The Right Places (35 page)

Peeling, or peeling done in conjunction with plastic surgery, is certainly the most fashionable way to stay young today. Silicone injections, which had the same end in mind, were very much the thing a few years back, but now they have fallen into disrepute—to the extent that they are against the law. Silicone, it seems, had one unfortunate habit. “It travels,” says Venner Kelsen. A wad of silicone, in other words, which is injected in the forehead to remove worry lines, may descend, following the laws of gravity, into the eyelids. Material placed to relieve lines around the nose may sink and settle in the upper lip. “And once it's there,” says Miss Kelsen sadly, “it seems that there just isn't any way to get it out.” A number of people who received silicone injections in order to achieve more youthful and pretty faces have, it seems, wound up with results that were just the opposite.

At the same time, the beauty world is always spawning cults, and easily the most passionate recent cult—the fervor of the cultists approached that of a religion—was the one that had New York's Dr.
Erno Laszlo as its chief guru. Laszlo, who says, “I have degrees from all the best universities in Europe,” is a black-mustached, hand-kissing Transylvanian who has labored on the skin problems of women such as Gloria Vanderbilt Cooper and the Duchess of Windsor. Laszlo's own skin—creamy, smooth and clear—is one of his best advertisements, and naturally his competition in the beauty business claims that he had had his own face lifted. “He's had it lifted to the skies!” says one woman. Laszlo denies this.

Though he no longer personally sees clients, his was quite an operation. In a semidarkened room, with his subject in a hospital gown on a hospital bed, Laszlo went to work with strange, mad-scientist-looking electrical instruments of his own design which made the face muscles jump and twitch—“vacuum the pores,” was his expression—and “calm down the capillaries.” He then prescribed a variety of secret (and very costly) potions and lotions and instructed each client to wash her face three times a day with his “sea-mud soap,” each washing followed by thirty rinses. His sea-mud soap cost ten dollars a cake. He pooh-poohs the suggestion that all this washing and rinsing could be a chore and says that he has rinsed his face as many as ninety times a day. Laszlo is opposed to makeup, and when, not long ago, designer Bill Blass decreed that women should not wear makeup during the day, Bill Blass fans wrote to Laszlo for his ministrations.

A twenty-minute consultation with the Master, which most members of the Laszlo cult considered a continuing essential—Laszlo lectured on sex, drinking, smoking, dietary, and toilet habits, all of which, he says, directly affect the skin—costs seventy-five dollars. One did not tip a man who keeps a signed photograph of Doris Duke on his desk, but an expensive present at Christmastime was considered quite proper. Subsequent visits, with full electric treatment and therapy, also cost seventy-five dollars, and most of the cultists—a number of whom were men—felt that a Laszlo treatment must be undergone at least twice a month. Today, however, Laszlo products—though still expensive—are mass-produced and sold in stores all over the country. And Laszlo clients are cared for by a staff of specialists.

The cosmetics industry now says that for years it has known that
men were using their wives' cream and emulsions, their deodorants and hairsprays, but that until quite recently no way to cash in on the male market had been found—that American men regarded male cosmetics as sissy. Meanwhile, in Europe men had been using cosmetics for years. Probably the first male cosmetic products to become popular here were hair tonics. Then came men's colognes.

Today, Revlon's Braggi line for men includes over a dozen items; among them are a Sauna Splash for body rub, an after-shower dusting powder, a bath oil, a cake-type face powder, a face-bronzer in four shades (the darkest gives a man a smashing tan, which washes off with soap and water), a number of before- and after-shave items, and a hairspray. Essentially, these products are identical to similar products for women; they have been given a more “masculine” packaging and more manly scents (pine and lemon, as opposed to the more feminine flower essences). A home hair-coloring product for men introduced a year or so ago has been an enormous success, partly the result of some clever man-to-man advertising, but mostly the result of a whole new feeling in the air: A man now wants to look just as good, in his own way, and as young as a woman.

