A Natural History of Love (32 page)

Fortunately, beauty’s power isn’t absolute in every case. The equation of looks and personality runs in both directions: we credit attractive people with being superior in other ways; but we also credit good/talented/superior people with being more attractive. Consider the sometimes dissonant features of many famous and talented actors and actresses thought to be beautiful—Marlene Dietrich, for example. She was a beautiful woman, with an angular face and quite sunken cheeks. To achieve that caved-in look, she had her upper rear molars removed when she was a young starlet. To look wide-eyed and innocent, she plucked her eyebrows into very high, thin, rounded arches that made her look as if she were always on the verge of asking a question.

When one is in the throes of an affair, it’s easy to believe one’s lover an Adonis. Then, years later, bumping into the same man in a bookshop, you may think:
I never noticed how short he was
, or
Did he always have that broken capillary in his eye?
Anaïs Nin describes beauty’s fickle current in her notebooks. When a gorgeous woman strolls by, she’s instantly smitten, but then she discovers the woman’s inner face, and that completely changes how she perceives the outer one:

As June walked towards me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. A startlingly white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine a true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the evenness of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me. As I sat before her, I felt I would do anything she asked of me…. By the end of the evening I had extricated myself from her power. She killed my admiration by her talk. Her talk. The enormous ego, false, weak, posturing …

FACING OUR BIASES

As both Dietrich and Nin understood, we often judge someone’s character by their looks. Attractive criminals receive lighter jail sentences; suspects with ugly or coarse features have a harder time proving their innocence, and are dealt with more harshly if they’re guilty. And if people look alike, we suspect they may act alike. Prompted by these simple truths of human nature, Galen, Hippocrates, and many other ancient doctors believed in physiognomy, the practice of deciphering a person’s character and condition from his face. Formal treatises on face-reading abound in medical literature, from the Greeks to the Chinese. Aristotle claimed that if a person looked at all like an animal he shared that animal’s essential nature. Someone with a beaky nose and angular face would be eaglelike—bold, brave, and egotistical. Someone with a horsey face would be loyal and proud. A broad face indicated stupidity, a small face trustworthiness, and so on. In medieval Europe, astrologers read faces as well as the stars. The Elizabethans believed that eye color revealed one’s character. Honest people had blue eyes, ne’er-do-wells had medium brown, the innately jealous had green, people of mystery had the darkest brown, and those with loose morals had blue eyes ringed in a slightly darker blue. In his “Moral Diseases of the Eye,” Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister, went so far as to correlate virtue with health of the eyes. Someone with inflamed eyes was proclaiming how “unchaste” they were, a truth that must have been especially disillusioning during allergy season. If a person squinted, it proved they had a base nature, a myopia of the soul. Along with face-reading, phrenology arose, the art of reading the shape of the head and any bumps it might have. In time it became so fashionable that instead of telling someone “You need to get in touch with your feelings,” the usual line was “You need to have your head examined!” Although, intellectually, we may dismiss such customs as claptrap, to some extent we do judge people by their faces. So it’s no surprise that reconstructive surgery is an ancient practice.
^*
Or that a beautiful face is enough to start the engines of love.

*
“Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” Christopher Marlowe asked. A joke making the rounds is that scientists now have quantified beauty into units called “helens.” A millihelen is just enough beauty to launch one ship.

*
Interesting local theory: Irene, who runs Isadora’s, a lingerie shop in my town, tells me that she’s noticed something curious among her male clientele. Unlike the women, they respond voluptuously to the feel of the softest fabrics. They spend a long time choosing just the right nightdress or slip, but once they touch something that’s silky and soft they buy it, regardless of price. She thinks this may be because men have evolved to relish the softest-fleshed women, the young fertile ones, and thus instinctively respond to skin-soft frillies.

*
The fifteen-hundred-year-old Sanskrit
Rig
Veda
speaks of nose repair, and the Egyptian Papyrus Ebers offers instructions for repairing noses, ears, and other parts disfigured by war or accident.

THE HAIR

When lovers describe their sweethearts, they usually mention the color and length of their hair. One may love the whole person, body and spirit, but hair becomes the fetish of that love. Yielding and soft, sumptuous and colorful, decorative and dangling, it invites a lover’s touch. It’s fun to fondle, play with, and disarrange. Messing it up is the symbolic equivalent of undressing the other’s body. A woman quickly learns that cutting her hair without warning her lover first is a bad mistake. Even a becoming change of hairstyle can be shocking and disturbing.

A boyfriend, on the verge of breaking up with me, once exclaimed with a wince, “Your hair!” “What’s wrong with it?” I asked, suddenly vulnerable as a trembling fawn. “Well, there’s just so much of it…” he said. I knew then that everything was over between us. Hair is the caressable plumage of love, a feature individual as the shape of one’s chin or the size of one’s fingers. If he had said: “I no longer like your mouth,” it wouldn’t have been more wounding. I once tucked a perfect curl of my hair, tied with a lavender ribbon, between the pages of a poetry book I was returning to a friend. The curl marked my favorite love poem, and I felt as if I were charging the book with my life force. I knew I was giving him a powerful talisman. Hair is sacred to lovers, but also to society.

