Editorial Observer: The Beautification of
America
September 27, 1999
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
The Beautification
of America
hen the vaudeville
actress and comedienne Fanny Brice had her nose bobbed in 1923,
by a traveling quack in a hotel room, her legions of fans wondered
why in the world she would do that to herself. The new skills
in plastic surgery, learned in repairing the faces of young soldiers
disfigured in World War I, were just coming into popular use.
But last month, when the singer Carnie Wilson, daughter of Brian
Wilson of the Beach Boys, had a gastrointestinal bypass done
as a radical means of losing weight, the whole surgery was broadcast
on the Internet, on a Web site called adoctorinyourhouse.com,
and 50,000 people viewed it.
The very idea of broadcasting such a thing -- much less watching
it -- undoubtedly makes millions of Americans want to run out
of the room. A great part of the population still strives for
spiritual perfectability, and nurtures the idea of contentment
with self. But one of the great cultural, scientific and entrepreneurial
themes in America, as well as in Europe and other parts
of the world, has been the effort to remake and improve the physical
being. American celebrity has often been a process of recreation,
of identities renamed, histories rewritten and personalities
and features recast, all of it in pursuit of a certain appearance.
Helena Rubinstein and Estee Lauder made fortunes selling the
idea of available good looks, and in a nation where more people
of different backgrounds look different from each other than
in any other place, the effort to assimilate, to blend in, has
always been a physical one.
The effort to alter and repair has ancient roots. The first attempts
at nose reconstruction, Elizabeth Haiken writes in "Venus
Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery," occurred in India
in 600 B.C. The progress of medicine since then makes it possible
for almost the entire outward body to be nipped, tucked, tightened,
suctioned or recast today. The compulsion that used to go into
ethnic erasure now rages in pursuit of beauty, the appearance
of youth, the correction of whatever little thing annoys. Aging
boomers get themselves new faces, and parents in Southern California
-- as in Brazil -- buy their daughters larger breasts and flatter
stomachs to go away to college with.
As Nancy Hass wrote in The Times's Styles section recently, 10
million Americans, more than 6 per cent of the adult population,
have chosen to have some kind of plastic surgery in the last
decade, simply because they can. In a celebrity and spectacle-obsessed
age, more thousands now watch those procedures being performed
on the Internet. Plastic surgeons have become some of the culture's
newest cult figures. For the older generation, who survived World
War II to realize that their postwar babies all looked like Winston
Churchill -- the ultimate cut may come soon. Arabella Churchill,
a baby who did in fact grow up to look like her grandfather Winston,
has accepted free surgery to change her famous features. It is
to be performed live on celebritydoctor.com, the owner of the
Web site, a former model, has announced.
Technology and all that aside, it seems more than a little sad
to cast off such distinguished lines in pursuit of common beauty.
There have, after all, been plenty of celebrated men and women
who got on without benefit of the surgeon's knife. Churchill's
features, viewed in a certain light, weren't exactly handsome
on him, either. And there is the example of Gertrude Stein, whose
silhouette grew as famous as her language and her taste. She
seemed content to loom large in all respects. A nose, she might
have said, is a nose is a nose.