It is women, many in the cosmetics business say, who are responsible for this new feeling. One who thought this way was the late Eddie Pulaski, proprietor of Eddie's—one of the elegant and expensive new “hairstylist to men” shops that have been springing up along upper Madison Avenue in New York. Eddie liked to cite the case of a woman, the wife of a customer (he, too, liked to refer to his customers as “clients”), who gave her husband for Christmas a gift certificate for an Eddie's hairpiece. These run from three hundred and fifty to five hundred dollars, depending on the area to be covered. Eddie also claimed that he saw more women than men in men's shops and men's department stores—that women were the ones who set men's fashions.

Eddie was the son of a small-town barber who, during World War II, was stationed in France and, on trips to Paris, was astonished to see French-style men's haircutting—it is cut wet, after shampooing, with a straight razor, then dried with a hand dryer, teased and styled with a brush and comb, then wrapped in a hairnet and sprayed. He
practiced on his fellow servicemen, and he liked to say that he introduced the French style to America.

Eddie's first customers over here were, he admitted, men from the wealthy homosexual world. But before his death in 1972 he said, “Ninety per cent of my clients are ordinary businessmen—lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers.” Executive-placement agencies send clients to be groomed before sending them out to be interviewed for high-paying jobs.

All this made Eddie Pulaski a wealthy man himself. He lived in a penthouse apartment in the East Seventies, an address unlikely for a barber.

This has been the pattern in men's cosmetics and fashions: Whether sponsored by women or not, ideas have started in Europe, been taken up in America at first by the homosexuals, then have moved to the general businessmen. The outfit that looks a bit outré on the young elegant will, in a few years' time, have made its way to the board meeting in Wall Street.

When Eddie first opened his shop, he was called on to do one, or perhaps two, men's hair-coloring jobs a week. By 1972 he was averaging forty a day. Does He or Doesn't He? Who can tell any more? (A number of hairstylists insist, though, that LBJ colors his hair.) Many more men, too, are having their hair straightened, and Eddie's hairpiece business is growing by leaps and bounds. Ten years ago nearly every man who came in for hair coloring insisted on having it done in a private booth. Today, the majority have it done right in the barber chair, no longer ashamed to be seen by other men having their hair dyed. Hairpiece clients do, however, still like their privacy.

The hairpiece is, of course, only a partial solution to male baldness. Even the most expensive hairpieces give themselves away in little ways, and they limit the wearer's activities. One technique that is being used to give a more natural look is weaving, where hair from the sides and back of the man's head is allowed to grow longer; these strands of real hair are then artfully upswept and woven into the hairpiece. But this means that the hairpiece must remain on the head for two weeks at a stretch if the wearer doesn't want to destroy the effect.

Another system of hair transplant plucks live hairs from the sides
and back and plants them anew, one by tiny one, on the bald scalp—an enormously expensive and painful operation, which doesn't always work and can leave the victim's head so scarred that a hairpiece is required to cover the damage.

The big excitement in the men's hair world is that it does finally seem that the breakthrough is imminent—that a chemical solution will be perfected that will grow hair on bald heads. One hairstylist says, intending no pun, that he has “a few kinks to work out,” but claims that his product is already working on two out of five subjects.

If you are very rich and have the time, you can pursue beauty and youth all over the world, and many men and women do. In Europe particularly, where medical and pharmaceutical laws are more lenient than they are in America, all sorts of exotic stay-young treatments and products are arrayed, and each has a band of well-heeled devotees.

Olivia de Havilland, for instance, likes to take the seaweed baths at Trouville, in France, right across the river from Deauville, which is the more fashionable place to stay. The immersions in seaweed are alternated with massage and strong hosings of seawater. Afterward, one is required to lie silently, facing the sea, in a reclining chair in a large relaxing room. Meanwhile, according to Miss de Havilland, a “really serious” seaweed bath is at Roscoff, in Brittany, with seaweed gathered fresh on the beaches there. “The cure,” she says, “has medical value to people with various ailments. I am told it is not at all a gay place and is for the very earnest. I go to Montecatini, too, and take the waters and baths there, even though it is known chiefly as a liver cure.”

