Doll-like and Dangerous

My favorite shade of lipstick is a color called Silent Red. It's a liverish, bloody, voluptuous unction, heavy with complicated pigments; the saturated hues of love and anger mixed together in a neurotic, regal, murderous, transcendent red. Over the years I've had long auburn curls, Louise Brooks bobs, and platinum buzz cuts, but always the red lips.

I never wear eye shadow, or rouge. Sometime back in the early eighties I figured out that seven different shades of iridescent powder and gobs of Maybelline Great Lash made me look more like Baby Jane than David Bowie, and I stopped wearing makeup.
Then, a couple of years ago, something in me snapped. I quite unexpectedly found myself over thirty, with a small child, a Volkswagen, a flat chest, and a blunt cut, living in Southern California. All quite by accident. One day I put on my favorite lipstick and saw a great, grinning baboon's bottom in the middk oEmy wan, weak-eyed face. I wiped it off with a Kleenex and threw the little ribbed gold tube in a drawer. I shuddered. Somehow, my former slutty, girlish, disarray had undergone a subtle change; I had now become the perfect simulacrum of a posthippie hausfrau. I began to have nightmares in which I was always just about to sprout great, knuckly Hobbit feet and go Birkenstock.

The answer to my feminine identity crisis came one day when I was visiting Nancy (a good, game girl from Brooklyn Heights, who looks on makeup with withering disdain, even though I know for a fact she goes to Beverly Hills once a month to be waxed from the waist down). Nancy's five-year-old daughter had been given a pair of false eyelashes in her Christmas stocking, a demure pair of black Ardell Sweeties. On the pretext of playing dress-up, I plastered them on, and suddenly there I was: the new me, vixen extraordinaire.

I didn't look made-up in the usual sense, but my face was brighter, my gaze more voluptuous, my mien both doll-like and dangerous.

I winked, then tossed my head back and let loose a throaty, wicked laugh, sounding like a Raymond Chandler moll. Moments later I was peeling down Silverlake Boulevard, reveling in the feel of the Santa Ana winds streaking through my stolen lashes. The next day I bleached my hair platinum, and the Silent Red went back in my purse.

Putting On a Face

A few weeks later I was at a Spanish stucco house in the Fairfax district, talking to Sharon Stone's makeup artist, Trisha Sawyer, for a story about Casino. «When I was a kid, I used to go next door to Wilma Alcorn's house,» Trisha was saying. «She'd sit me on the counter and I would watch while she put on her face.»

Trisha led me downstairs to her garage, trailed by a black cat named Mascara. The dark garage was lined with shelves, and the shelves held row upon row of plastic storage boxes that contained all of Sharon Stone's past, present, and future faces. The place was gleefully eerie, a kind of pop pharaonic tomb, a glamour girl's Cave of Wonders, both altar and archive.

Trisha heaved open an enonnous wooden crate on wheels, the kind of toolbox my ex-boyfriend used to hold everything necessary to build a small house. The box was full of false eyelashes. Trisha knew my weakness.

For the next hour, we talked underlashes and overlashes. Trisha showed me how to cut a pair in half and wear them on the outer lid «for the I Dream of Jeannie look» and how to pile on three pairs at once for the sixties showgirl thing. She showed me the subtle sleight of hand entailed by individual false eyebrow hairs, and the delights of gaudy glue-on eyeliner strips encrusted with rhinestones. Most important, I took away with me a kind of beauty queen's Grail: hand-tied silk false eyelashes, the Cadillac of all facial accessories. Trisha thought I might still be able to get them at Columbia Stage & Screen Cosmetics.

Sure enough, when I walked into the little Formica shop on the comer of Sunset and Gower in Hollywood, there they were behind the glass display, my Wunder Lashes, each pair nestled inside a heart-shaped plastic case that sits on cotton inside a silver foil box, whisper-light and thirty dollars a pair. They looked like something you'd find in a locket around the neck of some sad, longhaired poet.

The salesclerks were all busy, and I browsed while I waited; the shelves mostly held specimens of fake werewolf hair and bloody eyeballs mounted on springs.

«No, it's like this,» a skinny, tobacco-voiced woman in a leather jacket was explaining to one of the salesclerks. «The glowing tip of a cigar is embedded in the flesh of his neck.» She sounded exasperated.

I was rescued by Suzette, a salesgirl and part-time makeup artist with orangey foundation rubbed into her eruptile chin. Suzette's claim to fame, she told me, was once having worked on Rodney Dangerfield.

When I told her that 1 wanted the Wunder Lashes, she looked at me askance and insisted, that first I needed to try out this new eyebrow «system.» She held a plastic stencil to my forehead and painted on the brow, the way furniture stores paint the letters on a «Going Out of Business» sign. Then she demonstrated a foundation that would add «color» to my preternaturally olive complexion. «You should wear black mascara,» she said. I said I preferred brown. For the sake of comparison, she did half my face with each product. I looked like I was going out of business. I looked like I'd had a stroke.

