WITH THE AID of a metal rod, the first woman of “the New Generation” stands in Robert Filoso’s Los Angeles workshop, her feet dangling a few inches off the floor. Her clay arms are bandaged in gauze strips and her face hooded in a plastic bag, knotted at the neck to keep out dust motes. A single speck could cause a blemish.
“There are no imperfections in my models,” the thirty-eight-year-old mannequin sculptor explains. “They all have to be taken out.” The dank environment inside the bag, however, has bred its own facial flaws. Between the woman’s parted lips, a green mold is growing.
On this April morning in 1988, Filoso is at work on the model that will set the standard for the following year. Ever since he brought “the new realism” to female mannequins—chiseling detailed vertebrae, toes, and nipples—Filoso has led the $1.2 billion dummy industry, serving all the better retailers. This year, he is making some major changes. His New Generation woman has shrunk in height, gained almost three inches on her breasts, shed an inch from her waist, and developed three sets of eyelashes. The new vital statistics, 34-23-36, are voluptuous by mannequin standards, but the Lacroix era of strapless gowns and bone-tight bodices requires bigger busts and wasp waists. “Fashion,” Filoso says, “determines the shape of my girls.”
The sculptor gingerly unwinds the cloth strips and hands them to his assistant and model, Laurie Rothey. “It seems like so many of the girls are getting breast implants,” Rothey is saying as they work, and she isn’t referring to the mannequins. “It’s the only way you can get jobs because big breasts are all the [modeling] agencies are hiring now. . . .”
Filoso interrupts her with a curse. The clay hasn’t dried yet and the mannequin’s arm has flopped off its metal bone. The sculptor tries to reattach the limb but now one arm is shorter than the other. “Look at her now, she’s a disaster,” Filoso cries, throwing his towel on the floor and departing in a huff.
Later that day, his composure regained, Filoso describes his vision for the New Generation. He pictures an in-shape upscale Marilyn Monroe, a “curvy but thin” society lady who can “afford to go to Bergdorf Goodman’s and buy anything.” Their poses, too, he says, will be “more feminine, more contained. . . . In the 1970s, mannequins were always out there, reaching for something. Now they are pulling into themselves.” That’s the way it is for real women in the ’80s, too, he says: “Now you can be yourself, you can be a lady. You don’t have to be a powerhouse.”
In Filoso’s opinion, these developments are a big improvement over the ’70s, when women “didn’t care” about their appearance. “The stores didn’t want beautiful mannequins, because they were afraid women customers would look at them and say, ‘God, I could never look like that in a million years.’” That era, Filoso is happy to report, has passed. “Now, mannequins are really coming to life. They are going to start getting prettier again—more like the fashion photography you’d see in old magazines from the 1950s.” And what of female customers who might say, as he put it, “God, I could never look like that in a million years”? But that’s the good news, Filoso says. “Today, women can look at a beautiful mannequin in a store and say, ‘I want to look like her,’ and they actually can! They can go to their doctor and say, ‘Doc, I want these cheekbones.’ ‘Doc, I want these breasts.’”
He sighs. “If I were smart, I would have become a plastic surgeon.”
• • •
DURING THE ’80s, mannequins set the beauty trends—and real women were expected to follow. The dummies were “coming to life,” while the ladies were breathing anesthesia and going under the knife. The beauty industry promoted a “return to femininity” as if it were a revival of natural womanhood—a flowering of all those innate female qualities supposedly suppressed in the feminist ’70s. Yet the “feminine” traits the industry celebrated most were grossly unnatural—and achieved with increasingly harsh, unhealthy, and punitive measures.
The beauty industry, of course, has never been an advocate of feminist aspirations. This is not to say that its promoters have a conscious political program against women’s rights, just a commercial mandate to improve on the bottom line. And the formula the industry has counted on for many years—aggravating women’s low self-esteem and high anxiety about a “feminine” appearance—has always served them well. (American women, according to surveys by the Kinsey Institute, have more negative feelings about their bodies than women in any other culture studied.) The beauty makers’ motives aren’t particularly thought out or deep. Their overwrought and incessant instructions to women are more mindless than programmatic; their frenetic noise generators create more static than substance. But even so, in the ’80s the beauty industry belonged to the cultural loop that produced backlash feedback. Inevitably, publicists for the beauty companies would pick up on the warning signals circulating about the toll of women’s equality, too—and amplify them for their own purposes.
“Is your face paying the price of success?” worried a 1988 Nivea skin cream ad, in which a business-suited woman with a briefcase rushes a child to day care—and catches a glimpse of her career-pitted skin in a store window. If only she were less successful, her visage would be more radiant. “The impact of work stress . . . can play havoc with your complexion,” Mademoiselle warned; it can cause “a bad case of dandruff,” “an eventual loss of hair” and, worst of all, weight gain. Most at risk, the magazine claimed, are “high-achieving women,” whose comely appearance can be ravaged by “executive stress.” In ad after ad, the beauty industry hammered home its version of the backlash thesis: women’s professional progress had downgraded their looks; equality had created worry lines and cellulite. This message was barely updated from a century earlier, when the late Victorian beauty press had warned women that their quest for higher education and employment was causing “a general lapse of attractiveness” and “spoiling complexions.”
The beauty merchants incited fear about the cost of women’s occupational success largely because they feared, rightly, that that success had cost them—in profits. Since the rise of the women’s movement in the ’70s, cosmetics and fragrance companies had suffered a decade of flat-to-declining sales, hair-product merchandisers had fallen into a prolonged slump, and hairdressers had watched helplessly as masses of female customers who were opting for simple low-cost cuts defected to discount unisex salons. In 1981, Revlon’s earnings fell for the first time since 1968; by the following year, the company’s profits had plunged a record 40 percent. The industry aimed to restore its own economic health by persuading women that they were the ailing patients—and professionalism their ailment. Beauty became medicalized as its lab-coated army of promoters, and real doctors, prescribed physician-endorsed potions, injections for the skin, chemical “treatments” for the hair, plastic surgery for virtually every inch of the torso. (One doctor even promised to reduce women’s height by sawing their leg bones.) Physicians and hospital administrators, struggling with their own financial difficulties, joined the industry in this campaign. Dermatologists faced with a shrinking teen market switched from treating adolescent pimples to “curing” adult female wrinkles. Gynecologists and obstetricians frustrated with a sluggish birthrate and skyrocketing malpractice premiums traded their forceps for liposuction scrapers. Hospitals facing revenue shortfalls opened cosmetic-surgery divisions and sponsored extreme and costly liquid-protein diet programs.
The beauty industry may seem the most superficial of the cultural institutions participating in the backlash, but its impact on women was, in many respects, the most intimately destructive—to both female bodies and minds. Following the orders of the ’80s beauty doctors made many women literally ill. Antiwrinkle treatments exposed them to carcinogens. Acid face peels burned their skin. Silicone injections left painful deformities. “Cosmetic” liposuction caused severe complications, infections, and even death. Internalized, the decade’s beauty dictates played a role in exacerbating an epidemic of eating disorders. And the beauty industry helped to deepen the psychic isolation that so many women felt in the ’80s, by reinforcing the representation of women’s problems as purely personal ills, unrelated to social pressures and curable only to the degree that the individual woman succeeded in fitting the universal standard—by physically changing herself.
