Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty Page 6

  According to my friend Leona Cramer, if you dared to wear a Wonderbra you not only became a girl who has intercourse with boys, gets pregnant, and has a baby, but you also became a liar for life. As much as I told myself I was not the kind of girl who would ever buy a padded bra, I did. Just once. I did. I snuck over to Penney’s department store, where I purchased the oh-so-evil Wonderbra and wore it to school the next day. At lunch, my longtime crush Dave Garland poked his finger into the left 32B cup, where it stuck like glue to my flat chest. Mortified, I ran home, promising myself I would never lie again.

  Meanwhile, in Victoria’s Secret I was surrounded by a lot of happy women enjoying the fun of being sexy. The experience was downright wholesome. I was beginning to feel like Victoria had invited me to her colorful, lighthearted home. After a while, Jane breezed down the hallway and knocked on Dexter’s dressing room door. Dex peeked out and showed Jane how she looked in the 34C bra. Jane took a long, hard look at Dexter’s breasts and nodded yes to the 34C. Perfect. The next step? Bra style. Dex lined up three favorites. Pink’s Heartbreaker Push-Up Plunge Bra. Pink’s Wear Everywhere Lightly Lined Bra. And her favorite, Pink’s Campus Push-Up Bra. Thrilled though she was, Jane also suggested that Dexter might include Pink’s Yoga Push-Up Bra with Mesh, a more natural everyday, after-swimming sports bra. Dexter nodded her head.

  Victoria’s marketing genius was simple: she gave women the right to choose their own underwear. No more waiting for husbands and lovers to buy that Valentine’s Day black lace garter belt or a see-through push-up bra with little holes for the nipples from Frederick’s of Hollywood. Those days are over. Women can choose their own “sexy lady” underwear. Dexter placed the gift card on the checkout counter. She put down her four Pink bras, three Pink Cheekster panties, three Pink thongs, and three Pink Cheekini boy shorts. She was a happy, newly fledged moderate shopper. I was excited for Dexter, and grateful to Victoria for letting a girl be a girl—but mainly for giving sex a lighter spin. Nevertheless, the world in Pink was beginning to wear thin. I was ready to go home to Black and White and Gray all over. I wanted to be light on my feet, like Cary Grant. I wanted to put on a smoky gray dress suit with suspenders. I wanted to be an international stilt walker, with an ironic smile and a dimpled chin.

  If, like Dexter’s, your body is voluptuous; if it curves in wondrous ways; if you have broad shoulders and a broad back; if you have killer hips and a round bottom that’s hard as a rock; if you’re all woman and you love your body like Dexter does hers, Victoria’s Secret is a safe funhouse haven. But if your favorite word when you were little was “tomboy” and if you ran to the arroyo to climb trees and pretend you were Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier, in a coonskin cap, then where the hell do you shop when you’re a grown-up looking for a little fun with the menswear look? Where’s the equivalent of Victoria’s Secret, complete with merchandise like “Life of the Party” boxer shorts written on a different kind of crotch? Where’s the shop for those of us who want to play around with part-time gender bending?

  All in all, just about every female celebrity has dabbled in men’s clothes, even if only for a photo shoot. Think Marlene Dietrich cross-dressing in a man’s tux. Think Amelia Earhart in pullover sweaters and khakis. Think Ellen DeGeneres in a vest with a casual white shirt underneath and a pair of Paige jeans and white tennis shoes. Come on, where’s that store? And what’s it called? How about “Ellen’s Crossing”? I’d shop there. Who wouldn’t? I promise you it’d be just as mind-expanding and fun as Victoria’s Secret, even for the accessories alone—the hats, the fingerless gloves, the turtlenecks, the socks, the shoes, the scarves. Come on, Ellen loves a scarf now and then. Why doesn’t every city have an “Ellen’s Crossing” with its own delicious secret? Victoria had one.

  I always thought feminine meant delicate, frightened, and helpless. Because of Cary Grant’s allure, and the thought of dancing through life in black and white, I’ve always been drawn to men’s clothes. Now that I’m sixty-seven, I’m aware that fear is not gender-based. You could call a good two-thirds of my wardrobe an impenetrable fortress. By this I mean the hats that hide the head, the gloves that hide the fingers, the long-sleeved turtlenecks that hide both the arms and the neck, the leggings that hide the legs, and the boots that hide the feet.

