In Our Prime (12 page)

Films reinforced expectations about
what styles, behaviors, and gestures were appropriate for a teenager or a middle-aged woman. In darkened movie houses, silent pictures communicated a screen character's personality and role through clothing and movements.

In such a visual culture, it was possible to create widely disseminated templates of beauty and style that people from San Francisco to Atlanta could view and imitate.
Gibson Girl drawings, created
by Charles Dana Gibson at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, may have provided the first common national image of feminine beauty in America. Unlike the more voluptuous female forms prevalent in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Gibson Girls had tiny, cinched waists and youthful features. In 1930, McClelland Barclay's mass-produced illustrations of young and athletic girls were adopted as an emblem of the Fisher Company brand, which produced automobile hulls. The Fisher Body Girl, modeled on the artist's 19-year-old bride, presented another idealized, youthful image to which women could aspire.

Greater numbers of advertisements carried the message that physical beauty, even more than chronology, was the definitive barometer of aging. “
When it came to age
, how old you look is more important than how old you actually are,” a 1923 ad for Boncilla face powder declared. “If you are fifty and your face is clean and fresh, and your facial contour firm and youthful—you are young. If you are twenty—and your skin is dull and lifeless, and the outline of your face is drooping—you are old.”

Awareness of one's own appearance grew with the invention of photography. Americans were so unaccustomed to regularly seeing themselves that when portrait photographs first became popular in the 1840s, subjects sometimes rejected the finished product, refusing to believe the image on paper was theirs.
On occasion, customers even
picked up the wrong photograph, mistaking someone else's face for their own. Affordable portraits, like inexpensive mirrors before them, encouraged a new level of
narcissism about one's face and physique. Marketing campaigns and, later, movies fueled the indulgence. Individuals viewed themselves through a “double gaze,” imagining how they appeared in the eyes of someone else.

This heightened degree of
self-consciousness, of watching your own self, is something the newspaper columnist Heywood C. Broun observed of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920: “He sees himself constantly not as a human being, but as a man in a novel or in a play. Every move is a picture and there is a camera man behind each tree.”

As photographs and film images
permeated everyday life, Americans developed what the fashion historian Anne Hollander calls “camera vision”—the way we see images that are captured by a camera. As she explains in
Seeing Through Clothes,
by the 1920s chic was no longer defined by graphic artists and portrait painters whose painstaking pen and brushwork was meant to be appreciated through prolonged examination but by the instant image captured through the camera's lens. This split-second glance in turn influenced standards of fashion and beauty.

At the turn of the century
, for example, middle-aged women embodied stylishness. They dressed to present an S shape: hair piled high under a hat, and a bustle resting on the rear to emphasize the “mature bust and hips.” Buxom actresses like Lillian Russell and Lillie Langtry offered models of beauty with thicker waists and seasoned features. Young ladies adorned with layers of silk, muslin, and crinoline hid the true shape of their bodies and mimicked the style of the middle-aged. “
Until this century, and until the movies
, the ideal well-dressed woman had been the Lady, a cultivated personage whose mature style and charms had been carefully developed over time, with the support of the social position and income of her father and her husband,” Hollander writes. Compared with these formidable middle-aged ladies, young girls had “only a raw awkward charm and no style at all and their lives no scope. They lacked training, experience and fully developed bodies; elegance was not at all suitable to them.”

Mrs. Woodrow explained the
allure of a mature woman to
The Cosmopolitan
's readers: “The woman of fifty, who is beautiful, is the woman who lives in the world's life, in its finer issues and ideals, its hopes and dreams. . . . In a word, she has not been afraid to live.”
Harper's Bazar
noted in 1912
that middle-aged women “express a degree of elegance,
dignity and charm in her mode of dressing which a younger person striving after bizarre and smart effects cannot hope to attain.” Then, the supermodel body would have looked a lot more like Helen Mirren's than Naomi Campbell's.

By 1925, the 20-year-old
Clara Bow represented the new look, sexy and self-sufficient, rather than mature and experienced.
Abstract graphic design incorporating
simplified shapes mirrored the preference for sleek body outlines popularized in films. “Since that time,” Hollander notes, “women have had to be slender.”