The emblems of pulchritude marketed in the ’80s—frailty, pallor, puerility—were all beauty marks handed down by previous backlash eras. Historically, the backlash Venus has been an enervated invalid recovering on the chaise longue, an ornamental and genteel lady sipping tea in the drawing room, a child bride shielded from the sun. During the late Victorian era, the beauty industry glorified a cult of invalidism—and profited from it by promoting near-toxic potions that induced a chalky visage. The wasting-away look helped in part to unleash the nation’s first dieting mania and the emergence of anorexia in young women. In times of backlash, the beauty standard converges with the social campaign against wayward women, allying itself with “traditional” morality; a porcelain and unblemished exterior becomes proof of a woman’s internal purity, obedience, and restraint. The beautiful backlash woman is controlled in both senses of the word. Her physique has been domesticated, her appearance tamed and manicured as the grounds of a gentleman’s estate.
By contrast, athleticism, health, and vivid color are the defining properties of female beauty during periods when the culture is more receptive to women’s quest for independence. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, female athletes began to eclipse movie stars as the nation’s beauty archetypes; Coco Chanel’s tan launched a nationwide vogue in ruddy outdoor looks; and Helena Rubinstein’s brightly tinted cosmetics made loud and flamboyant colors acceptable. By the late 1920s and ’30s, however, the beauty press denounced women who tanned their faces and companies fired women who showed up at work sporting flashy makeup colors. Again, during World War II, invigorated and sun-tanned beauties received all the praise. Harper’s Bazaar described “the New American Look of 1943” this way: “Her face is out in the open and so is she. Her figure is lithe and strong. Its lines are lines of action. The glamour girl is no more.” With the war over, however, the beauty industry restored that girl—encouraged by a new breed of motivational research consultants who advised cosmetics companies to paint more passive images of femininity. Beauty publicists instructed women to inflate their breasts with padding or silicone, to frost their hair with carcinogenic dyes, to make themselves look paler by whitening their face and lips with titanium—to emulate, in short, that most bleached and medicalized glamour girl of them all, Marilyn Monroe.
Under the ’80s backlash, the pattern would repeat, as “Action Beauty,” as it was so labeled and exalted in ’70s women’s magazines, gave way to a sickbed aesthetic. It was a comprehensive transformation carried out at every level of the beauty culture—from the most superficially applied scent to the most invasive and dangerous operations.
In the winter of 1973, Charles Revson called a high-level meeting of Revlon executives. He had a revolutionary concept, he told them: a fragrance that celebrated women’s liberation. (It actually wasn’t that revolutionary: in the 1910s, perfume companies like Shalimar replaced weak lavenders with strong musks and marketed them to liberated New Women.) The Revlon team code-named the plan “Cosmo,” and they spent the next several months taking groups of women out to lunch and asking them what they wanted in a perfume.
The women told the Revlon interviewers that they were sick of hearing that fragrances were supposed to be defining them; they wanted a perfume that reflected the new self-image they had defined for themselves. The company’s market researchers considered this and eventually came up with a fragrance called Charlie, which they represented in ads with a confident and single working woman who signs her own checks, pops into nightclubs on her own, and even asks men to dance. Revlon introduced Charlie in 1973—and sold out its stock within weeks. Less than a year into its launch, Charlie had become the nation’s best-selling fragrance.
“Charlie symbolized that new lifestyle,” Revlon executive vice president Lawrence Wechsler recalls, “that said, you can be anything you want to be, you can do anything you want to do, without any criticism being directed at you. If you want to wear pantsuits at the office instead of a skirt, fine.” The success of the Charlie ad campaign inspired nearly a dozen knockoffs, from Max Factor’s Maxi (“When I’m in the Mood, There’s No Stopping Me”) to Chanel’s Cristalle (“Celebrate Yourself”), each featuring heroines who were brash, independent, and sexually assertive. Superathletes abounded, from Coty’s ice-skating champion, Smitty, to Fabergé’s roller-skating dynamo, Babe (“the fragrance for the fabulous new woman you’re becoming”)—in homage to Olympian Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
Suddenly in 1982, Revlon retired the old Charlie ad campaign and replaced her with a woman who was seeking marriage and a family. The change wasn’t inspired by a decline in sales; Revlon’s managers just “sensed” that Charlie’s time had past. “We had gone a little too far with the whole women’s liberation thing,” Wechsler says. “And it wasn’t an issue anymore, anyway. There were more important issues now, like drugs. And then there’s the biological clock. There’s a need now for a woman to be less striving.” But the cancellation of the Charlie ad campaign, he insists, is actually a sign of women’s “progress.” The American woman has come so far, he says, “she doesn’t have to be so assertive anymore. She can be more womanly.”
The new campaign, however, didn’t appeal to female customers and Revlon had to replace it again in 1986. This time the company did away with the character of Charlie altogether and offered an assortment of anonymous women who were identified as “very Charlie” types (in an ad campaign created by Malcolm MacDougall, the same ad executive who produced Good Housekeeping’s New Traditional woman). In a sense, the company had come full circle: once again, the fragrance was defining the standard that women had to meet.
At least the “very Charlie” women were still walking and showing signs of life. By the mid-’80s, many of the fragrance ladies had turned into immobilized, chalky figurines. The perfume industry had decided to sell weaker fragrances to weaker women, and both the scent and the scented were toned down. “In the past few years, many women have worn fragrances that were just as strong as their push for a vice president position,” Jonathan King, marketing director for fragrance supplier Quest International, asserted in the press in 1987. But now, more “relaxed” fragrances with a more ladylike, restrained aura would take their place, restoring depleted feminine “mystery.” A host of ’80s perfume makers dispensed curative potions: “Aroma Therapy” they were called, fragrance lines to induce a “calming” mood in fretful careerist female wearers. These odors can even “relieve stress and depression without taking drugs,” International Flavors vice president Craig Warren announced cheerfully. Avon marketers even insisted that their variety, Tranquil Moments, had a proven soothing effect on female brain waves. But it wasn’t just the tranquilizing odors that symbolized the change. In a new round of perfume ad campaigns in the ’80s, the female models on display were no longer “pushing” either, as fragrance merchandisers focused their marketing drives around three stock “feminine” types: the upper-class lady of leisure, the bride, and the little girl.
In the first half of the ’80s, five hundred high-priced perfume brands claiming to offer an upper-class socialite scent flooded the market. (To reinforce the point, at least a half-dozen lines added gold flecks to their high-society perfumes.) As couture designers sought lucrative fragrance licensing contracts for themselves, their names started showing up on perfume bottles instead of women’s; Bill Blass replaced Babe Didrikson. The women who did make it into perfume ads were representatives of gentility or glamour, not independence or athleticism. To promote Passion, Parfums International deployed Elizabeth Taylor to play the aristocratic lady; she read poems in TV ads and hosted ladies’ teas in department stores. Even middlebrow Avon tried the upscaling method, buying the rights to such perfume names as Giorgio, Oscar de la Renta, and Perry Ellis and introducing Deneuve at $165 an ounce.
