Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking (18 page)

MAINE CHANCE DIARY

McCALL’S /
March, 1966

From time to time over the years, word has leaked into the society columns and fashion magazines of a fabulous health and beauty resort where very rich women go to be slimmed and trimmed: Elizabeth Arden’s Maine Chance in Arizona. There was a brief hullabaloo in the press during the Eisenhower Administration when Mamie Eisenhower commandeered the Presidential plane to make her annual safari there. It is rumored to be the most expensive retreat of its kind in the world.

One gathers from these tantalizing hints that Maine Chance stands at the apex of the whole vast pyramid of America’s multibillion-dollar beauty industry—the
ne plus ultra
of beautification. Yet the particulars of this establishment are shrouded in mystery, for unlike Cartier jewels and Dior dresses it is never advertised.

I have long been curious about this place. It occurred to me that having investigated the American way of death, I should take a logical step backward and explore an aspect of the American way of aging; so I determined to go there and have a look.

Preliminary investigation led me to believe there are some points of similarity between the Maine Chance operation and the American funeral: an objective of both is what the undertakers’ journals call “a body that can be shown with pride.” There is the same business about prices: as in the mortuary world, the atmosphere is so heavy with discretion and graciousness, it seems crude to ask about the mundane matter of costs, and every time one does they go up, up, up.

I telephoned Arden’s in New York to make my reservation. I had been told the cost was $400 a week. But no; the reservations lady (whose voice, like those of undertakers, exuded controlled inner peace and happiness) explained that this was some years ago. At the present time they have a few rooms with shower only at $600 a week; those with bathtub start at $750. A hundred and fifty dollars a week for renting a bathtub? But I decided to go whole hog, and booked one of those. She also told me that while the recommended length of stay is two or more weeks, much can be accomplished in one week.

My indoctrination into the Maine Chance way of life began with the literature sent to me from Arden’s in New York. The descriptive brochure is full of this sort of thing:

The flowers in every room are breathlessly fresh. The carpet beneath your feet will be an Aubusson, the floor beneath the carpet, marble.

A big part of the therapy is a reversion to infantile ways:

There is the luxury of being told. Not asked, petitioned, begged to consider, requested to choose, just told. You do not have to make a single decision. You are lulled back into the life of childhood—the life of a good child. “Brush your hair, thus. Sleep now, and when you wake up your eyes will shine.” What to wear? The Blue Number, sometimes called the Great Leveler, which serves as exercise and swim suit.

There is a certain amount of judicious name-dropping:

Such well-known dynamos as Cobina Wright, Beatrice Lillie and Theresa Helburn accomplish prodigies of work fifty weeks of the year on energy stored up at Maine Chance.

And flowery analogy:

There is time to think about yourself, perhaps in the beautifully tended bougainvillea gardens, where you may observe that it takes care and patience to make flowers blossom to perfection, but it can be done.

The brochure was supplemented by letters from the reservations desk: “We have reserved for you a charming room in the Upper Garden of Arden. A little bed-jacket is useful for breakfast in bed. For evening, tea gowns or simple evening dresses of short length. We do have a little boutique for shopping, should you forget anything!”

Friends greeted my plan with derision which ill concealed their secret envy. They threatened to take before-and-after pictures, and to stuff my suitcase with Arden lotion bottles filled with martinis (liquor is, of course, forbidden at Maine Chance). They made cruel remarks about what I would look like in the Great Leveler. They pointed out that I was least likely to succeed at Maine Chance, since my ideas of beauty care are pretty rudimentary: one lipstick until it is used up instead of the “color-correlated shades for each outfit” suggested in the ads; and although, like most people, I have resolved from time to time to do the Air Force Exercises or equivalent, the requisite nine minutes a day was always my undoing.

Oddly enough, while they deplored the whole preposterous idea of me at Maine Chance, their comments betrayed enormous curiosity as to what goes on there. “Write to me daily. Keep notes. We want every detail,” they said. So one Sunday in mid-November I packed a large notebook in which to keep a daily journal along with my little bed-jacket, and, agog for the well-known dynamos, the breathlessly fresh flowers, the whole strange adventure, I boarded the plane for Phoenix.