In the late sixties, a white woman was nowhere if she didn’t have straight hair. Straight hair suggested a nonethnic (and therefore upper-class) bloodline; the cheerleaders all wore their blond hair straight. And among the rebels who yearned to be like Judy Collins and Joan Baez, it expressed a sincerity based on contempt for society, hand-me-down values, and the coiffed generation’s ideals. However, I came into this world capped in black curly hair—deep-night black with real corkscrew curls—and you could no more straighten it than you could hold back the sea. But I tried. I used to iron my hair; get it temporarily denatured in a reverse permanent; or set it on jumbo orange-juice cans. In fact, most of my teen years were spent sleeping on rollers of one Inquisitional design or another. “Beauty sleep” was an oxymoron. What self-imposed tyranny! For short spells, my hair did look “tamed,” “tidy,” “controlled.” Society was exploding in all directions, but my hair was in place. Lack of control was scary, and suggested the lawlessness of murder, bank robbery, or having sex—all equally criminal for “nice girls” when I was sixteen.

Then, sweet miracle, one day many years later I walked into the Lexington Avenue salon of Richard Stein, whose pretty, vivacious styles I had seen on a number of fashionable women. He looked compassionately at my country-western hairdo, which had taken two hours under a hair dryer to achieve, and said indignantly on my behalf: “Why do you do this to yourself?” Then he turned the anima in my hair loose, shaping it into a long thick shag—the waterfall of curls it always yearned for—and for the first time in my life I had simple, wash-and-wear hair. The years of setting, drying, and vanity-rich fussing were over. So was a special kind of bondage to one rigid ideal of beauty. A symbolic freedom came from accepting my hair on its own terms, relishing its eccentricities instead of trying to disguise them. Now, once every three months or whenever I begin to feel like a sheepdog, Richard tames what he refers to as my “Queen of the Amazon” hair. He has often been the last person I would see before setting out on an expedition, or the first when I returned. This does not surprise him. Scissorwise and insightful, he knows well how symbolic hair is, particularly to women.

And especially for me, since my hair sometimes seems to have a life of its own. “Just look for a weather system of black hair,” I say, “and you’ll find me.” A poetry student of mine (who was also a professional cartoonist) once did a series of drawings about a woman with my kind of hair. It was her hair that a beau introduced to his parents, her hair that chose from a menu, her hair that streamed out of a car window like Spanish moss. Recently, when I was having the house enlarged to accommodate a room that’s a combination bathroom and astronomical observatory (one telescope), a twinkling-eyed woman whose job it was to help design that sensory marvel, said: “I don’t know what your taste is … but I presume it’s like your hair.” Then she suggested a harem tent fluttering over the tub, its flight propelled by small strategically placed fans. Once, stricken by despair, I phoned a girlfriend and, when I calmed down enough to speak, sobbed out my woes. “Oh, boy trouble,” she said in a tone of voice that meant
Hell, we can deal with that
. “I was afraid you’d got a bad haircut.” When her daughter was born, she cradled the baby in her arms and swore: “I promise I’ll never give you a hard time about how you wear your hair.”

This is the crux of the matter. Mothers and daughters are always confronting each other on the battlefield of a daughter’s hair. I know so many women whose mothers would greet them—sometimes before even saying hello—by pushing their hair straight back and exclaiming, “You’d look so much better with the hair off your face, dear!” They say this for years, regardless of how hairstyles change, and it’s always accompanied by yanking the hair back severely, as if it should be held by an Ace bandage.

It’s as if a daughter were seen as the incarnation of the pure side of a mother’s being. An important moment comes when a mother tells her daughter that she likes her hairdo, which often occurs late in life and signals an armistice of larger dimensions. There is something too sexy about out-of-control hair, or hair falling over the face. Something too competitive. Remember how Glenn Close in the movie
Fatal Attraction
is always seen with psychotic blue eyes under a blond whitewater of hair. When long-haired women have children, they frequently cut their hair short. Pleading convenience, they explain it merely as a practical move. But it is, I think, more symbolic. In various cultures and religions (among nuns and some Jewish wives, for instance) women are expected to cut their hair short so that they will no longer be attractive to men. A freshly bobbed new mother might be saying, in essence, I’m going to focus my life now on nurturing my family; I’m not available for flirtation. At the end of World War II, collaborators were de-sexed and shamed by having their hair chopped off in what was, essentially, a form of social circumcision. Mothers often wish a daughter to cut her hair short when she reaches puberty, but fathers want a daughter to keep her hair long forever. A friend tells me that when she turned fourteen her mother talked her into cutting her waist-length hair, much to the horror of her father who, in a melodramatic and ritually symbolic gesture, insisted that he alone be allowed to cut it.

   Throughout history, hair has been considered not just ornamental but magical. In ancient Egypt, a widow would bury a lock of her hair with her husband as a charm and, possibly, as a vow that her love went with him. The goddess Isis used her hair as a rejuvenating fabric to bestow life on her dead lover, Osiris; and even the shadow of her hair, spread like the wings of an eagle, protected her child from harm. The constellation Berenice’s hair—a pretty cascade of stars lying between Bootes and Leo—is said to be the hair of an Egyptian queen who lived in the third century
B.C
. and was married to her brother, Ptolemy III Euergetes. Soon after the wedding, Ptolemy III went off to war in Asia, and Berenice swore that if he returned alive and victorious she would sacrifice her hair to the gods. I don’t think her motive was that the gods needed chignons, but the all-too-human belief that nothing good happens without the requisite amount of sacrifice or punishment. On Ptolemy’s safe return, she offered up her long hair in the temple of Aphrodite near present-day Aswan. But the next day, mysteriously, the hair vanished. Soon the Alexandrian mathematician and astronomer, Conon of Samos, alerted the king to a swarm of stars he had seen near the tail of the constellation Leo, and his conviction that they were the queen’s hair, set in the heavens to commemorate Ptolemy’s victory. What really happened to Berenice’s hair, we will never know. (Perhaps Conon secretly had a crush on Berenice, and wanted at least to possess her hair, an intimate part of her.) But his discovery certainly was timely.