  Let’s take the turtleneck. Turtlenecks are particularly underrated. Buy one. I dare you. Give one a try. Turtlenecks cushion, shield, and insulate a person from harm. Never let a turtleneck’s collar sag. Get smart and sew stays at both side seams. It will keep your turtleneck gravity-free. Make sure the fabric isn’t too bulky, unless you want a linebacker’s neck. If you take my advice, trust me, your head will be framed to perfection. Buy one. Be brave. If it turns out that you begin to wear turtlenecks as often as I do, and you’re my age, and you’re not Cary Grant, you will run the risk of receiving a fair amount of criticism. Even though turtlenecks worked well for my costumes in Something’s Gotta Give, there was an implied criticism when Harry Sanborn, played by Jack Nicholson, says, “I just have one question: What’s with the turtlenecks? I mean, it’s the middle of summer.” Erica, played by me, replies, “Well, I guess I’m just a turtleneck kind of gal.” Harry: “You never get hot?” Erica: “No.” Harry: “Never?” Erica: “Not lately.” And it’s true, I never get hot.

  At this point, no one criticizes Dexter’s choice of Pink underwear. She’s not a Victoria’s Secret model. She isn’t wearing her “Let’s Party” Pink boy shorts on display. Online recently, I saw a paparazzi picture of myself under the headline “Diane Keaton and Her Daughter.” We were on the streets of Beverly Hills. It was a study in contrasts. She had on a pair of Old Navy USC red Trojan shorts, flip-flops, and a pale blue H&M sweatshirt with iPod wires sticking out of her ears. True to form, I was duded out in black leather platform boots, gray-and-black plaid ski pants, a black Uniqlo Jil Sander coat with a four-inch-wide belt cinched in at my waist, a white shirt, polka-dot gloves, and the ever present wide-brimmed hat. It was seventy-eight degrees outside. I did not look like Cary Grant, and Dexter did not look like Stephanie Seymour. We looked like the yin and yang of life, Frick and Frack, the Odd Couple. No one would assume we were mother and daughter. Not only was the age difference working against us, but so was the choice of how we present ourselves to the world. That was the truth as documented in a paparazzi photograph posted online. Underneath the photograph was this comment: “Actress Diane Keaton stepped out wearing yet another one of her Annie Hall–inspired ensembles to go Christmas shopping in Beverly Hills. However as the 65-year-old confidently strutted ahead, her young daughter Dexter trailed behind, possibly in embarrassment.” What the photographer did not capture, and what the commenter missed, was this: under Dexter’s casual running shorts and hooded sweatshirt was the exuberant world of a private imagination at play.

  As for shopping? Think Big. Think Small. Think Different. Beauty Outside. Beast Inside. American by Birth. Rebel by Choice. Make the Most of Now. Because You’re Worth It. When the World Zigs, Zag. Decry Complacency. Think Outside the Bun. Have It Your Way. Just Do It. If You’ve Got It, Flaunt It. Does She Or Doesn’t She? The United Colors of Benetton. We’re not liberal America or conservative America—we’re part of the United States of America. You’re you. I’m me. And Dexter’s Dexter. It’s just as okay to be the old flamboyant as it is to be the young casual. It’s great to be the mind behind J. Crew and Ralph Lauren, and Quiksilver, and H&M. It’s fantastic to have an imagination stimulated by diversity. It’s a world of style influenced by Coco Chanel and Miuccia Prada and Paul Harnden, too. It’s Rihanna and Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj. It was thrift-store Barbra Streisand in the 1970s and Madonna’s street-smart layered look of the ’80s. It was Romeo Gigli in the ’90s. Now it’s Paul Smith’s classic schoolgirl look and Thom Browne’s Mad Men suits. It’s Anna Wintour’s hatred of Black teamed up with Grace Coddington’s love of Orange. It’s the Row, by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. It’s Louis Vuitton designed by Marc Jacobs. For me? It’
s Cary Grant and Dexter Keaton. It’s women in men’s clothes made for women. It’s Bill Cunningham on his bicycle shooting the fashion trends of men and women on the streets of New York City. It’s Victoria’s Secret and Ellen’s Crossing. It’s potential for change, and it’s change itself. It’s turtlenecks and ties, and bikinis and bras.

  This morning the ocean was beautiful. But what does that even mean? Cloudy with pockets of blue? Hazy gray, hardly a blue kind of blue? Blue peppered with pale pink? Suddenly those hazy gray clouds parted and from the bluff I could see two ships spotlit by the sun. Was that beauty?