JOURNAL
:
SUNDAY
NIGHT

My plane was two hours late, a circumstance that rattled me terribly, but at the airport I was at once enfolded in the tranquilizing Maine Chance ambience. I was met by a gliding lady (they all glide at Maine Chance rather than walk), who turned me over to a driver—“our little driver,” she called him, although he appeared to be of normal stature. The glider had to leave me to meet another arriving flower, so the little driver took me directly to the Upper Garden of Arden, which is at a short distance from the main buildings. It was too dark to see much but I discerned the outlines of a gatehouse at the entrance to the premises. The driver told me that a twenty-four-hour guard is posted there (evoking uneasy thoughts of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles being stormed by the hungry populace). At the steps of the Upper Garden another gliding lady awaited me; in a sort of minuet progression, the little driver presented me to her and she in turn introduced me to “your maid,” who escorted me to my room. Thus my first impression was of ineffable solicitude, service, courtesy.

My room is one of a row on a balcony overlooking the Upper Garden’s own small private swimming pool. It is just like a very good motel room (white wool carpet and pink sateen curtains); the $150-a-week bath, alas! just like any bath; I had rather hoped for sunken lapis lazuli and gold taps. (I discovered later that there are other, far grander rooms up at the main house and at nearby Hilltop House, with canopied beds and flouncy satin all over, palace living with Hollywood overtones; these cost $800 a week and are generally reserved for the faithful old regulars.) On the dressing table are half a dozen jars of Arden preparations (“a gift for you,” said my maid), face cream, hand lotion, deodorant, and so on, with prices on the bottoms, for a total retail value of about eleven dollars. Five breathlessly fresh roses on my bureau. I flopped into bed to the pleasant sound of my maid rustling about with my unpacking.

MONDAY

This morning my maid appeared early with breakfast (black coffee and grapefruit) and a card showing my schedule for the day. First, she explained, I must be examined by the doctor. He arrived, looked sadly at me, asked “How many years young are you,” checked heart and blood pressure, and pronounced me fit for the rigors ahead.

The maid offered to have me driven to the main pool area, where all the action takes place, less than two city blocks away. I elected to hike, so she ushered me on foot across a shocking-pink wooden bridge, past some magnificent flower gardens where little gardeners were already at work, and over a sweeping lawn to the pool, where for the first time I set eyes on my fellow-inmates: one and a half tons of female forms in various stages of dilapidation, each in her little blue number and white terry-cloth robe. (I do not mean to exclude myself from this depressing description, for I fitted right into it. The fact is that middle-aged women in their natural state, sans girdle, bra, or make-up, do not present an attractive sight, particularly in the bright glare of the Arizona morning sun.)

There were about twenty of us round the pool, half of our total enrollment; the others had already disappeared into adjacent buildings, gymnasiums, massage rooms, steam cabinets, to start their chores of the day. The poolside sitters were having various things done to them by white-uniformed attendants: manicure, pedicure, scalp massage, hair brushing. Others were grimly submitting to various machines placed round the pool—electrically powered rollers against which they were pressing their behinds, or on which they were sitting for a walloping of the inner thighs.

I overheard one of our number gaily comparing our situation to that of a girls’ boarding school. There may be something to it, the all-female company, the isolation from the outside world; but there the analogy ends. We are not (alas!) girls, neither are we scholars. The scene reminded me of another kind of institution, a well-appointed and expensive private lunatic asylum where I once visited a friend who had suffered a nervous breakdown. The inmates of that sad place, disheveled and drab in their housecoats and wrappers, were gathered in a pretty drawing room. As I looked more closely, I noticed that many were doing things to themselves, rhythmically brushing their hair, twisting or pleating their clothes, stroking their faces. One began to see that the poor spirits were utterly turned in on themselves; for the time being they had lost touch with the outside world.

The median age of my fellow-beauty-seekers is, I judge, around fifty-five. There are one or two of about thirty-five, regular tubs of butter and rather cross-looking tubs at that—or perhaps they are just stoically contemplating the tasks ahead. A few upward of sixty-five. One or two of those handsome, ageless women seen only in America—might be anywhere from early thirties to late forties. Quite a collection of bosoms, ranging from flat to pendulous, with abdomens to match. As Gypsy Rose Lee put it, “I have everything I had twenty years ago only it’s all a little bit lower.”