Fashion photographers of the 1920s, like Edward Steichen at Condé Nast, helped transform the slenderized figure into a glamorous ideal. Unlike turn-of-the-century reform-minded photographers who captured grainy, pockmarked reality, Steichen created a flawless paragon of feminine beauty.
For the first time, young
girls rather than middle-aged women embodied elegance.
A 1927 ad for Ivory Soap
in
Photoplay
claimed “youth ‘de-bunked' clothes and living.” Beneath an illustration of two women, one in a long gown with a bustle, the other in a short slim dress, was the text: “Youth demanded simple clothes instead of these fussy, elaborate styles of the 1900s. Clothes more expressive of youth's own slim natural grace. . . . Youth has taken the artificiality out of American taste.”

In Edith Wharton's
Twilight Sleep,
the middle-aged Dexter Manford notices the altered female form as he flirts with an acquaintance his age. Wharton herself was more like the “rich armful” that Manford remembered: “how splendid he had thought plump rosy women in his youth, before money and fashion imposed their artificial standards.” By comparison, the young and wanton Lita, with whom he is nonetheless fascinated to the point of ruin, is a “stripped skeleton.”

The heady wave of breakthroughs, from the internal combustion engine to the telegraph and airplane, reinforced Progressives' belief that all human behavior and social ills could be managed with help from technology and scientific rationality. Amazing creations that their grandparents would have considered fanciful had materialized—machines that lifted occupants to the heavens; devices that permitted conversations across
the country as if across a parlor; potions that could cure previously fatal fevers. Science was magical.
Thomas Edison was described
as a “wizard” who could transform night into day.

In this atmosphere, the idea that science could restore the body to its youthful form did not seem so far-fetched.
Revolutionary-era physicians
like the founding father Benjamin Rush believed that certain organs and functions underwent “renovation.” One of the early experimenters in rejuvenation was the 72-year-old French physician Charles Édouard Brown-Séquard, who in 1889 reported that he had injected himself with a mixture of testicular blood and semen extracts from dogs and guinea pigs, and had regained the energy of youth. His work was predicated on the widely held assumption that the weakening effects of old age were the result of a depletion of sperm.

Ernest Starling's discovery of human hormones in 1902 spurred a flood of experimentation into these wondrous chemical messengers that moved through the bloodstream and regulated growth, sexual development, physical shape, and more. Hormones looked like they might hold the key to stopping or reversing aging. “
There seemed to be a more
general agreement that a man is as old, not as his heart and arteries as was once thought, but as his endocrine glands,” G. Stanley Hall concluded after surveying the leading medical authorities.

Fevered talk of “an elixir of youth”
was further fueled in 1912 by the French surgeon Alexis Carrel, who announced he managed to keep a sliver of chicken-heart tissue alive in a culture. Headlines promised that the immortal chicken heart would defeat aging, among other miracles, but it was no more successful than the various kinds of rejuvenation treatments that followed it.

In 1918, Leo L. Stanley
, a doctor at San Quentin prison, attracted attention after he transplanted the testicles of an executed man into a senile 60-year-old inmate. He subsequently claimed to have successfully implanted both human and animal testicles in 643 inmates, most of whom were feeble or mentally disabled, all with outstanding results—at least in his view. He also experimented with injecting inmates with a serum made from animal testicles, which, he reported, cured everything from senility to acne. His successes, however, never materialized outside the prison's walls.

One of the more publicity-minded surgeons who promised to restore youth by transplanting organs was Serge Voronoff, a Russian who lived in Paris.
During a visit to the
United States in 1920, he demonstrated his technique of grafting the testicles of young animals onto old ones. His reported success prompted a frenzy of attention and he received thousands of requests for lectures, demonstrations, and interviews. Later that year, he transplanted monkey testicles into men who had lost their sexual drive, and by 1922 claimed to have performed five hundred operations on men.