  That’s what I was thinking when it dawned on me my sister Robin still hadn’t called me back. She’d been crying about her dog Dash’s penchant for attacking her next-door neighbor’s awful Chihuahua, Joanie, when Dylan, her four-year-old grandson, started screaming. She said she’d call me right back and hung up. But she hadn’t. So, was the ocean beautiful this morning? Or was it background music for my agitation? Mom had loved describing flawless beauty, especially in her journals. She never dirtied it up with doubts. But beauty isn’t perfect. And neither is Robin, who still hasn’t called me back. What the hell is beauty?

  I was a stubborn girl. I remember cutting a deal with Mom, saying I’d learn to read but only if the books were illustrated with pictures. Wasn’t it Alice in Wonderland who peeked into the pictureless book her sister was reading and said to herself, “What is the use of a book without pictures?” In the Dick and Jane series, co-authors William S. Gray and, Zerna Sharp wrote, “Oh, see. Oh, see Jane. Funny, funny Jane.” I saw Jane because she was illustrated. Years later, I saw Keith Carter’s portrait of a black dog because Keith Carter took the photograph. Reading is seeing, too. But it requires more thought. Is thought beautiful? Some thoughts are. So what is beauty? For me, it’s a collection of images, and objects, and thoughts, and feelings I’ve gathered over the course of my life. Dad would have numbered beauty. Mom wrote it down. Dexter listens to it. Duke wants to own it, all of it, in every shape and form. Sometimes beauty, like today, is a closed book I can’t open. Sometimes it’s hanging in my closet. Like my dad’s old sweater. Sometimes it’s a message saved on my voice mail.… But one thing for sure: all of it is personal.

  LOST DOG BY KEITH CARTER

  Several years ago my old dog Josie had lost her appetite. At the vet’s, Dr. Kalin drew blood, took X-rays, and listened to her heartbeat. A week later, the call came. Josie’s liver count was high. Cushing’s disease was mentioned. Even though Jaws—that’s what I called her after she bit the mailman—was a nasty shepherd mix, I loved her. Fifteen years after she passed, I saw her essence in Keith Carter’s portrait called Lost Dog. His dog is black, and maybe not so old, but in that face, with its predominant nose much too close to the camera lens; in his blurry, soulful gaze; in his loyalty, his sweet trust, I saw Josie. I saw our twelve years together. I saw my dread of losing her. I saw that her loss has been a sadness I will carry with me all the days of my life.

  Josie, my Jaws, had been reawakened in a photograph taken by a man I didn’t know. The subject was a dog I’d never seen. Keith Carter wrote this: “For me, a portrait is something that has a certain weight, a certain seriousness to it.… These days, I treat everything as a portrait, whether it’s a safety pin hanging from a string in a woman’s bedroom, or a man witching for water in a field. They’re the same. They are all equal, I try to give them the same weight.”

  WENDY, THE MADAME ALEXANDER DOLL

  One day Mom drove me to my friend Mary Lou’s house. It was on the other side of the 110 freeway. That meant one thing: her house would be shabby and small. When our station wagon pulled up I saw I wasn’t wrong, and the inside was no better. Off the narrow hallway were four doors. Behind door number 3 was Mary Lou’s bedroom. When she opened it, I was struck dumb. There on a bookshelf as big as the wall stood a museum-sized collection of Madame Alexander dolls. Nine-year-old-me wasn’t prepared for a feeling I’d never had before. I’ll say this: it wasn’t good. Why did Mary Lou’s parents, who lived on the other side of the 110, have enough money to buy her hundreds of the most collectible doll ever? Why hadn’t Mom and Dad given me the Scarlett O’Hara doll for Christmas, or at least one of the famous Dionne quintuplet baby dolls from 1936, and the Queen Elizabeth the Second doll, too? But the worst possible shock, the one I wasn’t able to handle with even a modicum of grace, was Mary Lou’s brand-new eight-inch Wendy, the bridesmaid doll, in a pink ruffled gown, with a perfect straw hat balanced on top of her curly blond hair.

  One week later, I was called into my parents’ bedroom. Mary Lou’s mother, Nancy, had phoned our house on the party line, wanting to know if I’d unintentionally taken the Madame Alexander Wendy doll. That’s when I understood that beauty could be evil. It could make a perfectly good girl like me turn into the devil. So, what is beauty? When I was nine, it belonged to someone else, and I made it MINE, consequences or not.