Seen in terms of art, there are many early Thurbers in our group (soft white turnips for faces and vaguely defined bodies), one or two possible Renoirs (pink and fleshy), some Helen Hokinsons (solid, imposing shapes evocative of a high degree of organizational leadership), one Mary Petty (a violet cloud of hair atop a finely wrinkled, birdlike face).

Surveying them, I wonder: Will they be transformed before my very eyes as the days go by? I much doubt it. The bovine, freckled woman with the insipid stare will (I predict) be ever bovine, freckled, and insipid; nor will the petulant, overblown brunette be noticeably different. As for me, time will tell.

As a newcomer I was first weighed in (at 140¾ pounds) and measured in half a dozen strategic places. “A half-inch needs to come off here,” murmured the measurer as she did my upper arm. Then the regime began in earnest.

We are doing or being done to (mostly the latter) from nine till five, a full working day, with everything planned to the exact minute, ten-minute intervals between treatments and one hour off for lunch. We glisten alternately with cream or sweat. It goes like this: Massage—a splendid Swedish masseuse of the old school rubs you all over with cream, rolls up her sleeves muttering “I’m going to get rrrrrrough,” and proceeds to knead, pound, push, and pull you about for forty-five minutes. Exercise—two classes a day, about six of us in each, conducted by an elongated lady whose figure we should all like to emulate. We lie on mats or stretch to the ceiling to her cry of “Tuck it in, class! A nice, tight tuck. And now we stre-e-e-e-tch the rib cage, and walk our ears right up the wall for posture. Did you feel that? Gooooooood.” The exercises are much like those a friend used to drag me to at the Y.W.C.A. Hair—daily brushing and scalp massage with cream, while a manicurist is going after feet or hands and digging about in the cuticles with more cream. No shampoo or setting until graduation day, I’m told. Mask—this is done in the nurse’s office. She creams your face, covers it with a pinkish contraption so that you look like the victim of a mad doctor, and turns on some electricity. The mask, by remote control, gradually gets warm. Then she turns if off and it gradually gets cool. I asked her what it is for; she said good for circulation, also sinus trouble. Shortwave diathermy is the official name for this mysterious procedure. Facial—more cream, forty-five minutes of face massage, followed by iced lotion compresses. Ardena bath—pure torture chamber. The attendant pours some boiling hot wax into a bed sheet and makes you get in (responding with solicitous encouragement to cries of “ouch” and “too hot”), then pours more hot wax all over you (more than a gallon, I learned) until you are completely coated, then wraps you to the neck in sheets and warmed blankets; arms and legs are immobilized as with swaddling clothes. Thus pinned, one’s nose at once starts tickling; you tell her, and she wipes off the face with icy lotion which feels pleasant but easily misses the tickle. You stay like that for twenty minutes, are peeled out of the wax which is now solidified, leaving a small pool of sweat in the waxy form. She says it draws all the poisons out of the body. “All
what
poisons?” I ask in alarm, but she is vague on that point. Steam cabinet—same idea, you are covered to the neck and slowly cooked, only in hot moist air instead of wax. Shakeaway—you are strapped into a sort of electric chair, the juice is turned on, and you sit there vibrating for twenty minutes.

The shakeaway chair is strategically located in the little boutique, to which the ladies flock during their ten-minute break between activities. As I sit there jiggling away, I see them clustered in twos and threes around the racks of negligées, bed-jackets, tops, and slacks. “I’ll take that, that, that, that, and two of those” is the standard cry, like a school cheer. There is an Arden Christmas stocking on display made of quilted white satin and filled with small gifts of Arden products. “I’ll take twenty of those, they’ll solve my Christmas gift problem,” says one of the ladies. After she leaves, I ask the price (she didn’t): the stockings are $27.50 each.

In the course of the day, the name of Miss Arden (as she is referred to hereabouts in reverent tones) is frequently invoked. “What sort of cream is that?” “A special formula that Miss Arden learned of years ago from a doctor in Rome.” The mask is Miss Arden’s own patented invention, as is the shakeaway contraption; Miss Arden has personally worked out the details of our 900-calorie diet.