In the 1950 screen classic “All About Eve,” Bette Davis is 40 years old and looks it.
Her jaw line is softening, her mouth is beginning to droop, shadows are forming under her famous eyes. Slathered in cold cream or smeared with heavy makeup, her face bears testimony to late nights and dry martinis, grand passions and petty jealousies.
And that’s the point.
Davis is playing an actress whose age makes her both strong and vulnerable, heroic and ordinary. When she struggles to hold on to the (younger) man she loves, her fragile grasp on youth makes her terror more meaningful and her wit more poignant.
The pleasures of “Eve” are worth contemplating at a time when America is hurtling toward yet another plastic surgery breakthrough: FDA approval of the cosmetic use of Botox – a drug that smoothes age lines by paralyzing facial muscles.
With analysts predicting a major jump in Botox use, with the Fox News anchor Greta Van Susteren publicly discussing her recent surgery to eliminate under-eye bags, with celebrities such as Cher and Carol Burnett bearing the signs of ambitious facial reconstruction plans, it is becoming increasingly easy to envision a day when the naturally aging face will be an endangered species.
And what would we lose if we turned our backs forever on wrinkles and jowls, on slackening skin and eyelids that grow heavier by the day?
We would lose that magnificent early scene in “Eve” when Davis’ character, Margo, her face puffy and greasy with cold cream, brings her younger man (literally) to his knees with her tart wit and outrageous self-confidence.
We would lose Albert Einstein in all his glory – the wild white hair, the swooping pouches of skin, the eyes as old as the universe, the faint smile that hints at secrets younger men have not yet dreamed of.
We would be without the photos of a craggy Abraham Lincoln that we love best, the bulldog visage of Winston Churchill at his most heroic.
Shakespeare never would have written, “That time of year thou mayest in me behold/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang.” Nor, for that matter, would he have written “King Lear.”
The point isn’t that plastic surgery is bad, or even necessarily undesirable. We live in an age when even such feminist paragons as Gloria Steinem are disinclined to pass judgment on those who would nip and tuck.
Something lost
The point is that we lose something when we cheat Father Time — maybe something we think we don’t want, maybe something we’d swear we don’t need, but something that enriches human art and experience.
We would lose the exhilaration of that scene in “Eve” when Margo’s 32-year-old lover bursts into her dressing room to find her still removing her makeup. “Forty-seven minutes from now, my plane takes off, and how do I find you?” he thunders. “Not ready yet. Looking like a junkyard.”
“Thank you so much,” Margo says, amused.
“Is it sabotage? Does my career mean nothing to you? Have you no human consideration?”
“Show me a human, and I might have.”
“The airlines have clocks even if you haven’t. I start shooting a week from Monday. [My boss] Zanuck is impatient. He wants me. He needs me.”
“Zanuck! Zanuck! Zanuck! What are you two, lovers?”
He kneels at her feet: “Only in some ways. You’re prettier.”
“I’m a junkyard.”
“My wonderful junkyard! The mystery and dreams you find in a junkyard.”
Without the signs that Margot is no longer in the first blush of youth, her performance would lack the element of grace under pressure that gives it its resonance, that makes our heroine not just a clever prima donna, but a real-life romantic warrior who won’t fire at Father Time until she can see the whites of his eyes.
Gone, too, if we did away with aging, would be the authority of Maya Angelou’s regal glare, the baroque decadence of Jack Nicholson’s sneer, the wry delights of Lauren Bacall’s smirk, the tender gravity of Ronald Reagan’s smile.
We would lose the end of the story, which is seldom as pretty as the beginning, but often more meaningful.
As Steinem put it in an interview with Modern Maturity magazine, “As I age, I notice my body doing something, and I want to see what it’s doing. I don’t want to interfere with that. It knows something I don’t.”
In a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine, actress Liv Ullmann put a religious spin on that notion: “I wanted to see what God wanted from [my face],” she said.
Of course, there’s a big leap between saying aging is illuminating and saying it is physically beautiful — a leap that science — particularly evolutionary psychology — has done much to discourage in recent years. It turns out that men across a range of cultures tend to be attracted to certain youth-associated female traits, among them waists that are relatively small compared with hips.
But if science suggests to us that youth is beauty and beauty is youth, art would beg to differ. Visual artists traditionally undertake intensive study of the human form, with many developing an intense appreciation of the bodies that differ the most from Greek statues and Barbie dolls.
“I admire an old, gnarled tree. Why can’t I admire that in a person?” says University of Illinois professor of photography Bea Nettles, who chronicles her own body’s journey into middle age at the Web site beanettles.com.
Look at the alternatives
Another argument in favor of the naturally aging face is that — as in the case of democracy — the alternatives are worse.
You don’t have to venture as far afield as Michael Jackson and Jocelyn Wildenstein, the New York socialite who rearranged her features to resemble those of a lion, to conclude that plastic surgery is not yet a reliable fountain of youth.
Relatively mainstream figures such as Cher, Carol Burnett, Joan Collins and Burt Reynolds appear to have gone under the knife, in some cases repeatedly, in procedures that have bestowed not the freshness of youth, but rather an eerie wax museum imitation of it.
And then there’s the issue of civic responsibility:
Even if science did allow you to turn back the clock, and you gratefully accepted the offer, would you want others to follow your example?
It’s one thing to wish that you yourself would look perpetually 25, quite another to wish for a world in which everyone looks perpetually 25.
Grandmothers and grandfathers.
Judges. Presidents. Surgeons.
Santa Claus.
You can almost see the public service billboards on the high-speed trains of 3001: “Aging. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.”