On the Mediterranean island of Ischia, radioactive mud baths are all the rage, and a prolonged series of treatments is recommended. The full course of baths consists of twelve—one each day for three days, then a day of total rest; then three more days of baths, a day of rest, and so on until the twelve days of baths have been completed. Along with the baths are various types of massage, some done with the subject submerged in radioactive water, and each day ends with a fifteen-minute inhalation of radioactive steam.

A sixteen-to-eighteen-day treatment such as this costs around eight hundred dollars, including doctors' fees, analyses, and round-trip air fare (first class) Paris-Ischia. European health and beauty resorts and
spas are still less expensive than those in America; a similar stay, with treatments, at Elizabeth Arden's Maine Chance would cost nearly three times that figure.

In Paris, everyone is going in for saunas and oxygenation. Oxygen-whiffing, inhaling the straight stuff for sessions of fifteen to thirty minutes, is, indeed, becoming popular everywhere, and in Los Angeles, a number of the better beauty salons—even a few drugstores—have installed oxygen tanks for their customers. Oxygen, it is said, is particularly good for treatment of the common hangover, a malaise that often afflicts the wealthy. “Thirty minutes of oxygen are worth three days in the mountains” is the rule, and now small oxygen tanks and masks, designed to fit into a lady's handbag or a man's briefcase, are sold in stores that specialize in expensive gimmickry.

In Paris, salons have sprung up that offer not only oxygenation but massage, physical culture, swimming, food, music, paraffin baths, Salmonoff baths, haircutting, manicure, pedicure—in short, the works. While this is going on, your clothes which you brought with you in the morning are being pressed and readied for your appearance when you emerge in the evening. Another popular treatment in Paris is called Infrason, which is described as “a method of air compressing and decompressing to attack cellulite,” which is French for fat.

Recently a number of health and beauty resorts—as well as “cellular” clinics modeled on those of Paul Niehans in Vevey—have sprouted in Rumania, in towns along the Black Sea. Rumania is particularly popular with West Coast people, who can fly to Bucharest over the Pole. It is said that Rumanians are definitely out to snatch some of the health business away from Switzerland.

Obviously, most of the emporia above—plus, we must not forget, the elegant private hospitals, retreats, and sanitariums where the emotional lives of the rich can be put gently back in order—offer promises of added youthfulness only to those with unlimited time and money. But it isn't true that in order to stay young one
must
be rich, though it certainly helps. One of the less expensive developments in recent years, as far as women are concerned, has been that of the estrogens, which are said to eliminate “lady problems” in a woman's middle years and generally to help women feel better, have more energy, look younger, and enjoy happier sex lives. (And the old wives' tale that sexual
intercourse is good for a woman's skin may, doctors now say, turn out to have a certain basis in fact; it is male hormones, absorbed by a woman's body, that do the trick, they claim.) So-called “hot flashes,” which are related to drops in hormone levels, can be virtually eliminated by estrogen. Women who get estrogen seem to have a lower cholesterol count and, consequently, better circulation and heart action. While the medical profession is not entirely agreed about who should take this hormone, one thing is certain; the pills are so inexpensive and easy to take that any woman whose doctor thinks she should have them can afford them. An eight-to-twelve-dollar supply will last four months.

And there are even less costly ways of staying young—ways, indeed, that cost nothing at all. One is what Joan Crawford, at sixty-four, calls her “basic beauty rule.” With a flash of her famous green eyes, she says that this rule is “Look to the stars!” By this she does not refer to her own celebrated ambition to be tops at whatever she does but means, quite simply, that a woman, when she reaches a certain age, should keep her chin up as much as possible, to avoid jowls or a crepe-y neck. (It is no coincidence that many actresses who are over forty are careful to be photographed only when their chins are up-tilted.) Joan Crawford also stresses the importance of a youthful walk and youthful posture.

Another inexpensive way to stay young is offered by Lyn Tornabene, a writer who at the age of thirty-three enrolled in a Midwestern high school to see whether she could “pass” as a teenager, in order to write a book about it. She passed, more or less, though she admits she got some fishy looks and funny questions asked, and that one girl commented that Mrs. Tornabene had sort of an “old face.” Mrs. Tornabene is also a Fairfield County housewife who does her own cooking and housework, helped only by a part-time cleaning woman, and still looks much younger than she is.