As the fragrance industry geared up its second strategy, the marriage pitch, demure and alabaster brides soon proliferated in perfume ads, displacing the self-confident single women. In 1985, Estee Lauder unveiled Beautiful, the fragrance “for all your beautiful moments.” But the only “moment” the ads ever depicted was a wedding day. (The “Beautiful Moments” campaign for women happened to coincide with Omega watches’ “Significant Moments” campaign for men, making for an unintentionally instructive back-to-back contrast in many magazines: on one page, she lowered her veil; on the next, he raised his fist to celebrate “the pure joy of victory.”) Bijan for Women even spelled out its promarital message in black and white: the perfume maker’s 1988 ads advised women that they showed “Bad Taste” to cohabit, “Good Taste” to marry and get pregnant, and “exceptional Good Taste” to be “proudly wearing your wedding band.”
Women in the fragrance ads who weren’t having babies were being turned into them—as one company after another selected a prepubescent girl as the new icon of femininity. “Perfume is one of the great pleasures of being a woman,” the caption read in Vogue, accompanying a photo of a baby-girl Lolita, her face heavily made up and blond curls falling suggestively across cherubic cheeks. “In praise of woman,” was the 1989 ad slogan for Lord & Taylor’s perfume Krizia, but the only woman praised in this ad was a preschooler dressed in Victorian clothes, her eyes cast demurely downward. “You’re a wholesome woman from the very beginning,” murmured still another perfume ad—of a ladylike five year old. Even one of Revlon’s new “very Charlie” types was under ten.
But none of these marketing strategies paid off. The flood of upscale scents, in fact, caused fragrance sales to fall in 1986—the first drop in years. At prestige outlets, sales of the upscale concentrated perfumes fell by more than $20 million between 1980 and 1985. At Avon, by 1988, quarterly earnings were dropping 57 percent, less than half its beauty profits were coming from U.S. sales, and the company had to fire one-third of its sales managers. By appealing to affluent “ladies,” that company had ignored its most loyal and numerous consumers: working-class women. Avon might have consulted its own research, which showed that its typical customer was a woman with a high-school education, blue-collar job, two children, and an annual household income of $25,000. How was she supposed to buy a $165 1-ounce bottle of perfume?
With the lures of wealth, marriage, and infancy proving insufficient inducement, the perfume ad campaigns pushed idealization of weak and yielding women to its logical extreme—and wheeled out the female corpse. In Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium ads, a woman was stretched out as if on a bier, her eyes sealed shut, a funereal floral arrangement by her ashen face. In Jovan’s Florals ads, a modern-day Ophelia slipped into supreme repose, her naked body strewn with black and white orchids. The morbid scene sported this caption: “Every woman’s right to a little indulgence.”
The cosmetics industry adopted a familiar Victorian maxim about children as its latest makeup “trend” in the late ’80s. As a feature headline put it, “The Makeup Message for the Summer: Be Seen But Not Heard.” The beautiful woman was the quiet one. Mademoiselle’s cosmetics articles praised the “muted” look, warned against “a mouth that roars,” and reminded women that “being a lady is better . . . better than power, better than money.” Vogue placed a finger to women’s lips and appealed for silence: “There’s a new sense of attractiveness in makeup. . . . [N]othing ever ‘shouts.’” Ten years earlier, makeup, like fragrance, came in relentlessly “spirited” and “exuberant” colors with “muscle.” The “Outspoken Chanel” woman wore nail and face color as loud as her new “confidence” and “witty voice.” Now cosmetics tiptoed, ghostly, across the skin. Partly, of course, this new beauty rule was just the by-product of that time-honored all-American sales strategy: Create demand simply by reversing the dictates of style. But the selection of the muffled maiden as the new ideal was also a revealing one, a more reassuring image for beauty merchants who were unnerved by women’s desertion of the cosmetics counter.
The makeup marketers rolled out the refined upper-class lady, too; like the fragrance sellers, they hoped to make more money off fewer women by exhorting affluent baby-boom women to purchase aristocratic-sounding beauty products—with matching high-class prices. But again this marketing maneuver backfired. The heaviest users of makeup are teens and working-class women—and the formidable price tags on these new “elite” makeups just scared them off. The makeup companies’ tactics only caused their earnings to fall more sharply—soon, leading securities analysts were warning investors to avoid all cosmetics stocks.
Finally, though, these companies came up with a more lucrative way to harness backlash attitudes to their sales needs. Many major cosmetics companies began peddling costly medicinal-sounding potions that claimed to revert older female skin to baby-pale youth and to shield women’s “sensitive” complexions from the ravages of environmental, and especially professional, exposure. By exploiting universal fears of mortality in the huge and aging baby-boom population—exploiting it in women only, of course—the industry finally managed to elevate its financial state.
By the late ’80s, entering a cosmetics department was like stumbling into a stylish sanitarium. The salesclerks were wearing white nurse uniforms, and the treatments were costly and time-consuming regimens with medicinal names and packages, accompanied by physicians’ endorsements. Clarins’s $92 “Biological Tightener” came in a twenty-day treatment rack lined with test-tube-shaped “ampoules.” Glycel, an “antiaging” cream, boasted the support of heart surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard. La Prairie offered “cellular therapy” from their “world-renowned medical facility” in Switzerland—and its $225 bottles were filled with “capsules” and came with little spoons for proper dosage. Clinique’s “medically trained” staff urged women to exfoliate daily, chart their epidermal progress in a “Daily De-Aging Workbook,” and monitor skin health on the company’s “computer”—a plastic board with sliding buttons that was closer to a Fisher-Price Busybox than a Macintosh.
References to female fertility were replete at the cosmetics counter, too, as the beauty industry moved to exploit the “biological-clock” anxieties that popular culture had done so much to inflame. The labels of dozens of beauty treatments claimed remedial gynecological ingredients: “sheep placentas,” “bovine embryos,” and even, bizarrely, “human placental protein.” Also on display, in keeping with the demands of ’80s backlash fashion, were $50 “breast creams” and “bust milks” to boost a woman’s bra size—products not seen in department stores since the 1950s.
To promote their skin “treatments,” cosmetics companies employed traditional scare tactics about skin damage (“Premature Aging: Don’t Let It Happen to You,” Ultima II ads warned—it’s “every skin-conscious woman’s worst nightmare come true”), but they delivered these fear-inducing messages now with pseudofeminist language about taking control. The ad agency that created Oil of Olay’s successful ’80s campaign—which shifted the company’s focus from older women with real wrinkles to baby-boom women with imaginary ones—employed what its executives labeled “the control concept.” Its age-terrorized but take-charge female model vowed, “I don’t intend to grow old grace-fully. . . . I intend to fight it every step of the way.” Chanel ads even advised professional women to use antiwrinkle creams to improve their work status; fighting wrinkles, they informed, was “a smart career move.”