  THE LEGACY OF BILL WOODS, JR.; OR, THE FAMILY OF MAN

  Bill Woods, Jr., was a professional photographer who documented life in Fort Worth for several decades after World War II. His studio on Hawkins Street was a hub of activity. He drove a yellow VW Bug. He wore bow ties. He took a picture of an adolescent girl in a bathing suit with a football-sized tumor protruding from her thigh. He took a picture of Eleanor Roosevelt shaking hands with a man in front of a curtain. He took a picture of a man holding a rifle standing next to a dead bear hanging by its feet. He took a picture of two nuns seated in a bare room with a small TV in the corner and a black man in a janitor’s uniform cleaning a white porcelain bowl. I bought every one of the twenty thousand photographs Bill Woods, Jr., took with his large-format camera.

  Bill Woods’s photographs were commissioned by a variety of local patrons, who posed in front of a series of backdrops culled from real life. But reality vanished with the click of Mr. Woods’s camera. Diane Arbus said, “For me the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.” That was the result, if not the intention, of Bill Woods’s life work. His subjects were, as Diane Arbus said, more complicated than the story each photograph was trying to tell.

  Bill Woods was no Diane Arbus. Bill Woods got the job done. He recorded life in Fort Worth. He gave his clients validation, just not the way they expected. Bill Woods’s work is a reminder that none of us are that much different from the folks of Fort Worth. We all long to feel confident, look great, and do well. We all want to be remembered. Sometimes we’re lost. Sometimes we’re found. But one thing’s for sure: no matter how much control we have over our appearance, we’re all awkward, laughable, ugly, and beautiful at the same time. The only difference between Bill Woods’s patrons and me is this: my life has been documented by more than one photographer. Like others, to the best of my ability I’ve tried to create a Diane Keaton I want the future to see.

  A SNAPSHOT OF DOROTHY HALL LAUGHING

  I woke up in the middle of the night five hours after my mother’s body, draped in a purple cloth, had been wheeled out of the kitchen on a gurney. I woke up knowing there would never be another person to replace her. I would have to rely on myself. I knew that the days of little high-foreheaded Di-annie Oh Hall-ie had been wheeled away with Dorothy.

  Life keeps moving forward, as if following a predictable time line. I was a girl, I grew up, I became an adult, I reached middle age, I worked hard to accomplish my goals, I got old, I watched people die, and I said my goodbyes, including farewells to a couple of sparrows who flew into my plate-glass window unaware. I’ve had a life, and soon it will be reasonable to expect me to let it go with grace. But that’s not the way it works for some of us.

  Like the sparrows, I’ve flown into some serious plate-glass windows, but I survived. On the way, I’ve learned a few things. Namely this: beauty’s a bouquet gathered in loss. The sad part about my bouquet is that it keeps growing. Now that Mother is gone, darkness is spreading across my fading petals. Light is beautiful, but darkness is
eternal.

  I live with the beauty of regret, and the memory of love. I feel it when I feed cheddar cheese to Dexter’s rats, Ludicrous and Nala. I watch them hold the orange strips in their almost human hands as they trim the cheese with delicate precision. I see Mother’s hands. I see her fingers throwing bread crumbs to the pelicans on the seawall. I believed in Mother’s permanence. I believed in the radiance of her face in the photograph Dad took of her with her head thrown back in laughter. When I try to make her photograph laugh in three dimensions, I feel the sorrow of beauty lost.

  BERENICE ABBOTT’S PARABOLIC MIRROR,

  THE MIRROR WITH A THOUSAND EYES

  There’s “a bird’s-eye view,” “a gleam in the eye,” and “a roving eye.” There’s “a sight for sore eyes” and “a worm’s-eye view,” too. Don’t forget “all eyes are on you”—that’s a favorite. Or “an eye for an eye” or “don’t bat an eye” or, especially, “be in the eye of the storm.” I love “bedroom eyes” and “I can’t take my eyes off of you,” but I don’t want “a black eye.” I’d give anything to be “eye candy” and “more than meets the eye.” There’s always the old standby “Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes.” As far as I’m concerned, I don’t want to take the “red-eye,” even if “we’re seeing eye to eye.” If you want to, try to get some “shut-eye,” then don’t let the “stars get in your eyes,” because you’re the “apple of my eye.” And never “turn a blind eye,” “without batting an eye,” especially with “your eyes wide open.” In the end, “there wasn’t a dry eye in the house,” because “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”