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

electrodes!” They became objects of amusement. Schizophrenic Uncle Ken, who lived on the second floor and was a frequent recipient of electric shock treatment, seemed unphased by this insensitivity. He chuckled along with the rest of us.
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    In the 1970s there was a massive 1940s retro explosion. Betty’s entire look, including platform shoes, came screaming back into fashion. She was frequently accosted by young girls asking her where she got her hair done. Betty was delirious. She contemplated opening her own salon and putting Madge out of business.
    Betty cut and styled her own hair for the rest of her life. There was a short break in the 1980s when she broke her shoulder and Terry took over. He did his best but was unable to get the requisite height. “It’s bad enough being in agony without having to look like a bloody washerwoman,” said Betty ungratefully.
    Finally, in her seventies Betty eschewed peroxide and allowed her hair to grow out. With her steely gray coiffure, she never looked better. Her entire look—maquillage, coiffure, unlifted face, and tailored wardrobe—came gorgeously together. And she knew how good she looked.
    It was around this time that Betty began to indulge in a bit of revisionist history. She started to deny ever having been a bottle blonde. At first she claimed that the bleach period had lasted only a few months. Before long she was denying ever having done it.
    I called her one day in the late nineties when she was going through chemotherapy. “A young lady from social services is coming round today with some wigs.” She cackled malevolently. Betty loved nothing more than to watch a do-gooder fall flat on her face.
    I wondered if Betty had made any attempt to forewarn the lady about her Byzantine hairdo. Since Betty’s hair was upswept, there would be no way to augment it unless with an expensive custom hairline wig. Pull-on wigs went down. Only hairline wigs went up.
    “Have you described your hair?” I asked tentatively.
    “No. I thought it would be fun to see what this trout comes up with,” replied my mum, who had no idea that referring to the other females as “trouts” might ever be considered offensive.
    The trout arrived, took one look at Betty’s thinning, complex coiffure, handed over a bag of cheap pull-on wigs, and fled. This wig bag provided Betty and Terry with endless amusement. They even staged a fashion shoot, using the horrid wigs, in the backyard of their bungalow and sent me the resulting pictures. Perched on a stool, the formerly glamorous Betty in her pull-on wig looks like a horrid little hobbit. She no longer makes a pleasing and glamorous impression. She voluntarily picked this moment, while staring her mortality in the face, to let down her guard and remind the world what afabulous job she had done of concealing her inner troll, and of enhancing our lives.
    Her impudent expression seems to say, “If I weren’t such a generous and glamorous person, I would have subjected you to this ! Instead I elected to transform myself, for which gargantuan lifelong effort you should be eternally grateful.”
    Betty saw her vanity as a component of good manners. It was life enhancement for everyone. No charge! According to her, we owed it to each other to make an effort. She did not engage in deranged attempts to turn back the clock. She did not waste money on pointless skin-care unguents or self-punitive procedures. For Betty, beauty was a positive thing, a life-affirming, creative force.
    When she was on her deathbed, yet another well-meaning, breezy trout materialized in the hospital room doorway and offered her assistance with what was left of her hair.
    By this time pain-racked Betty was venomous and irate. She insisted on smoking in her room and would berate me for trying to substitute low-tar ciggies for her usual brand. She would take one drag, remove the cigarette from her mouth, snap off the filter, and reinsert the offending item in her mouth