While cosmetics companies used the vocabulary of women’s liberation for marketing purposes, they also claimed that the fruits of that liberation were eroding women’s appearance. Career “stress” was the real destroyer of feminine beauty, the cosmetics industry insisted. The fluorescent office lights and even the daily commute posed a greater threat to female skin than intensive tanning, Ultima II ads insisted. “Dermatologists have agreed that you accumulate far more damage during the year going to and from work than in two weeks of concentrated sunbathing.”
The beauty companies fared better hawking antiwrinkle potions than traditional scents and cosmetics because backlash appeals in this venue were able to couple female awareness of ancient cultural fears of the older woman with modern realities of the baby-boom woman’s aging demographic. This was a most effective combination. By 1985, a cosmetics trade association survey of skincare professionals found that 97 percent had noticed that their clients were markedly more worried and upset about the threat of wrinkles than just a few years earlier. By 1986, skin-cream annual sales had doubled in five years to $1.9 billion. And for the first time, many department-store cosmetics counters were selling more skin-treatment products than color makeup. At I. Magnin, these treatments made up 70 percent of all cosmetics sales.
The popularity of high-priced antiwrinkle creams could hardly be attributed to improvements in the lotions’ efficacy. The claims made on behalf of high-priced antiaging products were virtually all fraudulent, the promises of “cell renewal,” “DNA repair,” and age “reversal” so ludicrous that even the Reagan-era U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued cease and desist orders against twenty-three of the cosmetic firms. Promises to protect women’s health by shielding their skin from the sun were similarly phony. Skin-care companies cashed in with sunblocks claiming protection factors as high as 34; researchers and the FDA could find no effectiveness over 15. And while it would be nice to believe that beauty companies simply wanted to guard women’s skin from carcinogenic rays, they showed no such vigilance against cancer when publicizing one of their most highly touted skin-treatment innovations of the decade: Retin-A.
A century earlier, women were encouraged to consume “Fowler’s Solution,” an arsenic-laced acne cream, to revitalize aging skin; it made them sick, some fatally. In the ’80s, beauty doctors dispensed a prescription acne ointment reputed to possess antiaging properties. Retin-A, however, also had caused cancer in mice and an oral version of the drug, Accutane, was linked to birth defects. Moreover, Retin-A seemed more effective at burning women’s faces than burnishing them. In the one study testing the cream’s effect on wrinkles—sponsored by Retin-A’s own maker, Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp.—73 percent of the participants who took Retin-A needed topical steroids to reduce the painful swelling and 20 percent developed such severe dermatitis that they had to drop out of the study. (On the other hand, the study found that Retin-A gave one of the participants a “much improved” facial appearance.)
The dermatologist who had conducted this lone study, John Voorhees, agreed to serve as Ortho’s chief promoter of Retin-A. Needless to say, the dermatology chairman from the University of Michigan didn’t dwell on the medical dangers when he endorsed Retin-A at a news conference in the Rainbow Room in Manhattan—a publicity stunt that caused Johnson & Johnson’s stock price to leap eight points in two days. The media dubbed Voorhees the ’80s Ponce de Leon; USA Today declared his discovery “a miracle.” In one year, Retin-A sales rose 350 percent to $67 million, pharmacies sold out of the $25 tubes, dermatologists’ office visits skyrocketed and doctors set up Retin-A shopping-mall “clinics” that drew hundreds of women. The FDA had not approved Retin-A’s use for wrinkles, but dermatologists dispensed it for that purpose anyway, simply claiming on the prescription forms that their middle-aged female patients were suffering from adolescent acne breakouts. On paper anyway, the doctors had succeeded in turning grown women back into pimply teenage girls.
It was a sad day for America when the Breck Girl retired. That’s what her maker, American Cyanamid, said, anyway, when it put to rest “a stable force in our society for over forty years.”
Actually, the glossy-haired paragon had been more of an intermittent force, coming on strongest during backlash years. She was born a salon poster baby in the Depression. She entered mass advertising in the feminine-mystique era, debuting as a seventeen-year-old celestial blonde on the back cover of a 1946 Ladies’ Home Journal. Each year, the company traded in one wholesome young model for another. As time passed, she became the twenty-plus blonde, although often still clutching a doll.
With the ’70s, the Breck Girl began to fall from favor. First women turned to shampoos with herbal and other natural ingredients. Then the women’s movement began criticizing the company for its cookie-cutter vision of femininity. To appease its critics, the company began including mini-biographies in the ads, to give each girl a “personality.” Even so, the Breck Girl’s popularity kept slipping, and the company finally paid her its last respects in 1978. “It was management’s feeling that the Breck Girl was no longer promoting the shampoo effectively,” Breck product manager Gerard Matthews explains.
But come the ’80s backlash, the Breck Girl rose from her Madison Avenue tomb. She’s back and more “modern” than ever, the company’s spokesmen assured customers in 1987, as they unveiled her new slogan: “The Breck Girl: A Self-Styled Woman of the Eighties.” Breck rehired its ’70s illustrator, Robert Anderson, and sent him out on a national hunt for the perfect Breck Girl.
Anderson was still nursing wounds from his last skirmish with the women’s movement. “These militant feminists would come up to me and say, ‘What right do you have to go out and decide what’s beautiful?’” he recalls. It was a right Anderson would gladly reclaim in 1987, as he set off on “the Search” to seek “the personification of American beauty.” Like the prince bearing the glass slipper, Anderson says, “I knew when I saw her, I would know her at once.” The company also gave him a few pointers. “We didn’t want a woman who was a doctor or above average,” Breck product manager Gerard Matthews recalls. Anderson concurred; as he wrote in “My Impressions of the Search,” women might find successful female role models intimidating—“equally frustrating,” in fact, as “flawlessly beautiful models.” He decided to move cautiously; he would look for a woman who had made only “some decisions” about her life and was “perhaps a bit more defined than some of the earlier Breck Girls.”
“I was busy at my computer and when he walked by, I just nodded—there wasn’t even any conversation,” Cecilia Gouge says, recalling the eventful March day when Anderson’s search arrived at her desk. At twenty-eight, Gouge had started working as a secretary at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Atlanta only a month earlier, after getting “really bored” as a housewife.
The next day, Gouge was interviewed by Anderson and an assistant. She recalls a lot of questions about “my morals.” “He asked me a lot about my family, my values, how I felt toward my family,” Gouge says. “I told them that Joey [her husband] used to be a minister and I was a Sunday school teacher, and they were very interested in this. . . . They asked me if I had a problem going back to work after Morgan [her daughter] was born. I told them how I decided, after I had Morgan, to stay home with her and didn’t go back to work until later. They were really interested that I had done that.” She also was clear where she stood on the equal rights question. “I’m not a big woman’s mover type. I’m not a feminist. In my family, Joey is the head of the household.”
