The Right Places (34 page)

Meanwhile, the National Club Association is busy. It has, after all, an industry involving hundreds of thousands of people, who do everything from manicure golf greens to manicure fingernails, to support. The NCA recently announced a new and successful club called the Mill River, in Upper Brookville, Long Island. Its charter stipulates a membership equally divided between Jews and gentiles, and is intended to reverse the trend of other Long Island clubs “to go one way or the other.”

In New York City, a new men's social club has been announced, to be called the New Yorker Club. It will be “private, distinguished, but unexclusive in the usual sense. It will be devoted to interracial friendship.” The New Yorker Club will restrict itself to one thousand members, the only qualification being that members either work or reside in the New York metropolitan area. Behind the club are Richard V. Clarke, a Negro who heads a minority-group consulting firm; Holmes Brown, chairman of the New York Board of Trade; Herbert J. Farber, a prominent public relations man; Senator Jacob K. Javits and Senator Charles E. Goodell; Charles Luce, chairman of Consolidated Edison; Arthur Goldberg, former delegate to the United Nations; Theodore W. Kheel, labor consultant; Orin Lehman, chairman of the New School for Social Research; and advertising man David Ogilvy. Initiation fees for corporate membership will be twenty-five hundred dollars and “must include either the chairman or president of a company.”

Perhaps the New Yorker Club is the private club of the future. One can only speculate, and agree that it is a new departure. Meanwhile,
for those who long for the days when the band, in raspberry tuxedos, played sweet songs on Saturday nights for sweet-smelling and compliant girls, perhaps you had better go back to Mr. O'Hara's novels.

In London, meanwhile, the great social clubs—White's, Boodle's, St. James's, the Saville—upon which American social clubs were originally modeled, are still flourishing. In fact, there are some who feel that socially it is more important today for a young London businessman to ally himself with the right club that it ever was before, that the helping hand and lift from obscurity are still provided by clubs on that side of the Atlantic. A recent item from
The Times
of London would seem to confirm this. The item reported that a certain London gentleman—not named in the story—had applied for membership in a certain club so often, and had been turned down with such gonglike regularity, that he had finally pleaded, “If you'll just let me join this club, I promise I'll never so much as set foot inside it.”

There are some tales that one longs to have be true, but that one suspects cannot really be. The above story is one of these. Can this actually have happened? Or was it a slow day at
The Times
reporter's desk and, for his own amusement, did he tap out this little vignette for his newspaper—just to see if it would get past the copy editor's desk, perhaps? It seems like something very close to sacrilege to doubt the authenticity of a news item from, of all places,
The Times
of London. But do
you
really believe that story?
Do
you?

Courtesy of the Erno Laszlo Institute

An Erno Laszlo “symposium,” Dallas

18

Where to Get Young and Beautiful

There is hardly any point in having money—old money or new—if you can't use it to look your best, is there? While country clubs and city clubs may be languishing, health and beauty spas are flourishing all over the world, and with but one design in mind—to help the rich stay young and pretty.

Staying young, to begin with, takes time, and time, to use a more than familiar phrase, is money. If you have money, you can buy time—other people's time. A person who has servants to help around the house can find time for a little nap in the afternoon, little naps that keep you looking youthful and rested. With servants to do her household chores, a woman can spend time before her mirror with creams and masks and jellies, tweezers, brushes, teasing combs, and eyelash curlers. She can take the time to study her face, to experiment with different kinds of cosmetics, to find which shapes and shades flatter her best and make her appear younger. She has time, in other words, to
think
beautiful.

Or she can take the time to turn herself over to others—to the masseuse who, for fifteen dollars and up an hour, will tug and twist and push and pound her body into shape as many times a week as a client wishes; to an exercise instructor, like those at Kounovsky's in New York (where Mrs. Onassis goes and where Mme. Louis Arpels wears diamonds with her leotard), where the calisthenics a woman needs to keep her firm and fit are made a gay social occasion, and not
the chore and bore they are when done, alone, on the bedroom floor at home; to a salon, such as Elizabeth Arden's, where a whole “Day of Beauty” (costing a hundred dollars and up, depending on how far you want the Arden people to go) will tackle the entire woman, from hairstyle to pedicure. With time, a woman (and a man, too, of course) can take up all the sporty, outdoorsy things—golf, tennis, swimming, riding—that are so good for one. With time, a woman can take a week—or two, or three—at a place like the Greenhouse in Texas, where, for about one thousand dollars a week plus tips, a woman can go through a programmed ritual of health and beauty, involving diet, exercise, massage, skin treatments, hair treatments, makeup lessons, manicures, pedicures, fashion lectures, and, for good measure, a little culture (travelogues). With time, which is money, the list of things available to help you look younger is almost endless.

“To me, it is a crime—a
crime
,” cries Jolie Gabor, “for a woman not to look her most beautiful, her most glamorous for her husband or her lover. When he comes home at night, she should be freshly bathed, in her most exquisite perfume, in her most beautiful dress, her loveliest makeup, every hair in its place!” Well, yes, but the servantless woman, whose day has been spent with housework and laundry and small children, and who is exhausted by the time she has the roast in the oven, must certainly be forgiven for collapsing on the sofa in her blue jeans rather than stepping into a perfumed tub.

