale. (But of course, just when things got too pedestrian, George Hamilton or Rock Hudson dropped by, or an enormous Bel Air mansion was purchased.)

  Elizabeth’s moment of reckoning arrived after a hard look in a full-length mirror. Eventually she whittled herself down to 122 pounds through diet (“a bore”) and a grudging exercise program tailored to her bad back. She rewarded herself with a weekly, pornographically described “pig-out,” which might consist of an entire pizza foll
owed by a hot fudge sundae, which she rightly pointed out is only properly festive if there is more hot fudge than ice cream. And, like a true celebrity, Elizabeth borrowed “one day at a time” principles from AA to apply to dieting. (Her alcoholism, she claimed, would be a different book entirely, one that I will certainly snap up.)

  Joan Collins was another tempestuous, oft-married brunette, whose 1980 beauty-and-fitness book became a cornerstone of my collection. The Joan Collins Beauty Book, the first of five lifestyle guides that the industrious Dynasty star churned out, is my most prized because it’s such a decadent, spandex-body-suited-and-terrycloth-headbanded time capsule. While today’s beauty and fitness guides are penned by a tedious parade of chipper personal trainers and nutritionists who favor chapter titles like “The Joy of Soy,” Joan’s book was more suited for undoing the damage of staying out all night at Regine’s. “I pay attention to the upkeep of my health and looks, but not to the detriment of my enjoyment of life,” she wrote, “and this includes eating well, drinking wine, staying up late, sunbathing, and even, God forbid, smoking!”

  Show me another beauty guide that includes a “tip” to stay away from cocaine, which could sap a girl’s looks. (Joan related her own story of doing blow in Saint-Tropez, after which she was plagued by insomnia and a nasty case of postnasal drip.) And who but the woman who played Alexis Carrington would devote an entire page to wig maintenance, a section criminally absent from most beauty books? (Be sure and secure your wig with extra hairpins, she cautioned, before “lovemaking.”) Even the section on vitamins had a debauched, Studio 54 feel: Joan confided that if she had been smoking heavily, she took up to nine thousand milligrams of vitamin C as a restorative. The disco ball continued to whir in the skin-care section, when she shared an effective tanning formula from her youth: Mix eight parts baby oil with one part iodine; apply every hour. This, she warned responsibly, should not be done too often, but she admitted that it did provide a “gorgeous glowing tan.”

  Heavy perfume received a well-deserved nod, too. Ms. Collins, a fan of major Statement Scents like Opium and Jungle Gardenia by Tuvache, urged readers to layer it on with abandon: Start with perfumed soap and bath oil in the tub, followed by a dousing of scented powder, body lotion, and cologne, and then a liberal dose of the perfume itself. Why be timid? Announce yourself in a hurricane of overpowering scent, the olfactory equivalent of enormous shoulder pads! If people flee from you in the elevator with handkerchiefs over their mouths, why, then, you have it all to yourself!

  Joan knew how to maintain her allure. She wore fishnet stockings and a full face of evening makeup for her exercise photos and unapologetically listed her most trusted crash diets: the six-eggs-a-day diet, the banana-and-milk diet (Joan lost a quick seven pounds on this one when she first signed with Twentieth Century–Fox), and the nothing-but-green-grapes plan. Unsure if a crash diet is for you? Joan provided a simple test: Lie flat on your back and put a ruler lengthwise on your stomach. If it doesn’t form a straight ridge between your pubic bone and your ribs, better stock up on those grapes.

  In the mid-eighties, celebrity beauty books became a little more workmanlike. While ones written in the sixties encouraged artifice and drastic diet shortcuts, the eighties ushered in an era of frisky outdoorsiness. This is best exemplified by Christie Brinkley’s Outdoor Beauty and Fitness Book, which I loved when I was younger and now find completely exhausting. Christie, while a joy to behold in a bathing suit, wouldn’t necessarily be the most fun companion on a vacation. “How often have you sat in the sand watching the surf crash or listening to the radio?” she wrote. “You could have been exercising!” Every paragraph burbles with energy and bristles with exclamation points. There are endless photos of her working out on various sunny beaches, battling what she calls “El Bulgo” and smiling wide enough to display her back molars.

  The supermodel used every opportunity to enhance her splendor. After a beach party, she liked to procure half a can of flat beer from the bar and comb it through her hair as a makeshift setting lotion, and was fond of using cut lemons to rub on her elbows. (After ten minutes, they’ll be “bleached white!”)

  Christie’s book, along with fellow eighties model Cheryl Tiegs’s The Way to Natural Beauty, could be useful, although neither was as appealingly quirky as their predecessors. When I revisited Tiegs’s guide not long ago, the only read-entertainingly-aloud nuggets were descriptions of her early binge eating. She related the story of being on a bathing-suit shoot in Puerto Rico and finding some ancient boxes of crackers in the cupboard of a house she was renting. Insects were literally hatching inside the crackers, so resourceful—and hungry—Cheryl simply ate around the bugs. Fabulous!