Anderson called off the search; the Breck Girl had been “discovered,” as the subsequent press release put it. “Cecilia possessed every quality we were looking for in the New Breck Girl,” Anderson asserted. “She’s not just a pretty face.” Her other qualities, according to the company’s announcement: She “loves to cook country style” and “play with her baby daughter”—and she “does her own housework.”
Breck did not pay this new Breck Girl for her services. Cecilia Gouge’s only compensation was an all-expenses-paid trip to New York and free tickets to a Neil Simon Broadway play. The company’s officials said they would pay her a few hundred dollars for each subsequent public appearance, but they only recalled her once—for the company’s “Family Day.”
“Sometimes it does bother me a little bit,” Gouge says of the unre-munerative arrangement. “But then, I guess it’s tit for tat. I got the recognition, the chance for a whole nation to know me. It was a chance to launch a modeling career.” But that career never materialized.
“Cecilia came back from Boston [where she sat for the Breck portrait] in the clouds,” her husband, Joe, recalls, a year later. He is sitting at the kitchen table in the Gouges’ home in an Atlanta suburb. Cecilia, having just returned from her forty-hour-a-week clerical job, after stopping at the day care center to pick up their two-year-old daughter, is now stationed at the stove, preparing a casserole. Joe, waiting for dinner to be served, continues: “The more she talked, the less excited I got. She had stars in her eyes. I remember we went out to dinner and finally she looked at me and said, ‘You don’t look very excited,’ and I said, ‘To be honest, I’m not.’ I felt like her going back to work was enough of an adjustment. I was very worried about what this might lead to.”
Soon after she received the Breck Girl title, Cecilia hired a modeling agent and signed a contract to make $3,000 monthly appearances at the Marathon Company’s boat dealers’ meetings. But Joe canceled the deal after a few months. “My biggest concern was her being gone to the different cities by herself. I like to have everything organized and laid out at home, and it got a little disorderly.” Cecilia eventually saw things his way. “It was all getting a little hectic, I guess,” she says now, clearing the kitchen table—as Joe retires to the living room to watch TV.
The next year, Breck reported that unit sales for its fifteen-ounce shampoo bottle had risen 89 percent in 1987. But, as the company’s product manager conceded, the surge was unrelated to the Breck Girl’s return. It was the 22 percent price cut earlier that year that proved the decisive factor.
Over lunch at San Francisco’s all-male Bohemian Club, the businessmen are discussing their wives. “My wife is forty but she looks thirty,” plastic surgeon Dr. Robert Harvey tells them. So far, all he’s had to do is a few facial collagen injections to smooth her crow’s feet. “Eventually, she’ll probably want a tummy tuck.” The men nod genially and spear bits of lobster salad. The few women present—at lunch, the club admits women as “escorted” guests—say nothing.
At this noon repast, Dr. Robert Harvey, the national spokesman of the Breast Council, is the featured speaker. This is, in fact, his second appearance. “The Breast Man of San Francisco,” as some of his staff and colleagues refer to him, Harvey is said to be the city’s leading breast enlargement surgeon—no small feat in a city boasting one of the nation’s highest plastic surgeon—to-patient ratios.
With lunch over, the Breast Man pulls down a movie screen and dims the lights. The first set of slides are almost all photos of Asian women whose features he has Occidentalized—making them, in Harvey’s opinion, “more feminine.” As the before-and-after pictures flash by, Harvey tells the men how one woman came in complaining about the shape of her nose. She was “partly correct,” he says; her nose “needed” changing, but not in the way she had imagined.
Back at the office later that day, one of Harvey’s “patient counselors” rattles off a long list of Harvey’s press and public appearances: “Good Housekeeping, Harper’s Bazaar, the ‘Dean Edell Show’—we’ve got a video of that if you want to see it. . . .” Then there are the speaking engagements: “The Decathalon Club, the San Francisco Rotary Club, the Daly City Rotary Club, the Press Club. . . .” The list is surprisingly long on men’s associations. “They tell their wives about it,” she explains. “The men’s clubs are very revenue-producing.”
Harvey’s patient counselor (who has since relocated) was herself a prime revenue-producer for the doctor. When prospective clients called, she told them to come on in and look at her breasts. She had hers expanded from 34B to 34C a few years ago. She told the women, “I can say that personally I feel more confident. I feel more like a woman.” (She doesn’t, however, feel confident enough to have her name used; some of the men closest to her, she explains, don’t know she had the operation.) She served as an effective marketing tool, she says. “They feel safe if they can talk to a nonthreatening [woman] first. That way they don’t feel like a guy is trying to sell them something.” Her assistance was a real boon, helping Harvey’s breast business to double in three years. Harvey liked to call her “my right arm.”
For patients nervous about surgery, Harvey’s counselor suggested they start out with a facial injection of collagen. At $270 per cc, one collagen injection lasts about six months. “It’s a good way for them to get their feet wet. It helps them cross the bridge to surgery.” She administered several injections a day—“seven is my max.” In one year, she says, this procedure alone quadrupled Harvey’s revenues. He didn’t pay her a commission on the surgical patients she brought into his practice this way, but she says she doesn’t mind; she’s just “grateful” that he let her perform the operation. Anyway, Harvey rewards his employees in other ways: for their birthdays, he has given nearly half the women on his staff free cosmetic surgery.
Harvey originally became a plastic surgeon “for altruistic reasons;” he wanted to work with burn patients. But he soon switched to cosmetic procedures, which are “more artistic”—and far more lucrative. Sitting in an office stocked with antiques and coffee-table books on Leonardo da Vinci, Harvey explains, “It’s very individual. We are sculptors.” He has never had plastic surgery himself. “I guess my nose isn’t great, but it just doesn’t bother me.” From his desk drawer, Harvey pulls out samples of the various “choices” now available to women seeking breast implants. They can choose between silicone-based, water-based and “the adjustable.” The last comes with a sort of plastic straw that sticks out of a woman’s armpit after the operation. If she doesn’t like the size, he can add or subtract silicone through the straw: “That way the lady can feel she has some control. She can make adjustments.”
Most women who want breast implants are “self-motivated,” he says. By that, he means they aren’t expanding their breasts to please a man. “They are part of that Me Generation. They are doing it for themselves. Most times, their husbands or boyfriends like them just the way they are.” That doesn’t stop him, however, from maintaining his full schedule of men’s-club speaking engagements.
“I’ve never met anyone post-op who wasn’t just thrilled,” Harvey’s counselor says, as she provides a list of five satisfied customers. “The results are excellent,” Harvey says. “Only five percent have to get their implants removed.”
But the very first woman on the list belongs to that five percent. A year earlier, Harvey had injected silicone gel implants through this woman’s armpit into her breasts. A few weeks later, her breasts started hurting. Then they hardened into “rocks.” Then the left implant started rising.
“It just got worse until it felt like the implant was stuck under my armpit,” says the woman, an engineer in nearby Silicon Valley. “I couldn’t move it. I’d use my bicep and two arms and my boyfriend would help me and it still wouldn’t move. I tried tying an Ace bandage around my chest to keep them in line. I was getting afraid.” She called Harvey and he told her, she recalls, “not to worry, it would go down.”
