The Right Places

Where to Get Young and Beautiful

There is hardly any point in having money—old money or new—if you can’t use it to look your best, is there? While country clubs and city clubs may be languishing, health and beauty spas are flourishing all over the world, and with but one design in mind—to help the rich stay young and pretty.

Staying young, to begin with, takes time, and time, to use a more than familiar phrase, is money. If you have money, you can buy time—other people’s time. A person who has servants to help around the house can find time for a little nap in the afternoon, little naps that keep you looking youthful and rested. With servants to do her household chores, a woman can spend time before her mirror with creams and masks and jellies, tweezers, brushes, teasing combs, and eyelash curlers. She can take the time to study her face, to experiment with different kinds of cosmetics, to find which shapes and shades flatter her best and make her appear younger. She has time, in other words, to think beautiful.

Or she can take the time to turn herself over to others—to the masseuse who, for fifteen dollars and up an hour, will tug and twist and push and pound her body into shape as many times a week as a client wishes; to an exercise instructor, like those at Kounovsky’s in New York (where Mrs. Onassis goes and where Mme. Louis Arpels wears diamonds with her leotard), where the calisthenics a woman needs to keep her firm and fit are made a gay social occasion, and not the chore and bore they are when done, alone, on the bedroom floor at home; to a salon, such as Elizabeth Arden’s, where a whole “Day of Beauty” (costing a hundred dollars and up, depending on how far you want the Arden people to go) will tackle the entire woman, from hairstyle to pedicure. With time, a woman (and a man, too, of course) can take up all the sporty, outdoorsy things—golf, tennis, swimming, riding—that are so good for one. With time, a woman can take a week—or two, or three—at a place like the Greenhouse in Texas, where, for about one thousand dollars a week plus tips, a woman can go through a programmed ritual of health and beauty, involving diet, exercise, massage, skin treatments, hair treatments, makeup lessons, manicures, pedicures, fashion lectures, and, for good measure, a little culture (travelogues). With time, which is money, the list of things available to help you look younger is almost endless.

“To me, it is a crime—a crime,” cries Jolie Gabor, “for a woman not to look her most beautiful, her most glamorous for her husband or her lover. When he comes home at night, she should be freshly bathed, in her most exquisite perfume, in her most beautiful dress, her loveliest makeup, every hair in its place!” Well, yes, but the servantless woman, whose day has been spent with housework and laundry and small children, and who is exhausted by the time she has the roast in the oven, must certainly be forgiven for collapsing on the sofa in her blue jeans rather than stepping into a perfumed tub.

“Household help is absolutely the one essential thing,” says a New York housewife who happens to be without it at the moment. “If you have help, everything about staying young and looking good becomes much, much easier. Even dieting is easier. I mean, I know it’s easier for Jackie Onassis to keep her figure than it is for me. If she steps on the scales and sees she’s gained a pound, she simply tells her cook, ‘All I want for dinner tonight is a cup of yoghurt and some fresh strawberries’—and it’s done! She doesn’t have to fix the kids’ dinner, so she couldn’t possibly—ever—catch herself licking the spoon from the mashed potatoes. And if John-John brings home an uneaten half of a peanut-butter sandwich in his lunch box, it isn’t Jackie who finds it there and eats it.”

The older one gets, the more it costs—in time and money—to stay young. This is a sort of natural law—that the richest are able to stay looking youngest longest. There is, for example, the matter of cosmetic surgery, which most doctors now view more favorably (or at least with less disfavor) than they did in the past, on the basis that anything that improves a patient’s appearance will improve his outlook and thus make him feel better. On the other hand, plastic surgery is costly; fifteen hundred dollars is an average cost of a face-lift, and it is not covered by Blue Cross; and since any surgery is a shock to the system, recovery takes time and involves some discomfort.

The number of cosmetic operations performed in America has escalated enormously—some say by as much as five hundred per cent in the past ten years. At the same time, surgeons who specialize in this work have become much more skillful, sophisticated, and ingenious. The face-lift is now the most commonplace of these operations, and one woman who had checked into a Connecticut hospital for the removal of some varicose veins decided to have the doctor lift her face as well, “just for the fun of it.” Men, in the meantime, have also been getting facelifts in hugely increasing numbers, but not for fun at all. They have found that the lack of puffy eyes and jowly chins has become a definite business asset and—for that purpose—can become tax-deductible.

Today, there is virtually no part of the body that cannot be put into trimmer, more youthful shape by the removal or addition of snips and pieces here and there. Women who have weight problems, impatient with diets, now frequently order themselves instantly slimmed, through surgery. According to one doctor, whom his colleagues consider “particularly clever,” if a woman is “too chesty, too busty, I give her my little pinch pleats.”

While all this has been going on, it is inevitable that some of the business of keeping wealthy people young has slipped into the hands of those who—though not certifiable quacks—possess qualifications somewhat more tenuous. After all, the business of keeping wealthy people young has become big business, and everybody wants a bit of the action. The relatively new (in the United States, that is) technique of facial peeling is still the subject of much controversy, and a number of practitioners have found themselves in serious difficulties with the courts and have even gone to jail. The process, by which the outer layer of skin—along with the accompanying wrinkles—is peeled away through the application of chemicals, must, to be legal, be performed by a licensed M.D. It is reasonably uncomfortable, and for a time after the operation, peeled people do not look very presentable and are well advised not to appear in public. But this does not mean that peeling cannot be fun. Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton Davies May, an elderly beauty, makes a game of it. Every year or so, she invites her doctor and three close friends to her Palm Beach house and all four ladies have themselves peeled. In the sequestered days that follow, they are a congenial foursome for bridge.

