Sundays, the one day a week a restaurant man gets to breakfast with his family, Cecil flails his napkin in his lap, leans in and says: “Girls, isn’t your mother the most beautiful woman in the world?”
Beauty is work. Even if, like Audrey, you’re born beautiful, beauty requires constant vigilance. A pimple foments an emergency trip to the dermatologist. Feet are maintained by a visiting chiropodist. A dignified woman named Bea Irsa, carrying a wicker suitcase that contains a hot plate, makes house calls. Behind Audrey’s closed door, Mrs. Irsa, who sees more of my mother than I ever will, waxes away unwanted hair.
Maintenance of fingernails, hairdo and body tone takes place outside the home. One of Audrey’s exercise instructors, Marian McGlone, teaches her a condensed form of calisthenics she performs every morning when her feet hit the floor. They’re brutal but take just seven minutes.
Beauty is not a free ride. Age is the enemy. Once it is established you are beautiful, people try to find reasons you’re not. Later, Audrey will refuse to celebrate her birthday. She will refuse to acknowledge her anniversary too. She moves to a new town and no one knows how old she is. If someone knows you married at eighteen and you’re celebrating your fiftieth anniversary, how hard is it to do the math?
In her forties, although she is still the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Audrey begins taking more pains with her makeup. She issues a puzzling edict: “I can no longer wear black.” Passing the hall mirror, she stops, presses her palms against her cheeks and pulls. She gleans names from Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. She queries her hairdresser. Mr. Paris knows scars firsthand, knows who does good “work.” Hiding behind dark glasses and a scarf, my mother makes the rounds of New York’s leading plastic surgeons. The Most Beautiful Woman in the World is considering a face-lift. To us, Audrey is as flawless as ever. Why would she tamper with that face? But she sees things we don’t. And she’s not happy about it. Her face has become her adversary. She weighs her options, performing due diligence, taking into account each doctor’s reputation, the look of the office, his personality and grooming, what he’s wearing, the refinement of his staff, what he thinks she “needs,” what hospital he’s affiliated with, where he trained, whether he’s board-certified, if he teaches, whether he strikes her as discreet, does he naïvely try the kiss of death—the “hard sell”?—how many diplomas and certificates hang on his wall and how tastefully they’re framed and arranged. She will be placing her face in the hands of a stranger.
After completing her research, she commits to Dr. Smith. One question remains: Should the face-lift be just her face, or should it also involve her neck? My father, my sister and I are canvassed for opinions. We sit around the dining table and discuss Audrey’s neck. Anything that concerns Audrey is important and newsworthy: a new filling in a tooth, replating the silver ice bucket, a haircut or new shoes. The upside of doing the neck will be a tightening or firming. The downside, there is no way to avoid a two-inch scar on the ventral side of her chin. My mother doesn’t have any scars anywhere except for a fading ovoid smallpox vaccination on her upper left arm, and a tiny deformity on her right big toe from an ingrown nail. There is also the ghost of a line—but it’s almost invisible, you have to look for it—in the natural folds of her neck where Dr. Max Som excised a branchial cleft cyst (an ontogenic gestational gill). All of us feel rotten her beauty must bear the burden of any scars at all. She is too perfect for imperfection.
After the third family neck meeting, a strange thing happens. Quite suddenly, out of nowhere, I notice empty skin beneath Audrey’s chin. It looks soft. It’s barely there. You couldn’t fit a grape in it. Who knows? Maybe she would be better off without it. So what if there’s a little scar? Who sees the underside of your chin? You have to throw your head back and laugh like a madman, which is not the kind of thing Audrey does. In the end, Audrey elects to keep the pouch. No matter what her decision is, we’re behind it. We want her to be happy.