Gently, I insisted on seeing the Wunder Lashes. Bored, Suzette pulled out a set and threw them on the glass counter. «They're expensive,» she said.

I told her I'd be cutting them in half, so they would really only be fifteen dollars a pair instead of thirty. She gave me a startled, keenly assessing look and then grew suddenly furtive and excited.

«I have something to show you,» she said in a conspiratorial whisper, and disappeared into the back room. She came back with a dog-eared copy of People magazine from August 10, 1992. On the cover was a perfectly dreadful picture of Marilyn Monroe, looking overexposed and frowzy, if no less goddesslike.

«It's a terrible picture,» Suzette owned, «but I saved it because, look--the photo is so bad that you can see exactly how her makeup is done! See? Marilyn wore the lashes just on the end--like you!» In Suzette's mind, I was already some kind of freak prophet. «And the brown liner--you're wearing brown liner. See, in the picture, it's not black Marilyn's wearing, it's brown.» I examined the picture, and it was true.

I plunked down my thirty dollars in a daze and raced out into the Hollywood sun, forgetting all about my one freak eyebrow.

A Moment of Silence for Ava Gardner's Neck

I wore my new, glamorous look to a dinner party soon after, at the home of John Spath and Donald Rawley, or the Duke and Duchess of Spath, as they sometimes prefer to be known.

Their house in Sherman Oaks is a mirrored jewel box stuffed with paintings, etageres, exotic curios, and perfume bottles; if you lifted the roof off, a ballerina in a pink tutu would pop up and dance slowly around on point while Swan Lake tinkled like cut glass under the stars. I would never dream of showing up for cocktails or dinner at the Spath Manor without dyeing my shoes to match my purse.

John is a painter, and the house is full of his landscapes. Lately he's been painting these kind of twisted, gargoylish monkeys engaged in human leisure activities. John has silver hair and a silver mustache, and I always picture him in a silk smoking jacket and ascot, even though I can't honestly say whether or not I've ever seen him thus attired. Donald justly considers himself «one of the last great social queens,» and usually receives at home in some kind of vaguely Moghulish tunic and a great deal of Important Jewelry.

At this particular dinner, I met two fabulous gentlemen who have been arbiters of style since the forties: Michael Woulfe, who costumed Ava Gardner, and Bob Sidney, who often choreographed Rita Hayworth.

I have a poster of Rita Hayworth at home in my bedroom. «There never was a woman like GILDA,» it says, above a sultry, strapless Rita who is smoking a cigarette and looking as if she'd as soon grind that Pall Mall out on your shoe as blow you a kiss. John and I have sat together in the book-lined Spath study, in front of the VCR, taking turns murmuring, «Oh, Rita,» with an indeterminate, elegiac despair.

Together the four gentlemen admired my lashes over a pitcher of martinis, and sighed. «There aren't any glamorous movie stars
anymore,» Bob said.

Michael nodded in agreement, looking at me with a pity that extended to my entire generation. «I bet you can't name one movie
star with an ounce of style.»

«Sharon Stone,» I offered.

«Ah, yes,» said Michael, his eyes glowing momentarily bright. Then he shook his head sadly as if to say, Doesn't the exception prove the rule. «But she's the only one.»

Sidney reminisced of quiet, magical evenings with Rita at Aly Khan's Swiss chalet. Later, between the salad and the lamb, the conversation turned to Ava. «I remember one evening in front of a restaurant, when I saw her step out of a limousine,» Woulfe said. «She was wearing an evening gown that bared her shoulders, and carrying her sandals in her hand. She slung them over her shoulder, then tipped her head back and laughed. I remember thinking at that moment, that was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.» There was a universal intake of breath at the table, as all four men fell silent in rapt memory of Ava Gardner's neck.

Over coffee, Woulfe began to go into the years he spent as «the only man who spoke to Howard Hughes on the telephone every day.» He outfitted the starlets Hughes was courting, squiring them on shopping sprees, tending to their attire and posture. «During one of these conversations, he asked where I sat in the limousine,» Woulfe said. «I said that I generally sat in the back, with them. He asked me not to; I should sit up front with the driver, because that way, the young lady would not have to turn her head in order to converse with me. That turning of the head would stretch the skin of her neck, you see, and he didn't want that. We had to take routes that avoided crossing any railroad tracks, as the bouncing would also contribute to the deterioration of the skin.»

The oblique and mysterious Hughes gesture struck me as weirdly intimate, less crazy than wistful. How anxiously, maniacally
sentimental! One can cry outrage, I suppose, at women in their thirties getting face-lifts. In Vogue, I read that at least one plastic surgeon recommends liposuction in the·early twenties for best results. Well, maybe he's right. And why not? Beauty should be unhealthy. It should be bad for you, and painful and overreaching, a kind of sick-sweet torture all around, a dizziness of greatness and humiliation.

Hasn't beauty always been the poetic brainchild of anxiety? Nothing has reaIly changed, or at least not in Hollywood.