“Household help is absolutely the one essential thing,” says a New York housewife who happens to be without it at the moment. “If you have help,
everything
about staying young and looking good becomes much, much easier. Even dieting is easier. I mean, I
know
it's easier for Jackie Onassis to keep her figure than it is for me. If she steps on the scales and sees she's gained a pound, she simply tells her cook, ‘All I want for dinner tonight is a cup of yoghurt and some fresh strawberries'—and it's
done!
She doesn't have to fix the kids' dinner, so she couldn't possibly—
ever
—catch herself licking the spoon from the mashed potatoes. And if John-John brings home an uneaten half of a peanut-butter sandwich in his lunch box, it isn't
Jackie
who finds it there and eats it.”

The older one gets, the more it costs—in time and money—to stay young. This is a sort of natural law—that the richest are able to stay
looking youngest longest. There is, for example, the matter of cosmetic surgery, which most doctors now view more favorably (or at least with less disfavor) than they did in the past, on the basis that anything that improves a patient's appearance will improve his outlook and thus make him feel better. On the other hand, plastic surgery is costly; fifteen hundred dollars is an average cost of a face-lift, and it is not covered by Blue Cross; and since any surgery is a shock to the system, recovery takes time and involves some discomfort.

The number of cosmetic operations performed in America has escalated enormously—some say by as much as five hundred per cent in the past ten years. At the same time, surgeons who specialize in this work have become much more skillful, sophisticated, and ingenious. The face-lift is now the most commonplace of these operations, and one woman who had checked into a Connecticut hospital for the removal of some varicose veins decided to have the doctor lift her face as well, “just for the fun of it.” Men, in the meantime, have also been getting facelifts in hugely increasing numbers, but not for fun at all. They have found that the lack of puffy eyes and jowly chins has become a definite business asset and—for that purpose—can become tax-deductible.

Today, there is virtually no part of the body that cannot be put into trimmer, more youthful shape by the removal or addition of snips and pieces here and there. Women who have weight problems, impatient with diets, now frequently order themselves instantly slimmed, through surgery. According to one doctor, whom his colleagues consider “particularly clever,” if a woman is “too chesty, too busty, I give her my little pinch pleats.”

While all this has been going on, it is inevitable that some of the business of keeping wealthy people young has slipped into the hands of those who—though not certifiable quacks—possess qualifications somewhat more tenuous. After all, the business of keeping wealthy people young has become big business, and everybody wants a bit of the action. The relatively new (in the United States, that is) technique of facial peeling is still the subject of much controversy, and a number of practitioners have found themselves in serious difficulties with the courts and have even gone to jail. The process, by which the outer layer of skin—along with the accompanying wrinkles—is
peeled away through the application of chemicals, must, to be legal, be performed by a licensed M.D. It is reasonably uncomfortable, and for a time after the operation, peeled people do not look very presentable and are well advised not to appear in public. But this does not mean that peeling cannot be fun. Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton Davies May, an elderly beauty, makes a game of it. Every year or so, she invites her doctor and three close friends to her Palm Beach house and all four ladies have themselves peeled. In the sequestered days that follow, they are a congenial foursome for bridge.

In Los Angeles, the presiding lady genius of skin-peeling is Venner Kelsen, who says that she has the title of “doctor,” but prefers, for reasons of her own, not to use it. Her treatment, which takes three reasonably lengthy appointments, followed by a two-week recuperative period, costs from seven hundred and fifty to fifteen hundred dollars.

Venner Kelsen can, she boasts, make a forty-five-year-old face look thirty, and most clients find that their Kelsen peelings last at least five years. At this point, according to her, nearly every major film star in Hollywood—men as well as women—past the age of forty has passed through her doors. In the cases of older clients—she has worked on women of seventy-five—Miss Kelsen works cooperatively with such celebrated California plastic surgeons as Dr. Michael Gurdin. “He handles the structural problems; then I go to work on the skin,” says Miss Kelsen.

Meanwhile, a more superficial sort of peeling can be done by licensed operators in beauty salons. This process is less painful (“The face experiences only a warm glow,” says one operator), can be done in a day, and the recipient is ready to be viewed and admired immediately afterward. It also costs less (a hundred and fifty dollars) and doesn't last as long—about a month. The process is also called “lysing”—lysis, according to Webster, is “a process of disintegration or dissolution (as of bacteria or blood cells)”—and the instruction booklet for one of these cell-disintegrating compounds is delightfully vague on the subject of just what the sticky—it looks like Elmer's glue—and rather unpleasant-smelling material consists of. It is, says the booklet, a “biological construction of the preparation with the characteristic combination of the various kinds of silicic acid and traces of
elements, calcium and so on.” The booklet was printed in Vienna, which may be why it seems so uninformative.

It also says “A lysing … should be made before starting a cosmetic treatment, or if the skin is plain, too oily, too dry, too smooth or too coarse. [This just about includes everybody, doesn't it?] If the skin has no more the power to eliminate the cells of the epidermis, when they are only loosened at its borders but still fasten [sic] and when looked at with a magnifying glass appear like little horn-leaves [whatever those are] covering chinks and pores, when the skin—examined through the skin microscope—looks cracked, when the pores are obstructed by dust or fat particles—then the receptibility of the skin for nutritive preparations is reduced and the best products applied on the skin remain uneffective.… A treatment … should be made either before each cosmetic skin-treatment or at least each second one.… [This product] is after all the best preparation to normalize the skin and blemiches [sic] will pass completely.”

Well, there has always been a certain amount of fantasy and hocus-pocus surrounding every aspect of the beauty world, and anyway, women—and men, too—are coming in for lysing treatments in droves.