The morning of the surgery, we arrive at the hospital at seven. We wait with Audrey in the dark wood-paneled room she will occupy during her stay. The doctor has scheduled her for eight. All of us are pleased she is his second patient of the day. He will have warmed up, but not be tired. At seven-thirty a nurse administers a drip to make Audrey drowsy. But something goes wrong. The operation is postponed. The doctor has an emergency. Audrey is rescheduled for eleven and given more medicine to relax. Then something goes wrong again. We bring in lunch from the local deli and discuss what kind of emergency a plastic surgeon could have. A movie star went through a windshield? The mayor broke his nose? Nurses sweep in and give her medicine to keep calm. The surgery is postponed again and again. We sit around her bed, my father and I, all day, watching her doze, her beautiful face in drugged repose as shadows grow on the wall. She is rolled into the operating room at six. When she comes downstairs two hours later, Audrey is swathed like the Invisible Man.
She spends three nights in the hospital, then Cecil drives her home. When the black-and-blues disappear and the swelling subsides, she is taut and still beautiful. But she’s different. It’s hard to pinpoint the changes between her new face and the original. She looks like a police sketch of herself. There’s more than a resemblance. I’d recognize her, anybody who knew her old face would. But it’s a different face. It’s not the face I know. I can’t remember her real face. I have to look at old photo albums to see the face I love.
Later, much later, she confides that the doctor, exhausted after a full day in the OR, severed a nerve on one side of her mouth. She doesn’t want anyone to know, especially Dad. But every time Audrey is with people, she has to compensate, a conscious act to elevate one side of her mouth. She exerts herself into symmetry. And I, student of her beauty, don’t know this for thirty years, that’s how well she manages it. Only when she becomes so sick she doesn’t have the strength to hoist her left levator labii superioris alaeque nasi muscle do I catch the droop. She has two more face-lifts before she dies, but the smile is unfixable. Once you sever the levator labii superioris alaeque nasi nerve, that’s it.
Schiap will never be pretty like her sister, Beatrice. Both of her cheeks are sprayed with moles. Her left cheek is worse, eleven raised ones. She hates to have her picture taken. “Schiap was an ugly child as standards go,” she writes. “Her mother began making disparaging remarks about her looks. She was always being told she was as ugly as her sister was beautiful.” The astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli—discoverer of the Canals of Mars, and director of Milan’s Brera Observatory—tells his niece that, no, she isn’t bruta. “He liked me because he used to say I was born with the constellation of the Great Bear on my cheek. They were, of course, beauty spots.” Seven of the moles scattered over her left cheek loosely form the Big Dipper, the central part of Ursa Major. Uncle Giovanni invites Elsa to his observatory so she can look through his telescope and see her cheek in the sky. From then on she sees her face a different way. She is convinced her moles are lucky. Years later, she uses the Big Dipper repeatedly in her collections, embroidering it, printing it on fabric. She asks Cartier to make her a Big Dipper brooch using diamonds for the stars, and wears it, echoing her moles.
“Schiap still considered her sister much better looking than herself and this made her increasingly shy.” The little girl invents a way to make herself prettier than Beatrice. What is more beautiful than flowers? What if she can get flowers to grow on her face? If flowers are beautiful, her face will be beautiful. She convinces the gardener to give her seeds from her favorites: nasturtiums, poppies and morning glories. She closes the door to the bathroom and studies her face in the mirror. She pushes the seeds up her nose as far as they’ll go. She plants her ears and her mouth. She waits for her face to burst into bloom. Once her face is covered with flowers, she will be more beautiful than her sister.
That evening at dinner, something is wrong. Elsa barely touches her food. She’s having trouble breathing. Signora Schiaparelli dispatches a servant to the doctor’s house. The
seeds are extracted except for one that has worked its way into her sinus, discovered at a later date.
Face planting marks Schiap’s first foray into Surrealism. Twenty years later, does she tell her good friend Salvador Dalí about it? One of her favorite paintings—Dalí gives it to her—is his Necrophiliac Springtime. In the painting, a beautifully gowned woman has a bouquet for a head.
No matter how famous Schiap becomes, throughout her life she returns to flowers to telegraph beauty. The firm of Lesage beads them onto sweaters, jackets and gowns. Silk flowers grow out of necklines, waistbands and hats. Sometimes flowers are the hat in its entirety. Pockets on summer dresses are printed with seed packets. Women pluck the glass nosegay from the Shocking perfume presentation and wear it as a brooch, so Schiap has it made into a brooch.
