Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints by Simon Doonan Read Free Book Online

Mrs. Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, springs easily to mind: “an able woman in her line, and very trustworthy, but for one fault—a fault common to a deal of them nurses and matrons— she kept a private bottle of gin by her, and now and then took a drop over much.”
    We had two Mrs. Rochesters, so we needed twice as much booze.
    My mother, I hasten to add, was not a sloppy drunk like Grace Poole. Au contraire! Betty Doonan could “hold” her liquor. Though she drank every day for years, I have never once seen her plastered. Holding one’s liquor was a highly prized ability and seemed, in Terry and Betty’s milieu, to correlate with strength of character. People who could not hold their liquor were spineless toerags, while people who could hold it were thought to be much more important and valuable to society.
    The accolades heaped upon Betty for her drinking abilities were nothing compared to those she received for her hair.
    As I reflect upon the complexities and contradictions of Betty’s life, and of the twentieth-century in general, I realize that they both found full expression in that incredible hairdo.
    Betty was always a rule breaker. As a child, she kept a petpig. When the circus came to town, she played hooky from school in order to carry buckets of water to the zebras. She befriended the clowns, who cheered loudly as she tore round the sawdust-filled ring on her tricycle.
    In her twenties, rebellious Betty flew the coop, joined the Royal Air Force, and changed the direction of her hair. Gone was the dowdy, chin-length bob of her childhood. Instead, she adopted the complex upswept, bulbous hairstyle known as the Force’s Roll. This new hairdo had a transformative effect. She was no longer Martha, the small-town girl who left school at thirteen to churn butter and butcher pigs at the local grocery store. Martha had been replaced by Betty, the confident, sassy, lipstick-wearing broad with the Eve Arden wit.
    The new hairdo was infinitely more flattering and imposing than her previous 1930s bob. Formerly five feet, one inch, Betty now stood tall at five feet, seven inches, thanks to three inches of suede platform and a corresponding measurement of hair. The sculptural pompadour which now rose above her forehead not only added height but offset the impact of her large Roman nose. She now looked less like an American Indian and a lot more MGM. Like Bette Davis in Now, Voyager, Betty Gordon had traveled the road from troll to siren simply by reversing the direction of her coiffure. What had previously gone down now went up.
    Betty met Terry in a soup kitchen after the war. They married two months later at a registry office on a date which neither of them could ever remember, thereby relieving us forever of the obligation to do anything as bourgeois as celebrate their wedding anniversary.
    For the next fifty years Betty slept with Terry, and with a full head of hair rollers. The roller at the nape of her neck would frequently become dislodged during the night and work its way to the middle of her back. As a result Betty often dreamt that Zulus were chasing her and prodding her with their spears.
    Her morning toilette in front of the small gas fire in her bedroom always took at least an hour. While we unkempt slobs shoveled our breakfast alongside our lodgers and nutty relatives downstairs, Betty would be upstairs painting and primping and coiffing.
    Betty worked at it. She had no illusions. She knew she wasn’t Grace Kelly. Rather than long to be something she wasn’t, she took pride in her ability to improve on what God had given her. Her philosophy could be summed up as follows: “Even if you happen to be a North Irish peasant, you can still, with the right techniques, learn to make a pleasing and life-enhancing impression. It is your duty not to inflict your innate troll-like appearance upon the people around you and to do everything in your power to camouflage it.”
    Becoming a blonde was