Instead, it rose higher. She went to the medical school library and started reading about breast surgery. The studies she read in the professional literature informed her that breast implants injected through the armpit fail 40 percent of the time, not 5 percent. (Harvey says he got the 5 percent figure from an unwritten, unpublished study he conducted of two hundred of his own patients.) After a year of anguish, she finally had Harvey remove the implants. He installed a new set through the nipples, a procedure that leaves a scar but has a lower failure rate. So far, she says, it seems to be working out. She says she bears Dr. Harvey no ill-will. “At first,” she says, “I was kind of angry, but he was very good about helping me with my problem. I was really grateful for his patience. He didn’t even charge me for the second operation.”
Asked about this woman’s experience later, Harvey blames it on the patient. “She probably wasn’t massaging enough,” he says.
Starting in 1983, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons launched a “practice enhancement” campaign, issuing a flood of press releases, “pre-and post-op photos,” and patient “education” brochures and videotapes. They billed “body sculpturing” as safe, effective, affordable—and even essential to women’s mental health. “There is a body of medical information that these deformities [small breasts] are really a disease,” a statement issued by the society asserted; left un-corrected, flat-chestedness causes “a total lack of well-being.” To fight this grave mental health hazard, the society was soon offering a financing plan for consumers—“no down payment” and credit approval within twenty-four hours.
The inspiration for the society’s PR blitzkrieg was the usual one—a little problem with supply and demand. While the ranks of plastic surgeons had quintupled since the 1960s, patient enthusiasm hadn’t kept pace. By 1981, the flood of doctors into cosmetic surgery had made it the fastest-growing specialty in American medicine, and they simply needed more bodies. Plastic surgeons started seeking publicity in a systematic way. By the mid-’80s, their appeals overran magazines and newspapers, offering “low monthly payment plans,” acceptance of all credit cards, convenient evening and Saturday surgery sessions. A single issue of Los Angeles magazine contained more than two dozen such ads.
The surgeons marketed their services as self-image enhancers for women—and as strategies for expanding women’s opportunities. Cosmetic surgery can even help women “pursue career goals,” an ad in the New York Times promised. With liposuction, “you can feel more confident about yourself,” the Center for Aesthetic & Reconstructive Surgery said. “Most important,” you can exercise a “choice”—although by that, the ad copy referred only to “your choice of physician.”
From Vogue to Time, the media assisted the doctors, producing dozens of stories urging women to “invest,” as a Wall Street Journal article put it, in breast expansion and liposuction. “Go curvy,” Mademoiselle exhorted. “Add a bit above the waist;” it’s easy and you can “go back to work in five days, and to aerobics in six weeks.” “Attention, front and center!” the magazine demanded again, three issues later. “The lush bust is back”—and breast implants are the ideal way of “getting a boost.” A feature in Ladies’ Home Journal lauded three generations of women in one family who have “taken control” of their appearances by taking to the operating table: grandmother had a $5,000 face-lift, mother a $3,000 breast implant (after her husband admitted that the idea of big breasts “would indeed be exciting”), and daughter a $4,000 nose job. “I decided that feeling good about my body was worth the risk,” the mother explained. TV talk shows conducted contests for free cosmetic surgery; radio stations gave away breast implants as promotions. Even Ms. deemed plastic surgery a way of “reinventing” yourself—a strategy for women who “dare to take control of their lives.”
Soon, the propaganda circle was complete: cosmetic surgeons clipped these articles and added them to their resumes and advertisements, as if media publicity were proof of their own professional excellence. “Dr. Gaynor is often called ‘the King of Liposuction,’” an ad for dermatologist Dr. Alan Gaynor boasted. “He has appeared as a liposuction expert on TV dozens of times, as well as in Time magazine and the Wall Street Journal, and most local newspapers.”
The campaign worked. By 1988, the cosmetic surgeons’ caseload had more than doubled, to 750,000 annually. And that was counting only the doctors certified in plastic surgery; the total annual figure was estimated in excess of 1.5 million. More than two million women, or one in sixty, were sporting the $2,000 to $4,000 breast implants—making breast enlargement the most common cosmetic operation. More than a hundred thousand had undergone the $4,000-plus liposuction surgery, a procedure that was unknown a decade ago. (By 1987, the average plastic surgeon cleared a profit of $180,000 a year.) About 85 percent of the patients were women—and they weren’t spoiled dowagers. A 1987 survey by a plastic surgery association found that about half their patients made less than $25,000 a year; these women took out loans and even mortgaged homes to pay the surgery bill.
Publicity, not breakthroughs in medical technology, had made all the difference. Plastic surgery was as dangerous as ever; in fact, the operations would become even riskier as the big profits lured droves of untrained practitioners from other specialties. In 1988, a congressional investigation turned up widespread charlatanry, ill-equipped facilities, major injuries, and even deaths from botched operations. Other studies found that at least 15 percent of cosmetic surgery caused hemorrhages, facial nerve damage, bad scars, or complications from anesthesia. Follow-up operations to correct mistakes filled a two-volume, 1,134-page reference manual, The Unfortunate Result in Plastic Surgery. Plastic surgeons were devoting as much as a quarter of their practices to correcting their colleagues’ errors.
For breast implants, in at least 20 percent of the cases, repeat surgery was required to remedy the ensuing pain, infection, blood clots, or implant ruptures. A 1987 study in the Annals of Plastic Surgery reported that the implants failed as much as 50 percent of the time and had to be removed. In 1988, investigators at the FDA’s Product Surveillance division found that the failure rate of breast implants was among the highest of any surgery-related procedure under their purview. But rather than take action, the FDA stopped monitoring failure rates altogether—because consulting doctors couldn’t decide what constituted “failure.”
Contracture of scar tissue around the implant, separation from the breast tissue, and painful hardening of the breasts occurred in one-third of women who had the operation. The medical literature reported that 75 percent of women had some degree of contracture, 20 percent of it severe. Implants also caused scarring, infection, skin necrosis, and blood clots. And if the implants ruptured, the leaking could cause toxicity, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and autoimmune diseases such as scleroderma. The implants also could interfere with nursing, prevent cancer detection, and numb sensitivity. In 1989, a Florida woman died during breast enlargement surgery. While the cause, an overdose of anesthesia, was only indirectly related to the procedure, it’s still fair to describe her as a backlash victim: a model with two children, she had the operation because the modeling agencies were demanding women with big breasts.
In 1982, the FDA declared breast implants “a potentially unreasonable risk of injury.” Yet the federal agency did not pursue further research. And when a 1988 study by Dow Corning Corporation found that silicone gel implants caused cancer in more than 23 percent of rats tested, the FDA dismissed the findings. “The risk to humans, if it exists at all, would be low,” FDA commissioner Dr. Frank Young said. Not until April 1991, after still more federal research linking foam-coated implants to cancer surfaced and after a congressional subcommittee intervened, did the FDA finally break down and give the implant manufacturers ninety days to demonstrate that their devices were safe or take them off the market. A nervous Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. wasted no time yanking its two brands from the shelves.