As an adult, Schiap’s long face presents with hooded eyes, a high domed forehead and a voluptuous lower lip. Her upper lip is short. Her brown eyes turn down at the corners and the skin around them is sunken and dark. She knows she’s not pretty. She’s referred to as a jolie-laide. Beautiful-ugly women are not conventionally good-looking. Their faces are idiosyncratic, off-kilter, ill-proportioned. But something makes them jolie too. It’s a combination of attitude and style. They groom themselves impeccably and dress with imagination. They have flawless carriage and hold themselves as if they are in fact beauties. When a jolie-laide enters a room, heads turn. Jolie-laides compel. They are referred to as “striking.” “Striking” is a way of saying “not beautiful but worthy of attention.” Famous jolie-laides are Diana Vreeland, Anjelica Huston and the Duchess of Windsor.
In Paris in the 1920s, it is said that you haven’t arrived until your portrait has been taken by Man Ray. “To be done by Man Ray means that you were rated as somebody,” said Sylvia Beach, the expatriate bookseller and publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Schiap trusts him. She poses for many photos, and most of the time he airbrushes her Big Dipper out. In his 1932 surreal Self-Portrait with Camera, Man Ray reveals that he too had a cheek speckled with moles. He leaves his in.
There are advantages to not being a great beauty. Beauty fades and the only thing sadder than losing it is trying to keep it. If you are not beautiful, something more lasting gets to be the coin of your realm. Schiap will never suffer the fate of her earlier neighbor on the place Vendôme, the outrageously beautiful Countess di Castiglione, cousin of Cavour, mistress of Napoleon III. As she grew older and less beautiful, Castiglione covered her mirrors and painted her rooms black. She waited until nightfall to go for a walk. According to Schiap, Castiglione “mourned in solitude the fatal passing of a nearly divine beauty.”
Audrey would have known what to do. If she could have gotten her hands on Schiap, she’d have said: “Find an excellent dermatologist, darling. Have those moles removed. No one will miss them. And your hairdresser? He isn’t doing you any favors. See an orthodontist and get a retainer. Push that overbite back. Above all, this is very important, concealer for under your eyes. And darling, don’t be stingy.”
Vuk Vuchinich’s portrait of the Yugoslavian partisan Draža Mihailovic´ and his portrait of Audrey Volk. (illustration credit 11.1)
Audrey in oil. Audrey in hotel-lobby pastel. Did she look more like Lana Turner or Grace Kelly? (illustration credit 11.2)
Schiap’s uncle, a world-famous astronomer, told her that the “beauty spots” on her face formed the Big Dipper. (illustration credit 11.3)
Schiap, accompanied by her friend and collaborator Salvador Dalí, wears her diamond Big Dipper brooch to the races.
Necrophiliac Springtime, a gift to Schiap from Salvador Dalí in 1936. The woman’s head is made entirely of flowers. (illustration credit 11.5)
Man Ray’s “beauty spots” formed the constellation of Leo. He retouched Schiap’s portraits, but not his own. (illustration credit 11.6)
The famous beauty the Countess di Castiglione once lived on the place Vendôme. Schiap’s surreal Profile Hat has a jeweled eyebrow. (illustration credit 11.7, 11.8)
I gave this hand mirror to my mother on her birthday. The engraving reads: “For the Most Beautiful Woman in the World 1.21.90.”
chapter twelve
Improving the Mind
The fact that I was obliged to learn things I did not care about, and curb my imagination, revolted me. Mathematics was my worst subject, and I was invariably at the bottom of my class. I could not grasp figures, and thus it has always been with me.
—Elsa Schiaparelli
I returned to school that January, prepared for the anomaly of becoming an average student. No longer would I stand with chalk in my hand at the blackboard, demonstrating the solution to a problem. Nor would my arm be waving like a banner over the heads of my classmates, so that my voice could be heard first in response to the teacher’s question. I accepted the role graciously and with a light heart, happy to abandon the responsibilities of “stardom.”
—Audrey Volk (journal entry)
Every September Audrey Morgen’s new teachers steel themselves for the worst.
“Are you Robert Morgen’s sister?”