In Los Angeles, the presiding lady genius of skin-peeling is Venner Kelsen, who says that she has the title of “doctor,” but prefers, for reasons of her own, not to use it. Her treatment, which takes three reasonably lengthy appointments, followed by a two-week recuperative period, costs from seven hundred and fifty to fifteen hundred dollars.

Venner Kelsen can, she boasts, make a forty-five-year-old face look thirty, and most clients find that their Kelsen peelings last at least five years. At this point, according to her, nearly every major film star in Hollywood—men as well as women—past the age of forty has passed through her doors. In the cases of older clients—she has worked on women of seventy-five—Miss Kelsen works cooperatively with such celebrated California plastic surgeons as Dr. Michael Gurdin. “He handles the structural problems; then I go to work on the skin,” says Miss Kelsen.

Meanwhile, a more superficial sort of peeling can be done by licensed operators in beauty salons. This process is less painful (“The face experiences only a warm glow,” says one operator), can be done in a day, and the recipient is ready to be viewed and admired immediately afterward. It also costs less (a hundred and fifty dollars) and doesn’t last as long—about a month. The process is also called “lysing”—lysis, according to Webster, is “a process of disintegration or dissolution (as of bacteria or blood cells)”—and the instruction booklet for one of these cell-disintegrating compounds is delightfully vague on the subject of just what the sticky—it looks like Elmer’s glue—and rather unpleasant-smelling material consists of. It is, says the booklet, a “biological construction of the preparation with the characteristic combination of the various kinds of silicic acid and traces of elements, calcium and so on.” The booklet was printed in Vienna, which may be why it seems so uninformative.

It also says “A lysing … should be made before starting a cosmetic treatment, or if the skin is plain, too oily, too dry, too smooth or too coarse. [This just about includes everybody, doesn’t it?] If the skin has no more the power to eliminate the cells of the epidermis, when they are only loosened at its borders but still fasten [sic] and when looked at with a magnifying glass appear like little horn-leaves [whatever those are] covering chinks and pores, when the skin—examined through the skin microscope—looks cracked, when the pores are obstructed by dust or fat particles—then the receptibility of the skin for nutritive preparations is reduced and the best products applied on the skin remain uneffective.… A treatment … should be made either before each cosmetic skin-treatment or at least each second one.… [This product] is after all the best preparation to normalize the skin and blemiches [sic] will pass completely.”

Well, there has always been a certain amount of fantasy and hocus-pocus surrounding every aspect of the beauty world, and anyway, women—and men, too—are coming in for lysing treatments in droves.

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.

Her solution has nothing to do with injections, or radioactive mud-baths, or saunas, or hosings with hot seawater, or oxygen-sniffing. She says, “The best way to stay looking young is to stay up on things. Keep up with what’s happening, and, as much as possible, be for what’s happening. Take a positive attitude toward things that are different and new—don’t close yourself off from new things.” In other words, don’t knock pop and op art or whatever comes next, at least until you’ve studied it to see what you can get out of it. Don’t complain about the high-school boy next door just because his hair is down to his shoulders. Keep up with the latest books, the latest plays, the latest music, the latest films, both underground and above.

The late Elizabeth Arden, who went to her grave in her eighties looking the way most women in their fifties wish they still looked, once said, “The secret of perpetual youth is perpetual motion.” She had a point. Staying busy and interested in what’s going on is one of the most important secrets one must learn to stay young. Lyn Tornabene says, “At a party, or in any group of people, it’s the pooh-poohers, the tongue-cluckers, the gracious-what’s-the-world-coming-to types who look old!”

The rich have learned these secrets, too (not all the rich look young, but those who do have young interests), and, of course, with more money, the rich will always have more time to stay abreast of things. It seems unfair that the rich should have a priority on youthfulness, but they do have that important edge.

What’s more, the rich today begin the job of staying younger sooner than ever. It is no longer a surprise to hear of a mother who trots her ten-year-old (or younger) daughter to Norbert’s or Vidal Sassoon’s for a haircut, shampoo, set, manicure, et al. Venner Kelsen in California and Erno Laszlo in New York are only two of many costly skin specialists in the country who are now doing a big business treating adolescent skin.

Youngsters today are having their teeth not only straightened, but capped before they reach high-school age. Eddie’s like other high-priced hairstylists, is now giving seven-dollar haircuts and twelve-dollar hair-straightening jobs to prep-school boys before they go off to Andover or Groton, and his clients for hairpieces today include several Ivy League college boys. At an early age, the children of the rich are learning the importance of staying young, healthy, and attractive.

And yet it should not be said that the rich emphasize these things only out of vanity, or because they are bored or lazy and have no interests other than their own beautification and adornment. There is more to it than that, and a lot of it has to do with the somewhat special attitude of the American rich where, today, the most important question is not who you are or what you do—or even what’s your mother’s maiden name?—but “Is he attractive?”

This attitude grows more pronounced, and one New York society woman states it rather well. “It’s part of the different role which money plays in America today,” she says. “In Grandpa’s day, men made money so they could wield financial power—control a railroad or that sort of thing. Today, people who have money use it almost entirely on pleasure—travel, entertaining, going out to restaurants and parties, and that sort of thing—and on improving their surroundings and, last but not least, themselves. To do that you’ve got to feel and look your best. Do you see what I mean? I mean, if you don’t look young and attractive—well, for all you’re worth, you might as well be poor.”