  Another spree involved a box of cookies that one of her New York City roommates had received from Paris. The roommate had eaten the “gooey insides” of the cookies and tossed the chewed-up crusts into the garbage bin. “When I got home that night,” Cheryl recalled, “I caught a glimpse of those castaways and one by one extracted them from the garbage and finished them off. Some had the flavor of orange peels, others of coffee grind.” Why was it so gruesomely comforting to read about her moments of weakness?

  I had the opposite feeling when I recently tracked down Jaclyn Smith’s The American Look. I remember taking scrupulous notes from my library copy and carefully following her instructions to wash my hair with a final blast of freezing water to maintain its shine. But when I reread the book, I discovered a chilliness my youthful eyes had missed. One paragraph breezily began with “Despite my good fortune in having little trouble maintaining my ideal 115 pounds …” She went on to say that she was blessed with “untroubled skin,” she was “not troubled” by eye redness; exercise was a pleasure; and her pregnancy didn’t show until she was six months along. These declarations were bolstered with photos of Jaclyn looking regal as she lounged by the pool, toes fetchingly pointed. Jaclyn had broken the crucial covenant with readers of these sorts of books. What she was required to do was pretend she wasn’t an otherworldly creature blessed by genetics in order to sell the illusion that looks like hers were actually achievable with contouring makeup and half a grapefruit for breakfast. If Jaclyn had only confessed to wolfing down half-gnawed cookies studded with old coffee grinds, her book might still be in print.

  My collection stopped as the nineties commenced and these books fell out of fashion. Now the star is either the diet itself—South Beach, the Mediterranean Diet—or an all-business personal trainer. How could they compare to Super Looks, Morgan Fairchild’s classic 1984 guide in which she vamps on the cover in glittering jewels, a sequined bustier, and two crimson slashes of blush on her cheekbones? Give me three dozen lavish photos of a celebrity doing halfhearted, low-impact, sweat-free aerobics in a fuchsia leotard, matching leg warmers, and a full face of inappropriate evening makeup. (If she’s holding a matching fuchsia set of half-pound weights, so much the better.)

  And so I cling to my old collection and revel in its datedness. Reading these musty old books brings me a perverse pleasure as I marvel at how seriously I followed the frequently bonkers advice. I was so hopeful that I could actually get rid of my freckles with a few squirts of lemon juice and vanquish my paunch with eight glasses of water a day.

  And I realized recently that my mother has had a much greater influence on my appearance than any model or movie star. It was she who instilled in me my most enduring habits, from dressing well on a budget to a healthy dollop of sunblock even on cloudy days. Her longest-running campaign, met with mild but not overwhelming success, has been a protracted attempt to convert her daughters from the natural look to the more vivid makeup that she favors. When it comes to cosmetics, my mother has always believed that it’s pretty much impossible to overdo it. In fact, if she had written her own book—let’s call it Judy’s Principles—it would include the following:

  Sit up straight. Slouching makes you look like you have saggy bosoms.

  Get that gum out of your mouth. Hold on a minute, I
’ve got a tissue in my purse. We are not going into this restaurant with you chewin’ your cud like a cow. It makes a person look less intelligent. It just does. Put your gum in this tissue. I’m not arguing with you.

  If you have a chocolate craving, just eat the tiniest, tiniest little handful of chocolate chips. I always keep a bag right in the pantry for emergencies.

  Stop fiddling with your hair. (Sound of hand briskly slapping away daughter’s hand) You look like a teenager when you do that.

  I don’t know what you girls have against brooches. It’s the best way to add personality to an outfit.

  Don’t overpluck those eyebrows of yours, or they will never grow back. You’ll have spindly little eyebrows forever. Is that what you want?

  Your generation takes this whole “natural look” too far. A little eye shadow never hurt anyone. I do not say that all the time. What’s so funny? Honest to Pete, you girls laugh at everything I say. Let me show you. Come here and hold still. This is called “Midnight” by Clinique. Now. Doesn’t that look better?

  Don’t Be Weird

  I ask you: If my definition of total happiness is a long trip to Japan, or India, or Morocco, then why is it that I can’t manage to leave my apartment when I’m in America? I never want to go anywhere. I can barely cope with a trip to the dry cleaner. I just want to stay home. Scarily, I can do so for days and days and days. What is this cabin fever I hear about? I once interviewed country star Martina McBride, who admitted that she, too, often had to be flushed out of her lair. I asked her how long she has hunkered down at home without leaving. When she told me a week, I nodded soberly and squeezed her arm in understanding. If I had a platinum-record-built Nashville compound like Martina’s, I could easily dig in for a month.