Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty (2 page)

These old-as-dirt days have one advantage: I’ve learned to see beauty where I never saw it before. But only because my expectations are more realistic. My favorite part of my body is my eyes. Not because of their color and God knows not because of their shape, but because of what they see. When I was in my twenties and thirties I wanted my appearance to be more interesting than the beauty that surrounded me. It was a fool’s folly.

On my fifteenth birthday my dad told me I was becoming
a pretty young lady. Mom said I had a pretty smile. One of my teachers complimented me on my pretty new dress. I was old enough to understand that pretty was a poor cousin to beautiful. Pretty was the stuff of being friendly but not being friends. Pretty was the right dress from Bullocks department store, not a beatnik tunic with black tights and a beret. Pretty was Sandra Dee, easy and light. Pretty fades. Beautiful was Natalie Wood, deep like the ocean. I knew this because on the cliffs of Laguna Beach I cried from the sheer wonder of what I saw. Beautiful makes you come back for more. It makes you ask questions. It’s vast, unknowable, and magnificent. That’s part of its power. It makes you think about the experience it’s giving you. That’s when I knew what I wanted. I’ve been chasing it ever since.

If we’re lucky we have a long time to consider what beauty means. One thing I know, there is no beauty without pain. Beauty flourishes on sorrow. It’s enriched by the knowledge that life is fleeting, sometimes cruel, and often ends without resolution. That’s what makes beauty deep. Marilyn Monroe’s insecurity explains her continuing appeal. It wasn’t just her pretty face. It was the depth of her sad experience. Without living through the journey from orphan to goddess with a breathless voice, would she have become a legend? In the complexity of her suffering lies the universality of her appeal.
How did Picasso come to see the scope of Marie-Thérèse’s riveting head and shape it? I’ll tell you how: through loving her, living with her, and seeing her as both ugly and magnificent. Because of his sculptures, Marie-Thérèse emerged as a symbol of unsightly, frightening, even hideous but also, I have to say, complete beauty.

When I was growing up I had a hard time doing much of anything right. Dad was always harping, “Diane, how many times do I have to tell you, don’t stand in front of the open refrigerator, you’re wasting electricity.” Or “Diane, use your noggin. That’s what happens when you forget your lunchbox in the car. You don’t get lunch.” And every single night at the dinner table: “For God’s sake, Diane, keep your mouth closed when you chew.” There was always something interfering with getting things right: a question (the wrong kind), a hesitancy, and always, always the mangling of my sentences, the stammers, the ums, the you-knows, the oh-wells, the I-don’t-knows. I was inept, inexact, and imprecise. I would never have believed you if you had told me that this ineptness would help me later on, but somehow it did and I made my way.

Mom, on the other hand, taught me there was beauty in the imperfect. She would jot down words of wisdom and leave them on my desk. Things like “You don’t have to be perfect to
be beautiful.” “Walk in power.” “Find a reason to love yourself every day.” “Only you can decide if things are right or wrong.” “Buy yourself a gift for just being you.” “Honor yourself, Diane. You deserve it.” “Laugh at your friend Leona for making fun of your face.” When I was a senior at Santa Ana High School, these words of wisdom, while well intended, seemed stupid. Walk in power? Laugh because someone tells you you’re ugly? Please. “Only you can decide if things are wrong or right”? Okay, but how?

Look, I get how Valdez and others might see me: the woman hiding under her hat to be seen. I know it might sound disingenuous at best and whiny at worst to complain about what I find in the mirror. But I’d be lying if I told you my mornings don’t start with self-doubt, and you wouldn’t believe me anyway. Besides, when I think about beauty I mean something much bigger than a face in the mirror or a photograph of an undeniably gorgeous woman or even some Internet story about Hollywood’s ten ugliest female celebrities. I’m talking about that overwhelming feeling you get when you stand on a cliff and look out at the ocean. I’m talking about Phyllis Diller chasing the garbage truck or Joan Rivers getting in the first laugh about herself.

Or Katharine Hepburn in her tunic on the red carpet. Or Lady Gaga in her egg. Or Diana Vreeland’s wise words about style helping you get down the stairs. I’m talking about finding
whatever works for you to get out the door every day. I’m talking about the flaws that eventually take on a life of their own. The ineptness that makes you who you are. I’m talking about women who make us see beauty where we never saw it; women who turn wrong into right.

As I throw my coat on the chair, I see Alexander Gardner’s 1865 portrait of Abraham Lincoln hanging on my living room wall. My first impression of President Lincoln came from a book I checked out of the Bushnell Way Elementary School library,
Abe Lincoln: Log Cabin to White House
, by Sterling North. In it President Lincoln fought to free the slaves. He was a great man who paid the ultimate price. Mr. North described President Lincoln as unsightly, even homely. To a ten-year-old girl,
that meant President Lincoln was ugly. I didn’t understand how an ugly man could become the president of the United States. Gardner’s photograph, taken just days before Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre, contradicts North’s description of a man who got shortchanged in the looks department.

Dominated by a pair of eyes set in darkness, Lincoln’s face is magnificent. His left eye, engaged by what it sees, looks out with endless empathy, while his right eye tells a story that is harder to comprehend. The bottom half of his face, framed by two deep lines, singles out his prominent nose, but it’s those eyes, particularly the left eye, the caring eye, the engaged eye, that is so compelling. Or is it? As my own eyes drift across Lincoln’s wide forehead, I look back into the right eye, the one drawn toward reflection, and you know what I see? I see the darkness of a great calling.

Did President Lincoln’s face become magnificent because he accepted a grave responsibility that would lead to a tragic end? Or was it the angle of Mr. Gardner’s pose, the light, the patina? Was it good luck or a fortunate mistake? After living with Mr. Lincoln’s portrait for several years, I’ve come to this conclusion: his beauty, like the hidden cast of his right eye, became identifiable only after I included “unsightly” as a possible way of describing a beautiful face.

