Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (6 page)

It was inconceivable to me that Mrs. McCann could find this stuff interesting or glamorous. Statistics about grain silos and wheat fields would never have held the attention of anyone in my house. The gin-fueled, witty repartee which sizzled and crackled between my parents and their friends was infinitely more titillating and engaging.

And getting more so.

Not only did we have free gin but we now had free wine, gallons and gallons of it.

It all started after we took a mind-expanding trip of our own. It wasn’t very far, and it didn’t take very long, but when we returned we were changed forever.

*  *  *

One day in the early 1960s, Betty; Terry; my sister, Shelagh; and I took the train up to London and visited the Ideal Home Exhibition.

This sounds like it might have been a gigantic yawn, but nothing could be further from the truth. Here, in booth after booth, we deprived postwar Brits encountered something beyond our wildest dreams. Talk about life-enhancing! There were free beverages! Free hors d’oeuvres! Chips and dips! Crackers and nibbly bits! Cheeses of the world, and bizarre things like anchovies, all proffered by attractive, enthusiastic young men in tight trousers.

I was experiencing, at no charge, my very first stand-up finger buffet!

The scene, however, lacked the gentility normally associated with such events. Unself-consciously and ungratefully, we plebs crammed handful after handful of exotic morsels
into our mouths without any regard for the provenance thereof. It was more like feeding time at London Zoo.

Eventually we reached satiation point. Stuffed to the gills, we staggered off in the direction of the kitchen appliances, little knowing that our lives were about to change forever.

Nestling in between the chip fryers, cheese cutters, and ice cream makers, we discovered a whole booth dedicated to amateur winemaking. For some reason my parents seemed a lot more interested in this than in the pasta makers or the Chinese noodle-frying kits, or even the free snacks!

Before you could say “cirrhosis of the liver,” my dad was forking over some cash.

Within days of returning home, Terry Rothschild Lafite Doonan had gone into production.

It’s no exaggeration to say that my parents went completely berserk. They filled every single inch of our house with vats and vats of gurgling, fermenting wine, jugs and buckets and flagons of it. Every time you opened a cupboard, you were confronted by some aspect of the winemaking process. The stench of yeasty fermentation, along with the sound of drunken laughter, is among the most the abiding memories of my childhood.

Occasionally there were leaks and disasters. A vat of homemade black currant vin rouge exploded in the attic right next to blind Aunt Phyllis’s room. As it drip, drip, dripped onto Betty through the ceiling of her all-white bedroom, it gave her the distinct impression that Aunt Phyllis had been murdered in the windowless garret in which she slept.

Nobody balked at the mess or inconvenience. Château
Doonan was so fruity and sweet that everyone, all the assorted lodgers and relatives, knocked it back with ever-increasing enthusiasm. We entered an era of bacchanalian largesse during which, between Uncle Peter’s gin sample room and Terry’s ad hoc winery, no Doonan ever darkened the door of the local liquor store again. It wasn’t a hobby, it was a lifestyle, an utterly intoxicating lifestyle.

My dad was beside himself, especially when he found out that you could make wine from just about anything.

“It makes you wonder why they bugger about with grapes in France when you can make a delicious wine from potato peelings,” he guffawed as he secreted yet more bottles of tea-leaf and parsnip wine in the crawl space under the living room floor.

It was not long before Terry figured out that he could magically increase the intoxication level simply by adding more sugar at the right juncture. As a result, Château Doonan became more of a rich, fruity sherry than a wine.

Terry made gallons and gallons and gallons of it, which meant we could then drink gallons and gallons and gallons of it. Which is what we did. By the time I hit my teens, I was sloshing a dollop of Château Doonan in my Ribena, and learning to love the warm, comforting glow which ensued.

Terry’s vin extraordinaire and Uncle Peter’s gin played a very important role in the day-to-day functioning of our family. Simply put, alcohol took the edge off. Alcohol was the low-cost prescription which enabled Betty and Terry to deal with the strains and unpredictability of life with batty Uncle Ken, not to mention the crazed and belligerent Narg.