To these problems, the American Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons responded with a “position statement,” written as a press release, which offered “reassurance to the nearly 101,000 women who undergo breast enlargement every year.” Women with breast implants “are at no increased risk of delayed cancer diagnosis,” the statement soothed, without offering any medical evidence to back its claim. It did, however, propose that “the real causes of late diagnosis are ignorance, complacency, neglect, and denial.” In other words, the woman’s fault.
The track record of liposuction, the scraping and vacuuming of fat deposits, was no better. Between 1984 and 1986, the number of liposuction operations rose 78 percent—but the procedure barely worked. Liposuction removed only one to two pounds of fat, had no mitigating effect on the unseemly “dimpling” effect of cellulite, and, in fact, often made it worse. The procedure also could produce permanent bagginess in the skin and edema, just two of the “variations from the ideal” that the plastic surgery society cataloged in its own report. Another “variation” on the list: “pain.”
Furthermore, the plastic surgery society’s survey of its members turned up several other unfortunate incidents. A liposuction patient lay down to have stomach fat removed and woke up with a perforated bowel and fecal matter leaking through the abdominal cavity. Three patients developed pulmonary infections and two had massive infections. Three suffered pulmonary fat embolism syndrome, a life-threatening condition in which fat can lodge in the heart, lungs, and eyes. And “numerous patients” required, as the survey delicately put it, “unplanned transfusions.”
On March 30, 1987, Patsy Howell died of massive infections three days after a liposuction operation performed by Dr. Hugo Ramirez, a gynecologist who ran a plastic surgery clinic in Pasadena, Texas. The same day Howell had her operation, Ramirez performed liposuction on Patricia Rogers; she also developed massive infections, was hospitalized in critical condition, and eventually had to have all her skin from below her chest to the top of her thighs removed.
Howell, a thirty-nine-year-old floral shop manager and the mother of two sons, submitted to liposuction to remove a small paunch on her five-foot-one frame. She weighed only 120 pounds. “This literature she got at a shopping mall said the procedure was so simple,” her friend Rheba Downey told a reporter. “She said, ‘Why not?’” She made up her mind after reading Ramirez’s newspaper ad, calling the surgery “the revolutionary technique for reduction of fat without dieting.” No one told her about the dangers. Ramirez operated on more than two hundred women, causing numerous injuries and two deaths before his license was finally revoked.
By 1987, only five years after the fat-scraping technique was introduced in the United States, the plastic surgery society had counted eleven deaths from liposuction. A 1988 congressional subcommittee placed the death toll at twenty. And the figure is probably higher, because patients’ families are often reluctant to report that the cause of death is this “vanity” procedure. A woman in San Francisco, for example, who was not on the surgery society’s or Congress’s list, died in 1989 from an infection caused by liposuction to her stomach; the infection spread to her brain, her lungs collapsed, and she finally had a massive stroke. But her family was too ashamed about the procedure to bring it to public attention.
The society’s 1987 report on liposuction, however, seemed less concerned with safety than with “the reputation of suction lipectomy,” which its authors feared had been “marred by avoidable deaths and preventable complications.” It concluded that all problems with liposuction could be easily solved with “guidelines governing who is permitted to perform and advertise surgical procedures.” In other words, just get rid of the gynecologists and dermatologists and leave the surgery to them.
Yet some of the liposuction patients had died at the hands of plastic surgeons. And the most common cause of death was the release of fat emboli into the heart, lungs, and brain—a risk whenever inner layers of epidermis are scraped, no matter how proficient the scraper. As even the report acknowledged: “[Liposuction] is by its nature a tissue-crush phenomenon. Therefore, fat embolism is a realistic possibility.”
Surgeons also marketed the injection of liquid silicone straight into the face. Vogue described it this way: “Plastic surgery used to be a dramatic process, but new techniques now allow doctors to make smaller, sculptural facial changes.” This “new” technique was actually an old practice that had been used by doctors in the last backlash era to expand breasts—and abandoned as too dangerous. It was no better the second time around; thousands of women who tried it developed severe facial pain, numbing, ulcerations, and hideous deformities. One Los Angeles plastic surgeon, Dr. Jack Startz, devastated the faces of hundreds of the two thousand women he injected with liquid silicone. He later committed suicide.
For the most part, these doctors were not operating on women who might actually benefit from plastic surgery. In fact, the number of reconstructive operations to aid burn victims and breast cancer patients declined in the late ’80s. For many plastic surgeons, helping to boost women’s self-esteem wasn’t the main appeal of their profession. Despite the ads, the doctors were less interested in improving their patients’ sense of “control” than they were in improving their own control over their patients. “To me,” said plastic surgeon Kurt Wagner, who operated on his wife’s physique nine times, “surgery is like being in the arena where decisions are made and no one can tell me what to do.” Women under anesthesia don’t talk back.
Diana Doe, a single working woman, had much to be proud of by the time she reached her thirty-fifth birthday. (“Diana Doe” is a pseudonym. The woman originally agreed to have her name used and actively sought media attention. Her story and name have been published in other news accounts and aired in a TV news program. But that publicity led to such an outpouring of verbal abuse and mockery that the woman retreated in shame. She has asked that her name not be mentioned here.) She had published three children’s books; she was running several workshops to improve children’s speech and self-esteem; she had a dozen different free-lance writing projects in the works; and she had just been asked to teach gifted students for a program sponsored by a top university. Yet, as she stood in the supermarket checkout line on a hot June day in 1986, idly inspecting the magazine rack, she felt a chill of humiliation pass through her body. She was looking at the Newsweek cover story, which notified her that her chances at marriage had just fallen to 5 percent. “I just felt sick. I told myself, Okay, [Diana], get ahold of yourself. This is not like getting cancer.” She went home and put the statistic out of her mind.
A few weeks later, she was on the phone with a male reporter at a fitness magazine, trying to set up another free-lance assignment. “So did you see that story in Newsweek?” she recalls him asking her. “You might as well forget it; you’re never going to get married.” Why? she asked. “Women in their thirties are physically inferior,” he said. “It’s just a reality.” She told him that she had every intention of marrying, and besides, “Women in their thirties have a lot more to offer than you are giving them credit for.”
“Are you really convinced of that?” he asked. “Because if you are, then you wouldn’t mind putting a little money on the deal.” By the time they hung up, Diana had bet him nearly $1,000 that she would “beat the five percent odds” and be married by forty. The journalist was also single, and thirty-eight years old, but somehow it never occurred to either of them to make a wager on his marital future.
Diana said she took him up on the bet because she wanted to show him “what a woman at my age is capable of achieving.” She said, “I really believe that women in their thirties are evolving in the 1980s.” But pretty soon, she was diverting all those capabilities to the “evolution” of her physique. Her story is one of the more extreme illustrations of how thoroughly backlash ends had harnessed feminist means—and how destructive the consequences could be when liberation rhetoric got mixed up in individual women’s minds with cultural signals that were meant to undermine, not improve, their confidence and sense of self-worth.