Sharing wall space with Abraham Lincoln are forty-seven other portraits of men I’ve collected over twenty-five years. I
call them my prisoners. There’s Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of the artist Francesco Clemente, who presents his hands from under a black coat. There’s Marion Robert Morrison’s face before he became John Wayne. On the bottom left, Tony Ward is painted with mud. His hands frame his eyes. Maybe he’s sick of looking out from under the dirt. Maybe he doesn’t want to be painted into a shadow; maybe he’s tired of being Herb Ritts’s favorite model. The face of the Russian revolutionary and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky stares out in shaved-head resistance. He brings up longings. I’d carry his coattails. I’d be his lackey. Next to the kitchen door, Elvis Presley is sticking his tongue into a young woman’s mouth. I never understood why he made millions of girls cry until I saw Albert Wertheimer’s
Kiss
in an ad for Sam Shepard’s play
Fool for Love
.

Which brings up Sam Shepard, who is framed dead center among the other prisoners on my wall. I was thirty-one when I went to a matinee of Terrence Malick’s
Days of Heaven
at Cinema 1 on Third Avenue between Fifty-ninth and Sixtieth Streets in Manhattan. The movie seemed to glide through a brilliantly lit travelogue until Sam Shepard walked onto the screen and took my breath away. His face bore the imprint of the West in all its barren splendor. For years, I followed Sam’s life from the safety of distance, a fan’s distance. He was the playwright of
Buried Child
and
True West
. He worked with Bob
Dylan. He was married. He fell out of marriage, and into love with Jessica Lange. He wrote, “When you’re looking for someone, you’re looking for some aspect of yourself, even if you don’t know it. What we’re searching for is what we lack.” And that’s the way it was. Some aspect of him was an aspect in me, an aspect I hadn’t developed, something I lacked. Or so I thought.

As life would have it, Sam slipped into the background until ten years later, when I inadvertently came across his face on a fifty-cent eight-by-ten glossy I bought at the Rose Bowl swap meet. The photograph was not exceptional except for one thing: Sam’s face. That damn face. A day doesn’t go by without a glance his way.

Gary Cooper also came to me in motion, but he wasn’t beautiful. What he was, was old. I saw him walking a dusty town’s deserted street toward four killers in Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 motion picture
High Noon
. The movie was told in “real time,” a time where events happened at the same rate that my ten-year-old eyes experienced them. Everything about the movie seemed super real. On Gary Cooper’s wedding day to Grace Kelly, he had a choice: he could either ride into the horizon with his pretty new bride or stay and face the killers. As a girl I didn’t think about Gary Cooper’s looks, or the difference between Grace Kelly’s age and his. I didn’t care. Would he ever see her again? Would he die? Did he have to be
so brave? I remember their goodbye. I remember Tex Ritter singing “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’.” I remember crying. Looks weren’t the issue. Courage was. I didn’t know that courage was a form of beauty, but I must have felt it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered Cecil Beaton’s photograph of a thirty-year-old drop-dead-gorgeous Gary Cooper. Beaton did more than document the awe-inspiring good looks; he somehow captured Gary Cooper’s awkward lack of calculation, his sweetness. Sometimes I compare the portraits of Gary Cooper and Sam Shepard. One photograph is of a man my age, still alive, still Sam. The other is an image of a legend I never met. Gary Cooper’s photograph is the work of an artist. Sam Shepard’s photograph is just another glossy eight-by-ten. Both, however, set off memories of milestone moments in movie theaters.

John Wayne’s is the youngest, most irresistible face framed behind glass. It’s ironic that he would become the ultimate symbol of the American male. There’s no hint of aspiration in his expression. He seems almost perplexed by the idea that someone is taking his picture. How could a football player from Glendale have imagined donning a big old ten-gallon hat for some guy with a Rolleiflex dangling around his neck? Before Gary Cooper and Sam Shepard, it was John Wayne, the Duke, who would walk through the western landscape and into the heart of Joan Didion, who describes him best: “We
went three and four afternoons a week, sat on folding chairs in the darkened Quonset hut which served as a theater, and it was there, that summer of 1943 while the hot wind blew outside, that I first saw John Wayne. Saw the walk, heard the voice. Heard him tell the girl in a picture called
War of the Wildcats
that he would build her a house, ‘at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.’ As it happened I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls that is still the line I wait to hear.”

All three men came and went as they walked through time on the screen. All three acted out stories written for the entertainment of the masses, particularly women like me. All three are icons. Now they’re incarcerated on my wall, where their beauty continues to evolve. Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Sam Shepard still take me to Joan Didion’s “bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow.” They still give me hope for a house that can never be—a home that exists only in my dreams.

Warren Beatty is not one of the prisoners on my wall. He
is a person I loved in real time, not reel, and not in a photograph. Real-life Warren was a collector’s item, a rare bird. He lived in a three-room, eight-hundred-square-foot penthouse on top of the Beverly Wilshire hotel. Littered with books and scripts, the place was not fancy. Yet he owned an unfinished Art Deco estate on a hilltop, and he claimed he was going to make it his home. He was always late and always meeting people, and always, always, always working on a script. He had aspirations I couldn’t begin to contemplate. You have to remember, I was Annie Hall. At that point I was happy to act in movies, not produce, star, and direct them while contemplating a political career. One moment Warren was stunning, especially from the right side; the next, I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. These variables kept me curious. Was he a beauty or wasn’t he?

Yes. Warren was a beauty. That stood out with particular intensity during our bittersweet breakup. And wouldn’t you know it, it revolved around a photograph I saved but couldn’t find to put on my wall.