But Audrey is a model of decorum. Trusty messenger to the principal’s office, keeper of the Hall Pass, honored fire-drill monitor. The prettiest, the smartest. The only girl in an extended family with six male first cousins, attention is lavished. Expectations reach the stratosphere. The goal is perfection. Flawless straight-A report cards are brandished at the dinner table. Year after year, Audrey reigns at the top of her class. In prewar New York the prevailing wisdom is: If a child does remarkably well, it’s in that child’s best interest to skip a grade. Everyone agrees: Intellectual nourishment transcends the value of social adjustment. Understimulating a child is a crime. As a result, girls and boys graduate high school at twelve and toddle off to college.
In June, on the last day of public school, Polly leans out her kitchen window. Waving Audrey’s report card, she shouts to the other kitchen windows on the airshaft, “Audrey skipped again!” Thus my mother finds herself, one September, to be eleven in the ninth grade. Her classmates are fifteen.
“I had no idea what the teachers were talking about in history.” She shakes her head. “I was completely lost. No one spoke to me. The older girls wore grown-up clothes and silk stockings clipped to their garter belts. I was still in cotton lisles.”
Math makes no sense either. “It was as if the teacher were speaking a foreign language.”
Audrey is terrified. “My little world was turned upside down. Before the first report card was due, I knew I had to face shattering the family’s dream.” One night she bolts up in bed and howls. Polly and Herman rush in.
Audrey wails out her fear of failure.
Do the words “resort” and “restore” have the same origin? The next morning, Polly whisks her little girl away to a resort in Lakewood, New Jersey. “It was famous for restoring visitors to the best of health,” Audrey’s journal reads. “This was accomplished by walking around the lake and inhaling aromatic, pine-scented air. Mother and I walked and walked but I still didn’t know the missed history, geography and grammar.”
Back home, the family convenes. A decision is made. Audrey will sit out the rest of the term and enter a new school in a new grade in January. She spends the weeks reading biographies, “nursing my wounded spirit in the company of famous scientists, artists, writers and theatrical personalities.” She begins to reassemble. After Christmas break, she enters the Calhoun School in the eighth grade.
Joining a class midterm, a class of older children who have grown up together since kindergarten, Audrey is a guaranteed outsider. She’s the new girl. Her smartness and prettiness work against her. Who wants to be friends with someone smarter and prettier? She invites classmates to her father’s restaurants. She tries to make movie dates for Saturdays. When nothing works, Audrey devises a plan. She studies Edith, the most popular girl, then copies her. Like Edith, Audrey compliments people and stops gossiping. Like Edith, Audrey smiles. Eating lunch
alone, she smiles. Last one chosen for a team, she smiles. Audrey laughs without mercy and forces herself to look like the happiest girl in the world. One day, walking home after school, Edith invites her to play acey-deucey. Soon Audrey is having Chinese food with Gladys upstairs on Broadway and watching double features with Rhea and Edna. Naomi becomes her partner in crime. Together they sneak into Wednesday matinees after school. Two starstruck girls become “second-acters,” scouting empty seats in the theater as the audience thins after intermission. They see the last two acts of every Broadway show for free. When their parents ask them where they’ve been, Audrey and Naomi say, “Glee Club.”
For the rest of her life Audrey maintains an outward aura of happiness. “If you act a certain way,” she paraphrases William James, “you become that way.” She creates a persona designed to inspire envy. This makes her feel enviable. “I always think everything I have is the best,” she likes to say. Her dentist is the best. Her husband is the best. Her apartment is the best. The woman who decorates her apartment is the best, as is the Syrie Maugham sofa this best decorator persuades her to buy. Her manicurist and her hair colorist are the best. Though her daughters could use a little work, when presented to the outside world they’re the best too. Her grandchildren, who go to the best schools, say the best, most quotable things.
After a big party (she throws the best parties, with the best food and the best conversation), I help my mother fold her freshly laundered napkins. She teaches me the best way to “iron” drip-drys: You lay the napkin flat on top of the dryer and smooth it with the side of your palm. Then you fold it in half, and smooth it again using elbow grease on the crease. The napkins look perfectly ironed.
Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me Page 9