All cynicism is defeated in that cultivated, savored, well-wrought yet unexpected moment when the great, mythic beauty steps forward, a perfumed arabesque of careless, cared-for flesh, throws back her head, and laughs.

I Want to Be Evil

Eartha Kitt performed at the Cinegrill, in the lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel. The Cinegrill is a drab room with little sense of history or atmosphere, despite or because of being on Hollywood Boulevard just opposite Mann's Chinese Theatre, or despite or because of the little-known fact that Liberace's brother, George, was the house pianist in the fifties. That must have been while Eartha Kitt was in Europe. Now she was here, packing the house every night for weeks on end. She was sixty-seven, and a minx.

Though I was seated in the back of the room, I could make out her enormous Barbie Doll lashes just fine as she batted them up and down at a businessman in the front row.

«Aren't you the guy who went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back?» she asked him in her dusky falsetto. The caterpillar lashes went up and down again slowly. «And what's that piece of green apple pie you've got with you now?» she hissed, catlike, pointing a long, red nail at his date.

Then she tossed her head and sang «Uska Dara» in Turkish, and then she sang my favorite song, «I Want to Be Evil,» about a good girl who wants to go bad.

After the concert, I dodged around the autograph seekers and asked her publicist, a bearded man named Alan, if I might have a
word with Ms. Kitt. A short while later I found myself upstairs in Eartha Kitt's suite, her poodles Mootsie and Abba nosing at my knees. It all happened very fast. Eartha was talking to her musicians in the hallway, and Alan took me aside by the elbow and said, «Listen, I think you're okay.»

«Thank you,» I said, happy to be vetted, thinking it must have been the Wunder Lashes.

«So this is what I'm going to do,» Alan said, still whispering. «I'm going to let you unbutton Eartha.»

It took me a moment to understand what he meant, but when I did, it had the same effect as if I'd just been offered the opportunity to personally rip a virgin's heart out on an altar. «Thank you,» I said, so flattered and, frightened I wanted to die, «thanks a lot.»

When Eartha floated into the room, I noticed with a start that her makeup looked like a mask, as if, now that she was offstage, she wasn't quite wearing it anymore. It seemed to hover slightly above the surface, but maybe this was because she wore absolutely no expression whatsoever. Alan whispered in her ear, and she turned in the doorway, arms held slightly out, and presented her back. Alan waved me in. I stepped up, and saw that there were in fact a million little silk-covered buttons running from her neck to the small of her back. The office of unbuttoner was dignitary, but not symbolic. She couldn't have done it herself. I unlooped button after button, slowly exposing her taut spine, the heat of her skin collecting heavy in my fingers. It was a weird, erotic, and historic performance. When I finished, she sailed away without turning.
Moments later she reappeared in a bright caftan, her face again animated. She curled up among the cushions on the couch while the poodles jumped nervously around her periphery.

She laughed at me right away. Thirty-dollar lashes? Perish the thought! «I don't believe in paying a lot of money for eyelashes!» she declared, amused at my folly. «I think it's terribly funny, that we're conned into all this nonsense. And mink eyelashe! Who the hell is going to know they're mink?»

«Is there such a thing as mink lashes?» I asked; and she laughed. «Sure!»

I asked what kind she wore, and she walked me over to the kitchenette, where she kept her lashes in their pink plastic box,
right next to her rice cooker. They were the same old Ardell lashes you get at Woolworth's, and I noted down the model number: 747 Longs.

It was after midnight, and Eartha was tired. She was in the habit of getting up every morning at six-thirty and jogging through Burton Chase Park with weights on her ankles. We chatted for a moment or two about exercise, and health, and the rice cooker, and she confessed that her favorite thing in the world was a garlic sandwich. A garlic sandwich! After the unbuttoning, I felt twice blessed.

As I stood dreamily to leave, Alan took me aside again. «You know,» he said, «if you're interested in eyelashes, I also represent Carol Channing and Anita O'Day. Anita just had pennanent eyeliner tattooed on. She's in Palm Springs right now, recovering. «

Anita O'Day. I sighed at the thought of meeting such a demented angel as she. After a lifetime of sex, drugs, and jazz, she's
finally gotten tired of putting on her eyeliner every day. And Carol Channing? Alan told me her natural lashes all fell
out long ago, she had abused them so. Now she always wore false ones.

I adore the ever-so-wanton diligence of these women, the dignity with which they turn their formidable countenances on the
world, lips and lashes heavy with war paint. It frightens some people, the sarcophageal style of the old legends. No fresh-faced starlet on her way up is ever going to be as beautiful as an eight hundred-year-old Anita O'Day, her freshly inked eyes all greasy with Bacitracin and shaded against the brutal Palm Springs glare. It's her luminous voice that sings, «Leave your worries on the doorstep, just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.» The way she sings it, the song isn't coy or cloying, it's a sweetly manic jag, a bright spring day that's ever so slightly narcotic.

Makes a girl want to be evil.

© 1997 by Hillary Johnson