Tall, with angular cheekbones and big eyes, Diana had, in fact, worked briefly as a model in her twenties. But with age, she believed, her body had not stood the test of time and could “stand some improvement;” her physical deficits, she became convinced, stood between her and the marriage altar. Her anxiety over her appearance was only heightened after she consulted a modeling expert, who “told me that I should divide my body up into parts and go over each part with a magnifying glass,” Diana recalls. “The parts that I could improve on, I should go ahead and work on. The rest, I should try to cover up.”
After reviewing her body inch by inch, she concluded it needed a complete overhaul. Having read all the stories on the miracles of plastic surgery, she figured that was the most efficient way of executing her transformation, or “defining a woman’s new options and opportunities in the ’80s,” as she put it. She even settled on her final measurements: 37—25—37. The only question was how to pay for it. A seasoned freelance entrepreneur with a self-professed taste for “dealmaking,” Diana had always been adept at pulling together financing for her professional projects; now she redirected that same talent to rearranging her body. Diana’s strategy might recall that of the avenging housewife in Fay Weldon’s popular 1983 novel, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. But Weldon’s heroine retooled her body to triumph over her philandering husband; Diana Doe was changing her body only to comply with male wishes and please a potential mate.
With a marketing plan in mind, Diana tracked down Patrick Netter, Hollywood personal-fitness trainer. Turning back the clock on her body could be a “great media story,” she told him. “It’s a story about a woman realizing her own potential. It’s a Cinderella story for the ’80s.” She wielded a profit analysis she had personally commissioned from a marketing professor. (He computed that selling her metamorphosis could generate “anywhere from $101,000 to a half-million dollars.”) She even had a handle for her new self: “the Ultimate 5 Percent Woman.” And Netter could have a piece of the action. He could be her personal manager, she proposed, and locate health-care and cosmetics companies that would be interested in financing her transformation in return for free publicity. “I thought her idea of promoting her metamorphosis made commercial sense,” Netter says later. “It’s a little sad that a woman has to do that.” But not so sad that it stopped him from drawing up a contract—guaranteeing himself 50 percent of the profits.
A few weeks later “the Project,” as Diana called it, was officially launched. An L.A. television infotainment show filmed a segment on her makeover. And Netter set her up with a plastic surgeon, who agreed to perform $20,000 worth of plastic surgery on her at no charge: facelift and-peel, eyelid lifts on both top and bottom lids, a nose job, a breast augmentation operation, a tummy tuck, and liposuction on her hips and thighs. In exchange, she would mention his name in radio and television shows—with the guarantee that, as Netter puts it, the publicity would be “favorable” and “in good taste.” Diana struck similar deals with a Los Angeles dentist, a health club, a beauty spa, and a wardrobe consultant. She also contracted with a fitness magazine to write ten articles about her evolution. Later, she hired a literary agent to sell her fourth book, the story of her physical renovation, entitled Create Yourself.
In the spring of 1987, she reported to her plastic surgeon for the first operation, breast implants. She lay down on the operating table and held the anesthesia mask to her mouth and nose. As the room went fuzzy, Diana pushed aside her fears about the operation’s effect on her health: “Okay, what do you want more, to be beautiful or run a marathon?” she recalls murmuring to herself. “To be beautiful, of course.” When she woke up, she was in no shape to stand, much less jog. Her chest throbbed with pain and her muscles were so weak that she had to be lifted out of bed.
When she was well enough to resume the Project, she paid a visit to some marketing executives at Oil of Olay. She had seen the company’s new “control concept” ad campaign urging women to “fight” aging; she figured they would be interested in her action-oriented story. They were—until she revealed that her self-improvement plan involved cosmetic surgery. They told her the surgery represented a “conflict of interest” with their image because it wasn’t “natural.” During her first radio show, Diana ran up against the same critique—this time from male callers. They denounced her “vanity” and accused her of manipulating her flesh “unnaturally.” First the male reporter had put her down because she was “physically inferior;” now men were criticizing her for trying to live up to male-created standards—standards that she had made her own. In pursuit of the Project, her desire to achieve and her desire to find acceptance had become indistinguishable. “They were telling me that I shouldn’t strive for what I want,” she says. “They were saying . . . don’t take charge of your looks.”
Eventually Netter called to say he had arranged a meeting with several producers at Paramount for a possible “Movie of the Week.” When Diana walked into the studio’s plush office suite, the producers were seated around a boardroom table, already planning “her story.” They continued to talk as if she weren’t present. “They kept saying, ‘It’s great but we need an ending,’” Diana recalls. “‘Should we marry her off? Should we have her fail and go off by herself?’ They were talking about me as if I was some girl on the auction block.” She didn’t want them to make up her ending—she wanted to create her own.
Meanwhile, prospects on the marriage front were looking bleak. She had struck up a “phone relationship” with a real estate broker. He kept wanting to meet her, and she kept refusing to see him until “the Project was completed.” He told her he was “behind her a hundred percent” and she shouldn’t worry about the way she looked. This went on for five months until she reluctantly agreed to fly out and spend the day with him.
When he picked her up at the airport, she spotted the disappointment in his eyes. “He looked at me and I knew it was all over.” It was weeks before they talked again. “You aren’t going to be there for me, are you?” she asked him. “No,” he said. “Why?” she asked, and waited for the answer she had already anticipated. After a silence, he finally said it: “You look too old.” (He was two years older than she.) Then he rattled off “a list of all my failings,” she recalls, “starting with my hair and going down to my toes. He had about ten things on that list to explain why he was dumping me.” And every one of them was physical. Several months later, she heard he was engaged—to a woman ten years his junior.
In August 1988, with the Project approaching its second year, Diana was struggling to lose weight in preparation for the liposuction operation. On a hot summer afternoon, she sat at the Skinny Haven restaurant and studied the calorie counts, helpfully listed on the menu. Diana’s students were graduating later that day, and she would be giving a speech at the ceremonies. She was proud of her pupils, but that wasn’t what was on her mind at the moment. Her birthday was coming up soon, she said. How old would she be? She looked up sharply; she didn’t appreciate the reminder. “I’ll be thirty-eight,” she said. “But when my project is done, then I’ll start the counting over—at one.”
Reversing the aging process is an ancient, and famously doomed, quest. It’s not the sort of challenge a practical-minded and professional woman like Diana might be expected to take up. Yet by the late ’80s, the revival of harsh beauty standards had left even resourceful, enterprising women like her in a bind. It’s easy enough to mock the apparent self-absorption of Diana’s Five Percent plan. But perhaps she can be forgiven for choosing to hunt for the fountain of youth rather than seeking to build a life of her own against the overpowering currents of the times. Diana belonged to a culture that barely recognized these currents, much less provided women with the reinforcements to challenge them; instead, it armed women only with salves and scalpels to battle their own anatomy. If Diana chose then to take on nature itself, rather than resist comparisons with the Breck Girl and her many commercial sisters, maybe she had her reasons. Faced with a lonely and treacherous decade for women trying to buck the “trends,” she may have simply given herself better odds fighting biology than triumphing over a seemingly more overwhelming cultural undertow.