“Narg put her bloomers in the oven and set them on fire!”

Slosh, gurgle, swallow. “No problem!”

“Uncle Ken rode his bicycle into the canal!”

“Bottoms up! Is he okay?”

“Narg hurled insults at the ladies from the Women’s Institute!”

“Mmmm! Try this! What did she actually say?”

This is not a new concept. Lunatics have always driven their caretakers to drink. Grace Poole, nurse to the mad 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 pet
pig. 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 part of this process. Becoming a blonde was also highly therapeutic. It provided Betty with a continuous outlet for her Irish Protestant temper. The quest for the perfect shade of blond gave focus to her combative streak. She was a highly visual broad with a naturally sophisticated color sense who was utterly obsessed with the tone of her hair. She had to have the perfect shade of blond. This became her Holy Grail.

Her quest took her to see a woman called Madge, whose
eponymous hair salon served our neighborhood. I remember Madge, the salon and the person herself, as if it were yesterday. This cramped, steamy hothouse of femininity reeked of perfume and something called hair lacquer. Before hair spray in aerosol cans, there was hair lacquer, a nasty brown liquid which came in medicinal-looking, opaque plastic, squeezable bottles.

I logged in many hours at Maison Madge listening to the wheeze of the lacquer bottles and inhaling the chemical, toffeelike smell of their contents. Betty’s hair needed lots of extra lacquer. It had to withstand the rush of wind which jiggled it when she rode home from Madge on the back of Terry’s motor scooter.

Madge was a woman with a mission. Her concept was to bleach every client’s hair ice blond and then, on successive weeks, coerce her into trying a novelty color tint. Madge’s employees, who had names like Queenie and Sylvia, all had the same ice-blond hair. Every week they would try a new pastel color tint. Queenie would be pink one week and violet the next. Sylvia even went pale green.

Betty had nothing but contempt for this kind of pointless experimentation. “I don’t want to look like a tart!” she would say, fending off Madge and her horrid tints, and unintentionally insulting Queenie and Sylvia.

All Betty wanted was the perfect shade of Grace Kelly blond. Was that too much to ask?

Time and time again I would hear her complaining to the lodgers that Madge had “bollixed” up her hair yet again. Yet again it had “come out brassy.”

Brassy blond is too warm in tone. It has too much orange. It looks like dark brown hair which has been dyed blond, which was what Betty’s was. Betty wanted people to believe she was a blonde.

Her quest continued into the 1960s. By now her vintage hairstyle was starting to have curiosity value. My friends at school commented on it, and on her overpainted Joan Crawford lip line.

Madge canvassed Betty to adopt a more current style. Her hair was now officially two decades out of date. Under pressure from Madge and Queenie et al., Betty capitulated, but with a caveat: she would change her hair but it must remain up. She would never go down.

Accordingly, Madge scraped her hair back into a cluster of large tunnel curls, which sat on her head in the yarmulke region. This look was augmented with dangly earrings and false eyelashes. One wet Saturday afternoon, Betty strode into the house, yanked off her plastic rain hood, and unveiled her new look. Silence. We were not sure what to say. Betty now looked horribly cheap. Though she was always painted and dressed, Betty was never cheap-looking. Until now. This new tarty, hard-faced, crowlike, unfamiliar Betty got the thumbs-down chez nous, even from blind Aunt Phyllis. Betty stuck her head under the kitchen faucet and demolished Madge’s handiwork. After pouring herself a comforting glass of elderberry-potato wine (Terry was experimenting with improbable ingredient combos), she began the painstaking task of reconstructing her signature hairdo.

Betty had had it with Madge and her crazy ideas. From
now on she did the whole job herself. She purchased all the necessary paraphernalia, including professional scissors and two evil-looking two-inch metal clips. These were worn above the ear whenever she was not in public and guaranteed that the hair at the temple was going in the correct, i.e., upward, direction. We referred to these as her “electrodes,” as in “Hey, Mum, you forgot your 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.

*  *  *

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.