Many doctors scoffed at his boasts of restoring sexual vigor, eliminating senility and hair loss, and prolonging life.
In October 1922, the French Academy
of Medicine refused to allow Voronoff to deliver a paper on his gland grafts. But the public was enthralled and showed up in force the following day when he spoke at another venue about his work. There was a “near riot” the
Chicago Daily Tribune
recounted. “Hundreds of persons, almost half of whom were young girls and women, almost fought to enter the experimental laboratory of the College of France where the Russian savant had waiting some rejuvenated men, some rejuvenated rams, moving pictures, and a mass of fascinating detail. One woman became so thrilled with Dr. Voronoff's description of ‘virile impulses' that she jumped up and shouted, ‘When are you going to do something like that for us women?' ‘You ladies will never need anything like that. It is only old men who need it,' Dr. Voronoff said smilingly.”

As evidence, he presented one 74-year-old patient, who said the operation restored his health and hair, filled out his wrinkles, and reversed early signs of senility.
The French press threw
its support behind Voronoff and chastised “official scientists who [are] always retrograde owing to their dead weight of age and honors.”
Popular sentiment may have accounted
for the academy's decision to permit one of Voronoff's pupils, a Paris physician named Francis Heckel, to deliver a paper in January 1923 about the twenty-seven operations he had performed grafting monkey testicles onto human beings. “Dr. Heckel said that a majority of those applying for grafting—there were many hundreds daily—were men of fifty or sixty years who gave as a reason that they wished to complete some life work they had undertaken or see some particular enterprise through, which had not yet been crowned with success,” the
New York Times
reported. Later
that year, the French Academy finally permitted Voronoff to perform two operations grafting chimpanzee glands onto human testicles. “
Dr. Voronoff's triumph was
complete last night when two of the best known surgeons in Paris defended the scientific worth of the gland operations,” the
Chicago Daily Tribune
announced.

The accolades turned business-minded followers to Africa as investors excitedly talked about cornering the market on chimpanzees. In 1925, Voronoff commenced raising chimpanzees on a farm in the Congo to provide testes for his famed procedures.

The doctor's scientific acclaim was short-lived. Voronoff's accounts of the number of operations he performed kept changing, as did the duration of their success. Effects could dissipate in four to six months, he admitted.
By 1926, an article in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
declared Voronoff's transplants to be useless and possibly harmful. His tales of miraculous rejuvenations continued to fascinate the public, though, influencing the popular imagination far beyond the actual number of surgeries or successes.
Voronoff kept at it
, telling an interviewer in 1939 that in the twenty years that followed his first animal-to-human transplant, he had performed two thousand gland grafts.

Commerce and science happily collaborated, as both respected scientists and basement dodgers promoted and sold rejuvenation therapies. Men were by far the most frequent patients and lab subjects.
World War I's heedless
slaughter of young men generated fears about the descent of the white race. Building up the “male principle” or “seminal liquor” might offer a means of restoring the vitality of absent youth. Both racial and class worries continued to surround surgical and hormonal efforts to regain the look and vigor of youth.
In his 1920 tract,
Life,
Voronoff, referring to his own gland transplants, asked: “Does any scientific discovery of the ages exceed this in its importance to the individual and the race?”

There are no convincing estimates of how many people signed up for some kind of rejuvenation treatment, serious or faked.
Celebrated physicians with impressive
credentials performed the procedures on Park Avenue clients, but there were many more urban and small-town quacks who opened storefront rejuvenation clinics that lured in bankers, merchants, laborers, and farmers worried about their looks, their energy,
their sexual appetite, or their jobs. Some physicians offered to graft testes from goats and rams onto men; other charlatans simply filled vials with colored water and injected the substances into a patient's arm or buttocks. If the snake-oil salesmen ran out of patients or, more likely, were run out of town, they simply set up shop elsewhere.
Medical diploma mills and fraud
made it easy for people to pass themselves off as qualified doctors. The procedures clearly did not work, but that did not dampen the public's fascination with rejuvenation, which crossed both class and gender lines.
As David and Sheila Rothman
relate in their book
The Pursuit of Perfection,
“Doctors were facing unhappy patients, old men complaining of reduced sex drive, impaired mental performance, fatigue and malaise. Rather than just standing there, the doctors were doing something.”